The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

“Whole family going? Or just you, little lady? Why, you’re a real pitchur unto yourself—oh, excuse me, make that pic-ture.”

“Yessir!” I cried as I wheeled and ran out of there, hugging the private precious nugget of the Plant to myself. I would never share that knowledge with him. You might as well tell your news to the whole town.

And what if it turned out that Granddaddy was—God forbid—wrong? I could bear it if he was wrong, but I couldn’t bear other people making fun of him. I had noticed in passing that he remained well-esteemed in the community due to his building of the gin and other business enterprises in decades long past, but there was sometimes a tinge of mockery of his present pursuits. I’d heard him called “the Perfessor” by various semiliterate wags about town in tones that might have been termed faintly derisive. My grandfather didn’t care what others thought of him, but I did. I cared. My disloyal thoughts were followed by a stout, And what if he’s right? Of course he was right; he had to be. In our time together, I’d never known him to be wrong about anything. He might misplace a five-lined skink from time to time (and who did not?), but he was never wrong about the facts.

I knew full well that the next few weeks were going to be an agony of waiting and that leaving myself unoccupied would make things much, much worse. I resolved to dive into a frenzy of specimen collecting, science, schoolwork—work of any kind—to make the time go faster.

What I did not foresee was that the work would be housework.

CHAPTER 14

THE SHORT HOE

Nature . . . cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they may be useful to any being.

I CONTINUED TO HOVER over the Plant with Granddaddy. To my great relief, it thrived under our tender care, first stretching for the light and then trailing along the windowsill. Granddaddy called it the Proband. He told me that’s what you called the first of a kind. Every day I took it outside for a few minutes to expose it to the bees for pollination. I was vigilant in my duties and shooed away all grasshoppers and other plant eaters that dared to venture too close.

I turned my attention to other experiments of my own devising, anything to keep me away from Christmas socks. The cotton harvest was looming, so I considered the issue of the short hoe, which still raged through our part of the world. Granddaddy had taught me that the best way to learn about something was to undergo the experience or perform the experiment yourself, and he had given Father the opportunity to study the short hoe as a youngster, making him spend a day toiling with it. In my new campaign of activity to hasten time, I took one of the long hoes from the tool shed (we had no short ones on the property). I figured that if I held it halfway down, it would be the same thing as working with the short one. I walked out to our closest row of cotton, a good fifty yards from the back porch. Mother said that a proper lady always had a lawn and a garden; women who were not proper ladies had cotton planted right up to their windowsills.

The bolls were swelling on the plants, performing their miraculous transformation from hard green pods into fluffy white spheres. Cash money, coming right out of the ground.

I swung my hoe.

Oh, it was hard work, let me tell you. And the weather wasn’t even that hot. And I didn’t have to do it hour after hour for my daily bread. And I wasn’t an old person with rheumatism like I’d seen some in the fields. All these things were going through my head when I heard a shriek like a screech owl coming from the house. I nearly jumped out of my skin.

“What are you doing?” Viola charged at me from the back porch. I had never in my life seen her so upset.

“I’m chopping cotton, what does it look like?”

“Lord a’mighty, you get inside! At once! Before anybody sees. Jesus help me.” She grabbed the hoe from my hand and shoved me toward the house, hard. “What’s the matter with you?” she hissed. “Have you completely lost your senses? Playing like you a Negro.”

“I wanted to see what it’s like, that’s all. Granddaddy told me about—”

“I don’t want to hear about that old man. That old man losing his mind, and now you losing yours.” She muttered and prodded me all the way back to the house, “Little girl chopping cotton. White girl chopping cotton. Tate girl chopping cotton. Lord help me.”

We made it to the safety of the kitchen with her looking around in alarm and griping at me the whole way.

“Gimme that pinafore,” she said, snatching it off me. “You go get a new one right now. Your mama take a fit, she see you. Don’t you tell anybody. I mean it.”

“Why not? Why are you so mad? I was only trying it out.”

“Jesus God, give me strength.”

“Don’t be so mad at me, Viola.”

“I got to sit down for a minute.”

“Here,” I said, “I’ll get you a glass of lemonade.”