Sugar

by Bernice McFadden

  “I gotta tell Mary, he’s a friend she don’t need,” she said aloud as she slammed out of the building and into the bright sunlight.

  There she was, back to her beginning, but now it was worse. Now she was all alone. She traveled from city to city always trying to get someone to hear her sing, but all they wanted to do was fuck. So she gave up and gave in.

  Chapter Eight

  THE hammer that resided in her head was banging hard today, causing Sugar to squint her eyes in pain and massage her temples. The headaches had been with her since she was a teenager. The hammer . . . the bang, bang, bang just seemed to be the perpetual echo of a million headboards slamming hard against bedroom walls.

  She rose from her bed and stiffly walked to the bathroom. Fragments of a dream fading in and out, trying to slip between the pain and the pounding. She couldn’t bother with that now, she felt soiled, her body and hair were heavy with the left-behind smell of a john.

  She sat on the toilet and let the urine fall from inside of her. She picked at the long dried rivers of cum that clung to her thighs; it flaked easily and fell weightless to the floor.

  No different than the night, week, month or year before. Always the same, so why now did the sameness of her life bother her, cause her frustration and purple anger?

  She wanted to slap at these men, the ones who came to find pleasure between her legs, she wanted to slap and claw at their faces when they used her roughly and wrongly, treating her as if she were a lavatory. These men who didn’t stop to kiss the nape of her neck, or explore the lonely place beneath her breasts with their tongues.

  She wiped herself and laughed at the comical indecency of it all, the business and the men that kept it prosperous. Who would know to look at them, Bigelow men; broad-backed, strongchinned men that wore pride on their shoulders, spoke loving words to their wives and kissed the small foreheads of their children nightly. Who would know they laid with Sugar Monday through Saturday and asked God for forgiveness on Sunday. Same hands that cupped the soft cheek of a wife or held lightly to the elbow of an elderly grandparent, had also crossed Sugar’s body and invaded her moist places. If only the Bigelow women knew, knew for sure. Right now all they heard were rumors that spelled something, but what that something was, they didn’t yet know.

  Sugar brushed her teeth, scouring her tongue with her toothbrush until it was pink with irritation. She worked feverishly at trying to rid her mouth of the lingering taste from the night before that otherwise found its way into every forkful of food she consumed.

  She sighed and moved to the lower parts of the house, into the kitchen that held one table, two chairs, bare cupboards and a refrigerator that hummed empty. She would have to go out today, take a walk into town and shop at the small market underneath the quiet, hating eyes of the Bigelow women.

  Maybe Pearl would need to go too; it would make her task so much easier. She could allow herself to be distracted by the constant sound of Pearl’s voice.

  Sugar moved to the living room and stretched out on the couch. She could hear the small laughter that sailed into her house from the Taylor home. Pearl. Sugar liked her, perhaps because Pearl did not question her outright. Although Sugar had caught the question in Pearl’s eyes, saw it poised in the lift of her brow and slight purse of her lips. Never voiced, not yet anyway. Sugar knew it would not always be that way, the same way you knew night would not last forever and summer would follow spring.

  Saturday. Bid whist night. Pearl, Shirley, Minnie and Clair Bell sat around the kitchen table, doing more talking than playing. Bid whist was just the excuse to draw them together. Tall glasses filled with lemonade sat at the wrists of card-holding hands, water moved slowly down the outside of the glasses, forming tiny puddles around their bases. It was hot enough to have all of the windows open to welcome in any small breeze that chose to come, but what the other women were hoping for, praying and wishing for, was a glimpse of Sugar—preferably naked—to appear across the way.

  Shirley and her sister Minnie had fought like children over a toy about who was going to sit in the chair facing the window, until Pearl threatened to lower the shade. Shirley gave up, conceding only because she had witnessed the maiden unveiling of Sugar’s privates.

  “I tell you, Pearl, somethin’ ain’t right about that woman. And now you and her spending time together . . . that don’t look right at all,” Shirley said, looking over her glasses at Pearl. “I say ya better keep a close eye on your belongings . . . and that means Joe too!”

