Juneteenth (28 page)

“No!” she said. “OH NO! Revern’ Bliss, Revern’ Bliss! YOU WERE LOOKING AT MY NAKEDNESS! YOU WERE EXPOSING MY NAKEDNESS!”

He was mute, shrinking within himself, his head turning from side to side as he thought,
If I could fall off the bed it would go away. If I had wings I could—

But her words were calling up dreadful shapes in his mind. A black horse with buzzards tearing at its dripping entrails went galloping across a burning field, making no sound.… A naked, roaring-drunk Noah stumbled up waving a jug of corn whiskey and cursing in vehement silence while two younger men fought with another trying to cover his head with a quilt of many-colored cloth and he could feel her words still sounding. All the darkness seemed to leave the room. Nearby the cats which had hurtled across the night like a swirling wheel of knives had cornered now, filling the air with an agony of howling.

“You were, weren’t you, Revern’ Bliss?” she said. “Tell me, what was you doing!” And the minor note of doubt in her voice warned him that there was still time to lie, to erase it all with words and he seemed to be running, trying to catch up but he wasn’t fast enough and felt the chance slipping through his hand like a silver minnow. He seemed to hear his voice sounding unreal even before he spoke.

“I didn’t mean to do it, mam, honestly, I didn’t….”

“But you
did!”
she said in a fierce whisper. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, peeping at my nakedness and me asleep. Sneaking up on me like a thief in the night, trying to steal me in my sleep! You, who’s
supposed
to be Revern’ Bliss, the young preacher!”

“Please, mam,
please
mam. I really didn’t mean to do it. Forgive me. Please, forgive me….”

She shook her head sadly, sitting higher and clutching the sheet around her.

“Oh you really ought to be ashamed,” she said. “That’s the least you can do. Acting like that, like an old rounder or something that’s had no training or anything. What I want to know is ain’t there
any
of you men a God-fearing woman can trust! I thought you was a real genuine preacher of the gospel and I was proud to have you staying in my house. You never would’ve had to sleep in any hay around
here. But now just look what you done. I guess I been offering my hospitality to an old jackleg. A midnight creeper. I guess you just another one of these old no-good jacklegs. You’re not good and sanctified like Revern’ Hickman at all and it’ll probably break his heart to hear what you done.”

He cried soundlessly now, wanting to go to her, his whole body, even his guilty fingers crying
Mother me, forgive me
. He felt cast into the blackest darkness, the world being transformed swiftly into iron.

“Please,” he cried, touching her arm, but she pulled away, refusing to touch him as he reached out to her.

“No,” she said, “oh no. You get out of my bed. Get on out!”

“Please, Sister Georgia.”

“I said, get!”

“Yes, mam,” he said. He dragged himself from the bed now and found his way back to the sofa and lay sobbing in the dark.

“Sister Georgia,” he called to the other room. “Sister Georgia …”

“What is it, ole jackleg?”

“Sister Georgia, please don’t call me that. Pleeease …”

“Then you oughtn’t to act like one. What is it you want?”

“Sister Georgia,” he said, “are you a lady or a girl?”

“Am I
what?”

“Are you a lady or a girl?” he said.

She was silent; then: “After what you done you shouldn’t have to ask.”

“But I have to know,” he said.

“I’m a woman,” she said. “What difference does it make, ole jackleg preacher?”

“Because … maybe if you’re a girl what I did isn’t really so bad….”

She was silent and he lay straining to hear. Finally, she said, “You go to sleep. It won’t be long before day and I have to have my sleep.”

She won’t tell me
, he thought,
she won’t say
.

His tears were gone now and he lay face downward, thinking,
I don’t care, the other one is the one for a mother….

