Corregidora (Bluestreak) (13 page)

“Any of them, even them he had out in the fields, if he wonted them, he just ship their own husbands out of bed, and get in there with them, but didn’t nothing happen like what happened over on that other plantation, cause I guess that other plantation served as a warning, cause they might wont your pussy, but if you do anything to get back at them, it’ll be your life they be wonting, and then they make even that some kind of a sex show, all them beatings and killings wasn’t nothing but sex circuses, and all them white peoples, mens, womens, and childrens crowding around to see …

“Naw, he said he wouldn’t’ve been nothing but a waste of my pussy, cause he said my pussy bring gold. But what was funny after that they kept claiming he did something. Not Corregidora, but this black man. I was only talking to him once, all Corregidora did was seen us talking, and I guess he figure the next step was we be down in the grass or something. I don’t know, but they said he did something, and they were goin to beat him real bad. He was young too, young man, so he run away. When somebody run away, it almost mean you can do whatever you wont to with them. I think he woulda run away anyway, cause he had this dream, you know, of running away and joining up with them renegade slaves up in Palmares, you know. I kept telling him that was way back before his time, but he wouldn’t believe me, he said he was going to join up with some black mens that had some dignity. You know, Palmares, where these black mens had started their own town, escaped and banded together. I said the white men had killed all of them off but he wouldn’t believe me. He said that was what his big dream was, to go up there and join all these other black mens up there, and have him a woman, and then come back and get his woman and take her up there, but he had to find his way first, and know exactly where he was going. I said he couldn’t know where he was going because Palmares was way back two hundred years ago, but he said Palmares was now. But they claimed he did something, and he had to leave before he planned to. Wasn’t nothing but seventeen or eighteen. This ole man said he told him to rub garlic on his feet so the hounds wouldn’t smell him, but he said the boy must’ve forgot to. We was all praying for him, though. They sent this whole mob of mens out after him. You know, they didn’t need no mob for just one person. Mob and hounds. So they can have the hounds to smell out nigger blood, cause they trained them to do that. But it was only because Corregidora thought he’d been fooling with me when he hadn’t, or that we’d been fooling with each other, cause all that was all uncalled-for. Sometimes I would be a little bold with him, little bolder than the others, cause I know I was the piece he wonted the most, so I said, ‘He wasn’t after my pussy. He ain’t been after my pussy. He even too young to know I got one.’ ‘Ain’t no nigger on this place too young to know you got one, way I got them trained,’ he said. He moved away from me, then he moved back toward me. He must’ve been fucking me while they was chasing after
him.
But maybe he did the right thing to run anyway, because maybe if he had stayed there, the way Corregidora was looking when he seen us talking he might’ve had him beat dead. I ain’t never seen him look like that, cause when he send them white mens in there to me he didn’t look like that, cause he be nodding and saying what a fine piece I was, said I was a fine speciment of a woman, finest speciment of a woman he ever seen in his life, said he had tested me out hisself, and then they would be laughing, you know, when they come in there to me. Cause tha’s all they do to you, was feel up on you down between your legs see what kind of genitals you had, either so you could breed well, or make a good whore. Fuck each other or fuck them. Tha’s the first thing they would think about, cause if you had somebody who was a good fucker you have plenty to send out in the field, and then you could also make you plenty money on the side, or inside. But he was up there fucking me while they was out chasing
him.
‘Don’t let no black man fool with you, do you hear? I don’t wont nothing black fucking with my pussy.’ I kept saying I wouldn’t. ‘I don’t wont nothing black trying to fuck you, do you hear that?’ ‘Yes, I hear.’ Let his own color mess with me all they wont to. Sometimes I used to think he even wonted to be in there watching, but out of respect for them, not me, he wouldn’t. Yes, tha’s just how I was feeling, while he was up there jumping up and down between my legs they was out there with them hounds after that boy. Wasn’t nothing but seventeen. Couldn’t’ve been more than seventeen or eighteen. And he had this dream he told me about. That was all he wanted me for, was to tell me about this dream. He must’ve trusted me a lot, though, cause I could’ve been one of them to run back to Corregidora with it. But I wouldn’t. It was because he seen us out there talking. I wouldn’t even go tell him, cause I would’ve been seen telling him. And I kept feeling all that time he was running, he kept thinking I’d told something when I didn’t. And then there I was kept crying out, and ole Corregidora thinking it was because he was fucking so good I was crying. ‘Ain’t nobody do it to you like this, is it?’ I said, ‘Naw.’ I just kept saying Naw, and he just kept squeezing on my ass and fucking. And then somehow it got in my mind that each time he kept going down in me would be that boy’s feets running. And then when he come, it meant they caught him …

