Sugar

by Bernice McFadden

  Slut. Whore. Bitch.

  She made her way down the main road past the white-washed homes with their large wrap-around porches and picket fences. Past magnolia gardens and sweeping peach trees where young boys hung precariously from knotted limbs, watching her with large dark eyes.

  She walked with purpose past the general store where the white man called Abraham gave out credit and charged a 2 percent interest if you didn’t settle your bill with him by the first Friday of every month.

  She came down Pleasant Way, where Anna Lee (said to be the illegitimate offspring of the general store owner) swept at the dirt that always seemed to need sweeping when word came that something interesting was happening outside the perimeters of her home. Anna Lee watched the woman with an even eye and stopped her lazy sweeping, not to tilt her head in greeting but to concentrate on the vision before her. When their eyes met, Anna Lee’s did not smile or blink with shame; they stretched wide and shouted: Unacceptable! Unwanted! Get out!

  Sugar turned the corner that held Bigelow’s only school-house. It was small, white and unassuming.

  She stopped short, dead in front of Fayline’s House of Beauty, and peeked in at the women whose hair was in the process of being washed, dyed, teased, conked or pressed into the latest styles from New York, Detroit and Washington, D.C.

  No one said hello, welcome or even invited her in for a Coke. No, they just sat, openly watching her, their arms folded defiantly across their breasts, hands resting in resistance on their hips, as she examined the chipped blue paint on the dusty storefront glass that separated them from her. The paint that used to be a brilliant blue and would have in the past screamed FAYLINE’S HOUSE OF BEAUTY, but years of winter wind and summer sun had faded the letters so that they barely whispered to you what and whose establishment you stood in front of.

  She moved on, aware of the pandemonium that was brewing around her.

  Sugar walked slowly down a narrow dirt road, sycamores on either side giving an eerie shaded feel to the walkway. The homes that lined the street were identical in every way except color. Small, neat, board-and-shingle houses, painted white, light gray or a watery sort of blue. Two floors, two windows to each of the five rooms. Fenced-in yards that held sleeping dogs or guileful cats and mulberry bushes that sat beneath open windows shading blooming azaleas.

  A sign, rusted and bent nearly in half by a passing twister or unruly adolescent, swung around and around on the lone post, stopping briefly as the breeze that guided its frantic spin lulled.

  GROVE STREET.

  Sugar stopped, set her bags down and pulled a damp, folded piece of brown paper from her bosom. The address, written in black ink, was now smudged, causing the 10 and Grove Street that were written there to blend into each other, becoming nearly indecipherable.

  She looked from the paper to the sign post and back to the paper. Satisfied she was in the right place, she retrieved her suitcases and walked toward her new home and new life.

  Behind her the people of Bigelow buzzed like flies around shit. The heat forgotten, all thoughts were on the woman that had just strutted her way right through the main square in front of their children, and more important, in front of their men.

  They hated her immediately, not knowing of her childhood or the life that, after only one day of living it, would have had them calling out to the Lord for help.

  They hated her and did not know that she had never loved in that way. That way—when a man and woman come together and the cost involved is one that no bank could ever lend out, no national mint could ever print, reprint or discontinue.

  They hated her because it was clear that she had been one of them at some point, but had left before she would mature into a woman that tied her hair up in worn cloth at sunset and pushed her sleeves up around her elbows to begin an evening of toil after having toiled all day for the Man. Baking bread and churning sweet butter, growing butter beans and collard greens in the yard behind the small house that would (during her entire lifetime) belong to the bank even though she had a thirty-year mortgage that should have been paid off five years ago, but somehow the bank keeps telling her about interest that was miscalculated back in ’46. And so now she owes for a few more years, but they can’t say how many for sure, and she won’t demand an exact count, because she’s colored and they’re not and this is the South, 1955.

