“Missie May, take yo’ hand out mah pocket!” Joe shouted out between laughs. Shouting, laughing, twisting, turning, tussling, tickling each other in the ribs Missie May clutching onto Joe and Joe trying, but not too hard, to get away. For several minutes the two were a furious mass of male and female energy. He ran inside but could not close it after him before she crowded in and locked with him in a rough-and-tumble. He ran around the house with Missie May at his heels. “Nobody ain’t gointer be chunkin’ money at me and Ah not do ’em nothin’,” she shouted in mock anger. While she did this, the man behind the jasmine darted to the chinaberry tree. She peeped under the porch and hung over the gate to look up and down the road. She leaped off the porch and began to search the shrubbery. “Who dat chunkin’ money in mah do’way?” she demanded. Missie May promptly appeared at the door in mock alarm. The nine dollars hurled into the open door, he scurried to a hiding place behind the Cape jasmine bush and waited. It was this way every Saturday afternoon. But she knew that it was her husband throwing silver dollars in the door for her to pick up and pile beside her plate at dinner. She had not seen the big tall man come stealing in the gate and creep up the walk grinning happily at the joyful mischief he was about to commit. But before she could tie her slippers, there came the ring of singing metal on wood. She grabbed the clean mealsack at hand and dried herself hurriedly and began to dress. “Humph! Ah’m way behind time t’day! Joe gointer be heah ’fore Ah git mah clothes on if Ah don’t make haste.” She heard men’s voices in the distance and glanced at the dollar clock on the dresser. Her stiff young breasts thrust forward aggressively, like broad-based cones with the tips lacquered in black. Her dark-brown skin glistened under the soapsuds that skittered down from her washrag. Missie May was bathing herself in the galvanized washtub in the bedroom. Fresh newspaper cut in fancy edge on the kitchen shelves. Yard raked so that the strokes of the rake would make a pattern. Everything clean from the front gate to the privy house. The front door stood open to the sunshine so that the floor of the front room could finish drying after its weekly scouring. A mess of homey flowers planted without a plan but blooming cheerily from their helter-skelter places. The front yard was parted in the middle by a sidewalk from gate to doorstep, a sidewalk edged on either side by quart bottles driven neck down into the ground on a slant. Fertilizer works for its support.īut there was something happy about the place. It was a Negro yard around a Negro house in a Negro settlement that looked to the payroll of the G. “The Gilded Six-Bits” by Zora Neale Hurston
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