Great Short Stories by American Women (31 page)

With her this phrase ended. She never repeated it because of that night when she had made that discovery.

Her father had taken to solitude and the study of sociology. Sometimes he would turn her about by the shoulder and look at her, breathing in a thick way he had with him of late, and once he told her she was a good girl but foolish, and left her alone.

They had begun to lose money, and some of Little Lief’s tapestries, given her by her mother, were sold. Her heart broke, but she opened the windows oftener because she needed some kind of beauty. She made the mistake of loving tapestries best and nature second best. Somehow she had gotten the two things mixed — of course it was due to her bringing up. “If you are poor you live out of doors — but if you are rich you live in a lovely house.” So to her the greatest of calamities had befallen the house; it was beginning to go away by those imperceptible means, that at first leave a house looking unfamiliar and then bare.

Finally she could stand it no longer and she married a thin, wiry man with a long thin nose and a nasty trick of rubbing it with a finger equally long and thin — man with a fair income and very refined sisters.

This man Misha wanted to be a lawyer. He studied half the night and never seemed happy unless his head was in his palm. His sisters were like this also, only for another reason: they enjoyed weeping. If they could find nothing to cry about they cried for the annoyance of this dearth of destitution and worry. They held daily councils for future domestic trouble — one the gesture of emotional and one of mental desire.

Sometimes Little Lief’s father would come to the big iron gate and ask to see her. He would never come in — why? He never explained. So Little Lief and he would talk over the gate top, and sometimes he was gentle and sometimes he was not. When he was harsh to her Little Lief wept, and when she wept he would look at her steadily from under his eyebrows and say nothing. Sometimes he asked her to take a walk with him. This would set Little Lief into a terrible flutter; the corners of her mouth would twitch and her nostrils tremble, but she always went.

Misha worried little about his wife. He was a very selfish man, with that greatest capacity of a selfish nature, the ability to labor untiringly for some one thing that he wanted and that nature had placed beyond his reach. Some people called this quality excellent, pointing out what a great scholar Misha was, holding him up as an example in their own households, looking after him when he went hurriedly down the street with that show of nervous expectancy that a man always betrays when he knows within himself that he is deficient — a sort of peering in the face of life to see if it has discovered the flaw.

Little Lief felt that her father was trying to be something that was not natural to him. What was it? As she grew older, she tried to puzzle it out. Now it happened more often that she would catch him looking at her in a strange way, and once she asked him half playfully if he wished she had been a boy — and he had answered abruptly, “Yes, I do.”

Little Lief would stand for hours at the casement and, leaning her head against the glass, try to solve this thing about her father — and then she discovered it when he had said, “Yes, I do.” He was trying to be strong — what was it that was in the family? — oh, yes — iron in the blood — he feared there was no longer any iron left — well, perhaps there wasn’t — was that the reason he looked at her like this? No, he was worried about himself. Why? — wasn’t he satisfied with his own strength? He had been cruel enough very often. This shouldn’t have worried him.

She asked him, and he answered, “Yes, but cruelty isn’t strength.” That was an admission — she was less afraid of him since that day when he had made that answer, but now she kept peering into his face as he had done into hers and he seemed not to notice it. Well, he was getting to be a very old man.

Then one day her two sisters-in-law pounced upon her so that her golden head shook on its thin, delicate neck.

“Your father has come into the garden,” cried one.

“Yes, yes,” pursued the elder. “He’s even sat himself upon the bench.”

She hurried out to him. “What’s the matter, father?” Her head was aching.

“Nothing.” He did not look up.

She sat down beside him, stroking his hand, at first timidly, then with more courage.

“Have you looked at the garden?”

He nodded.

She burst into tears.

He took his hand away from her and began to laugh.

“What’s the matter, child? A good dose of hog-killing would do you good.”

“You have no right to speak to me in this way — take yourself off!” she cried sharply, holding her side, and her father rocked with laughter.

She stretched her long, thin arms out, clenching her thin fingers together. The lace on her short sleeves trembled, her knuckles grew white.

