I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots

by Susan Straight

  Sinbad turned up the small radio and said, “You ain’t even nervous, huh?” The wind outside pushed paper and leaves through the street, but with his voice and the radio’s warnings, she couldn’t hear the scattering for a second.

  “We best put up the wood,” she said. Outside, they didn’t talk as they fit the plywood and boards to the glass. She saw a bird hovering over them, not going anywhere. Sinbad hunched his shoulders and went first into the darkened store.

  First the radio was silent, and without the burble of music Sinbad stiffened. But he said, “Can’t get no good stations here anyhow—not like Motown.” When the lights went out, he didn’t move from the table. Marietta heard only her own shoes scraping on the floor; she went into the back and found candles in the supply closet. As soon as she could see his face in the flame light, he said, “Shit, I can’t stand the dark.”

  “You ain’t use to dark?”

  “Hey, my mama paid her light bill. It don’t bother you?”

  Marietta smiled to herself, thinking of the rooms at home, with her mother sleeping and the fire gone out. “This ain’t dark.” She listened. “This ain’t no bad storm yet, neither. Already had one this year, name Cindy.”

  “Yeah, Frank said that, but I didn’t see nothing that day,” he said.

  “Came bad where I live.” Marietta corrected herself: “Where I live before. Knock down people tree—lotta fig tree, peach tree go. Left my mama peach tree.”

  He looked at her closely. She stood near the counter. “You had a house?”

  “My mama house. She pass. Then I come here.” She turned to check the windows; now that his eyes had focused on her, for the first time, she felt her scarf too tight, her lips dry.

  “You all live in a small town?” he asked.

  “Ain’t no town. Some house, a store. Creek.”

  “Everybody live in a house?” he asked, getting up to take another beer from the refrigerator.

  “Why you keep ax for house?” she said. “You don’t like house?”

  “Never lived in one. Always stayed in apartments. Sixth floor. Mrs. Gray’s four rooms. Shit.” He wasn’t smiling, his eyes weren’t wide, and she had never heard his voice like this.

  “We only have two room. See?” she said.

  “Forget it, I was just talking.” He drank deeply and said, “Hurricanes. I don’t even know why I stay here. You sure we shouldn’t go someplace else?”

  “Frank ax us for watch the store. Where you gon go in the wind?” she said.

  Sinbad looked at the blank eyes of the stove, the cave of empty glass case. “Ain’t nothing more pitiful than a empty restaurant,” he said. “Look like sorrow’s kitchen.” He laughed.

  “Where you talking about?” she said.

  “Didn’t your gramma use to say that? One a them old-timey things they always say, from the South. ‘I been in sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots, boy.’ Said that all the time.”

  Marietta shook her head. “I never listen. Where you gran from?”

  “Mississippi. Backwoods, Missippi.”

  She sat at the table next to his and stretched her fingers. “Why you came here anyway?”

  He was quiet, but then he smiled. “I got in some shit with the cops. Been a while. Been…” he stopped… “five years. Damn. Stole a car—me and my friend C.B. He got caught—short, bowlegged cat couldn’t run for nothing. I went to my aunt’s house in Cincinnati. Dead as dead, so I started checking places out. Went to Atlanta. Memphis.”

  “Why you came here?”

  “That all you can say?” He smiled and put his feet up on the chair. “I heard when I was a kid somebody way back in my family use to work iron. Made wrought-iron gates and shit. I came down here, drove down them streets where all the tourists go, seen gates. Rich white folks behind em. So?” He smiled wide this time. “I wanted to see the ocean. I just didn’t expect to see it up to my neck. I heard it floods like crazy when you get a hurricane.”

  “Sometime.”

  “You should know.”

  She didn’t say anything. His lips popped around the neck of the bottle, and she stared into the dark store, away from his hand clutching the beer. Willie’s father’s hand—when the flood came, that was how they’d found his body, which had been hidden in the bushes beside the highway after the car hit him. His hand—that was what floated near Aint Sister’s porch. Dogs must have chewed it off, torn it from the wrist. And the rest of him came later. He was a haint now, Willie’s father, roaming the highway, Aint Sister said. Marietta closed her eyes, listened to the wind. She spoke without looking at Sinbad. “You think my Uncle Hurriah dead?”

