The Third Life of Grange Copeland (7 page)

One night he spied on Mem and her upright, clean-living beau and knew he must have her for his wife. And coming in that night, with him standing in the unlit doorway gazing out at them, Mem brushed past him with tears in her eyes. That was the first time he knew she loved him, and that she was forcing him out of her life by womanly design, and that if he didn’t do something soon she would be lost to him. He caught her in his arms as she was going up the stairs and vowed in words and kisses never to let her go.

The next day he went out into the country, to a plantation not far from where he was born, to a man he had heard was fair. They talked of farming on shares for two years, or until Brownfield could make enough money to take his bride northward.

The next week Mem and Brownfield left Josie and Lorene still fighting each other over him, each claiming the other had pushed Mem on to “ketch” him. Brownfield borrowed a wagon from the man he was now working for, and Mem sat beside him on the splintery wooden seat.

“We ain’t always going to be stuck down here, honey. Don’t you worry,” he promised her while she sat quietly, holding her veil in her warm brown hands, and looking and smiling at him with gay believing eyes, full of love.

T
HREE YEARS LATER
when he was working the same farm and in debt up to his hatbrim and Mem was big with their second child, he could still look back on their wedding day as the pinnacle of his achievement in extricating himself from evil and the devil and aligning himself with love. Even the shadow of eternal bondage, which plagued him constantly those first years, could not destroy his faith in a choice well made. For Mem was the kind of woman who sang while she cooked breakfast in the morning and sang when getting ready for bed at night. And sang when she nursed her babies, and sang to him when he crawled in weariness and dejection into the warm life-giving circle of her breast. He did not care what anybody thought about it, but she was so good to him, so much what he needed, that her body became his shrine and he kissed it endlessly, shamelessly, lovingly, and celebrated its magic with flowers and dancing; and, as the babies, knowing their places beside her as well as life, sucked and nursed at her bosom, so did he, and grew big and grew firm with love, and grew strong.

They were passionate and careless, he and Mem, making love in the woods after the first leaves fell, making love high in the corncrib to the clucking of hens and the blasting of cocks, making love and babies urgently and with purest fire at the shady ends of cotton rows, when she brought him water to the field and stood watching with that look in her eyes while he drank and leaned an itching palm against the sweaty handle of his plow. As the water, cooling, life-giving, ran down his chin and neck, so did her love run down, bathing him in cool fire and oblivion, bathing him in forgetfulness, as another link in the chain that held him to the land and to a responsibility for her and her children, was forged.

I
T WAS A YEAR
when endless sunup to sundown work on fifty rich bottom acres of cotton land and a good crop brought them two diseased shoats for winter meat, some dried potatoes and apples from the boss’s cellar, and some cast-off clothes for his children from his boss’s family. It was the summer that he watched, that he had to teach, his frail five-year-old daughter the tricky, dangerous and disgusting business of handmopping the cotton bushes with arsenic to keep off boll weevils. His heart had actually started to hurt him, like an ache in the bones, when he watched her swinging the mop, stumbling over the clumps of hard clay, the hot tin bucket full of arsenic making a bloodied scrape against her small short leg. She stumbled and almost fell with her bucket, so much too large for her, and each time he saw it his stomach flinched. She was drenched with sweat, her tattered dress wringing wet with perspiration and arsenic; her large eyes reddened by the poison. She breathed with difficulty through the deadly smell. At the end of the day she trembled and vomited and looked beaten down like a tiny, asthmatic old lady; but she did not complain to her father, as afraid of him as she was of the white boss who occasionally deigned to drive by with friends to watch the lone little pickaninny, so tired she barely saw them, poisoning his cotton.

That pickaninny was Brownfield’s oldest child, Daphne, and that year of awakening roused him not from sleep but from hope that someday she would be a fine lady and carry parasols and wear light silks. That was the year he first saw how his own life was becoming a repetition of his father’s. He could not save his children from slavery; they did not even belong to him.

His indebtedness depressed him. Year after year the amount he owed continued to climb. He thought of suicide and never forgot it, even in Mem’s arms. He prayed for help, for a caring President, for a listening Jesus. He prayed for a decent job in Mem’s arms. But like all prayers sent up from there, it turned into another mouth to feed, another body to enslave to pay his debts. He felt himself destined to become no more than overseer, on the white man’s plantation, of his own children.

That was the year he accused Mem of being unfaithful to him, of being used by white men, his oppressors; a charge she tearfully and truthfully denied. And when he took her in his drunkenness and in the midst of his own foul accusations she wilted and accepted him in total passivity and blankness, like a church. She was too pure to know how sanctified was his soul by her silence. He determined at such times to treat her like a nigger and a whore, which he knew she was not, and if she made no complaint, to find her guilty. Soft words could not turn away his wrath, they could only condone it.

He was expected to raise himself up on air, which was all that was left over after his work for others. Others who were always within their rights to pay him practically nothing for his labor. He was never able to do more than exist on air; he was never able to build on it, and was never to have any land of his own; and was never able to set his woman up in style, which more than anything else he wanted to do. It was as if the white men said his woman needed no style, deserved no style, and therefore would get no style, and that they would always reserve the right to work the life out of him and to fuck her. His crushed pride, his battered ego, made him drag Mem away from schoolteaching. Her knowledge reflected badly on a husband who could scarcely read and write. It was his great ignorance that sent her into white homes as a domestic, his need to bring her down to his level! It was his rage at himself, and his life and his world that made him beat her for an imaginary attraction she aroused in other men, crackers, although she was no party to any of it. His rage and his anger and his frustration ruled. His rage could and did blame everything,
everything
on her. And she accepted all his burdens along with her own and dealt with them from her own greater heart and greater knowledge. He did not begrudge her the greater heart, but he could not forgive her the greater knowledge. It put her closer, in power, to
them,
than he could ever be.

