If Emmy Lou had been disposed to be hurt, she understood now! Minnie having gone by to the grocery would be back!
They have known her to speak to now for a week. She stopped one day at Izzy's gate when he and Emmy Lou and Sister were standing there. Her plaits were tied with bits of calico and there was a smudge on her wrist; under her arm was a paper bag and in her hand a bucket. She swept the three of them, Izzy, Emmy Lou, and Sister, up and down with her eyes.
"You go to synagogue," she told Izzy. "An' your mother's gone away sick an' left you," she said to Emmy Lou. Then she turned to Sister.
"Nigger," she said.
But Sister was what she afterward explained as "ready for her." She had met Minnie before, so it proved, and M'lissy, her mother, had her ready if she ever met her again. For all she was a little thing, Sister swept Minnie up and down with her eyes.
"Po' white," she said.
Which, while meaningless to some—Emmy Lou and Izzy for example—brought the angry red to Minnie's cheek.
This was a week ago. Since then Minnie had come out on the pavement twice and joined Emmy Lou and Izzy at play.
Wonderful Minnie! At once instigator and leader, arbiter and propounder. Why? Because she knew. Knew what? Knew everything. About the devil who would come right up out of the ground if you stamped three times and said his name. Though from what Emmy Lou had heard about him at Sunday school, and Izzy knew from some boys down at the corner, one wondered that any would incur the risk by doing either.
And Minnie knew about gypsies who steal little boys and girls out of their beds! Izzy is six, and Emmy Lou is four, and Minnie is ten going on eleven; can it be wondered that they looked up to her?