by Alice Walker
He had never seen more than thirty people at once before, unless they were working in a cotton field, and he was amazed at the diversity of clothing people wore. There were storekeepers in black suits, their helpers in threadbare blue. He saw a few white women leaning on the arms of their husbands, fussy-looking in frills and wide hats. He saw black women trudging home from the day’s nannying, their uniforms remarkably starched and ironed, their aprons still on. He saw a mixed group of black people walking determinedly, eyes down, heads down, for the very end of the second street. On a hunch, Brownfield followed them.
Soon losing sight of this group, Brownfield turned left off the street in the direction of some shacks. In a few minutes he stood in front of the local Negro bar and grill. It was a small wooden structure with a bare, hard, cleanly swept yard. Its sides were covered with tin and wooden posters, some of them advertising Brown Mule tobacco, Red Cherry snuff and laxatives; the rest advertising Cajun whiskey, Old Joe and Grape Beer.
He could tell what each thing was because he was thoroughly familiar, as was every black person in the county, with all of these products. No father came to town on Saturday evening without bringing home at least one. If tobacco, on him; if whiskey, mostly inside him.
The juke joint, when he imagined how it must jump with light and life at night, fascinated Brownfield, and he thought he would try to get a job there. He had no money, and knew he would need some if he decided later to push on to Chicago.
His mother and father had come to such places, perhaps this same one, and when they had fought and argued in public it was usually among the kind of people who would frequent such a place. But this thought only heightened Brownfield’s interest in the night spot, which, in the dull gray dusk, held all the latent tension of an important club. Sighing and feeling young and incapable, he squared his shoulders and walked in.
There were twelve small tables with black-flowered oilcloth covers on them arranged neatly around a potbellied stove, in which a fire was burning low. The smell of chitlins, pig’s feet and collard greens was strong and thick coming from somewhere in back behind the counter. There was a box in the corner for keeping beer cold, and kerosene lamps around the walls. A gramophone, like those he had seen in catalogues, was pushed against one side of the counter, its big horn turned outward like a gourd that had been cut off at one end. A murky silence with a near-undercurrent of voices that went with the cooking food, enveloped him; he was overwhelmed already by the gracious aspects of town living that he saw.
A heavy cantaloupe-colored woman with freckled cheeks and gray-green eyes looked him up and down and said, “You kinda young, aincha, cutie?” She eyed him in a way that made his palms sweat, and he was sure she had no intention of hiring him.
“But I can do your cleaning, and help move things around. I’m strong,” Brownfield said, rubbing his hands on his pants. “I can do your chopping.”
At that the woman looked interested and smiled a sly little smile.
“Does good choppin’, does you?” she asked.
“Yessem.”
“No need to yessem me,” she said lazily. “The name is Josie. Fat Josie.” She looked at Brownfield as if she expected him to have heard the name before. During the pause a thin, very black young woman slid by.
“This here’s my daughter, Lorene.” Josie reached out abruptly, arrested the woman, and pulled her unwilling and muscled arm close beside her, holding it in a pinch. The woman, darting her eyes at Brownfield, snatched her arm from her mother’s grip, then looked from one to the other of them with baleful scorn. She was cursed with the beginnings of a thick mustache and beard. Her hard, malevolent eyes were a yellowish flash in her dark hairy face. She was sinewy as a man. Only her odor and breasts were female. She reeked of a fishy, oniony smell.
“Yep,” said Josie, chuckling at the look on Brownfield’s face and watching her daughter slouch off, “that’s the pride of her mama’s heart.”
Lorene turned and hissed something vile, her tongue showing through her lips like a snake’s. With one hand she yanked at her waistband. Brownfield looked down with astonishment as her slip disappeared under her short tight skirt. Her legs were even more hairy than her face.
When he looked at Josie she was running her tongue over her teeth, her eyes small brassy points between the fat.
