More Women of Wonder (SSC) by Pamela Sargent

Author:Pamela Sargent [Sargent, Pamela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci Fi Anthology
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 1976-07-31T23:00:00+00:00

Nothing much happened after that. I began to get my books ready for high school. Blue cornflowers sprang up along the sides of the house and my father, who was better now, cut them down with a scythe. My mother was growing hybrid ones in the back flower garden, twice as tall and twice as big as any of the wild ones; she explained to me about hybrids and why they were bigger, but I forgot it. Our visitor took up with a man, not a nice man, really, because he worked in the town garage and was Polish. She didn’t go out but used to see him in the kitchen at night. He was a thickset, stocky man, very blond, with a real Polish name, but everyone called him Bogalusa Joe because he had spent fifteen years in Bogalusa, Louisiana (he called it “Loosiana”) and he talked about it all the time. He had a theory, that the colored people were just like us and that in a hundred years everybody would be all mixed up, you couldn’t tell them apart. My mother was very advanced in her views but she wouldn’t ever let me talk to him. He was very respectful; he called her “Ma’am,” and didn’t use any bad language, but he never came into the living room. He would always meet our visitor in the kitchen or sometimes on the swing in the back garden. They would drink coffee; they would play cards. Sometimes she would say to him, “Tell me a story, Joe. I love a good story,” and he would talk about hiding out in Loosiana; he had had to hide out from somebody or something for three years in the middle of the Negroes and they had let him in and let him work and took care of him. He said, “The coloreds are like anybody.” Then he said, “The nigras are smarter. They got to be. They ain’t nobody’s fool. I had a black girl for two years once was the smartest woman in the world. Beautiful woman. Not beautiful like a white, though, not the same.”

“Give us a hundred years,” he added, “and it’ll all be mixed.”

“Two hundred?” said our visitor, pouring coffee. He put a lot of sugar in his; then he remarked that he had learned that in Bogalusa. She sat down. She was leaning her elbows on the table, smiling at him. She was stirring her own coffee with a spoon. He looked at her a moment, and then he said softly:

“A black woman, smartest woman in the world. You’re black, woman, ain’t you?”

“Part,” she said.

“Beautiful woman,” he said. “Nobody knows?”

“They know in the circus,” she said. “But there they don’t care. Shall I tell you what we circus people think of you?”

“Of who?” he said, looking surprised.

“Of all of you,” she said. “All who aren’t in the circus. All who can’t do what we can do, who aren’t the biggest or the best, who can’t kill a

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