“A good pig-killing,” he repeated, watching her, and she grew sullen.

“Eh?” He pinched her flesh a little and dropped it. She was passive; she made no murmur. He got up, walked to the gate, opened it and went out, closing it after him. He turned back a step and waved to her. She did not answer for a moment, then she waved back slowly with one of her thin, white hands.

She would have liked to refuse to see him again, but she lacked the courage. She would say to herself, “If I am unkind to him now, perhaps later I shall regret it.” In this way she tried to excuse herself. The very next time he had sent word that he wished speech with her she had come.

“Little fool!” he said, in a terrible rage, and walked off. She was quite sure that he was slowly losing his mind — a second childhood, she called it, still trying to make things as pleasant as possible.

She had been ill a good deal that Spring, and in the Fall she had terrible headaches. In the Winter months she took to her bed, and early in May the doctor was summoned.

Misha talked to the physician in the drawing-room before he sent him up to his wife.

“You must be gentle with her; she is nervous and frail.” The doctor laughed outright. Misha’s sisters were weeping, of course, and perfectly happy.

“It will be such a splendid thing for her,” they said. Meaning the beef, iron and wine that they expected the doctor to prescribe.

Toward evening Little Lief closed her eyes.

Her child was still-born.

The physician came downstairs and entered the parlor where Misha’s sisters stood together, still shedding tears.

He rubbed his hands.

“Send Misha upstairs.”

“He has gone.”

“Isn’t it dreadful? I never could bear corpses, especially little ones.”

“A baby isn’t a corpse,” answered the physician, smiling at his own impending humor. “It’s an interrupted plan.”

He felt that the baby, not having drawn a breath in this world, could not feel hurt at such a remark, because it has gathered no feminine pride and, also, as it has passed out quicker than the time it took to make the observation, it really could be called nothing more than the background for medical jocularity.

Misha came into the room with red eyes.

“Out like a puff of smoke,” he said.

One of his sisters remarked: “Well, the Fenkens lived themselves thin.”

The next Summer Misha married into a healthy Swedish family. His second wife had a broad face, with eyes set wide apart, and with broad, flat, healthy, yellow teeth, and she played the piano surprisingly well, though she looked a little heavy as she sat upon the piano stool.

Zora Neale Hurston

(c. 1891—1960)

ZORA NEALE HURSTON was the most famous woman writer of the Harlem Renaissance; when she died in poverty in 1960, her literary reputation was forgotten, and she was buried in an unmarked grave in Ft. Pierce, Florida. Today Hurston’s reputation is restored, thanks largely to the work of Alice Walker, whose 1979 anthology of Hurston’s writing,
I Love Myself When I Am Laughing ... and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive,
introduced new generations to Hurston’s work.

Hurston was born in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated all-black town in the United States, where she spent much of her childhood and which would figure prominently in her work. In 1925 Hurston arrived in New York City, where she quickly made a name for herself in the literary circles that flourished during the Harlem Renaissance. She graduated from Barnard College in 1928, after studying anthropology with Franz Boas. During this time, Hurston published articles, essays, stories and plays. She contributed a piece to Alain Locke’s landmark volume,
The New Negro,
and her work appeared in the leading periodicals of the day, such as
Crisis, Opportunity
and the controversial
Fire!
One of the most prolific writers of her period, Hurston wrote four novels
(Jonah’s Vine Gourd,
1934;
Their Eyes Were Watching God,
1937;
Moses, Man of the Mountain,
1939; and
Seraph on the Suwanee,
1948), two books of folklore
(Mules and Men,
1935; and
Tell My Horse,
1938) and an autobiography
(Dust Tracks on the Road,
1942).

“Sweat” is a showpiece of Hurston’s virtuosity as storyteller, anthropologist and stylist. The story features a heroine trying to achieve a sense of her own protagonism within the black community. As in many of Hurston’s stories and novels, the relationship between the sexes is fraught with tension. As Delia struggles to shake off the hold of her adulterous husband, the story ends with an ironic twist that sets her free.

