A Piece of Mine

by J. California Cooper

  During the first 12 years as she was realizing her world of food, animals, insects, trees and flowers, school and other people, people, mostly men, were realizing her. Even brothers and uncles liked to put their hands and anything else they could where they shouldn’t have been. She always had some change to spend and she was generous and kind to everyone and shared always. She liked to laugh. I mean, what did she know to cry about? So she was fun to be with.

  Her mother, Sissy, was tired and worn out early from having fun because it seemed every time she had some fun, she had another baby! They were beautiful children though and each one a memory of some good time! The first one was her husband’s and maybe one or two of the others. She didn’t know and it didn’t matter no-way! She had some money from the state and her own little odd jobs (not too many tho, she had been tired a long time now) so that in case, as usual, her husband didn’t bring nothing home, she could feed them and him, too. Sissy was like that, treated everybody alike.

  So Lida Mae hurried to school and to play, even to household chores with a smile on her pretty face. She lived by rote that way til she was 14 years old and was coming home from school and got a ride from one of her mother’s friends, Smokey, who had a run-down raggedy car but acted like it was a new Oldsmobile or something. During the ride he drove real slow, the long way, cause he couldn’t get enough of feasting his eyes on Lida Mae and all her innocent peachy splendor. She shone like a brilliant star in that dirty beat-up old pile of junk. She had accepted the ride cheerfully enough so he asked her to accept $1.00 first then changed it to $2.00 to let him touch her in her very own private spot. She seemed disappointed for a moment, but Lida Mae kept looking at the $2.00 on the seat til she said “I ain’t gonna pull my panties down!” He said he could manage that and she opened her young legs and he managed it as she picked up her $2.00 and rolled it deep into her fist. She got out at home, at last, and he whispered “Don’t tell your mama!” She answered “Are you a fool? I ain’t gonna give her my $2.00!” and slammed the door and bounced on in her house!

  Now, people don’t have to be there to “know,” you know? Somehow some people just looked at Lida Mae and knew something from their own experiences. Lida Mae had a few boyfriends her own age she laughed and talked and kissed with and sometimes at a show or playing hide and seek, they did just that: played hide and seek. She was not really a loose young girl or a prudish one, just caught up in the middle of life and didn’t know a damn thing about it so she just “felt” her way through. Then, when she was 15 years old she was still a virgin because she also liked her school work, books and the teachers. She knew all about love leading to marriage and all that but she wanted something out of life because her teachers told her there was something to get out of life. She wasn’t always thinking about boys.

  But the unexpected is so unexpected it’s expected! One day going home from school (she was really a doll at 15 going on 16) the man who owned the filling-station called to her and said “Hey, little bit! come over here and have a Coke with me! It’s on the house!” Lida Mae, because of her fight for survival at the dinner table at home, seldom refused something to eat or drink for free. She smiled as she turned her feet toward the station, “O.K. Mr. Hammon!” He grinned down at her. “Let’s sit inside, it’s too hot out here!” “O.K.” she smiled as she followed him. He opened the Cokes asking her if she wanted some whiskey in it and when she said “No thank you” gave her plain Coke. He sat down in the only chair pulling her by her dresstail down on his lap, “Sit down here girl, ain’t got no other chair for you to sit on.” Now, Lida had known him all her life it seemed so she wasn’t nervous, she sat! He rubbed her leg through her dress while he talked to her, “Who your boyfriend girl?” he grinned. (He wasn’t a bad looking man.)

  “I don’t know,” she said smiling.

  “You don’t know who you love?” He looked shocked.

  “I don’t love none of em, I just like em!” She took a drink.

  “I know they like you.” He lowered his voice.

  “How come?” She grinned.

  “Girl, you know you pretty, pretty as a picture!” He rubbed her leg. “Even I could like you!” He was serious now.

  “Oh, Mr. Hammon, you wouldn’t! I’m too young for you and Mrs. Hammon wouldn’t like that!” She took another drink.

  “Mrs. Hammon don’t know everything!” He smiled then noticed she was almost through with the Coke. “Wanna nother Coke?”

  “No, I got to go now! I’ll take one with me if you want to!” She set the empty bottle down and prepared to get off his lap.

