He knew I hated him, but you see, there was this part of me that I could not shield with my hate. That part of me was the carnal side. He made my body respond to his evil touches, and then he would throw it in my face. He knew that I was trying to remain cold at his touch, but my body would respond sometimes and he would laugh at me. He would say, “How can you hate me and like what I’m doing to you at the same time? You want this as much as I do.”
To prove to me that I wanted it as much as he did, he would go days, weeks, without doing anything to me, without touching me or even leering. Those were the worst days for me. Those were the days when I hated myself. Those were the days when I contemplated taking my own life. It’s killing me to write this. I did desire him sometimes. He made my body want him. Yet I still hated him. But how could I hate him, then?
The other girls, the ones who survived through love, they survived because the love they felt made them feel sorry for their monster. It made them pity him. In their minds they were saying, “He is in such pain that he is forced to hurt me like this. He is forced to do this evil thing to me, this wickedness.” They never blamed him for it. They never blamed themselves for it. They were turning the other cheek even at that age. Thus, they never ever saw it as their fault. Unlike me, they never ever had to consider that maybe they were the cause of their own father’s evil against them.
I stabbed him finally, not because I hated him, but because I hated myself, and he knew that. As they were taking him to the hospital he was looking at me, smiling. He knew. I knew. It would be even worse after he came back from the hospital. He would own me forever. And that smile said that he knew that I knew it. I hated him, but I loved him too. That’s why we had to leave. That’s why all of those men. That’s why Brother Morrisohn. That’s why, maybe, even Elwyn. Maybe you’re right about that one. I’m still trying to find my way. I just need you to understand that what you are feeling for this man is not natural. I have been there. I know where it comes from. We can talk frankly about this. It is not you doing your own thing. It is not harmless. It is not a choice. It is evil. You have been seduced by the devil, and it is very likely my fault because I should have been more careful around you. I set a bad example. I passed on my weakness of the flesh.
I won’t be a hypocrite anymore, my dear brother, and I promise I won’t lie to you anymore. But you must be honest with me too. I must know this. You must tell me the truth about this.
Did our father ever touch you?
With Love Always,
Elaine
Mamie Girl
Mamie met him after Sunday service, as she sometimes did, down in Old Man Harbaugh’s orange groves, which were in bloom.
It was a very warm day and a good long walk through the dirt streets of Goulds, at least two miles from the tent where they’d had the church meeting, during which he had signaled to her. When she got there she was so worn out from the walk that she sat down in the shade on a small wooden bench one of the hands had left. Mamie had her Bible with her, but she was too ill at ease to open it while she waited for him to show. She sat fanning herself from the heat, worrying and waiting.
Mamie didn’t hear him come up behind her. She felt a tender hand on the side of her face and his heady shaving tonic smell mixing in with the pollen of the orange blossoms all around them, and then his lips were on hers. She kissed him hungrily, though she was nervous still. He must have felt it in her because his hands stopped roving over her dress and his lips broke away from the kiss.
She said, “I need to tell you—”
“Shusssshhh.” He pressed a finger to her lips.
She heard it then, the rumble of an engine. Somebody was driving up the lane. He backed away from her four giant steps and turned to one of the orange trees like he was inspecting it, like that was his business there, as though anyone would believe that a black man in a sharp suit and tie in 1942 would have any business inspecting orange trees.
They thought maybe it was an army truck because the soldiers, who were stationed at the base just outside Goulds, Florida, liked to use the fruit trails to practice their maneuvers—and, of course, to steal and eat the fruit straight from the branches. But the rumble turned out to belong to the engine of someone’s old beat-up Ford, and the someone turned out to be Chet Harbaugh, the owner’s oldest boy, who oversaw this section of the grove during picking time.
Chet Harbaugh slowed when he saw them and an ugly grin spread across his face as he approached. You couldn’t fool Chet about a thing like this. There was no point in even trying. He may not have had the brain power to keep up with his schooling, but he sure understood the ways of black folk, he claimed. He was all of sixteen with a lean, hairless face dusted with freckles and a dark olive-colored army cap on his head that he got from one of the soldiers. In the back of the truck, the long neck of the bass fiddle he played at the local dances could be seen sticking up. Chet leaned out of the open window of the slow-moving Ford and tipped his army hat. “Top of the mornin to you there, Sister Mamie. I see you’re catchin a good shade in my trees. There’ll be plenty of oranges enough for you to pick when the season comes. Don’t you worry none about it.”
Mamie shook her head at him. “Mornin to you, Mr. Chet.”
Chet cackled and called to the man in the sharp suit, “Top of the mornin to you too there, Rev. I see you’re out here smellin all the pretty flowers and whatnot. Turn around so I can talk to you.”
Chet further engaged the brakes on his old Ford and it groaned to a stop.
Buford Morrisohn turned around to face him.
“My, my, my, that’s one fine suit you got on there. Then again, that’s one fine gal you got there too. Prettiest one I ever seen you with, am I right, Rev?”
“Yes, Mr. Chet,” Buford said.
