Corregidora

by Gayl Jones

I said, “No.”

  He smiled a little. “Yeah, she’s my woman. Her and Ella. The rest of em can’t do nothing for me. Now the Lady Billie she …”

  When I told Mutt about Corregidora, it was before we got married. I hadn’t gone to his apartment and he hadn’t been to mine, but now we had gotten so he would come into my dressing room and we would talk there. He said he only knew one thing about when his people were slaves, but that it was enough for him. I asked him what was it. He said that his great-grandfather—he guessed great-grandfather—had worked as a blacksmith, hiring hisself out, and bought his freedom, and then he had bought his wife’s freedom. But then he got in debt to these men, and he didn’t have any money, so they come and took his wife. The courts judged that it was legal, because even if she was his wife, and fulfilled the duties of a wife, he had bought her, and so she was also his property, his slave. He said his great-grandfather had just gone crazy after that. “You can imagine how he must of felt.”

  I nodded, but said nothing.

  “Don’t look like that, Ursa,” he had said and pulled me toward him. “Whichever way you look at it, we ain’t them.”

  I didn’t answer that, because the way I’d been brought up, it was almost as if I was.

  “We’re not, Ursa.”

  I had stepped back suddenly.

  “What did you step back for, woman? I wasn’t going to bite you. What in the hell did you step back for?”

  He was looking at me with more hurt than anger. But when I came back toward him, he acted like he didn’t want me then. Said he was going out and get himself a drink. He had come in before the show instead of after. When I got outside, he was sitting there drinking. I sang all his favorite songs to try to make up to him. The next time he said, “Ursa, baby,” I let him do a little bit more of what he wanted, but this time he was the one who stopped himself.

  “I’ll wait till you ready,” he had said, then he smiled a bit. “I started to say, I won’t be ready till you are. But that would be a lie, Urs. I want you so much.”

  When he got up close to me, he was hot like a furnace. I backed away from him.

  “If you won’t have it this way, what about …”

  I said no before he could finish.

  “You didn’t hear what I was going to say.”

  “I think I know.”

  “I’m going to ask you again.”

  I said nothing.

  “All you act like you want from a man is a little peck on the cheek. Somebody ought to give you a little peck on the cheek, and I don’t mean this one.” He patted the side of my face.

  I couldn’t tell if he were angry or what. He pulled me back close to him.

  I didn’t let him inside me completely until the night we were married. I understood more than Mama knew about pushing a man out. He had never liked for me to sing that song “Open the Door, Richard” and I never would sing it after the first time because he’d said, “When are you going to let Richard in?” No, it wasn’t so much he didn’t like it as I felt uncomfortable singing it, or any song that had anything to do with opening up. I still sang the song about the tunnel closing tight around the train and the one about the bird woman who took this man on a long journey, but never returned him. “What’s wrong, Ursa?” he’d keep asking, and even the night we were married, and he took me up to his room at the Drake Hotel, he’d kept asking, “What’s wrong, baby? Ursa, honey, what’s wrong?” He kept holding me and kissing me. We were both out of our clothes, but we’d done nothing yet.

  “I can’t, Mutt.”

  “Hell if you can’t, you got a cunt, ain’t you?”

  I said nothing.

  “What’s wrong, baby? What do you call it?”

  I still wouldn’t answer.

  The first time, a couple of months later, when I’d flared back at him with his own kind of words, he’d said, “You never used to talk like that. How’d you get to talk like that?”

  I answered, “I guess you taught me. Corregidora taught Great Gram to talk the way she did.”

  “Don’t give me hell, Ursa,” he said now. “You know this is hell. Don’t you feel anything? Don’t you want me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I want to help you, but I can’t help you unless you help me.”

  He had parted my legs, but I pushed him away.

  “Any other man would say you was crazy. Any other man wouldn’t put up with this shit.”

  “You don’t have to.” I hadn’t meant to say it.

  He’d started soothing me again, almost like one soothes a baby.