“When they come back, they said they lost the boy at the river. They said they got to the river they didn’t see him no more. We was all glad. We didn’t show it, but the rest of us was all glad and rejoicing inside. But you know what happened? Three days after that somebody seen him floating on the water. What happened was they chased him as far as the river and he just jumped in and got drownded. Cause they didn’t know nothing till three days after that when he rose …

“Corregidora must’ve done some rejoicing then. He didn’t show it but he must’ve had it all inside. Ole man kept telling me if the boy had just remembered to rub garlic on his feet, the bloodhounds wouldn’t’ve been able to follow. I asked him if he ever tried it. He said, Naw, but he heard of folks that did. I asked him where was they. He said they was gone. He didn’t know where to, but they must’ve made it, cause didn’t nobody bring them back.”

She quit talking, and looked over at me suddenly, Mama again: “They just go on like that, and then get in to talking about the importance of passing things like that down. I’ve heard that so much it’s like I’ve learned it off by heart. But then with him there they figured they didn’t have to tell me no more, but then what they didn’t realize was they was telling Martin too …”

It was as if she had
more
than learned it off by heart, though. It was as if their memory, the memory of all the Corregidora women, was her memory too, as strong with her as her own private memory, or almost as strong. But now she was Mama again.

“One day after we’d been married, I don’t know, maybe six months. (He had come into the house to live, you know. Not on account of hisself but me. I kept saying I couldn’t not help them out, and if we didn’t live there, I couldn’t help us and them too. He said he’d help us, all I had to do was worry about them. I said something about how little he was making. Naw, it was almost like he moved in that house out of anger, not for me, but for anger.) Well, he had gone fishing one day, but when he came back, though, instead of coming around to the front where I was, he went around the back to the kitchen and put them in a big pan of water, and then he was gonna come around to the front and have me cut them up and fry them. Well, what happened is he must’ve started through their room and there she was, sitting on that bed in there powdering up under her breasts. I don’t know if she seen him or not—this was your grandmama—but she just kept powdering and humming, cause when I started through there, there she was powdering, and looking down at her breasts, and lifting them up and powdering under them, and there he was just standing in the door with his arms spread up over the door, and sweat showing through his shirt, just watching her. I don’t know what land of expression he had on his face. His lips was kind of smiling, but his eyes wasn’t. He seen me and he just kept standing there. I was looking at Mama and then looking up at him, and after he seen me the first time he just kept looking at her. She was acting like she didn’t know we was there, but I know she had to know. He was just standing there like he was hypnotized or something. I know she knew. She knew it, cause they both knew he wasn’t getting what he wanted from me. Cause you know with them in there, I couldn’t. I’d let him rub me down there. I kept telling him it was because they were in there that I wouldn’t. But … even if they hadn’t been. There she was just sitting there lifting up her breasts. I don’t know when it was she decided she’d let him know she seen him, but then all a sudden she set the box of powder down and looked up. Her eyes got real hateful. First she looked at me, then she looked at him. ‘You black bastard, watching me. What you doing watching me, you black bastard?’ She still had her breasts all showing and just cussing at him. He started over there where she was, but I got between them. ‘Martin, don’t.’ He just kept looking at me, like it was me he was hating, but it was her he was calling a half-white heifer. Her powder and him sweating all up under his arms, and me holding him. She kept calling him a nasty black bastard, and he kept calling her a half-white heifer.

“ ‘Messing with my girl, you ain’t had no right messing with my girl.’

“ ‘I’ma come over there and mess with your ass the next time you show it,’ he said, but then I got him in the kitchen, and there was them fish in that pan a water he had waiting for me to clean. He pushed me away from him, and grabbed them fish and started cutting them up hisself. ‘What do we have to do, go up under the house?’ he kept asking me. ‘What do we have to do, go up under the house?’

“ ‘Please, Martin.’

“He just kept grabbing those fish and cutting them up.

“When I came back through the house, Mama rolled her eyes at me. ‘Messing with my girl, he ain’t had no bit of right.’

“After that, whenever Martin wanted to get from one part of the house to the next, he’d go around the house … But she just kept acting like she didn’t even know he was there.”

She was quiet again, and then she said, “They had us sleeping in the narrow old trundle bed in the front room, the one you was sleeping in afterwards. I kept telling him it was because they were in there I wouldn’t, but then that time they weren’t there he wanted to take me in
their
bed …”

I didn’t ask her whether she had let him. That was something she didn’t have to tell me.

When we got to the highway, Mama took my arm.

“I think what really made them dislike Martin was because he had the nerve to ask them what I never had the nerve to ask.”

