Balls

by Nanci Kincaid

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

BALLS is the story of a college football coach, his rise, his fall, and his fallback position. You could say BALLS is the story of a coach's kick-off, his first, second, and third downs . . . and his punt. But BALLS is a coach's story that belongs to the coach's wife. To her, and to his mother, his mother-in-law, his daughter, his assistants' wives, his players' mothers and girlfriends, and even his players' grandmothers. It's the women standing behind this handsome football hero who tell the story behind the headlines of Mac Gibbs, Birmingham University coach Catfish Bomar's star quarterback, who married Dixie Carraway, the beautiful homecoming queen. Set in Alabama, home state of the legendary Paul "Bear" Bryant, BALLS is told by fifteen women and one little girl touched by Mac Gibbs's fall from fame as a college quarterback to infamy as head coach of the Birmingham University Black Bears. It's told in those women's voices, from their seats in the stands. They watch the other women, worry when players are slow to get up off the ground, pray when players are carried off on stretchers. They don't care much for the "science" of the game--or its brutality. They see football as it really is--sexy, dirty, sweaty, painful, empowering, corrupt. The story they tell is often funny and not always pretty, as the view from deep inside rarely is. This is a novel that moves with the force of a fourth down charge, and shimmers with the tears of the women waiting outside the locker-room door when the game is lost. The author, twice a head coach's wife, knows whereof she writes so brilliantly. She also knows a lot about love. And BALLS is, above all, a love story.

Release date: October 1, 1998

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 396

Sample

Mac runs onto the field. He’s beautiful. The band plays the national anthem, the flag wilts in the heat, I mouth the words “bombs bursting in air.” The first scream goes up, the coin is tossed, and somebody runs and kicks the ball into the sky. This is America, land of the free, home of the brave. My heart swells to nearly bursting with “Oh, say can you see.”

One hundred college boys roar, run on the field, and butt helmets like a fistful of dropped marbles. The pep band plays “Black Bear Boogie” and the team charges through two rows of cartwheeling cheerleaders who glisten in the sun.

Like any decent girl, I’d once set out to be a cheerleader, but I got the flu the week of tryouts and missed my chance. I was afraid my life was ruined. But that same fall I was elected Shades Valley homecoming princess. A home-coming princess who was not a cheerleader? It was like if you got to be commander in chief without having ever been a soldier.

Daddy has expensive binoculars the better to watch Mac with. And Jett too. He passes them to me so I can see Mac’s face, which I study, trying to imagine what he’s thinking.

All other eyes are on Jett. People pick him out first thing—it isn’t hard—the only colored boy on the field. They wait for him to make a mistake, to miss a pass or drop a ball or take a hangman’s hit—anything that might give them permission to rip a paper cup to shreds and rage against a nigger on the field.

Lilly doesn’t come to the games at all. She prefers to lie in bed at home, the lights off, the electric fan going, and listen to the game on the radio and nobody blames her at all. Jett’s uncles come and friends I recognize from pickup games Mac takes me to in their neighborhood. They sit in a cluster, the colored people, and make me think of a dark freckle on a big pink face.

It’s 1968 and the world’s changing. It scares everybody. People say the rules are changing and it doesn’t seem fair, to change now when people have finally gotten the hang of things with the rules they already know. I personally think rules are meant to be broken, even if I’m too chicken to break them myself. But not in football, of course, which is one good thing about it. It’s something people can count on. In football the rules are the rules are the rules. So everybody can go crazy and relax all at the same time.

Heat bears down on the stadium. “Too hot for football,” the man behind me says to his buddy.

“Never too hot for football,” his buddy answers. “If hell put together a decent team I’d buy me a ticket and go down there to watch it. And so would you.”

“I guess so,” the man behind me says.

Mac’s playing quarterback but the offense is sputtering. People are restless, waiting for the spectacular. I pray for the spectacular too.

Mac’s sacked for what seems like the hundredth time by the Ole Miss defense in the second half. He lands shoulder first. I swear I can hear the crunch of bones. Afterwards he can’t get up. Coach Bomar sends Vet, the trainer, to see about him. With the help of the managers Mac makes his way off the field, his arm dangling.

“If you can’t take a hit, get off the field,” a man yells.

“Get somebody who can throw the damn ball,” somebody says.

“Ignore them,” Rose tells me.

“There’s no shortage of jackasses in this world,” Daddy says with the binoculars pressed to his face.

