And Do Remember Me (6 page)

She had begun to pray fervently and often. She prayed in the
rapturous midst of the Sunday sermon beside the Greenwood women fanning and sweating, and praying and testifying and amening. She prayed driving along the back roads she traveled, and as she escorted someone into the courthouse. She prayed when the sun came up and when it went down. And the prayer, a simple God be with me, convinced her that she and Courtland and their friends would somehow be all right.

I
T WAS TWO
o’clock in the afternoon, the extravagant sun and heat melting even the hardiest souls. Jessie was lying on her bed, resting up for the evening session at the Freedom School when Lincoln entered her room. He sat on the edge of her bed and whispered, “Jessie, Jessie, are you asleep?” She had been dreaming. She was lost and trying to find her way back home. Wandering down a circular dirt road that twisted mazelike and stubborn, a road that had no end. She had knocked on countless doors but no one ever greeted her whom she could recognize or who wanted to claim her. The tears shed in the dream had just begun to infiltrate her consciousness, were threatening to moisten her cheeks, when she heard Lincoln’s voice. Jessie opened her eyes and saw his face. With a quick movement of her hands across her cheeks she dried her face. She sat up and Lincoln gently thrust a bouquet of black-eyed Susans between them. The plaintive yellow and black flowers grew in a small garden in the back of the Freedom House, along with tomatoes, greens and pole beans.

Jessie gazed in quiet gratitude at the flowers, whose scent was so enticing that it made her imagine that one day she would find her way back home. Lincoln kissed her, the kiss a
complex language of entreaty, demand and desire. She had tried to ignore the feelings Lincoln inspired, feelings that she now felt nudging her out of sleep. Lincoln took her face in his hands and kissed her again and Jessie felt him in her arms limp with need for her.

Most of what she knew of love had been taught in her father’s greedy, corrupt hold. So Jessie had in the weeks she had known Lincoln censored thoughts of herself in his embrace.

But Jessie had also learned the art of obedience in her father’s arms, so when Lincoln kissed her hungrily, so hard, so deep that it hurt, she did not resist.

She liked the part where his hungry lips patrolled her face and neck, and when he pushed up the oversized tee shirt she was wearing and found her breasts. They lay on the bed, the heat the only thing covering their nakedness, while Lincoln gently held her hands, rubbing them along the masculine, slender curve of his frame. He said her name as if it were a sacrament, and let his fingers play in her hair, now short and nappy and free like Macon’s. Lincoln told her how angry and hurt he was by all the things he saw everyday, and that she was the only one he felt he could talk to. On his way to Cleveland, Mississippi, the day before, he’d been shoved and hit by a highway patrolman who stopped him. As he lay huddled in her arms, curled at her breast, he said, “Jessie, you know, I wanted to kill him. I really did. I’m tired, but I feel like I got no right to be.” And when Jessie told him, “Lincoln, I don’t know what to say,” he said, “Don’t say anything, Jessie, just listen, that’s all. Sometimes, Jessie, it seems like you’re the only one that’s got the time anymore to do that for me. Seems like, Jessie, sometimes you’re really all I’ve got.”

When Lincoln took her, entering her slowly, carefully, because he did not know if this might be her first time, Jessie closed her eyes and the part of her that her daddy had got to
first rose, walked across the room and watched Lincoln make love to what remained. Jessie feigned pleasure, her father had taught her how to do that too. When it was over, Lincoln fell asleep beside her and for that Jessie was grateful. At least he would not hear her cry.

Once she was her mother’s favorite. The firstborn of Olive and Chester Foster, Jessie had reigned in her mother’s heart like the fulfillment of a prayer. Even when Mae Ann and Willie and Junior followed, it was Jessie on whom Olive doted, buying her the occasional new dress while the other children made do with hand-me-downs from the family Olive Foster kept house for. Three years separated Jessie’s birth and the arrival of the other children. In those years and the seven that followed, Olive Foster made Jessie a confidante, a friend, a rebuke to the weighty disappointment of her marriage.

But when Jessie was ten, her mother went into the hospital for surgery. Aunt Eva had told her simply, “Your mama’s sick and she’s got to have something took out of her body, so she can be well again.” But when she returned home, Olive Foster, a woman who had spoken with angels in her waking moments, seen God in her sleep and who had once longed to preach, was never healthy again.

