Tar Baby

9

“THIS IS a town?” Jadine shouted. “It looks like a block. A city block. In Queens.”

“Hush up,” he said squeezing her waist. “This is not only a town, it’s the county seat. We call it the city.”

“This is Eloe?”

“No. This is Poncie. Eloe is a little town. We got fourteen miles to go yet.”

Now she understood why he wanted to rent a car and drive to Florida. There was no way to fly to Eloe. They had to go to Tallahassee or Pensacola, then get a bus or train to Poncie, then bum a ride to Eloe for no buses went out there, and as for taxis—well, he doubted if either one would take them. Bumming a ride didn’t seem to be a problem in his mind. Her luggage held all he had and when they got off the bus she saw eight or ten black men lounging there in front of the depot, as Son called it. Son talked to one of them for at least five minutes. They waited another thirty minutes at the candy machine until a black man named Carl appeared driving a four-door Plymouth.

He drove them to Eloe asking pointed questions all the way. Son said he was an army buddy of a man named Soldier—that they were out of Brewton on their way to Gainesville. Thought he’d look in on old Soldier, he said. Carl said he knew of Soldier but had never met him. He had never seen a cashmere sweater with a cowl neckline, or Chacrel boots, and didn’t know they could make jeans that tight or if they did who but a child would wear them since no honest work could be done in them. So he looked in the rear-view mirror with disbelief. Nobody dressed like that in Brewton, Alabama, and he suspected they didn’t in Montgomery either.

He followed Son’s directions and dropped them off in front of a house Jadine supposed was in Eloe since Son paid the man and got out.

“Where are the ninety houses? I see four,” asked Jadine, looking around.

“They’re here.”

“Where?”

“Spread out. Folks don’t live all crunched up together in Eloe. Come on, girl.” He picked up the luggage and, grinning like a groom, led her up the steps. A frame door was open to the still March morning. They both stood in front of a screen door through which they could see a man sitting at a table with his back to them. Son didn’t knock or move, he simply looked at the back of the man’s head. Slowly the man turned his head and stared at them. Then he got up from the table. Son opened the screen door and stepped in with Jadine just behind him. He didn’t move closer to the man; he just stopped and smiled. The man did not speak and did not smile; he kept on staring. Then he raised his hands, clenching them into fists, and began to jump up and down on both feet, stamping the floor like a kid jumping rope. Son was laughing soundlessly. A woman ran in, but the man kept on jumping—pounding the floor. The woman looked at Son and Jadine with a little confused smile. The man jumped higher and faster. Son kept watching and laughing. The man was still jumping rope, but not smiling or laughing as Son was. Finally when the stamping shook a lamp to the table’s edge and a window banged down, and the children were peering in the doorway, the man shouted at the top of his lungs Son! Son! Son! to the beat of his crazy feet, and kept on until Son grabbed his head and pressed it into his chest. “It’s me, Soldier. It’s me.”

Soldier wrenched away, looked him in the face, then ran to the back window. “Wahoo! Wahoo!” he shouted, and came back to march four-step around the room. Two men came to the front door and looked in at the marcher and then at the visitors.

“Soldier’s clownin,” said the woman.

“Soldier’s clownin,” said the children.

“Good God a’ mighty, that’s Son,” whispered one of the men. And then it stopped. Son and Soldier hit each other on the head, the hands, the shoulders.

“Who bought you them skinny shoes?”

“Where’s your hair, nigger?”

HE ASKED HER if she would mind staying at Soldier’s house with his wife, Ellen, while he went to see his father. Jadine demurred; she had run out of conversation with Ellen ten minutes after it started, but Son urged her, saying he had not seen Old Man in eight years and that he didn’t want to bring someone his father didn’t know into his house the first time they met in all that time. Could she understand that? She said yes, out in Soldier’s yard near the mimosa, but she didn’t understand at all, no more than she understood the language he was using when he talked to Soldier and Drake and Ellen and the others who stopped by; no more than she could understand (or accept) her being shunted off with Ellen and the children while the men grouped on the porch and, after a greeting, ignored her; or why he seemed so shocked and grateful at the same time by news that some woman named Brown, Sarah or Sally or Sadie—from the way they pronounced it she couldn’t tell—was dead. But she agreed. God. Eloe.

He left her there and walked alone to the house he was born in. The yellow brick front looked tiny. It had seemed so large and sturdy compared to the Sutterfield shack he and Cheyenne had—the one he drove a car through. It wasn’t as big as Ondine’s kitchen. The door was unlocked, but no one was home. In the kitchen a pepper pot was simmering, so he knew Old Man wasn’t far and wouldn’t be long. His father, Franklin G. Green, had been called Old Man since he was seven years old and when he grew up, got married, had a baby boy, the baby was called Old Man’s son until the second child was born and the first became simply Son. They all used to be here—all of them. Horace who lived in Gainesville, Frank G. who died in Korea, his sister Francine who was in a mental home in Jacksonville, and the baby girl Porky Green who still lived in Eloe, so Soldier said, but went to Florida A and M on a track scholarship. They had all been in this house together at one time—with his mother.

Only a few minutes had passed when Old Man climbed the porch steps. Son waited, standing in the middle of the room. The door opened, Old Man looked at Son and dropped his onions on the floor.

“Hey, Old Man, how you been doing?”

“Save me, you got back.”

They didn’t touch. They didn’t know how. They fooled around with the onions and each asked the other about his condition until Old Man said, “Come on in here and let me fix you something to eat. Not much in here but it ain’t like I had notice.”

“I ate something over to Soldier’s.”

“You was over there?”

“I wanted to hear about you before I came by,” said Son.

“Oh, I ain’t dead, Son. I ain’t dead,” he chuckled.

