The GRANDMOTHER didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Baileys mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the journal."Now look here,Bailey,"she said,"see here,read this," and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other one rattling the newspaper at his bald head.
"Here this fellow that calls himself the Misfit is a loose from the Federal Pen and heading towards Florida and you read here what he did to these people." Just read it. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal a loose in it. I couldn't answer to my conscious if I did." Bailey didn't look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the children's mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green heads-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbits ears. She was sitting on a sofa,feeding a baby apricots out of a jar. "The children have been to Florida before," the old lady said."You all ought to take them somewhere for a change so they would she different parts of the world and be board. " They never have been to east Tennessee. The children's mother didn't seem to hear her but the eight-year-boy, John Wesley, a stocky child with glasses said,"If you dont to go to Florida,Why dontcha stay at home?" He and the little girl,June Star,were reading the funny papers on the floor. "She wouldn't stay at home to be a queen for a day" June Star said without raising her yellow head.
"Yes and what would you do if this fellow,The Misfit,Caught you?" the grandmother asked.
"I'd smack his face," John Wesley said.
"She wouldn't stay at home for a million bucks," June Star said. Afraid she'd miss something. She's has to go everywhere we go."
A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND
"All right,Miss," the grandmother said.
"Just remember that the next time you want to curl your hair. "
June 💫 Said her hair was naturally curly.
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The next morning the grandmother was first in the car, ready to go.
She had her big black Vasili that looked the head of an hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath it she was hiding with pity sing, the cat in it.
She didn't intend for the cat to be alone in the house for three days because he would miss her too much. She was afraid he might brush against one of the gas burners and accidentally kill himself. He son, Bailey, didn't like to arrive at a motel with a cat.
She sat in the middle of the back seat with John Wesley and June Star on either side of her.
Bailey and the children's mother and the baby sat in the front. They left Atlanta at 8:45 with the mileage on the car at 55890.
The grandmother wrote this down because she thought it would be interesting to say how many miles they have been when they get back. It took them 20 minutes to reach the outskirts of the city.
The old lady settled herself, comfortably, removing her white cotton gloves and putting them up with her purse on the shelf in front of the back seat. The children's mother still had on slacks and still had her hair tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a Navy Blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white Violet's on the brim. A Navy Blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white Ormandy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth of violets contains a sachet.
In case of an accident,anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once she was a lady. She said she thought it would be a good day for driving, neither hot nor cold, just right. She cautioned Bailey that the speed limit was fifty-five miles an hour and that the Patrol men hid themselves behind Billboards and small clumps of trees and sped out after you had a chance to slow down. She pointed out interesting details of the scenery:Stone Mountain;the blue granite that in some places came up to both side of the highway;The brilliant red clay banks slightly streamed with purple;and the various crops.
A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND
That made green rows of green-work on the ground. 🌱
The trees were full of sliver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.
The children were reading comic magazines and their mother had gone back to sleep.
"Let's go through Georgia fast so we won't have to look at it that much, " John Wesley said.
"If I were a little boy, " said the grandmother. "I wouldn't talk about my native state that way.
Tennessee has the mountains and Georgia has the hills.
"Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground, "John Wesley Said, "and Georgia is a lousy state too.
"You said it, " June Star said.
"In my time, " Said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, "Children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else.
People did right then. Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!
She said and pointed to a negro child standing in the door of a shack.
"Wouldn't that make a picture, now?"she asked and they all turned and looked and the little negro of the back window.
"He didn't have any britches on, " June Star said.
"He probably didn't have any, " the grandmother explained.
"Little niggers in the country don't have thing like we do.
A/N If you are trigger by the use of these words or if it haves a negative effect on you please don't read just leave this book.
He waved.
If I could paint, I'd paint that picture, "she said.
The children exchanged comic books.
The grandmother offered to hold the baby and the children's mother passed him over the front seat to her. She sat him on her knee and bounced him and told him about the things that were passing.
She rolled her eyes and sewered up her mouth and stuck her leathery thin face into his smooth bland one.
Occasionally he gave her a faraway smile.
The passed a large cotton field with five or six graves fenced in the middle of it, like a small island.
"Look at the graveyard!" The grandmother said, pointing it out.
"That was the old family burning ground. That belonged to the plantation.
"Where's the plantation?" John Wesley asked.
"Gone with the wind, " said the grandmother. "Ha. Ha"
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When the children finished all their comic books they had brought, they opened the lunch and ate it. The grandmother ate a peanut butter sandwich and an olive.
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The grandmother would not let the children throw the box and the paper napkins out the window
A/N Classy, Clean, Black, Family
When there was nothing else to do they played a game by choosing a cloud and making the other two guess the shape it suggested. John Wesley told the shape of a cow, June Star guessed a cow, John Wesley said"No"
An automobile.
June Star said he didn't play fair. They began to slap each other over the grandmother. The grandmother said, "She would tell them a story if they could keep quiet.
When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic.
She said once she was a maiden lady she had been courted a young man name of Author Dessel/Tea garden from Jasper, Georgia.
She said he was a very good-looking man and a gentleman and that he brought her a watermelon every Saturday afternoon with his initials cut in it, E. A. T. Well, one Saturday, she said, Mr. Tea garden brought the watermelon and there was nobody at home and he left it on the front porch and returns to his buggy to Jasper, but she never got the watermelon, she said, because a nigger boy ate it when he saw the initials E. A. T.
This story tickled John Wesley funny bone and he giggled and giggled, June Star didn't budge. June Star said she wouldn't marry a man that just brings watermelon on Saturday. The grandmother said she would have well to marry Mr. Tea garden because he was a gentle man and had bought cola-coke when it first came out and that he had only died a few years ago, he was a wealthy man.
I would think since he was wealthy he would leave money not food but it's not about me. Like me tell y'all this is not my story I'm just rewriting and imaging it if you know what I mean.
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They stopped at the tower for barbecued sandwiches.
The tower was part stucco and part wood filing station and dance hall set in a clearly outside of Timothy.
A fat man named Red Sammy butts ran it and it was signs stuck here and there on the building and for miles up and down saying, "TRY RED Sammy's FAMOUS BARBECUE. NONE LIKE FAMOUS RED Sammy's!
RED Sammy's! The fat boy with the happy laugh! A VETERAN!
RED SAMMY'S YOUR MAN!
Red Sammy was laying on the bare ground outside the tower with his head under a truck while a gray monkey about a foot high, chained to a small chained China Berry tree,chattered nearby. The monkey sang back into the tree and got on the.....
A Good Man Is Hard to find
Highest limb as soon as he saw the children jumped out the car and ran towards him.
