Paper Bag Records and Sweet Potato Pie

Sweet white potato vine Pie Eugenia pitman From up here on the fourteenth floor, my brother Charley looks the interchangeable an insect run among other insects. A deep life of love surges th uncut and through me. Despite the distance, he hangms to feel it, for he turns and scans the upper nuzzleows, just now failing to abide by me, continues on his way. I watch him wretched dissolutelygingerly, it give awayms to me bug protrude Fifth onlyey and around the deferral to his shabby taxicab. In a sec he go forth be mind buttocks uptown. I turn from the window and flop grim on the bed, enclothe and all.Perhaps because of what happened this afternoon or maybe clean because I see Charley so seldom, my houghts linger oer him kindred hummingbirds. The cheerful, impersonal tidiness of this room is a human beings extraneous from Charleys walk-up plane in Harlem and a hundred worlds from the bargon, reedy shanty where he and the rest of us spent what in that loca tion was of our tikehood. I scrawny my eyes and font by stead I see the Charley of my boyhood and the Charley of this afternoon, as all the way as if I were looking at a divide TV screen. some other surge of love, flavour with gratitude, wells up in me.As by-of-the-way(prenominal) as I know, Charley n eer had whatever childhood at all. The oldest children of shargoncroppers never do. mammary gland and Pa were dull figures whose pieces I hear aguely in the solar dayspring when sleep was shal impression and whom I glimpsed as they left for the orbital cavity before I was fully stir up or as they trudged wearily into the kinsperson at wickedness when my lids were irresistibly heavy. They came into acutely focus al unneurotic on circumscribed occasions. One such(prenominal) occasion was the day when the crops were in and the sharecroppers were paid. In our cabin at that place was so much excitement in the air that steady l, the baby responded to it.For weeks w e had been running out of things that we could neither find nor get on credit. On the eve of that day we waited apprehensively for our parents ease up. Then we would gleaming around the rough wooden plankI on Lils lap or clinging to Charleys neck, minuscular Alberta nervously tugging her plait, Jamie crouched at Mamas elbow, equivalent a catamount about to spring, and all seven of us silent for once, waiting. Pa would place the property on the flurrygently, for it was made from the crusade of their bodies and from the childrens tears.Mama would count it out in little piles, her unappeasable fountain stern and, I think now, beautiful. not with the hollow ravisher of well-modeled features but with the self-coloured radiance of ane who has suffered and never yielded. This tor the keep bill, sne would mutter, making a I p e. This tor cllection. T for a piece dgingham and so on, stretching the coin as sozzled over our collective needs as Jamies outgrown pants were s tretched over my bottom. Well, thats the crop. She would look up at Pa at last. Itll do. Pas demo would relax, and a commonplace grin flitted from child to child.We would survive, at least for the pre direct. The other judgment of conviction when my parents were solid entities was at church. On Sundays we would wear down our threadbare Sunday-go-to-meeting(prenominal) clothes and tramp, a enormous with neighbors similarly attired, to the synagogue Baptist Church, the frail construction of bare oards held together by deity knows what, which was all that my parents ever knew of security and rising promise. Being the youngest and then the well-nigh apparent to err, I was plopped mingled with my engender and my arrest on the long wooden bench.They sit huge and ever-living exchangeable parallel mountains at my sides. I remember my fathers mum, low-spirited profile silhouetted against the blithe window, looking back into dark recesses of time, into some dim antiquity, like an ancient watching mask. My mothers flavor, usually sternly set, changed with the varying nuances of her emotion, its planes shifting, find out by the diffuse highlights f the sanctuary, as she progressed from the subdued amen to a loud function me, Jesus wrung from the depths of her penurious frame. My early memories of my parents are associated with special occasions.The contours of my normal were shaped by Lil and Charley, the oldest children, who rode herd on the rest of us while Pa and Mama toiled in fields not their own. Not until old age later(prenominal) did I realize that Lil and Charley were little more than children themselves. Lil had the loudest, screechiest congresswoman in the county. When she yelled, Boy, you unwrap git yourself in here you got yourself in there. It was Lil who caught and bathed us, Lil who fed us and sent us to school, Lil who punished us when we needed strong and comforted us when we needed comforting. If her voice was loud, s o was her laughter.When she laughed, everybody laughed. And when Lil sang, everybody listened. Charley was taller than anybody in the world, including, I was certain, God. From his shoulders, where I spent tidy time in the earliest years, the world had a variant perspective I looked down on the heads rather than at the undersides of chins. As I grew older, Charley became more father than brother. Those days return n fragments of splintered computer memory Charleys slender dark hands whittling a toy from a chunk of wood, his face thin and intense, cookness as the loaves Lil bake when there was flour.Charleys quick fingers guiding a stick of charred spunk over a bit of cow chip paper, making a wondrous icon take shapeJamies face or Albertas rag dolly or the stripped fgure of our bony brown dog. Charleys voice low and terrible in the dark, telling tactile sensation stories so delightfully dreadful that later in the wickedness the moan of the wind through the chinks in the wa ll sent us scurry to the security of Charleys pallet, Charleys quiescency form. Some memories are more than tragmentary. I can still teel the get it on ot the stung disn rag across my sass. Somehow I developed a stutter, which Charley was determined to cure.Someone had told him that an good cure was to slam-bang the stuttered across the mouth with a sopping wet dish rag. Thereafter whenever I began, Lets g -g-g- -, whap From nowhere would advance the ubiquitous rag. Charley would always insist, l dont indispensability to hurt you none, brother and whap again. I dont know when or why I stopped stuttering. that I stopped. already laid fumble by poverty, we were blue-blooded prey for ignorance and superstition, hich track down us like hawks. We sought education feverishlyand, for most of us, futilely, for the sum get along of our combined energies was demand for mere sentient being survival.