“I see you ain’t.”

“Them money orders sure helped.”

“You got them?”

“Oh, yeah. Every one. I had to use some of em though.”

“Some of em? They were all for you. Why didn’t you use them all?”

“I couldn’t do that. I didn’t want to raise no suspicions. I just cashed a few when I couldn’t help it.”

“Shit, Old Man, don’t tell me you still got some?”

“They in there.” He nodded toward one of the two bedrooms. “Porky in school, you know. I had to help her out, too.”

They went in the bedroom and Old Man took a White Owl cigar box from under his bed and opened it. There was a thin pile of envelopes bound by a rubber band; some postal money orders held together with a paper clip, and a few ten and twenty dollar bills. Eight years of envelopes.

“These were for you, Old Man. To take care of you.”

“They did. They did. But you know I didn’t want to be going over there to the Post Office every month, cashin em. Might set folks to talkin and turn the law out on account of that other business. So I just took a few in every now and then. Quiet, you know.”

“Old Man, you one crazy old man.”

“You been to Sutterfield yet?”

“No. Straight here.”

“Well, you know Sally Brown died here a while back.”

“They told me.”

“Be at peace.”

“Hope so.”

“She slept with a shotgun every night.”

“Huh.”

“Every night. Well, she burnin up down there now, her and her nasty daughter…”

“Don’t say it, Old Man.”

“Yeah. You right. Shouldn’t rile the dead. But you know I was more scared of Sally than the law.”

“So was I.”

“Law don’t care about no dead colored gal, but Sally Brown, she slept with that shotgun every night waitin for you. Made my skin crinkle to walk past her. And she just about lived in church moanin. Stopped me from vespers altogether. I couldn’t sit there listenin to her berate you. Can you feature that? Pray every Sunday and hold on to a shotgun every night?”

“Where’s the boy?”

“Gone away from here, his folks too.”

“He get his eyebrows back?”

“Never did. Guess his folks figured he couldn’t hide nowhere around here lookin like that. Sally was lookin for him too.”

“I didn’t see his face. All I saw was his asshole.”

“That didn’t have no eyebrows either I bet,”

“I should have made him some with a razor.” They laughed together then and an hour or so passed while Son told what all he’d been doing for the last eight years. It was almost four when Son said, “I didn’t come by myself.”

“You with a woman?”

“Yeah.”

“Where is she?”

“Over to Soldier’s. Can she stay here?”

“You all married?”

“No, Old Man.”

“Better take her to your Aunt Rosa’s then.”

“She won’t like that.”

“I can’t help it. You be gone. I have to live here.”

“Come on, Old Man.”

“Uh-uh. Go see your Aunt Rosa. She be mad anyway you don’t stop by.”

“Scripture don’t say anything about two single people sleeping under the same roof.” Son was laughing.

“What you know bout Scripture?”

“I could have lied and said we were married.”

“But you didn’t lie. You told the truth and so you got to live by the truth.”

“Oh, shit.”

“That’s right. Shit. She’s welcome in my house all day in the day. Bring her back so I can meet her.”

“She’s special, Old Man.”

“So am I, Son. So am I.”

“All right. All right. I’ll go get her and bring her by. Cook up something, then I’ll take her by Aunt Rosa. That suit you?”

“Suit me fine.”

Son stood up to go, and his father walked him to the door. When Son said, “Be right back,” Old Man said, “Wait a minute. Can I ask you somethin?”

“Sure. Ask it.”

“How come you never put no note or nothin in them envelopes? I kept on lookin for a note.”

Son stopped. How hurried all those money order purchases had been. Most of the time he sent a woman out to both buy and mail them. He’d done it as often as he could and sometimes five would be sent from one city and none from any place for six months. How hurried he had been.

“I guess I didn’t want nobody to read em and know where I was…” But it was too lame an excuse to continue with. “Is that why you kept the empty envelopes too?”

“Yeah. They had your handwritin on em, you know. You wrote it, that part anyway. ‘Franklin Green.’ You got a nice handwritin. Pretty. Like your mama.”

“See you, Old Man.”

“Go by Rosa. Tell her you comin.”

JADINE was squatting down in the middle of the road, the afternoon sun at her back. The children were happy to pose, and so were some of the younger women. Only the old folks refused to smile and glared into her camera as though looking at hell with the lid off. The men were enjoying the crease in her behind so clearly defined in the sunlight, click, click. Jadine had remembered her camera just before she thought she would go nuts, trying to keep a conversation going with Ellen and the neighbor women who came in to see Son’s Northern girl. They looked at her with outright admiration, each one saying, “I was in Baltimore once,” or, “My cousin she live in New York.” They did not ask her what they really wanted to know: where did she know Son from and how much did her boots cost. Jadine smiled, drank glasses of water and tried to talk “down home” like Ondine. But their worshipful stares and nonconversation made Son’s absence seem much too long. She was getting annoyed when she remembered her camera. Now she was having a ball photographing everybody. Soldier’s yard was full. “Beautiful,” she said. “Fantastic. Now over here,” click click. “Hey, what’d you say your name was? Okay, Beatrice, could you lean up against the tree?” click, click. “This way. Beautiful. Hold it. Hooooold it. Heaven,” click click click click.

Son didn’t mean to snatch it. Just to end it somehow. Stop the crease, the sunlight, the click click click. And when he did she looked at him with confusion at first, then with evolved anger. “What’s the matter with you?”

It wasn’t nice. To snatch the camera and then to have to tell her about the sleeping arrangements—it wasn’t nice. Not nice at all.

