accidentally asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn’t like to arrive at a motel with a
cat.
She sat in the middle of the back seat with John Wesley and June Star on either
side of her. Bailey and the children’s mother and the baby sat in front and they left
Atlanta at eight forty-five with the mileage on the car at 55890. The grandmother
wrote this down because she thought it would be interesting to say how many miles
they had been when they got back. It took them twenty minutes to reach the
outskirts of the city.
The old lady settled herself comfortably, removing her white cotton gloves and
putting them up with her purse on the shelf in front of the back window. The
children’s mother still had on slacks and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief,
but the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets
on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and
cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a
purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing
her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.
She said she thought it was going to be a good day for driving, neither too hot nor
too cold, and she cautioned Bailey that the speed limit was fifty-five miles an hour
and that the patrolmen hid themselves behind billboards and small clumps of trees
and sped out after you before you had a chance to slow down. She pointed out
interesting details of the scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue granite that in some
places came up to both sides of the highway; the brilliant red clay banks slightly
streaked with purple; and the various crops that made rows of green lace-work on
the ground. The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them
sparkled. The children were reading comic magazines and their mother had gone
back to sleep.
“Let’s go through Georgia fast so we won’t have to look at it much,” John Wesley
said.
“If I were a little boy,” said the grandmother, “I wouldn’t talk about my native state
that way. Tennessee has the mountains and Georgia has the hills.”
“Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground,” John Wesley said, “and Georgia is a
lousy state too.”
“You said it,” June Star said.
“In my time,” said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, “children were
more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People
did right then. Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!” she said and pointed to a Negro
child standing in the door of a shack. “Wouldn’t that make a picture, now?” she asked
and they all turned and looked at the little Negro out of the back window. He waved.
“He didn’t have any britches on,” June Star said.
“He probably didn’t have any,” the grandmother explained. “Little niggers in the
country don’t have things like we do. If I could paint, I’d paint that picture,” she said.
The children exchanged comic books.
