Free The Third Life of Grange Copeland by Alice Walker

sharecropper’s cabin to another was something she hated. She hated the arrogance of the white men who put them out, for one reason or another, without warning or explanation. She hated leaving a home she’d already made and fixed up with her own hands. She hated leaving her flowers, which she always planted whenever she got her hands on flower seeds. Each time she stepped into a new place, with its new, and usually bigger rat holes, she wept. Each time she had to clean cow manure out of a room to make it habitable for her children, she looked as if she had been dealt a death blow. Each time she was forced to live in a house that was enclosed in a pasture with cows and animals eager to eat her flowers before they were planted, she became like a woman walking through a dream, but a woman who had forgotten what it is to wake up. She slogged along, ploddingly, like a cow herself, for the sake of the children. Her mildness became stupor; then her stupor became horror, desolation and, at last, hatred.
    Strangely, Brownfield could bear her hatred less than her desolation. In fact, he rather enjoyed her desolation because in it she had no hopes. She was weak, totally without view, without a sky. He was annoyed when she despised him because out of her hatred she fought back, with words, never with blows, and always for the children. But coming from her, even words disrupted the harmony of despair in which they lived.
    For Brownfield, moving about at the whim of a white boss was just another example of the fact that his life, as it was destined, had “gone haywire,” and he could do nothing about it. He jumped when the crackers said jump, and left his welfare up to them. He no longer had, as his father had maintained, even the desire to run away from them. He had no faith that any other place would be better. He fitted himself to the slot in which he found himself; for fun he poured oil into streams to kill the fish and tickled his vanity by drowning cats.

15
    E ACH S ATURDAY EVENING ; Brownfield was at the Dew Drop Inn lounge. Josie welcomed him; it was like home. Having been lovers they were now much more. They were comrades. They shared confidences. Lorene had migrated North, and Josie ran the lounge alone, except for two very young and talented girls who had Lorene’s old room.
    Brownfield and Josie spent a great deal of time talking. About Mem and her self-righteousness, about Brownfield’s error in marrying her, and about Josie and her fears and dreams and the cruel tricks fate had played on her. They talked of Josie’s driving will to survive and to overcome. Her need to avenge herself on those who wronged her. They talked about Brownfield, about how numb he felt when he allowed himself a fleeting remembrance of his mother. They talked about Margaret and her bastard baby, Star. They talked for hours and hours about Grange.
    “Your mammy was a fool, boy. Thinkin’ she could keep Grange by making him jealous of other mens,” Josie’s chin shook the slightest bit.
    “You tried the same thing,” said Brownfield, “in his absence. Or do you plan to tell me I got the job here just ’cause you liked my face?”
    “Oh, but I weren’t tryin to make Grange jealous, ” said Josie.
    “No?”
    “No.” Josie’s chin fairly quivered. “I were tryin’ to kill the son of a bitch!”
    For some reason Brownfield laughed. “It wouldn’t have killed him, seeing you with me. He never cared no more for me than a stranger.”
    “You don’t understand yet how the thing go, do you?”
    “I know enough.”
    “Ain’t you the lucky one, then,” said Josie. “Now set down and listen.”
    Brownfield sat down in a familiar blue chair, facing Josie, who was propped up in bed.
    “It was some weeks before you come,” said Josie, “that me and Grange made all our plans to leave Georgia. We was goin’ up to New York. To Harlem, the black folks’ city, where we owns everything! Ain’t that something? We was goin’ to go away