You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down Page 3

  “I began to hate Mama. We argued about Bubba all the time, for months. And I still slipped out to meet him, because Mama had to work. I told him how she beat me, and about how much she despised him—he was really pissed off that any black person could despise him—and about how she had these spells.… Well, the day I became seventeen, the day of my seventeenth birthday, I signed papers in his law office, and I had my mother committed to an insane asylum.

  “After Mama had been in Carthage Insane Asylum for three months, she managed somehow to get a lawyer. An old slick-headed man who smoked great big black cigars. People laughed at him because he didn’t even have a law office, but he was the only lawyer that would touch the case, because Bubba’s daddy was such a big deal. And we all gathered in the judge’s chambers—because he wasn’t about to let this case get out. Can you imagine, if it had? And Mama’s old lawyer told the judge how Bubba’s daddy had tried to buy him off. And Bubba got up and swore he’d never touched me. And then I got up and said Mama was insane. And do you know what? By that time it was true. Mama was insane. She had no mind left at all. They had given her shock treatments or something.… God knows what else they gave her. But she was as vacant as an empty eye socket. She just sat sort of hunched over, and her hair was white.

  “And after all this, Bubba wanted us to keep going together. Mama was just an obstacle that he felt he had removed. But I just suddenly—in a way I don’t even pretend to understand—woke up. It was like everything up to then had been some kind of dream. And I told him I wanted to get Mama out. But he wouldn’t do it; he just kept trying to make me go with him. And sometimes—out of habit, I guess—I did. My body did what it was being paid to do. And Mama died. And I killed Bubba.

  “How did I get away with killing one of the biggest lawyers in the state? It was easy. He kept a gun in his desk drawer at the office and one night I took it out and shot him. I shot him while he was wearing his thick winter overcoat, so I wouldn’t have to see him bleed. But I don’t think I took the time to wipe off my fingerprints, because, to tell the truth, I couldn’t stand it another minute in that place. No one came after me, and I read in the paper the next day that he’d been killed by burglars. I guess they thought ‘burglars’ had stolen all that money Bubba kept in his safe—but I had it. One of the carrots Bubba always dangled before me was that he was going to send me to college: I didn’t see why he shouldn’t do it.

  “The strangest thing was, Bubba’s wife came over to the house and asked me if I’d mind looking after the children while she went to Bubba’s funeral. I did it, of course, because I was afraid she’d suspect something if I didn’t. So on the day he was buried I was in his house, sitting on his wife’s bed with his children, and eating fried chicken his wife, Julie, had cooked.”

  Elethia

  A CERTAIN PERVERSE EXPERIENCE shaped Elethia’s life, and made it possible for it to be true that she carried with her at all times a small apothecary jar of ashes.

  There was in the town where she was born a man whose ancestors had owned a large plantation on which everything under the sun was made or grown. There had been many slaves, and though slavery no longer existed, this grandson of former slaveowners held a quaint proprietary point of view where colored people were concerned. He adored them, of course. Not in the present—it went without saying—but at that time, stopped, just on the outskirts of his memory: his grandfather’s time.

  This man, whom Elethia never saw, opened a locally famous restaurant on a busy street near the center of town. He called it “Old Uncle Albert’s.” In the window of the restaurant was a stuffed likeness of Uncle Albert himself, a small brown dummy of waxen skin and glittery black eyes. His lips were intensely smiling and his false teeth shone. He carried a covered tray in one hand, raised level with his shoulder, and over his other arm was draped a white napkin.

  Black people could not cat at Uncle Albert’s, though they worked, of course, in the kitchen. But on Saturday afternoons a crowd of them would gather to look at “Uncle Albert” and discuss how near to the real person the dummy looked. Only the very old people remembered Albert Porter, and their eyesight was no better than their memory. Still there was a comfort somehow in knowing that Albert’s likeness was here before them daily and that if he smiled as a dummy in a fashion he was not known to do as a man, well, perhaps both memory and eyesight were wrong.

  The old people appeared grateful to the rich man who owned the restaurant for giving them a taste of vicarious fame. They could pass by the gleaming window where Uncle Albert stood, seemingly in the act of sprinting forward with his tray, and know that though niggers were not allowed in the front door, ole Albert was already inside, and looking mighty pleased about it, too.

  For Elethia the fascination was in Uncle Albert’s fingernails. She wondered how his creator had got them on. She wondered also about the white hair that shone so brightly under the lights. One summer she worked as a salad girl in the restaurant’s kitchen, and it was she who discovered the truth about Uncle Albert. He was not a dummy; he was stuffed. Like a bird, like a moose’s head, like a giant bass. He was stuffed.

  One night after the restaurant was closed someone broke in and stole nothing but Uncle Albert. It was Elethia and her friends, boys who were in her class and who called her “Thia.” Boys who bought Thunderbird and shared it with her. Boys who laughed at her jokes so much they hardly remembered she was also cute. Her tight buddies. They carefully burned Uncle Albert to ashes in the incinerator of their high school, and each of them kept a bottle of his ashes. And for each of them what they knew and their reaction to what they knew was profound.