“What was that?”

“How much was hate for Corregidora and how much was love.”

I said nothing. She squeezed my arm. “I’ll try to pretend you’re okay until you tell me different,” she said.

“I’m okay, Mama.”

She kept looking at me. I didn’t like the way she was looking. I wanted to ask what about her now, how lonely was
she.
She’d told me about
then
, but what about
now.
Shortly after Grandmama died, she had written me a letter saying that Mr. Floyd had started to get sweet on her, talking about how he wanted to court her, but she said she hadn’t let him. She said he could just stay across that road, cause all he really wanted to do was to move out of that trailer, and into
her
house, and probably bring his mama with him. I hadn’t known whether to believe her or not, because I knew too many of my own excuses when men came to the piano, and then Logan—the man Max hired to see to it that men don’t bother me—was my best excuse. I could just give him that “he’s bothering me” look, and he’d put the man out.

After a while, Mama squeezed my arm again. She kept hold of it until the bus came and she put me on. “Do you know me any better now?” she asked. I only smiled at her. She stayed standing there until the bus pulled off. She didn’t let me see her walk back to the house.

I leaned back against the seat and closed my eyes. Then suddenly it was like I was remembering something out of a long past. I was a child, drowsy, thinking I was sleeping or dreaming. It was a woman and a man’s voice, both whispering.

“No.”

“Why don’t you come?”

“No.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“I’m not. I’m just not going with you.”

“Why do you keep fighting me? Or is it yourself you keep fighting?”

I drifted back into sleep. I never heard that man’s voice again.

I was thinking that now that Mama had gotten it all out, her own memory—at least to me anyway—maybe she and
some man
… But then, I was thinking, what had I done about my
own
life?

III

I couldn’t have been more than ten the year the Melrose woman committed suicide. Mama had come into the house. Gram said something to her and then they started hushing each other because I was in the room. I saw the way they was looking, but Mama sent me back in the kitchen to light the oven because she was going to bake some rolls for dinner. I went back in the kitchen. They didn’t think I could hear them, but I could. We had one of them three-room, straight-back shotgun houses. They was in the front room, and with just one room in between us, I could hear them. When I finished lighting the stove, I just sat down at the kitchen table and listened.

“Yeah, they found her over in Hawkins’ alley,” Mama was saying.

“Anybody know why yet?”

“They thought it must’ve been some man, you know, got her pregnant or something, but she wasn’t pregnant.”

“Had to been some man,” Gram said. “I ain’t never known a woman take her life less it was some man.”

“I reckon,” Mama said. She sounded weary. I didn’t hear them say anything else, and finally Mama said she was going back in the kitchen and start supper. I put my head down on the table, so she wouldn’t see my eyes.

It wasn’t until later that I knew what they were talking about. I was down at Mr. Deak’s store, and him and these men were talking. They weren’t like Mama and Gram. They didn’t care if I was there or not. Mama had sent me down for some corn meal. I thought it had happened in Bracktown, but it wasn’t Bracktown, it was up in Versailles that it happened, but the girl was from Bracktown—one of Mr. Melrose’s girls. She was in her twenties.

“Melrose is up there now,” Mr. Deak was saying. “Her mama is all to pieces. He told her to stay here, and he go take care of it. They gon move her body down here. But you know why he didn’t wont Miz Melrose there, because he gon try to find out what man’s responsible, buddy, it’s gon be some fireworks in Versailles.”

Mr. Deak was a little dark man who wore suspenders all the time, and stood with his thumbs under his suspenders, not up near his chest, but down near his waist. He must’ve been in his twenties, but I thought he was old then.

“You ain’t forgot what your mama wanted, did you, missy?” he said to me.

“Naw, sir.” I went and got the corn meal. I didn’t take it over to the counter, I just stayed standing there.

The other man started talking. “How her daddy gonna find out, and the whole police couldn’t?”

“A daddy got ways the police ain’t. Anway, she wasn’t nothing but a nigger woman to the police. You know they ain’t gon take they time to find out nothing about a nigger woman. Somebody go down there and file a complaint, they write it down, all right, while you standing there, but as soon as you leave, they say, ‘Here, put it in the nigger file.’ That mean they get to it if they can. And most times they can’t. Naw, they don’t say put it in the nigger file, they say put it in the nigger
woman
file, which mean they ain’t gon never get to it … You know, John Willie ain’t gon do nothing. But her daddy, now, that’s something different. You heard about the shot heard round the world. They gon be some rumbling over here in Bracktown when Mr. Melrose find that man.”

“Maybe it wasn’t no man, maybe it was just she went crazy.”

“Naw, it was a man. I bet my eyeteeth it was a man.”

