by Carolyn Wall
The Reverend Culpepper, a small man with frizzled white hair and a big voice, raised his hands and bowed his head, and I held my breath while he asked God to deliver this bounty to our bellies as he had delivered Jonah to the belly of the whale. He asked that we find faith with every mouthful of collards and fatback. A-men.
The eating commenced. While Pap and I had never gone hungry, this was more food than I’d ever seen. Miz Hanley took up a plate and asked me did I want chitlins and boiled taters, and would I like a chop or a slab of mealed catfish, a chicken leg or ham hock. I nodded yes, and also accepted greens boiled with vinegar, pickled watermelon, and peas with fatback. I ate corn pudding, Love Alice’s sweet potato pie, and creamed wild mushrooms. Miss Dovey, who taught school in the front room of her house, brought me a wedge of chocolate cake, which I shoveled in while balancing a bowl of blackberry ice cream in my lap.
Then supper was over, and the ladies began to clear away dishes. The men drifted out to roll cigarettes and sip from paper bags they’d hidden under the bushes. Junk sat with the other men, and after a time Love Alice came out, too. My stomach hurt, and I told her so, but she had a smile on her face as big as Kentucky, and she said this here was family, all right.
“Your real family’s in North Dakota, Love Alice?”
“Till they all died,” she said.
My belly had set up a rumbling, and I clutched it. “You got nobody left?”
“Don’t know about my mammy. How old you, O-livvy?”
I burped. “Ten.”
“All right, then, I tell you about my pappy, yes ma’am. He work at the general store, bustin’ up crates. One day he laying a new porch on the place. A white lady come by, lif’ her skirt to step on that porch. He look away quick, but it too late. She let out a scream, say my pappy look up her dress. Say he gonna rape her for sure. Pap say he do no such thing, but the store owner come out, and other men, too. They push him around, thinking what to do.”
Another burp. “Oh, Love Alice—”
“When he didn’t come home for supper, Mammy say—go on, Alice Lee, and see what’s keepin’ him. You want to hear this, O-livvy?”
“Yes.”
“Well. They behin’ the livery, got my pappy’s hands tied. They sling a rope ov’ a sycamore tree, take three men to lift him.”
I could feel my mouth open.
“Then they let go. He jerk and he twist.”
“What’d you do?”
“I go back and tell my mammy. She say to fetch her pocket-book. Then she go out the door. I never saw her again.”
I wanted to tell her how sorry I was, but I couldn’t find words. I touched my sore belly.
“Come on now,” she said. “They fixin’ to start.”
We went inside and found our chairs with the family. I thought about what it would be like to see my pap killed. I’d heard somewhere that when folks were hanged, their eyes came out of their sockets and hung down on threads. I sat not saying a word until, without warning, my innards cramped, and in the next instant, everything I’d eaten came up—all down the front of Junk’s mama’s dress and her shoes and the mended stockings of several ladies sitting nearby. Junk took me up in his arms and carried me outside where, behind the hedgerow, I groaned and wept in mortification.
Afterward, in the big room where they held the service, I sat leaning against Junk’s mama, whose arm stayed around me. Her dress was damp from scrubbing, and she smelled of soap and lavender water, and her bosoms were like great, soft pillows. I wondered if other ma’ams were like this—or was it only the colored ones. I let my eyelids slip down while the Reverend Timothy Culpepper prayed on and on. He said God was among us, yessir and yessir. We were all his children—he pronounced it chirrun. Let the rejoicing begin. Then the music commenced, filling cracks in the floor till the whole place throbbed like a hurt thumb, and I knew this was what we could hear down the wash. It thrilled me to my bones. There was foot-stomping and hand-clapping, folks smiling and shouting halleluiahs right and left. Even after I grew up, I never knew the word rapture to be anything other than this.
Later, leggy as I was, Junk carried me home while I slept with my face in his neck. It was late, but Pap met me at the back porch, lifting the lamp so Junk could clear the doorway and set me down. I hoped Junk would say nothing about what a shameful showing I’d made. But there was something different about Pap’s face, so that I tried to come awake and get my feet under me.
