Betsey Brown

by Ntozake Shange

  “Girls, come help me with the supper,” Jane shouted from the kitchen.

  “All right, Mama,” but none of them moved. They were waiting for some sign from Charlie that everything was all right again.

  “You heard Aunt Jane, go get dinner ready, would you? I’m hungry.”

  Charlie could talk fine, but his words were slurred cause he wanted to cry too. He couldn’t bear the burden of the whole race all by himself. Not every day. Alone. He was so glad Uncle Greer had decided to go with him just once. He’d let those guineas, oh, those people, know he wasn’t alone in this. Not by a long shot.

  Vida’d come in from her garden and run everybody, including Jane, out of the kitchen. She said there was too much mess going on in the house, and cooking gave her peace of mind. The children needed to do their lessons, so the white folks would know they weren’t any dummies.

  “Look, Grandma, the white folks didn’t kill me.”

  “Of course not, Allard. They only kill little boys who don’t mind.”

  “Mama! That was an inappropriate answer,” Jane said, irritated.

  “Well, I told him what I think.”

  “Allard, the white people aren’t going to kill anybody. What happened to Charlie happens everywhere, even between Negroes themselves. Remember what I told you: there’s evil folks in every walk of life. Their color has nothing to do with it.”

  “That’s not what Charlie said. He said there was five of them and one of him.”

  “Allard, Charlie’s mad right now. Everything he says when he’s mad isn’t true.”

  “No, I saw it. He’s got a black eye.”

  “Mama, you know those white boys beat on Charlie,” Sharon added adamantly.

  “See what I told you bout messing with them white folks.” Vida was sprinkling the greens with cayenne, thinking maybe she ought to give each of the children a little bit to throw on the whites who bothered them.

  “Mama, this is not the time to discourage them.”

  “I’m not discouraging them. I’m encouraging them to mind their ways round those people.”

  “They are not ‘those people,’ they are just some other people. Mama, please, let’s not argue.”

  “Well, if they bother me, I’m gonna set em on fire, that’s what I’m gointa do,” Allard declared.

  “You’ll do no such thing.”

  “Yes I will. They go up in flames to glory. Won’t they, Grandma?”

  “I’m not sure that’s where they’ll go, Allard.”

  “Mama, how could you say such a thing when you know Allard has a predilection for fire-setting. I just can’t believe it.”

  “Well, why don’t you take a look at Charlie’s eye and see what’s to be believed, then?”

  “Greer, Greer, take me out of here. I have to go somewhere and clear my head. Tween the white folks, Mama, the Supreme Court, the buses, the boys, the girls at that stage, oh my God, Greer, please get me out of here.”

  Greer stood in the doorway of the kitchen toward the back steps.

  “Come on upstairs, Jane. It’s quiet. I’m going to take all the children to school tomorrow, make no mistake. Right now, though, I think I better take care of you.”

  “I just don’t know how much of this I can take,” Jane murmured as she and Greer slowly walked to their room.

  “It’s not that bad, is it?” Greer stopped at the bend in the stairs where the children couldn’t spy on them and wrapped his arms around her.

  “It’s not my idea of a quiet family life.”

  “These aren’t peaceful times, Jane.” Greer kissed her temple and held her face in his hand. “You’re as strong as I am. We’ll make it through this and we’ll reminisce bout the evening you were storming about, saying you were losing your mind. The evening I asked for a little bit of loving at quarter of six.”

  “Now?”

  “Yep.”

  “What about dinner and the children?”

  “They’ll be right there, believe me, they aren’t going anywhere.”

  “Must be you think I’m crazy, too. All you can think I have to do is to go off making love to you at quarter of six in the evening. I couldn’t have conceived this is where we’d be thirteen years from then. And thirteen years from now?”

  “We’ll still be together, sweetheart. How about a tango, a bolero, a samba, a mambo?”

  Jane snuggled up to Greer. “Just nothing too African, you hear. The bed can’t take it.”

  Betsey peeked around the corner of the landing they were on before they ran off and locked their door.

  “There’s never enough when you’re really in love, is there Mommy . . .”

