by Pearl Cleage
“You haven’t even read it all and you’re making changes?”
I put the pen down. “I was minding my own business,” I reminded her. “You asked me to read it.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Go ahead.”
Under the Statement of Purpose, Joyce had typed in all caps:
TEN THINGS EVERY FREE WOMAN SHOULD KNOW
How to grow food and flowers
How to prepare food nutritiously
Self-defense
Basic first aid/sex education and midwifery
Child care (prenatal/early childhood development)
Basic literacy/basic math/basic computer skills
Defensive driving/map reading/basic auto and home repairs
Household budget/money management
Spiritual practice
Physical fitness/health/hygiene
At the bottom she had written, not necessarily in that order, and underlined it twice.
I wondered if she can do all that stuff. I’d say I’ve got a grip—a loose grip—on about half. Maybe a third. But I had to admit, Joyce’s list covered the waterfront. I’d never seen anything like it written down that way. It looked so sensible and orderly. I wished somebody had handed me a list like that when I was about twelve. It would have been nice, first of all, to know that what I was trying to become was a free woman, and it would have been great to have some specific suggestions about what skills I needed to qualify.
But that’s not what we got when we came crashing into puberty. What they gave us instead was a little pamphlet with a very repressed-looking young white girl on the cover entitled What Every Young Girl Should Know. Unlimited copies of this brochure were provided by one of the sanitary napkin companies, although I don’t know why since the slender booklet accomplished the almost impossible feat of explaining our periods to us without once mentioning the word blood.
Joyce’s list was grounded in the real world. I wondered what the women in the Sewing Circus would be like if they all achieved mastery of the Ten Things. I wondered what I’d be like. I looked at Joyce sitting across the table trying to read my mind.
“This is great,” I said.
“Really?”
“Really.”
Joyce smiled and reached over to take the list from my hands. Her eyes scanned it critically. “I didn’t want to make it grim, you know? That’s why I put the flowers on there.”
“It’s perfect. Can you do all these things?”
“All except the self-defense,” Joyce said.
“Didn’t Mitch have a gun?”
She nodded. “Mitch and Eddie used to hunt these woods together when they were kids, but I never even fired it. Besides, I’m not sure I’m talking about guns.”
“What are you talking about? Hand-to-hand combat?”
“I don’t know what I’m talking about yet. I don’t want to start teaching people to kill each other, but a lot of these women are involved with men who hit them as part of the regular routine. It’s so ordinary, nobody even talks about it until somebody gets beaten so bad she has to go to the hospital. Then the whole discussion focuses on what she did to set him off like that.” Joyce turned the paper sideways to read my note in the margin. “Why’d you change it?”
“Too long,” I said. “Too political. Nobody uses words like shackles, Comrade. This is the nineties, remember?”
Joyce made a face at me. “Ungrateful wretches.”
I told you she will say that old-time stuff in conversation like it’s the latest thing.
“We changed the world for you and what do you do?”
“We fuck it up,” I said. “Big time.”
She studied the list again. “Did I leave anything out?”
I leaned over to check the list again, then took it and wrote these five additions off the top of my head as subsets of the basic sex education component:
Don’t fuck men you don’t like.
Bring your own birth control.
Practice safe sex every time.
If it’s hurting you, it shouldn’t be exciting him.
Don’t fake—demonstrate.
I slid the page back across the table to Joyce, who read it quickly.
“Why not love?”
“Why not love what?”
“Why not, don’t fuck men you don’t love?”
Spoken like a woman who was lucky enough to meet the true love of her life when she was fifteen.
“Because love is too rare to make it a condition for sex. You could spend your life waiting, celibate and evil.”
“Maybe it’s worth waiting for,” Joyce said, and she wasn’t being smug. She really couldn’t imagine having sex with anybody you didn’t love.
“Maybe,” I said, “but as a practical solution, it’s right up there with just say no to drugs.”
She nodded. “What if they’re lesbians?”
“Then they don’t have to worry about it,” I said. “They won’t be fucking any men, period.”
“But should they be fucking women they don’t like?”
I hadn’t thought about it. Why would they? Women fucked men they didn’t like for all kinds of reasons—money, safety, protection, purely sexual release, ambition. Did the same stuff apply to women? I didn’t know, but I figured until I did, it’d be safer to just say:
Don’t fuck people you don’t like.
Joyce noted the change. She nodded agreement through two, three, and four and grinned at the last one.
“Does number five mean what I think it means?”
“It means if he’s not doing the things that make you feel good, it may be that he just doesn’t know what they are and would benefit greatly from being told.” I thought about Eddie. “Or shown.”
Joyce looked at me. “You’re not going to start talking dirty to your big sister, are you?”
“I hope you won’t be using uptight words like dirty when you’re talking about all this to the sisters of the Circus,” I said, teasing.
“Not a chance,” Joyce said. “I wasn’t always a widow.”