“How’s the wife?” asked Chet, his blue-gray eyes twinkling with mischief.
“She’s just fine.”
“That’s good. She at home, I suppose?”
“I believe so, Mr. Chet.”
“And you’re out here with this one. Ain’t this that preacher lady?” Chet nodded his head, like my, oh my, you black people are something else. “Well, I’ll be pushing off now, Rev. Don’t you all go messin with my trees, now hear? If I find any of my buds missing, I’m gonna know who to come after.”
Chet drove off slowly down the dirt track and when they couldn’t hear his engine anymore, Buford came and put his arms around her and kissed away her tears, which had begun to fall. As he held her, she knew that she would love him forever. He took her further into the grove where it was safe, and he lay her down on a bedding of leaves. He was tender and generous in his lovemaking, as he always was, but she wanted him to know how she felt, so she urged him with her hips for more. He cried out when he came with open-mouth joy.
She was quite happy now, the nervousness gone, as she got back into her dress and patted her thick mat of hair back into place under her kerchief. He lay stretched out on the ground, propped up on his elbows looking at her, chewing a blade of grass, and she felt loved. She leaned down to his face and kissed him. Then she kissed his neck and his strong shoulders. He spit out the blade of grass and pulled her down as though they might do it again in the shade of the trees. She felt so full of love that she just had to tell him.
“I love you, Buford,” she told him through a mouth stuffed with his kisses. “I will always love you.”
His hands were roving again. It felt so good. There had to be a way out of their problem. There just had to be. She did not hate Glovine, but she knew that Glovine was not his true love. This, this here, was true love. There had to be a way for them to be together. He kissed her lips. His hands went under her dress. She spread her knees for him. He knew just how to touch her so that she lost control. He was biting her neck. He was pinching the flesh between her thighs. The flesh between her thighs began to twitch.
It was at that moment that she said to him, “Buford, I am carrying your child.”
He stopp
ed kissing her. Her world stopped spinning.
“Buford.”
“You better go,” he told her with an icy stare. Then he stopped looking at her altogether.
He broke away from her and stood up. He still didn’t have his clothes on. He had a broad chest and a narrow waist and long, lean, muscular legs. His body was hard from working the fields and fruit picking and it glistened with the sweat from their loving. She took in as much of him as she could without embarrassment and then averted her eyes. She was thirty-four, yet shy as a maiden, for she had only recently been introduced to the mysteries of the body. He was forty, well respected, college educated, and married to her cousin Glovine, the daughter of her aunti.
Why had she done it? Oh Lord, why? To get this far up in years so pure and safe from sin only to make such a mistake as this.
Well, the truth is, she had always loved him. She had loved him from the day he showed up ten years ago. She hadn’t been so old back then and she made a vow to herself as soon as she saw him: if this one comes to court me, I will accept. His passion for the Lord equals mine.
But this thing between them—this illicit but so wonderful love—they had been sharing it now for three months. It started right after the cane season ended. It had come on the night of fire and brimstone when Buford had preached the house down and Mamie, who had no professional musical training but had been blessed with a musical ear from the Lord, had been mashing the piano keys like she had thirty fingers. It was the mightiest tent meeting ever in these parts. Close to fifty had been saved, plus four white people. The Holy Spirit was going to and fro throughout the earth. But the devil was too.
Their hands touched as they were rejoicing outside the tent at the end of the service, which had gone way beyond midnight. Their hands touched and they knew. Well, Mamie had always known. She had been carrying Buford in her heart for ten years, but he hadn’t even noticed her. How could he? How could any man notice her with her beautiful, bright-skinned cousin Glovine around? Yet that night when their hands touched, Buford knew it too. They kissed as brother and sister in the Lord, but that first kiss let the devil in. They fled the tent and the presence of the Lord for a place where they could be alone. When they kissed again it was in the murky, midnight darkness in the field of harvested cane. When they kissed again, Mamie began to know the mysteries of love between a man and a woman that had been kept from her all of her life. They were Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They were the songs in Song of Solomon. They were fornicators and adulterers in a field of cane.
Oh why, Lord, why?
How could the Lord allow this to happen to them of all people?
She blamed it on the devil and on her music, and she never played an instrument again. Buford, for his part, did not pass blame. He refused to give what they were doing a name. He preferred to refer to it as this thing.
Now he was dismissing her: “Get on up from here and go, woman. Leave me alone.”
“I love you,” said Mamie, looking up at him desperately.
He was hauling on his underwear, which was bright white and starched. His sharp dark suit that he had folded so neatly and set in the branches of one of the trees, he now pulled down angrily. He stepped into his pants. He put on and buttoned his white shirt and then fastened his tie with quick, nimble fingers. He said, “All I sacrifice for this church. I don’t have to live down here and take this. Had the Klan come to my house. Had white men box me on the face because I have an education. But I stay—I don’t run away—I stay. Because things have got to change, and this is the thanks I get. I thought you were different, Mamie girl. I believed in you, but you’re just like the rest of them. I can’t believe you would do this to me.”
