The Third Life of Grange Copeland Read online

  His dreams to go North, to see the world, to give Mem even the smallest things she wanted from life died early. And in his depression he saw in his submissive, accepting wife a snare and a pitfall. He returned to Josie for comfort after his “mistake” and for money to pay his rent, leaving Mem to carry on the struggle for domestic survival any way she chose and was able to manage. He moved them about from shack to shack, wherever he could get work. When cotton declined in Georgia and dairying rose, he tried dairying. They lived somehow.

  Over the years they reached, what they would have called when they were married, an impossible, and unbelievable decline. Brownfield beat his once lovely wife now, regularly, because it made him feel, briefly, good. Every Saturday night he beat her, trying to pin the blame for his failure on her by imprinting it on her face; and she, inevitably, repaid him by becoming a haggard automatous witch, beside whom even Josie looked well-preserved.

  The tender woman he married he set out to destroy. And before he destroyed her he was determined to change her. And change her he did. He was her Pygmalion in reverse. The first thing he started on was her speech. They had begun their marriage with her correcting him, but after a very short while this began to wear on him. He could not stand to be belittled at home after coming from a job that required him to respond to all orders from a stooped position. When she kindly replaced an “is” for an “are” he threw her correction in her face.

  “Why don’t you talk like the rest of us poor niggers?” he said to her. “Why do you always have to be so damn proper? Whether I says ‘is’ or ‘ain’t’ ain’t no damn humping off your butt.”

  In company he embarrassed her. When she opened her mouth to speak he turned with a bow to their friends, who thankfully spoke a language a man could understand, and said, “Hark, mah lady speaks, lets us dumb niggers listen!” Mem would turn ashen with shame, and tried to keep her mouth closed thereafter. But silence was not what Brownfield was after, either. He wanted her to talk, but to talk like what she was, a hopeless nigger woman who got her ass beat every Saturday night. He wanted her to sound like a woman who deserved him.

  He could not stand having his men friends imply she was too good for him.

  “Man, how did you git hold of that schoolteacher?” they asked him enviously, looking at his bleached and starched clothing and admiring the great quantities of liquor he could drink.

  “Give this old blacksnake to her,” he said, rubbing himself indecently, exposing his secret life to the streets, “and then I beats her ass. Only way to treat a nigger woman!”

  For a woman like Mem, who had so barely escaped the “culture of poverty,” a slip back into that culture was the easiest thing in the world. First to please her husband, and then because she honestly could not recall her nouns and verbs, her plurals and singulars, Mem began speaking once more in her old dialect. The starch of her speech simply went out of her and what came out of her mouth sagged, just as what had come out of her ancestors sagged. Except that where their speech had been beautiful because it was all they knew and a part of them without thinking about it, hers came out flat and ugly, like a tongue broken and trying to mend itself from desperation.

  “Where all them books and things from the schoolhouse?” Brownfield asked one day when he wanted to see if she’d learned her place.

  “I done burned ’em up,” she said, without turning from a large rat hole she was fixing in the bedroom floor.

  For a moment he felt a pang of something bitter, as if he had tasted the bottom of something black and vile, but to cover this feeling he chuckled.

  “I were just lookin’ for something to start up a fire with.”

  “Take these here magazines,” she said tonelessly, pulling some True Confessions from under her dress. She thought he had seen the bulge of them under her arm, but he hadn’t. He reached out a hand for them and with a sigh she relinquished all that she had been to all she would become now.

  Everything about her he changed, not to suit him, for she had suited him when they were married. He changed her to something he did not want, could not want, and that made it easier for him to treat her in the way he felt she deserved. He had never had sympathy for ugly women. A fellow with an ugly wife can ignore her, he reasoned. It helped when he had to beat her too.

  There was a time when she saved every cent she was allowed to keep from her wages as a domestic because she wanted, someday, to buy a house. That was her big dream. When she was teaching school they both had saved pennies to buy the house, but when he was angry and drunk he stole the money and bought a pig from some friends of his who promised him the pig was a registered boar and would be his start in making money as a pig breeder. Mem cried when he came home broke, with the pig. Then the pig died. The second time she saved money to buy the house he used it for the down payment on a little red car. She was furious, but more than furious, unable to comprehend that all her moves upward and toward something of their own would be checked by him. In the end, as with the pig, his luck was bad and the finance company took the car.

