"Are you sure it's a sunflower, mammy?"
"What you take me fur, chile? Don' I know a sunflower that's run ter seed las' summer, an' is empty an' dade as Furious [Pharaoh] now? I got no time to steddy 'bout sech foolishness."
I walked off,—not crestfallen, but blithe. One word had shunted my ideas upon a new track. She called this nondescript—which might, or might not, be the dried and warped disk of a sunflower that had cast its seeds—"dead." What should hinder me from making it alive? It looked like a hedgehog, or some other animal. It should be an animal! Food of the right kind, and plenty of heat, were all it needed.
"Carbon and animal heat!" uttered I, consequentially, swelling with the prospective joy of creation.
Already I foresaw, in imagination, the tremor of the coming breath running through the uncouth body that would then put out, from mysterious hiding-places, head and limbs and tail, as buds unfold into flowers. I would confide to nobody what I was going to undertake. But I would do it! I would keep up animal heat, hour after hour, day after day, until my—Creature—breathed and moved and grew!
Without delay I hied me to the kitchen, and begged a cold sausage and a pone of corn-bread from Aunt 'Ritta. She made no objection beyond asking why I "wanted sassage 'n' corn-bread in de middle o' de mawnin', 'stead o' piece o' cake, or somethin' sweet."
"Because the weather is so cold," I replied briefly, and got what I wished with a grunt of "Dat's so, honey!" Negroes are constitutionally averse to winter and cold, and recognize, without knowing why, the carboniferous properties of pork and pone. I bore my treasures off to the dining room, shut the door, and began my experiment in the hottest flare of the fireshine.
Molly's Experiment. "I hied me to the kitchen and begged a cold sausage and a pone of corn-bread from Aunt 'Ritta."