The second-string quarterback runs in and the crowd cheers. I look two rows back at Mac’s parents. Mr. Gibbs is going colorless, like a blank space where a man should be. Mrs. Gibbs is looking straight ahead, stiff as a board, tears rolling down her powdered face. She fumbles through her pocketbook for a tissue. Bobby’s new wife, Lisa, is beside Mrs. Gibbs, patting her arm.

With Mac out of the game Coach Bomar takes Jett out too. The crowd loves this. “Sit your butt on the bench, black boy!” a man several rows ahead yells. Rose takes a handful of ice out of her lemonade thermos and throws it, hitting him in the back of the neck, which shocks me because it’s not good manners and next to God, Rose mostly believes in good manners even at sporting events, which don’t necessarily lend themselves much to courtesy. The man slaps at his neck like he’s been stung by a bee. “Down in front,” Rose says and then smiles.

Midway into the third quarter Mac comes back onto the sideline with Vet right behind him. Mac’s still in uniform and has an adhesive-tape-looking contraption on his shoulder. Birmingham University is struggling to get a first down. Mac breathes down Coach Bomar’s neck like a shadow. Jett stands apart from the other players, holding his helmet in his hand, sipping water from a paper cup.

When the second-string quarterback is helped off the field with an injured ankle people applaud him and boo. Then Coach Bomar puts Mac back in. They’ll kill him, I think to myself.

The crowd’s on its feet. Behind me Mrs. Gibbs yells, “Okay, Mac, let’s go, Son.” I look at her and smile.

Rose slides her sunglasses into her hair and claps. “All right Jett, let’s do something now, honey.”

The Ole Miss defense is in Mac’s face, mouthing off with their plastic-coated teeth, lisping cusswords—I can read their lips through the binoculars—just before they grunt and knock the fool out of each other. I look at Mac’s face. It’s closed. He’s refusing to hear them, refusing to see them. They sack him and grind into him, their knees, their fists, their ball-like heads hammering him.

“Get up, Mac,” I whisper to myself. His name is spoken in a God voice over the loudspeaker again and again—“Gibbs stopped on the forty,” “Gibbs sacked again,” “Gibbs brought down by number thirty-three.”

Mac throws the ball like a man with a double-jointed elbow. It’s not pretty. The point is to get the pass off fast—short and fast, short and fast, get it to Jett, to Jett, to Jett—then take his hits. Again. Again. Again. Mac should not be getting up at all. Not anymore. Sometimes he waits for somebody to pull him up. He should be out cold. He should be dead.

In my mind I run down the stadium steps, jump over the rail, weave my way through the players and onto the field. My feet don’t touch the ground as I go to Mac, throw myself over him where he lies trampled on the ground. I’m like Cornelia Wallace, who flung herself over George when the bullets started flying.

Then, late in the game, like a whisper, something begins to pass over the crowd. It’s like a breeze through the stadium, where we’re baking in our sweatbox seats, our wet clothes stuck to us. We begin—just barely—to believe. One simple thing.

Mac Gibbs will get up. No matter how hard he’s crushed into the ground, no matter how many times. He will rise again. It’s a small, difficult thing to believe. But easier in Birmingham than in lots of other places because we’re Bible people. Believing is in our blood.

A boiled-faced man jumps up, spilling his cold drink. “You can knock him down, but damn if you can keep him down,” he yells.

“Amen!” somebody says.

Dixie is a pretty girl. I hope it doesn’t ruin her life.

There are worse things than not getting chosen, like getting chosen too early. Or getting chosen too often. But you have to live awhile before you can know that.

Dixie’s smart too, which if she isn’t careful can destroy her about as quick as anything else. I tell her, “Being smart can be a real detriment to a woman unless she knows how to go about it tactfully.”

“Like you do, Rose?” she says.

“There are worse examples you could follow,” I say. “Where do you think you got your brains in the first place?”

“From Daddy, I guess,” she says.

“God knows how I wish that was the truth.” I laugh.

Then Dixie looks at me sharp-eyed and that’s the end of it.

She’s my daughter and I love her, but without question she’s got Bennett’s sour blood. She’s got that Carraway melancholy. Bennett Sr. might be the one that put the gun to his head, but they’re all geared that way. Although there’re just the slightest traces in Dixie so far, I see the signs and it breaks my heart. I’m afraid if she’s not careful—in time—that Carraway despair might overtake her.

