DN14

 White People, Grandmother Eiserloh, & Ordinary Animals

June 30, 1945, 9:30 in the morning. The day is somewhat misty and without the sun.

The morning did not "set well" with the Man. He stood looking out of the back door with a sour, dry look on his face. He looked at the shed he had built with his own hands that was still standing after 10 years. His glance swept past the shed and through a crack in the wall of the fence. He caught sight of Grandmother Eiserloh standing in the Eiserloh kitchen, drinking coffee. He watched the old lady fascinated and with quickened interest. It always interested him to watch white people unobserved. They acted like so normal animals. 

The old woman stood hunched a little over the kitchen table, over which gleamed a checked brown oilcloth. Her hair was swept back from her forehead in a tignon, its graying mass caught up in a knot the size of a man's fist at the nape of her neck. Her face had that early morning look about it as she stared through the window that looked out upon the neighbor's house some forty feet away. She drank her coffee with an intense look--or rather, an intense feel. She drank it like one who has a great hunger and need for a thing. Like a thirsty man drinking water, quietly, draught after draught, or a small child drinking sweet milk when hungry. 

 He watched her there for a moment as she sucked in the hot coffee, oblivious to everything in the world, her blank eyes staring out of the window, and her mind's eyes turned inward into the innermost recesses of her soul. "They are such damn normal, ordinary animals!" said the man as he turned away to go into his bathroom.

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