  The children—there were two living, three had died—did not get anything for Christmas that year. On Christmas Eve they sat around and watched him until he ran out of the house to see if Josie would give him money for a drink. When he got home he woke the children and cried over them, but when he saw they were afraid of him he blamed Mem. When she tried to defend herself by telling him the children were just frightened of him because he was drunk he beat her senseless. That was the first time he knocked out a tooth. He knocked out one and loosened one or two more.

  She wanted to leave him, but there was no place to go. She had no one but Josie and Josie despised her. She wrote to her father, whom she had never seen, and he never bothered to answer the letter. From a plump woman she became skinny. To Brownfield she didn’t look like a woman at all. Even her wonderful breasts dried up and shrank; her hair fell out and the only good thing he could say for her was that she kept herself clean. He berated her for her cleanliness, but, because it was a small thing, and because at times she did seem to have so little, he did not hit her for it.

  “I ain’t hurting you none,” she said, pleading with something in him he kept almost suppressed, and he let the matter drop.

  “Just remember you ain’t white,” he said, even while hating with all his heart the women he wanted and did not want his wife to imitate. He liked to sling the perfection of white women at her because color was something she could not change and as his own colored skin annoyed him he meant for hers to humble her.

  He did not make her ashamed of being black though, no matter what he said. She had a simple view of that part of life. Color was something the ground did to flowers, and that was an end to it.

  Being forced to move from one sharecropper’s cabin to another was something she hated. She hated the arrogance of the white men who put them out, for one reason or another, without warning or explanation. She hated leaving a home she’d already made and fixed up with her own hands. She hated leaving her flowers, which she always planted whenever she got her hands on flower seeds. Each time she stepped into a new place, with its new, and usually bigger rat holes, she wept. Each time she had to clean cow manure out of a room to make it habitable for her children, she looked as if she had been dealt a death blow. Each time she was forced to live in a house that was enclosed in a pasture with cows and animals eager to eat her flowers before they were planted, she became like a woman walking through a dream, but a woman who had forgotten what it is to wake up. She slogged along, ploddingly, like a cow herself, for the sake of the children. Her mildness became stupor; then her stupor became horror, desolation and, at last, hatred.

  Strangely, Brownfield could bear her hatred less than her desolation. In fact, he rather enjoyed her desolation because in it she had no hopes. She was weak, totally without view, without a sky. He was annoyed when she despised him because out of her hatred she fought back, with words, never with blows, and always for the children. But
coming from her, even words disrupted the harmony of despair in which they lived.

  For Brownfield, moving about at the whim of a white boss was just another example of the fact that his life, as it was destined, had “gone haywire,” and he could do nothing about it. He jumped when the crackers said jump, and left his welfare up to them. He no longer had, as his father had maintained, even the desire to run away from them. He had no faith that any other place would be better. He fitted himself to the slot in which he found himself; for fun he poured oil into streams to kill the fish and tickled his vanity by drowning cats.

  15

  EACH SATURDAY EVENING; Brownfield was at the Dew Drop Inn lounge. Josie welcomed him; it was like home. Having been lovers they were now much more. They were comrades. They shared confidences. Lorene had migrated North, and Josie ran the lounge alone, except for two very young and talented girls who had Lorene’s old room.

  Brownfield and Josie spent a great deal of time talking. About Mem and her self-righteousness, about Brownfield’s error in marrying her, and about Josie and her fears and dreams and the cruel tricks fate had played on her. They talked of Josie’s driving will to survive and to overcome. Her need to avenge herself on those who wronged her. They talked about Brownfield, about how numb he felt when he allowed himself a fleeting remembrance of his mother. They talked about Margaret and her bastard baby, Star. They talked for hours and hours about Grange.

