You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (3 page)

It don’t matter, Son, I say. Don’t fret none over me.

I commence to sing. And I sound ——— wonderful. Being able to sing good ain’t all about having a good singing voice a’tall. A good singing voice helps. But when you come up in the Hard Shell Baptist church like I did you understand early that the fellow that sings is the singer. Them that waits for programs and arrangements and letters from home is just good voices occupying body space.

So there I am singing my own song, my own way. And I give it all I got and enjoy every minute of it. When I finish Traynor is standing up clapping and clapping and beaming at first me and then the audience like I’m his mama for true. The audience claps politely for about two seconds.

Traynor looks disgusted.

He comes over and tries to hug me again. The audience laughs.

Johnny Carson looks at us like we both weird.

Traynor is mad as hell. He’s supposed to sing something called a love ballad. But instead he takes the mike, turns to me and says: Now see if my imitation still holds up. He goes into the same song,
our
song, I think, looking out at his flaky audience. And he sings it just the way he always did. My voice, my tone, my inflection, everything. But he forgets a couple of lines. Even before he’s finished the matronly squeals begin.

He sits down next to me looking whipped.

It don’t matter, Son, I say, patting his hand. You don’t even know those people. Try to make the people you know happy.

Is that in the song? he asks.

Maybe. I say.

1977

For a few years I hear from him, then nothing. But trying to lose weight takes all the attention I got to spare. I finally faced up to the fact that my fat is the hurt I don’t admit, not even to myself, and that I been trying to bury it from the day I was born. But also when you git real old, to tell the truth, it ain’t as pleasant. It gits lumpy and slack. Yuck. So one day I said to Horace, I’ma git this shit offa me.

And he fell in with the program like he always try to do and Lord such a procession of salads and cottage cheese and fruit juice!

One night I dreamed Traynor had split up with his fifteenth wife. He said:
You meet ’em for no reason. You date ’em for no reason. You marry ’em for no reason. I do it all but I swear it’s just like somebody else doing it. I feel like I can’t remember Life.

The boy’s in trouble, I said to Horace.

You’ve always said that, he said.

I have?

Yeah. You always said he looked asleep. You can’t sleep through life if you wants to live it.

You not such a fool after all, I said, pushing myself up with my cane and hobbling over to where he was. Let me sit down on your lap, I said, while this salad I ate takes effect.

In the morning we heard Traynor was dead. Some said fat, some said heart, some said alcohol, some said drugs. One of the children called from Detroit. Them dumb fans of his is on a crying rampage, she said. You just ought to turn on the t.v.

But I didn’t want to see ’em. They was crying and crying and didn’t even know what they was crying for. One day this is going to be a pitiful country, I thought.

How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in the State? It Was Easy.

“M
Y MOTHER AND FATHER
were not married. I never knew him. My mother must have loved him, though; she never talked against him when I was little. It was like he never existed. We lived on Poultry street. Why it was called Poultry street I never knew. I guess at one time there must have been a chicken factory somewhere along there. It was right near the center of town. I could walk to the state capitol in less than ten minutes. I could see the top—it was gold—of the capitol building from the front yard. When I was a little girl I used to think it was real gold, shining up there, and then they bought an eagle and put him on top, and when I used to walk up there I couldn’t see the top of the building from the ground, it was so high, and I used to reach down and run my hand over the grass. It was like a rug, that grass was, so springy and silky and deep. They had these big old trees, too. Oaks and magnolias; and I thought the magnolia trees were beautiful and one night I climbed up in one of them and got a bloom and took it home. But the air in our house blighted it; it turned brown the minute I took it inside and the petals dropped off.

“Mama worked in private homes. That’s how she described her job, to make it sound nicer. ‘I work in private homes,’ she would say, and that sounded nicer, she thought, than saying ‘I’m a maid.’

“Sometimes she made six dollars a day, working in two private homes. Most of the time she didn’t make that much. By the time she paid the rent and bought milk and bananas there wasn’t anything left.

