“My Grand-Daddy was a gambling man,” my friend said to me yesterday as we were packing her fresh eggs into boxes. We had been talking about drunks. The weekend kind who had a drink and went to sleep. My friend does not drink. But it was a natural jump to gambling.
“He had gambled all he had that one day so he bet his hat.” She says.
I laugh.. I love her old family stories.
“… bet his hat.” I say. “Mercy!”
“They kilt him for that hat. He lost the hand but he would not give up the hat. Would’nt hand it over. Would’nt do it. So they kilt him.”
“They shot him?” I say. Laughter swallowed in horror.
“I reckon so.” She says.
We both sit quiet trying to make sense of such an action in our heads. Shooting a black man for his hat. Our laughter still in the air above us. Watching.
A breeze wafts the scent of rain through the window, then is gone.
She shifts in her seat at my long table, the chair creaks, a gambling chair, she turns one of the eggs we had been packing. She absently measures it and wipes it, inspects it as she thinks. Our breaths in the same timing. Our hands cleaning eggs in the same rhythm as we sit. She moves forward in the chair and looks at me. Her hands still. Her eyes black and shiny with decision.
“I came here, to Chicago when I was 14 years old.” she says. “From Mississippi. Me and my family. They say folks is racist down there in the South, maybe so but I tell you they will always nod and say howdy. Everyone does. Black or white. They will always say g’mornin’. How are ya. Whether they knows you or not. Every time”.
“Up here”, she nods North towards the big city. “The white folks, they see you on the street and pull themselves to the side”. Unconsciously she pulls her skirts closer to her knees, her shoulders tucking in, imitating those white folks, her voice softening from the hurt. “They won’t look at you. Like you are not even there. Their eyes go to the side. Or they look at the ground”. She pauses. Looking at the floor. Not for effect, just to find the next words. I can see the words running in behind her eyes, whole stories of them. Her racing brain choosing and discarding. Sorting. How much to tell me. Her eyes chasing dust across my floor. Then she lets them go – those words. She shrugs. Relaxing her body into my kitchen chair again. Looking back at me again. “Took me a long time to get used to that. I cut you and then cut me, our blood will be just red, just the same. Bleed the same.”
We sit for a moment. Our eyes seeing our blood and each other. Just the same. From different cultures, different looks, different accents. But bleed the same. Hurt the same. Love the same.
I reach across and touch her arm. After a moment she nods, answering her own invisible question, then reaches up and touches my hand. My strong farm-worn white hand on her black arm covered in that strong black hand of hers seemed as natural as breath to us – she is my oldest friend out here. She hugged me the first time we saw each other. She moves about me like a mother about a child. She tells me if my face is dirty or my hair is a mess or if I need to get those cobwebs. And where are your shoes girl. She tells me to Set a Spell when I visit her front porch with the rocking chairs. And not often enough either, she says. She worries about me being alone out here – a foreigner who does not understand how this country is.
“There’s trouble coming, Cecilia. Things that were kept under..” She pauses again. Then, I can see her folding it all back away again. All her thoughts. These important words. This dreadful history. Cutting the words off. We never talk like this, she and I. Our friendship too young. Feeling our way. Usually we happily talk of gardens and food and changing the beds and getting the clothes in off the line if it looks like rain or the house in the country they are renovating for their retirement.
Be careful she is thinking to me. Be careful I am thinking to her. My friend.
” Well, I’ll be glad when we are out of the city for good”. She says.
“Down here with me.” I say.
“I’ll teach you how to cook.” she says.
We both laugh.
She pats my hand. Pat, pat. And leans forward to pack the last egg, allowing my hand to fall naturally back to help her close the lid of the egg box.
“Well.” she says gathering herself up. She is the only woman I know who can gather herself up with such grace and consideration. She is almost old fashioned in the way she moves her body in its proper order. Reassembling in seconds. Ankles, knees, elbows, fingers. She stands. She picks up the box of eggs and her bag and turns to the door. The conversation is over.
“Time to be getting on. You got chores. Them hogs ain’t going to feed themselves, Cecilia. And it looks to me like you are late getting John’s dinner on the cooker.”
The door clicks behind us as we leave the kitchen. Our drifting voices parting with the usual called goodbyes. Dogs, cats and pigs joining in the chorus as we descend the steps and fade and part.
Be careful my friend – up there in the big city.
Love celi
The Kitchen's Garden 
78 responses to “My friend said to me …”
Beautifully written, deeply felt message of the importance of friendship and caring – the being in close relationship of heart and purpose no matter the “costume” of person and place. This past year I have deeply involved my days with the teaching and practicing English language – written, spoken, read….and the friendship that has blossomed with refugees from DRC…and in particular one family with four beautiful boys 3 to 11. My little home garden a delight to them as they pull a carrot from the earth, pick beans and peas and always the sweet delight of eating fresh berries warmed by the sun. The earth is a good place to open the gates to heart felt communication with others…may your frieind find her way to the countryside and leave behind the rough edges that she feels every day in the city. Prayers for all that soon we will know peace and walk through this rough storm.