  “I act like a child, don’t I? Somebody told me even after I’d had a man, I’d still act like a child.”

  “You not a child. You something, but you not a child.”

  I let him get close to me again.

  “Naw, Ursa, you ain’t a child.”

  I let him get close till he was inside.

  He kept asking me what he was doing to me, but I wouldn’t tell him.

  “What am I doing to you, Ursa … I’m fucking you, ain’t I? What’s wrong? Say it, Urs. I said I know you from way back. I’m fucking you, ain’t I? Say it.”

  “Mutt, I …”

  He laughed. “You ain’t no hard woman, baby.”

  Stroking my hair, he came. “Are you still afraid of me?”

  “Naw, Mutt.”

  “Are you sure, baby?”

  “I’m sure.”

  He kissed my forehead.

  May Alice had said that after you had a baby you felt like telling people. After I had had Mutt I felt like telling people, but at the same time it was something that you didn’t tell, something that you kept inside. I think I was happy then. I would sing songs that had to do with holding things inside you. Secret happinesses, a tenderness. I think Mutt was embarrassed by the way I would look at him. Sometimes I would sing whole songs to him, and that’s why I would think he had gotten out of the habit of sitting as close to the front as he did, but later I learned it was because he wanted to watch the other men, how they were reacting to me. I learned that it was because he’d got crazy somehow on account of me. Once I’d said playfully, when he brought the subject of the other men up, “You crazy, man.” He’d answered me equally as playful, “You crazy, too, woman.” But then it got so it wasn’t playful anymore, and he’d meant everything he said about those men.

  “When Corregidora had that stroke he didn’t call in his men, he called in his women and said he’d give them any amount of money they wonted if they take it off him, but they said didn’t none of them put it on him.”

  “Shit, I’m tired a hearing about Corregidora’s women. Why do you have to remember that old bastard anyway?”

  I said nothing.

  “You one of them,” he said.

  “What?”

  “If you wasn’t one of them you wouldn’t like them mens watching after you.”

  “They don’t watch after me, Mutt.”

  “I wish you’d take that damned mascara off. It makes you look like a bitch.”

  “The thunder sounds like it’s talking, don’t it?” I asked.

  “That’s because you got music all in your head. The thunder ain’t doing nothing but thundering.”

  “Naw, Mutt, it’s talking. If you listen, you can hear it too.”

  “I seen the way Tyrone Davis was looking at you.”

  “He wasn’t looking no way at me.”

  “A man don’t like for other mens to look at they wives like that.”

  “Last night you didn’t wont nobody to say nothing to me, and tonight they can’t even look at me.”

  “Not the way mens look. A man know if a woman don’t.”

  “Mutt, you crazy.”

  “You call me crazy again you gon see just how crazy I am.”

  I came home from work and he was laying across the bed in his shorts. He only went to my performances sometimes now, usually on Friday. We had been married about four months. It was near the end of March,
and was just beginning to be warm in the day, but still cold at night. He hadn’t turned the heat on, and didn’t have a cover over him, and looked like he was freezing.

  “Mutt, you’ll catch your death.”

  I went over and lit the heater.

  “What do you care? You got all them men.”

  “Mutt, you crazy.”

  He only looked at me this time. I hadn’t meant to say it, and regretted it.

  “Rub my thighs, baby.”

  “What’s wrong with your thighs?”

  “They tight. I been working all day. You know a man got to work. And working in tobacco ain’t easy.”

  I felt he had some kind of trick, but I took my jacket off and went over to the bed and started massaging his thighs.

  “Feel how tight they are.”

  “Yes.” The muscles did feel tight.

  “Get back behind there, you ain’t rubbed behind there.”

  I rubbed behind his thighs.

  “You ain’t rubbed in between them.”

  I rubbed in between his thighs, and he kept telling me to move up just a little bit, and then he pulled me by the shoulders until I was up on top of him, and felt him through my skirt.

  “You ain’t had it this way, have you?”

  “No.”

