Free Georgia Boy by Erskine Caldwell Page A

cutting his eyes around to see how Ma was acting.
    “Fortune, my foot!” Ma said.
    Ma turned around.
    “William,” she said, “go inside the house and pull down all the window shades and shut the doors. I want you to stay there until I call you.”
    “It really wasn’t much to get excited about, Martha,” Pa said, standing first on one foot and then on the other. “The Queen—”
    “Shut up!” Ma said. “Where are your clothes?”
    “I reckon she made off with them,” Pa said, looking around the shed, “but I got the best of the deal.”
    Ma turned and motioned me toward the house. I started off, backing as slow as I could.
    “While she wasn’t noticing,” Pa said, “I got hold of this.”
    He held up a watch in a gold case. It had a long gold chain, and it looked as if it were brand-new.
    “A watch like this is worth a lot of money,” Pa said. “I figure it’s worth a lot more than my old overalls and jumper, and anything else they carried off. The old ax wasn’t worth anything, and that old bucket with the hole in the bottom wasn’t, either.”
    Ma took the watch from Pa and looked at it. Then she closed the door and locked it on the outside. After she had gone into the house, I went back to the woodshed and looked through a crack. My old man was sitting on a pile of wood in his underwear untying a yellow ribbon that had been tied in a hard knot around a big roll of greenbacks.

VIII. The Time Handsome Brown Ran Away
    H ANDSOME WAS IN AND OUT of the house all morning, scrubbing the floor and splitting fat-pine lighters and sweeping the yard with the sedge broom, but we didn’t miss him until just before dinnertime when my old man went out on the back porch to tell him to take two eggs from the hen nests and to go down to Mr. Charlie Thigpen’s store and swap them for a sack of smoking tobacco. Pa called him four or five times, but Handsome didn’t answer even the last time Pa called. Pa thought he was hiding in the shed, the way he had a habit of doing, so he wouldn’t have to come out and do some kind of work, but after looking in all of Handsome’s hiding places, Pa said he couldn’t be found anywhere. Ma started in right away blaming my old man for being the cause of Handsome’s leaving. She said that Handsome would never have gone off if Pa had treated him halfway decent and hadn’t always been cheating Handsome out of what rightfully belonged to him just because he was an orphan colored boy and scared to speak up for his rights. My old man, Handsome and me played marbles sometimes, and Pa was always fudging on Handsome and breaking up the game by taking all his marbles away from him even when we weren’t playing for keeps.
    “Anything might happen to that poor innocent colored boy when he gets out in the cruel world,” Ma said. “If he hadn’t been driven to it, he’d have never left the good home I tried to provide for him here.”
    “Handsome didn’t have the right to run off like he done,” my old man said. “It oughtn’t to matter how much he was provoked and, besides, it ought to be against the law for a darkey just to pick up and go without a by-your-leave. He might have owed me some money.”
    “What did you do to Handsome this morning that would’ve made him run off?” Ma asked him.
    “Nothing,” Pa said. “Anyway, I can’t think of nothing out of the ordinary.”
    “You done something,” Ma said, getting angry and moving towards my old man. “Now, you tell me what it was, Morris Stroup!”
    “Well, Martha,” Pa said, “any number of things might have peeved Handsome and made him run off. I declare, I just can’t think of everything.”
    “You stand there and think, Morris Stroup!” she said. “Handsome Brown would never have gone away like this if you hadn’t caused it.”
    “Well, I did sort of borrow his banjo,” he said slowly. “I asked him to lend it to me for a while, but he wouldn’t do it, so I went up in the loft where he keeps it in