  “Your mammy was a fool, boy. Thinkin’ she could keep Grange by making him jealous of other mens,” Josie’s chin shook the slightest bit.

  “You tried the same thing,” said Brownfield, “in his absence. Or do you plan to tell me I got the job here just ’cause you liked my face?”

  “Oh, but I weren’t tryin to make Grange jealous,” said Josie.

  “No?”

  “No.” Josie’s chin fairly quivered. “I were tryin’ to kill the son of a bitch!”

  For some reason Brownfield laughed. “It wouldn’t have killed him, seeing you with me. He never cared no more for me than a stranger.”

  “You don’t understand yet how the thing go, do you?”

  “I know enough.”

  “Ain’t you the lucky one, then,” said Josie. “Now set down and listen.”

  Brownfield sat down in a familiar blue chair, facing Josie, who was propped up in bed.

  “It was some weeks before you come,” said Josie, “that me and Grange made all our plans to leave Georgia. We was goin’ up to New York. To Harlem, the black folks’ city, where we owns everything! Ain’t that something? We was goin’ to go away and never come back. You may wonder what I was planning to do with Lorene,” she said, looking at Brownfield. “Well, just between you and me, I was goin’ to dump Lorene. She been a chain round my neck long enough. If it hadn’t been for her me and your daddy would have been together in the first place. Grange and me started goin’ to church them weeks he was here. And I want you to know he promised me he was goin’ to take me with him; and then he sneaked off and I ain’t seen him from that day to this one!”

  Josie leaned her head back against the pillows, her eyes on the ceiling. In a minute, in a lower, more careless voice, she continued.

  “Oh, Grange and me goes back a long ways. Since way before you was born. Way before he even met your mama.”

  Brownfield was not surprised. He had waited to know this part of his father’s life.

  “Where you keep yourself all that time?” he asked. “I never heard nobody at home talk about no Josie.”

  “You remember tellin’ me ’bout that fat yellow bitch your mammy use to mention?”

  “You don’t mean …” said Brownfield, still not very surprised.

  “Nobody else but.” Josie wore a red silk kimono with blue and purple dragons on the sleeves. She ran a pudgy hand down into the cleavage of her dress.

  “Lemme tell you,” she said, “Grange never would have married Margaret if he hadn’t been pushed into it by his damn ‘respectable’ family. His African Methodist Episcopal brothers and they mealy-bosomed wives couldn’t stand the thoughts of having me in the family; I weren’t good enough for him. Never mind I built up a establishment with my own hands and figured out how to git rich with my own brain. I still wasn’t good enough. Nothing would do the family but that your daddy marry Margaret. The only thing she had that I didn’t have was a unused pussy. But it didn’t stop me and Grange from being together. He didn’t have the heart to leave your mammy outright. But every Saturday evening, by the dock, you could find Grange Copeland right where you is now.”

  “So he come here, and you took … care of him?” The chair he was sitting in felt uncomfortable. Brownfield got up and paced.

  “Yes,” said Josie, proudly. “I took care of him, ’cause he was mine. I didn’t pity your mammy one bit.”

  “Mama was okay,” said Brownfield. “At least she put herself out of the way. I wondered why she done it like that. Looked like to me at the time she knowed something I didn’t.”

  “She knowed plenty,” Josie sneered. “Knowed she wouldn’t do for your daddy what Fat Josie would do. You think she could come up with any idees of how to git Grange out of debt? And with half the men in the county after her tail? The thought never crossed her mind! Then, when it did strike her, she forgot to charge! Shit.”

  “Well,” said Brownfield, embarrassed, “it been ten years almost since he left here. Long enough for me to done run up on you, run away from you, and run back to you.” He turned to face her, seeing the new gray hair she had not had time to blacken, seeing the deepened wrinkles everywhere.

  “You might as well stop sleepin’ with me,” he said softly, feeling so grown up and knowledgeable he could hardly bear it. “Grange ain’t coming back. If you still want to give him a little shock you got to go all the way up Norse to do it. I ain’t no good to you.”

  Josie read the sickness in his eyes.