Kristin
I misread an important line at first, thinking that there was the word “the” in front of” heart” – so I had to stop and go back to get it right. Now I like both versions: “The earth is a good place to open the gates to heart felt communication with others” and “the earth is a good place to open the gates to the heart.” It is so encouraging to hear stories like yours and Celi’s.
Reblogged this on Misc. Maggie and commented:
Sometimes a farm blog is more than a farm blog.
Thank you for sharing this beautiful entry. Wrenching. Alas, the excruciating, continued pain and suffering of institutionalized racism in this country. We cannot heal until we face it and lance this terrible boil. We must acknowledge this whole history and all the pain and suffering and suspicion and superiority. Because there is also so much hope and goodness and kindness in the people of our country who long to know how we can change and grow and overcome. I’m grateful, so grateful you shared this.
I go straight to writing this. Don’t want to lose what’s happening inside. Was at a funeral of a friend the other day. She was not a close friend, but that of a good friend of mine, and I sat there in the pew, with moisture leaking from the corners of my eyes. Mostly managing to keep it together, trying to swallow the knot in my throat, smooth the hurt in my heart; the hurt that’s back again after reading here today. Life is so unfair, the things that happen, the hurts we suffer. So worrisome, what’s happening right now and I pray for sanity to rise from this mêlée, so much muck and muddle, so very wrong. May we keep working to live together as the one human race we are; to recognise each and every one of us as separate and distinct, yet one and the same…
Such a beautiful read, Miss C, thank you. Like so many others, I feel a great deal of truth in your friend’s prophesy of trouble coming. Thing I don’t understand is why, if so many others feel it, we seem to be powerless to overcome the problems. Just don’t bet your hat in troubling times.
This was incredibly profound. Sometimes I just don’t ‘get’ people. It seems when common courtesy, basic manners, respect and cohesive family units fell by the wayside all the ugly was allowed to surface. I think it would be difficult to attack the person you greeted with a ‘good morning’ or who held the door for you. I pray we get back to those positives before the trouble gets here.
Beautiful.
As my mom (85) says so often, “I wasn’t born yesterday”. Neither was your friend.
[…] morning, even though she never reads my blog, I go see how things are at The Kitchen’s Garden. She barely has time to feed herself but she feeds everything else and my soul so I stop by every […]
This moved me to tears. Thank you for sharing this story.
It is those unuttered thoughts, but understood all the same … precious friends. Laura
Yes, a very sad truth that trouble is coming. My upstairs neighbor, a black man, says he worries about me (I’m white – but he doesn’t seem like he ever noticed – I understand, the exterior is so unimportant, I saw just a man when we met) . He’s an ex-pro boxer, but the gentlest man I’ve met in years. We sit and talk of an evening behind the building and we’re both uneasy about the state of things. I wish I could be out in the country instead of where I am. We all bleed the same, every one of us, we all hurt the same, we all should love the same. The hating is learned, unfortunately, from parents, peer groups, the media and that hate is bringing a retribution none of us wants to see, let alone have to deal with. I hope your friend will make it out before the trouble hits.
When my dear friend Charlie and I would go to the grocery store together, he in his power wheel chair and me rolling a cart behind for him to toss supplies into, I noticed that people wouldn’t look at him. They nodded and smiled at me, but acted as though he wasn’t there. That’s when I understood another truth about separatism ( my term for the sad security that comes from a group identity). They didn’t look because his condition frightened them. They didn’t know how to relate to a man who can’t walk, a person who obviously suffers everyday from his condition but nevertheless smiles and says hello sincerely, and often tries to strike up a conversation just to put the other person at ease– or maybe not that, maybe just because he was genuinely friendly and didn’t see his living in a chair and having to look up as making him less a participant in ordinary social events. I can’t speak for anyone else than Charlie and me (we talked about this often), but I wouldn’t be surprised if what your friend is experiencing, Celi, is as much a matter of guilt and confused sadness on the part of others as it is of true alienation. In general I know that racist views are our greatest threat to intramural peace, but I also believe that sometimes the sufferer can do more than they realize to heal others as well as herself. At least that’s one big thing I learned from Charlie and his chair.
(Sorry about messing with the pronouns there at the end. I’m feeling confused lately about group identities.)
A moving, profound and beautiful story. I have just read t aloud to my partner, a beautiful American. He too was deeply moved by the beauty of your telling, and the profundity of the story. Thank you Dear Celi.
It’s all been said by the others earlier on, so the Johnny-come-lately just says a profound “Thank You!”
I will chime in, later yet, and also say “thank you”. Trouble is coming, but, I want to believe that good will overcome evil.
Love…
Can’t be trumped.
Not one thing in the past will EVER be “fixed”, or undone. Leave it all and allow the children to move on.