Proud Flesh Read Free Page B

not only that. And they could have lived with the notion of a Renshaw’s living deriving wholly from Negroes, if only it had derived a little more indirectly. Association with Negroes was all right. They themselves passed time with Negroes, under certain outdoor sporting conditions. They all liked Negroes, liked some of them better than lots of white men they knew, and brother Clyde was even then evincing that preference for the company of Negroes which was to end by making him almost an alien from his own race. What stung was the thought of a Renshaw waiting on Negroes, serving them, taking orders from them, clerking to them, selling them intimate household items for petty cash, hand to hand, retail. And so a little vigilante party of Renshaw boys dropped in unannounced at the grocery store one busy Saturday afternoon. It was a hot summer day and Uncle Conway was doing a carnival-stand trade in RC Colas at seven cents a bottle (a nickel was the going price at the time). Black, or rather, work-worn, blackish-yellow, horny hands clamored for gingersnaps and vanilla wafers and bananas and canned sardines, all paid for with fistfuls of sweaty small change laboriously counted out of snap-top pocketbooks the length and the shape of socks—it looked, when they drew one out of their overalls pockets, as if they were extracting a vital body gland—and consumed on the premises while Uncle Conway filled their orders for the week’s provisions, off-brand goods at marked-up prices to which was further added a carrying charge for credit. Uncle Conway professed himself mighty pleased to see the boys, and asked automatically after Ma. But the blood flew to his cheeks and he suddenly adopted a more distant manner toward his customers and they a more respectful one toward him. That was on a Saturday; the following Monday morning Renshaw’s grocery failed to open its doors for business. Uncle Conway sold out that same week. Shortly afterward he re-emerged in the business world on a more genteel plane, taking on the local franchise for bottling a new brand of strawberry pop. This did not go over so he went into the feed and grain business, was set up in it by Ma’s boys, said those who sided with them in this dispute.
    Not everybody did. They were criticized for their highhanded interference in their uncle’s affairs, and for that family pride which made them do it. Still, the same ones who blamed them had to concede that whenever any Renshaw was in trouble, or under outside attack, Ma’s boys were there johnny-on-the-spot to help him out. The Renshaws were like hornets: tangle with one of them and you had the whole nest down upon you. Better be prepared to look the other way, turn the other cheek. For the Renshaws were never so quick to defend or avenge one of theirs as when he was in the wrong.
    Whether they actually laid hands on Malcolm Beatty to avenge their cousin Claude (who certainly started the trouble that led to that bloody Saturday afternoon on the town’s public square) was never known. It was generally accepted that Beatty had meant as part of his plan from the start to leap those four stories to his death. Be that as it may, he must certainly have been strengthened in his desperate resolve by the noise of those five lawless Renshaw brothers pounding on his office door.
    Cousin Claude Renshaw, like all farmboys, was a shadetree mechanic, only Claude was better than most, a mechanical wizard, and left the farm on the strength of it, within a year was foreman of a garage in town and within another year owned it, within two more had bought out his nearest competitor, taken over the local Ford distributorship, then hired town people to do all the paper-work out front while he went back to what he loved: greasemonkeying. He had been seen once to lift an old roadster with one hand and slip the already jacked-up jack under the axle all for the admiration of one passing nameless wide-eyed little boy. A