  “Believe it, Pearl, Shirley talkin’ the truth, she may be crazy but she ain’t stupid!” Minnie Grayson added in a laughing voice.

  Pearl moved her gaze from her cards and planted it dead center on Minnie’s thin face. Minnie was Shirley’s baby sister. Nearly fifteen years separated them. She was the quintessential change-of-life baby. Although they were full-blood relatives, the two women looked nothing alike. Minnie was cobalt black, short and extremely thin. Her face resembled a vulture’s, long, ragged and drawn—her life was written all over it.

  The only similarities connecting the two were the large wide eyes and flair for minding other people’s business. They were infamous for bickering amongst themselves and insulting each other was a way of life for them.

  “The Lord don’t like no slack mouth,” Pearl said and turned back to studying her hand of cards.

  “Sure don’t . . . He must can’t stand you at all, Shirley!” Minnie said and slapped her thigh hard with laughter.

  “Hush up, woman . . . I done told you once already,” Shirley said between clenched teeth. She was getting riled up and her head shook in anger and exasperation against her sister. “I ain’t gonna tell you again!” She shook her finger at Minnie and adjusted her blue wig.

  “Aw, cool it, Shirley, you know I’m just messin’ with you.” Minnie waved her hand at Shirley. Pearl caught the glint of mischief in her eyes and the short tail of the smile that moved swiftly across her lips.

  “Alls I know is I heard Gibson down at Motley’s talkin’ ’bout her.” Clair Bell spoke in her scratched voice. As a young woman, the thick coarseness of her voice had been seductive, but now, pushing seventy, it came out as if from vocal cords made of steel wool; hard, brash and unappealing.

  Clair Bell, the great-granddaughter of the town’s first reverend, was hardly outspoken. To share the same breathing space with Clair Bell was to be alone. She behaved the exact opposite of what her physical presence presented. A large woman, a full six feet, big boned and thick skinned, Clair Bell looked as if she could beat any man in four counties. In fact she was the exact opposite. She could chop her own wood and haul a twenty-pound bag of grain on her head from the general store to her front porch, but she couldn’t snap the thin necks of chickens or handle the jelly-like liver of cows. She cried crocodile tears at the thin slicing pain of a splinter. Clair Bell was nothing that you would expect her to be.

  And now she spoke in her small voice, the one that sounded lost in a cave deep inside her large body. Everyone was quiet, waiting for Clair Bell to tell what she’d heard. She seemed not to remember that she’d spoken at all, instead she moved her chair back from the table, raised one stockinged foot and placed it in her lap. She examined the off-color nude nylon that enclosed her foot and then began to massage her swollen protruding bunion.

  The women quietly watched her for a while in disgust. All except Pearl were disgusted at the very fact that she would begin a statement of such magnitude and then forgo it to massage a bunion. Pearl, on the other hand, was disgusted that Clair was massaging her bunion right at her kitchen table.

  “Well . . . what they say?” Minnie asked after the quiet and the lack of information began to take hold of her neck like a suffocating grip.

  “Hmmm.” Clair Bell looked up from her feet. Her face and eyes always retained somnolent characteristics, and she yawned, suggesting that it was more than a look.

  “Gibson. What did he say?” Shirley pushed, leaning in closer.
<
br />   “Say ’bout who?” Clair Bell was truly lost.

  They all exhaled loudly. Shirley sat back and crossed her arms over her sagging breasts and rolled her eyes up in the air in disgust. Minnie shook her head in dismay and turned to look at Pearl.

  “What did Gibson say about the woman Sugar,” Minnie said slowly, making sure she left time and space between each word so that Clair Bell could fully grasp what she was trying to say.

  “Oh . . .” Clair Bell stopped and tilted her head slightly upward, searching the air for the words she needed, and then very calmly she said: “He said she a whore.”

  There were just hearts. Hearts beating loud and excitedly, and finally they all remembered to breathe.

  It was said; the damage was done. Clair Bell went back to her bunion untethered by the excitement her words caused.

  “Oooh wee! Hot dang! I knew it! Right here in Bigelow . . . a whore! Lawdy, Lawdy!” Shirley’s eyes sparkled behind her thick lenses.