  The experience undercut whatever solid foundation Elethia had assumed she had. She became secretive, wary, looking over her shoulder at the slightest noise. She haunted the museums of any city in which she found herself, looking, usually, at the remains of Indians, for they were plentiful everywhere she went. She discovered some of the Indian warriors and maidens in the museums were also real, stuffed people, painted and wigged and robed, like figures in the Rue Morgue. There were so many, in fact, that she could not possibly steal and burn them all. Besides, she did not know if these figures—with their valiant glass eyes—would wish to be burned.

  About Uncle Albert she felt she knew.

  What kind of man was Uncle Albert?

  Well, the old folks said, he wasn’t nobody’s uncle and wouldn’t sit still for nobody to call him that, either.

  Why, said another old-timer, I recalls the time they hung a boy’s privates on a post at the end of the street where all the black folks shopped, just to scare us all, you understand, and Albert Porter was the one took ’em down and buried ’em. Us never did find the rest of the boy though. It was just like always—they would throw you in the river with a big old green log tied to you, and down to the bottom you sunk.

  He continued:

  Albert was born in slavery and he remembered that his mama and daddy didn’t know nothing about slavery’d done ended for near ’bout ten years, the boss man kept them so ignorant of the law, you understand. So he was a mad so-an’-so when he found out. They used to beat him severe trying to make him forget the past and grin and act like a nigger. (Whenever you saw somebody acting like a nigger, Albert said, you could be sure he seriously disremembered his past.) But he never would. Never would work in the big house as head servant, neither—always broke up stuff. The master at that time was always going around pinching him too. Looks like he hated Albert more than anything—but he never would let him get a job anywhere else. And Albert never would leave home. Too stubborn.

  Stubborn, yes. My land, another one said. That’s why it do seem strange to see that dummy that sposed to be ole Albert with his mouth open. All them teeth. Hell, all Albert’s teeth was knocked out before he was grown.

  Elethia went away to college and her friends went into the army because they were poor and that was the way things were. They discovered Uncle Alberts all over the world. Elethia was especially
disheartened to find Uncle Alberts in her textbooks, in the newspapers and on t.v.

  Everywhere she looked there was an Uncle Albert (and many Aunt Albertas, it goes without saying).

  But she had her jar of ashes, the old-timers’ memories written down, and her friends who wrote that in the army they were learning skills that would get them through more than a plate glass window.

  And she was careful that, no matter how compelling the hype, Uncle Alberts, in her own mind, were not permitted to exist.

  The Lover

  For Joanne

  HER HUSBAND had wanted a child and so she gave him one as a gift, because she liked her husband and admired him greatly. Still, it had taken a lot out of her, especially in the area of sexual response. She had never been particularly passionate with him, not even during the early years of their marriage; it was more a matter of being sexually comfortable. After the birth of the child she simply never thought of him sexually at all. She supposed their marriage was better than most, even so. He was a teacher at a University near their home in the Midwest and cared about his students—which endeared him to her, who had had so many uncaring teachers; and toward her own work, which was poetry (that she set very successfully to jazz), he showed the utmost understanding and respect.

  She was away for two months at an artists’ colony in New England and that is where she met Ellis, whom she immediately dubbed, once she had got over thinking he resembled (with his top lip slightly raised over his right eyetooth when he smiled) a wolf, “The Lover.” They met one evening before dinner as she was busy ignoring the pompous bullshit of a fellow black poet, a man many years older than she who had no concept of other people’s impatience. He had been rambling on about himself for over an hour and she had at first respectfully listened because she was the kind of person whose adult behavior—in a situation like this—reflected her childhood instruction; and she was instructed as a child, to be polite.

  She was always getting herself stuck in one-sided conversations of this sort because she was—the people who talked to her seemed to think—an excellent listener. She was, up to a point. She was genuinely interested in older artists in particular and would sit, entranced, as they spun out their tales of art and lust (the gossip, though old, was delicious!) of forty years ago.

  But there had been only a few of these artists whose tales she had listened to until the end. For as soon as a note of bragging entered into the conversation—a famous name dropped here, an expensive Paris restaurant’s menu dropped there, and especially the names of the old artist’s neglected books and on what occasion the wretched creature had insulted this or that weasel of a white person—her mind began to turn about upon itself until it rolled out some of her own thoughts to take the place of the trash that was coming in.

  And so it was on that evening before dinner. The old poet—whose work was exceedingly mediocre, and whose only attractions, as far as she was concerned, were his age and his rather bitter wit—fastened his black, bloodshot eyes upon her (in which she read desperation and a prayer of unstrenuous seduction) and held her to a close attention to his words. Except that she had perfected the trick—as had many of her contemporaries who hated to be rude and who, also, had a strong sense of self-preservation (because the old poet, though, she thought, approaching senility, was yet a powerful figure in black literary circles and thought nothing of using his considerable influence to thwart the careers of younger talents)—of keeping her face quite animated and turned full on to the speaker, while inside her head she could be trying out the shades of paint with which to improve the lighting of her house. In fact, so intense did her concentration appear, it seemed she read the speaker’s lips.

