“Yeah. Well, she was determined to have it. Kept on reminding me. I told her I had some to home, but naw, she wanted it new. So I sent Li’l June to get some that very morning when she was laying dead. I was just fixing to bring it over, ’long with a piece of sweet bread. You know how she craved my sweet bread.”
“Sure did. Always bragged on it. She was a good friend to you.”
“I believe it. Well, I had no more got my clothes on when Sally bust in the door hollering about how Cholly here had been over to Miss Alice saying she was dead. You could have knocked me over, I tell you.”
“Guess Essie feels mighty bad.”
“Oh, Lord, yes. But I told her the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Wasn’t her fault none. She makes good peach pies. But she bound to believe it was the pie did it, and I ’spect she right.”
“Well, she shouldn’t worry herself none ’bout that. She was just doing what we all would of done.”
“Yeah. ’Cause I was sure wrapping up that sweet bread, and that could of done it too.”
“I doubts that. Sweet bread is pure. But a pie is the worse thing to give anybody ailing. I’m surprised Jimmy didn’t know better.”
“If she did, she wouldn’t let on. She would have tried to please. You know how she was. So good.”
“I’ll say. Did she leave anything?”
“Not even a pocket handkerchief. The house belongs to some white folks in Clarksville.”
“Oh, yeah? I thought she owned it.”
“May have at one time. But not no more. I hear the insurance folks been down talking to her brother.”
“How much do it come to?”
“Eighty-five dollars, I hear.”
“That all?”
“Can she get in the ground on that?”
“Don’t see how. When my daddy died last year this April it costed one hundred and fifty dollars. ’Course, we had to have everything just so. Now Jimmy’s people may all have to chip in. That undertaker that lays out black folks ain’t none too cheap.”
“Seems a shame. She been paying on that insurance all her life.”
“Don’t I know?”
“Well, what about the boy? What he gone do?”
“Well, caint nobody find that mama, so Jimmy’s brother gone take him back to his place. They say he got a nice place. Inside toilet and everything.”
“That’s nice. He seems like a good Christian man. And the boy need a man’s hand.”
“What time’s the funeral?”
“Two clock. She ought to be in the ground by four.”
“Where’s the banquet? I heard Essie wanted it at her house.”
“Naw, it’s at Jimmy’s. Her brother wanted it so.”
“Well, it will be a big one. Everybody liked old Jimmy. Sure will miss her in the pew.”
The funeral banquet was a peal of joy after the thunderous beauty of the funeral. It was like a street tragedy with spontaneity tucked softly into the corners of a highly formal structure. The deceased was the tragic hero, the survivors the innocent victims; there was the omnipresence of the deity, strophe and antistrophe of the chorus of mourners led by the preacher. There was grief over the waste of life, the stunned wonder at the ways of God, and the restoration of order in nature at the graveyard.
Thus the banquet was the exultation, the harmony, the acceptance of physical frailty, joy in the termination of misery. Laughter, relief, a steep hunger for food.
Cholly had not yet fully realized his aunt was dead. Everything was so interesting. Even at the graveyard he felt nothing but curiosity, and when his turn had come to view the body at the church, he had put his hand out to touch the corpse to see if it were really ice cold like everybody said. But he drew his hand back quickly. Aunt Jimmy looked so private, and it seemed wrong somehow to disturb that privacy. He had trudged back to his pew dry-eyed amid tearful shrieks and shouts of others, wondering if he should try to cry.
Back in his house, he was free to join in the gaiety and enjoy what he really felt—a kind of carnival spirit. He ate greedily and felt good enough to try to get to know his cousins. There was some question, according to the adults, as to whether they were his real cousins or not, since Jimmy’s brother O. V. was only a half-brother, and Cholly’s mother had been the daughter of Jimmy’s sister, but that sister was from the second marriage of Jimmy’s father, and O. V. was from the first marriage.
One of these cousins interested Cholly in particular. He was about fifteen or sixteen years old. Cholly went outside and found the boy standing with some others near the tub where Aunt Jimmy used to boil her clothes.
