by Terra Little
“If I have to wait until eight to eat, then I’m having a steak to make up for my sacrifice,” he complains. “And tell me now if your mama knows anything embarrassing about me, so I can be prepared.”
“Are you nervous about meeting my mama?”
“Are you nervous about me meeting your mama?”
“Why should I be?”
“What if she doesn’t like me?”
“Doesn’t matter,” I say, rubbing his head. “I like you.”
“I thought you said you loved me.”
“I do that too. Where are you going with the sub-plot about the old lady and the Bible?”
He turns the page in my hand and reads upside down. “Me and old Nettie go way back. You have to keep reading and see what happens.”
“Why don’t you just tell me who she is?”
“Who said she was a real person?”
“Sula,” I blurt out. “She told me to ask you about Nettie a while back, but I’m just now thinking about it. So I’m asking, who is Nettie and where do I go looking for her if I need to kick her ass about my man?”
He starts to say something and then stops himself. His forehead wrinkles and puckers up. “Wait a minute. Who the hell is Sula?”
“A psychic lady Stella took me to see.”
He chuckles and pinches his nose, shakes his head tiredly. He’s crazy about Stella, but he thinks the two of us together is triple trouble. “You and that damn Stella. Did she have you burying potatoes with nails in them and sprinkling salt across doorsteps too?”
“Don’t make fun of the gris-gris,” I tease. “Sula knows if you talk about her, Aaron. She will find you and rock your world.”
“I can see she rocked yours. What did she say?”
“She just told me to ask you who Nettie is.” I am not so much lying as I am omitting a small portion of the actual truth. A woman shouldn’t tell a man every damn thing. “I was skeptical about her powers, and giving me Nettie’s name was supposed to prove to me that she was the real deal.”
“Playing with God again,” he murmurs.
“Just tell me who she is, Aaron!” My frustration makes him crack up, and I want to strangle him.
“Nettie Sugarwater is a legend, baby,” he says, still giggling. “A family legend. According to my mother, she’s a distant relative who was a slave down in Alabama somewhere. My grandfather’s sister’s uncle’s cousin’s daughter. Or maybe she was my grandmother’s sister’s uncle’s cousin’s sister’s daughter? Hell, I don’t know. She was somebody’s daughter; we can speculate on that much.”
Suddenly, he is fascinated with the evening news, and I am left staring down at him and waiting for the rest of the tale. When he is quiet for too long, I shake him. “And? What happened to her?”
“She was hanged in the town square when she was nineteen and pregnant with her sixth child. I added a few years to her age in the manuscript, as you can see.”
“Damn, six kids?” This piece of information stops my flow. It is scary to contemplate pushing that many babies from my womb and then having to love and care for all of them simultaneously.
“Had to keep the plantation fully staffed.” He aims the remote at the television and lowers the volume. Looks at me like we are about to swap ghost stories. “Legend has it that she was something else. Always in trouble for one thing or another. Slapping little white kids and talking back to the massa, refusing to nurse anybody’s babies but her own. Shit like that. Now, you would think, with the way they did little Emmett Till for supposedly whistling at a white woman years later, that Nettie’s ass would’ve been grass. But people claimed she was a witch, so nobody was too quick to tangle with her. She was into hexes. The gris-gris, as you call it.”
“So why did they hang her?”
“Because nothing else seemed to work. She laughed when they lashed her and then kept right on doing what she was doing. They say she spoke in tongues and talked to the dead, scared the shit out of people. They said she wasn’t human. And let my mother tell it, she never made a sound when she gave birth to her babies and every last one of them came out with a birthmark in the middle of their foreheads, like a star.”
I throw my head back and laugh because I can’t help it. I’m convinced that Aaron is making this up as he goes along. Trying to freak me out.
“I’m serious,” he insists. “Nettie talked the massa into letting her learn how to read and write, and then she used what she knew to help other slaves escape. She wrote out fake travel passes and helped slaves passing through on the Underground Railroad. Some even say she knew Harriet Tubman.”
“If she knew Harriet Tubman, why didn’t she take her babies and get on the train too?”
“She probably would’ve, eventually, if she hadn’t been so quick tempered and vindictive. She got caught up in a war of wills with a neighboring plantation’s mistress, and that’s how she ended up being hanged. Her children were little stairsteps and not really old enough for hard labor, but the massa hired them out to work on the neighboring plantation anyway, and that pissed Nettie off.”
“She put hexes on everybody over there?”
He nods and cracks a smile. “Hell yeah, she did. She had the massa walking around like he didn’t know if he was coming or going, had the slaves revolting, and caused a horse to throw the massa’s son. So now you can add a crazy massa and a paralyzed son to the mix. Nettie was a mess, I’m telling you. She got to be friends with a cook in the big house, and she passed the woman some herbs to put in the food over there. That’s how she messed with the massa’s head and had his hair falling out.”
“And nobody figured out it was Crazy Nettie doing all that stuff?” I think I love Nettie and I don’t even know her. I don’t even know if she ever really existed, but her legendary love for her children speaks to me like a lifelong friend.