  He pushed me away real hard. “Well, you ain’t getting it.”

  “Mutt.”

  That was when he first started to use that part of my feeling to try to pressure me into giving up the job. Whenever he wanted it and I didn’t, he’d take me, because he knew that I wouldn’t say, No, Mutt, or even if I had, sometimes I wonder about whether he would have taken me anyway. But those times that I wanted it, and he sensed that I wanted it, that’s when he would turn away from me.

  “Mutt.”

  “Take it someplace else.”

  “What if I do?”

  He gave me a hard look. “Try me.”

  He made me think he was going to.

  “My pussy, ain’t it, Ursa?”

  “Yes, Mutt, it’s your pussy.”

  “My pussy, ain’t it, baby?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it’s yours now.”

  He turned away.

  Finally I got to the point where I tried to learn from him, play it his way. If he could be cold, I told myself, I could too. He’d been kind of funny about coming to the place lately. He’d come to the place, and kind of look around, like in those movies where those men come in and “case out a joint,” one hand in his pocket, smoking a cigarette with the other hand, then he’d leave. But he never sat down at a table like he used to. He had moved from a front table while we were courting to a back table in the corner while he was watching who looked at me wrong, and then finally, just before he went and tried to grab me off the stage, he had begun to “case out the joint.” If it had been anyone else, I mean, if I had been anyone else, and the consequences hadn’t been like they were, seeing him standing there with his hand in his pocket, smoking that damned cigarette, would have made me laugh.

  I was sitting on the edge of the bed. He had come in and cased out the joint, but then when I got home he wasn’t even there. When he did come home he got undressed. I guess he must have thought I didn’t want it, because he was going to give it to me. But this time I wasn’t going to give it to him.

  “What’s the matter, Urs? Cat got your tongue? Cat or rat one. If the cat ain’t got it, the rat have. What’s the matter, woman!”

  He was angry now, but he didn’t try to force me in bed with him like I thought he would. And it was the first time I hadn’t given it to him when he said yes. Maybe it was because I did want it.

  “I’m just playing it your way,” I said. “Something else I learned.”

  “My way or your own?” he asked.

  No, he didn’t force me down with him, and when I did want to give in he wouldn’t take what I had to give.

  “And that bastard you work for, he ain’t no different from anybody else. He’s all eyes too, and probably all dick.”

  It was after one of his joint casings. I said nothing.

  “How many times you relieved his swelling? He ain’t had you working there every night for nothing, have he?”

  “Mutt, it ain’t like that. He ain’t tried nothing. He don’t mean nothing to me.”

  “You got to mean something to him, though, way I see him looking.”

  “He ain’t even really friendly. He’s kind of shy, anyway.”

  “Them’s the kind you got to watch out for. Play like he ain’t friendly. But I bet he’s got something friendly down there between his legs. Them’s the kind womens come to anyway. The shy ones. I mean, since they don’t come to the womens, the womens got to come to them.”

  “Like you?”

  He said, “Shit.”

  The next night I heard some men laughing at Mutt. If he had ever heard it, he just didn’t care. I was on my way up to the stage. It wasn’t like a theater stage, but more like a reserved space in the floor, with a piano. I kind of stopped when I heard them. Mutt was standing near the back of the room, looking.

  “What that nigger call hisself doing? Being Dick Tracy?”

  The other man said softly, “That’s his wife.”

  The man turned around. “Aw, scuse me.”

  I said nothing. I went on up to the stage.

  Mutt must’ve spent several weeks acting that way. When I started singing, he would listen a little, look around again, and then leave. They have Shaft coats now. I guess he must’ve been wearing his Dick Tracy coat then. Yeah, if I was an outsider I probably would’ve laughed too. I just stood there trying not to let my embarrassment show in my voice. I sang “See See Rider.” Somebody hollered, “Yeah, see what you have done, baby.” “Tadpole gonna see see your behind out of here.” “Let the woman sing,” somebody else said. I sang “The Broken Soul Blues.” People always got real quiet on that. Mutt left in the middle of “The Broken Soul Blues.” Either he was getting disturbed in the mind, I was thinking, or he was just doing that to humiliate me. Naw, I didn’t think he was crazy now, I just thought he was doing it all for spite.