  Mr. Hammon moved his knees and Lida Mae almost fell backwards and Mr. Hammon grabbed her around the waist and under her dress as she struggled to get up. He said, “Oh! Oh! Lookit here what I got my hand on! I didn’t mean to do it, but I couldn’t let you fall!” He grinned.

  “Well help me up!” She cried.

  “I can’t!” He grinned. “I can’t move my hand!” But he was moving his hand and when he let Lida Mae up, she was mad! She left there with six Cokes tho and her virginity intact.

  Lida Mae didn’t play so hard with the boys for the next week or so. Something told her it wasn’t so innocent and she felt a little grown up in a way they weren’t.

  Somehow on the next hot day after school when Lida Mae had no money, her long braids freely flying behind her, she turned into Mr. Hammon’s filling-station. He was just a man after all and she felt grown so she went and got her own Coke and sat down in the chair herself! Mr. Hammon watched awhile as he worked on his customer, one of the few in this little small town, then she was leaving with six more Cokes, waving good-by. In a few days she stopped again and reached for a Coke but the Coke freezer was locked. Mr. Hammon walked over to her smiling as he unlocked it and held it open for her and told her to take two out. This day when she sat on his lap, she opened her legs and he smiled with the devil looking out of his eyes and she looked at him with eyes wide open to receive the devil.

  It wasn’t long before Lida Mae was not a virgin anymore and really liked Mr. Hammon. She had all the Coke she wanted to drink and kept a nice little piece of change in her pockets. She had new sweaters, blouses, skirts and shoes to wear. Things she had never had too much of except at Christmas, maybe. She didn’t play with the boys her age anymore cause “she had a MAN,” a grown man with money! She felt above her friends, girls and boys, until sometimes she forgot and played as hard as they did at games the way a young girl her age should have!

  Mr. Hammon didn’t care nothing bout no school; sometimes he told his wife he was going fishing instead of working and closed the garage and Lida Mae skipped school. He and Lida Mae stayed in back of the garage on the little cot Mr. Hammon had kept for such purposes for the last 20 years anyway. They drank Coke, only now they had whiskey in it and Lida Mae would get home drunk but nobody paid it no mind, there was so much else to pay attention to in a house full of nine grown and half grown kids: some of the older ones coming in drunk too. There were still some there that were 25 years-old or bout! Just lazy, do-nothings most of them. Some bringing a wife or husband home or go live off with one and be back and forth so you sometimes didn’t know who was living at home and who was not! Sissy didn’t get drunk so much anymore after the doctor warned her. Just laid around and never smiled, eating and sleeping and getting fat, but when she did get drunk they gave her plenty space cause she would tell them to get their grown asses out of her house! Then, she would grab her coat and stagger out the door to they didn’t know where and they didn’t care where! Just don’t mess with their lives! I’m sure the devil used to look in on the situation and be amused!

  Lida Mae liked herself because she had more sense than to settle for boys who could only make babies. Mr. Hammon wouldn’t do that to her! He gave her money too! Now, how you like that!? She smiled to herself. SHE had a future! She was gonna stop cutting school too! The teachers had spoken to her and she was getting ready to graduate, but she had missed a few tests and t
hings that she had to make up! So! This was the last day she was going to let him talk her into cutting class in the afternoon, she thought to herself as she turned into the filling-station.

  She was telling him that as he was undressing her, he was already undressed when he let her in the back door. She was also taking a drink of her Coke and whiskey as he laid her down and was kissing her beautiful body all over, loving its smoothness and softness. He excited her body and she put the drink down tho she wished he wouldn’t hurry so! They were moving up an old road for him and a new and unfamiliar one for her.