He took her to Old Man’s, and after supper there to Rosa’s. Drake and Soldier picked them up and drove them to a joint in Poncie called Night Moves, where there was live music, Bar B Que sandwiches and unrestrained dancing under four blue lights that neither flashed or strobed. They even managed some snatch in the car—Jadine under the impression that nobody knew; he aware that everybody did. The back seat turned her volume up, but the beer and the bad whiskey made her so sleepy there was no problem when he left her at Rosa’s. She slept like a boulder for three hours, then woke missing him and suffocating in that little bedroom without windows. She sat up naked, for she never wore nightgowns, and held her shoulders. The room had a door to the living room and one that opened to the back yard. She opened the latter and looked out into the blackest nothing she had ever seen. Blacker and bleaker than Isle des Chevaliers, and loud. Loud with the presence of plants and field life. If she was wanting air, there wasn’t any. It’s not possible, she thought, for anything to be this black. Maybe if she stood there long enough light would come from somewhere, and she could see shadows, the outline of something, a bush, a tree, a line between earth and sky, a heavier darkness to show where this very house stopped and space began. She remembered the blackness she saw when Son told her to close her eyes, and to put a star in it. That would be the only way it would get there, she thought, for the world in the direction of the sky, in that place where the sky ought to be, was starless. Haze, she guessed; there must be haze in the sky. Otherwise there would be a moon, at the least. The loudness of the plants was not audible, but it was strong nonetheless. She might as well have been in a cave, a grave, the dark womb of the earth, suffocating with the sound of plant life moving, but deprived of its sight. She could see nothing and could not remember what she had seen when it was daylight. A movement behind made her jump and turn around. Rosa was standing in the inner doorway, lit from behind by a lamp.

“Anything the matter? I heard you moving around.”

Jadine closed the back door. The lamplight from the other door was weak but it was healthy enough to spotlight her nakedness. Rosa gazed down Jadine’s body with a small bowing of her head, and then up again. Her eyes traveled slowly, moving like one of those growing plants Jadine could not see, but whose presence was cracking loud.

“Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t have no nightclothes. I got somethin I can let you have,” Rosa said.

“I…I forgot,” said Jadine. “I forgot to bring anything.”

“I’ll get you something.”

When Rosa came back, Jadine was in the bed. Rosa handed her a kind of slip, wrinkled but clean-smelling.

“You all right, daughter?”

“Oh, I’m fine. I just got too warm and wanted some air,” Jadine answered.

“This used to be a porch. I made it into a extra room, but it does heat up. I didn’t feel like buyin no windows.”

“Can you leave the back door open?” asked Jadine.

“I wouldn’t advise it. Anything at all might come in here out of those trees. I got a little old electric fan I’ll get you.”

“No. No. Don’t bother.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“It’s beat up, but it stirs the air around.”

“It’s okay.”

“Well, I’ll leave this here door open.” Rosa propped a wooden slatback chair against the inner door. “Sorry,” she said. “That gown ain’t much, but it’ll cover you.”

“Thanks,” said Jadine, but it didn’t cover her. She lay down in the slip under the sheet and her nakedness before Rosa lay down with her. No man had made her feel that naked, that unclothed. Leerers, lovers, doctors, artists—none of them had made her feel exposed. More than exposed. Obscene.

God. Eloe.

They were leaving Sunday. Surely she could get through a Sunday and then she and Son would be back on the train holding hands, and then on the airplane playing with each other under the Delta Airlines blanket—their faces serene as passengers, their hands devious and directed. She fell asleep on that thought and woke at ten-thirty with Rosa’s fingertips tapping her on the shoulder.

“Son’s in there,” she said. “You all goin to eat with me, ain’t you?”

Jadine got up and dressed quickly. He was sitting at the table looking more beautiful than after the first haircut on Isle des Chevaliers, more beautiful than when he stood at the piano with his coat over his shoulder and she saw savannas in his face, more beautiful than on the beach when he touched her foot, than when he opened the door to his room at the Hilton. She wanted to sit in his lap, but Drake and Soldier were at the table too, so she just walked over and put her hand on his head. He smiled up at her and kissed the palm of her other hand. Drake and Soldier looked bathed and glittery. They beamed at Son with the same adoration she did, but they didn’t compete. They sat back and enjoyed his presence and his prize woman. They looked at him with love and looked at her like she was a Cadillac he had won, or stolen, or even bought for all they knew.

“YOU ALL gettin hitched?” Soldier asked. They were alone in the house while Son and Drake drove Rosa to church.

“I guess so,” Jadine answered. “We haven’t talked about it.”

“He’s good. You ought to snatch him.”

She laughed. “Should I?”

“Damn right. You don’t, somebody else sure will. He was married before, you know.”

“I know.”

“Never should have married that woman. That Cheyenne. Every one of us told him that, or tried to. But he did it anyway to his grief and sorrow.”

“Was she pretty?” asked Jadine. She didn’t want to ask it, but it seemed extremely important to know the answer.

“Naw. I wouldn’t say pretty. Not bad-lookin, mind, but nothin like pretty.”

“He must have loved her, though.”

“That could be what it was.” Soldier sounded as though there were some doubts. “Naw,” he said. “She wasn’t pretty, but you had to hand it to her though. She had the best pussy in Florida, the absolute best,” and he turned his eyes on Jadine as if to say Now top that!

It wasn’t nice. Not nice at all. Son embarrassed her in the road with the camera; Rosa made her feel like a slut; and now Soldier was trying to make her feel like a virgin competing with…She didn’t answer him so he went on.

“You ever been married?”

“No,” she said, and looked squarely in his face thinking, if he says “Good-lookin woman like you ought to be able…” she would smack him in the mouth. But all he said was “Too bad,” and that didn’t seem definite enough to break his face for.

“Any children?”

