by Alice Walker
“If he love you so much why ain’t he here with you right now?”
Josie had retreated in tears, and the next day pretended she’d made her story up.
“Thank God I ain’t poor,” Josie murmured from the bed. “And thank the good Lord I takes care of myself without the help of strangers, which, in a matter of plain speaking, ain’t got a pot to piss in nor a window to throw it out of.” She took the liberty occasionally of reminding Brownfield of his penury. Now she took his pillow from his side of the bed and cradled it in her arms like a lover.
“Listen,” she said, “my side of the bed’s wet.”
Brownfield stumbled next door without a word, into Lorene’s room and, not caring to sleep on the floor, he climbed unhesitatingly into Lorene’s bed.
10
THE FIRST TIME Brownfield saw Mem, Josie’s “adopted” daughter, he had been balling Josie and Lorene for over two years. Mem had been away at school in Atlanta, an errant father paying her bills. She was Josie’s sister’s child. Her mother was dead.
“She died and left me the sweetest li’l burden,” Josie occasionally allowed as how to impressionable friends.
“That girl have to buy books that cost as much as a many of us pays for dresses!” Josie would smile proudly and with malicious aforethought at some of her less well-off acquaintances. For her “business” in the lounge paid off, and she didn’t mind letting people think she was putting Mem through high school.
Mem’s father, Brownfield learned, was a big Northern preacher with a large legitimate family. He had met Josie’s sister one summer when he came South to preach revival services in Josie’s father’s church. They had fallen in love and Mem was conceived. The preacher went back North to his family and Mem’s mother was put out of her father’s house.
Josie took her in until Mem was born, and shortly afterward she died.
“Of course, my sister sort of snatch that preacher from me on the rebound, you understand.” Josie smiled coyly, insistently, at Brownfield. “But it were really me he actually love.”
According to Josie, the only reason Lorene didn’t go to school (“of course, I were anxious and well off enough to send her”) was because she was too stubborn to go. However, by the time she was fifteen Lorene was the mother of two baby boys. Living in the lounge with her mother’s boy friends always after her, she was tripped up from the start by the men underfoot, and was the fastest thing going, next to her mother, in town. It had not taken Brownfield long to see that Lorene had her kind of crush on him (anything her mother tried appealed to her), and that Josie more than liked him. At seventeen he was well set up between the two of them and the lounge was as much his as theirs. Or so they were quick to assure him.
He got along well with them both and turned his back when they fought over him. Lorene, a smoke-cured slattern who doused herself with cheap perfume and wore her hair a bright new penny red, was as flattering a lay as her mother. For although she looked more like somebody’s brother than anybody’s girl, she had a reputation for toughness that earned her an abundance of respect from youngsters who hoped to grow up to be like her. She was noted for her expert use of the razor, and it was said that she had once cut up a customer’s wife and then run the customer out of the room while his wife almost bled to death. Brownfield enjoyed her also for her language, as when she said of the customer and his bleeding wife, “I was just tryin’ to catch that nigger and tell him to get that bleeding brood sow off my floor. I ain’t gonna kill my ass mopping up after these nasty folks.” Brownfield was happy until he got his first look at Mem.
Mem was cherry brown, not yellow like Josie or dark and hairy like Lorene. She was plump and quiet, with demure slant eyes. When she came home from school she was barely noticed. She stayed upstairs when the lounge was rocking, and when she did come down she kept right on out of the house and out walking, just walking, in the woods. Brownfield tried to talk to her but she answered him shyly, her eyes on the ground, without interest, it seemed to him, and went her way, with him more and more turning to look after her. He had never known anybody to go walking, “just walking,” in the woods, unless they expected to walk up on a good stick.
“Who the hell she think she is?” he asked Josie, frowning at what he couldn’t understand. “I can’t stand for women to go away for two weeks and come back talking proper!”
Part of what he meant was “walking proper,” for Mem certainly had a proper walk. For a while her walk alone mystified him, intrigued him, and in every way set his inquisitive itch on edge. He was not averse to making his person available to all members of the family.
“Aw, quit your going on and get on in this bed,” Josie purred, looking more like a fat caterpillar every day. “Ain’t no need for you looking at that one, she ain’t got no real itch in her pussy. She can’t do for you what I can do.”
Brownfield responded to her soft, sinful old hands by taking her to bed.
“When’s you and me going to get married, lover?” Josie asked, while Brownfield realized that Mem’s bed was just on the other side of the wall, about a foot from her benevolent “mothers.”
In moments of spitefulness, Lorene tried to tell Brownfield that what Josie had said about Grange and her was true. It didn’t make any sense to Brownfield that his father and Josie might have been lovers. Besides, what did he care if he now plowed a furrow his father had laid? Josie’s old field had never lain fallow. And after Mem came, what Lorene or Josie told him about anything didn’t matter. He was interested only in Mem. How to penetrate her quiet strangeness occupied his whole mind.
