Explore "A Gathering of Old Men" by Ernest J. Gaines on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Candy met us at the gate, where the gate used to be; you didn’t have a fence or a gate there now. She stood on one side the ditch, we was on the other side. She was a little, spare woman, not too tall; always wearing pants and shirts, never dresses. She thanked us for coming. You could tell by her face how happy she was to see us. Thanking this one, thanking that one, thanking the other one. She knowed most of us by name, because we all lived in the same parish and she had traveled all over the parish all her life. After everybody had spoke to her, she looked back at me. She knowed about me and my gardening, and she figured I had brought the people there in my truck. Now she started telling me what had happened. I listened good, but I could see from the start she was lying. For one thing, I knowed what Mathu meant to that family, and specially to her. Besides that, she was trying too hard to make me believe her. Like most of these white folks you’ll find round here, when they trying to convince you they’ll look you dead in the eye, daring you to think otherwise from what they want you to think. Adding to all that, she told it too fast, too pat—she had practiced it too much.
After listening to her, I looked at Mathu squatting against the wall with the gun in his arms. He wasn’t looking at us, he was looking over us toward the trees on the other side of the road. He acted like he didn’t care if we was even there. Mathu was one of them blue-black Singaleese niggers. Always bragged about not having no white man’s blood in his veins. He looked down on all the rest of us who had some, and the more you had, the more he looked down on you. I was brown-skinned—my grandpa white, my grandma Indian and black, and both my parents black; so he didn’t look down on me quite as much as he did some others, like Jacob, or Cherry, or the Lejeune brothers. With Clabber and Rooster, he just shook his head. Rooster was yellow, with nappy black hair; Clabber was milk white, with nappy white hair. Mathu just shook his head when he saw either one of them.