“You ask too many questions,” she said. “Anything you want to know about me ask Son.”

Soldier smiled at that and shook his head. “Son don’t talk about his women and don’t let nobody else talk about em either.”

“I’m glad of that,” she said.

“I ain’t. Keeps him dumb. He wouldn’t know a good woman from a snake and he won’t let nobody point out the difference.”

“Can he tell the difference between a good man and a snake?”

“Oh, yeah. Son knows people. He just gets confused when it comes to women. With most everything else he thinks with his heart. But when it comes to women he thinks with his dick, you know what I mean?”

“Some people think with their mouths.”

“Yeah. I guess you right about that.” Soldier smiled. “But maybe it’s better’n not thinkin at all.”

“How would you know?” she asked him.

He laughed. “You a hot one, ain’t you?”

“Yes, I’m a hot one.”

“Yeah.” He ran his fingers over the place on his head where his hair was thinning. “A hot one all right and a live one too.”

“Believe it.” She got up to pour herself more coffee.

Soldier scanned her hips. “Can I ask you somethin?”

“What?”

“Who’s controllin it?”

“Controlling what?”

“The thing. The thing between you two. Who’s in control?”

“Nobody. We’re together. Nobody controls anybody,” she said.

“Good,” he said. “That’s real good. Son, he don’t like control. Makes him, you know wildlike.”

“We don’t have that kind of relationship. I don’t like to be controlled either.”

“But you like to have it, don’t you?”

“Not with him.”

“Good. Good.”

“Did Cheyenne have control?” She sat down and stirred air into her coffee.

“Cheyenne? Naw. She didn’t control nothin. At least not during the day. But good God she sure did run the nights.” He laughed and then, since she did not join in, he sobered quickly and asked, “How long you all plannin to stay around?”

Jadine repressed a smile. He’d lost, and wanted her out of town. “We’re leaving today.”

“Today? You can’t leave today.”

“Why not?”

“Ernie Paul is coming. We called him up. He left from Montgomery already, be here Monday.” Soldier was alarmed.

“Who’s Ernie Paul?”

“He’s one of us. Grew up with Son and Drake and me. He takin off work to come down and see Son and all of us.”

TKO, thought Jadine, but she didn’t hang up her gloves. When Son got back she showed him the train schedule.

“One more night, baby,” he said.

“I can’t. Not in that room. Not alone.”

“Come on.”

“No, Son. Not unless you stay with me.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Then I’m leaving. I’m long past fourteen.”

“Okay. Look. After church, when Rosa gets back, we’ll go for a ride.”

“Son.”

“Listen now. Let me show you this county. Bring your camera. Then tonight you go back to Rosa’s…”

“Son.”

“Wait. Leave the back door open. I’ll come in and stay with you all night. And in the morning I’ll go round the front like I just got there.”

“You promise.”

“I promise.”

Paleolithic, she thought. I am stuck here with a pack of Neanderthals who think sex is dirty or strange or something and he is standing here almost thirty years old doing it too. Stupid. “Stupid,” she said aloud.

“I know, but that’s the way they are. What do you want me to do? You think anything we do is going to change them?”

“I want us to be honest.”

“Can’t we be gentle first, and honest later?”

Accommodating beyond all belief. Because it was his hometown and his people, she supposed. She photographed everything during the ride until she was out of film. They found sheds and orchards to make love in and an open window of a schoolhouse with a teacher’s desk wide enough for two. They got back to Eloe at eight and stayed out as late as they could—when Night Moves closed—then gave everybody a ride home. When Jadine got to Rosa’s she put on the wrinkled slip to amuse him when he returned, unlatched the door and got in the bed. Half an hour later he was there. She had been listening carefully so she heard the swing of the door.

“Son?”

“Yeah.”

“Hurry up.”

He hurried. Something was in his hand as he knelt by the bed, leaves or fern or something. He made her take the slip off and he brushed her all over with the fern and she tried not to moan or laugh or cry out while he was saying Sssh, sssh. He undressed and climbed in. Jadine opened her arms to this man accustomed to the best pussy in Florida. It must have been that thought, put there by Soldier, that made her competitive, made her struggle to outdo Cheyenne and surpass her legendary gifts. She was thinking of her, whipped on by her, and that, perhaps, plus the fact that she had left the door unlatched and Son had opened it on its hinges and after it was open on its hinges it stayed wide open but they had not noticed because they were paying attention only to each other so that must have been why and how Cheyenne got in, and then the rest: Rosa and Thérèse and Son’s dead mother and Sally Sarah Sadie Brown and Ondine and Soldier’s wife Ellen and Francine from the mental institution and her own dead mother and even the woman in yellow. All there crowding into the room. Some of them she did not know, recognize, but they were all there spoiling her love-making, taking away her sex like succubi, but not his. He fell asleep and didn’t see the women in the room and she didn’t either but they were there crowding each other and watching her. Pushing each other—nudging for space, they poured out of the dark like ants out of a hive. She shook Son and he woke saying “Huh?” and she said “Shouldn’t you close the door” because she didn’t want to say there are women in the room; I can’t see them, but this room is full of women. He said, “Yeah,” and went back to sleep. She just lay there, too frightened to do it herself for then she would have to walk through the crowd of women standing in the pitch-dark room whom she could not see but would have to touch to get through them. And she felt them nudging each other for a better look at her, until finally being frightened was worse than anything they could do to her so she got mad and sat up. Her voice was half as loud as her heart.

“What do you want with me, goddamn it!”

They looked as though they had just been waiting for that question and they each pulled out a breast and showed it to her. Jadine started to tremble. They stood around in the room, jostling each other gently, gently—there wasn’t much room—revealing one breast and then two and Jadine was shocked. This was not the dream of hats for in that she was asleep, her eyes closed. Here she was wide-awake, but in total darkness looking at her own mother for God’s sake and Nanadine!