“You sort of gets a thrill from the thought of plowin’ through all that hair, don’t you?” she asked, shamelessly grinning while Brownfield stammered.
Confounded by her, Brownfield pushed his shoe box farther under his arm and turned away.
“Wait a minute,” the woman wheezed. “What’s your name?”
“Brownfield.”
“Brownfield?” the woman cackled. “Shit. Brownfield what?”
“Copeland,” said Brownfield weakly.
Josie was fingering his tie. She was so close he could feel her breath. Suddenly she drew back.
“Where you from?” she asked suspiciously.
“Green County,” said Brownfield. “What county’s this?”
“Baker.” She took the shoe box from him and pushed him to a table in the back.
“Now,” she said, “tell me just how you happened to turn up here.”
“What’s the matter with here?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe that’s what you come to tell me,” she said.
By nine o’clock that night he was installed washing dishes and chopping wood, scarcely believing his luck, and listening to the thoroughly arousing music that came from the magic gramophone. Josie had clucked sympathetically as he told of his unfortunate life with Margaret and Grange. She was deeply interested in what he had to say about Grange and when Brownfield spoke of him Josie fidgeted with her hands and nibbled her lips. After his story she fixed him a supper and pulled him along behind her upstairs to her room. There she fitted him with an apron, standing behind him and reaching around and under his shoulders to get at the halter.
“How come you so curious about the Copelands?” Brownfield had asked.
“Oh,” Josie had said, “it just seem like to me I had done heard that name before.” Then—looking down the front of his trousers—“But on a heap bigger man.”
And he said “Ma’am?” In his excitement over having the job, he did not think that his father might indeed have passed exactly this way; through the town, through the tavern, and even through Josie. And then she had laid her arm on his, her skin like dry cracked honey, and said in a sporty way, “Never you mind, Sugar, I’m just talkin’ to myself.”
In the weeks to follow he found her a devouring cat, voracious and sly, wanting to eat him up, swallow him down alive. Thoughts of his father ceased to come to him as he was led into her incredible softness; thoughts of moving northward melted from him in the snug forgetfulness of her experienced warmth. What she had said about the much bigger man with the same name didn’t begin to haunt him until it was too late. His contented existence could not have anticipated a day when he would see Grange once more, not in New York or Chicago, but in the very room in which the majority of his nights were to be spent. Grange, not bewildered or rich in the North but crazy and well-to-do in the South, in Baker, in Josie’s room, in Josie’s arms, disgusted with everything, caring for nothing, but for some reason wanting to take the great lusty insatiable cat up to the altar.
7
JOSIE HAD VIOLENT DREAMS. Once she had gone to Sister Madelaine for help. Sister Madelaine said her dreams had to be told, and Josie could never do that.
“They just embarrasses me so bad, Sister,” she said. “When I prays in church the other womens laugh at me. They don’t know how I’ve suffered; if they did they wouldn’t laugh at me.”
“That’s your feelings about it anyhow. But listen, they say you should lay your burdens at the feet of the Lord. They say He’ll listen.” Sister Madelaine stifled a yawn. “But you have to tell Him the truth; that’s the only catch there. Else, even He can’t help you.”
“I h
ave laid them everywhere, believe me that is the truth. Starting years ago I went to everybody that would listen. Including Him. But the more I lays them down the heavier they gets. All around me is a great big hush, like before a storm, and when I dream it is just to let witches ride me.”
Sister Madelaine raised an eyebrow. “My colleged son will tell you there is no such thing as witches riding people. From Morehouse he learns it is indigestion. Something you ate, the way you are laying in the bed. The circulation of your blood stops and you can’t move. While you lay there sweating and not able to move you have nightmares, and when you wake up you think a witch has been riding you. According to my son you wouldn’t need a fortuneteller, you’d need a dose of salts.”
“He rides me,” Josie cried, pleading for belief. “I seen him do it.”
“Who?”