Now my family—if we all wanted to put guns to our heads, then yes, it would make sense. Nobody would question it. Most of us have good reason to try and hurry out of this life and on to the next one. Some of us don’t have anything to lose but loss itself, if you’ll excuse the expression. But the Carraways now. It’s mysterious. They have everything to live for. Every reason in the world to be happy.

I’m planning Dixie’s wedding. None of her grandparents are alive to see it. Nobody much in my family left to witness this. So mostly it will be Bennett’s people, cousins, aunts and uncles, coming from miles around to see how Bennett is handling his grief and his father’s estate. I think they’ll be surprised. Bennett has good business sense, which I guess is better than no sense at all. He tells me there’s no need for Dixie’s wedding to be extravagant, but he knows I don’t believe in extravagance. I believe in understatement. I want this to be something we all remember—forever. Bennett says, “Rose, don’t try to make this into the wedding you and I never had, you hear me. It’s Dixie’s wedding. If you need to plan something for the two of us you can go ahead and start planning our funerals.”

I’ve already planned his funeral a thousand times. In my mind I’ve given him an assortment of tasteful burials, chosen the casket and the music and stood right there and watched them shovel the dirt over him. So whether he knows it or not I’m way ahead of him.

Dixie, married. It’s nothing I can really prepare her for. I can’t decide if it’s cruel for mothers not to warn their daughters, or if it’s crueler to. Sometimes I get the feeling she wants me to talk her out of it. But I know if I tried she would probably never forgive me.

And Mac. He’s a nice boy. I’m fond of Mac. If he’d been drafted into pro football he could have given her a good life. Some travel and excitement. Zale says Mac is a fine Christian and would make a good preacher if he was inclined. But no, he’s inclined to make a good high school football coach. I just want Dixie to be happy. I don’t know if football is going to be any kind of life for her.

Besides, I wonder if Mac really knows Dixie, knows about the notebooks she fills her room with. You can’t call them diaries because there’s no key to lock them with. I see those notebooks. Under her bed, in the back of her closet behind the laundry basket, closed away in shoe boxes. I could take one out and read it anytime, but I don’t. Even when she leaves one of those notebooks lying wide open on her unmade bed, her thoughts right out there like so many birds poised for flight, well, I don’t disturb them.

Dixie says, “Rose, you do like Mac, don’t you?”

I say, “Of course.”

“I mean really,” she says. “Are you crazy about him?”

“I think Mac is just fine,” I say.

“Well, sometimes I wonder. That’s all. After what happened that night. It was like you hated him.”

“That’s over and done with,” I say. “We’ve settled that, haven’t we?”

“I guess so,” she says.

I know she thinks about it. I know it didn’t make sense to her at the time and might never. But when I woke up so late like that, an alarm ringing silently in my head, and went down the hall in the dark, the last thing I ever thought I’d see was a man in bed with Dixie. Every thought flew through my mind. Save her, I said to myself. You’ve got to save her. The idea felt like pulling a trigger and it made a sound like a gunshot too, the echo inside me. At first I went so crazy I didn’t know it was Mac. It was just some thief in the night stealing my daughter’s life. I wanted to kill him, to just rip into him, tear him apart—and make him regret everything right before he died from a bullet to his heart. Where was Bennett’s gun? Where was the gun Bennett’s daddy shot himself in the head with? Where was my sharp kitchen knife? I went at him with my fingernails and teeth. He wasn’t Mac. He was every man I’ve ever loathed. He was every man I’ve ever watched destroy something beautiful.

And Dixie was screaming so bad I had to slap her to make her stop. That’s what scared Mac, I think, seeing me slap Dixie that way. But she wasn’t just Dixie. I was slapping myself too—that’s what he didn’t understand. I was slapping hell out of the stupid girl I had been, the one that now Dixie was going to be. Slapping sense into her. But she wouldn’t stop screaming.

He says now I didn’t actually hurt him, but God knows it wasn’t because I didn’t try. Just some scratches on his face and bruises that didn’t amount to much. Afterwards I had his skin under my fingernails. Zale says there’s the power to kill in all of us. I know that now. I know that in a split second you can become somebody you don’t recognize and you can try to kill the stranger in you and the strangers around you. There was a moment, barely a flash, when I thought, God, yes, this feels good. It feels right. I have never killed anything but there is so much that needs killing. Mac kept saying, “Mrs. Carraway, it’s okay. It’s me, Mac.” It almost makes me laugh to think about it now, Mac believing he’s an exception, that he’s different from all the rest of the men in this world. If Bennett hadn’t stopped me when he did, who knows what I’d have done.

