Paper Bag Records and Sweet Potato Pie

Sweet Potato Pie Eugenia Collier From up here on the fourteenth floor, my brother Charley looks like an insect scurrying among other insects. A deep opinioning of love surges th blunt me. Despite the distance, he seems to feel it, for he turns and scans the upper windows, but failing to find me, continues on his way. I watch him moving quicklygingerly, it seems to me down Fifth Avenue and nigh the corner to his shabby taxicab. In a moment he exit be heading back uptown. I turn from the window and hiss down on the bed, shoes and tot all toldy.Perhaps because of what happened this afternoon or maybe equitable because I see Charley so seldom, my houghts hover over him like hummingbirds. The cheerful, nonpersonal tidiness of this room is a world away from Charleys walk-up horizontal in Harlem and a hundred worlds from the b ar, noisy shanty where he and the take a breath of us spent what there was of our chelahood. I close my eyes and human face by side I see the Charley of my boyhood and the Charley of this afternoon, as clearly as if I were looking at a split TV screen. a nonher(prenominal) surge of love, seasoned with gratitude, wells up in me.As far as I know, Charley never had any childhood at all. The oldest children of sh becroppers never do. mammy and Pa were shadowy figures whose voices I heard aguely in the morning when pile was shallow and whom I glimpsed as they left for the field before I was fully awake or as they trudged wearily into the house at night when my lids were irresistibly heavy. They came into sharp focus only on particular(prenominal) occasions. One such occasion was the day when the crops were in and the sharecroppers were paid. In our confine there was so much excitement in the air that flat l, the baby responded to it.For weeks we had been running out of things that we could neither grow nor get on credit. On the evening of that day we waited anxiously for our parents return. Then we would luster around the rough wooden t ableI on Lils lap or clinging to Charleys neck, fiddling Alberta nervously tugging her plait, Jamie crouched at Mamas elbow, like a panther about to spring, and all seven of us silent for once, waiting. Pa would place the money on the tablegently, for it was made from the sweat of their bodies and from the childrens tears.Mama would count it out in superficial piles, her tincture face stern and, I think now, beautiful. Not with the mindless beauty of well-modeled features but with the strong radiance of one who has suffered and never yielded. This tor the farm animal bill, sne would mutter, making a I p e. This tor cllection. T for a alternate dgingham and so on, stretching the money as tight over our collective needs as Jamies outgrown pants were stretched over my bottom. Well, thats the crop. She would look up at Pa at last. Itll do. Pas face would relax, and a general grin flitted from child to child.We would survive, at least for the present. The other time when my par ents were solid entities was at church. On Sun years we would don our threadbare Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes and tramp, along with neighbors similarly attired, to the synagogue Baptist Church, the frail edifice of bare oards held together by God knows what, which was all that my parents ever knew of security and future promise. Being the youngest and therefore the approximately apt(predicate) to err, I was plopped between my father and my mother on the long wooden bench.They sat huge and eternal like twin mountains at my sides. I remember my fathers still, black profile silhouetted against the sunny window, looking back into dark recesses of time, into some dim antiquity, like an ancient ceremonial mask. My mothers face, usually gravely set, changed with the varying nuances of her emotion, its planes shifting, shaped by the soft highlights f the sanctuary, as she progressed from the flaccid amen to a loud Help me, Jesus wrung from the depths of her gaunt frame. My early memori es of my parents are associated with special occasions.The contours of my everyday were shaped by Lil and Charley, the oldest children, who rode herd on the proportion of us while Pa and Mama toiled in fields not their own. Not until years later on did I realize that Lil and Charley were little more than children themselves. Lil had the loudest, screechiest voice in the county. When she yelled, Boy, you better git yourself in here you got yourself in there. It was Lil who caught and bathed us, Lil who fed us and sent us to school, Lil who punished us when we needful punishing and comforted us when we needed comforting. If her voice was loud, so was her laughter.When she laughed, everybody laughed. And when Lil sang, everybody listened. Charley was taller than anybody in the world, including, I was certain, God. From his shoulders, where I spent considerable time in the soonest years, the world had a different perspective I looked down on the heads rather than at the undersides of chins. As I grew older, Charley became more father than brother. Those days return n f put onments of splintered memory Charleys slender dark hands whittling a toy from a chunk of wood, his face thin and intense, brown as the loaves Lil baked when there was flour.Charleys quick fingers guiding a stick of charred kindling over a bit of scrap paper, making a wonderfully picture take shapeJamies face or Albertas rag chick or the spare fgure of our bony brown dog. Charleys voice low and awed in the dark, telling ghost stories so delightfully dreadful that later in the night the moan of the wind through the chinks in the mole sent us scurrying to the security of Charleys pallet, Charleys sleeping form. Some memories are more than tragmentary. I can still teel the know ot the lopsided disn rag across my mouth. Somehow I developed a stutter, which Charley was determined to cure.Someone had told him that an powerful cure was to slap the stuttered across the mouth with a sopping wet dish rag. Thereafter whenever I began, Lets g -g-g- -, whap From nowhere would cum the ubiquitous rag. Charley would always insist, l dont want to hurt you none, Buddy and whap again. I dont know when or why I stopped stuttering. further I stopped. Already laid waste by poverty, we were easy mark for ignorance and superstition, hich hunted us like hawks. We sought education feverishlyand, for most of us, futilely, for the sum total of our combined energies was required for mere brute survival.