Betsey Brown Read Free

chirren.”
    â€œI’ma tell Daddy you took my books.”
    â€œI bet you won’t have no backside side, if he gets holdt to ya.”
    â€œCome tie my shoes, please.”
    â€œFor God’s sake, somebody tie Allard’s shoes.”
    â€œMargot, you better do something with that mess you call hair.”
    â€œYou said you would comb it for me.”
    â€œShe sure ’nough did.”
    â€œWhere’s my geography book?”
    â€œSomebody tie Allard’s shoes, fore he trips over himself.”
    â€œI’ma tell Daddy.” The refrain arose from everyone’s lips.
    No one could find Allard to tie his shoes. Meanwhile Greer had strapped his conga drum round his shoulder. It was the one he’d brought from Cuba where Sharon was conceived under a sky of shooting stars, or so the story went. As if he were a southern Mongo Santamaria, Greer mamboed up the back stairs, through the halls, and down the front steps, gathering the mass of family he called his own, chanting all the while.
    Â 
    â€œThe Negro race is a mighty one
The work of the Negro is never done
Muscle, brains, and courage galore
Negroes in this house
Meet me at the back door
Oh! the Negro race is a mighty one
Each and every one of you is an example of one
Oh! the Negro race is a mighty one
We goin to show the world
What can be done
Cause the Negro race is a mighty one.”
    Â 
    Jane was not crazy about her children screaming at each other or about her husband’s idea of reveille. Cuba, yes. St. Louis, no. St. Louis was still an old-fashioned place. With “Yes, M’ams” and “No, Sirs” grating Jane’s ears every time she heard one of her children say sucha thing, but Greer swore it wouldn’t hurt them and Greer knew a lot about the worlds Jane had never considered. Matisse, Gauguin, Pippin, Bearden, and Modigliani. Whenever Dizzy Gillespie came to town, there they were, justa waiting. If Chuck Berry was in a scrap with the law, there they were. Greer operating and Jane taking pictures. Sometimes she couldn’t believe what she did for this man. Love and buckshot, music and street diagnoses, late-night feuds bout the future of the Negro race, whether DuBois or Walter White hadda place and where. That time DuBois had carried Betsey to bed was history. Everybody knew what a crotchety ol’ figure of a man he was, but couldn’t nobody but W.E.B. himself get that child to sleep. Was like the night Betsey’d hid in the back seat of the car to see Tina Turner, as if nobody would want to collect a ticket from her or see some I.D. from an eleven-year-old at the bawdiest night spot on the wrong side of the tracks. Saying “I wanna be an Ikette” didn’t do it. Greer had to hightail it back to the house with his girl, trying to explain that Tina Turner didn’t accept applications from young women under the age of eighteen. From that second, Betsey decided she would do everything just like Tina Turner do. Greer knew that and thatworried him, and then again, he was assured Betsey’d be good at whatever she put her mind on.
    Why couldn’t Greer see what kind of an influence he was having on the children, Jane worried. Her sister would never have let Charlie stay with them if she’d known all this was going on.
    Betsey’d run off behind her father to get ready for the morning quiz. Up and down and round about the house they went with Greer chanting, the children dancing.
    They all marched into the kitchen where Grandma sat in a corner by the window that opened on an oak tree frequented by bluejays she fed whenever something was simply beyond her. She hummed, “I been ’buked, & I been scorned.” Her daughter had married a mad man, bringing all this Africa mess into her house. Low-down music and prize-fighters at his heels soon as he stepped through the door. Nothing but the lowest of the low appealed to him, cept for her daughter, Jane.