Loving Women (50 page)

“Where’s your superior officer?” I said, getting out of the car. Gabree inhaled, trying to look more chesty. His hand went to his service revolver.

“He’s asleep, sailor. And besides, I don’t even have to
answer
you.”

“Then you better wake him up, jackoff. If these people die, I’m gonna hold you responsible.”

Gabree said, “You know something? I might just arrest you on general principles.”

I pointed at Bobby Bolden’s writhing body.

“This man was a Naval corpsman at the Chosen reservoir,” I shouted. “He saved more Marines than you’ll ever even
meet
. If you let him die, then you oughtta die too, fuckhead.”

“That’s a
threat
, sailor.”

“You’re fucking right it’s a
threat
. Just stop the bullshit and get these people to a hospital.”

He started to take the .45 from its holster. His face was cold. I heard Bolden groan. I couldn’t see Eden, who was behind Catty.

“You better kill me with that, pal,” I said. “If you don’t, I’m taking it off you and you’ll end up with an extra asshole.”

Then another car pulled up behind Eden’s and the horn beeped. There were two lieutenants in the car. I turned my back on Gabree and walked over to them and explained what was going on. They were both Marine pilots.

“Oh, these goddamned chickenshit assholes,” said the officer behind the wheel. He got out of the car and shouted: “Corporal, get your ass over here!”

They had that squinty-eyed pilot look, the shambling bony bodies. But they took over. They made Corporal Gabree help them lift Catty and Bobby Bolden into their car, then raced past us through the gate into the great slumbering base. I pulled Eden’s car around in a circle, stopping just short of the gate. Gabree was standing there.

“I’ll see you around, Corporal.”

He looked at me without blinking and then I pulled away. Eden huddled against the door, away from me. She didn’t speak until we were on the road back to Ellyson Field.

What a night, I said, trying to get her to talk.

She looked at me, shook her head.

I’m sorry for all those rotten things I said. I’m sorry I blew my stack.

Forget it, she said in a soft voice. I shouldn’t’ve egged you on.

It should have felt like a reconciliation; it didn’t. We passed a lot of closed bars and churches. Just short of the base, she asked me to pull over.

I can’t go back to the trailer tonight, she said.

I mumbled something about not letting the idiots scare her off and how she didn’t really have anything to be afraid of, since this was really about Bobby Bolden and Catty.

She said, Are you kidding?

I said, No. In a way, maybe Bobby brought this on himself, with the Klan and all. You know, having a white woman and all that. Even the black people there—well, you saw that old man.

Then Eden Santana began to sob, shaking her head, her body racked.

Oh you poor damn silly
fool
, she said, through tears. You poor damn kid. You poor child.

I put my arms around her and held her close and the hopeless sobbing got heavier and then slowly eased.

What is it, baby? I whispered. What
is
it?

She pulled away and looked at me with her eyes all wet and the tracks of tears on her cheeks.

Don’t you see
anything?
she said.

I looked and waited and then she said it.

I’m black, you damn fool. I’m
black
.

Chapter

57

What Eden Told Me (II)

I
’
m one of The People, child. And maybe you don’t know about them, and for sure you don’t know about me, so listen up, you hear? Don’t sit there with that damfool white boy look on your face. You should’ve seen. You should’ve listened. You should’ve thought: Who was this James Robinson and why are there no pictures of her children on the walls and why is there a kink in her hair and why does she live by the lake with the niggers? You should’ve known. Yeah, I hid it. The truth be told, I didn’t want you backing up, didn’t want you going away. But I knew that if you knew, you’d go away. I learned long ago that I could pass in the white man’s world. But I couldn’t do it forever, child. Sooner or later, the white man smells niggers and forces them to pay for the white man’s own degraded sins. That’s what The People learned, too. Though it took em quite a while before they paid for the sin of pride and for all their sad treasons
.

I knew that from the beginning: when you touched my hand and when you entered my body: because it was all in The Story that was passed to me by my daddy and to him from his daddy, The Story passed down through all the generations, like a curse
.

The People came from a place called Isle Brevelle, twenty-five miles from Natchitoches, way up in the northwest of Louisiana. This was long ago, you hear me? Before there was a United States, before your people came here, before everybody that was to come and fill the great empty land. Before all of them, The People was here. Americans from the start
.

They were like two giant rivers joining to make a new one: the Africa river, the Europe river. The French were down here then, the whole damned Gulf was theirs and the big river too, all the way to Canada, and later the Spanish were here, and always the Indians were here, and together they brought to America the men and women of Africa. All of them made us, and later they called us the
gens de couleur libre,
the free people of color, the Creoles. We just called ourselves The People. We came from all those fucks of Africans and Europeans, fucks in the woods of the empty land, fucks in the August fields, fucks in slave quarters and masters’ beds, fucks at gunpoint and fucks freely given
.

The white men looked at us, at the women most of all, and they wanted us. They had no women here, or their women were pale and scrawny things, their heads full of Christian damnation (though some of the women did wander to the woods with black men and add to The People and that’s in The Story too). The white man tried to label us, ignoring the fact that before we ever saw a white skin or a blue eye we had the names of Africa, where we had lived since time began, and where later the Arabs chained us and put us in the holds of ships to be carried across oceans. The white men labeled us as if we were goods, and of course, to many of the whites, that’s what we were. But late at night it didn’t matter how white we were or how black. The white men wanted us
.