  BAM! The window next to the door was broken in and Mrs. Hammon looked through the opening! “Andy! Open this got-damn door!” She screamed, looking like a crazy woman in a frame. Mr. Hammon was speechless and could only stare at the broken window and shift his gaze to the door as she kicked it! He wished he could stop moving on top of Lida Mae, who was trying to push him off, but he couldn’t. Lida was scared and wanted to run but he wouldn’t stop and she began to have a climax just as Mrs. Hammon came through the window and lifted her knife and started trying to cut Lida Mae’s face (which Lida hid with her arms) but cut her arms instead; then her husband was reaching for her, trying to stop her and hollering to Lida Mae to run! Get her things and run! Which Lida Mae, wide-eyed and frightened nearly to death and bleeding from numerous cuts, tried to do! She had to grab clothes, dodge the knife, open the door all at the same time. She was crying too and couldn’t always see. Finally she got the door open and there were all those people who had heard the noise and come to see what was happening. Lida was naked and bleeding … what a sight! She had just begun to run when the knife flicked across her buttocks and she screamed as she ran into the arms of Smokey who “just happened” to be standing there with what looked like hate in his face. He grabbed her and helped fight Mrs. Hammon off because Mr. Hammon couldn’t stay outside long with no clothes on, til he hit her on the chin, knocking her out, and put Lida Mae in his car to take her to the hospital.

  They were almost there when he stopped the car near a wooded area. He slapped her already bloody face saying “Whatcha wanna go with that sucker for? I’m glad I told on you cause that’ll keep your ass away from there!!!” She was in shock, so she couldn’t say nothin as he wiped the blood away from her face and kissed her as he removed the clothes from her, laying her back. She started to struggle and he said “I just saved your life, bitch!” He slapped her again so hard her ear ring flew off through the window. He made sex with her, dirty as she was, and bloody, then drove her to the hospital and helped her go in. Needless to say she carried those scars the rest of her life, the ones outside … and the ones inside.

  Lida Mae didn’t get to her graduation. She did not want anyone to see her again, ever. The doctor had sewn her up; 72 stitches on her arms and buttocks. They had also decided to fix her insides (since she had already started trouble so young) so she would not be bothering the state with bills for children. She didn’t know it, no one but the doctor and the nurse did.

  When she went home, she was so unhappy there, her mother sent her to live with a sister of hers about 15 miles away in another little town. Lida Mae was glad to go. She packed her new long-sleeved blouses and the rest of her things and left without looking back.

  She was very quiet the first month or two she lived in the new town. Going to church with her aunt who was very religious. School was out, so she helped around the house and with the few animals they had. Everything was fine and Aunty was pleased cause Lida was no trouble at all and she must be a good person cause the preacher started stopping by two or three times a week to visit and he never had before. He was watching his flock … he said.

  Lida Mae knew why he was coming by cause he was always touching her when it was accompanied by words of the Lord. But, she wasn’t having any of that! She thought about the graduation she had missed and her future that had stopped. She didn’t want to be a domestic or a waitress so she had to think of going back to school or something! Well, “something” came up first, in the person of a friend of her uncle’s. A nice older man about 55 years old, James Winston. His wife had passed on and he had a house, car, some land and some money and even tho he had another girl friend, Josie B., he was falling in love with Lida Mae. He wanted to marry her.

  Lida Mae took about a week to think about it. She kept picturing the house and the car. She could have her OWN! Her aunt kept urging her by saying, “HOUSE, HOUSE, HOUSE.” Her uncle kept saying, “Money, money, money.” So Lida Mae took her young, inexperienced, naive self and married him and went home to her house!

  Now, in the country, if you don’t work or have something to do, the time stretches out long, long, long. You fill the days with eating, gossip or making love. Lida Mae’s largest outlet was gossip! She didn’t really know she was gossiping, she thought she was just telling a friend the truth about what she thought. But people can take your truth and stretch it, twist it, tear it apart, turn it inside out and when you get it back, you are making enemies and when you try to straighten it out, you talk a whole lot more and give the people new ammunition to shoot back at you and then you have made more enemies! So the days come to be filled with stinky shit and then you don’t feel so good (unless it’s natural to you) and you don’t always know why. Then, you go to church and sing and shout and get a little off your chest and then feel better all day Sunday … for awhile.

  It wasn’t long before Lida Mae was going with the preacher. She just seemed to move naturally into situations without much forethought, but she really hadn’t ever known anyone who gave her any idea of how or why this was done; only a few teachers in school regarding the future through education, and there was so much in her life that diluted those urgings to wise decisions.