“Now,” said Josie, “I can’t tell you that.”
“Well,” said Sister Madelaine, handing Josie a cup of tea, “you wouldn’t go to a doctor with a pain in the behind without telling him a mule kicked you, would you? I am a fortuneteller, but I ain’t God. I got limits. Also a boy in college.”
Josie took a sip of tea and handed over some bills.
Sister Madelaine paced, her Indian-chief profile to Josie.
“That theory about witch-riding belongs wholly to my educated child. I don’t argue with him to keep peace in the family. But I ask you, what kind of business could I have built up if I didn’t believe in witches? I know they are real because I have had to shed a few of my own. My son has learned they are not real in college, where everybody believes in a man called Freud who uses old couches. Well, I don’t believe in couches! But what do youngsters know about anything?”
She stopped pacing and looked down at Josie. There was never pity in Sister Madelaine’s eyes, just a steady, beady waiting. This unnerved Josie, who thought of the fortuneteller as of another species than herself. She could not bear to look Sister Madelaine straight in the eye.
“Everyone who is straddled by a witch knows the identity of the witch,” Sister Madelaine said with her back to Josie. “If you can call his name,” she said, as Josie was leaving, “you will be cured.”
After Josie was gone, Sister Madelaine scribbled a short note to her son, put it in an envelope, together with the money Josie had paid her, and then sat back reflectively in her chair, savoring the last drops of her tea.
8
JOSIE HAD NOT been able to say his name. She even told herself she did not remember him. She did not know why he came to her while she slept, drenching her in perspiration, racing her heart with fear, holding her immobile with his weight, like judgment, across her chest. For her father had been a heavy man, and it was her father who rode Josie, stifled through the night.
Her father. How did she remember him? A question asked slowly, always in bewilderment, to dull the unforgotten impression of one cruel night over thirty years ago. Her last night in her father’s house as a young girl. The night that was to have changed her life of sin back to its original country righteousness.
She had thought her father agreed to let her back into his house. He had not refused her gifts to his other children or to himself or to Josie’s mother. And Josie had worked hard to buy them. She had thought, at last I will go home to stay, to be again a child, be again sixteen, and near his heart and hand.
It happened on her father’s birthday. Josie came walking down the road, dusty-shoed, into the hard swept yard. Her father was on the porch, a shabby dais of power, not knowing about the party she planned for him. She carried small bundles, but had hidden away larger ones the night before. His deep solemn eyes followed her up the steps and into the house. He did not speak. But his eyes seemed to glow with promise and there was a bemused smile on his lips. She thought she was about to be forgiven.
“Do you think he’ll let me come back?” she asked her mother, who, like her daughter, was big with child. The money Josie put into the party for her father would be the last she would earn before she delivered. Her mother’s answer was a prayer in silence, a frightened and hopeful cautious nod of the head. Her mother was a meek woman, and though she rarely agreed with Josie’s father she never argued with him.
Josie had come early to prepare the food, mix the drinks—corn liquor, sugared water, crushed mint leaves—and to greet her father’s guests. They knew her shame but would come, fearing her father in his stiff sobriety and decency, but depending on his abundant Christianity, the same that he preached to them, to help him forgive. Not only Josie, but them.
For themselves, those who had fucked his daughter, they had paid when possible and felt only a very limited twinge of conscience when they knew she used that money to try to buy back her father’s love. And he took the new pipe, the slippers, the big brass watch, and they watched him wear them, and listened to his thoughts on crops and the weather, and saw the amused yet baffled horror in his eyes.
At the party they sat in a semicircle around him and watched him ignore her.
“You want some of this, Pa?” “You want some of that?” And the big questioning eyes over the big thrusting stomach that none of them owned. Josie took more of the liquor for herself and moved out from them on its floating haze, and when she fell clumsily on her back within the curve of the all-male semicircle (the wives of the men had, of course, not come) it was then and only then that her father rose from his chair, from the garish cushion of war, with birds and cannon and horses and red roses, that she had bought him with the money, that he rose and, standing over her, forbade anyone to pick her up.
