For she used the car as a jitney bus. It was her social life. She never
had a "party" in all her nearly seventeen years--wouldn't have one; but
she never drove a block in the car in her life that she didn't begin to
fill the car with pick-ups! Everybody rode with Mary White--white and
black, old and young, rich and poor, men and women. She liked nothing
better than to fill the car full of long-legged High School boys and an
occasional girl, and parade the town. She never had a "date," nor went
to a dance, except once with her brother, Bill, and the "boy
proposition" didn't interest her--yet. But young people--great
spring-breaking, varnish-cracking, fender-bending, door-sagging carloads
of "kids" gave her great pleasure. Her zests were keen. But the most fun
she ever had in her life was acting as chairman of the committee that
got up the big turkey dinner for the poor folks at the county home;
scores of pies, gallons of slaw; jam, cakes, preserves, oranges and a
wilderness of turkey were loaded in the car and taken to the county
home. And, being of a practical turn of mind, she risked her own
Christmas dinner by staying to see that the poor folks actually got it
all. Not that she was a cynic; she just disliked to tempt folks. While
there she found a blind colored uncle, very old, who could do nothing
but make rag rugs, and she rustled up from her school friends rags
enough to keep him busy for a season. The last engagement she tried to
make was to take the guests at the county home out for a car ride. And
the last endeavor of her life was to try to get a rest room for colored
girls in the High School. She found one girl reading in the toilet,
because there was no better place for a colored girl to loaf, and it
inflamed her sense of injustice and she became a nagging harpie to those
who, she thought, could remedy the evil. The poor she had always with
her, and was glad of it. She hungered and thirsted for righteousness;
and was the most impious creature in the world. She joined the
Congregational Church without consulting her parents; not particularly
for her soul's good. She never had a thrill of piety in her life, and
would have hooted at a "testimony." But even as a little child she felt
the church was an agency for helping people to more of life's abundance,
and she wanted to help. She never wanted help for herself. Clothes
meant little to her. It was a fight to get a new rig on her; but
eventually a harder fight to get it off. She never wore a jewel and had
no ring but her High School class ring, and never asked for anything but
a wrist watch. She refused to have her hair up; though she was nearly
seventeen. "Mother," she protested, "you don't know how much I get by
with, in my braided pigtails, that I could not with my hair up." Above
every other passion of her life was her passion not to grow up, to be a
child. The tom-boy in her, which was big, seemed to loathe to be put
away forever in skirts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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