He ventured a tentative “Hey.” They responded with another. The fifteen-year-old named Jake offered Cholly a rolled-up cigarette. Cholly took it, but when he held the cigarette at arm’s length and stuck the tip of it into the match flame, instead of putting it in his mouth and drawing on it, they laughed at him. Shamefaced, he threw the cigarette down. He felt it important to do something to reinstate himself with Jake. So when he asked Cholly if he knew any girls, Cholly said, “Sure.”
All the girls Cholly knew were at the banquet, and he pointed to a cluster of them standing, hanging, draping on the back porch. Darlene too. Cholly hoped Jake wouldn’t pick her.
“Let’s get some and walk around,” said Jake.
The two boys sauntered over to the porch. Cholly didn’t know how to begin. Jake wrapped his legs around the rickety porch rail and just sat there staring off into space as though he had no interest in them at all. He was letting them look him over, and guardedly evaluating them in return.
The girls pretended they didn’t see the boys and kept on chattering. Soon their talk got sharp; the gentle teasing they had been engaged in with each other changed to bitchiness, a serious kind of making fun. That was Jake’s clue; the girls were reacting to him. They had gotten a whiff of his manhood and were shivering for a place in his attention.
Jake left the porch rail and walked right up to a girl named Suky, the one who had been most bitter in her making fun.
“Want to show me ’round?” He didn’t even smile.
Cholly held his breath, waiting for Suky to shut Jake up. She was good at that, and well known for her sharp tongue. To his enormous surprise, she readily agreed, and even lowered her lashes. Taking courage, Cholly turned to Darlene and said, “Come on ’long. We just going down to the gully.” He waited for her to screw up her face and say no, or what for, or some such thing. His feelings about her were mostly fear—fear that she would not like him, and fear that she would.
His second fear materialized. She smiled and jumped down the three leaning steps to join him. Her eyes were full of compassion, and Cholly remembered that he was the bereaved.
“If you want to,” she said, “but not too far. Mama said we got to leave early, and it’s getting dark.”
The four of them moved away. Some of the other boys had come to the porch and were about to begin that partly hostile, partly indifferent, partly desperate mating dance. Suky, Jake, Darlene, and Cholly walked through several backyards until they came to an open field. They ran across it and came to a dry riverbed lined with green. The object of the walk was a wild vineyard where the muscadine grew. Too new, too tight to have much sugar, they were eaten anyway. None of them wanted—not then—the grape’s easy relinquishing of all its dark juice. The restraint, the holding off, the promise of sweetness that had yet to unfold, excited them more than full ripeness would have done. At last their teeth were on edge, and the boys diverted themselves by pelting the girls with the grapes. Their slim black boy wrists made G clefs in the air as they executed the tosses. The chase took Cholly and Darlene away from the lip of the gully, and when they paused for breath, Jake and Suky were nowhere in sight. Darlene’s white cotton dress was stained with juice. Her big blue hair bow had come undone, and the sundown breeze was picking it up and fluttering it about her head. They were out of breath and sank down in the green-and-purple grass on the edge of the pine
woods.
Cholly lay on his back panting. His mouth full of the taste of muscadine, listening to the pine needles rustling loudly in their anticipation of rain. The smell of promised rain, pine, and muscadine made him giddy. The sun had gone and pulled away its shreds of light. Turning his head to see where the moon was. Cholly caught sight of Darlene in moonlight behind him. She was huddled into a D—arms encircling drawn-up knees, on which she rested her head. Cholly could see her bloomers and the muscles of her young thighs.
“We bed’ get on back,” he said.
“Yeah.” She stretched her legs flat on the ground and began to retie her hair ribbon. “Mama gone whup me.”
“Naw she ain’t.”
“Uh-huh. She told me she would if I get dirty.”
“You ain’t dirty.”
“I am too. Looka that.” She dropped her hands from the ribbon and smoothed out a place on her dress where the grape stains were heaviest.