CHAPTER 10

He, Bliss, sat at the kitchen table drinking the ice-cold lemonade and listening to the tinkle the chunk of ice made when he stirred it with his finger. The others were sitting quietly in the room with Daddy Hickman and he could see Sister Wilhite nodding in her chair over near the window. Sister Wilhite’s tired, he thought. She’s been up all night and Deacon has too. He looked at the cooking stove, dull black with shining nickel parts around the bottom made in the shape of scrolls. They’re the same shape as the scrolls on the lid of my coffin, he thought. Why do they put scrolls on everything? Sister Wilhite’s sewing machine has scrolls made into the iron part where her feet go to pedal and it has scrolls painted in gold in the long shining block that holds the shiny wheel and the needle. Scrolls on everything. People don’t have scrolls though. But maybe you just can’t see them. Sister Georgia.… Scroll, Scroll Jellyroll.… That’s a good rhyme—but sinful.… Jellyroll.

The stovepipe rose straight up and then curved and went out
through a hole up near the ceiling. The wallpaper up there was black where the smoke had leaked through. The stove was cold. No fire was showing through the airholes in the door where the wood and coal went, and he thought, It’s sleeping too. It’s resting, taking a summer vacation. It works hard in the winter though, it goes all day long eating up wood and coal and making ashes. From early in the morning till late at night and sometimes they stoke it and it burns all night too. It’s just coasting then though, but it’s working. Summertime is easy except for Sunday when a lot of folks have to eat string beans, turnip greens, cabbage and salt pork, sweet potato pie, ham hocks and collards, egg-cornbread and dandelion greens is good for you. Make you big and strong. Summer is easy except for those good things so the stove can take a rest. It wakes up for oatmeal for breakfast and eggs and grits and coffee but then it goes out. Not a stick of wood in the corner or bucket of coal. No heat for lemonade but it’s good. In the fall is the busy time. In the fall they’ll be killing the hogs and taking the chitterlins and the members will be bringing a whole pig to Daddy Hickman all scalded and scrubbed clean, then he’ll give it to Deacon Wilhite and Deacon’ll give it to Sister Wilhite and that’s when the stove will really have to work. The door where the fire goes’ll be cherry red and the stovepipe too.

That big pot on the back there will be puffing like a steam engine. Meshach, Shadrach and Abednego and I like black-eyed peas and curly pigtails and collards, hogshead hopping John—Pa don’t raise no cotton or corn and neither no potatoes, but Lord God, the tomatoes. I like candied yams, spare ribs and Sister Wilhite’s apple brown Betty with that good hard sauce. Sister Lucy, Daddy Hickman said that time, don’t let the you-know-who’s learn how good you can cook, because they’re liable to chain you to a kitchen stove for ninety-nine years and a day. Chained? she said. I already been chained for fifteen years.
I wouldn’t want to be chained to any stove
but
Sister Lucy just laughed about it and looked at Deacon. He looked at Sister Wilhite sleeping in the chair. She’s really getting it, that sleep, he thought. She’s making up for lost time….

Then he must have dreamed because Sister Georgia was there in the kitchen and she was leading him over to the red-hot stove and asking him about Meshach, Shadrach and old big-headed Abernathy and shaking him—

But it wasn’t Sister Georgia, it was Sister Wilhite.

“Wake up, Revern’ Bliss,” she said, “Revern’ is calling you,” And he got up sleepily and yawned and she guided him into the bedroom. The others were still there, sitting around and talking quietly. Then he was at the bed looking once more at the bandaged face. Daddy Hickman’s eye was closed, hidden beneath the bandages and he thought,
He’s asleep
when Sister Wilhite spoke up.

“Here’s Revern’ Bliss, Brother A.Z.” And there was Daddy Hickman’s eye, looking into his own.

“Well, there you are, Bliss,” Daddy Hickman said. “Did you have enough lemonade?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s fine. That’s very good. So what have you been doing?”

“I had a nap and I’ve been wondering …”

“Wondering, Bliss? What about?”

He hesitated, looking at Deacon Wilhite who sat with his legs crossed smoking. He was sorry he had said it, but it had come out.

“About that lady,” he said.

“No, Revern’ Bliss,” Sister Wilhite said from behind him. “Let’s forget about that. Now let Revern’ rest….”

“It’s all right,” Daddy Hickman said. Then the eye bored into his face. “She frightened you, didn’t she, boy?”

He bowed his head. “Yes, sir, she sure did.”

Then he tried to stop the rest from coming out, but it was too late. “She said she was my mama….”