  7

  The burnt-orange and clay dried leaves fell as quickly as the days went by, there wasn’t enough time to catch up with her old playmates, not enough time to dig to China, never enough time to tell the white folks what she really felt about them, walking around like they owned the world. There was never any time to see Eugene. Basketball. Basketball. Basketball. Even Charlie didn’t get to see him. Plus, she was to keep her mind on her studies, now she was competing with the white children—as if that hadn’t been the case in the beginning. Who did they think she was gonna grow up and compete against, Rodan? Grown-ups made such little sense. Why go lock yourself up in a room when there were sycamores and white oaks to nestle under. Why throw things and scream and holler on account of some white man coming to the door saying that the John Birch Society represented all Americans. Mama liketa jumped down the man’s throat and Daddy wasn’t too keen on the explanation of separate but equal that the tiny little white man presented from a global perspective. Daddy said the only way to really understand white folks was to listen to them.

  Betsey thought she must know all about the white people by now, she listened to them all day long. Every day. Not the way a blues gets in your bones and has ya inchin along in tune to the smells and sways of a colored day, so it’s pleasant and downright comforting, but the way the gnats be coming at ya at night if no one has any bug lotion. White folks got on ya like gnats. She missed everything on account of them. She thought on what she could do as hard on the white folks as they were hard on her.

  She was a secret now, lying in the dirt and dry leaves out of sight of Mr. Jeff’s gardening tools. That man had a way about him. If there was an empty plot of ground, he’d sure ’nough find something to plant in it. But Betsey’d planted herself in the shadow of her tree and the fragrance of earth to conjure some way back at the white folks which didn’t have one iota of the ways of the Lord in it. She wasn’t certain she was making a bargain with Satan, but even if she did, white folks did it all the time. Come hell or high water, Betsey was gonna do em up right, least in her neighborhood.

  Everybody’d gone off to swim at the Y. Friday was the day they cleaned the pool, that’s how come the colored could swim on Fridays. Betsey’d missed that cause she got home from the white school too late to take the carpool of colored children over there.

  The street was vacant. Like a big old movie set. Nothing. Nobody to do a thing with. What could she do alone? Better yet, what could she do alone that could exclude the white folks, who were nowhere to be seen except in her wounds and aches of memories. Betsey decided to play hop-scotch, but she laid the hop-scotch pattern out with enough room to write “For Colored Only,” “Crackers and Dogs Not Allowed,” “Peckerwoods Got No Welcome Here,” “Guineas Go Home.” Betsey’s hop-scotch was something to behold. Chalk never seemed so powerful as when it messed with white folks.

  Betsey jumped all over her great design. She danced on the “No Whites” till it smudged beyond recognition. Then she wrote it over again till she was so tired she went into the house to take a nap.

  The neighborhood was outraged. How in an era of desegregation and reconciliation of the races could such an ugly, hateful hop-scotch game appear on their street. Not one of the Negro families on the block admitted to having any hostile feelings toward white folks. Not a single one.
Including the Browns, who were as astonished as the Blackburns and the Williamses that a prejudiced soul lived among them. Betsey volunteered to rid the street of the vile creation with a hose from round back of her house. There was no need to contaminate the minds of the young ones a moment longer. With a swoosh of water there’d be not one more unpleasantry about white folks visible on the block. But Betsey Brown had had her day, when she was in control.

  But things were getting out of control for Jane and Greer. The melody of their first years together was wearing thin. Good help was hard to find. Good loving was hard to nurture, with the whole world going topsy-turvy round about you. Lean his kisses were, short her hugs. The children scrambled into their bed each morning with some new dilemma, or just a wet kiss from the wrong side of the bed. Jane took refuge in decks of cards she collected and hoarded from whoever was learning their numbers. Queens, kings, jacks, hearts, spades, diamonds, her other reality. Concentrated, ordered and private. Now when Jane was in college, she’d laughed at the girls whiling their days away in pinocle, bridge, or whist. The drama of Bernhart, Holiday, and Home held too much for her then. Yet now that was so far away, solitaire was her forte.

  “Since when do you have time to go play cards at the Alley Cat Club?” Greer asked one night, while undressing.