“Olivia, honey,” he said. “We got a telegram from the hospital in Buelton. Your ma’am’s coming home at the end of summer!”
I shook my head.
“We’ve got to start getting ready for her.”
It was not possible. This woman who called herself Pap’s wife belonged in Buelton, where she could not touch us. Well, as long as I lived I would neither love her nor call her my ma’am. Pap had betrayed me.
I twisted away and ran down the back steps to the garden, where I flung myself down. My face to the wet earth, I prayed that Junk’s mama would claim me first. I begged God to let me eat chitlins without throwing up—to flatten my nose and kink my hair. I asked it in the name of the potato garden with its turned-up plants and rubbery stalks. I asked in the name of sliced green tomatoes and cucumbers, summer squash and pickled watermelon. In the name of the Reverend Timothy Culpepper, I prayed to be colored. Yessir. Amen.
6
Love Alice was Junk’s wife, first, last, and always. I wondered what Miz Hanley thought about her son having brought home a child bride.
When she could, Love Alice met me in town. One of our favorite things was to press our noses to the windows of Dooby’s drugstore, French’s Hardware, and other places along Main Street. We were doing that one cloudy day when she heaved a sigh and sat down on the sidewalk. I sat, too.
“Something wrong?” I spat on the toe of my boot and rubbed it with my finger.
Love Alice was barefoot, the soles of her feet being a lighter brown than the rest of her, almost pink—and her hands were, too. Her heels were thick and yellow with calluses, the way the heels of Pap’s hands were from plugging whiskey jugs.
“I plumb wore out, O-livvy,” she said.
“Miz Hanley makin’ you do all the work?”
“Oh, it ain’t that.” She giggled. “It’s that Junk man. But I shou’n’t tell you thangs—what a man do to a woman.”
It struck me then that Love Alice was privy to secrets only married people knew. “My pap’s told me everything,” I said.
“All of it?”
“I’ve seen dogs,” I said importantly.
She leaned so close I could make out each freckle. “Well,” she said, “when a man climb on a woman—that got a name.”
“What name?”
She lowered her voice even further. “Mountin’.”
“Mountain?” I said.
“Yes’m. When a man do his bidness.”
I had never got ahold of why this occurred, nor, until now, had I known its name. “How come a man’s got to?”
“If he don’t,” she said, “he’ll puff up like a toad—”
“Love Alice Hanley, you’re making that up.”
“I ain’t, either,” she said. “You seen them ol’ men what sits in front of Mr. French’s store? Fat as pigs? Well, you can bet yo’ life they ain’t mountin’.”
“Junk tell you that?”
“I figured it out my own self. You want to hear this?”
I did.
“Well, it build up all day, but a man got to hide it. Won’t do fo’ him to go around, his trousers pooched out. I as’ Junk what a man do if he don’t have a woman to come home to.”
I was not sure I wanted to know. My pap had no woman—but this chance might never come again. “What did he say?”
Love Alice giggled. “He say a man take hisself out in the woods and do his own bidness.”
I couldn’t imagine. Old man French was unmarried and skinny as a hoe handle. “How?”
“I as
’ the same thang. Junk show me his hand, curl up his fingers. I say yessir, that’d do it all right.”
I wondered why nobody had revealed this to the geezers who slouched on Main Street in their tipped-back chairs. Then they wouldn’t have to leave their trousers unbuttoned, or suffer bellies like ripe watermelons.
“Anyway,” Love Alice said with a sigh, “Junk think ’bout me, out there inna field, mm-hmm, but he wait. Some nights we barely get through our supper fo’ he take me in the back room—leavin’ his mama at the table, fit to bawl.”
“Why’s she upset? She’s done it, too—or she wouldn’t have Junk.”
“Well,” Love Alice said. “Maybe it hard to think of her boy all growed up.”
I wondered how a man the size of Junk Hanley could do anything with this girl who was no bigger than a toothpick. I bit my lip. “What’s it like, Love Alice?”