They all thought I was crazy. That’s what Bennett kept saying “Goddamnit, Rose. You are fucking crazy.” Bennett talks so ugly sometimes. He pinned me up against the wall with my hands twisted behind my back while Mac got out of the house. I thought he might break both my arms.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Bennett kept slamming me up against the wall. “Say? What the hell is wrong with you?”

Of all people, he should know.

The first time Mac opened one button on my blouse and touched my breast I thought it was a moment of genius. I think it must have been the way America felt when Columbus discovered it.

Even now, even though we’re officially engaged, we still park up by the Vulcan on that road Mac knows, because of that time Rose caught Mac in my room and went crazy—and we weren’t even doing anything but lying there talking—I mean crazy like a lunatic who belonged in an insane asylum, which I don’t know if I will ever forgive her for or not, and she had on that see-through nightgown too, her nipples bouncing like two polka dots under there. Since then, we don’t have any place much to go where we can be alone together. Except Mac’s car, which sort of automatically veers up toward the Vulcan now.

“You are so sweet, Dixie Carraway, I could just eat you up,” Mac says. It’s not an original thing to say. It’s what people say to babies, but he sincerely means it. In the last couple of years Mac has named his top lip Lewis and his bottom lip Clark because he says they are such a hell of a pair of explorers. They are too. He’s like a man lip-led. Our mouths have taken over all other aspects of our love, like we are two infants in the world of passion—tasting, biting. I love that word, passion. It makes me think of a vine-ripened tomato on the hottest day of the year that last second before the skin splits open and the pulp oozes out. That fleshy red. All those little seeds.

Mac goes crazy if I suck his finger. You wouldn’t think a little thing like sucking a finger could do to a guy what it does to Mac. But I don’t just suck it, I really make it interesting, you know. I’ve developed what you might call technique. I just love what mouths can do—that the place that makes the words is also the place that makes the kisses. I watch him watch me while I suck his finger. For those few minutes it’s like I rule the world. I mean if I said, “Mac, go run into that burning building,” I think he’d actually consider it.

Before Mac, Daddy was mean to boys who came around me. He was rude. Rose was never rude and it really irritated her for Daddy to be—but too bad. Daddy was always telling boys it was time for them to go home, and no, I could not drive down to the shopping center with them. No, I couldn’t go to the late movie. No, I couldn’t go to the drive-in. No. No. No. Maybe that’s where I developed my appreciation for the power of the word no.

But as soon as Mac came along, Daddy just sort of changed his tune. Sure, Mac could take me to the drive-in. Sure I could drive over to Tuscaloosa with Mac to see a basketball game. If it had to do with Mac, Daddy was in favor of it. I love Daddy and all, but the truth is this has never set right with me.

Since Daddy abandoned his fatherly patrol it has become my job to patrol things. I think I do it as well as any girl I can name who is fully human. Saying no is hard work. It can wear you out. As young as I am I’m already practically exhausted. No. No. No. God, how Mac loves hearing me say that word. Just the word itself seems to transform me into an angel and send me flying around in some heavenly sphere in his mind. Lucky for me no is Mac’s favorite word. That’s the kind of boy he is.

I’ve put on a few extra pounds, so I need to find a bridesmaid dress that won’t point that out. “All I ask is that you cover up your breasts,” Dixie says. “This is not a cleavage exhibition, Frances Delmar. It’s a wedding, thank you.”

Is it my fault I might outshine the bride in certain areas? “Take it up with God, Dix,” I tell her. “Don’t blame me.”

See, the real truth is I’m scared to death of taking after my mother, whose boobs make her look like a woman trying to shoplift a couple of watermelons out of the Piggly Wiggly. And Dixie knows I’m scared of turning into my mother—because she’s scared of the same thing.

Cleet says, “Frances Delmar, as far as I can see there’s not one inch of you to waste.” He’s the sweetest guy. He says, “Let’s put it this way, Frances Delmar. Nobody would ever mistake you for a boy. That’s for damn sure.” Cleet’s the best.

Anyway, I’ve cut out all french fries, Shoney’s Big Boys, and hot fudge cake until the wedding. Also no barbecue. That should take these pounds off. But you know where I always lose first? Boobs. Wouldn’t you know it?

