But she was half black, and she just watched the white woman with that expression of quiet and grave contempt with which she contemplated or listened to the orders of the wife of the house’s heir even while he was alive. Just as she had listened two days ago when Narcissa had informed her that she was going to Memphis for a day or so and that Elnora would have to take care of the old aunt alone. “Like I ain’t always done it,” Elnora thought. “It’s little you done for anybody since you come out here. We never needed you.
Don’t you never think it. But she didn’t say this. She just thought it, and she helped Narcissa prepare for the trip and watched the carriage roll away toward town and the station without comment. “And you needn’t to come back,” she thought, watching the carriage disappear.
But this morning Narcissa had returned, without offering to explain the sudden journey or the sudden return, and in the early afternoon Elnora from her cabin door had watched the woman and the boy go down across the pasture in the hot June sunlight.
“Well, it’s her business where she going,” Elnora said aloud, mounting the kitchen steps. “Same as it her business how come she went off to Memphis, leaving Miss Jenny setting yonder in her chair without nobody but niggers to look after her,” she added, aloud still, with brooding inconsistency. “I ain’t surprised she went.
I just surprised she come back. No. I ain’t even that. She ain’t going to leave this place, now she done got in here.” Then she said quietly, aloud, without rancor, without heat: “Trash. Town trash.”
She entered the kitchen. Her daughter Saddie sat at the table, eating from a dish of cold turnip greens and looking at a thumbed and soiled fashion magazine. “What you doing back here?” she said. “Why ain’t you up yonder where you can hear Miss Jenny if she call you?”
“Miss Jenny ain’t need nothing,” Saddie said. “She setting there by the window.”
“Where did Miss Narcissa go?”
“I don’t know’m,” Saddie said. “Her and Bory went off somewhere. Ain’t come back yet.”
Elnora grunted. Her shoes were not laced, and she stepped out of them in two motions and left the kitchen and went up the quiet, high-ceiled hall filled with scent from the garden and with the drowsing and myriad sounds of the June afternoon, to the open library door.
Beside the window (the sash was raised now, with its narrow border of colored Carolina glass which in the winter framed her head and bust like a hung portrait) an old woman sat in a wheel chair.
She sat erect; a thin, upright woman with a delicate nose and hair the color of a whitewashed wall. About her shoulders lay a shawl of white wool, no whiter than her hair against her black dress. She was looking out the window; in profile her face was high-arched, motionless. When Elnora entered she turned her head and looked at the Negress with an expression immediate and interrogative.
“They ain’t come in the back way, have they?” she said.
“Nome,” Elnora said. She approached the chair.
The old woman looked out the window again. “I must say I don’t understand this at all. Miss Narcissa’s doing a mighty lot of traipsing around all of a sudden. Picking up and—”
Elnora came to the chair. “A right smart,” she said in her cold, quiet voice, “for a woman lazy as her.”
“Picking up—” the old woman said. She ceased. “You stop talking that way about her.”
“I ain’t said nothing but the truth,” Elnora said.
“Then you keep it to yourself. She’s Bayard’s wife. A Sartoris woman, now.”
“She won’t never be a Sartoris woman,” Elnora said.
The other was looking out the window. “Picking up all of a sudden two days ago and going to Memphis to spend two nights, that hadn’t spent a night away from that boy since he was born. Leaving him for two whole nights, mind you, without giving any reason, and then coming home and taking him off to walk in the woods in the middle of the day. Not that he missed her. Do you think he missed her at all while she was gone?”
“Nome,” Elnora said. “Ain’t no Sartoris man never missed nobody.”
“Of course he didn’t.” The old woman looked out the window. Elnora stood a little behind the chair. “Did they go on across the pasture?”
“I don’t know. They went out of sight, still going. Toward the creek.”
“Toward the creek? What in the world for?”