She twisted her mouth, finding the words.
Junk had sat eating bread and jam with me. I wished we weren’t talking about him.
She drew back her lips. “The first time I kep’ my teeth—so. ’Cause it hurt like anythang. But when Junk seen the blood, he got weepy, say he never gonna do that again.”
A dozen pigtails bobbed up and down. “But I say, Mm-hmm, husband, you comin’ at me again. An’ sure enough, the next night—”
“Oh, you poor thing.”
“O-livvy, sometime he big around as a syrup jar!” She shrugged. “I get used to it. Amazin’ what a man can do, and later on—”
I sat there blinking.
“Later on,” she said, grinning, “it like too much pecan pie.”
“Really.”
Love Alice laughed. “Oh, here come ol’ Mr. French.” She jumped up and pressed her back against Dooby’s window, her eyes on the sidewalk.
I’d seen Love Alice do this a hundred times. When I’d told Pap how much I hated it, he said to let things be.
“Love Alice, after you lost that baby out at Doc’s, how come you never had another one?”
She sighed. “I’z no more’n seven or eight. Takin’ a shortcut home. A white man I never seen before, he come outa the field, and he throwed me down on this dirt road. I was so little I fitted in a rut. After, I was all swole up, purple and bleedin’. Mammy said she like to lost me. Doc said sumpin’ was tore real bad. Now I ain’t ever gon’ have babies.”
I was angry with the whole world for making Love Alice lie down in a rut. It was then, through the window, that I saw Dooby’s sparkling soda counter, the stools that spun.
“Love Alice, come on in and have an ice cream cone with me.”
She shook her head.
“Don’t you like ice cream?”
She put her hands behind her back.
“I’ll treat you. My pap’ll pay for it.”
“You know Mr. Dooby don’t allow it.”
“That’s a stupid rule.”
“Don’t matter.” She wagged her head and the pigtails flopped around some more.
“Well then, I have somethin’ to say to Mr. Dooby.”
“Oh no, O-livvy!”
But I’d already marched into the store with both my chin and my backside in the air, and I stood where Dooby was unpacking boxes in the middle aisle.
“Mr. Dooby,” I said. “How come you don’t let coloreds in here?”
He took cans of snuff from the box and lined them up on a shelf, just so. “They can come in, Olivia. They just got to come around to the back door. Then if there’s no white folks shopping—”
“Mr. Dooby, that’s not very Christian.”
“You and your pap do the same thing. Coloreds shop one day a week. They get what they need. I fixed Miss Dovey’s medicine for her backache this morning, and powders to help her sister’s gout.”
I was embarrassed that it was our rule, too, and I was spoiling for a fight. “Well, I’d like one ice cream cone for Love Alice, and one for me, please, and put them on my pap’s bill.” I had never done such a thing before, and Pap would tear me apart.
“Can’t do that, Olivia,” he said. “We don’t serve coloreds from the soda fountain. You know that.”
“Then I would like two cones for myself, Mr. Dooby. One chocolate and one strawberry.”
“Olivia—”
“You won’t let me have two cones in case I give one to Love Alice,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am, that’s right.”
I dropped my chin and watched him from under my eyelids. “Then I guess I’ll take just one.”
“All right, then.” He sighed like grown-ups do when a child tries them mightily. “Chocolate, is it?”
I climbed on the stool and watched him open the carton, dip the frozen stuff into a cone. I tried not to think about Pap’s bill at the end of the month.
“There you go, Olivia,” he said, handing it to me with a paper napkin.
“Thank you, Mr. Dooby.” I got down. Then I went out the front door and gave the cone to Love Alice. I looked back through the glass to make sure Dooby was watching.
Love Alice got up and stood looking at the thing, till it began to melt and run down over her hand. I smiled at her, showing my teeth, then turned and walked away. At the end of the block, I looked back. She was standing right where I’d left her. Then she stepped into the road and dropped the cone. With her bare foot she ground it into the iron grate. It sucked the breath right out of me, and it came to me as I stood there, that if there were such a thing as honor, Love Alice possessed more of it than I ever would.
