Corregidora

by Gayl Jones

  “Corregidora must’ve done some rejoicing then. He didn’t show it but he must’ve had it all inside. Ole man kept telling me if the boy had just remembered to rub garlic on his feet, the bloodhounds wouldn’t’ve been able to follow. I asked him if he ever tried it. He said, Naw, but he heard of folks that did. I asked him where was they. He said they was gone. He didn’t know where to, but they must’ve made it, cause didn’t nobody bring them back.”

  She quit talking, and looked over at me suddenly, Mama again: “They just go on like that, and then get in to talking about the importance of passing things like that down. I’ve heard that so much it’s like I’ve learned it off by heart. But then with him there they figured they didn’t have to tell me no more, but then what they didn’t realize was they was telling Martin too …”

  It was as if she had more than learned it off by heart, though. It was as if their memory, the memory of all the Corregidora women, was her memory too, as strong with her as her own private memory, or almost as strong. But now she was Mama again.

  “One day after we’d been married, I don’t know, maybe six months. (He had come into the house to live, you know. Not on account of hisself but me. I kept saying I couldn’t not help them out, and if we didn’t live there, I couldn’t help us and them too. He said he’d help us, all I had to do was worry about them. I said something about how little he was making. Naw, it was almost like he moved in that house out of anger, not for me, but for anger.) Well, he had gone fishing one day, but when he came back, though, instead of coming around to the front where I was, he went around the back to the kitchen and put them in a big pan of water, and then he was gonna come around to the front and have me cut them up and fry them. Well, what happened is he must’ve started through their room and there she was, sitting on that bed in there powdering up under her breasts. I don’t know if she seen him or not—this was your grandmama—but she just kept powdering and humming, cause when I started through there, there she was powdering, and looking down at her breasts, and lifting them up and powdering under them, and there he was just standing in the door with his arms spread up over the door, and sweat showing through his shirt, just watching her. I don’t know what land of expression he had on his face. His lips was kind of smiling, but his eyes wasn’t. He seen me and he just kept standing there. I was looking at Mama and then looking up at him, and after he seen me the first time he just kept looking at her. She was acting like she didn’t know we was there, but I know she had to know. He was just standing there like he was hypnotized or something. I know she knew. She knew it, cause they both knew he wasn’t getting what he wanted from me. Cause you know with them in there, I couldn’t. I’d let him rub me down there. I kept telling him it was because they were in there that I wouldn’t. But … even if they hadn’t been. There she was just sitting there lifting up her breasts. I don’t know when it was she decided she’d let him know she seen him, but then all a sudden she set the box of powder down and looked up. Her eyes got real hateful. First she looked at me, then she looked at him. ‘You black bastard, watching me. What you doing watching me, you black bastard?’ She still had her breasts all showing and just cussing at him. He started over there where she was, but I got between them. ‘Martin, don’t.’ He just kept looking at me, like it was me he was hating, but it was her he was calling a half-white heifer. Her powder and him sweating all up under his arms, and me holding him. She kept calling him a nasty black bastard, and he kept calling her a half-white heifer.

  “ ‘Messing with my girl, you ain’t had no right messing with my girl.’

  “ ‘I’ma come over there and mess with your ass the next time you show it,’ he said, but then I got him in the kitchen, and there was them fish in that pan a water he had waiting for me to clean. He pushed me away from him, and grabbed them fish and started cutting them up hisself. ‘What do we have to do, go up under the house?’ he kept asking me. ‘What do we have to do, go up under the house?’

  “ ‘Please, Martin.’

  “He just kept grabbing those fish and cutting them up.

  “When I came back through the house, Mama rolled her eyes at me. ‘Messing with my girl, he ain’t had no bit of right.’

  “After that, whenever Martin wanted to get from one part of the house to the next, he’d go around the house … But she just kept acting like she didn’t even know he was there.”

  She was quiet again, and then she said, “They had us sleeping in the narrow old trundle bed in the front room, the one you was sleeping in afterwards. I kept telling him it was because they were in there I wouldn’t, but then that time they weren’t there he wanted to take me in their bed …”

  I didn’t ask her whether she had let him. That was something she didn’t have to tell me.

  When we got to the highway, Mama took my arm.

  “I think what really made them dislike Martin was because he had the nerve to ask them what I never had the nerve to ask.”

  “What was that?”

  “How much was hate for Corregidora and how much was love.”

  I said nothing. She squeezed my arm. “I’ll try to pretend you’re okay until you tell me different,” she said.

  “I’m okay, Mama.”

  She kept looking at me. I didn’t like the way she was looking. I wanted to ask what about her now, how lonely was she. She’d told me about then, but what about now. Shortly after Grandmama died, she had written me a letter saying that Mr. Floyd had started to get sweet on her, talking about how he wanted to court her, but she said she hadn’t let him. She said he could just stay across that road, cause all he really wanted to do was to move out of that trailer, and into her house, and probably bring his mama with him. I hadn’t known whether to believe her or not, because I knew too many of my own excuses when men came to the piano, and then Logan—the man Max hired to see to it that men don’t bother me—was my best excuse. I could just give him that “he’s bothering me” look, and he’d put the man out.