11
WHAT HE FELT always when he thought of Mem was guilt. Shame that he was no better than he was. Grime. Dirt. He thought of her as of another mother, the kind his own had not been. Someone to be loved and spoken to softly, someone never to frighten with his rough, coarse ways. But he could never successfully communicate his feelings to her; he did not know the words she knew, and even if he could learn them he had no faith that they would fit the emotions he had. She could read magazines and books, and he could only look at the pictures in them and hazard a guess at what the print meant. Often, when they were thrown together in the house and she walked outside on the porch to keep from being inside alone with him, he followed and tried to talk to her. She would smile and speak a few words, never harsh, about his carryings on with Josie and Lorene. He expressed an interest in wanting to read and write, and she offered to teach him. He caught on quickly to small things, and they spent many afternoons, before the Dew Drop Inn opened, on the steps outside with her old school books. When she began teaching grade school in the fall she took him along with her class. Or tried.
“In the first place,” she would begin, in an intense prim way Lorene and Josie scoffed at, “if you have two or three words to say and don’t know which word means two or more, it is better to just not use ‘s’ on the end of any of the words. This is so because the verb takes on the same number as the subject. You understand? Well, all I’m saying is ‘I have some cake,’ sounds better than ‘I haves some cake.’ Or, ‘We have a friendship,’ is better than ‘We haves a friendship.’ Now is that clear?” And she would look at him, properly doubtful, wrinkling her brow. And he would nod, yes, and say over and over happily in his mind, We haves a friendship! We, Mem and me, haves us a friendship! and he would smile so that she would stop her frowning and smile too.
She was a good teacher. He had never had one. He learned to write his own name, to recite the ABC’s, and to write his name and her name linked together, all in a flourish, without lifting his hand from the paper. When she began to teach at school he sometimes sat on the porch by the open door and listened to her clear voice directing the small children, and he concentrated on what she said, as much for the subject matter (which taught him how to spell chicken, goat, cow, hog) as for the pleasure of hearing her speak. She did not sound at all like Josie and Lorene, who talked like toothless old women from plain indifference. Mem put some a
ttention to what she was saying in it, and some warmth from her own self, and so much concern for the person she was speaking to that it made Brownfield want to cry.
In his own mind he considered himself perfect for Mem, if only because he loved her. But much of the town saw things differently, including Josie and Lorene, who were so jealous of their Cinderella that Brownfield became afraid for her (although he was hardly royalty, unless they considered him Prince Stud). Besides, Mem had never told him she cared for him.
But what really began to bother Brownfield was that since he became the man of the establishment, he had not felt it necessary to draw a salary. He was constantly dependent on Josie or Lorene for money, which they gave him readily enough, but with the understanding that he must work for his living and in exactly the ways they specified. And so he stood it around the house as long as he could, screwing Josie and Lorene like the animal he felt himself to be, especially when he stood next day in the same room with Mem, whose heart, pained, was becoming readable in her eyes. There was no longer any joy in his conquest of the two women, for he had long since realized that he wasn’t using them, they were using him. He was a pawn in a game that Josie and Lorene enjoyed. Sometimes he felt he was the link they used to prove themselves mother and daughter. Otherwise they might have been strangers. They existed for the simple pleasure of flirting with each other’s men, and then of fighting it out in the street in front of the lounge, where every man in the district soon learned that if you wanted a piece of pussy you had only to make up to one of them to have the other one fall in your lap.
For a while it was grand being prize pawn; for both women, fast breaking from the strain of liquor, whoredom, moneymaking and battle, thought they truly loved him—but as a clean young animal they had not finished soiling. Their lives infinitely lacked freshness. They were as stale as the two-dollar rooms upstairs. Innocence continued to exist in him for them, since they were not able to see anything wrong in what they did with him. He enjoyed it and after all he was nobody’s husband.
And if guilt feeling did exist, as perhaps it did on Sunday mornings in the Baptist church, when they outdressed all the women in town and outshouted half of them, it was a minimal and momentary uneasiness, fanned into a pleasurable passion of repentance by inflamed readings from the Scripture. They shouted out their sins in paroxysms of enjoyable grief. The righteous cleanliness of their souls hardly outlasted the service.
12
MATTERS CAME TO a head for Brownfield when he saw Mem walking for the first time with a man, a teacher like herself. Suddenly he felt he might be passing up a great chance. He felt injured by her choice. Had Mem bypassed him because he was not a well-taught man? His pride was hurt. Gloomily he thought of his poverty and his dependence on Josie and Lorene. All he owned were the clothes on his back and they were none too new.
One night he spied on Mem and her upright, clean-living beau and knew he must have her for his wife. And coming in that night, with him standing in the unlit doorway gazing out at them, Mem brushed past him with tears in her eyes. That was the first time he knew she loved him, and that she was forcing him out of her life by womanly design, and that if he didn’t do something soon she would be lost to him. He caught her in his arms as she was going up the stairs and vowed in words and kisses never to let her go.
The next day he went out into the country, to a plantation not far from where he was born, to a man he had heard was fair. They talked of farming on shares for two years, or until Brownfield could make enough money to take his bride northward.
The next week Mem and Brownfield left Josie and Lorene still fighting each other over him, each claiming the other had pushed Mem on to “ketch” him. Brownfield borrowed a wagon from the man he was now working for, and Mem sat beside him on the splintery wooden seat.