“I have breasts too,” she said or thought or willed, “I have breasts too.” But they didn’t believe her. They just held their own higher and pushed their own farther out and looked at her. All of them revealing both their breasts except the woman in yellow. She did something more shocking—she stretched out a long arm and showed Jadine her three big eggs. It scared her so, she began to cry. Her back pressed hard, hard into the wall, her right hand in a ball over her stomach, she shook Son and shook him some more. When he stirred and woke she slammed her face into his shoulder crying.

“What is it? What’s going on?”

“Tell them to leave me alone.”

“What?”

“Hold me.”

“Jadine.”

“Shut the door. No, don’t move. Hold me.”

“Those hats again?”

“No.”

“What?”

“Hold me.”

And he did. Till morning. Even while he slept and she didn’t and the women finally went away—sighing—he did not let her go.

Nobody was fooled by that little charade. Old Man guessed, the men knew and Rosa heard them as clear as the radio.

She couldn’t shake it. Not because Rosa fried eggs in the morning, or even the camera business or Soldier’s big mouth or Old Man’s phony biblical conversation, or the wrinkled slip and the stuffy room, but the possibility of more plant sounds in the cave and the certainty of the night women kept her nervous. She couldn’t shake it. The women in the night had killed the whole weekend. Eloe was rotten and more boring than ever. A burnt-out place. There was no life there. Maybe a past but definitely no future and finally there was no interest. All that Southern small-town country romanticism was a lie, a joke, kept secret by people who could not function elsewhere. An excuse to fish. Ernie Paul could come to New York—faster, even, if he flew. She needed air, and taxicabs and conversation in a language she understood. She didn’t want to have any more discussions in which the silences meant more than the words did. And no, she didn’t want to party at Night Moves, Son, please, get me out of here. You know I have things to do. Take me back, or I’ll go back and you stay, or go. But Son, I’m not spending another night here.

“I’ll come to you again tonight.”

“It doesn’t help.”

“We’ll stay out all night.”

“No. Just get me to the train on time.”

Son closed the eyes inside his eyes to her for a minute—the way he had in the bedroom when he had come in without knocking—closed them without shutting them. She was making him choose. But he opened them again and asked her, “You love me?”

“I love you,” she said.

“Will you be there when I get there?”

“I’ll be there. Of course I’ll be there. Waiting.”

“Ernie Paul has a car. I’ll go back to Montgomery with him tomorrow and fly from there to New York.”

“Okay. No longer?”

“No longer.”

“I love you.”

“I love you.”

They got to the train on time, but he didn’t get to New York on time. Four days passed and he still had not come. Jadine was not disturbed—there was so much to do, errands, and lunches, and hair appointments and jobs. She had to call Dawn to see if she was coming back as planned. Did she have to find another place? On the fifth day, she was feeling orphaned again. He could have called. She imagined him carousing with Ernie Paul and Soldier. Then another weekend rolled by and still no Son. Apparently he knew how to call Ernie Paul but not how to call her. She thought of calling Eloe; there was a telephone in Night Moves, but she couldn’t remember whether she’d seen one in any of the houses. Now she was biting mad. At his carelessness, his indifference. Then she got desperate. In her heart she knew he would come, sometime, and that he would have either a good excuse or no excuse at all; but she knew that he would come. The desperation came from the sense she had of his being down there with all those women with their breasts and eggs, the bitches. All the women in his life and in hers were down there—well, not all the women in her life. Dawn wasn’t there, and neither was Aisha, or Felicité, or Betty. They wouldn’t have done that to her anyway. They were her friends. They were like her. Not like old Cheyenne with the statewide pussy, or Rosa with the witness eyes, or Nanadine with the tight-fisted braids looking sorrowful at the kitchen table and accusatory in that room. And not like Francine attacked by dogs and driven crazy, or even like her own mother how could you Mama how could you be with them. You left me you died you didn’t care enough about me to stay alive you knew Daddy was gone and you went too. But she had rerun that movie so many times its zazz was gone leaving only technique to admire. Of course her mother was with them, showing her boobs; of course she would be there. But what made them think they could all get together to do that to her? They didn’t even know each other. What did they have in common even, besides the breasts. She had breasts; so did Dawn, and Aisha and Felicité and Betty. But she couldn’t shake it and it kept her angry and the anger was good for the photographers and the agency and the telephone company and the apartment managers. Everybody took notice and got out of the way.

Dawn said May 15, she would be back then. Jadine asked around about another sublet, and found two—one a house for one month, June; another an apartment for six months, but it was way uptown. Then a loft she could share for two weeks and keep for the summer…. Every night she went to bed too exhausted to worry, only on waking did it come back—fresher each time, heavier, till finally she sat with a glass of grapefruit juice in her hand in the morning and since she could not shake it, she decided to reel it in. Cut off its head, slice it open and see what lay in its belly. The women had looked awful to her: onion heels, potbellies, hair surrendered to rags and braids. And the breasts they thrust at her like weapons were soft, loose bags closed at the tip with a brunette eye. Then the slithery black arm of the woman in yellow, stretching twelve feet, fifteen, toward her and the fingers that fingered eggs. It hurt, and part of the hurt was in having the vision at all—at being the helpless victim of a dream that chose you. Some was the frontal sorrow of being publicly humiliated by those you had loved or thought kindly toward. A little bitty hurt that was always gleaming when you looked at it. So you covered it over with a lid until the next time. But most of the hurt was dread. The night women were not merely against her (and her alone—not him), not merely looking superior over their sagging breasts and folded stomachs, they seemed somehow in agreement with each other about her, and were all out to get her, tie her, bind her. Grab the person she had worked hard to become and choke it off with their soft loose tits.