  Ellis, who would be her lover, had come into the room and sat down on a chair by the fire. For although it was the middle of summer, a fire was needed against the chilly New England evenings.

  “Have you been waiting long?” he asked.

  And it suddenly occurred to her that indeed she had.

  “But of course,” she answered absently, noting the crooked smile that reminded her of a snarling, though not disagreeable, wolf—and turned back just as the old poet jealously reached out his hand to draw her attention to the, for him, hilarious ending of his story. She laughed and slapped her knee, a gesture of such fraudulent folksiness that she was soon laughing in earnest. Catching Ellis’s eye as she thus amused herself she noticed therein a particular gleam that she instantly recognized.

  “My lover,” she thought, noticing for the first time his head of blue-black curls, his eyes as brown as the Mississippi, his skin that was not as successfully tanned as it might have been but which would definitely do. He was thin and tall, with practically no hips in the beige twill jeans he wore.

  At dinner they sat together, looking out at the blue New England mountains in the distance, as the sun left tracings of orange and pink against the pale blue sky. He had heard she’d won some sort of prize—a prestigious one—for her “jazzed-up” poetry, and the way he said it made her glance critically at his long fingers wrapped around his wine glass. She wondered if they would be as sensitive on her skin as they looked. She had never heard of him, though she did not say so, probably because he had already said it for her. He talked a good deal—easily and early—about himself, and she was quite relaxed—even entertained—in her listener’s role.

  He wondered what, if anything, younger poets like herself had to say, since he was of the opinion that not much was learned about life until the middle years. He was in his forties. Of course he didn’t look it, but he was much older than she, he said, and the reason that he was not better known was because he could not find a publisher for his two novels (still, by the way, unpublished—in case she knew publishers) or for his poetry, which an acquaintance of his had compared to something or other by Montaigne.

  “You’re lovely,” he said into the brief silence.

  “And you seem bright,” she automatically replied.

  She had blocked him out since his mention of the two unpublished novels. By the time he began complaining about the preferential treatment publishers now gave minorities and women she was on the point of yawning or gazing idly about the room. But she did not do either for a very simple reason: when she had first seen him she had thought—after the wolf thing—“my lover,” and had liked, deep down inside, the illicit sound of it. She had never had a lover; he would be her first. Afterwards, she would be truly a woman of her time. She also responded to his curly hair and slim, almost nonexistent hips, in a surprisingly passionate way.

  She was a woman who, after many tribulations in her life, few of which she ever discussed even with close friends, had reached the point of being generally pleased with herself. This self-acceptance was expressed in her eyes, which were large, dark and clear and which, more often than not, seemed predisposed to smile. Though not tall, her carriage gave the illusion of height, as did her carefully selected tall sandals and her naturally tall hair, which stood in an elegant black afro with exactly seven strands of silver hair—of which she was very proud (she was just thirty-one)—shining across the top. She wore long richly colored skirts that—when she walked—parted without warning along the side, and exposed a flash of her creamy brown thigh, and legs that were curvaceous and strong. If she came late to the dining room and stood in the doorway a moment longer than necessary—looking about for a place to sit after she had her tray—for that moment the noise from the cutlery already in use was still.

  What others minded at the Colony—whether too many frogs in the frog pond (which was used for swimming) or not enough wine with the veal (there was talk of cutting out wine with meals altogether, and thereby ending a fine old Colony tradition!)—she did not seem to mind. She seemed open, bright, occasionally preoccupied, but always ready with an appreciative ear, or at times a humorous, if outdated joke of her own (which she nevertheless told with gusto and found funny herself, because she would laugh and laugh at it, regardless of what her listene
rs did). She seemed never to strain over her work, and literally never complained about its progress—or lack thereof. It was as if she worked only for herself, for her own enjoyment (or salvation) and was—whether working or simply thinking of working—calm about it.

  Even the distraction caused by the birth of her child was a price she was, ultimately, prepared to pay. She did not intend to have a second one, after all—that would be too stupid—and this one would, before she knew it, be grown up enough for boarding school.

  Relishing her short freedom during the summer as much as she contemplated enjoyment of her longer future one, she threw herself headlong into the interim relationship with Ellis, a professional lover of mainly older women artists who came to the Colony every year to work and play.

  A New York Jew of considerable charm, intellectual pettiness, and so vast and uncritical a love of all things European it struck one as an illness (and who hated Brooklyn—where he had grown up—his parents, Jewish culture, and all he had observed of black behavior in New York City), Ellis found the listening silence of “the dark woman,” as he euphemistically called her, restorative—after his endless evenings with talkative women who wrote for Esquire and the New York Times. Such women made it possible for him to be included in the proper tennis sets and swimming parties at the Colony—in which he hoped to meet contacts who would help his career along—but they were also driven to examine each and every one of their own thoughts aloud. His must be the attentive ear, since they had already “made it” and were comfortable exposing their own charming foibles to him, while he, not having made it yet, could afford to expose nothing that might discourage their assistance in his behalf.

  It amused and thrilled him to almost hear the “click” when his eyes met those of the jazz poet. “Sex,” he thought. And, “rest.”

  Of course he mistook her intensity.