Free Gone Crazy in Alabama by Rita Williams-Garcia Page B

this?” I asked.
    â€œâ€™Cause I hear it every third day. Milk the cow, cross the creek to Aunt Naomi, and she tells me her side. Then I come back home to Miss Trotter with a basketful of eggs, and as she inspects each dozen, hoping for a bad egg to fuss about, she tells her side. I know the story inside and out. Backward and forward.”
    â€œDon’t you get tired of hearing it?”
    â€œWhat do you think, cousin?” He kicked a cone in his path. “I won’t be around long. When I go off to flight school who’ll they tell?”
    â€œWhy don’t they just tell each other? They seem to be the only ones interested.”
    â€œThey don’t speak to each other.”
    â€œNever?”
    JimmyTrotter thought for a second. “Only once that I recall.”
    â€œOh.” I knew when. The funerals. Four caskets.
    â€œAuntie said, ‘Sorry for your losses, Ruth.’ Then Miss Trotter said, ‘Thank you kindly, Naomi.’ Then your grandmother invited us in for the repast but Miss Trotter said she wasn’t up to it and we went home.”
    It was funny that Big Ma loved her soap operas during the day, television dramas at night, and supermarketgossip magazines when Uncle Darnell brought them in for her, but she wouldn’t talk about our own family.
    â€œOur family is a regular nighttime soap opera.”
    â€œYou got that right,” JimmyTrotter said.
    We had a nice lunch and a slice of pie that came in a white bakery box. Unlike Ma Charles, Miss Trotter sent JimmyTrotter into town to buy groceries from the store. She kept an herb garden for her “medicinals,” as she called them, and a much smaller vegetable garden than Ma Charles’s, but she had no hard, fast rules about where everything came from. She chose to be stubborn in other ways.
    Miss Trotter watched us gobble down the pie, her own cheeks rising in little, hard apples. Then she asked us, “Speak up if you know who Augustus is.”
    Fern said, “I don’t know who it is, but I know when it is.”
    â€œNot August, dope,” Vonetta said.
    â€œCut it out, Vonetta,” I said.
    â€œCan’t one of my sister’s prized greats tell us who Augustus is?”
    We didn’t know who Augustus was, which suited Miss Trotter just fine, and that was the point.
    â€œEarliest we know, we sprung from my grandfather, Augustus,” Miss Trotter began, but not without a few words of spite disguised as pity about Ma Charles. “She didn’t bother to tell you that? Well, maybe she’s getting on and can’t remember the family history. Poor old thing.”
    JimmyTrotter tossed me a wink.
    â€œI was going to mix up something special to repay her for the denture rinse but I’ll give you some history instead.” To Vonetta she said, “Tell her, ‘Great-granny, today we learned our family history from one who knows it.’ That’ll repay her just fine.”
    Vonetta promised she’d say it just like that, even with me balling my fist at her.
    â€œOur Augustus, my daddy’s daddy, was not a free man, but became one: a freedman. He wasn’t a man at all. Just more than a boy. Like this’n.” Her chin pointed to JimmyTrotter. “Only younger.”
    Miss Trotter was all too happy to tell the history and to have someone to tell it to. I knew she had told this story over and over because she sang it more than she plain-spoke it. She said, “One night when the cotton was ready for picking, Augustus looked at his hands and they bled. Just bled at the thought of having to pick cotton from daybreak to day-be-done. ‘No more bleeding and picking cotton for me,’ he said. So Augustus watched the moon and stars in the pitch of night and chose his time and stole away. Through the woods. And the marshes. And prickly burs and such. He grew hungry shortly after he’d set out and came upon a lake. In that freshwater