Cholly felt sorry for her; it was just as much his fault. Suddenly he realized that Aunt Jimmy was dead, for he missed the fear of being whipped. There was nobody to do it except Uncle O. V., and he was the bereaved too.
“Let me,” he said. He rose to his knees facing her and tried to tie her ribbon. Darlene put her hands under his open shirt and rubbed the damp tight skin. When he looked at her in surprise, she stopped and laughed. He smiled and continued knotting the bow. She put her hands back under his shirt.
“Hold still,” he said. “How I gone get this?”
She tickled his ribs with her fingertips. He giggled and grabbed his rib cage. They were on top of each other in a moment. She corkscrewing her hands into his clothes. He returning the play, digging into the neck of her dress, and then under her dress. When he got his hand in her bloomers, she suddenly stopped laughing and looked serious. Cholly, frightened, was about to take his hand away, but she held his wrist so he couldn’t move it. He examined her then with his fingers, and she kissed his face and mouth. Cholly found her muscadine-lipped mouth distracting. Darlene released his head, shifted her body, and pulled down her pants. After some trouble with the buttons, Cholly dropped his pants down to his knees. Their bodies began to make sense to him, and it was not as difficult as he had thought it would be. She moaned a little, but the excitement collecting inside him made him close his eyes and regard her moans as no more than pine sighs over his head. Just as he felt an explosion threaten, Darlene froze and cried out. He thought he had hurt her, but when he looked at her face, she was staring wildly at something over his shoulder. He jerked around.
There stood two white men. One with a spirit lamp, the other with a flashlight. There was no mistake about their being white; he could smell it. Cholly jumped, trying to kneel, stand, and get his pants up all in one motion. The men had long guns.
“Hee hee hee heeeee.” The snicker was a long asthmatic cough.
The other raced the flashlight all over Cholly and Darlene.
“Get on wid it, nigger,” said the flashlight one.
“Sir?” said Cholly, trying to find a buttonhole.
“I said, get on wid it. An’ make it good, nigger, make it good.”
There was no place for Cholly’s eyes to go. They slid about furtively searching for shelter, while his body remained paralyzed. The flashlight man lifted his gun down from his shoulder, and Cholly heard the clop of metal. He dropped back to his knees. Darlene had her head averted, her eyes staring out of the lamplight into the surrounding darkness and looking almost unconcerned, as though they had no part in the drama taking place around them. With a violence born of total helplessness, he pulled her dress up, lowered his trousers and underwear.
“Hee hee hee hee heeeeee.”
Darlene put her hands over her face as Cholly began to simulate what had gone on before. He could do no more than make-believe. The flashlight made a moon on his behind.
“Hee hee hee hee heeee.”
“Come on, coon. Faster. You ain’t doing nothing for her.”
“Hee hee hee hee heeee.”
Cholly, moving faster, looked at Darlene. He hated her. He almost wished he could do it—hard, long, and painfully, he hated her so much. The flashlight wormed its way into his guts and turned the sweet taste of muscadine into rotten fetid bile. He stared at Darlene’s hands covering her face in the moon and lamplight. They looked like baby claws.
“Hee hee hee hee heee.”
Some dogs howled. “Thas them. Thas them. I know thas Old Honey.”
“Yep,” said the spirit lamp.
“Come on.” The flashlight turned away, and one of them whistled to Honey.
“Wait,” said the spirit lamp, “the coon ain’t comed yet.”
“Well, he have to come on his own time. Good luck, coon baby.”
They crushed the pine needles underfoot. Cholly could hear them whistling for a long time, and then the dogs’ answer no longer a howl, but warm excited yelps of recognition.
Cholly raised himself and in silence buttoned his trousers. Darlene did not move. Cholly wanted to strangle her, but instead he touched her leg with his foot. “We got to get, girl. Come on!”
She reached for her underwear with her eyes closed, and could not find them. The two of them patted about in the moonlight for the panties. When she found them, she put them on with the movements of an old woman. They walked away from the pine woods toward the road. He in front, she plopping along behind. It started to rain. “That’s good,” Cholly thought. “It will explain away our clothes.”