  When I came home he was turned over on his back. I asked him what was wrong. He said a man works hard all day and just gets tired sometime. I said nothing. Then he said something about a man working for a woman. He said, “A man works for a woman, a man don’t work for hisself.” I said, “A man’s got to eat and have someplace to sleep too.” He said, “A man sees to it that a woman eats and has some place to sleep, and children, if he got any, before he takes a bite or feels like he can lay his head down.” I didn’t say anything else to him. He asked me to come over and rub his back for him, to loosen up some of those tight muscles. I went over and rubbed his back. He fell asleep before I finished, or pretended he was asleep.

  “That’s what I’m gon do,” he said. He was standing with his arms all up in the air. I was on my way to work. “One a y’all wont to bid for her? Piece a ass for sale. I got me a piece a ass for sale. That’s what y’all wont, ain’t it? Piece a ass. I said I got a piece a ass for sale, anybody wont to bid on it?”

  “Mutt, you wouldn’t.”

  “You think I won’t. I’ma be down there tonight, and as soon as you get up on that stage, I’ma sell me a piece a ass.”

  I walked out the door.

  Mutt was there. I’d started to tell Tadpole what he planned to do, but I didn’t. I was afraid if I did, Mutt might not go through with it, and then there I’d be, looking like a fool anyway. I thought the best thing to do would be just to sing loud, and have Tadpole put him out when and if he started something. I was glad so far he hadn’t started a fight with a man. I’d been expecting that, but instead he’d come in looking like damn Dick Tracy, making men rather laugh at him than fight him anyway.

  Mutt wasn’t there when the show started, but he came in the middle. I was singing one of Ella Fitzgerald’s songs, and as soon as I saw him I kind of gradually increased the volume, h
oping people wouldn’t notice. The piano player, though, must’ve thought I was crazy, but he played a little louder too. A few men, I think, who had started waiting for Mutt to come in, looked around and saw him and kind of smiled. I was scared too, but I was still singing, and calling his bluff. I saw him raise his arm, and just keep it suspended in the air. Instead of saying anything, he just let it drop, and put his hand in his pocket and left. I ended the song loud anyway. And then I sang a very soft one.

  When I got home he was sitting at the dresser. He didn’t turn around to look at me because he could see me through the mirror. I closed the door and stood looking at him.

  “I’m glad you didn’t, Mutt.”

  “It wasn’t on account of you, it was on account of my great-grandaddy. Seeing as how he went through all that for his woman, he wouldn’t have appreciated me selling you off.”

  “Well, for whatever reason, I’m glad. I was hoping it was for me, though.” I went to hang up my jacket.

  “Don’t act Missy,” he said, angry.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t act Miss Missy with me. I ain’t your slave neither.”

  “I didn’t say you was. I haven’t treated you like you was.”

  He’d turned from the dresser and got up. He was standing looking at me real wild, like he would do something.

  “I didn’t say you was,” I repeated.

  I was looking hurt now, at least I felt hurt. And I was also afraid of him.

  “I ain’t looking for no argument,” he said, and walked out, slamming the door.

  I must’ve been asleep when he came back. I could only feel him getting up in the morning, getting ready to go to work. He had to be there at eight.

  “They got a big-time band from Chicago coming out to Dixieland,” Mutt said. “You think ole Crawdad’ll let you off Friday night?”

  He was acting more like himself, but lately I’d gotten into the habit of being cautious.

  “His name ain’t Crawdad, it’s Tadpole.”

  “Crawdad or Tadpole, they both swim around in the same hole,” he said, but not sarcastic. He was still in good spirits.

  “I think I can get off,” I said coolly.

  “Come on, Ursa, baby, don’t act that way. We need a little night out together, don’t you think?”