Mr. Deak looked at me again, this time real hard, and I handed him the money for the meal, and ran out the door.

“Did you hear what happened to that Melrose woman?” I asked May Alice. She was my girl friend. She was a couple of years older than me, though, and had already started bleeding. She called it bleeding, so I had started calling it bleeding. Before then I had been taught to call it monthly or time of month. They told me about it when I was nine. They wouldn’t have told me that early, but I’d found some of Mama’s bloody sheets and had started screaming and crying, and they couldn’t convince me that mama wasn’t sick until they told me about it. When I told May Alice, she’d laughed, and every since that, she would start pointing out people and saying, “She bleeds.” At first I had liked “monthly” but then I had started liking her word better. I hadn’t started bleeding yet, but May Alice said I would start in a few years. She said she had started early, though, and sounded like she was bragging. She said it was a good thing I’d had that scare then, because if they hadn’t told me, and I’d seen all that blood in my bloomers, I would have had a bigger scare. She said she knew this girl who hadn’t been told and when she saw all that blood she thought something was wrong with her, but was even too scared to tell her mama, and went down in the basement and kept trying to wipe the blood off, but it just kept coming, and she thought she was dying or something. Then May Alice laughed at me again.

“She wasn’t a woman. She wasn’t any older than my sister,” May Alice said now.

“Your sister’s married, ain’t she?”

“That don’t make her a woman. Anyway, Mama keeps telling her it’s time for her to start acting like a woman. She might’ve had it in her, but that don’t make her no woman.”

“Had what in her?”

“Dick, silly.”

“What?”

“Her husband’s thing. A man’s got something different from a girl.”

“I know that.”

“You don’t act like it.”

“I ain’t seen one, but I know what it looks like.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because we was watching Mr. Trumbo’s dick get hard through his pants, and I told you. You don’t remember nothing.”

“I remember.”

“Well, just because somebody had it in them, don’t make them no woman. I had it in me, and I ain’t no woman.”

“How you have it in you?”

“I just did, that’s all. I opened my legs, and Harold put it in me. He said, ‘Open your legs up, May Alice,’ and I did. I played like I didn’t know what he was going to do, but I did. Then he put his thing in me, and my pussy got all bloody.”

“You said you already bleed.”

“I do, but that’s not the only kind of bleeding a woman, I mean a girl, have to put up with. The first time a man sticks it in you, you bleed.”

“Does it hurt?”

“It does for a little while, and then it feels good.”

“Naw it don’t.”

“Yes, it does.”

“How can it feel good if it hurts.”

“I said it hurts for a little while, and then all the hurting goes, and then it feels good.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You will. Rate you going, you probly be my sister’s age, but you’ll say, May Alice told me it would feel good.”

“Naw I won’t. I’ll say May Alice told me a story.”

She just laughed.

When we were older—or maybe I should say when I was older—May Alice always seemed the same age to me; I was about twelve myself then, no, I was thirteen, because I’d just started getting my period—I was in the six grade and she was in the eighth, but we had recess at the same time, and I saw her and Harold leave the playground and go over in Mr. Jouett’s wheat field. Harold came back first, and then she came back and came over where I was.

“May Alice, you going to have a baby if you don’t quit.”

“Did Miss Smoot see us?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think she was looking.”

“You know what’ll happen if you don’t quit,” I said again.

She looked angry at first, and then she kind of laughed a little. “I been trying to, but then it gets so you can’t help it. You’ll find out.”

I kind of frowned. She was always mentioning the fact that she’d been having it and I hadn’t, like when we were younger and she would keep saying, “I got a bigger hole than you got,” and asking me if I wanted to see it. I said, “Naw.”

“I’ll show it to you if you show me yours,” she said.

“Naw.”

“Reason I got a bigger hole than you got is cause Harold been in me.”

“Harold can’t get in you. You ain’t got no door.”

“Yes, I do, cause I got one down between my legs.”

Then when I first started bleeding, I tried to get back at her. I said, “You said it would be red. It looks like chocolate.” “It’ll get red,” she told me, and it did.

“Anyway,” she went on now, “once you had it in you, it seems like you have to keep having it in you. I heard Mama talking about this woman that didn’t have it done to her and went crazy. You got to have it in you, or you go crazy.”

“You lying.”

“Naw I ain’t. Mama said this girl, there was this man that used to come and visit her mama, and her mama never would let her do nothing, and then this man left her house, and went walking down the street, and this girl broke loose, and ran down the street after him, and tried to rape him, right there on the sidewalk. They put her in the asylum after that.”