  He was surprised. “Huh?”

  “He been gone two month, maybe more.”

  “I don’t really know the cat, but he likes to sing. Doesn’t like to talk, not no long conversation.”

  “Like you,” Marietta said. She clicked her teeth nervously—say some word fast-fast. “How old you think my uncle?”

  “I don’t know, maybe forty, forty-five. He probably caught up somewhere, maybe doing some time. He ain’t dead.”

  She kept seeing her uncle, his face an older, darker version of her mother’s, lying beside a road, floating in the storm now, with her father and Willie’s father, all of them riding the water face up, waiting for someone to find them. The wind knocked small branches scratchy against the boards, and she could hear rain. “If you scare of flood, you could go upstair. I stay here,” she said, watching his mouth tighten.

  “I ain’t staying nowhere by myself. You the hurricane expert—you gon save me if something happen,” he said, trying to show his teeth.

  “Nothing for do but wait.”

  “You sound like a grandma. Like Miss Pat. How come y’all talk so funny sometimes and then sound damn near normal other times?”

  She smiled back. “Depend.”

  “See? You sound eighty years old. How old are you?”

  “Eighteen,” she lied, without thinking. “And you?”

  “I was eighteen when I left Motown.”

  “You twenty-three.”

  “I knew you could add—I seen you take money from people, and nobody ain’t hit you yet.” He was still trying to be funny, but his eyes were on the black windows. “Only thing I like to do when I’m scared is sleep. Slept on the bus all the way from Detroit.”

  “Go on sleep,” she said. “I keep watch.”

  “Nuh-uh,” he said. But he drank another beer, and when the candles were shorter, he lay on the long seat in the corner booth, his legs and feet flopping until he curled onto his side, and his mouth stayed open in sleep. She waited a long time before she stood near him to see his smooth jaw and the soft mustache up close. His arms were thick at the shoulder and wrist, but his ankle bones poked high through his socks. She sat there for several hours, listening to the wind subside and the water trickle from roofs and ledges, and she knew he’d be embarrassed when he woke up.

  She ran to her room. The windows had blown in because they faced directly into the wind. She wrapped herself in several shirts and a blanket, rescued her two Ebony magazines from the floor where they lay with edges curly-wet. Would Sinbad be afraid when he woke up? Would he remember what he had said?

  In the morning, the glass shards glinted blue on the floor, on the street. And Sinbad only smiled at her, briefly, eyes moving away quickly, never like he did to the girls with books and eyelashes and rolls of hair.

  Her hair wouldn’t grow. She tried to wrap it with string, heavy white string, like Aint Sister and Rosie and them did at home, like they had wrapped her hair when she was small, but the curls were too short to pull into her hand. The ball of string in her palm, she sat against the wall on her mattress. Aint Sister—her long hair in corded spirals hanging almost to her shoulders if you ever saw her without her headwrap. Her mother and Aint Sister had given up doing Marietta’s hair long ago, because although the curls were soft they refused to grow as individuals; they nestled thick against e
ach other and stayed close to her head.

  Sometimes she wondered if Aint Sister and them thought she was dead, floating somewhere in water. The storm had dissipated by the time it hit Charleston, so she knew it hadn’t hurt Pine Gardens badly, but she still saw bodies floating from the bury yard at night, maybe even her mother. For days, she had watched the landlord smile, listened to him say, “Bet it getting cold in some bitch room at night.” She was afraid to ask him to fix the window, so she took plywood from Frank’s and fitted it to the frames at night, taken it down in the morning so she could see. But she was afraid to ask Frank, either, and not Sinbad, who avoided her with his shoulders and face.

  Miss Pat and Michael came twice a week now that winter was near, unloading potatoes and maybe cabbage, so she had finally asked Michael to help her with the window. He had stared at the crates, the new mattress on the floor. A customer had asked Frank to put up a note selling the mattress, and Marietta bought it. But even on the clean, slippery new material she didn’t sleep at night; even after Michael had gone, silent, and the windows let in light again, she turned the pages of the Ebonys again and again.

