Those Other People

Mary King O'Donnell, I know nothing of her. I know she was a Texan, born in Houston who moved to San Francisco in 1943. Her first husband died, and her second husband was a Communist. the details don't connect at all and paint no cohesive picture. Her writing, what I've seen of it, is simple and spare but she seems to stumble into the true picture of things- fixating on small background details like Hemingway often did.

"The young negro man in the pink shirt had bought a watermelon. He was splitting it open with his clasp-knife. Squatted on his haunches on the sidewalk, he was cutting the red heart out of the green skin, lifting the heart on the point of his knife in the sunlight. Aloft on the knife blade, the red heart quivered and blazed...Across the street, the colored ban in the pink shirt still squatted beside the watermelon. He had eaten the heart , and now he was scraping the last of the pink meat away from the rind. the last bite poised on his knife blade and disappeared into his mouth... The man stood up and wiped the knife blade on his leg. He shoved the rind into the gutter with his foot, put the knife in his pocket and walked away."

I splice together the character's three brief appearances there. The image is vivid, but bitter-sweet. O'Donnell was a Southerner 6 decades ago. She was probably a bigot. Today the image of black man + watermelon is a classic bigoted caricature. the paragraphs tell me as much about the story as the writer.