Sweat

I

IT WAS ELEVEN o’clock of a Spring night in Florida. It was Sunday. Any other night, Delia Jones would have been in bed for two hours by this time. But she was a washwoman, and Monday morning meant a great deal to her. So she collected the soiled clothes on Saturday when she returned the clean things. Sunday night after church, she sorted and put the white things to soak. It saved her almost a half-day’s start. A great hamper in the bedroom held the clothes that she brought home. It was so much neater than a number of bundles lying around.

She squatted on the kitchen floor beside the great pile of clothes, sorting them into small heaps according to color, and humming a song in a mournful key, but wondering through it all where Sykes, her husband, had gone with her horse and buckboard.

Just then something long, round, limp and black fell upon her shoulders and slithered to the floor beside her. A great terror took hold of her. It softened her knees and dried her mouth so that it was a full minute before she could cry out or move. Then she saw that it was the big bull whip her husband liked to carry when he drove.

She lifted her eyes to the door and saw him standing there bent over with laughter at her fright. She screamed at him.

“Sykes, what you throw dat whip on me like dat? You know it would skeer me — looks just like a snake, an’ you knows how skeered Ah is of snakes.”

“Course Ah knowed it! That’s how come Ah done it.” He slapped his leg with his hand and almost rolled on the ground in his mirth. “If you such a big fool dat you got to have a fit over a earth worm or a string, Ah don’t keer how bad Ah skeer you.”

“You ain’t got no business doing it. Gawd knows it’s a sin. Some day Ah’m gointuh drop dead from some of yo’ foolishness. ’Nother thing, where you been wid mah rig? Ah feeds dat pony. He ain’t fuh you to be drivin’ wid no bull whip.”

“You sho’ is one aggravatin’ nigger woman!” he declared and stepped into the room. She resumed her work and did not answer him at once. “Ah done tole you time and again to keep them white folks’ clothes outa dis house.”

He picked up the whip and glared at her. Delia went on with her work. She went out into the yard and returned with a galvanized tub and set it on the washbench. She saw that Sykes had kicked all of the clothes together again, and now stood in her way truculently, his whole manner hoping, praying, for an argument. But she walked calmly around him and commenced to re-sort the things.

“Next time, Ah’m gointer kick ’em outdoors,” he threatened as he struck a match along the leg of his corduroy breeches.

Delia never looked up from her work, and her thin, stooped shoulders sagged further.

“Ah ain’t for no fuss t’night Sykes. Ah just come from taking sacrament at the church house.”

He snorted scornfully. “Yeah, you just come from de church house on a Sunday night, but heah you is gone to work on them clothes. You ain’t nothing but a hypocrite. One of them amen-corner Christians — sing, whoop, and shout, then come home and wash white folks’ clothes on the Sabbath.”

He stepped roughly upon the whitest pile of things, kicking them helter-skelter as he crossed the room. His wife gave a little scream of dismay, and quickly gathered them together again.

“Sykes, you quit grindin’ dirt into these clothes! How can Ah git through by Sat’day if Ah don’t start on Sunday?”

“Ah don’t keer if you never git through. Anyhow, Ah done promised Gawd and a couple of other men, Ah ain’t gointer have it in mah house. Don’t gimme no lip neither, else Ah’ll throw ‘em out and put mah fist up side yo’ head to boot.”

Delia’s habitual meekness seemed to slip from her shoulders like a blown scarf. She was on her feet; her poor little body, her bare knuckly hands bravely defying the strapping hulk before her.

“Looka heah, Sykes, you done gone too fur. Ah been married to you fur fifteen years, and Ah been takin’ in washin’ fur fifteen years. Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!”

“What’s that got to do with me?” he asked brutally.

“What’s it got to do with you, Sykes? Mah tub of suds is filled yo’ belly with vittles more times than yo’ hands is filled it. Mah sweat is done paid for this house and Ah reckon Ah kin keep on sweatin’ in it.”

She seized the iron skillet from the stove and struck a defensive pose, which act surprised him greatly, coming from her. It cowed him and he did not strike her as he usually did.