Jadine sipped the grapefruit juice. Its clean, light acid dissolved the morning cloud from her tongue. “No, Rosa. I am not your daughter, and he is not your son.”

WHEN SON got back, she fought him. In between the sweet times—she fought him. He thought she was fighting him about Ernie Paul and being late and not calling. She thought so too, part of the time—but most of the time she knew she was fighting the night women. The mamas who had seduced him and were trying to lay claim to her. It would be the fight of their lives to get away from that coven that had nothing to show but breasts.

He needed a job, a degree, she said. They should go in business for themselves. He should enroll in business school. He had two semesters of Florida A and M, maybe he could pass the LSAT; he should take the SAT the GRE the CEE. “You can go to law school,” she said.

“I don’t want to be a lawyer,” he said.

“Why?” she asked.

“Think,” he said.

“Why?”

“Think.”

“Why?”

“I can’t hassle nobody that looks like me, or you either.”

“Oh, shit. There’s other kinds of law.”

“No, there isn’t. Besides I don’t want to know their laws; I want to know mine.”

“You don’t have any.”

“Then that’s the problem with it.”

She fought him, but she never mentioned the night women. They fought instead about Valerian Street. He would lend them the money to open a shop or start an agency.

Son said, “No way and I am not about to sit here and argue about that white man.”

“Who cares what color he is?”

“I care. And he cares. He cares what color he is.”

“He’s a person, not a white man. He put me through school.”

“You have told me that a million times. Why not educate you? You did what you were told, didn’t you? Ondine and Sydney were obedient, weren’t they? White people love obedience—love it! Did he do anything hard for you? Did he give up anything important for you?”

“He wasn’t required to. But maybe he would have since he was not required to educate me.”

“That was toilet paper, Jadine. He should have wiped his ass after he shit all over your uncle and aunt. He was required to; he still is. His debt is big, woman. He can’t never pay it off!”

“He educated me!” Jadine was shouting, “and you can’t make me think that was not an important thing to do. Because nobody else did! No. Body. Else. Did. You didn’t!”

“What do you mean, I didn’t?”

“I mean you didn’t! You didn’t!” She slapped him and before he could turn his head back she was choking him with both hands around his neck, screaming all the while, “You didn’t you didn’t.” He pulled her hair until she let go and when she tried another blow, he dropped her as carefully as he could. She fell back on her behind, turned over and crawled on all fours to jump him again. He held her arms behind her back and she bit him to his teeth. The pain was so powerful he had to put out her light with his fist.

When she came to and touched her jaw he went wild thinking he had loosened one of the side teeth so precious to him. Jadine dressed the bite marks on his face; and they said, “Ollieballen,” laughing as best they could with the bruises.

Sometimes they argued about school. Maybe that was the problem.

“It’s bullshit, Jadine.”

“It is not. When will you listen to the truth?”

“What truth?”

“The truth that while you were playing the piano in the Night Moves Café, I was in school. The truth is that while you were driving your car into your wife’s bed I was being educated. While you were hiding from a small-town sheriff or some insurance company, hiding from a rap a two-bit lawyer could have gotten you out of, I was being educated, I was working, I was making something out of my life. I was learning how to make it in this world. The one we live in, not the one in your head. Not that dump Eloe; this world. And the truth is I could not have done that without the help and care of some poor old white dude who thought I had brains enough to learn something! Stop loving your ignorance—it isn’t lovable.”

Son picked her up and took her to the window. After a violent struggle he actually held her out of it by her wrists shouting, “The truth is that whatever you learned in those colleges that didn’t include me ain’t shit. What did they teach you about me? What tests did they give? Did they tell you what I was like, did they tell you what was on my mind? Did they describe me to you? Did they tell you what was in my heart? If they didn’t teach you that, then they didn’t teach you nothing, because until you know about me, you don’t know nothing about yourself. And you don’t know anything, anything at all about your children and anything at all about your mama and your papa. You find out about me, you educated nitwit!”

It was only ten feet off the ground and she wet her pants, but still she hollered loud enough for him to hear as well as the few people gathered on the sidewalk to watch, “You want to be a yardman all your life?”

“His name is Gideon! Gideon! Not Yardman, and Mary Thérèse Foucault, you hear me! Why don’t you ask me to help you buy a house and put your aunt and uncle in it and take that woman off her feet. Her feet are killing her, killing her, and let them live like people for a change, like the people you never studied, like the people you can’t photograph. They are the ones who put you through school, woman, they are the ones. Not him. They worked for him all their lives. And you left them down there with him not knowing if they had a job or not. You should cook for them. What the hell kind of education is it that didn’t teach you about Gideon and Old Man and me. Nothing about me!”

When he pulled her back in, her arms were so sore she could not move them. But she was curled up teary-eyed in his lap an hour later when the doorbell rang. Son was massaging her shoulders, and begging forgiveness. They both went to the door and looked so lovey-dovey the police thought they had the wrong apartment, it must have been somebody else throwing a woman out of the window.

Other times they fought about work; surely that was the problem.

He mentioned once wanting to go back to the boats.

“You can’t; you’re blacklisted. You jumped ship, remember?”

“That don’t mean nothing.”

“You’ll be away all the time. Why do you want to leave me?”

“I don’t. But we don’t have to live here. We can live anywhere.”

“You mean Eloe.”

“I mean anywhere. I can get good work in other places.”

“Where?”

“Houston, Montgomery, Atlanta, San Diego.”

“I can’t live there.”

“Why do you want to change me?”

“Why do you want to change me?”