I wanted to run back and put my arms around her, tell her I was sorry. Wanted to rush into Dooby’s store and beat him with my fists. But all I could do was hide around the corner, lean my sorry face against the sooty bricks, and wish I’d never been born.
7
Every July Reverend Culpepper took his flock down to Captain’s Creek for fried chicken, buttered corn cakes, and renewal of the spirit. The creek itself had happened by accident.
A long time ago, our town was discovered by Frank and Aurora Solomon, who steered their boat down the Capulet River, probably meaning to catch a fish for their supper. They built a dock so they could tie up their boat, and a shack for bad weather, and pretty soon folks came behind them, setting up houses and opening shops. Then one night by the light of the moon, Aurora packed up their things, and they moved on in search of some other place where nobody was.
Over the years the Capulet sprouted arms and legs. Now folks from Aurora picnicked in the elbows of those creeks, their babies playing in the shallows, toddlers catching minnows. Reverend Culpepper used Captain’s Creek for baptizing. This was an event I had never witnessed, but by the grapevine I’d heard that more people drowned than came up saved. In the first place I wasn’t sure what salvation was, except that the Lord Jesus was involved. Maybe He came out of the clouds and spoke to the Reverend in a voice the rest of us could not hear.
I’d once seen a picture of a courtroom in a book, with the judge seated high up in front, and the guilty man standing before him in chains, pleading for mercy. I wondered if baptism was like that, and if each man went before the Lord—or the Reverend—and stated his case. And if, in this life, baptism was the only chance he got to do that. I asked Pap if I could go down to the creek and watch. He said to mind my manners and not get in the way.
In an elm grove I crouched behind a tree, not because I wouldn’t be welcomed, but because the possibility of them seeing me and tossing me in the river threw me into a panic. I could not swim well, and I didn’t want to die. I wondered, too, about the fat folks, if the handlers would have trouble hauling them back up. And if they drowned, did those people float downstream and wash up, sanctified, at somebody else’s picnic?
While I considered this, the ladies spread blankets, and set babies to roll, gurgling and half naked. Like a normal Sunday afternoon, they passed drumsticks and melon slices. Old men sat on folding chairs under the trees, spitting seeds and roaring with laughter. They drank lemon water from paper cups,
smoked brown cigarettes, and slapped their knees. I watched children play stickball and wished I could join them.
Miz Hanley saw me. “Miss Livvy, child, that you?” she called from her place on a quilt where she was surrounded by grandchildren, bowls of mustard potato salad, and jars of sweet pickle.
I was taught better than to turn and run, so I stepped from behind the tree. “Yes, ma’am, Miz Hanley. It’s me, Olivia Harker.”
“Well, come on down here, and let us see you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Junk,” she said, “fetch this young’n a plate. You hungry, child?”
“Yes’m,” I said, although I couldn’t have eaten, my stomach doing flip-flops and being more scared then any previous moment in my life. But these people loved me—Junk, and Love Alice who was playing chase with the children and making them squeal. They would not let anything happen to me. Still, I wished I knew how to swim.
I sat down next to Junk’s mama, and two little babies crawled in my lap. I touched their fuzzy heads and stroked their backs. Their skin was smooth and cool, the color of chocolate melted in a pan. Although I could have gone on touching them all day, Junk shooed them away and laid a paper plate on my knees.
“You just happen by, Miss Livvy?” he said. He was taller than Pap, and bigger around than any six oak trees. His hands were the size of Easter hams that hung in the Buelton butcher shop.
“I—”
“It’s all right if you was or wasn’t,” he said, his voice slow and kind, his face wide with smiling. Junk knew me better than I knew myself.
Nobody said it was time to get started, but a man in the shade began to hum, then another, harmony sliding between trees, rising and falling. Some closed their eyes and held out their hands like it was raining, only it wasn’t. Their sound was like warm water washing over me, which reminded me of the river and made me anxious again. I set my plate down.
The Reverend lifted his head and prayed in his loud, rich voice.
