Toni Morrison - Paradise

She walked fast, as though tripping through red coals or else in pain from something stuck in the toes of her shoes. Something valuable, K. D. thought, otherwise she would have removed it. He carried the equipment box through the dining room. Narrow panels of lace spilled from a basket on the side table. Aunt Soane worked thread like a prisoner: daily, methodically, for free, producing more lace than could ever be practical. Out back the garden skirting to the left was weed-free and nicely tilled. K. D. turned right toward the shed and entered. The collies were thrilled to see him. He had to straddle Good to keep her down. Her ears were soft in his fingers and he was steady with the camphor-soaked cotton. The ticks came away like coffee grounds. He put his palm under her jaw; she licked his chin.

Ben, the other collie, head on paws, looked on. Life at Steward Morgan's ranch loaded the dogs with mess. They needed a few days in Ruby under K. D.'s care twice a year. He took the bristle brush from the box. Dug deep in Good's hair, brushing it smooth and singing, softly in a Motown falsetto, the song he'd made up for her when she was a puppy. "Hey good dog; stay good dog; old good dog; my good dog. Everybody needs a good good good dog. Everybody needs a good a good a good good dog."

Good stretched her pleasure.

Just those concerned would be at the meeting tonight. Everybody, that is, except the one who started it all. His uncles Deek and Steward, Reverend Misner, Arnette's father and brother. They would discuss the slapping but not the pregnancy and certainly not the girl with sapphires hidden in her shoes.

Suppose she hadn't been there. Suppose her navel had not peeked over the waist of her jeans or her breasts had just hushed, hushed for a few seconds till they could figure out how to act-what attitude to strike. In public, without girls hanging around, they would have known. As a group they would have assumed the right tone immediately. But Arnette was there, whining, and so was Billie Delia. K. D. and Arnette had separated themselves from the others. To talk. They stood near the dwarf oaks behind the picnic benches and tables for a conversation worse than he ever thought talking could be. What Arnette said was, "Well, what are you going to do about it?" What she meant was: I'm going to Langston in September and I don't want to be pregnant or to abort or get married or feel bad by myself or face my family. He said, "Well, what are you going to do about it?" thinking: You cornered me at more socials than I can remember and when I finally agreed I didn't have to take your drawers down you beat me to it so this ain't my problem.

They had just begun to veil threats and unveil mutual dislike when the bus pulled away. All heads, all, turned. First because they had never seen a bus in the town-Ruby was not a stop on the way to someplace else. Second to see why it stopped at all. The vision that appeared when the bus drove away, standing on the road shoulder between the schoolhouse and Holy Redeemer, riveted the attention of everybody lounging at the Oven. She didn't have on any lipstick but from one hundred and fifty feet, you could see her eyes. The silence that descended seemed permanent until Arnette broke it. "If that's the kind of tramp you want, hop to it, nigger."

K. D. looked from Arnette's neat shirtwaist dress to the bangs across her forehead and then into her face-sullen, nagging, accusatory-and slapped it. The change in her expression well worth it. Somebody said, "Ow!" but mostly his friends were assessing the screaming tits closing in on them. Arnette fled; Billie Delia too, but, like the good friend she was, looked back, to see them forcing themselves to look at the ground, the bright May sky or the length of their fingernails.

Good was finished. Her belly hair could stand a light clipping-its knots were otherwise impossible-but she was beautiful. K. D. started on Ben's coat, rehearsing his line of defense to Arnette's family. When he described the incident to his uncles they had frowned at the same time. And like a mirror image in gestures if not in looks, Steward spit fresh Blue Boy while Deek lit a cigar. However disgusted both were, K. D. knew they would not negotiate a solution that would endanger him or the future of Morgan money. His grandfather had named his twins Deacon and Steward for a reason. And their family had not built two towns, fought white law, Colored Creek, bandits and bad weather, to see ranches and houses and a bank with mortgages on a feed store, a drugstore and a furniture store end up in Arnold Fleetwood's pocket. Since the loose bones of his cousins had been buried two years ago, K. D., their hope and their despair, was the last male in a line that included a lieutenant governor, a state auditor and two mayors. His behavior, as always, required scrutiny and serious correction. Or would the uncles see it another way? Maybe Arnette's baby would be a boy, a Morgan grandnephew. Would her father, Arnold, have any rights then that the Morgans had to respect?

Fondling Ben's coat, picking burrs from the silky strands of hair, K. D. tried to think like his uncles-which was hard. So he stopped trying and slipped off into his dream of choice. Only this time it included Gigi and her screaming tits.

"Hi." She cracked her gum like a professional. "Is this Ruby? Bus driver said this was it."

"Yep. Yeah. Uh huh. Sure is." The lounging boys spoke as one.

"Any motels around?"

They laughed at that and felt comfortable enough to ask her who she was looking for and from where she had come. "Frisco," she said. "And rhubarb pie. Got a light?"

The dream, then, would be in Frisco.

The Morgan men conceded nothing but were uneasy at the choice of meeting place. Reverend Misner had thought it best to serve protocol and go to Fleetwood rather than season the raw insult done to the family by making the aggrieved come to the house of the aggressor. K. D., Deek and Steward had sat in the parsonage living room all nods and conciliatory grunts, but K. D. knew what his uncles were thinking. He watched Steward shift tobacco and hold the juice. So far the credit union Misner had formed was no-profit-small emergency loans to church members; no-penalty payback schedules. Like a piggy bank, Deek had said. But Steward said, Yeah for now. The reputation of the church Misner had left to come to Ruby floated behind him: covert meetings to stir folks up; confrontations with rather than end runs around white law. He obviously had hope for a state that had once decided to build a whole new law school to accommodate one student-a Negro girl-and protect segregation at the same time. He clearly took seriously the possibility of change in a state that had also built an open closet right next to a classroom for another Negro student to sit in by himself. That was in the forties, when K. D. was a nursing infant, before his mother, her brothers, his cousins, and all the rest left Haven. Now, some twenty years later, his uncles listened weekly to Misner's sermons, but at the close of each of them they slid behind the steering wheel of their Oldsmobile and Impala and repeated the Old Fathers' refrain: "Oklahoma is Indians, Negroes and God mixed. All the rest is fodder." To their dismay, Reverend Misner often treated fodder like table food. A man like that could encourage strange behavior; side with a teenage girl; shift ground to Fleetwood. A man like that, willing to throw money away, could give customers ideas. Make them think there was a choice about interest rates.

Still, the Baptists were the largest congregation in town as well as the most powerful. So the Morgans sorted Reverend Misner's opinions carefully to judge which were recommendations easily ignored and which were orders they ought to obey.

In two cars they drove barely three miles from Misner's living room to Fleetwood's house.