  Lida Mae was kind tho, she was good to her husband. The house was clean, his meals were cooked, his clothes were clean, but he drank quite a bit now and was usually sleeping it off nights. She was drinking more now and with some kind of confrontation at least three times a week on account of her mouth, she naturally turned to the preacher. It made her feel the affair was O.K. with God. It wasn’t O.K. with God and it wasn’t O.K. with Mrs. Preacher either cause one night she came over to see Lida Mae and when Lida Mae came to the door, Mrs. Preacher threw a pot full of lye water in Lida’s face. It was a good thing her aunt was there; she cared for Lida’s face and got her taken to the doctor. Lida’s skin was young and healed well but her eyes were affected and they were cloudy and dim when she came from the hospital. I went by to see her and she said to me “Well, here I am, still young, done been cut up and now almost had my eyes burnt up! I can see, but not much. Not the things I want to see. Not the pretty world outside and not my pretty clothes. I don’t want to go anywhere again. But, this is my house! I have given up a lot for it and done a lot to it and I don’t want to leave it again ever, tho I do want to leave this town. I don’t want no more of Mr. Preacher either! Oh he calls, and comes around! But I wouldn’t open the door and if my husband let him in I went in my bedroom and shut the door til he was gone!”

  But time passed and soon everything was back to “normal?” Lida Mae thought of school only briefly, just couldn’t get the grit up to go. Thought of eye operations, but since she had to go out to some big city and she didn’t want to do that either and her husband didn’t want to spend all his money (course they wasn’t his eyes) she didn’t go. She seem to be seeing a little better every day anyway.

  Time went by and this Josie B., who used to be Lida’s husband’s girl-friend, came to be friends with Lida Mae. I could have told Lida she didn’t mean her no good cause Josie B. was still mad bout losing that house and money and a man. But Lida Mae seem to listen to you, then when she talked back to you seem like she ain’t heard nothing you said! Anyway they became friends and they started going out together to these juke joints that they have round here. Between that gossip and liquor and backbiting, Josie somehow got things fixed so one day when Lida Mae was high and sitting on a stool
in one of those joints, Leella and Bertha jumped on her and beat Lida up! Even busting a bottle cross her mouth so that she lost four or five teeth right there in front. Well Lida Mae went right back in the house again and stayed there and in church for three or four months. She was about 20 years old now, but drinking so heavy (used to send her husband to the liquor store every day!) she looked like she was 50! Skin still smooth and all but them eyes and that mouth and them scars! Lord have mercy!

  Then, one day, her husband stepped on a nail and only soaked his foot and in two weeks he was dead! Josie B. and Bertha came and sat outside the cemetery and laughed, drinking in their car with hatred in Josie B.’s eyes. I went to see Lida after the funeral, she was sitting on the screened in front porch still in her black dress with a record playing real loud saying “The sun gonna shine in my backdoor some day!” I talked to her awhile and she said one thing; she say “You know, I got this house, I got some money and a car … but I keep trying to see, in my mind, would I rather have my eyes, and my teeth … and my looks back and all these scars off … I believe I rather have nothing if I could just have myself back. OR SOME REAL LOVE! Ain’t nothin left for me but love. I’m all gone.”

  She was young, but she was old! And through! But somewhere inside of me I didn’t think she had to be.

  Something good happens to everybody and about a year or so later a man came back to this town who had grown up here. He came to see his mama and saw Lida Mae at church (that’s the only day she sobered up) and gave her his heart and stayed longer than he had planned. She took him in, used him, abused him … just tried to use that poor man up! She seemed to be mean, mean, mean! He was a neat, clean person with a little money, I guess, cause he was always running to the liquor store for Lida or bringing her candy, flowers and sweaters and things. Got her car fixed and all the work in her house that needed a man’s touch. But she put him out every day when she through needing him for that day, cussing him. Now, she was playing that record bout the sunshine was coming in her back door some day and here the sunshine was coming in her front door and she didn’t see it! Well, she was making him eat shit and nothing but a fool want to eat the same thing every day so he finally kissed his mama good-by and left, looking back, but leaving anyway! Lida Mae say “He’ll be back! I put some of this good stuff on him! He be back!”