THE FACE OF FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE
The day that they denominated Threat Hubbelthwait for mayor of Friendship Village was band-concert night. It’s real back-aching work to go to our band concerts, because we ain’t no seats—nothing but a bandstand in the middle of the market square; but yet we all of us do go, because it’s something to do. And you die—you die for some place to go to see folks and to move around among them, elbow near.
I was resting on the bottom step of the bandstand between tunes, when Mis’ Timothy Toplady come by.
“Hold up your head,” says she. “You’re going to be mayored over in a minute by a man that ain’t been drunk for six months. I dunno but they used that in the campaign. This town ain’t got a politic to its name.”
“Do they know yet,” I ask’ her, “who’s going to run against him?”
“I heard ’Lish Warren,” says Mis’ Toplady. “They want Eppleby to run interdependent, but he won’t leave himself down to run against Threat and ’Lish, I don’t believe. I wish’t,” Mis’ Toplady says, “I was men.”
But all of a sudden she sort of straightened up there to the foot of the bandstand.
“No, I don’t,” she says. “I wish’t I was a human being. A human being like the Lord meant me to be, with a finger in His big pie as well as in Timothy Toplady’s everlasting apple-pie. I wish’t—oh, I wish’t I was a real human being, with my brains in my head instead of baked into pies and stitched into clothes and used to clean up floors with.”
I’ve often wished that, too, and every woman had ought to. But Mis’ Toplady had ought to wish it special. She’s big and strong of limb, and she can lift and carry and put through, capable and swift. She’s like a woman left from some time of the world when women was some human-beinger than they are now, and she’s like looking ahead a thousand years.
“But just half a human,” she says now, dreamy, “would know that election day ought to be differn’t from the run o’ days. Some men votes,” she says, “like they used the same muscles for votin’ that they use for bettin’ and buyin’ and sellin’. I wonder if they do.”