  After a while, Mama squeezed my arm again. She kept hold of it until the bus came and she put me on. “Do you know me any better now?” she asked. I only smiled at her. She stayed standing there until the bus pulled off. She didn’t let me see her walk back to the house.

  I leaned back against the seat and closed my eyes. Then suddenly it was like I was remembering something out of a long past. I was a child, drowsy, thinking I was sleeping or dreaming. It was a woman and a man’s voice, both whispering.

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you come?”

  “No.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “I’m not. I’m just not going with you.”

  “Why do you keep fighting me? Or is it yourself you keep fighting?”

  I drifted back into sleep. I never heard that man’s voice again.

  I was thinking that now that Mama had gotten it all out, her own memory—at least to me anyway—maybe she and some man … But then, I was thinking, what had I done about my own life?

  III

  I couldn’t have been more than ten the year the Melrose woman committed suicide. Mama had come into the house. Gram said something to her and then they started hushing each other because I was in the room. I saw the way they was looking, but Mama sent me back in the kitchen to light the oven because she was going to bake some rolls for dinner. I went back in the kitchen. They didn’t think I could hear them, but I could. We had one of them three-room, straight-back shotgun houses. They was in the front room, and with just one room in between us, I could hear them. When I finished lighting the stove, I just sat down at the kitchen table and listened.

  “Yeah, they found her over in Hawkins’ alley,” Mama was saying.

  “Anybody know why yet?”

  “They thought it must’ve been some man, you know, got her pregnant or something, but she wasn’t pregnant.”

  “Had to been some man,” Gram said. “I ain’t never known a woman take her life less it was some man.”

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nbsp; “I reckon,” Mama said. She sounded weary. I didn’t hear them say anything else, and finally Mama said she was going back in the kitchen and start supper. I put my head down on the table, so she wouldn’t see my eyes.

  It wasn’t until later that I knew what they were talking about. I was down at Mr. Deak’s store, and him and these men were talking. They weren’t like Mama and Gram. They didn’t care if I was there or not. Mama had sent me down for some corn meal. I thought it had happened in Bracktown, but it wasn’t Bracktown, it was up in Versailles that it happened, but the girl was from Bracktown—one of Mr. Melrose’s girls. She was in her twenties.

  “Melrose is up there now,” Mr. Deak was saying. “Her mama is all to pieces. He told her to stay here, and he go take care of it. They gon move her body down here. But you know why he didn’t wont Miz Melrose there, because he gon try to find out what man’s responsible, buddy, it’s gon be some fireworks in Versailles.”

  Mr. Deak was a little dark man who wore suspenders all the time, and stood with his thumbs under his suspenders, not up near his chest, but down near his waist. He must’ve been in his twenties, but I thought he was old then.

  “You ain’t forgot what your mama wanted, did you, missy?” he said to me.

  “Naw, sir.” I went and got the corn meal. I didn’t take it over to the counter, I just stayed standing there.

  The other man started talking. “How her daddy gonna find out, and the whole police couldn’t?”

  “A daddy got ways the police ain’t. Anway, she wasn’t nothing but a nigger woman to the police. You know they ain’t gon take they time to find out nothing about a nigger woman. Somebody go down there and file a complaint, they write it down, all right, while you standing there, but as soon as you leave, they say, ‘Here, put it in the nigger file.’ That mean they get to it if they can. And most times they can’t. Naw, they don’t say put it in the nigger file, they say put it in the nigger woman file, which mean they ain’t gon never get to it … You know, John Willie ain’t gon do nothing. But her daddy, now, that’s something different. You heard about the shot heard round the world. They gon be some rumbling over here in Bracktown when Mr. Melrose find that man.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t no man, maybe it was just she went crazy.”

  “Naw, it was a man. I bet my eyeteeth it was a man.”

  Mr. Deak looked at me again, this time real hard, and I handed him the money for the meal, and ran out the door.

  “Did you hear what happened to that Melrose woman?” I asked May Alice. She was my girl friend. She was a couple of years older than me, though, and had already started bleeding. She called it bleeding, so I had started calling it bleeding. Before then I had been taught to call it monthly or time of month. They told me about it when I was nine. They wouldn’t have told me that early, but I’d found some of Mama’s bloody sheets and had started screaming and crying, and they couldn’t convince me that mama wasn’t sick until they told me about it. When I told May Alice, she’d laughed, and every since that, she would start pointing out people and saying, “She bleeds.” At first I had liked “monthly” but then I had started liking her word better. I hadn’t started bleeding yet, but May Alice said I would start in a few years. She said she had started early, though, and sounded like she was bragging. She said it was a good thing I’d had that scare then, because if they hadn’t told me, and I’d seen all that blood in my bloomers, I would have had a bigger scare. She said she knew this girl who hadn’t been told and when she saw all that blood she thought something was wrong with her, but was even too scared to tell her mama, and went down in the basement and kept trying to wipe the blood off, but it just kept coming, and she thought she was dying or something. Then May Alice laughed at me again.