  At night she would kiss her children (never less than four offspring) good-night. If she was lucky and owned a radio, she could sit on her porch or in the tiny living room and listen to a radio show and chuckle at the humor, because a day of picking cotton, chopping wood or canning fish leaves you with little strength to out-and-out laugh. You save your laughter for real good time evenings, when the boss man is an extra day away. Blessings may shower her and that hot talent Ella Fitzgerald may come across singing “A-Tisket A-Tasket” and get her foot to tapping and maybe even humming along, but not too hard because she’s darning a holey sock as she listens to this song about the basket, or hemming hand-me-down pants, and working with a needle by candlelight can be tedious. She’s got drawers soaking in a bucket behind the house that have to be scrubbed and hung to dry in the night air, but her husband has bathed tonight and splashed a little of that drug store aftershave on his cheeks; that means he wants to do more than just lay beside her, he wants to lay up on her and inside her. So she leaves the drawers to soak for another hour or so, while she does her duty as Mrs. and pleases her man, because she can function on three hours of sleep. Keeping her man well fed and fucked are number one priorities that she can’t slack on because you can never know when a woman dressed to the nines with a blond wig, long legs and a high fat ass that should have been equal to you in almost every way may decide to hop on the first southbound Greyhound and end up looking at you through whispering letters on a dusty storefront window.

  Chapter Two

  THE phone blared out and startled Pearl, causing her heart to skip a beat. She still had not grown used to the sound of it. The black speaking and hearing contraption that she had waited patiently nearly two years for while Ma Bell decided whether it was cost effective to put up telephone lines in a town full of coloreds with low-paying jobs was ringing for the first time all day. Pearl had picked up the phone at least twice that day and listened to the clicking sounds that traveled through the long snake-like cord that exited the bottom and disappeared into her wall. And now after watching it and tip-toeing around waiting for it to ring, it does just that and startles her breathless.

  “Lord have mercy.” Pearl jumped at the shrill sound of the phone and then moved quickly into the living room where the phone sat on its own table for easy viewing. Pearl was short and stout and her walk was more like a waddle than a stride. Her arms were thick and visibly strong from years of lifting heavy household objects and pushing a scrub brush back and forth over countless wooden and tiled floors. She was sixty, but her face was still very youthful. Her husband called her Bit, a nickname that carried over from the days when Pearl was short and petite. Pearl is still short, but petite is a word and a proportion long forgotten.

  “Hello?” Pearl answered the phone in a labored voice.

  “I think she here! She ain’t too long passed my house . . . girl, she is a sight!” Shirley Brown was rattling a mile a minute. “She coming in your direction.”

  “Shirley, who you talking about—”

  “The one the Reverend told you about. The one you suppose to welcome and all. She a sight. If that’s her she a sight, Pearl!”

  Pearl listened to Shirley ramble on excitedly as she vaguely recalled the conversation she’d had with Reverend Foster just two weeks ago.

  “Pearl, you have been a faithful member of this congregation for years.” Reverend Foster moved in close to her as they stood in front of Bigelow’s First Baptist Church. He lowered his voice so that the congregation that was leaving Sunday service would not hear what he was relaying to Sister Pearl. He took her lightly by the elbow and guided her away fr
om the crowd.

  “Don’t tell no one, but you are one of my favorite followers.” He smiled at her and Pearl lowered her eyes away from his handsome face and soft eyes. He smelled like the air after a good rain. Him being so close to her made her feel light-headed.

  “I hear we gonna have a new resident in our small town. A woman coming in from over in Short Junction, taking over the house next door to you.”

  “Hmmm,” Pearl said and nodded her head.

  “So I figure since you are such a dedicated member, and my favorite, you would be the perfect person to welcome her to our little community and eventually bring her into the fold.”

  Pearl looked up from his shiny shoes, which seemed a little too fine for a Reverend in a town made up of sharecroppers and factory workers. But she pushed the thought away and tried to concentrate on his words.

  “Would you do that for Reverend Foster, Sister Pearl?” His voice was pleading.

  “Of course, Reverend. When we expecting Mrs. . . . Mrs.?”