Maybe that was the beginning of the pride: their wanting us. Maybe that was why we went with them, to break them down, to make them love us, knowing that if they loved us
, we
owned
them.
Maybe that led to the pride. The true sin
.

So you look at me now, here in this place in the fifties, and I guess you think I’m one woman walking in the world. But the truth be told, looking at me you’re also looking at people long dead and gone. Their blood’s in me. The blood of The People. I can’t even go all the way to the beginning of The Story. Can’t go to Africa, child
.

But I know that in 1742, on a plantation near Natchitoches, a woman named Coincoin was born. Her parents were from Africa, slaves of a French family, they gave her a Christian name, Marie Thereze, but always called her Coincoin in the old language. In The Story, that’s the name that was always used
.

That slave couple had other kids, but Coincoin was the smart one, the beautiful one, black and smooth and big-assed and ripe. She knew the language that came across the ocean in the slave ships, but she spoke French and Spanish too, and could read all the books in the master’s house. She also knew all the healing that could be done with the simple things of God’s earth, roots and herbs and plants and magic mud. And though she was Catholic and read the Bible and went to the church, she had the old religion too. She knew all about the gods of the rivers and forests and wind, the sun and the moon. By the time she was twelve, she was famous all over for healing. White folks came to her and black folks too
.

But for all the respect they gave her, Coincoin knew one terrible thing. You hear me? She was the property of other men. She and her mother, her father and sisters and brothers did other men’s work: cooked their food, plowed their fields, picked their crops, nursed their babies. And because they were property they never got paid, no more than a mule got paid. And though the Code Noir said they couldn’t, the white men could grab the girl children and make them sleep with them. And then they could sell them off the way you might sell a saddle or a cart or a mule
.

One night when she was sixteen, Coincoin found herself on her own. On that single night her mother died, her father died and the master died in an epidemic that ran through the whole area and killed hundreds. They tell how the master’s wife got sick too and how Coincoin drew on the old medicine and saved that woman’s life. They say her father on his deathbed asked her to look for the kee-ah root, and Coincoin went foraging in the deep woods, was gone for four days. But when she came back with the secret root, it was too late to help her own father and mother. The Story says Coincoin hated the master and let him die. But when she was certain the man was gone, she saved his wife
.

When the plague was over, her slave family was split apart. Coincoin and a brother were given to the master’s son. And The Story says that he was kind to her; after all, she had saved his mother. But for all the kindness, she was still property. And in those days, the females were like brood mares to the damned masters. The more children they had, the more human beings the master could sell at a profit, or keep around to work the plantations. So the new master made Coincoin live with a fresh new slave from the old country. She must’ve felt something for the man because she had four children with him, one after the other, and along the way, started knowing better about the true world
.

And then, so The Story goes, when Coincoin was twenty-five, the Frenchman came to Natchitoches
.

Her Frenchman
.

He was tall and blue-eyed and kind, two years younger than Coincoin, free of family and responsibility, come to Louisiana to make his fortune. His name was Metoyer. He met Coincoin. They fell in love. And within a few months, Coincoin’s black man was gone, sold off into the country, her children by him were sold, and Coincoin was living in the Frenchman’s house
.

This wasn’t easy to do, child. She was someone
else’s
property, not the Frenchman’s. She couldn’t come and go when and where she pleased. But the Frenchman wanted her, and she wanted the Frenchman’s wanting. So the Frenchman went to Coincoin’s owner and made a deal. He
rented
her, like you might rent an ox to work your fields. And there, in the Frenchman’s house, the Frenchman and Coincoin began to make The People
.

They stayed together for twenty-five years. She gave him seven children. The humiliation was always there, I guess, because though he leased her, all her children belonged to the original master. Still, they lived a moral life. She was his woman, simple as that, his black wife living in the house and taking him inside her and giving him children
.

It wasn’t always easy. A Spanish priest came to Natchitoches and tried to break them up. But Metoyer loved his Coincoin, and he fought the authorities and they stayed together until, when the owner was on his own deathbed, Metoyer bought Coincoin from him. Bought her outright. And then, because the Code Noir said that no owner was allowed to father a child by one of his own slaves, the Frenchman freed her. And she stayed there in the house with him and their children
.

Finally, Coincoin started to get old. And the Frenchman came to her one night and said he wanted to break up with her. This was after twenty-five years and seven children. See, he was rich now and prosperous, this Metoyer, the owner of more slaves than anyone else in the region and thousands of acres of land. He said he wanted to marry a white woman that he’d met in New Orleans. That was the only way under the law that he could pass on his lands to someone, because he wasn’t allowed to pass it on to black people. Well, we just don’t know what Coincoin said to him when he brung her this news. I like to think she looked at him across a table and said, Go ahead, Frenchman, go to your white woman, but you ain’t ever gonna find no woman like me again. Not in your bed. Not by your side. Not ever
.

Whatever was said, they stayed friends for the rest of their lives. He arranged to buy her some land on the banks of the Cane River. He gave her money. He made sure all their children together were free and that they carried his name and that they knew how to read and write
.

And in spite of her years, Coincoin used her freedom
.