“Oh, now she’s Crazy Nettie?”
“You know what I mean. What happened after that?”
“She would go over to the other plantation and call the mistress out, spit at her feet and curse her out in all kinds of foreign-sounding languages, so nobody knew what she was saying. But you got the point.
“She was throwing down hexes all over the place. She’d sneak over there, grab her kids and bring them back home. Massa would come looking for them, and she’d have them in her shack, sitting in the floor shooting marbles like it was any other day, and she wasn’t clowning.
“The lash was nothing to her. Some even say the scars she got disappeared from her back in a day’s time.” He snaps his fingers and catches my eyes. “Just like that. There one minute and gone the next, like she cast a spell and made them disappear.”
“So . . . she was hanged because, why?”
“I’m getting there, Lena. Chill out and enjoy the story,” he says.
“She was hanged because she turned the massa into a bumbling idiot and fed his wife enough poison to send her running out of the house, straight into the cotton fields, choking and gagging. They say the woman was speaking in tongues and stuffing her mouth with cotton as she died. Said that after she was dead, a star appeared in the middle of her forehead and there wasn’t enough makeup in the world to cover it up for her funeral.
“They figured it was Nettie’s doing and they figured the only way to stop her was to kill her. She was hunted down and brought to the town square for a public hanging because by that time, more than a few people wanted to see her dead.”
He rolls up and off the couch, reaches for my hand and pulls me up too. “We need to start getting ready for dinner.”
“I was excited,” I say, looking anything but. “But now I feel bad for Nettie. What happened to her kids?”
Aaron shrugs and leads the way to the bathroom. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that part of the story. I’ll sit in here with you while you take a shower.”
“Come in with me,” I tell him even though he’s already taken a shower. “The woman died trying to save her children and nobody knows
what happened to them?”
“I think they lived to tell the story. That’s probably how it got passed down from one generation to the next, though I’m sure it’s beyond tall by now. She was crazy as a road lizard, as my mother would say.”
“Crazy about her kids, and I can’t be mad at her for that. I don’t blame her for doing what she had to do, even if she should’ve seen the future and taken her kids and ran behind Harriet Tubman way before it got to that point.”
“My mother says that a mother’s love for her child is incomprehensible.” He turns on the faucet and adjusts the water temperature. I help him shed his shirt and then I get undressed. “Makes you do all kinds of shit you never thought you’d do, in the name of protection.”
“Makes you lose what little good sense you thought you had,” I say and step under the spray. I knot my locks at the top of my head and wait for him to take the hand I hold out to him.
He does and then he kisses my palm. I run my hands along his chest, press a kiss to his nipple and say, “Your mother was right.”
Chapter Twenty-two
“I want you to explain something to me, Lena,” Isolde says, looking from my face to the slip of paper that she holds in her hands curiously. “How is it that your paycheck is damn near twice what mine is and I’ve been on my job for twelve years?”
“You went to school for the wrong thing. Should’ve gone into computers or something. Maybe accounting or law. There’s plenty of innocent people looking to avoid prison.”
She stares at the pay stub I submitted a moment longer and passes it back to me. I think I see discontent in her eyes, and I don’t blame her. She is overworked, underpaid, and unappreciated. Even in prison I kept up with the news, and I know it’s been years since state workers have been given a decent raise.
“You just might be on to something.” She closes my file and folds her hands on top of it. Closes this chapter of my life, the chapter where our lives have intersected for a brief period of time, and sits back with a wide smile. “So . . . this is it. It’s over, huh?”
“It’s over,” I say. “No offense, but I hope I never see you again.”
“None taken. I was just about to say the same thing to you. I hope I never see your face in this place again, Lena. It doesn’t belong here, and I’m not sure it ever did.”
I point to my file. “You’ve read the circumstances of my crime?”
“I have.”
“Well, then you know that I did belong here.” I take a deep breath and release it slowly. “But I don’t anymore. It was nice knowing you, Isolde, and thanks for everything you did and didn’t do. I appreciate it.”
Isolde tries to look confused, but she doesn’t quite manage it. “Was there something I was supposed to do that I didn’t?”
“You know damn well you could’ve treated me like shit if you wanted to, but you didn’t.” I zip my pay stub in my purse, slip the strap over my shoulder, and stand. I extend a hand to her. “It means a lot to me that you didn’t.”
My hand is ignored and Isolde is hugging me before I know what is happening. “Good luck, Lena,” she says close to my ear. “I think I’ll actually miss seeing you every month.”
I am hugging her back before I know I want to. “Me too,” I say and mean it.
“The country?” Beige shrieks in a tone that I have never heard before.
Aaron is already in defense mode, circling around my apartment with his hands out and keeping his eyes on Beige, in case she makes any sudden moves. “Technically, it’s not really the country,” he says, sounding calm and extremely reasonable. “It’s not the suburbs, but it’s not the country either. More like somewhere in between the suburbs and the country. There will be running water and electricity.”
“Where is this place anyway? And why is it called an unincorporated township?”
“That just means it doesn’t belong to any specific city. But there’s no need to start turning red in the face, Beige. It’s only about thirty or forty minutes away, and they even have a Super Wal-Mart.”
