Free Mississippi Bridge by Mildred D. Taylor

I t was raining and had been all the day. Fact, it had been raining for some weeks, a steady, big drop kind of rain that had roads all slopped up outside and ceilings all swollen up and leaking inside. Our ole Mississippi winter it was almost finished, but not quite. In those there last few days before spring, folks had to go looking for things to do. Mostly, the womenfolks, they found something; womenfolks could always find work. Ma and my sister, Lillian Jean, they stayed inside and cooked and sewed and ironed and quilted andcleaned. But there was nothing much for menfolks to do but wait out the rain, wait for the dry-out and wait to plow and wait to plant. Pa and my brothers, R.W. and Melvin, and me, we had done chopped up all the wood needed chopping, mended all the fences and tools needed mending, and bought our seed, so we just waited.
    Pa passed a goodly amount of his time up at the Wallace store. R.W. and Melvin, who were near to man-size theyselves, spent considerable hours up there too. Pa and R.W. and Melvin and the other men who gathered there would sit around that old potbellied stove. They’d play checkers some, but mostly they just talked about the hard times. They laughed and told stories and done some joking and Ma said that all helped them to pass the time, helped to ease the worry about cotton prices. Cotton had been down lower than ever for a long spell—more than two years—ever since the Depression come in ’29 and everything hit bottom. It ain’t looked like prices were ever going to rise up again and Pa said if they didn’t get to rising soon, we would all be living worse than Negroes.
    There were a many days I gone up to the Wallace storemyself. I ain’t had much age on me then. I was only ten so I ain’t sat much with the men inside. ’Stead, I’d sit myself right there on the floor boards of the porch, lean against a post, and watch the crossroads. Course now, watching the roads ain’t meant there was that much to see, just the forest all around and the slop of red mud. Every now and again a truck would come along or a wagon or somebody’d come walking up the road heading for the store. About once the week the bus come down this way from Jackson, made a stop in front of the store to pick up folks, then gone on west over the bridge that crossed the creek called the Rosa Lee. The next day, it come back up again, heading north. Most days, though, I just sat on that porch, looking out at the rain and the gloom and ain’t nothing much happened to break the expectedness of it all.
    Fact to business I was sitting there the day Rudine Johnson and her mama come up the road carrying a couple of string-tied suitcases and looking like they were about to travel. There was a low fog and I seen them step out of it on a sudden, almost like haints in the night. Rudine was of good age, near to the same as R.W. and Melvin, and I ain’t know’dneither her nor her mama too well, so all I done was give a nod and they done give a nod back, then they stepped past me and gone in the store.
    I ain’t paid them no more attention after that, leastways not till I heard Mr. John Wallace laugh. Then I turned round and looked inside. Rudine, she was standing front of the counter and her mama was right side of her. Rudine, she was kind of fingering a wide brim, summer-sky-blue hat with the tiniest little sprig of spring-like flowers tucked off to one side of it. The hat was sitting on a counter stand and Rudine, she was asking of Mr. John Wallace, who owned that store, if maybe she couldn’t try it on. That was how come Mr. John Wallace was laughing.
    “Now, Rudine, you know I can’t let you try on that hat,” said Mr. John. “You can buy it now, but once you do, you gotta keep it. Can’t be bringing it back for no exchange, not after you done put it on your head.”
    “Yes, suh . . . I knows . . .” She looked kind of longing like at that hat, then she done sighed deep and shook her head. “Well, I