“I know.” I rolled my eyes remembering listening to the muffled sounds of pleasurable exchange coming from Joyce and Mitch’s room when I was growing up. They were newlyweds when Mama died and the honeymoon was still in progress when I left and moved to Detroit. When I was about twelve and my adolescent hormones were truly raging, I remember getting up to go to the bathroom and hearing their lovemaking so distinctly as I passed their bedroom door that I hurried back to bed and discovered masturbation. It was probably one of the most intense solo sexual experiences I’ve ever had, but that’s when I moved my room downstairs where it is now. I knew I was out of line. Some things are supposed to be private.
“I think you’re right about the statement of purpose, too,” Joyce said, putting the papers in a folder labeled Sewing Circus. “I’ll make the changes and maybe you’ll look at it again for me?”
Of course I would. I really felt the possibilities of what Joyce was trying to do for the first time and I had to admit it was sort of exciting to be a part of it. I was looking for a new gig anyway and even though it was only temporary, this one did not require me to fool with anybody’s hair or fry up a chicken sandwich to go. There was no big reason to rush my ass off to San Francisco. Things here were clicking along at a very interesting pace and I am a firm believer in the bit of old Negro wisdom that says: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
• 2
eddie went by to sit with Johnny Mack for a while and then came by our place afterward with an idea. Eddie has known Mack all his life and he wanted to make sure he was okay and offer to look in on him on a more regular schedule. It was hard for a lot of these old men to ask for help or to accept it when it was offered. They had been so strong so long, and all of a sudden they couldn’t hardly get to the grocery store. It scared them first and then it made them angry, a typical black male pattern, if you think about it. Brothers tend to be more familiar with anger than any of their other emoti
ons, so if you leave them to their own devices, that’s usually where they’ll go. It can start out as fear, or confusion, or sorrow, or hurt feelings, but nine times out of ten, it’s going to come out on the other end mad. Sometimes you can talk them out of it if you catch it on the front end, but the process requires lightning reflexes, infinite patience, and nerves of steel. Sort of exhausting as a lifetime commitment.
But old Mack was beyond anger. He was just through. He had worked at the post office all of his life, supported his wife, raised his children, and scraped together enough money to buy a house on Idlewild Lake so they could take his reliable federal pension and retire in peace. Now his children all lived in the city, his wife had died in her sleep, lying beside him the way she had done every single night of their fifty-two-year marriage, and he didn’t feel safe in his own house anymore. He was disappointed and exhausted, and when Eddie sat down beside him in the living room, the empty space on the doily-covered table where his television used to sit was just proof that things weren’t the way they used to be.
Eddie said when he offered to come by a couple of times a week, Mack snorted.
“You figure you’d a been stopping by here at two o’clock in the morning, do you?”
It was a rhetorical question, of course, and the old man waved off Eddie’s suggestions for improved security measures.
“None of that matters. If they want it bad enough to beat me in my own bed to get it, they can have it. All of it!”
He told Eddie he had called his son and told him he was ready to move into the Baptist Home, which is what his kids had been lobbying in favor of for months. He had resisted because he knew what it meant. Nobody ever moves out of the old folks’ home.
“The thing I’m going to miss is how it used to be,” he told Eddie, looking out across the lake. “This used to be a place where Negroes acted like they had some sense. You could leave your door unlocked all summer and your place empty all winter once the snow started and nobody would touch a thing. Now these young boys got no respect. They’d just as soon kill me as look at me.”
The anger was returning, but it was just a flash.
“I’m too old to teach them any better,” he said. “So it’s time for me to go. I’m going to put the house on the market on Monday. If you know anybody who wants it, let me know. I’ll give them a good price.”
Eddie said he would and headed straight this way. He’s been thinking about the Sewing Circus just like we have. We all know Joyce can’t keep having the meetings at the house. It’s not big enough. It’s cozy to have a crowd around the kitchen table, but it gets to be a problem when there are so many people only half of them can be in any room at a time. What Joyce is dreaming needs a place to spread out. Eddie thinks Johnny Mack’s place might be a possibility. He only wants ten thousand dollars for it if the buyer can pay cash, and it’s got three acres of land with sun enough for a huge garden and unobstructed lakefront access.
Joyce was concerned about the small rooms, but Eddie said he could knock out most of the walls and make a common room big enough to hold fifty people seated if it had to. He said he didn’t have any money to put in, but he could do all the renovations himself and that would save us a lot.
I could see Joyce was really excited about the idea. I could practically hear her brain trying to figure out how to get the money together. I listened as she asked Eddie for estimates on the cost of this or that, and he sounded as enthusiastic as I felt. My mind started doing budgets, too. I had my real estate windfall to work with and as I sat there listening to them cutting costs here and making do there, that money started burning a hole in my pocket. San Francisco seemed more and more like somebody else’s dream.
I felt more alive here than I had for years. I had my sister, the lover of my dreams, a role as part of a long-term project that excited me, and a big-eyed, baldheaded baby girl to take on my morning walks. I was meditating morning and evening, walking three miles a day, and I hadn’t had anything stronger than a glass of wine with dinner in a month. It was my choice that had brought me back here, and for the first time, it really felt like home.