Her mother stood outside the ringed pack of men, how many of them knowledgeable of her daughter’s swollen body she did not know, crying. The tears and the moans of the continually repentant were hers, as if she had caused the first love-making between her daughter and her daughter’s teenage beau, and the scarcely disguised rape of her child that followed from everyone else. Such were her cries that the men, as if caught standing naked, were embarrassed and they stooped, still in the ring of the pack, to lift up the frightened girl, whose whiskied mind had cleared and who now lay like an exhausted, overturned pregnant turtle underneath her father’s foot. He pressed his foot into her shoulder and dared them to touch her. It seemed to them that Josie’s stomach moved and they were afraid of their guilt suddenly falling on the floor before them wailing out their names. But it was only that she was heaving and vomiting and choking on her own puke.
“Please, sir,” someone said from the intimate circle, “let her up. She in a bad way.”
They saw that Josie had seemed to faint, her dark dress pulled up above her knees. Knees turned out. Arms outstretched. She was like a spider, deformed and grotesque beneath the panicked stares of the gathered men. Stares that were only collectively horrified and singly aroused. They had seen her so stretched out before.
“Let ’er be,” growled her father. “I hear she can do tricks on her back like that.”
Such was the benediction of Josie’s father, the witch who rode her breathless in her middle age. Lorene had almost been born beneath his foot. As it was she was born into a world peopled by her grandfather’s male friends, all of whom frequented the little shack on Poontang Street where “fat Josie” (she grew large after the baby) did her job with a gusto that denied shame, and demanded her money with an authority that squelched all pity. And from these old men, her father’s friends, Josie obtained the wherewithal to dress herself well, and to eat well, and to own the Dew Drop Inn. When they became too old to “cut the mustard” any more, she treated them with jolly cruelty and a sadistic kind of concern. She often did a strip tease in the center of their eagerly constructed semicircle, bumping and grinding, moaning to herself, charging them the last pennies of their meager old-age savings to watch her, but daring them to touch.
9
A WET GURGLE came from Josie’s throat. An alien force seemed to be pressing her into the mattress. She drew her breath shudderingly, her body rigid. She was bui
lding up pressure for a scream. Brownfield poked her dutifully and after a minute she opened her eyes. She lay breathing heavily, trembling.
“You all right?” he asked. “You want some water or something?”
“God help,” said Josie.
“What is this dream you keep having?” asked Brownfield. “You gets just as stiff and hard as a dead person. Except you sweat. You kind of vibrates too, like there’s a motor on right there where people say the heart is.”
For a year Brownfield had been asking about the dream. Josie never talked. They lay in bed between crisp white sheets. On Josie’s side the crispness had become moist and limp with sweat. Brownfield lit the lamp and placed it on the table near her head. He stood, naked and concerned, gazing down on her face. Josie’s face was heavy and doughy, lumpy and creased from sleep, wet from her dream. She had the stolid, anonymous face of a cook in a big house, the face of a tired waitress. The face of a woman too fat, too greedy, too unrelentless to be loved. She could grin with her face or laugh out of it or leer through it, but she had forgotten the simple subtle mechanics of the smile. Her eyes never lost their bold rapacious look, even when she woke from sleep terrified, as she was now.
Josie, Brownfield was sure, had never been young, had never smelled of milk or of flowers, but only of a sweet decay that one might root out only if one took the trouble to expose inch after inch of her to the bright consuming fire of blind adoration and love. Then she might be made clean. But Brownfield did not love Josie. He did not really wonder, therefore, that she told him almost nothing about herself, although she constantly pumped him for details of his own life. To shock him once she had told him a strange tale about how his father had stopped at the Dew Drop Inn on his way North, and stayed with her, and loved her. Brownfield had laughed.