“Wal-Mart?” She damn near chokes. “I don’t shop for clothes at Wal-Mart. Oh my God, Mom, are you even listening to this?”
“Aaron,” I say and shake my head. He is not helping, and the lopsided smirk on his face tells me that he knows it. I go over to Beige and touch her arm. “You said yourself, there’s not enough room in my apartment for both of us. Plus, Aaron won’t let me leave him here. We need a house, Bey, and I like the one we looked at.” I turn on Aaron and narrow my eyes. “And it’s not forty minutes away, either. Probably about half an hour, if that.”
She slaps her hands on her hips and paces the room. “Okay, well, tell me this: Do any other black people live in this town?”
“You can be the first,” Aaron puts in and covers his smile with his hands. I shoot him a warning look and he shakes his head. He sits on the futon, turns his attention to the television, and pretends he’s not listening and laughing.
“Bey, come on. I want you with me. I need you with me.”
“Mom, please, you know I’m coming. Ain’t no way you’re moving and not taking me with you this time. But . . .” She stamps her foot and puts on her whining face, swings her arms from side to side. “It’s just . . . what about my friends?”
“You mean, what about Darrick,” Aaron singsongs like a five-year-old. Two sets of eyes train on him and snap his mouth closed.
“What am I supposed to do there? I won’t know anybody, and I already know everybody at my school. I don’t want to start at a new school. All the kids will be looking at me funny because I have on Reeboks and they have on cowboy boots with mud all over them.”
“I think you’re exaggerating just a little bit, Bey. You can—”
“She can stay at the same school,” Aaron chirps like a parrot that’s been trained to talk.
I tune him out and keep talking. “. . . make new friends and still keep in touch.”
He clears his throat and coughs words into his fist. “Stay at the same school.”
“There’s email, and we might actually have a telephone installed for emergencies, you know. In case one of the pigs gets sick. Oh Lord, Aaron. What are we going to do if one of the pigs gets sick? Do you think people in the country know where to find pig doctors?”
“You’re not funny, Mom. This is serious. If we move to the country, my social status is zero. I’ll miss all the parties and I won’t know the latest music. Probably can’t even get the same radio stations. Next thing you know, my best friend will be a boy named Bubba, who stutters and eats his own boogers.”
“Oh, now see . . .” I forget my train of thought and slap a hand over my mouth to keep from bursting out laughing. When Aaron looks up, I am in a corner, bent over at the waist, quietly cracking up.
“Look,” he says and puts his hands back out. “What about this: Lena, you still have to drive in to work every morning, and some mornings I will too. We can drop Beige off at school and bring her home in the afternoons. It’ll take some compromising though.”
“Such as?”
He looks at Beige. “Such as, school gets out at two-forty and Lena doesn’t get off work until four. You ride the bus to Vicky’s house after school, get your homework done, and be standing at the curb promptly at four. I want my woman home with me as soon as possible, so you can’t be bullshitting around and getting lost with your friends. Social events have to be planned and arranged in advance, and your grades need to stay where they are or better.” He thinks about it for a second, dips his head and catches Beige’s eyes. “I heard about that D in math.”
She is outraged. “Math is hard, and why can’t we get a house in the city? They’re building all those new houses on the south side. They’re nice looking.”
“Because I want a yard where I can have a decent size pool installed, and I don’t want to have to put up a fence around the three inches of land I own. I don’t want my neighbors so close that I can smell what they’re having for
dinner with the windows closed and the curtains drawn.”
“A pool?” She is listening now.
“Right. And I’m getting a dog, so if you’re allergic, you better see about some medication or something now. Dogs need room to run and play.”
Beige sees what I see. Aaron holds his own. He will not be easily intimidated by living in a house where he is outnumbered two to one. We stare at him and swear we can see him marking his territory.
“What about a cat?” Beige says. “Or some fish? A bird?”
“I’m not running an animal shelter,” Aaron says. “Besides that, a cat will try to eat the fish and the bird, which defeats the whole purpose, doesn’t it? And the dog will be kicking the cat’s ass every other minute. So it needs to be one or the other. Cat, bird, or fish, plus my dog.” He starts pacing, then he stops and drops his hands on his hips. “We could probably find a cat who can get along with dogs.”
“Um . . .” I raise a finger like I’m in church and look from Beige to Aaron helplessly. “Did anybody ask me if I wanted a cat or a dog?” They look at each other and roll their eyes to the ceiling, decide to ignore me. “Excuse me? Is this how it’s going to be? Two against one?”
“Lena might even be able to change her work schedule so you can get home earlier. We’ll play with some time frames and see what we come up with. You think you can work with that?”
“I guess so. Do I have a choice?”
“Not really. It’s either Podunk High or plan B. Those are the choices.”
“And what are you guys doing, getting married or something?”
Aaron and I catch each other’s eyes and stare. We’ve been making plans. Plans to live under the same roof. Plans to have Beige live with us. Plans to be together forever. But we haven’t factored marriage into the equation. I am the first to look away because I have never factored marriage into my life.