  Pearl’s mouth was slightly open in disbelief and Minnie was holding her stomach and laughing loudly.

  “You got the whore of Babylon right next door . . . and you call her friend.” The word friend came out slick as blood. “Running ’round town with her like ya’ll was cut from the same cloth. What you think about her now?” Shirley was pointing a crooked accusatory finger in Pearl’s face.

  “Take your finger outta my face.” The words moved out of Pearl’s mouth like steel pellets, her face turned to ice, her glare moved from Shirley and fell hard on Clair Bell. “That’s a terrible thing to say ’bout someone. You spreading rumors, and that ain’t right. How you fix your mouth to say such a thing? You don’t even know her.” Pearl’s chest was rising and falling quickly as she struggled to take in and release air. Her heart was beating wild with anger. But her mind stepped back to a hot, heavy day when the sun refused to shine and field peas lay in waiting on the kitchen table between herself and Sugar. She remembered the questions she asked about Sugar’s life and the answer she got: “I cleaned up in a women’s home.” The words echoed false in her mind, just as they did when Sugar first uttered them aloud. Pearl ignored the warning bells that went off in her soul.

  Clair Bell raised her eyes to Pearl’s and smiled a little. “I ain’t sayin’ it, I’m repeatin’ it . . . there’s a difference.” She said this in the small childlike voice that was characteristic of Clair Bell, but the usual innocence it carried was gone. Challenge took its place.

  Pearl lowered her eyes and then raised them again. She placed the cards face down on the table and got up curtly. Tears stung at her eyes as she turned her back to the women and peered out the window. “It ain’t right no matter how you put it. You don’t know that girl from Adam and here you are dragging her name through the mud based on hearsay. Ya oughta be ashamed!”

  Who was she to protect Sugar and why should she? Didn’t Jesus protect the whore by asking those who were without sin to throw the first stone? Pearl questioned herself and her actions. How much did she really know about Sugar? Not much, when you got right down to the nitty-gritty of things. Sugar hardly spoke and when she did it wasn’t about anything that had to do with her directly. She spoke in circles. Pearl didn’t want to prod and probe her, she could see that though Sugar had a menacing look about her, she was really very fragile. Pearl had come this far with her, had been in her home, sat with her on the porch quietly watching the sunset or listening to the sounds of life that surrounded them. Too far to let it go to waste. She was near to bringing her into the fold, presenting her to God as a saved member of the Bigelow First Baptist Church. And then there was her face. The face that reminded her so much of Jude. She couldn’t turn her back and let all of that go. She wouldn’t.

  Confident, she turned to meet their gazes. She knew of their indiscretions. Their dirty little secrets, the ones they themselves had forgotten existed. She looked at them with eyes as black as coal.

  “Maybe Gibson is confused . . . maybe he mean someone that look like her. Maybe someone told him about some one time, long ago thing that happened to her. Something she trying to forget that done caught up with her.” The women listened to the excuses as they spilled one after the other from Pearl’s mouth. Their eyes shifted between each other and then back to Pearl.

  “Everybody gotta past, something they ashamed of.” Pearl paused and looked directly at Shirley. They held each other’s eyes for one long moment, Pearl revealing, with one look, what she’d known for years. Shirley’s eyes were confused and then, as if a light went on, tears of comprehension, shame and then anger filled her eyes. She turned her head sharply away and lowered her eyes.

  Pearl knew the story as did everyone else in Bigelow. But Pearl was the only woman bold enough to confront Shirley with it. And she would if Shirley pushed, she’d repeat what she’d heard from her own mother’s mouth, if Shirley pushed her.

  It was a story that was told amongst the colored kitchen help while they cleaned up after a birthday party or the field hands as they stole sweet relief from the sun beneath the shade of a magnolia tree. They would chew tobacco or drink heavily from tin cups filled with fresh well water and lean their backs against the bark of a tree or lay themselves down on the earth and speak of small things that had happened in their lives, or others they knew. Eventually, someone would start to speak of Crazy Ciel Brown.

