Proud Flesh Read Free Page A

inherited.
    Perhaps old Dot-and-Carry had had to let off such an excess of steam outside the house because of being so bottled up at home, looking already in their faded sepia-toned wedding photograph which hung over the parlor mantelpiece—she enthroned upon a stiff ladder-backed chair and wearing not a bridal gown but one of those gray soutanes such as she was wearing on the day a half century later when struck down by illness—like the consort to a queen. Unremembered now in the lineaments of his offspring, in all of whom down to the fourth generation her pattern was distinct and assertive as the tartan of a clan: brown, almost black eyes, round-lidded, deep-set under shelving brows, a high ridged forehead, reddish-blond hair highly resistant to graying and balding, long sharp nose with narrow nostrils, short upper lip, overfull pouting lower one, the jaw heavy and a trifle undershot, and in the men a thick neck, thickly corded, with a gaunt Adam’s apple like a knot in a rope. That, with allowances (though not many) for the difference in sex, was the image of her who now lay behind day-drawn shades in the upstairs bedroom of the big rambling yellow house on the hill.
    People were inclined to feel that Alonzo Renshaw had been dead even longer than he had. In conversation his widow managed to convey the impression that she had raised, if not conceived, her ten children singlehanded. And it was true that even during her husband’s lifetime she had been both mother and father to their boys, leaving to him the girls. She it was who regularly on the third Saturday of the month brought in her brood to be barbered. They would arrive punctually on the stroke of ten, and the barbershop would be emptied in expectation; for she sat through the entire shearing and her presence put such a damper on the customary male conviviality of the place that the customers, and even the shoeshine boy, retired to the backalley until her departure. They would line up in order of age: Clifford, Clyde, Ross, Ballard and Lester. At Mr. Birdwell’s hands they all received the same monkish tonsure, but this never discouraged their mother from issuing a stream of directives for trimming each of her boys in such a way as to soften and flatter what she alone could discern as his individual features. On climbing down from the chair each had to submit to her running her hand through his hair to muss it up and give it a less newly-clipped look. He was then free to go outside and stand by the peppermint pole with his hands in his pockets until the rest of his brothers were done. A favorite Saturday morning pastime of other boys proud of their shagginess was to stroll past the barbershop and whisper something taunting, having reference to cueballs and peeled onions, to the accumulated Renshaw brothers around the pole, who, unable to respond beneath their mother’s all-seeing eye, like so many Samsons shorn of their force, could only hiss an invitation to meet them later, an invitation seldom accepted, as the Renshaw boys fought all for one and one for all, and did not scruple to fight all five against one.
    Anyone who bore the name Renshaw, no matter how remote the connection, could count on Ma’s boys for help in time of trouble. Likewise he could count on hearing from them should he do anything to besmirch the name.
    Once word reached the boys that Conway Renshaw, who lived in the neighboring county, had been dragging their proud name in the dirt. They called him Uncle though none knew exactly how he was related to them. Uncle Conway had recently opened a grocery store in a Negro neighborhood in his town. Through a sharp credit system he had in no time at all made such a good thing of it that already they were calling him “Nig” Renshaw, and a local wit had tagged him “the black man’s burden.”
    The Renshaw boys disapproved of this reputation for sharp practice which their kinsman had earned. However, it was