William Faulkner: Flags in the Dust

He descended and tethered the team, and his spirit mollified by the rebuke administered and laved with the beatitude of having gained his own way, Simon paused and examined the motor car with curiosity and no little superciliousness tinged faintly with envious awe, and spoke affably with its conductor. But not for long, for Simon had sisters in the Lord in this kitchen, and presently he let himself through the gate and followed the path that led around to the back. He could hear the party going on as he passed beneath the windows: that stained unintelligible gabbling with which white ladies could surround themselves without effort and which they seemed to consider a necessary (or unavoidable) adjunct to having a good time. The fact that it was a card party would have seemed neither paradoxical nor astonishing to Simon, for time and much absorbing experience had taught him a fine tolerance of white folks’ vagaries and for those of ladies of any color.

The hillman had built his house so close to the street that the greater part of the original lawn with its fine old trees lay behind it. There were once crepe-myrtle and syringa and lilac and jasmine bushes without order, and casual stumps and fences with honeysuckle overgrown; and after the originalhouse had burned these had taken the place and made of its shaggy formality a mazed and scented jungle loved of mockingbirds and thrushes, where boys and girls lingered on spring and summer nights among drifting fireflies and choiring whip-poor-wills. Then the hillman had bought it and cut some of the trees in order to build his house near the street after the country fashion, and chopped out the jungle of bushes and vines and whitewashed the remaining trees and ran his barn- and hog- and chicken-lot fences between their ghostly trunks. He didn’t remain long enough to learn of garages.

Some of the antiseptic desolation of his tenancy had faded now, and its present owner had set out more shrubbery—jasmine and mock-orange and verbena—with green iron tables and chairs beneath them and a pool and a tennis court; and Simon passed on with discreet assurance, and on a consonantless drone of female voices he rode into the kitchen where a thin woman in a funereal purple turban and poising a beaten biscuit heaped with a mayonnaise-impregnated something in a soiled kid glove, and a mountainous one in the stained apron of her calling and drinking melted ice-cream from a saucer, rolled their eyes at him.

“I seed him on de street yistiddy and he looked bad; he jes’ didn’t favor hisself,” the visitor was saying as Simon entered, but they dropped the theme of conversation immediately and made him welcome.

“Ef it ain’t Brother Strother,” they said in unison. “Come in, Brother Strother. How is you?”

“Po’ly, ladies; po’ly,” Simon replied. He doffed his hat and unclamped his cigar and stowed it away in the hat-band. “I’se had a right smart mis’ry in de back. Is y’allkep’well?”

“Right well, I thank you, Brother Strother,” thevisitor replied. Simon drew a chair up to the table, as he was bidden.

“What you gwine eat, Brother Strother?” the cook demanded hospitably. “Dey’s party fixin’s, and dey’s some cole greens and a little sof’ ice-cream lef’ f’um dinner.”

“I reckon I’ll have a little ice-cream and some of dem greens, Sis’ Rachel,” Simon replied. “My teef ain’t much on party doin’s no mo’.” The cook rose with majestic deliberation and waddled across to a pantry and reached down a platter. She was one of the best cooks in Jefferson: no mistress dared protest against the social amenities of Rachel’s kitchen.

“Ef you ain’t de beatin’es’ man!” the first guest exclaimed. “Eatin’ ice-cream at yo’ age!”

“I been eatin’ ice-cream sixty years,” Simon said. “Whut reason! got fer quittin’ now?”

“Dat’s right, Brother Strother,” the cook agreed, placing the dish before him. “Eat yo’ ice-cream when you kin git it Jes’ a minute and I’ll—Here, Meloney,” she interrupted herself as a young light negressJn a smart white apron and cap entered, bearing a tray of plates containing remnants of edible edifices copied from pictures in ladies’ magazines and possessing neither volume nor nourishment, with which the party had been dulling its palates against supper, “git Brother Strother a bowl of dat ‘ere icecream, honey.”

The girl clashed the tray into the sink and rinsed a bowl at the water tap while Simon watched her with his still little eyes. She whipped the bowl through a towel with a fine show of derogatory carelessness, and with her nose at a supercilious angle she clattered on her high heels across the kitchen, still under Simon’s unwinking regard, and slammed a door behind her. Then Simon turned his head again.

“Yes, ma’am,” he repeated, “I been eatin’ icecream too long to quit at my age.”

“Dey won’t no vittle hurt you ez long ez you kin stomach ‘um,” the cook agreed, raising her saucer to her lips again. The girl returned with her head still averted and set the bowl of viscid liquid before Simon who, under cover of this movement, dropped his hand on her thigh. The girl smacked him sharply on the back of his gray head with her flat palm.

“Miss Rachel, can’t you make him keep his hands to hisself?”

“Ain’t you ‘shamed,” Rachel demanded, but without rancor. “A ole gray-head man like you, wid a family of grown chillen and one foot in de cemetery?”

“Hush yo’ mouf, woman,” Simon said placidly, spooning spinach into his soft ice-cream. “Ain’t dey erbout breakin’ up in yonder yit?”

“I reckon dey’s erbout to,” the other guest answered, putting another laden biscuit into her mouth with a gesture of elegant gentility. “Seems like dey’s talkin’ louder.”

“Den dey’s started playin’ again,” Simon corrected. “Talkin’ jes’ eased off whiles dey et. Yes, suh, dey’s started playin’ again. Dat’s white folks. Nigger ain’t got sense ernough to play cards wid all dat racket goin’ on.”

But they were breaking up. Miss Jenny Du Pre had just finished a story which left the three players at her table avoiding one another’s eyes a little self-consciously, as was her way. Miss Jenny travelled very little, and in Pullman smokerooms not at all, and people wondered where she got her stories; who had told them to her. And she repeated them anywhere and at any time, choosing the wrong moment and the wrong audience with a cold and cheerful audacity. Young people liked her, and she was much in demand as a chaperone for picnic parties.

She now spoke across the room to the hostess. “I’m going home, Belle,” she stated. “I think we are all tired of your party, I know I am.” The hostess was a plump, youngish woman and her cleverly rouged face showed now an hysterical immersion that was almost repose, but when Miss Jenny broke into her consciousness with the imminence of departure this faded quickly, and her face resumed its familiar expression of strained and vague dissatisfaction and she protested conventionally but with a petulant sincerity, as a well-bred child might,

But Miss; Jenny was adamant and she rose and her slender wrinkled hand brushed invisible crumbs from the bosom of her black silk dress. “If I stay any longer I’ll miss Bayard’s toddy time,” she explained with her usual forthrightness, “Come on, Narcissa, and I’ll drive you home”

“I have my car, thank you, Miss Jenny,” the young woman to whom she spoke replied in a grave contralto, rising also; and the others rose with sibilant gathering motions above the petulant modulation of the hostess’ protestings, and they drifted slowly into the hall and clotted again before mirrors, colorful and shrill Miss Jenny pushed steadily toward the door.