She had had plans to study at a Bible college in Knoxville when she met Chester Foster, a friend of her brother’s who stayed at their house during Olive’s eighteenth summer. Chester Foster haunted her imagination like some exotic dangerous flower, the likes of which she had never before seen. When she walked demurely through the living room on her way to teach Sunday School, Olive prayed for forgiveness for the beating of her heart at the sight of Chester Foster’s thick muscled legs poking out from under the sheet covering him on the floor. Chester Foster smoked cigars and had a gold tooth that winked at Olive every time he smiled. He had met her brother Lonnie
in the Navy, where they had both been cooks, during World War II. Chester Foster shot dice, huddled beneath the street lamps outside their house, and called Olive “baby.” And when he was ready, he plucked Olive as easily as reaching for an apple on a tree.

That’s what her mother had told Jessie, in the days when she still talked to her about something other than the Lord. But in the wake of her illness, she concluded, “God put your daddy in my way as a test, to see what I loved more, the world or God, and I let the Lord down.” Olive’s voice bristled with a strange pride in the momentousness of her fall. When she discovered she was pregnant, Olive told her parents and Chester Foster married her as easily as he had taken up residence in their home.

Within months of their marriage Olive began hearing rumors about Chester and other women. She had let the Lord down once. She decided she would not do that again. No matter what, she would remain his wife.

In time, the children became a barrier between them. The love her husband had declared irrelevant she lavished on her children. Then a massive tumor, which she took as a sign from God, was found. Olive took increasingly to her bed and to the Bible. By the time Jessie was twelve, most evenings her mother entered the house, weary and drained from the demands of someone else’s home, and went straight to her room, leaving the younger children and the house to Jessie. She spent her extra money on medicines, visits to doctors, traveling to see root women. She bought herbs, and curious prescriptions came through the mail. In time, her children assumed the unkempt, suspicious demeanor of orphans.

Her parents no longer slept together. Stacks of
Watchtower
and
Daily Word
were stationed on the bed stand in her mother’s room. And Jessie became the mistress of the house.

“You ain’t my mama, so don’t be telling me what to do,” Junior scolded her brazenly when she attempted to enforce orders given by her parents.

“You think you special cause she put you in charge, but I ain’t gonna eat no more of this slop,” Mae Ann, willful and cocksure at nine, shouted one night, pushing her bowl of greens and yams onto the floor.

With Jessie in charge, the children bickered and raged, their anguish a brushfire consuming them. Jealousy, despair rained, like a storm of dry ashes, clinging to their skin.

And her mother’s door remained closed to Jessie, who at the end of each day, her spirit mauled into a tiny quivering thing, stood before the door and wished it open. But the lock never turned. Soon she was gripped by headaches, bouts of fatigue, fainting spells.

Beneath the thin covers at night she could feel anger slicing her insides into pieces, chewing her up, swallowing her whole. When she woke up in the mornings, she held her breath as her hands rediscovered her body, trying to see if she was still there. Her father stepped in, however, and offered her a facsimile of what she had lost. He pressed spare change into Jessie’s hand to show how he appreciated the work she did in the house. Sometimes when he got home late at night, he’d come in the room Jessie shared with Mae Ann and check on her, his hands fondling her beneath the covers. Alone in the house with Jessie, he’d sit her on his lap and rub her against his groin. Once he kissed her on the mouth, letting his tongue slide through her lips. Jessie thought she would vomit. The hard steel-like thing rising between her legs frightened her even more than the kiss. When she fought him he grabbed her by the shoulders and said, “You my baby, Jessie. I can kiss you if I wants to. There’s nothin’ wrong with that.” She believed him. He was her father. He loved her. Even the night he woke her up for the
first time from sleep and hustled her into bed with him, he’d told her that. “I’m your daddy. I love you.” Jessie, confused and frightened, was grateful that in the dark, in her father’s bed, in his arms, he talked to her, touched her, held her. That part did feel like she thought love was supposed to.