  “But, lover’—she smiled maternally, loosening her robe and coming to hold him—”ain’t you found out yet that I also likes you for yourself ?”

  16

  AS THE YEARS PASSED, Brownfield got in the habit of thinking of Grange as someone he had never closely known. He didn’t refer to him as Father, but as Grange. This made Josie seem not such a burden and lessened the feeling Brownfield often had that Josie had made a fool of him, pretending she cared for him, a boy whose manhood meant only one thing and went easily to his head, when all the time she was eating her heart out for Grange.

  He would never forget Josie’s face the night Grange returned to Baker County. How fear, self-condemnation, guilt and joy flushed through her as she hastily pushed Brownfield away; pushed him away as if he were as odious as a toad, as inconsequential as some kind of harmless lizard. For all her boasting that she wanted to “kill” Grange, she would have spared him that moment if it cost her her life. Brownfield wanted one day to see her damned for that stricken and guilty look on her face.

  They had been lolling on the bed, rubbing and feeling each other, Josie in her slip. They were speaking of their insatiable passion for each other, a subject they brought up whenever he became impotent with her. He was often unable, after Mem, to make love to Josie; the thought of Mem and her perpetual tired grayness shriveled him up. He and Josie talked about their passion, about the old days, and Josie made up lies to tell him about Mem. And sometimes, by pretending to believe something nasty about his wife, something lowdown enough to go home and beat her about, he could succeed in making love to Josie. Josie didn’t care how she got his passion up, she just wanted it up. With him covering her she released her mind from its memories of betrayals; she forgot the terrors of her recurring dream, and she entered a world of gentleness and contentment. Her face became that of a pure and guileless fat girl; she was innocent, uncomplaining, real.

  Even so, Brownfield never really shared sex with Josie, not in the complete, sustaining way he had with Mem. Josie took and he took. She was either stirred to a single-minded vileness, whe
n she swore at him and used foul descriptive words, or she passed into a safe solitude. A solitude to which Brownfield was genuinely happy to send her, for then he thought of his screwing as an act of kindness, and he wanted to be kind. Josie’s nightmares, witnessed over the years, had moved him. The least he could do, he thought, was help her sleep.

  But that night he had had no chance to help her sleep. Grange, graying, bushy-haired, and lean as a wolf, came through the bedroom door. Curses erupted from Brownfield. His first impulse was to knock his father down. But he realized immediately, and it made him sob, that he was still afraid of him. He might still have been a child from the fear he felt. So instead of fighting his father, Brownfield cursed him and cried and left one of his socks near Josie’s bed. Grange stood against the wall near the door gazing from Brownfield to Josie and finally resting his eyes on Josie.

  Brownfield put his arms around Josie’s neck. His tears dripped onto her bosom. But Josie looked beyond him, over his shoulder; for the final time she pushed him away.

  Forgetting about Brownfield, Grange and Josie shut him out. Josie wriggled into a somber wrapper, dabbed at her neck and throat with moist hands, and looked at Grange with eyes that said she’d die on the spot if he wanted her to. As Brownfield staggered away, angry and shaken, heading for a drunk, they hardly moved, frozen by some strange commitment to each other that Brownfield had not even been aware of. They did not fear him, for all his threats. Nor did he seem to matter to them in any way at all. In two weeks Grange and Josie were married.

  Part IV

  17

  VERY EARLY ON the morning of Ruth’s arrival into the world, at about five o’clock in the morning on a gray drizzly Thursday in November, Mem awakened Brownfield and asked him to get the midwife, who lived some eight miles away. Brownfield was sleeping off a drunk and could not rouse himself, although he tried, before seven o’clock, and by then Ruth had popped out by herself. Brownfield woke finally, groggy, with a sense of something new having been added, to find his wife surrounding a small bundle, shivering on the bed. His own cot, nearer to the fire than Mem’s bed, blocked the little heat that came from a smoldering hickory log in the fireplace. He was apologetic and sorry for his neglect and tried to make up for it with various cooing pleasantries directed at his small daughter, but Mem was in no mood to have Ruth subjected so soon to the foul after-aromas of puke-smelling brew.