“Buford, what did I do? I only told you that I am pregnant. I would never hurt you. I know it is my fault. I know it,” she said, climbing to her feet. She tried to put her arms around him, but he pushed her away. He was so angry he was shedding tears.
“Trying to trap me.”
“No, Buford. I love you.”
“Messing up my marriage. Messing up my good name.”
“I would never.”
He put up his hands. “I’ve got to go, Mamie. If you, of all people, are going to stab me in the back like this, then I’ve got to go.”
“I’m not stabbing you. I love you.”
He studied her face, then. Was she telling the truth? He said, “The truth is, I love you too.” He seemed weak. He groaned from somewhere deep in his soul. He went and held onto a tree with one hand for support. “But Glovine—oh, poor Glovine.”
She was crying now too. “I had never been with a man before. I had never been with anybody but you. The devil got ahold of me.”
He said, “What are you going to do? What are you going to do to me, Mamie, now that I am at your complete mercy?”
She put her hand in his. “I won’t hurt you.”
She had no other choice because she loved him. She opened her arms, and he let her hold him. She led him away from the tree, and they sat down upon the bed of leaves where she found her Bible. She set the Bible in her lap and they read it together, and he promised to love her, and she, of course, would always love only him, and they confessed their sins to each other, and they promised to sin no more.
Afterward, she felt better, though she was afraid of what it was going to be like to go it alone. Of course, he could not leave his wife. That would be a sin. Of course, he could not leave South Florida—he had to be here to fight the fight for the Faithful. Of course, he could not leave—she would never see him again if he left, and she did not want that to happen. These are the wages of her sin. She would have to raise the child alone and never name the father, for she loved this great man of God.
And if there should ever come a day when, God forbid, Sister Glovine should die, then he would marry her, his true love, he promised. This is what he told her sitting in the shade of the orange grove in bloom, and she believed him.
It was going to be hard. But she would do it, because she loved him and she believed him.
She would be a scorned woman because she had made so many enemies in the church through her fervent evangelism for the Lord. Now her enemies would punish her indeed—but only for a while, the Lord only lets His children suffer for a while. It was going to be hard, but Mamie would bear it for the God she served and the man she loved. Furthermore, she would have a child to love her and to remind her of their covenant.
She would wait, then, upon the Lord to fix the things that her own sinful nature had messed up. She would suffer as she deserved to, and she would wait. Good things come to those who wait upon the Lord. And Mamie loved Buford more than anything in the world. He was her good thing.
Thus, Mamie Culpepper sat talking with Buford Morrisohn on their bed of leaves in the grove in Goulds until the sun had moved to the west and their shadows were growing long. They had been talking for more than two hours. They had to leave soon or risk being missed. She did not want to let go of his hand. But she knew that she must. She looked into his handsome face and she saw the hope for her future. She looked into his handsome face and she saw love. His face made a slight movement and she thought that he was leaning toward her for a kiss, and so she leaned into him, hoping to be kissed one last time until the Lord shed His Grace upon them.
But Buford was not about to kiss her—he had just come up with an idea that he wanted to share with her.
So Mamie leaned in to receive what was not a kiss, but an open mouth from out of which Buford said, “I got a poem for you, Mamie girl. It just came into my head for you.”
And he spoke the poem to her.
The words were King David beautiful as she listened to them but not too easy to figure out. There were parts in it that made her think it was about the hardness of hearts that have turned away from God, and something about a long journey on a narrow and twisting road in eternal darkness, and one part about love between hellfire and gentle rain. She did not quite understand it completel
y, but it made her very sad.
He said to her, “What do you think?”
She said, “It’s beautiful.”
And he took her in his arms and kissed her.
Though they had already been away from their people for too long, he undressed her and made love to her tenderly once again. This time his loving did not make her cry out in joy, but filled her with a sadness that was more perplexing than even his poetic words.
Covenant of the Lord
When Mamie got home, the Holy Spirit hit her with a heavy, vengeful hand and knocked her down to the floor where she received a vision from the Lord, which was the interpretation of Buford’s poem.
They were two angels so bright and fair that she had to shield her eyes with her hand. One held up a sacred scroll, the other a golden sword. She thought the one with the sword would strike her, for there was wrath on his countenance, but when she looked again she saw that behind the first two angels was another, the Angel Beautiful, and his face calmed her soul. He came and stood between the first two and he spoke these words of truth: “His heart is hard. Your journey is long. The Lord will not suffer the fire to consume the rain.”
With that, the three angels ascended into the heavens and disappeared from sight.
Mamie cried out, “Praise the Lord! Praise ye the Lord!”
The next day, bright and early, just as the Lord had promised, there came a knock on the door and Mamie met Private Cooper.
And she was ready for him because she had understood the vision to mean: the Lord will provide a father for the child.
The fire (the ministry) was Buford’s passion.
The rain (tears from the pain of childbearing) was her passion.
The father for the child was this good-looking man at the door (with his hat in his hand).
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