“Enty? Dey smell a good deal alike, rattlesnakes an’ watermelons. It’s easy to take one fo’ de other, specially when de watermelons is kind o’ green.”
They crossed the back yard, which was clean-swept and white with sand, then passed by the kitchen where Big Sue cooked the white folks’ victuals. It was a long low whitewashed building with plenty of room inside, but Big Sue said when the duck shooting and deer hunting started that kitchen could hardly hold all the game. Not only ducks and deer, but partridges and wild turkeys and squirrels and oysters and turtles. As soon as a killing frost made the place safe from fever they’d be coming. Lots of ducks were already here. Lord, how she had to turn! Those white folks were heavy eaters.
Breeze could make himself mighty useful helping her, bringing in stove wood, running fast with the hot waffles, so they’d get to the dining-room before they got cold. Cold waffles are not fit to eat, and the kitchen was so far off it took quick moving feet to get anything into the house crisp and hot. But it’s dangerous to have a kitchen on to a house. Some of the best houses on the Neck caught fire and burned down as soon as kitchens were built up close to them.
A short straight clear path ran from the kitchen to the door of Big Sue’s home, a squatty cabin of whitewashed boards with the floor of its tiny front porch only one step up.
Big Sue pulled up her top skirt and her fat hand fumbled for the pocket of her petticoat, her hussy, she called it, where she carried her house key tied to a small flat piece of wood. She unlocked the padlock fastening the rusty chain that held the door tight shut, and went into the dark front room.
A few coals blinked with red eyes from out of a mound of ashes in the big fireplace. Big Sue well-nigh jarred them out when she threw a heavy knot of fat lightwood on them.
“Git down on de hearth an’ blow up de fire, Breeze. I got to git off dese shoes. My toes is pure got de cramp wid dem.”
While Breeze placed the fat knot carefully on the live coals, and blew on them with well-aimed puffs of his breath until a bright yellow flame sent smoke and sparks flying up the chimney, Big Sue groaned with trying to bend low enough to reach the strings in her shoes. She gave it up saying:
“Do unlace dese strings, son. My wind is too short fo’ me to strain a-tryin’ to bend down low.”