His dreams to go North, to see the world, to give Mem even the smallest things she wanted from life died early. And in his depression he saw in his submissive, accepting wife a snare and a pitfall. He returned to Josie for comfort after his “mistake” and for money to pay his rent, leaving Mem to carry on the struggle for domestic survival any way she chose and was able to manage. He moved them about from shack to shack, wherever he could get work. When cotton declined in Georgia and dairying rose, he tried dairying. They lived somehow.

Over the years they reached, what they would have called when they were married, an impossible, and
unbelievable
decline. Brownfield beat his once lovely wife now, regularly, because it made him feel, briefly, good. Every Saturday night he beat her, trying to pin the blame for his failure on her by imprinting it on her face; and she, inevitably, repaid him by becoming a haggard automatous witch, beside whom even Josie looked well-preserved.

The tender woman he married he set out to destroy. And before he destroyed her he was determined to change her. And change her he did. He was her Pygmalion in reverse. The first thing he started on was her speech. They had begun their marriage with her correcting him, but after a very short while this began to wear on him. He could not stand to be belittled at home after coming from a job that required him to respond to all orders from a stooped position. When she kindly replaced an “is” for an “are” he threw her correction in her face.

“Why don’t you talk like the
rest
of us poor niggers?” he said to her. “Why do
you
always have to be so damn proper? Whether I says ‘is’ or ‘ain’t’ ain’t no damn humping off
your
butt.”

In company he embarrassed her. When she opened her mouth to speak he turned with a bow to their friends, who thankfully spoke a language a man could understand, and said, “Hark, mah
lady
speaks, lets us dumb niggers listen!” Mem would turn ashen with shame, and tried to keep her mouth closed thereafter. But silence was not what Brownfield was after, either. He wanted her to talk, but to talk like what she was, a hopeless nigger woman who got her ass beat every Saturday night. He wanted her to sound like a woman who deserved him.

He could not stand having his men friends imply she was too good for him.

“Man, how did you git hold of that
school
teacher?” they asked him enviously, looking at his bleached and starched clothing and admiring the great quantities of liquor he could drink.

“Give this old blacksnake to her,” he said, rubbing himself indecently, exposing his secret life to the streets, “and then I beats her ass. Only way to treat a
nigger
woman!”

For a woman like Mem, who had so barely escaped the “culture of poverty,” a slip back into that culture was the easiest thing in the world. First to please her husband, and then because she honestly could not recall her nouns and verbs, her plurals and singulars, Mem began speaking once more in her old dialect. The starch of her speech simply went out of her and what came out of her mouth sagged, just as what had come out of her ancestors sagged. Except that where their speech had been beautiful because it was all they knew and a part of them without thinking about it, hers came out flat and ugly, like a tongue broken and trying to mend itself from desperation.

“Where all them books and things from the schoolhouse?” Brownfield asked one day when he wanted to see if she’d learned her place.

“I done burned ’em up,” she said, without turning from a large rat hole she was fixing in the bedroom floor.

For a moment he felt a pang of something bitter, as if he had tasted the bottom of something black and vile, but to cover this feeling he chuckled.

“I were just lookin’ for something to start up a fire with.”

“Take these here magazines,” she said tonelessly, pulling some
True Confessions
from under her dress. She thought he had seen the bulge of them under her arm, but he hadn’t. He reached out a hand for them and with a sigh she relinquished all that she had been to all she would become now.

Everything about her he changed, not to suit him, for she had suited him when they were married. He changed her to something he did not want, could not want, and that made it easier for him to treat her in the way he felt she deserved. He had never had sympathy for ugly women. A fellow with an ugly wife can ignore her, he reasoned. It helped when he had to beat her too.

There was a time when she saved every cent she was allowed to keep from her wages as a domestic because she wanted, someday, to buy a house. That was her big dream. When she was teaching school they both had saved pennies to buy the house, but when he was angry and drunk he stole the money and bought a pig from some friends of his who promised him the pig was a registered boar and would be his start in making money as a pig breeder. Mem cried when he came home broke, with the pig. Then the pig died. The second time she saved money to buy the house he used it for the down payment on a little red car. She was furious, but more than furious, unable to comprehend that all her moves upward and toward something of their own would be checked by him. In the end, as with the pig, his luck was bad and the finance company took the car.

The children—there were two living, three had died—did not get anything for Christmas that year. On Christmas Eve they sat around and watched him until he ran out of the house to see if Josie would give him money for a drink. When he got home he woke the children and cried over them, but when he saw they were afraid of him he blamed Mem. When she tried to defend herself by telling him the children were just frightened of him because he was drunk he beat her senseless. That was the first time he knocked out a tooth. He knocked out one and loosened one or two more.

She wanted to leave him, but there was no place to go. She had no one but Josie and Josie despised her. She wrote to her father, whom she had never seen, and he never bothered to answer the letter. From a plump woman she became skinny. To Brownfield she didn’t look like a woman at all. Even her wonderful breasts dried up and shrank; her hair fell out and the only good thing he could say for her was that she kept herself clean. He berated her for her cleanliness, but, because it was a small thing, and because at times she did seem to have so little, he did not hit her for it.

“I ain’t hurting you none,” she said, pleading with something in him he kept almost suppressed, and he let the matter drop.

“Just remember you ain’t white,” he said, even while hating with all his heart the women he wanted and did not want his wife to imitate. He liked to sling the perfection of white women at her because color was something she could not change and as his own colored skin annoyed him he meant for hers to humble her.

He did not make her ashamed of being black though, no matter what he said. She had a simple view of that part of life. Color was something the ground did to flowers, and that was an end to it.