Between the two rows of dingy old houses that squatted low under the great oak trees the hot sunshine brought rank scents up out of the earth. Odors of pig-pens and cow-stalls and fowl-houses and goats, mixed with Hoyt’s German cologne and the smell of human beings.
Children were playing around almost every door-step. Plump. Bright-eyed. Boys with loose-hanging, ripped-open trousers, their black bodies showing where shirt-fronts lay wide open. Girls with short, ragged skirts flapping around slim prancing legs. Babies cried. Tethered goats bleated. Penned pigs squealed. Men, women, some in every-day clothes, others in their Sunday best, sat on the door-steps, leaned out of windows, lolled on the bare earth, where there was sunshine. Talking. Parading. Laughing. Some of them combing and wrapping hair, others putting shoe-strings in shoes, or smoking and idling.
As Big Sue passed, she bowed or curtsied, and called out hearty good mornings that fell limpid on the lazy hum of voices.
“Whe’s Maum Hannah?” Big Sue asked, and everybody pointed to the last house where an old woman sat in a chair in the yard in front of a doorway, near a group of black children playing in the dirt.
A large clean white cloth, folded into three corners, lay across her head and shaded her eyes from the sun. Her arms were crossed, and each narrow flat bare foot rested on a brick. Side by side they slept, almost hidden by the wide white apron that fell stiffly from her lap in starched folds, with corners that reached the ground.
“Maum Hannah don’ trust de ground. E won’t as much as let her feet sleep on it. I bet e’s been awake all night, an’ e’s makin’ up for lost time now.”
Maum Hannah’s face bore a strong resemblance to Uncle Isaac’s. It was smoother and had smaller features, but the same rich brown tone was on the black skin. The wool that edged out from under her black headkerchief was snow-white too, but her face was almost unlined, except for the wrinkles that smiles had marked around her mouth.
The little black children stared and giggled as Big Sue went tripping forward and put both her fat hands over Maum Hannah’s eyes:
“Guess who, Mauma!”