I sat down beside Joyce and looked at the pad where she was scribbling figures. I took the pencil and put a check mark next to where she had written: Mack’s property, $10,000.
“I can take care of the house,” I said.
She looked at me. “What?”
“I have enough to buy it,” I said. What the hell? I had enough to live for two years without having to get paid by anybody but my own bank account, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t get a job if I really needed one. I can always open a salon if I have to. Nobody ever went broke making sisters’ hair look good. Besides, quiet as it’s kept, I wasn’t really in a position to get hung up on planning that far in advance.
I didn’t say all that to Joyce and Eddie, of course. We all have regular conversations in all our various combinations about my health—current state of, prognosis, and options. I know they talk about it when I’m not around, just like they do when they talk to me one on one, but I don’t encourage a lot of discussion about dying. I figure there will be plenty of time for that later.
“Are you sure?” Joyce whispered. Her eyes were already shining, but she wanted me to say it again.
“I’m sure,” I said, a little embarrassed at how they were looking at me. I had never been in a position to give anybody enough money to do something really important.
Joyce leaned over and hugged me so hard I almost fell out of the chair. Eddie was on the other side pumping my hand like I’d just promised him my vote and looking like he wanted to kiss me, but didn’t want to be inappropriate. So I kissed both of them and we all sort of danced around the kitchen like maniacs, loving each other and savoring the moment like the rare, sweet thing it was.
No wonder old Rockefeller and the boys give away so much money. It felt great.
• 3
eddie and i finally got Joyce to agree to keep a shotgun in the house. She still hates the idea, so we’re going to keep it in the closet in my room. I’m downstairs, so I’d be the one who could get to the problem first anyway. It also puts the gun in a room far from Imani. Joyce kept quoting all these awful statistics about how many kids are killed in gun accidents in their own homes. I assured her that each and every one of these children was older than two months and almost certainly walking at the time. She looked skeptical, so I promised to find another place to put it when Imani started crawling, which won’t be for another four or five months on the outside.
Once we got that straight, Eddie showed us how to clean it, how to load it, and the basic safety stuff about how to carry it without pointing it at anybody. Then we each fired it a couple of times so we could feel the kick and hear the noise so it wouldn’t surprise us. After that, I cleaned it again by myself, loaded it, put the safety on, and propped it up in the corner of the closet.
The first couple of days, it was like having a pile of plutonium in the room with me. I was so aware of the gun being there, I felt like it was glowing. I got up a couple of times, opened the closet door, and just looked at it sitting there. I was glad we had it, but it still made me feel weird.
I never could have imagined needing to have a gun in Idlewild. The whole time I was growing up, we never even locked the door. But it’s dangerous to pretend. That was then and this is most definitely now.
When Joyce was trying to make up her mind, she said, “I would never shoot somebody over a television set.” She was sitting in the rocking chair feeding Imani.
“Would you shoot somebody over Imani?” Eddie said, cool as shit, knowing Joyce would do anything for Imani.
Joyce ran her hand gently over Imani’s head and looked at Eddie.
“You win,” she said.
Eddie put his hand on her shoulder lightly. “I’ll win if you never have to use it.”
• 4
once we decided what to do, everything was easy. Mack was really happy we were going to buy his hous
e. It was a continuity that he needed right then. We helped him pack up all the things he wanted to take with him, and Joyce volunteered to ship whatever he couldn’t carry easily. Eddie helped coordinate travel arrangements with Mack’s very grateful son and drove with him to the airport on the designated day of departure.
Joyce and I stayed at the house. I was boxing up his incredible collection of paperbacks when Joyce discovered a shoe box full of old photographs he’d been searching for unsuccessfully all morning.
“Look at these,” she said, spreading them out on the coffee table.
Almost all of the pictures were taken in Idlewild during its vacation-paradise heyday. There were barbecues on the patio, highballs by the lake, and dinner dances at the Lot Owners Club House. There were smiling women striking the classic one-hand-on-hip, one-hand-behind-the-head pose of bathing beauties through the ages. There were amateur anglers holding up strings of bluegills and gardeners showing off baskets of oversized summer tomatoes. There were a lot of pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Mack while their boys were growing into manhood and later, of their grandchildren.
In every shot, the black folks looked rested, relaxed, and proud to be exactly where they were. They exuded the confidence of people who know the house note will be mailed on time and the car payments are always up-to-date.
“The good old days,” I said, tying up a stack of twenty-five detective novels with the white string old people always save in their kitchen drawers.
“I wish I knew what happened to all that,” Joyce said, replacing the pictures and labeling the box to send to Mack in Detroit.
“The factories closed,” I said. “You been to Detroit lately? Nobody’s working.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Yes, it is,” I said, scooping up a stack of cowboy sagas.
“You think if all the girls in the Circus were working, their lives would be that different?” she said.
“I think if any of them were working, their lives would be that different.”