Dixie’s letting Rose plan her whole wedding. That’s just like Dixie too. Do you think I’d just sit back and let my mother make all the decisions about the biggest day of my life? But Dixie acts like some kind of dumb Sleeping Beauty or something. It can really drive me crazy if I let it. We’ve been around and around about it. I say, “Dixie, damnit, wake up and smell the coffee, child.”

She smiles and says, “F. D., you smell it for me. You tell me what it’s like.”

Sometimes I think she lives her whole life through me. I do. Sometimes I wonder if I’d have done half of what I’ve done if Dixie wasn’t sitting at home waiting for me to come over and tell her all about it. She likes her adventure secondhand, and preferably home-delivery. Like to Dixie a book is a real wild adventure, if that tells you anything. She’s just so indifferent sometimes it really gets me. Curiosity might have killed the cat, but I swear if lack of curiosity hasn’t killed more than just a bunch of stupid cats.

But don’t get me wrong. I love Dixie. I really do. We’ve been best friends most of our lives. I used to spend practically every weekend at her house, used to go to all the Birmingham University football games with her family. Her dad’s a real sports fiend. Has season tickets to everything. And Rose, well, I guess she liked to see and be seen. But whenever I think of Dixie and me as kids, I think of those afternoons at Legion Field when I taught Dixie how to smoke. We got in a stall in the ladies’ room on the visitors’ side, where nobody would recognize us. The opposing team’s women were lined up waiting to pee. “You girls come out of there with those cigarettes,” they said. But it’s a free country. There’s no law about how long you can stay in a bathroom stall. And I take credit where credit is due: it was me who taught Dixie to inhale and hold it in even if it hurt.

Dixie’s parents were too wrapped up in the game to notice when later we smelled like a couple of Lucky Strikes doused in Shalimar. Her daddy was about three sheets to the wind by then. And Rose has been accused of being good looking all her life, but on game days she was guilty. I mean it. She was so beautiful sitting there that I went momentarily insane and started wishing she was my mother too.

Dixie and I wanted to grow up and be like the women we saw at Legion Field—lipstick bloodred, hair sprayed into helmets, fingernails painted, green-and-gold outfits with matching shoes and dangling gold bracelets. To Dixie and me, the ball game women were so glamorous.

We loved football, of course. The actual game. It was the most exciting thing there was. We memorized all the cheers. We studied the cheerleaders, rated their bodies, their kicks, their breasts. We took points off for sweat rings under their arms, failure to smile nonstop, fat thighs, or hair that frizzed in the heat. This seemed only fair. We knew even then that cheerleaders set the beauty standard that we were to aspire to. Of course I went on to be a cheerleader—high school and college both. But Dixie, she wasn’t so lucky—even though she pretends it doesn’t bother her. She pretends she’d rather be at home reading a book or writing some sort of weird poem or something. Dixie’s practically gorgeous, you know, when she wants to be. But if you ask me she’s never known how to make the most of it. Like she could have if she’d been a cheerleader.

Even when we were kids Dixie and I were certain we would grow up to marry football players. We swore neither of us would settle for less. We couldn’t think of anything worse than ending up with one of the smart boys at school. Some guy like Porter Warren—even though Dixie swears he’s a nice guy. If you ask me he’s as queer as a three-dollar bill. Besides, smart boys were not real boys as far as Dixie and I were concerned. Some of our best friends were smart boys, but certainly neither of us wanted to grow up and marry one.

Once I said to Dixie, “You know where I’m going to have my wedding? On the football field, at halftime, you know, in front of the whole stadium. My future husband can run out on the field wearing his uniform and carrying his helmet in his hand.”

“The coach won’t allow it,” Dixie said. “He’ll make your future husband keep his mind on the game.”

“Not if my future husband is a big star,” I said.

“Yeah, but what if the Birmingham Black Bears are losing?”

“I’ll call the wedding off. No way will I marry a loser.”

To this day I think that it was at Legion Field that Dixie and I learned to be women. What we loved about football was mainly two things. One, you could scream all you wanted to. We screamed until we began to sweat and our raw throats could no longer be soothed by Dr Pepper. Sometimes now I wish I could just go someplace and scream like we did back then. Just scream and scream and scream.

But the second thing, the thing we loved even more than we loved screaming, was that we loved going back and forth to the ladies’ room to comb our hair. Dixie has that straight hair that just lies still, obedient as some old dog that just knows one trick. But me, well, I have this hair. I’ve had to fight with all this curly mess day and night my whole life. If my hair was a dog it’d be a wet puppy, jumping, bouncing, yapping like crazy, running around chasing its own tail.

