The Gold Cadillac by Taylor Mildred D

Author:Taylor, Mildred D. [Taylor, Mildred D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101657973
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 1998-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

My father was silent, then he said: “All my life I’ve had to be heedful of what white folks thought. Well, I’m tired of that. I worked hard for everything I got. Got it honest, too. Now I got that Cadillac because I liked it and because it meant something to me that somebody like me from Mississippi could go and buy it. It’s my car, I paid for it, and I’m driving it south.”

My mother, who had said nothing through all this, now stood. “Then the girls and I’ll be going too,” she said.

“No!” said my father.

My mother only looked at him and went off to the kitchen.

My father shook his head. It seemed he didn’t want us to go. My uncles looked at each other, then at my father. “You set on doing this, we’ll all go,” they said. “That way we can watch out for each other.” My father took a moment and nodded. Then my aunts got up and went off to their kitchens too.

All the next day my aunts and my mother cooked and the house was filled with delicious smells. They fried chicken and baked hams and cakes and sweet potato pies and mixed potato salad. They filled jugs with water and punch and coffee. Then they packed everything in huge picnic baskets along with bread and boiled eggs, oranges and apples, plates and napkins, spoons and forks and cups. They placed all that food on the back seats of the cars. It was like a grand, grand picnic we were going on, and Wilma and I were mighty excited. We could hardly wait to start.

My father, my mother, Wilma, and I got into the Cadillac. My uncles, my aunts, my cousins got into the Ford, the Buick, and the Chevrolet, and we rolled off in our caravan headed south. Though my mother was finally riding in the Cadillac, she had no praise for it. In fact, she said nothing about it at all. She still seemed upset and since she still seemed to feel the same about the car, I wondered why she had insisted upon making this trip with my father.

We left the city of Toledo behind, drove through Bowling Green and down through the Ohio countryside of farms and small towns, through Dayton and Cincinnati, and across the Ohio River into Kentucky. On the other side of the river my father stopped the car and looked back at Wilma and me and said, “Now from here on, whenever we stop and there’re white people around, I don’t want either one of you to say a word. Not one word! Your mother and I’ll do all the talking. That understood?”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.