“I want to live, not change. I can’t live just for this goddamn city.”

“Is it because you’re afraid? Because you can’t make it in New York?”

“Make it in New York. Make it in New York. I’m tired of hearing that shit. What the fuck is it? If I make it in New York, then that’s all I do: ‘Make it in New York.’ That’s not life; that’s making it. I don’t want to make it; I want to be it. New York ain’t hard, baby. Not really hard. It’s just sad, and what you need to make it here is the easy stuff I got rid of a long time ago. I’ve lived all over the world, Jadine. I can live anywhere.”

“You’ve never lived anywhere.”

“And you? Where have you lived? Anybody ask you where you from, you give them five towns. You’re not from anywhere. I’m from Eloe.”

“I hate Eloe and Eloe hates me. Never was any feeling more mutual.”

She kept him on the defensive; demanded clarity, precision, very specific solutions to open-ended problems, and any furry notion he had in mind of what to do or where to do it matted before her rakelike intellect. He wanted to do things in time—she wanted them done on time. So he let her make private appointments, did take the SAT and scored in the 400s; the LET and was below the 13th percentile; the IRE and ranked above the 80th percentile; the CEE and scored in the 600s. “That proves,” he told her, “that I can sit still for three hours at a clip, but I always knew that.”

“One of two things,” she said finally. “Either you go to school while I work or we ask Valerian to invest in a business.”

“Will you marry me?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“I’ll go to school.”

“Ooo-wee!” She grabbed him around the neck and pulled him to the floor.

“But not here.”

“Why?”

“We’re living in other people’s space. This is not our crib. Let’s go someplace else.”

“How many times do I have to tell you—I can’t work someplace else. You can, but I can’t.”

“What the hell do you do that’s so jive you can’t take it out of the city and do it there?”

“I pay the bills is what I do.”

It was August. Jadine had sent for applications to C.U.N.Y. and S.U.N.Y. When they came, she sat down and filled them out. She was tired and looking tired. So much so the agency people were skipping her. That twenty-five-year-old face looked twenty-six and she had not been keeping up the regimen that held her at the twenty-year-old peak. Seventeen-year-old girls were getting the jobs. In Europe they liked older-looking black models, but in the U.S. the look was twelve. Soon she would really have to call her old professor. The modeling thing was going bust fast—she’d make all she could as fast as she could since it was seven times what teaching would bring. She sat at the table, perspiring a little, filling out Son’s application. You’d think he would at least do that.

Son was watching her—she was a model of industry and planning. Every now and then she asked him a question and they agreed on whether to lie or tell the truth. He watched her. There is the power, he thought, right there. That is all the power there is or ever will be and I don’t want any of it. She always referred to Eloe as his cradle. As though living there was child’s play, easy. As though living anywhere outside the First Cities of the World was kiddy stuff. Well, it hadn’t been easy for Francine and it hadn’t been easy for Rosa or his mother. Not easy at all. It was hard and he believed it scared her to think of how hard. She thought this was hard, New York. She was scared of being still, of not being busy, scared to have to be quiet, scared to have children alone. He tried to imagine what kind of woman she would be in fifty years. Would she be Thérèse? Or Ondine? Or Rosa or Sally Brown, or maybe even Francine, frail as a pick tearing all her hair out in the state hospital? Bald, bald Francine. Some cradle. It took all the grown-up strength you had to stay there and stay alive and keep a family together. They didn’t know about state aid in Eloe; there were no welfare lines in Eloe and unemployment insurance was a year of trouble with no rewards. She kept barking at him about equality, sexual equality, as though he thought women were inferior. He couldn’t understand that. Before Francine was attacked by the dogs, she gave him ten points on the court and still beat him. It was her athletic skill that caused her trouble. She was running in the fields and went too far. Some dogs tracking an escaped convict, frustrated at having lost the scent, attacked her. Sixty seconds later the police got them off her and took her home. She stayed nervous after that, well, “nervous” was what they all called it. But God that girl could run. Cheyenne was driving a beat-up old truck at age nine, four years before he could even shift gears, and she could drop a pheasant like an Indian. His mother’s memory was kept alive by those who remembered how she roped horses when she was a girl. His grandmother built a whole cowshed with only Rosa to help. In fact the room Jadine had slept in, Rosa built herself which was why it didn’t have any windows. Anybody who thought women were inferior didn’t come out of north Florida.

ON SEPTEMBER 16, two weeks before registration, a dividend came in the mail, $1,246 from the four municipal bond certificates Valerian had given her one Christmas when she was sixteen. She was delighted; it would take care of the school expenses. Son said no. Valerian educated her, all right; there was nothing to be done about that, but he would not let him finance his own education. Jadine dropped her hands to her side with sheer exhaustion.

“Valerian is not the problem.” Her voice was faint, gooey with repetition.

This rescue was not going well. She thought she was rescuing him from the night women who wanted him for themselves, wanted him feeling superior in a cradle, deferring to him; wanted her to settle for wifely competence when she could be almighty, to settle for fertility rather than originality, nurturing instead of building. He thought he was rescuing her from Valerian, meaning them, the aliens, the people who in a mere three hundred years had killed a world millions of years old. From Micronesia to Liverpool, from Kentucky to Dresden, they killed everything they touched including their own coastlines, their own hills and forests. And even when some of them built something nice and human, they grew vicious protecting it from their own predatory children, let alone an outsider. Each was pulling the other away from the maw of hell—its very ridge top. Each knew the world as it was meant or ought to be. One had a past, the other a future and each one bore the culture to save the race in his hands. Mama-spoiled black man, will you mature with me? Culture-bearing black woman, whose culture are you bearing?

