MIGHTY GOOD TO ME
49
solace, these people had at least the right not to be gaped at while
being solaced. Yet in such situations one hesitates and goes ahead.
We spoke of it to our hostess, who insisted we need have no
scruples. They were children, really, and would be ever so pleased
if
we'd pay them this attention. They'd be proud to have us. The
church, for some reason, lay beyond the settlement,
in
the open
fields.
Well, the church is not what I remember. The singing was
undistinguished and the preaching only moderately dull: There
was a not quite childlike, though somewhat unpleasant, effort to
cash
in
on the upper class attendance. We were, at some length,
made to feel that any sound of coin would be distinctly out of
character when the basket reached our party. It became just a
decent routine case of everybody's trying rather dismally to live
up to what was expected of him. There was never the remotest
approach to that Negro preacher who rolled forth the splendor of :
"'Moses was a nomad, but not in the Leibnitzian sense." No, the
church part seemed no solace to any of those present.
But we had become a group. And since all the others chose
to
ride over I had gone along earlier, alone, for the sake of stroll–
ing
through the lazier preparatory part of morning, the blank time
after breakfast and before the start of serious cooking. No one
was
doing anything. I had on my light gray suit, but everyone
not in his own yard was dressed up too.
She was sitting dreamily on her stoop, a little past the vil–
lage.
Although neither fat nor wearing the bandana, she was so
typical a mammy that in a larger place I would have suspected the
chamber of commerce. She had everything-the smile, the white
white hair, the ashy calico, the ability to sag with porch and pillar
-right down to the corn cob pipe. The cabin was sheer plagiarism
from
Tobacco Road.
When she removed the pipe to smile more, her smile included
me as naturally as if I'd been a hen. I leaned against her gate–
which corrects what I said about
Tobacco Road.
If
there was a
pte
in
that set, a tall man would hardly dare lean against it. She
-.med
to have the cabin to herself, as I the lane. Things were
planted in the yard but hadn't yet identified themselves. The jon–
quils
had only then opened. I couldn't tell which birds belonged
there
and which were stopping over.