“She used to leave me alone sometimes because there was no one to keep me—and then there was an old woman up the street who looked after me for a while—and by the time she died she was more like a mother to me than Mama was. Mama was so tired every night when she came home I never hardly got the chance to talk to her. And then sometimes she would go out at night, or bring men home—but they never thought of marrying her. And they sure didn’t want to be bothered with me. I guess most of them were like my own father; had children somewhere of their own that they’d left. And then they came to my Mama, who fell for them every time. And I think she may have had a couple of abortions, like some of the women did, who couldn’t feed any more mouths. But she tried.

“Anyway, she was a nervous kind of woman. I think she had spells or something because she was so tired. But I didn’t understand anything then about exhaustion, worry, lack of a proper diet; I just thought she wanted to work, to be away from the house. I didn’t blame her. Where we lived people sometimes just threw pieces of furniture they didn’t want over the railing. And there was broken glass and rags everywhere. The place stunk, especially in the summer. And children were always screaming and men were always cussing and women were always yelling about something.… It was nothing for a girl or woman to be raped. I was raped myself, when I was twelve, and my Mama never knew and I never told anybody. For, what could they do? It was just a boy, passing through. Somebody’s cousin from the North.

“One time my Mama was doing day’s work at a private home and took me with her. It was like being in fairyland. Everything was spotless and new, even before Mama started cleaning. I met the woman in the house and played with her children. I didn’t even see the man, but he was in there somewhere, while I was out in the yard with the children. I was fourteen, but I guess I looked like a grown woman. Or maybe I looked fourteen. Anyway, the next day, he picked me up when I was coming from school and he said my Mama had asked him to do it. I got in the car with him…he took me to his law office, a big office in the middle of town, and he started asking me questions about ‘how do you all live?’ and ‘what grade are you in?’ and stuff like that. And then he began to touch me, and I pulled away. But he kept touching me and I was scared…he raped me. But afterward he told me he hadn’t forced me, that I felt something for him, and he gave me some money. I was crying, going down the stairs. I wanted to kill him.

“I never told Mama. I thought that would be the end of it. But about two days later, on my way from school, he stopped his car again, and I got in. This time we went to his house; nobody was there. And he made me get into his wife’s bed. After we’d been doing this for about three weeks, he told me he loved me. I didn’t love him, but he had begun to look a little better to me. Really, I think, because he was so clean. He bathed a lot and never smelled even alive, to tell the truth. Or maybe it was the money he gave me, or the presents he bought. I told Mama I had a job after school baby-sitting. And she was glad that I could buy things I needed for school. But it was all from him.

“This went on for two years. He wouldn’t let me get pregnant, he said, and I didn’t. I would just lay up there in his wife’s bed and work out algebra problems or think about what new thing I was going to buy. But one day, when I got home, Mama was there ahead of me, and she saw me get out of his car. I knew when he was driving off that I was going to get it.

“Mama asked me didn’t I know he was a white man? Didn’t I know he was a married man with two children? Didn’t I have good sense? And do you know what I told her?
I told her he loved me.
Mama was crying and praying at the same time by then. The neighbors heard both of us screaming and crying, because Mama beat me almost to death with the cord from the electric iron. She just hacked it off the iron, still on the ironing board. She beat me till she couldn’t raise her arm. And then she had one of her fits, just twitching and sweating and trying to claw herself into the floor. This scared me more than the beating. That night she told me something I hadn’t paid much attention to before. She said: ‘On top of everything else, that man’s daddy goes on the t.v. every night and says folks like us ain’t even human.’ It was his daddy who had stood in the schoolhouse door saying it would be over his dead body before any black children would come into a white school.

“But do you think that stopped me? No. I would look at his daddy on t.v. ranting and raving about how integration was a communist plot, and I would just think of how different his son Bubba was from his daddy! Do you understand what I’m saying? I thought he
loved
me. That
meant
something to me. What did I know about ‘equal rights’? What did I care about ‘integration’? I was sixteen! I wanted somebody to tell me I was pretty, and he was telling me that all the time. I even thought it was
brave
of him to go with me. History? What did I know about History?

