Betsey Brown by Ntozake Shange

Author:Ntozake Shange
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312541231
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

7

The burnt-orange and clay dried leaves fell as quickly as the days went by, there wasn’t enough time to catch up with her old playmates, not enough time to dig to China, never enough time to tell the white folks what she really felt about them, walking around like they owned the world. There was never any time to see Eugene. Basketball. Basketball. Basketball. Even Charlie didn’t get to see him. Plus, she was to keep her mind on her studies, now she was competing with the white children—as if that hadn’t been the case in the beginning. Who did they think she was gonna grow up and compete against, Rodan? Grown-ups made such little sense. Why go lock yourself up in a room when there were sycamores and white oaks to nestle under. Why throw things and scream and holler on account of some white man coming to the door saying that the John Birch Society represented all Americans. Mama liketa jumped down the man’s throat and Daddy wasn’t too keen on the explanation of separate but equal that the tiny little white man presented from a global perspective. Daddy said the only way to really understand white folks was to listen to them.

Betsey thought she must know all about the white people by now, she listened to them all day long. Every day. Not the way a blues gets in your bones and has ya inchin along in tune to the smells and sways of a colored day, so it’s pleasant and downright comforting, but the way the gnats be coming at ya at night if no one has any bug lotion. White folks got on ya like gnats. She missed everything on account of them. She thought on what she could do as hard on the white folks as they were hard on her.

She was a secret now, lying in the dirt and dry leaves out of sight of Mr. Jeff’s gardening tools. That man had a way about him. If there was an empty plot of ground, he’d sure ’nough find something to plant in it. But Betsey’d planted herself in the shadow of her tree and the fragrance of earth to conjure some way back at the white folks which didn’t have one iota of the ways of the Lord in it. She wasn’t certain she was making a bargain with Satan, but even if she did, white folks did it all the time. Come hell or high water, Betsey was gonna do em up right, least in her neighborhood.

Everybody’d gone off to swim at the Y. Friday was the day they cleaned the pool, that’s how come the colored could swim on Fridays. Betsey’d missed that cause she got home from the white school too late to take the carpool of colored children over there.

The street was vacant. Like a big old movie set. Nothing. Nobody to do a thing with. What could she do alone? Better yet, what could she do alone that

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