  Wherever she saw a man leaning close to a woman, or talking to her on the telephone, or resting his fingers on her arm, his mouth near her face, she read the advertising around the photos. “Life is a whirl for the girl with the clear, bright Nadinola-light complexion. Don’t let dull, dark skin deprive you of popularity—give romance a chance!” “Skinny legs? Add shapely curves…” “Does he want to put orchids in your hair? Hair Strate—hair can’t revert!” “Sex and your perspiration—the most offensive odor—Rub in Arrid…” “Let’s talk frankly about internal cleanliness—Zonite is for ‘the delicate zone.’”

  At the store she stood before the pyramids and stacks of jars. “Lighter, brighter skin—a sure attraction! Black and White Bleaching Cream.” The jars were all sizes—50 cents, 75 cents, 90 cents. But she looked again at the pages of the magazines and at the faces on the jars—the noses and eyebrows, the mouths, weren’t hers. I need for save money if I’ma move, she thought. After I move, I have money for spend.

  She decided to watch the college girls when they came back for the holiday break, watch the way they moved and smiled at Sinbad. She looked at herself in the store windows; the winter sky was clear and reflected in the glass, and she saw sideways her all-one-color cheeks and lips stark against the white collar and headscarf, the smooth fall of her untucked shirt, her narrow ankles.

  The girls came, college and not, with red mouths, gold bracelets that jangled when they waved their hands. Hair sprang high from their foreheads. But their voices were nearly drowned out by the boys, Stan and Robert and Carey arguing about what to do with the white folks. Sinbad hovered, pulled a girl away to another table like choosing a grape, until Frank hollered at him, while Marietta listened.

  “Yeah, you can buy on King Street, but you still can’t go past Calhoun,” Robert shouted. “Don’t touch nothing in those shops.”

  “That stuff too expensive for niggers anyway,” someone else said, and Robert got angrier. “That’s not the point and you know it,” he said, and a girl put her hand on his wrist.

  “Don’t get mad at him,” she said.

  “I need to get mad at anybody who won’t help out when we need it,” Robert said, and Stan motioned him to be quiet.

  “What you need?” Sinbad said. “You need to tell me where the party at this weekend. I don’t need to know any of this other shit.”

  Some of the crowd laughed when he did, and Stan said, “You don’t know cause you don’t have to know.”

  “What’s that suppose to mean?” Sinbad said.

  “You can pack up and go home. ‘Motown,’ you always saying. This is my home,” Stan said evenly.

  Sinbad rolled his eyes and sang, “Wa-a-a-y down upon the Swa-a-a-nee River,” and Stan and Robert stalked out. Sinbad plopped down on the empty seat and said, “Let’s talk about more important things. I don’t need to shop with no white boys—I need to talk to some lovely ladies.”

  Frank told them all to be quiet more and more often before Christmas. He looked tired most of the time; the streaks of gray in his hair had widened, and his eyes were red-veined. Sometimes he let Marietta take over at the stove and counter, and she chopped the cabbage with the sharp cleaver, rocking it back and forth like she’d watched him do. She dropped the oysters and shrimp into the spattering oil while he rested in the corner booth, and she brought him a plate of mullet, his favorite.

  On New Year’s Eve, she asked him if she could use the stove to make Hoppin John—the rice brown with cowpeas and bits of ham and pepper. Hoppin John for luck, and greens for money—she simmered them on the back burner with the ham hock. She gave a plate to Frank and one to Sinbad, but they ate at different times, standing at the counter and taking bites now and then because the store was so busy. Marietta watched the people crowd in, the women thick in their coats like Rosie and Pearl, the men in hats. They were rushing to cook for family today, and no one hung around to tell jokes or argue at the tables. She knew Aint Sister and Rosie spooned Hoppin John onto plates for everyone today, too. And greens… good luck for the New Year: 1960.

  Frank turned the radio up one day in February and said to Marietta, “Listen. This must be what them boys was jawing about all last month.” Four college students had sat down at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, ordered cups of coffee and cherry pie, and refused to leave.