Ten or twelve times a game we walked back and forth in front of the concession stands to see who we might see—and more important, who might see us. We loved to roam the stadium with a swarm of friends and blend our small, nervous crowd into the larger, surer crowd, you know. We loved belonging. That was the magic of the thing—you could just buy a ticket and belong.

Jett come around here and says, “So Mama, what you think about Dixie and Mac getting married?”

“Well, I hope it goes better for them than it does for most folks,” I say. I was ironing Mr. Carraway’s shirts. He don’t like to send his shirts to the laundry, says they tear them up over there. He likes the way I do them, not too much starch. I ain’t trying to make a shirt into a piece of plywood like they do over there and then go and charge you for the uncomfort of it.

“Like your marriage, Mama? You talking about yourself?”

“Just in case you hadn’t noticed your daddy been missing out our lives for what—twenty years now. That’s enough to make me think my marriage ain’t going all that good,” I say.

The boy laughs. If you ask me it’s good when a boy can just laugh about the fool his daddy is. That wadn’t always the way. There was a time when Jett was hurt not having a man to sit out on our porch in the evenings in a straight-back chair and worry about something. A man to eat up all the chicken breasts and leave us the wings, work a job until the first paycheck, then decide it ain’t no kinda decent job after all, lay up on the sofa and watch some show on the TV like maybe it had anything at all to do with his own sorry life he was trying to live in some kind of big way. But Jett now, he don’t remember none of that.

All he remembers is his daddy getting out that electric guitar and filling up the house with that good music. The house would soak up all them tunes like it wasn’t nothing but a big cotton rag put down on a spill. Like you could hear the house drink it up, like you was living in a mighty thirsty house, like it was parched. You could touch your hand to the wall and just feel that music vibrating inside there like blood pumping, like the house was come alive. You could walk around barefoot and the music would go up right through your feet. I swear to God, you could feel it tremble your bones, like some kind of funny electricity shooting through you.

When Castro was making that music I thought I never seen any man look so good. It made good sense to love a man who could make that kind of music. I’d start to think he was a heavenly angel come down to earth or something—which he was not. He was just a music-making man. There was times we didn’t have much else but music, but if we had that then we felt like we had something. I miss it as bad as Jett does, the music—but it’s been so long now I can’t hardly think of what else there was to miss about Castro. When he set out for Memphis saying he would come back to get us I didn’t have no cause to doubt him. And that was the last we seen of the man too. Right this minute I couldn’t tell you what he used to look like.

“Dixie says you coming to her wedding, Mama,” Jett says. “Says you gon sit right up in the front with her mama and daddy.”

“She didn’t ask me nothing—not how I felt about that.”

“Well, how you feel about it?”

“I feel all right about it, I guess. I can’t think of nowhere else I ought to sit.”

“Tell the truth, Mama.” Jett laughs.

It don’t mean a thing to me, if you want to know the truth. I am not one of those that wants to go everywhere with the white folks. Now I think the movie theaters and the restaurants, they ought to do right by colored and white both, and anybody else that pays taxes and counts themselves as American. But do I want to go over to that country club and swim in that swimming pool with them people? I do not. I can’t think of much worse than a bunch of wet white people. They get that smell and I swear if it don’t make my stomach start to flip. And if not wanting to mix up with them makes me an Uncle Tom like Jett says, well then, that’s what I am.

It’s Jett that can’t stand to be left out of nothing. I don’t know how he got so determined. Sometimes I think it was me bringing him to work with me all those years, which I wouldn’t of done if I’d had no other way, him playing with Dixie and seeing what all white folks have and where they go and how much they spend and what they eat, the next thing you know Jett is wanting every bit of what they got and more. He’s most likely gon have it now too.

Already since he signed that contract he’s paid off my house and my credit and bought me that condominium even though I am not a condominium type of a person. I like some ground with a place. I like something to stand on outside where you can grow you a little something if you want to. I like my morning glory vines and my bell pepper and tomato plants and some collard greens and all the rest of it. Where am I supposed to plant something in a damn condominium—and me the only colored in the building. If he wanted to buy me something he could of bought me a piece of land with a nice house on it—you know, out away from here someplace. But no, he’s got to buy some kind of a showplace right in the middle of a bunch of yellow-haired white. . .