  “Oh, it’s Mizz Lacey, a niece, I believe, of some people over in Short Junction,” Reverend Foster said, lowering his voice another notch and looking over his shoulder as he did. “We expecting her any day, I suppose, Sister Pearl.”

  “All right then, Reverend, I’ll be looking out for her then.” Pearl smiled and walked slowly toward her husband who was patiently waiting.

  Now Pearl watched from her window as the woman walked up to and stopped right out in front of her house. “She’s here,” is all Pearl managed to say before she placed the phone back in its cradle, cutting off Shirley’s rambling.

  Was this the woman the Reverend spoke of? The woman Pearl had been asked to guide and help and eventually lead into the flock? Was this her? This woman didn’t look as if she’d ever spent a second in a house of worship, much less knew what one was. But there was something else too. A slither of something familiar that Pearl was yet to put her finger on.

  Pearl stood there in the shadows, half of her body in the living room, half in the hall. The woman leaned back on one leg, dropped her cigarette to the ground and smiled a knowing smile. Pearl held her breath. Did the woman see her spying?

  A crack of a bat and the roar of the crowd from the secondhand radio sent Pearl scurrying into the kitchen like a frightened mouse.

  The stranger laughed a low bitter sort of a laugh and walked the less than fifteen feet to #10 Grove Street. She walked slowly up the front steps, stooped and retrieved the key from beneath a worn mat that said: GOD BLESS THIS HOME.

  Pearl held her breath as the woman unlocked the door and disappeared into the house, allowing the screen door to slam loudly behind her.

  Afternoon moved to evening and the sun set slowly over Bigelow, leaving purple-orange streaks across the Arkansas sky. Pearl had settled herself at the kitchen table, taking up a silent vigil by the open window, hoping to catch sight of the woman in #10 with the familiar face.

  “Bit? What you doing, daydreaming again, girl?” Joe, Pearl’s husband, stood in the kitchen entrance. He was a towering man of sixty-two. Amazingly, the gray had just started to creep into the blackness of his temples. “I been calling you for dang near ten minutes, ain’t you hear me call you, Bit?” Pearl met his questioning eyes. She’d been sitting there at the kitchen table, attempting to separate the peas from their pods, her attention totally consumed with the woman inside #10 Grove Street.

  “Bit?” Joe was still waiting for an answer from his wife. Instead what he got was a dubious look topped with guilt.

  “Aw, baby, I just been in here popping these peas,” Pearl said timidly. They both looked down at the two lone pods that lay on the wooden table. “Well, I guess I was sorta daydreaming too,” Pearl added shyly.

  Joe’s gaze moved from the pods to the open window that looked directly onto the closed living room window of #10 Grove Street. He knew from pure instinct (and from being with the same woman for more than 30 years) that she wasn’t telling the whole truth.

  “Oh really?” was all he said, and turned to move back into the living room. Pearl immediately felt bad. She was caught and too silly to admit it. She walked into the living room and realized that the light that stretched along the wooden floor for most of the day had disappeared. The heat had subsided enough for Joe to have turned off the fan. A cool breeze came in on the tail of the blanketing dusk.

  “Joe, how’s ’bout we go on down to the Rib Shack. It’s Saturday, don’t feel much like cooking. ’Sides, the heat done drained me dry.”

  Joe just smiled.

  “C’mon, baby, what you say?” Pearl pushed. Joe got up from the couch and walked over to his wife, lightly tweaked her nose and shook his finger. “Let me get my shirt,” was his reply.

  Joe was a simple man, enjoying simple pleasures. A hearty card game with his friends, evening meeting with his Mason brothers or fishing alone on the edge of Hodges Lake. These are the things that pleased him and brought him quiet joy.

  God-fearing and soft-spoken, all that mattered to Joe was his wife, family and leading a life worthy of entering Heaven. Nobody could ever accuse this man of raising his hand or his voice in anger. He understood things about life and women that other men just couldn’t.