  “Her daddy was the white man from over in Ashton. He usta own the cannery and a few other things that ain’t worth mentioning because they ain’t no where ’round here. I believe his name was McHenry. Had lots of money, a wife and a pair of look-a-like girls. But I guess all that wasn’t enough for him. He had to have himself a colored woman too.”

  “How you know so much?” a doubting Thomas would ask.

  “I knows ’cause my cousin on my daddy side who usta cut cane down in Florida, knew the hairdresser by the name of Rebecca, who was acquainted with one of the maids that worked there who seen it all go down—her name be Belle. Belle Mason.”

  That explanation was usually good enough for any disbeliever.

  “Anyways, like most low-down crackers that God seen fit to give abundance to, he felt like he should be able to have anything and anyone that happened to be under his roof. ’Sides, his wife wasn’t no more good to him. She couldn’t meet his needs. She was a drinker.”

  “I can’t say that I blame a man for strayin’ away from a wife who put away more liquor than him. I mean, a man’s got needs, you know?” The same disbeliever would interrupt, yet again.

  “Will you hush and let the man tell the story?” someone would say in an irritated voice.

  “Like I was saying,” the storyteller would continue, “the woman of the house be passed out somewhere, while her man just be a tipping on down to the maid’s quarters, pick out the one he wanted and hop up on top of her like she was one of his horses.”

  “What the woman name be?”

  And uncomfortable silence would rise like thick smoke.

  “Man, if you don’t shut your mouth and let the man tell the story!” someone would hiss.

  “I believes her name was Shirley Brown. Don’t know where she at now, or if she even still alive. But back then she was just a young thing, barely thirteen years old from what I hear,” the storyteller would say in a voice filled with innuendo.

  “When Shirley got big, they say McHenry known it was his because he was the only one she had been with and he had the bloody sheet to prove it!”

  A gasp would emanate as they shook their heads in loathing.

  “Now ya’ll don’t think that the missus of the house didn’t know what was going on. She knew! And ain’t say one single solitary word about it!”

  “A colored woman would have bust him in his head!” someone would shout out and the crowd would fall out in uproarious laughter.

  “That is the truth! But ya see, she was doing her own midnight tipping down to them stables. Now whether she was laying with man or beast, ain’t for me to say, ’cause I wasn’
t there and don’t know one who was.”

  “Uhmph!”

  “When Shirley got too big to ignore it any longer, McHenry sent her away to have that baby. His wife said she wasn’t going to be shamed by what he’d done. She had to be able to go to town and them functions white people are so fond of, and hold her head up. Couldn’t have people whispering behind her back.

  I heard that that child, which is Ciel, was raised by an Injun couple over in Shepardsville. Well, she don’t look like she got an ounce of white blood in her no how, so no one was the smarter.”

  “Yeah, git to the money part!”

  “Well, once a month the couple would find money wrapped in cheesecloth and nailed to their door. People say McHenry was the one to send the money by way of his servants. The couple never knew where it was coming from and if they did, they didn’t say.

  “That man provided for Ciel good and right! And after he died, I heard that he left her a whole heap o’ money!”

  There would be an all consuming stillness, as the people digested the tale and drew their own conclusions from it.

  No, Pearl wouldn’t repeat it now, not if Shirley backed down and found her place again in Pearl’s home. She wouldn’t speak it but she would think it. Think it so caustically that the thoughts themselves would burn from her mind and rest like flames on Shirley’s soul.

  “How you all know it ain’t just a downright lie,” Pearl finished. Her tone challenged everyone in the room.

  Clair Bell and Minnie stared mute. Shirley was afraid to raise her eyes, lest she see her past looking back at her again. Then Clair Bell spoke again.

  “Well, he say he got a friend over in Hampton, who got a friend . . . some high yella boy that happen to got a little money.” She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. “Don’t know his name, though . . . well, he asked Gibson friend if he knew one of them type of women.” She tilted her head toward the open window, indicating Sugar’s house. Indicating Sugar. “And Gibson friend said, that he knew one of them type of women he was looking for. Told him her face wasn’t much to look at, but she made up for that in the bed.”