I kept saying she was lying, and she kept saying naw she wasn’t neither. Then Harold came over by us, and he was grinning. I told May Alice I had to go inside.

I never did tell her about that time I was home by myself and Harold and some more boys came and was standing outside the kitchen door wanting to get in, and I wouldn’t let them in.

“Let us in, Ursa,” Harold had said. “Let us in so we can give you a baby. Don’t you want a baby?”

They kept knocking on the door. I wouldn’t let them in the kitchen, so they went around to the front, but that was locked too.

“Henry said when you was five you let him see your pussy,” Harold said.

“I ain’t five now.”

“He said you let him feel all up in your ass.”

“Naw I didn’t.”

“Open the door so we can get some. Don’t you want a baby?”

I was in the bathroom when May Alice came in.

“Why’d you leave? Harold says you don’t like him.”

I said nothing. I was thinking of that time we had gone through the cut-off, May Alice and me, and Harold and those boys were there again. Harold had gone over to May Alice and the other boys were after me, but May Alice had thrown rocks at them. “Don’t let them get Urs,” she’d said. “Harold, make them leave.” When the other boys were gone, she and Harold got over in the grass. They were rolling like they were playing at first, and then I knew what they were doing. They hadn’t even told me to turn my head.

“What’s wrong, Urs?”

“You know what’ll happen if you don’t stop.”

“I can take care of myself,” she said, then she stuck her tongue out at me, and left.

I didn’t even know what she saw in him, except that day we had a dance at school and he asked me to slow-dance, and he kept getting real close to me, and he felt real hot down between his legs. I didn’t know anybody could feel that hot. When he asked me to dance again, I wouldn’t dance with him. He went over and said something to some boys, and these boys were standing over in the corner, looking at me, laughing. No one else asked me to dance that evening.

“We did it again last night,” May Alice said.

We were on the stairs going up to class. She had a torn place in the hem of her skirt.

“May Alice, you better quit.”

She said nothing.

“He ought to quit if you won’t,” I said.

“You know a boy won’t quit.”

“Why not?”

She laughed. “Anyway,” she said, “they be after it till you tell them to stop. But then after you start giving them some, you wouldn’t feel right to tell them to stop. I mean, you wouldn’t feel you had any right to tell them to stop.”

“I would.”

“Who you gave some to?”

I said nothing. She turned to go in her class. I kept on walking.

There was a boy at school who used to rub up against girls. Once when it was crowded and we were all going to the cafeteria he rubbed up against me. I wouldn’t hardly eat for a whole week, thinking he’d given me a baby, even though I knew from May Alice that you couldn’t get them unless you had it in you. I wouldn’t eat because I thought starving myself would get rid of it. Mama had kept saying, don’t you want such and such a thing, you better eat, Ursa, and I would keep saying I wasn’t hungry. And then she had said, “You die if you don’t eat.” I don’t know how long I could have kept it up, but then May Alice’s own scare drove me back to eating again. Yes, she had had a scare before she got really pregnant. She thought she was pregnant and kept asking me whether she should take a coat hanger like she heard some people did. I’d told her it would probably ruin her more doing that than if she went on and had the baby. She wasn’t even acting like she used to, like she would act when she was so sure of herself. She said she knew all about having babies but not how to get rid of them. I asked her didn’t she know how to keep from having them. She said, Yeah, but Harold was getting so now he was getting careless, and I asked her wasn’t she getting careless too. She said it was just that now she didn’t like to ask him to use something, and didn’t want to tell him to pull out.

But then her period had finally come that time. It was the next time that it didn’t. At first she kept telling me it was only because she’d been eating too much. “I’ve just been eating too much, I’ve just been eating too much, that’s all,” she kept telling me. But that day when she couldn’t tell me that anymore, I skipped class with her and we spent the whole afternoon sitting down in the wheat field, and she kept hugging me and crying, and hugging me, and saying why couldn’t I have been Harold and then nothing would have happened. I didn’t know what she was talking about then. She just kept hugging me.

She said her mama found out because she got suspicious when she’d stopped finding blood in her underwear when she did the wash. She’d tried to tell her that she’d washed it out herself, but her mama said she never did before, and took her down to Midway and had Dr. Roach examine her. May Alice said she wouldn’t even look at the doctor, she just kept rolling her eyes at him. She said it wasn’t like when you were making love or playing doctor, when a man opened your legs and looked at you down there. She said it was the most embarrassing thing a woman could go through. She said all she did was roll her eyes at him. Then she said the next week when her mama went to find out the results, she came back home and slapped her, and said the only reason she didn’t keep slapping her was because she didn’t want to be responsible for anything happening to the baby, and keep her from paying the consequences she deserved to pay.