Corregidora

by Gayl Jones

  “He ain’t my nigger.”

  “Well, he used to be.”

  “Used to ain’t now.”

  “You just scared of him, that’s all.”

  “I like to see the day I was scared of Mutt Philmore Thomas.”

  “That his middle name?” she laughed.

  I said nothing.

  “I bet you be scared if I said I was going over there and tell him you was over here.”

  “You better not. I might not be that much older than you, honey, but I know how to slap shit too.”

  She said nothing. I thought I had hushed her, but then she said, “See if I don’t.”

  “See if I don’t tell your mama I seen you over there in Hawkins alley with that Logan boy.”

  “Naw, that was Luella you seen with Wayne. I was just watching.”

  “Well, that means you twice as nasty.”

  “I bet you was fucking before I was born. How much fucking you think you goin do now?”

  It was my turn to say nothing.

  “It don’t mean you can’t,” I explained. “It just means …”

  “I heard Mama talking bout women like that. Mess up their minds and then fuck up their pussy.”

  “You too young to talk like that.”

  “You too young to have it took out of you too. Tha’s what mama said. She said, ‘Ain’t that awful and young as she is too. Jeff, now don’t you go over there both’ring that woman neither, cause she got enough trouble.’ ”

  “Nigger, get out of here.”

  “You said I could sleep with you.”

  “Then shut up and sleep. I told you I know how to slap shit too.”

  “You supposed to be sick. You ain’t sick.”

  “I will be if you don’t shut up.”

  “See if I don’t tell that nigger of yours.”

  I started to slap her. I was going to if she said another word. She must have felt it because she didn’t say nothing else. She started breathing hard, and then she must have been sleeping. I turned away from her and slept.

  I was drowsy, but I felt her hands on my breasts. She was feeling all on me up around my breasts. I shot awake and knocked her out on the floor. It wasn’t even daylight yet. It couldn’t have been more than three o’clock. There was a smell of vomit in the room, like when you suck your thumb.

  “Naw, bitch, you get the hell out of here,” I said. “You take that goddamn blanket and get the goddamn hell out of here.”

  She was crying, not from anything I said, but she must have skinned her ass when she hit the floor. I turned on the light and she was sucking her arm and getting the blanket and crying. I kept calling her a goddamn bull, but I didn’t like what else I was wondering. I was wondering how Cat Lawson got her to mind. Because that wasn’t the kind of kid that would respect anybody on account of age.

  Jeffy stumbled out the door.

  “What’s going on in nere?” I heard Cat say. “What you do?”

  Jeffy didn’t say nothing. Catherine came into the room, rubbing her eyes.

  “What happen? What she do?” She sat down on the cedar chest, as if she already suspected what she did.

  “She started feeling on me all up around here and I knocked her off on the floor,” I said.

  “I knowed she was like that, tha’s why I told her to sleep in here on the floor.”

  “Well, you should’ve told me she was like that before and I wouldn’t have said she could come in here and sleep with me. Why in the hell didn’t you tell me she was like that before?”

  “I told her to sleep on the floor. You should’ve let her sleep on the floor.”

  “Well, she seem like she too young to be like that. How the hell was I suppose to know? I didn’t wont the child sleeping on the damn floor and catch pneumonia.”

  “It’s a hot night.”

  “Well. She can catch pneumonia of the asshole for all I care.”

  “Don’t worry, she catch it.”

  I couldn’t restrain myself. “What, you goin give it to her?”

  She looked at me, drowsy, and hurt and angry.

  “I told her to sleep on the floor,” she said.

  I said nothing. She got up as if waiting for me to say something, but I still said nothing. Before she left, she cut me a hard look. I gave up wondering. I knew if Jeffy had got in the bed with her and started pulling that shit, she would have knocked her on the floor too. She would have knocked her past the floor.