“Correct,” he said. “The problem is not Valerian. The problem is me. Solve it. With me or without me, but solve it because it ain’t going anywhere. You sweep me under the rug and your children will cut your throat. That fucker in Europe, the one you were thinking about marrying? Go have his children. That should suit you. Then you can do exactly what you bitches have always done: take care of white folks’ children. Feed, love and care for white people’s children. That’s what you were born for; that’s what you have waited for all your life. So have that white man’s baby, that’s your job. You have been doing it for two hundred years, you can do it for two hundred more. There are no ‘mixed’ marriages. It just looks that way. People don’t mix races; they abandon them or pick them. But I want to tell you something: if you have a white man’s baby, you have chosen to be just another mammy only you are the real mammy ’cause you had it in your womb and you are still taking care of white folks’ children. Fat or skinny, head rag or wig, cook or model, you take care of white folks’ babies—that’s what you do and when you don’t have any white man’s baby to take care of you make one—out of the babies black men give you. You turn little black babies into little white ones; you turn your black brothers into white brothers; you turn your men into white men and when a black woman treats me like what I am, what I really am, you say she’s spoiling me. You think I won’t do all that company shit because I don’t know how? I can do anything! Anything! But I’ll be goddamn if I’ll do that!”

She looked at him and when he saw the sheen gone from her minky eyes and her wonderful mouth fat with disgust, he tore open his shirt, saying, “I got a story for you.”

“Get out of my face.”

“You’ll like it. It’s short and to the point.”

“Don’t touch me. Don’t you touch me.”

“Once upon a time there was a farmer—a white farmer…”

“Quit! Leave me alone!”

“And he had this bullshit bullshit bullshit farm. And a rabbit. A rabbit came along and ate a couple of his…ow…cabbages.”

“You better kill me. Because if you don’t, when you’re through, I’m going to kill you.”

“Just a few cabbages, you know what I mean?”

“I am going to kill you. Kill you.”

“So he got this great idea about how to get him. How to, to trap…this rabbit. And you know what he did? He made him a tar baby. He made it, you hear me? He made it!”

“As sure as I live,” she said. “I’m going to kill you.”

But she didn’t. After he banged the bedroom door, she lay in wrinkled sheets, slippery, gutted, not thinking of killing him. Thinking instead that it would soon be Thanksgiving and there was no place to go for dinner. Then she thought of a towering brass beech—the biggest and oldest in the state. It stood on the north side of the campus and near it was a well. In April the girls met their mothers there to sing and hold hands and sway in the afternoon light. Some of the girls hated it—the well, the beech, the mother-daughter day, and sat around in jeans and no shoes smoking herb to show their contempt for bourgeoisie sentiment and alumni hustling. But the girls who did not hate it surrounded the beech and in long pastel skirts swayed in the spring light. Pale sulfur light sprinkled so softly with lilac it made her want to cry. Jadine joined the barefoot ones, of course, but her tears were not because there was no one to sing with under the biggest beech in the state, but because of the light, pale sulfur sprinkled with lilac.

A piece of her hair was in her mouth and she tried to extricate it with her tongue for her hands weighed a ton apiece. This is familiar, she thought. I know what this is; it’s familiar. I am twenty-five and this feeling is too old for me.

Four hours later he was back—repentant, terrified that he had gone too far. But Jadine was solemn—a closed-away orphan in a Cheech and Chong T-shirt with no place to go at Thanksgiving.

Son sat at the foot of the bed and covered his knees with his hands. Jadine spoke very quietly to him.

“I can’t let you hurt me again. You stay in that medieval slave basket if you want to. You will stay there by yourself. Don’t ask me to do it with you. I won’t. There is nothing any of us can do about the past but make our own lives better, that’s all I’ve been trying to help you do. That is the only revenge, for us to get over. Way over. But no, you want to talk about white babies; you don’t know how to forget the past and do better.”

His budding repentance decomposed into a steaming compost.

“If I wanted the editorial page of the Atlanta Constitution I would have bought it.”

“With what?” Jadine’s voice was slick with danger.

“With the money you got from Valerian. The money you fucked your way across Europe for!”

“Well, buy it then. Here, here it is.” She picked her wallet up from the night table and opened it. “Here it is. Your original dime. The one you cleaned sheephead for, right? The one you loved? The only one you loved. All you want ‘in the money line.’ Take it. Now you know where it came from, your original dime: some black woman like me fucked a white man for it and then gave it to Frisco who made you work your ass off for it. That’s your original dime.” She threw it on the floor. “Pick it up.”

He stared at her. The Cheech and Chong T-shirt was up around her waist and her nakedness below embarrassed him now. He had produced that nakedness and having soiled it, it shamed him.

“Pick it up.” She said it again and didn’t even sit up. She just lay there, stroking her raw silk thighs the color of natural honey. There was sealskin in her eyes and the ladies minding the pie table vanished like shadows under a noon gold sun.

He thought it would be hard to do, but it wasn’t. He thought it would be cold, too. Cold and hard. But it wasn’t. It was warm, almost soft, and quite round.

He put it in his pocket and having no place to put himself left the apartment again. He came back the next night to empty rooms and a door key for each of the several locks. He sat down on the sofa and looked at the keys. A pile of mail was on the coffee table too and in it a heavy yellow envelope. He stared at it awhile and then opened it. Out came the photos she had taken in the middle of the road in Eloe. Beatrice, pretty Beatrice, Soldier’s daughter. She looked stupid. Ellen, sweet cookie-faced Ellen, the one he always thought so pretty. She looked stupid. They all looked stupid, backwoodsy, dumb, dead…

Son put down the photos. I have to find her, he thought. Whatever she wants, I have to do it, want it. But first I have to find her.