  Joe was a tall man standing nearly six feet, three inches, with skin the color of amber. He had a strong presence about him, the kind that made people move two inches more than necessary out of his path. People felt most comfortable addressing him with a slightly bowed head, avoiding the eyes that seemed to see straight through to your soul.

  Pearl had gazed into those very same eyes long ago and fell in love. She knew the first time he took her small hands into his own that this would be the man she would give herself over to until death parted them.

  They met after the war. That’s when Bigelow came alive again. Men returned home to their wives and sons returned to their mothers. The cannery, a main source of employment before the war, reopened. Word of this traveled far south and people that once held jobs there received it like a cool breeze to a heated brow. Men and women dropped their gunny sacks filled with cotton, oranges or watermelon, and stood tall for the first time in years. The sound of machetes cutting through the air could be heard for miles as they were flung high above the tobacco and wheat fields. And like an Old Testament exodus, hundreds of people left Jackson, Clearwater, Salem and Charleston on foot, by cart and donkey and if possible by train headed for Ashton. Headed for home.

  Joe Taylor was one of those who came home; a soldier boy who’d fought alongside white men who wouldn’t share the same toilet with him or drink from the same well back home, but in the end, before the last breath left their dying bodies, did not hesitate for one moment to turn pleading eyes on him.

  And so Joe put aside his memories of an uncle, naked, beaten, burnt and lynched, left to die hanging from a branch of a pecan tree. He shook the vision of his mother slapped so hard by a white woman that she permanently lost the sight in her right eye. He erased from his mind the words: “coon,” “monkey” and “nigger”—words a soldier had used hundreds of times during his lifetime and just moments earlier on Joe before the shell ripped through his body.

  Now this white soldier lay clinging to the last threads of life, his insides scattered around him, war sounds echoing in his ears and turns to Joe. “Please,” he utters, because he’s scared of death and does not want to die alone among bombs and bullets. It no longer matters to the soldier that Joe is Negro or colored. All that matters is that he is there.

  Joe has read the Bible and the Good Book says: Forgive and forget and love thy neighbor. With these words in mind, Joe lays his gun down and takes the dying man in his arms. Carefully, tenderly like a fragile newborn he rocks and shushes the man as the soldier whimpers at the sight of his blood running from his open wounds and seeping into the earth. Joe lulls the man into the afterlife, places his head gently on the ground, closes the lids over his empty eyes, retrieves his gun and continues to fight for a freedom he would nev
er be fully entitled to.

  It was back in the evenings, when Pearl made her way home from washing, ironing and cleaning all that wasn’t hers and would never be hers, she’d stop and stand for hours as close to the men as possible to listen in on their talk.

  They gathered in small bunches outside the Rib Shack, spitting distance from the hat shop where Pearl stood, pretending to admire the hats in the window, while eavesdropping on their conversation.

  Pearl had listened to Bigelow’s young men tell their stories of war and love. She smiled as they imitated the oui ouis and Bonjour s of the pale thin-lipped French women who would do what the colored women wouldn’t.

  She listened, while her stomach twisted and turned as Mickey Johnson described how they sawed off his ravaged leg while he watched, a block of wood clenched between his teeth.

  Izzy Cox told of a man who fought for two days, his intestines hanging from his stomach like snakes. “How the hell did that boy fight like that, Izzy?” a doubtful voice from the crowd asked.

  “That nigga put his guts in a bowl, took the nylons he was gonna bring back home to his woman, and bound it tight around his waist.” No one said a word. “That boy had some Indian in ’im,” Izzy added, and used his finger to make a swirling motion near his temple. The crowd of men nodded knowingly. A man was bound to do anything once he had some Indian in him. Everybody knew Indians were crazy.

  After that story, Pearl didn’t go around them for a few days. She couldn’t get the picture out of her mind and had a hard time eating out of a bowl.

  It was during one of those late afternoons that she first heard Joe Taylor speak. She’d seen him standing tall. Always quiet, maybe brooding. She did not know.