  It wasn’t so much how much fucking I was going to do now, I was thinking, but the consequences of that fucking. Shit. Cat telling me about the consequences of him loving me. Shit. What the hell did that mean? And her story. What about her and Joe Hunn? If I hadn’t stopped wondering when she gave me that hard-as-steel look I would’ve guessed that story. Maybe it’s just a man can’t stand to have a woman as hard as he is. If he couldn’t support her in money, he’d be wanting to support her in spirit. And what if I’d thrown Mutt Thomas down those stairs instead, and done away with the source of his sex, or inspiration, or whatever the hell it is for a man, what would he feel now? At least a woman’s still got the hole. Look, nigger, I still got my hole. Finger-pop it. Your mama’s a bitch, she was laid in a ditch. Naw, dropped you in one. And what they had to do in those days. I always get back to that. The tobacco fields or coffee ones. Hard because you have to be, but still those tender-eyed women and hands tender behind tobacco calluses with their men. Hurt you into tenderness finally. Is it more his fault than mine? Naw, when you start thinking that way. Naw, that nigger’s to blame. What’s bothering me? Great Gram, because I can’t make generations. I remember everything you told me, Great Gram and Gram too and.

  Good night, Ursa, baby. Good night, Irene. Honey, I remember when you was a warm seed inside me, but I tried not to bruise you. Don’t bruise any of your seeds. I won’t, Mama. I never told you how Great Gram had Gram. She thought she had to go to the toilet, and then something told her not to go outside to the outhouse like she was going to, and then she squat down on the chamber pot. And then that’s how she had your Gram, coming out in the slop jar. That’s how we all begin, remember that. That’s how we all begin. A mud ditch or a slop jar or hit the floor or the ground. It’s all the same. But you got to make generations, you go on making them anyway. And when the ground and the sky open up to ask them that question that’s going to be ask. They think it ain’t going to be ask, but it’s going to be ask. They have the evidence and give the verdict too. They think they hid everything. But they have the evidence and give the verdict too. You said that, Mama. I know I said it, and I’m going to keep saying it.

  “Come in here.”

  I was out in the yard playing with the little boy from across the street. He’d bet me I didn’t know how to play doctor. I bet him I did. We’d made a seesaw by putting a board across a tree stump. I lay across the board on my belly, and he raised up my dress. Mama saw us.

  “Come in here. Go on home, Henry.”

  She jerked me in the back door by the arm, and slammed the door.

  “Don’t you know what that boy was doing? He was feeling up your asshole.”

  “I couldn’t feel it.”

  “If I could see it, I know you could feel it.”

  “Mama, I couldn’t feel it.”

  “Get on in here. Have people looking at you. What do you think, the neighbors ain’t got eyes? What was he using?”

  “I didn’t feel nothing.”

  “Shut up. If I even think I see anything else, I’ll beat you.”

  I bet you were fucking before I was born.

  Before you was thought.

  “Ursa, what makes your hair so long?”

  “I got evil in me.”

  Corregidora’s evil.

  Ole man, he just kept rolling …

  Cat knocked on the door. I said, “Come in.” She came in, but stood near the door. It was the next day or, rather, later the same day. I was sitting up in bed.

  Cat stood looking at me, the
n she said, “I’m sorry. I should have told you that was why I didn’t want her in here.”

  “Tha’s awright. It’s all water under the bridge now.”

  “I still should have told you she was like that.”

  “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “I just came in to see how many eggs you wont for breakfast.”

  “Two. As long as you don’t send it by her.”

  “I won’t. Anyway, her mama come and got her at seven.”

  “Does Lurene know?”

  “I don’t know what Lurene know. If she do, she haven’t told me. They say Jeffy’s daddy, something was wrong with him. But I didn’t know him myself.”

  “You ask me, something must be wrong with all of ’em.”

  “Naw, don’t get into that. Lurene’s crazy about men as you are.”

  “Yeah, I heard her talking about some dude she got at work.”

  “Yeah, well, he help to make her day. Or I should say make her night.”

  I laughed. “Working night shift, he have to make her day.”

  “Well, I go fix breakfast.”