When they got back to the house, some ten or twelve guests were still there. Jake was gone, Suky too. Some people had gone back for more helpings of food—potato pie, ribs. All were engrossed in early-night reminiscences about dreams, figures, premonitions. Their stuffed comfort was narcotic and had produced recollections and fabrications of hallucinations.
Cholly and Darlene’s entrance produced only a mild stir.
“Ya’ll soaked, ain’t you?”
Darlene’s mother was only vaguely fussy. She had eaten and drunk too much. Her shoes were under her chair, and the side snaps of her dress were opened. “Girl. Come on in here. Thought I told you…”
Some of the guests thought they would wait for the rain to slacken. Others, who had come in wagons, thought they’d best leave now. Cholly went into the little storeroom which had been made into a bedroom for him. Three infants were sleeping on his cot. He took off his rain- and pine-soaked clothes and put on his coveralls. He didn’t know where to go. Aunt Jimmy’s room was out of the question, and Uncle O. V. and his wife would be using it later anyway. He took a quilt from a trunk, spread it on the floor, and lay down. Somebody was brewing coffee, and he had a sharp craving for it, just before falling asleep.
The next day was cleaning-out day, settling accounts, distributing Aunt Jimmy’s goods. Mouths were set in downward crescents, eyes veiled, feet tentative.
Cholly floated about aimlessly, doing chores as he was told. All the glamour and warmth the adults had given him on the previous day were replaced by a sharpness that agreed with his mood. He could think only of the flashlight, the muscadines, and Darlene’s hands. And when he was not thinking of them, the vacancy in his head was like the space left by a newly pulled tooth still conscious of the rottenness that had once filled it. Afraid of running into Darlene, he would not go far from the house, but neither could he endure the atmosphere of his dead Aunt’s house. The picking through her things, the comments on the “condition” of her goods. Sullen, irritable, he cultivated his hatred of Darlene. Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed men. He was small, black, helpless. His subconscious knew what his conscious mind did not guess—that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke. He was, in time, to discover that hatred of white men—but not now. Not in impotence but later, when the hatred could find sweet expres
sion. For now, he hated the one who had created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence. The one whom he had not been able to protect, to spare, to cover from the round moon glow of the flashlight. The hee-hee-hee’s. He recalled Darlene’s dripping hair ribbon, flapping against her face as they walked back in silence in the rain. The loathing that galloped through him made him tremble. There was no one to talk to. Old Blue was too drunk too often these days to make sense. Besides, Cholly doubted if he could reveal his shame to Blue. He would have to lie a little to tell Blue, Blue the woman-killer. It seemed to him that lonely was much better than alone.
The day Cholly’s uncle was ready to leave, when everything was packed, when the quarrels about who gets what had seethed down to a sticking gravy on everybody’s tongue, Cholly sat on the back porch waiting. It had occurred to him that Darlene might be pregnant. It was a wildly irrational, completely uninformed idea, but the fear it produced was complete enough.
He had to get away. Never mind the fact that he was leaving that very day. A town or two away was not far enough, especially since he did not like or trust his uncle, and Darlene’s mother could surely find him, and Uncle O. V. would turn him over to her. Cholly knew it was wrong to run out on a pregnant girl, and recalled, with sympathy, that his father had done just that. Now he understood. He knew then what he must do—find his father. His father would understand. Aunt Jimmy said he had gone to Macon.
With no more thought than a chick leaving its shell, he stepped off the porch. He had gotten a little way when he remembered the treasure; Aunt Jimmy had left something, and he had forgotten all about it. In a stove flue no longer used, she had hidden a little meal bag which she called her treasure. He slipped into the house and found the room empty. Digging into the flue, he encountered webs and soot, and then the soft bag. He sorted the money; fourteen one-dollar bills, two two-dollar bills, and lots of silver change…twenty-three dollars in all. Surely that would be enough to get to Macon. What a good, strong-sounding word, Macon.
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