Daddy Hickman lifted his hands quickly and lowered them back to the sheet. “Poor Bliss, poor baby boy,” he said, “you really had yourself a time….”

“Revern’,” Sister Wilhite said, “don’t you think you should rest?”

Daddy Hickman waved his hand toward Sister Wilhite.

“Is she, Daddy Hickman?” he said.

“Is she what, Bliss?”

“My mother?”

“That crazy woman? Oh no, Bliss,” Daddy Hickman said. “You took her seriously, didn’t you? Well, I guess I might as well tell you the story, Bliss. Sit here on the bed.”

He sat, aware that the others were listening as he watched Daddy Hickman’s eye. Daddy Hickman was making a cage of his big long fingers.

“No, Bliss,” he said. “The first thing you have to understand is that this is a strange country. There’s no logic to it or to its ways. In fact, it’s been half-crazy from the beginning and it’s got so many crazy crooks and turns and blind alleys in it, that half the time a man can’t tell where he is or who he is. To tell the truth, Bliss, he can’t tell reason from unreason and it’s so mixed up and confused that if we tried to straighten it out right this minute, half the folks out there running around would have to be locked up. You following me, Bliss?”

“You mean everybody is
crazy?”

“In a way of speaking, Bliss. Because the only logic and sanity is the logic and sanity of God, and down here it’s been turned wrong-side out and upside down. You have to watch yourself, Bliss, in a situation like this. Otherwise you won’t know what’s sense and what’s foolishness. Or what’s to be laughed at and what’s to be cried over. Or if you’re yourself or what somebody else says you are. Now you take that woman, she yelled some wild words during our services and got everybody upset and now you don’t know what to think about her and when you see me all wrapped up like the Mummy or
old King Tut or somebody like that, you think that what she said has to have some truth in it. So that’s where the confusion and the craziness comes in, Bliss. We have to feel pity for her, Bliss, that’s what we have to feel. No anger or fear—even though she upset the meeting and got a few lumps knocked on my head. And we can’t afford to believe in what she says, not that woman. Nor in what she does either. She’s a sad woman, Bliss, and she’s dangerous too; but when you step away and look at her calmly you have to admit that whatever she did or does or whoever she is, the poor woman’s crazy as a coot.”

“She’s crazy, all right,” Sister Lucy said. “Now you said something
I
can understand.”

“Oh, you can understand, all right, Sister Lucy,” Daddy Hickman said, “but you don’t want to let yourself understand. You want something you can be angry about; something you can hold on to with ease and no need to trouble yourself with the nature of the true situation. You don’t want to worry your humanity.”

“Maybe so,” Sister Lucy said. “But I see that frightened child and I see you all wrapped in bandages and I can still see that woman dressed in red interrupting in the House of God, claiming that child—And I’m supposed to feel sorry for—”

“Yes
,” Daddy Hickman said. “Yes, you are. Job’s God didn’t promise him any easy time, remember.”

“No, he didn’t,” Sister Lucy said. “But I never been rich or had all the blessings Job had neither.”

“We’ll talk about that some other time,” Daddy Hickman said. “You have your own riches. You just have to recognize what they are. So Bliss, not only is that woman sad, she’s crazy as a coot. That woman has wilder dreams than a hop fiend.”

“What’s ‘hop,’ Daddy Hickman?”

“It’s dope, Bliss, drugs, and worse than gin and whiskey….”

“Oh! Has she been taking some?”

“I don’t know, Bliss; it’s just a way of speaking. The point is that the woman has wild ideas and does wild things. But because she’s from a rich family she can go around acting out any notion that comes into her mind.”

“Now that’s something I can understand,” Sister Lucy said.

“They taught that they own the world,” Sister Wilhite said.

“Just like they got it in a jug, Revern’ Bliss,” another sister said.

“Here,” Sister Lucy said, and she held out a licorice cigar.

“Thank you, Sister Lucy.”

“So listen,” Daddy Hickman said. “Let me tell Revern’ Bliss a bit about that woman. A few years back she was supposed to get married. She was going to have a big wedding and everything, but then the fellow who she was supposed to marry was killed when his buggy was struck by the Southern at the crossroads and the poor woman seemed to strip her gears….”