  Stan and Robert and Carey were back at the store in a few weeks, smiling at Marietta and Sinbad, saying, “Now you see what has to be done.” More of their friends left Claflin and South Carolina State to come back to Charleston, they said, and organize. The store was filled with young people and the older men, shouting and disagreeing.

  “We’re gonna hit the five-and-dimes, the lunch counter, and the bus station,” Stan said.

  “Sit-ins ain’t gonna make them white folks love you,” Frank’s friend Clarence said.

  “I don’t want em to love me,” Robert said to him. “But I’ll be right there, and they can’t deny me.”

  “Why you want to sit with paddies anyway?” Sinbad said. “I done sat with plenty of em in Detroit. It ain’t no treat to watch them eat.”

  “I’m not even gonna bother with you, man,” Stan said. “But Marietta, she’s listening. Come here, let me enlist you,” he said to her. Frank and Sinbad watched her shake her head.

  “I ain’t need for buy nothing down there,” she said to Stan.

  He stood close to her. “I didn’t ask you to buy anything. Come with me tomorrow, and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

  “Stan serious about this sit-in,” the girl called Gina said, the one Sinbad whispered to the most.

  Sinbad walked away, saying, “Let me know when you tired of sitting-in so we can stand up and dance.”

  “You coming?” Stan said to her. “I’ll be by tomorrow, and you’ll be a member of the Carolina Student Movement Association.”

  “She ain’t a student,” Carey said.

  “She can learn tomorrow, man,” Stan said. “That’s why we left school, right, so we can spread it out.” He went toward the door, telling Marietta, “Tomorrow morning.”

  She went into the back before anyone else could say something, her hands shaking when she scoured the utility sink. Why did Stan want her to come? He was asking everyone else. All those white people downtown, where she hadn’t been since the day she walked for hours, looking for day work. What I say for white folks? Aint Sister always talk about “Buckra don’t want talk, only want work. Why crack your teeth?” Why I sit next to white lady for eat? I cain say nothing to Stan and them, barely say nothing to Frank. But Stan kept repeating, “Everybody needs to go. Everybody’s important.”

  Almost everyone was gone when she came back out; she had listened at the swinging door for a long time. Frank sat with the men, Clarence and Marshall and Anderson, in the corner booth, and she brought him a plate of mullet, crispy-hot. That
was all he would eat now.

  “You gon go tomorrow with that boy?” he said to the table.

  “I don’t know,” she answered carefully, and he turned to Marshall.

  “Don’t you know what somebody told me?” he said. “Man told me to think about it—crab, lobster, shrimp, all them, they the roaches of the sea. Yeah, man. What they eat? Go long the bottom eating on trash, everything people be throwing down there. Dead bodies, all we know. You don’t want roaches in your house, chase em away, and then come in here and order some ocean roaches!” He picked up a mullet, finger-long, and bit into the coating. “I eat me some swimming fish, that’s all.”

  “Look at em,” Marshall said, pointing to the case. “Maybe he right. But shrimp taste too good to me.”

  Clarence said, “I look at them fish and see white folks.”

  “What you talking about?”

  “All this about they don’t want to eat with colored, don’t want to shop with them, sit with em. Got these men beating on them kids. I look at them gray shrimp—see em? That the color some of them white men face. Some red as crab claw—you know that. And them ladies with pink cheeks. Talking bout colored people—shit, what they think they is?”

  “You crazy, Clarence.”

  “Naw, he right,” Frank said. “I don’t care to eat with em myself, but I can’t deny these kids what they want. They ain’t use to being told, and that ain’t so bad.”

  Marshall said, “Easy for you to say, Frank. You ain’t got no kids. I gotta raise three boy and they better get use to being told. I rather have em be told than be killed.”

  While she cleaned for the night, she tried to imagine the white faces that would shout at her if she went with Stan. She had only seen Mr. Tally, Mr. Briggs, their wives, close up, when she went to work the fields. The people who got out of the cars—she had hardly ever looked at their faces, just at the ground to see what they might drop, or at the baskets they might buy. The tiny woman with fluttering voice and hair, she had seen her face, but no one since. Marietta sat awake most of the night in her room, seeing the highway and the bridge and the flying bottles, the pale hands hanging out open windows.