Elnora didn’t answer. She stood a little behind the chair, erect, still as an Indian. The afternoon was drawing on. The sun was now falling level across the garden below the window, and soon the jasmine in the garden began to smell with evening, coming into the room in slow waves almost palpable; thick, sweet, oversweet.
The two women were motionless in the window: the one leaning a little forward in the wheel chair, the Negress a little behind the chair, motionless too and erect as a caryatid.
The light in the garden was beginning to turn copper-colored when the woman and the boy entered the garden and approached the house. The old woman in the chair leaned suddenly forward.
To Elnora it seemed as if the old woman in the wheel chair had in that motion escaped her helpless body like a bird and crossed the garden to meet the child; moving forward a little herself Elnora could see on the other’s face an expression fond, immediate, and oblivious.
So the two people had crossed the garden and were almost to the house when the old woman sat suddenly and sharply back. “Why, they’re wet!” she said. “Look at their clothes. They have been in the creek with their clothes on!”
“I reckon I better go and get supper started,” Elnora said.
II
In the kitchen Elnora prepared the lettuce and the tomatoes, and sliced the bread (not honest cornbread, not even biscuit) which the woman whose very name she did not speak unless it was absolutely necessary, had taught her to bake. Isom and Saddie sat in two chairs against the wall.
“I got nothing against her,” Elnora said. “I nigger and she white. But my black children got more blood than she got. More behavior.”
“You and Miss Jenny both think ain’t nobody been born since Miss Jenny,” Isom said.
“Who is been?” Elnora said.
“Miss Jenny get along all right with Miss Narcissa,” Isom said. “Seem to me like she the one to say. I ain’t heard her say nothing about it.”
“Because Miss Jenny quality,” Elnora said. “That’s why. And that’s something you don’t know nothing about, because you born too late to see any of it except her.”
“Look to me like Miss Narcissa good quality as anybody else,” Isom said. “I don’t see no difference.”
Elnora moved suddenly from the table. Isom as suddenly sprang up and moved his chair out of his mother’s path. But she only went to the cupboard and took a platter from it and returned to the table, to the tomatoes. “Born Sartoris or born quality of any kind ain’t is, it’s does.” She talked in a level, inflectionless voice above her limber, brown, deft hands.
When she spoke of the two women she used “she” indiscriminately, putting the least inflection on the one which referred to Miss Jenny. “Come all the way here by Herself, and the country still full of Yankees. All the way from Callina, with Her folks all killed and dead except old Marse John, and him two hundred miles away in Missippi—”
“It’s moren two hundred miles from here to Cal-lina,” Isom said. “Learnt that in school. It’s nigher two thousand.”
Elnora’s hands did not cease. She did not seem to have heard him. “With the Yankees done killed Her paw and Her husband and burned the Cal-lina house over Her and Her mammy’s head, and She come all the way to Missippi by Herself, to the only kin She had left.
Getting here in the dead of winter without nothing in this world of God’s but a basket with some flower seeds and two bottles of wine and them colored window panes old Marse John put in the library window so She could look through it like it was Callina.
She got here at dusk-dark on Christmas Day and old Marse John and the chillen and my mammy waiting on the porch, and Her setting high-headed in the wagon for old Marse John to lift Her down.
They never even kissed then, out where folks could see them. Old Marse John just said, ‘Well, Jenny,’ and she just said, ‘Well, Johnny,’ and they walked into the house, him leading Her by the hand, until they was inside the house where the commonalty couldn’t spy on them. Then She begun to cry, and old Marse John holding Her, after all them four thousand miles—”
“It ain’t four thousand miles from here to Cal-lina,” Isom said. “Ain’t but two thousand. What the book say in school.”
Elnora paid no attention to him at all; her hands did not cease. “It took Her hard, the crying did. ‘It’s because I ain’t used to crying,’ she said. ‘I got out of the habit of it. I never had the time. Them goddamn Yankees,’ she said. ‘Them goddamn Yankees.’” Elnora moved again, to the cupboard. It was as though she walked out of