“I began to hate Mama. We argued about Bubba all the time, for months. And I still slipped out to meet him, because Mama had to work. I told him how she beat me, and about how much she despised him—he was really pissed off that any black person could despise him—and about how she had these spells.… Well, the day I became seventeen, the
day
of my seventeenth birthday, I signed papers in his law office, and I had my mother committed to an insane asylum.

“After Mama had been in Carthage Insane Asylum for three months, she managed somehow to get a lawyer. An old slick-headed man who smoked great big black cigars. People laughed at him because he didn’t even have a law office, but he was the only lawyer that would touch the case, because Bubba’s daddy was such a big deal. And we all gathered in the judge’s chambers—because he wasn’t about to let this case get out. Can you imagine, if it had? And Mama’s old lawyer told the judge how Bubba’s daddy had tried to buy him off. And Bubba got up and swore he’d never touched me. And then I got up and said Mama was insane. And do you know what? By that time it was true. Mama
was
insane. She had no mind left at all. They had given her shock treatments or something.… God knows what else they gave her. But she was as vacant as an empty eye socket. She just sat sort of hunched over, and her hair was white.

“And after all this, Bubba wanted us to keep going together. Mama was just an obstacle that he felt he had removed. But I just suddenly—in a way I don’t even pretend to understand—woke up. It was like everything up to then had been some kind of dream. And I told him I wanted to get Mama out. But he wouldn’t do it; he just kept trying to make me go with him. And sometimes—out of habit, I guess—I did. My body did what it was being paid to do. And Mama died. And I killed Bubba.

“How did I get away with killing one of the biggest lawyers in the state? It was easy. He kept a gun in his desk drawer at the office and one night I took it out and shot him. I shot him while he was wearing his thick winter overcoat, so I wouldn’t have to see him bleed. But I don’t think I took the time to wipe off my fingerprints, because, to tell the truth, I couldn’t stand it another minute in that place. No one came after me, and I read in the paper the next day that he’d been killed by burglars. I guess they thought ‘burglars’ had stolen all that money Bubba kept in his safe—but I had it. One of the carrots Bubba always dangled before me was that he was going to send me to college: I didn’t see why he shouldn’t do it.

“The strangest thing was, Bubba’s wife came over to the house and asked me if I’d mind looking after the children while she went to Bubba’s funeral. I did it, of course, because I was afraid she’d suspect something if I didn’t. So on the day he was buried I was in his house, sitting on his wife’s bed with his children, and eating fried chicken his wife, Julie, had cooked.”

Elethia

A
CERTAIN PERVERSE EXPERIENCE
shaped Elethia’s life, and made it possible for it to be true that she carried with her at all times a small apothecary jar of ashes.

There was in the town where she was born a man whose ancestors had owned a large plantation on which everything under the sun was made or grown. There had been many slaves, and though slavery no longer existed, this grandson of former slaveowners held a quaint proprietary point of view where colored people were concerned. He adored them, of course. Not in the present—it went without saying—but at that time, stopped, just on the outskirts of his memory: his grandfather’s time.

This man, whom Elethia never saw, opened a locally famous restaurant on a busy street near the center of town. He called it “Old Uncle Albert’s.” In the window of the restaurant was a stuffed likeness of Uncle Albert himself, a small brown dummy of waxen skin and glittery black eyes. His lips were intensely smiling and his false teeth shone. He carried a covered tray in one hand, raised level with his shoulder, and over his other arm was draped a white napkin.

Black people could not cat at Uncle Albert’s, though they worked, of course, in the kitchen. But on Saturday afternoons a crowd of them would gather to look at “Uncle Albert” and discuss how near to the real person the dummy looked. Only the very old people remembered Albert Porter, and their eyesight was no better than their memory. Still there was a comfort somehow in knowing that Albert’s likeness was here before them daily and that if he smiled as a dummy in a fashion he was not known to do as a man, well, perhaps both memory and eyesight were wrong.