of the children of that church. The tables were
trimmed with flowers and frilled paper and there were cakes and
Jello. The children played games together at the end of the
party.

The big girls, when rain kept them from working, learned to cook
and sew and take care of babies; and even the little girls
learned a heap and made pretties they could keep, besides. From
the bottom of their clothes-box, Cissy brought a paper-wrapped
scrapbook of Bible pictures she had cut and pasted. Tom had made
a table out of a crate, but there wasn't room to fetch it.

"I got so fat and strong," boasted Cissy, punching her thin chest
with a bony fist. "For breakfast, Maw didn't have no time to
give us young-uns nothing but maybe some Koolade to drink, and a
slice of store bread; but at the Center us skinny ones got a hull
bottle of milk to drink through a stem after worship."

"Are you going back there?" Rose-Ellen asked.

Cissy nodded, her hands folded tight between her knees. "And
maybe stay all winter, and me and Tommie go to school. Because
Paw and Maw feel like the teachers was kinfolk, since what
happened to Georgie."

"What happened to Georgie?"

Six children huddled on the doorstep now, shivering in the chilly
dark. "One Sunday night," Cissy said, "Georgie took to yelling,
and went all stiff and purple, and we couldn't make out what
ailed him. Only that his throat hurt too bad to swallow; so Maw
tied up his topknot so tight it near pulled it out: that was to
lift his palate, because dropped palates make sore throats.

"Georgie didn't get any better. When the teachers come Monday
morning to tote us to the Center, they begged to take Georgie to
the doctor. Maw was might' nigh crazy by then, and she got into
the Ford without her head combed, Georgie in her lap. Maw said
she never had ridden so fast. She thought her last-day was come,
with the fences streaking past her lickety-split. And when they
come to the doctor he looked Georgie over and said, 'Could this
child have got hold of any lye?' And Maw said, real scairt,
well, she did have a bottle of lye water, and somebody might have
set it on the floor.

"So every day the rest of the summer them teachers toted Georgie
to the Center and the doctor cured Georgie up till now he can eat
purty good. So that's how come we're shore going back to the
onions next summer."

6: AT THE EDGE OF A MEXICAN VILLAGE

Cotton-picking was over, and the Beechams tided th