  “Cat, I don’t think I can stay here.”

  “I make sure Jeffy don’t even look at you while you here. I keep her outter here.”

  “It ain’t that … I shouldn’t stay here.”

  “You wont to be over there where that nigger is, don’t you?”

  “I expect to start back to work in a day or two,” I said.

  “Well, you stay here till you start back then.”

  “All right, a day or two,” I said.

  “Well, Tadpole be up in the air.”

  “What?”

  “Hear you be singing again.”

  “I just hope I’m as good. It’s been a long time.”

  “You be just as good.”

  “They didn’t say anything about my throat. They didn’t say it did anything to my throat.”

  “If it did they would’ve said something. You mean you ain’t sing nothing since it happened?”

  “Naw.”

  “Well, you sing for me tonight. Ain’t use worrying for nothing.”

  I said nothing.

  “I’ll keep her out of here,” she said, and went to fix the eggs.

  “Trouble in mind, I’m blue, but I won’t be won’t be blue always,” I sang and stopped.

  “Go on.”

  I was sitting up in bed. She was on the cedar chest. I went on and finished the song.

  She smiled and clapped.

  “It didn’t sound like it used to,” I said.

  “Your voice sounds a little strained, that’s all. But if I hadn’t heard you before, I wouldn’t notice anything. I’d still be moved. Maybe even moved more, because it sounds like you been through something. Before it was beautiful too, but you sound like you been through more now. You know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean, but it’s still changed.”

  “Not for the worse. Like Ma, for instance, after all the alcohol and men, the strain made it better, because you could tell what she’d been through. You could hear what she’d been through.”

  “Well, I don’t have to worry about the men,” I said.

  “That’d make you go through more, not having a man,” she said, and looked as if she’d wished she hadn’t said it.

  I went on as if I hadn’t heard it. “Well, we’ll see when I go on tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Well, okay, day after tomorrow.”

  “Okay. And first night make it just supper or evening, but not both. I’ll speak to Tad if you don’t.”

  “I don’t think he’d let me sing both anyway.”

  “Naw, he wouldn’t.”

  “You sure it’s okay?”

  “It’s more than okay.”

  She left me. I lay back and tried to sleep, but couldn’t. I started humming the part about taking my rocking chair down by the river and rocking my blues away. What she said about the voice being better because it tells what you’ve been through. Consequences. It seems as if you’re not singing the past, you’re humming it. Consequences of what? Shit, we’re all consequences of something. Stained with another’s past as well as our own. Their past in my blood. I’m a blood. Are you mine, Ursa, or theirs? What he would ask. What would I ask now? Do you want to see me? Naw, I don’t want to see you, I want to screw you. When he wanted to make up with me he’d always ask if I remembered such and such a thing. Do you remember that time we … Hell, yes, I remember. Blues songs and stroking your neck and laughter and sighs inside knees that made us hold each other tighter. When he got back from work he’d ask me to rub his thighs. Do you feel how tight the muscles are? Yes. My hand on his belly then. The mark of his birth. I’d tell him, I have a birthmark between my legs. That would make him laugh. But it’s your fault all my seeds are wounded forever. No warm ones, only bruised ones, not even bruised ones. No seeds. Let me in between your legs. It ain’t a pussy down there, it’s a whole world. Talking about his pussy. Asking me to let him see his pussy. Let me feel my pussy. The center of a woman’s being. Is it? No seeds. Is that what snaps away my music, a harp string broken, guitar string, string of my banjo belly. Strain in my voice. Yes, I remember your hands on my ass. Your damn hands on my ass. That vomity feeling when they squeezed my womb out. Is that the way you treat someone you love? Even my clenched fists couldn’t stop the fall. That old man still howls inside me. You asked me how did I get to be so beautiful. It wasn’t him. No, not Corregidora. And my spirit, you said, like knives dancing. My veins are centuries meeting. You scratched behind my ear and drew blood and then kissed where you scratched. You can’t kiss where you scratched anymore. No, anyway, I don’t believe what Cat said your reasons are. You don’t treat love that way. When you came and heard my music you requested songs, and then when you had me alone, you requested more than my songs. I can still feel your fucking inside me. If it wasn’t for your fucking I. When do you sing the blues? Every time I ever want to cry, I sing the blues. Or would there be glasses of tears? Yes, there would be spilled glasses. I came to you, open and wounded. And you said, Sing for me, goddamn it, sing. Your plate was stained with flies, and you kept requesting songs. I sang to you out of my whole body.

