Let The Great World Spin

hand him brushes and cloths. He painted wooden signs that swung in 

the wind for real estate and riverbed clams and sandwiches that cost a 

nickel. He was a short man who dressed impeccably for every job, no 

matter where it was. He wore a creased shirt with a starched collar and a 

silver tie pin. His trousers were cuffed at the bottom and he was happy to 

say that if he looked hard enough he could see the reflection of his work 

in his shoes. He never mentioned a single thing to us about money, or 

the lack of it, and when the Depression really kicked in, he simply went 

around to all of his old jobs and touched up the paint in the hope that the 

business would stay alive, and they might slip him a dollar or two when 

times were good. 

The lack of money didn't bother my mother too much-she was a 

woman who had known the worst of times and best of times: she was old 

enough to have heard all the slave stories firsthand, and wise enough to 

see the value of getting out from under its yoke, or at least as far as anyone 

could get out from it in southern Missouri in those days. 

She had been given, as a memento, the exchange slip from when my 

grandmother had been sold, and it was something she carried to remind 

her of where she came from, but when she finally got a chance to sell it, 

286 C O L U M M c C A N N 

she did-to a museum curator who came from New York. She used the 

money to buy herself a secondhand sewing machine. She had other jobs 

too, but mostly she worked as a cleaner in the newspaper office in the 

center of town. She came home with papers from all over the country and 

at night read us the stories she considered the good ones, stories that 

opened up the windows of our house, simple tales about climbing a tree 

for cats, or boy scouts helping the fire brigade, or colored men fighting 

for what was good and right, what our mother called justful. 

She wasn't from the Marcus Garvey choir: she held no rancor nor any 

desire to go back, but she wasn't averse to thinking that a colored woman 

could get herself a better place in the world. 

My mother had the most beautiful face I knew, perhaps the most 

beautiful one I've ever known: dark as darkness, full, perfectly oval, with 

eyes that looked like my father had painted them, and a mouth that had 

a slight downturn of sadness, and the brightest teeth, so that when she 

smiled, it threw her whole face into another relief. She read in a high 

African singsong that I guess came down along the line from Ghana long 

ago, something that she made American, but tied us to a home we'd 

never seen. 

Up until the age of eight I was allowed to sleep alongside my brothers, 

and, even after that, our mother would still put me in the bed beside 

them and read us all to sleep. Then she slipped her wide arms under me 

and carried me to my own mattress, which, because of the layout of the 

house, was in the narrow hallway outside her bedroom. I can still to this 

day hear my folks whispering and laughing before they went off to sleep: 

perhaps it is all I want to recall, perhaps our stories should stop on a 

dime, maybe things could begin and end right there, at the moment of 

laughter, but things don't begin and end really, I suppose; they just keep 

on going. 

On an August evening when I was eleven, my father walked through 

the door with a splatter of paint on his shoes. My mother, who was baking 

bread, just stared at him. He had never before, not once, ruined his 

clothes while out painting. She dropped a teaspoon to the ground. A little 

patch of melted butter spread on the floor. "What in the name of 

Luther happened t'you?" she whispered. He stood pale and drawn, and 

gripped the edge of the red- and- white- checked tablecloth. He seemed 

like he was swallowing to steady his voice. He faltered a little and his 

L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N 287 

knees buckled. She said: "Oh, Lord, it's a stroke." She put her arms 

around him. 

My father's narrow face in her big hands. His eyes skipping past hers. 

She looked up and shouted at me: "Gloria, go get the doctor." 

I slid out the door in my bare feet. 

It was a dirt road in those days and I can recall the texture of each 

step-it sometimes feels that I'm running that road still. The doctor was 

sleeping off a league of hangovers. His wife said he couldn't be disturbed, 

and she slapped me twice on either side of the face when I tried to break 

past her up the stairs. But I was a girl with a good set of lungs. I screamed