Inside his daughter in the dark, Chester Foster felt as small, invisible and minuscule as she, releasing into her every hurt. All the memories lapping at his brain obliterated forgetfulness. The awfulness of the act made him unreal, and in those moments the feel of his daughter’s small breasts against his skin, the terrified hushed song she sometimes sang to wisk herself from his grasp, froze his heart. All this terribleness made him forget sometimes Hector Beaumont, the one-eyed owner of the general store, who made him kneel before him, take his member in his mouth, beating Chester until he did it without resistance, the scent of tobacco, licorice, old cheese and sweat swirling around the back room where Hector Beaumont unzipped his pants and claimed Chester Foster for three years that lasted forever.

And women were just a blur, all one face to him, one body. He came to hate his wife because she had not broken the hold of memory, had not snapped the back of nightmare. In Olive’s arms he was the little boy again, each time, vulnerable and afraid. But when he took his daughter he became Hector Beaumont, instilling fear, not feeling it. Mornings after, he woke sick, unsatisfied, wondering what he had done. Knowing all too well. If he could kill himself, he thought, it would be over. But he’d never do that. Some poison was in him. Now that he had started, it was impossible to stop. Mornings after, Jessie stumbled from bed, already in the hold of a skillful, perfect amnesia that erased the night from memory while burying it in her soul.

And so, theirs was a house where everyone had a secret. Mae Ann never said a word about Jessie returning to their room in
the dark, and slipping back under the sheets beside her, smelling of their father’s cigar, his whiskey clinging to her like a second skin. She said nothing, but began to run away from home so often that after a while, no one took notice anymore, for they knew she would come back eventually.

Junior, the youngest boy, got into fights at school, and was sent to a juvenile home for stealing sneakers from a department store downtown. Nobody in the family talked about Junior’s behavior, or about the beatings his father inflicted with a savage sense of mission. Willie took refuge in utter, complete silence. He carved hundreds of tiny animals out of wood—mice, dogs, squirrels. Jessie found them one day in a box beneath his bed. He was so quiet they thought he was dumb. Chester Foster beat Junior because he was bad. He beat Willie because he was afraid he wouldn’t be a man.

When her father touched her, Jessie tunneled deep inside herself. There she hovered quiet, unmolested, untouched. Daydreams became the texture of her life. While cooking, she learned to transport herself in her mind to a foreign country they had studied in school, to sweep the floor and hear the amusing, subtle laughter of imaginary friends. And there was always Aunt Eva.

Jessie often stopped by Aunt Eva’s beauty shop on her way home from school or from the Bullocks’. She sat in the tiny shop, surrounded by the scorching scent of straightening combs and curlers, the acrid smell of shampoo and dye. The beauty shop was a confessional. Here women flaunted secrets, told raucous tales of lovers, recounted arguments with husbands and employers, divulged their fears for their children. Jessie swept the floor, gathering great balls of hair on the dustpan, cleaned the sinks, washed the towels and listened to the women unfold precious covert longings, draping them over the dreary exterior of their lives. When Eva gave Jessie a ride
home, she noticed how Jessie was reluctant to move once they drove up to her house, asking Eva more than once, “How come I got to come back here? How come I can’t go with you?” Concerned, Eva began visiting her sister’s house when she wasn’t expected and instantly sensed the chaos. She began taking Mae Ann and Jessie to her house for the weekends. When Chester Foster argued that they were needed to work in the house, Eva snapped at him, “Let them hardheaded boys of yours do some work, they got hands.”

Her sister’s marriage was the cause of her illness, Eva had concluded long ago. As she watched the two girls stuff a few things into a paper bag for the trip to her house, she wrestled with the impulse to go into her sister’s room and drag her out of the bed.

Mae Ann and Jessie slept with Eva, watching movies till past midnight, drinking Dr. Pepper and eating barbecued potato chips. When Jessie asked her aunt why she never got married, Eva rolled her eyes and said, “What I need a man for? Just tell me that.” And once while Mae Ann slept at the foot of the bed, Aunt Eva asked Jessie in the dark, “You got anything you want to tell me, Jess, anything at all?”

“Bout what?”

“Bout why you don’t want to git outta my car when I take you home. Bout that no count daddy of yours. That’s what about.”

“No, ma’am, I ain’t got nothing I want to tell,” Jessie whispered, images of disaster filling her mind at the thought of putting into words actions she could never truly describe.