Her throat grew hot. Holding the kitten in one hand against her warm neck and cheek, she left her bed and walked into Granny’s room. The firelight showed her standing there, a slim, timid figure.
She sat by the hearth a minute and watched the blaze just as her father had watched it when he was a little boy. The kitten tumbled to her lap, and crawled to the floor.
Then she heard a sweet, drawling voice, “Lonely, baby? Come by the big bed to-night.”
And the lonely baby climbed into the great pile of feathers, and with one hand pillowing her cheek, the other touching the warm face of her father’s mother, fell fast asleep.
CHAPTER V
GRANNY
When Hazel awoke the next morning her grandmother was up and dressed, and moving about the room. The child watched her unobserved.
Here was someone quite different from any of the people Hazel had known. Until she moved to Hammond Street she had met only the small class of business and professional colored people of her city. These men and women dressed and acted like the cultivated white people about them. Their view-point was that of their New England white neighbors; and their children, who were educated with white children, were staunch little New Englanders, with the same speech, the same dress, the same ambitions as their white schoolmates. On Hammond Street colored people were different. But then, they were poor, and did not have time for the niceties of life. But no one she had known in Jamaica Plains or in the South End was in the least like this grandmother.
The first thing Hazel noted was her strength. She had felt it the night before when she had snuggled up against the old woman’s breast, and she felt it this morning as she watched her move about the room lifting the full kettle as though it were made of tin, not of iron. And yet the hair that the child could see under the turban was grey, and the face bore many wrinkles.
She was dressed as though she had come out of a story book. On her head was a turban of a rich, deep red, and about her neck was a gay bandanna; her calico dress, faded now, still showed its red stripes on a grey background. Her dark brown face with its big features was alight with expression. She was looking toward the bed and Hazel shut her eyes.
She opened them in a few seconds and began to study the room. Here again was something quite outside her experience. It was large and the walls were of wood, but partly covered with pictures, photographs in frames, postal cards, illustrations cut from newspapers. On the bureau was her picture, taken when she was a baby.