“We ain’t always going to be stuck down here, honey. Don’t you worry,” he promised her while she sat quietly, holding her veil in her warm brown hands, and looking and smiling at him with gay believing eyes, full of love.
13
THREE YEARS LATER when he was working the same farm and in debt up to his hatbrim and Mem was big with their second child, he could still look back on their wedding day as the pinnacle of his achievement in extricating himself from evil and the devil and aligning himself with love. Even the shadow of eternal bondage, which plagued him constantly those first years, could not destroy his faith in a choice well made. For Mem was the kind of woman who sang while she cooked breakfast in the morning and sang when getting ready for bed at night. And sang when she nursed her babies, and sang to him when he crawled in weariness and dejection into the warm life-giving circle of her breast. He did not care what anybody thought about it, but she was so good to him, so much what he needed, that her body became his shrine and he kissed it endlessly, shamelessly, lovingly, and celebrated its magic with flowers and dancing; and, as the babies, knowing their places beside her as well as life, sucked and nursed at her bosom, so did he, and grew big and grew firm with love, and grew strong.
They were passionate and careless, he and Mem, making love in the woods after the first leaves fell, making love high in the corncrib to the clucking of hens and the blasting of cocks, making love and babies urgently and with purest fire at the shady ends of cotton rows, when she brought him water to the field and stood watching with that look in her eyes while he drank and leaned an itching palm against the sweaty handle of his plow. As the water, cooling, life-giving, ran down his chin and neck, so did her love run down, bathing him in cool fire and oblivion, bathing him in forgetfulness, as another link in the chain that held him to the land and to a responsibility for her and her children, was forged.
Part III
14
IT WAS A YEAR when endless sunup to sundown work on fifty rich bottom acres of cotton land and a good crop brought them two diseased shoats for winter meat, some dried potatoes and apples from the boss’s cellar, and some cast-off clothes for his children from his boss’s family. It was the summer that he watched, that he had to teach, his frail five-year-old daughter the tricky, dangerous and disgusting business of handmopping the cotton bushes with arsenic to keep off boll weevils. His heart had actually started to hurt him, like an ache in the bones, when he watched her swinging the mop, stumbling over the clumps of hard clay, the hot tin bucket full of arsenic making a bloodied scrape against her small short leg. She stumbled and almost fell with her bucket, so much too large for her, and each time he saw it his stomach flinched. She was drenched with sweat, her tattered dress wringing wet with perspiration and arsenic; her large eyes reddened by the poison. She breathed with difficulty through the deadly smell. At the end of the day she trembled and vomited and looked beaten down like a tiny, asthmatic old lady; but she did not complain to her father, as afraid of him as she was of the white boss who occasionally deigned to drive by with friends to watch the lone little pickaninny, so tired she barely saw them, poisoning his cotton.
That pickaninny was Brownfield’s oldest child, Daphne, and that year of awakening roused him not from sleep but from hope that someday she would be a fine lady and carry parasols and wear light silks. That was the year he first saw how his own life was becoming a repetition of his father’s. He could not save his children from slavery; they did not even belong to him.
His indebtedness depressed him. Year after year the amount he owed continued to climb. He thought of suicide and never forgot it, even in Mem’s arms. He prayed for help, for a caring President, for a listening Jesus. He prayed for a decent job in Mem’s arms. But like all prayers sent up from there, it turned into another mouth to feed, another body to enslave to pay his debts. He felt himself destined to become no more than overseer, on the white man’s plantation, of his own children.
That was the year he accused Mem of being unfaithful to him, of being used by white men, his oppressors; a charge she tearfully and truthfully denied. And when he took her in his drunkenness and in the midst of his own foul accusations she wil
ted and accepted him in total passivity and blankness, like a church. She was too pure to know how sanctified was his soul by her silence. He determined at such times to treat her like a nigger and a whore, which he knew she was not, and if she made no complaint, to find her guilty. Soft words could not turn away his wrath, they could only condone it.
He was expected to raise himself up on air, which was all that was left over after his work for others. Others who were always within their rights to pay him practically nothing for his labor. He was never able to do more than exist on air; he was never able to build on it, and was never to have any land of his own; and was never able to set his woman up in style, which more than anything else he wanted to do. It was as if the white men said his woman needed no style, deserved no style, and therefore would get no style, and that they would always reserve the right to work the life out of him and to fuck her. His crushed pride, his battered ego, made him drag Mem away from schoolteaching. Her knowledge reflected badly on a husband who could scarcely read and write. It was his great ignorance that sent her into white homes as a domestic, his need to bring her down to his level! It was his rage at himself, and his life and his world that made him beat her for an imaginary attraction she aroused in other men, crackers, although she was no party to any of it. His rage and his anger and his frustration ruled. His rage could and did blame everything, everything on her. And she accepted all his burdens along with her own and dealt with them from her own greater heart and greater knowledge. He did not begrudge her the greater heart, but he could not forgive her the greater knowledge. It put her closer, in power, to them, than he could ever be.