  “Urs, do you remember?”

  “Yes, I remember. Who told you I was here?”

  “The girl did.”

  “I thought she would, the little bitch.”

  “If she hadn’t, I wouldn’t have found you.”

  “You never lost me.”

  The shit you can dream. I struggled out of sleep. My eyes felt as tight as fists, but they opened. Light came in through the yellow shade. The shit you can dream. They say it’s what you really feel, but it ain’t what you really feel.

  I wondered if Cat was up. I got up and put on my robe. But I didn’t want to see that Jeffy if she was out there, so I sat down on the cedar chest and waited. I still felt sleepy, but I knew I couldn’t sleep. I held my arms around my belly. Then I got up and opened the door and went out in the living room. Jeffy wasn’t there. I had expected to see her in there. The clock on the mantelpiece said it was close to five o’clock. I wrapped my robe around me and stood in the living room. Then I heard Cat talking.

  “If you bother her again I’ll give you a fist to fuck.”

  “I ain’t going to bother her again.”

  “I said if you do you got my fist to fuck.”

  Then there was silence.

  “I could’ve told you she wouldn’t.”

  “What? You ask her?”

  There was a loud slap, and then low crying.

  “Laugh now.”

  “Please, Miss Catherine.”

  “I said, ‘Laugh now.’ ”

  Low crying.

  “I didn’t go in there to do it. I must’ve did it in my sleep.”

  “Shit if you did.”

  Silence.

  “Shit.”

  “I grab the shit out of you, you little nigg
er.”

  “Shit.”

  “Hush.”

  I had eased back to the door and by the time the “hush” came, I’d stepped back into the bedroom.

  “What is it?”

  “Hush.”

  Silence.

  I sat on the cedar chest with my robe open, then I got dressed. I think if Cat or Jeffy had come into the room then, I would’ve got evil. I would have got right evil. It wasn’t until years later that I realized it might have been because of my own fears, the things I’d thought about in the hospital, my own worries about what being with a man would be like again, and whether I really had the nerve to try. But then I just felt evil.

  I left the boxes at the foot of the bed. I put my bedclothes and cosmetics in a sack and went out the door and across the street. I’d send Tadpole for the boxes later. The front door was locked and I went up the backstairs and knocked on the door. It took him a long time to come.

  “Ursa, baby, what you doing over here? You awright?”

  “I want to come in,” I said.

  I must have been looking hateful. He asked me what was wrong.

  “A lot of shit,” I said. He’d been sleeping on the bed where I’d been sleeping when I was there. I went and sat down at the foot of the bed. He kept standing, looking at me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you know Jeffy stay over there.”

  “Yeah.”

  I didn’t say what I was going to. “She just stay over there. I’m taking up Jeffy’s space.”

  “That ain’t why you here,” he said.

  I started to tell him, but didn’t. I only told him about Jeffy in the bed, feeling all on my breasts. I didn’t tell him what I’d overheard. I didn’t tell him what Cat was. I didn’t tell him why I’d really left.

  “She should have told me Jeffy was like that before, and I wouldn’t have said she could come in and sleep with me. Cat knew she was like that, that’s why she told her to sleep on the floor.”

  “She could have told her to sleep on the couch,” Tadpole said.

  “Cat don’t allow nobody to sleep on the couch, because she says it’s the only decent thing she got and she wonts to keep it decent.”

  “And you ain’t going back over there?”

  “Naw.”

  “I guess you wont me to go over there and get your stuff for you?”