  “She wasn’t a woman. She wasn’t any older than my sister,” May Alice said now.

  “Your sister’s married, ain’t she?”

  “That don’t make her a woman. Anyway, Mama keeps telling her it’s time for her to start acting like a woman. She might’ve had it in her, but that don’t make her no woman.”

  “Had what in her?”

  “Dick, silly.”

  “What?”

  “Her husband’s thing. A man’s got something different from a girl.”

  “I know that.”

  “You don’t act like it.”

  “I ain’t seen one, but I know what it looks like.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because we was watching Mr. Trumbo’s dick get hard through his pants, and I told you. You don’t remember nothing.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, just because somebody had it in them, don’t make them no woman. I had it in me, and I ain’t no woman.”

  “How you have it in you?”

  “I just did, that’s all. I opened my legs, and Harold put it in me. He said, ‘Open your legs up, May Alice,’ and I did. I played like I didn’t know what he was going to do, but I did. Then he put his thing in me, and my pussy got all bloody.”

  “You said you already bleed.”

  “I do, but that’s not the only kind of bleeding a woman, I mean a girl, have to put up with. The first time a man sticks it in you, you bleed.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “It does for a little while, and then it feels good.”

  “Naw it don’t.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “How can it feel good if it hurts.”

  “I said it hurts for a little while, and then all the hurting goes, and then it feels good.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You will. Rate you going, you probly be my sister’s age, but you’ll say, May Alice told me it would feel good.”

  “Naw I won’t. I’ll say May Alice told me a story.”

  She just laughed.

  When we were older—or maybe I should say when I was older—May Alice always seemed the same age to me; I was about twelve myself then, no, I was thirteen, because I’d just started getting my period—I was in the six grade and she was in the eighth, but we had recess at the same time, and I saw her and Harold leave the playground and go over in Mr. Jouett’s wheat field. Harold came back first, and then she came back and came over where I was.

  “May Alice, you going to have a baby if you don’t quit.”

  “Did Miss Smoot see us?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think she was looking.”

  “You know what’ll happen if you don’t quit,” I said again.

  She looked angry at first, and then she kind of laughed a little. “I been trying to, but then it gets so you can’t help it. You’ll find out.”

  I kind of frowned. She was always mentioning the fact that she’d been having it and I hadn’t, like when we were younger and she would keep saying, “I got a bigger hole than you got,” and asking me if I wanted to see it. I said, “Naw.”

  “I’ll show it to you if you show me yours,” she said.

  “Naw.”

  “Reason I got a bigger hole than you got is cause Harold been in me.”

  “Harold can’t get in you. You ain’t got no door.”

  “Yes, I do, cause I got one down between my legs.”

  Then when I first started bleeding, I tried to get back at her. I said, “You said it would be red. It looks like chocolate.” “It’ll get red,” she told me, and it did.

  “Anyway,” she went on now, “once you had it in you, it seems like you have to keep having it in you. I heard Mama talking about this woman that didn’t have it done to her and went crazy. You got to have it in you, or you go crazy.”

  “You lying.”

  “Naw I ain’t. Mama said this girl, there was this man that used to come and visit her mama, and her mama never would let her do nothing, and then this man left her house, and went walking down the street, and this girl broke loose, and ran down the street after him, and tried to rape him, right there on the sidewalk. They put her in the asylum after that.”
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br />   I kept saying she was lying, and she kept saying naw she wasn’t neither. Then Harold came over by us, and he was grinning. I told May Alice I had to go inside.

  I never did tell her about that time I was home by myself and Harold and some more boys came and was standing outside the kitchen door wanting to get in, and I wouldn’t let them in.

  “Let us in, Ursa,” Harold had said. “Let us in so we can give you a baby. Don’t you want a baby?”

  They kept knocking on the door. I wouldn’t let them in the kitchen, so they went around to the front, but that was locked too.

  “Henry said when you was five you let him see your pussy,” Harold said.

  “I ain’t five now.”

  “He said you let him feel all up in your ass.”

  “Naw I didn’t.”

  “Open the door so we can get some. Don’t you want a baby?”

  I was in the bathroom when May Alice came in.

  “Why’d you leave? Harold says you don’t like him.”

  I said nothing. I was thinking of that time we had gone through the cut-off, May Alice and me, and Harold and those boys were there again. Harold had gone over to May Alice and the other boys were after me, but May Alice had thrown rocks at them. “Don’t let them get Urs,” she’d said. “Harold, make them leave.” When the other boys were gone, she and Harold got over in the grass. They were rolling like they were playing at first, and then I knew what they were doing. They hadn’t even told me to turn my head.

  “What’s wrong, Urs?”

  “You know what’ll happen if you don’t stop.”

  “I can take care of myself,” she said, then she stuck her tongue out at me, and left.

  I didn’t even know what she saw in him, except that day we had a dance at school and he asked me to slow-dance, and he kept getting real close to me, and he felt real hot down between his legs. I didn’t know anybody could feel that hot. When he asked me to dance again, I wouldn’t dance with him. He went over and said something to some boys, and these boys were standing over in the corner, looking at me, laughing. No one else asked me to dance that evening.