  “Since you went away . . . ,” Jane sang sarcastically.

  “You being funny or something?”

  “I didn’t know you had time to think about what I was doing with my leisure time. What little of it I’ve got.”

  “At the Alley Cat Club, there’s only so much you can do.”

  “A club is a suit in a deck of cards.”

  Greer lay next to Jane on their bed, being sure not to disturb the game she’d been playing so intently. “Is that your way of calling a spade a spade?”

  “Might be.” Jane rolled over to put her diaphragm in. She didn’t really know why she bothered. It hadn’t helped before.

  “You don’t need to do all that,” Greer said.

  “Oh no? You know what we’re in store for if I don’t, don’t you? There’s awready four of em. Don’t be a fool and make it five. I’ll be just a second.”

  “I’m going to learn how to play cards, so I could see you sometimes.” Greer spilled the deck marked with little forget-me-nots at the edge of the bed.

  “I said I’d be right back, and you know I only play solitaire.”

  The house was bathed in Bessie Smith from a station Betsey’d found on the radio downstairs. Betsey was adorning herself with the curtains and some feathers, stalking the front room like a teenaged Shirley Temple who was colored to begin with.

  “Betsey, turn that mess off and go to bed,” Jane hollered down the halls. If it wasn’t for Greer these children would have some sense. All that nasty colored music.

  “Betsey, turn that mess off, do you hear me.”

  Bessie Smith went down one decibel. Jane let it pass and fell into Greer’s arms.

  “You really should come home more often.”

  They didn’t bother to turn the lights out. The lights never went out at the Savoy or Birdland. Her skirts would twirl up toward the lights, the trumpets, and Cab Calloway’s chants. All this was coming back to Jane, why she loved her husband and where they’d courted.

  Downstairs Vida stole a lost moment for herself in the quiet of the parlor where she kept her photos of Frank and her children in their wedding gowns and graduation garb. The music Jane and Greer were moving to was inaudible to Vida, but the blues Betsey’d turned up again was athrilling Vida’s china bones. She took the picture of Frank in his best suit off the wall and danced a strange little dance of “I love you, you scoundrel, you love of my life.” She remembered, giggling a bit, that once she’d gone to a roadhouse and danced on a dime, somewhere near Savannah.

  “Oh that Frank of mine!” fell from her lips, made her smile. “Now, I wasn’t there on Sundays, hardly ever on a Monday, but I could get most every man to smile, if I did a Charleston for a while.” Vida pulled up her nightie and twitched her thin legs this way and that. “I wonder was it like this?” she asked herself, “Or more like this?” Vida slipped her hips to the east and then to the west. “Oh no, I couldn’t have been so bawdy, not nearly so naughty.” Vida let herself down in an easy chair by the window where she watched her Frank come up the front stairs of her father’s house. “I wonder if Vida is receiving company tonight?” Between the Bible and her man’s photograph Vida drifted to a land of glory smitten with ragtime, her other times.

  Betsey was in her own time, practicing her dancing and proverbs: the Bible and a little dance were a girl’s way to salvation, if you counted a good man as salvation, which Betsey did. Talking to herself had never bothered Betsey at all. Why Tina Turner even said, “There Is Something on My Mind,” and there was always something on Betsey’s mind.

  Etta James crooned something low and nasty in the background. Betsey’s little backside went everywhichaway trying to keep in the correct ambiance. “What am I ’sposed to do? Be deaf, dumb, and blind? A girl’s gotta practice her dancin, the fast as well as the slow kind. Be up on her Bible and the ways of the Negroes from Akron Ohio all the way to Machito. I’m gettin too big to play tie-em up and skidaddle with Dale and Joe. I’m more of a heifer now than they’ll ever know.”

  Betsey laughed out loud, remembering being the calf the ropers were to brand by mixing spit and dirt on their hands and rubbing it on the cheek of the heifer. Pretty soon, as they got older, the cheek wasn’t anywhere near her lips, but closer to her thighs. Her mama liked a died, seein that husky Dale and the tallest Joe this side of Enright Street rubbing Betsey’s behind. No, she was way too big for games like that now. She had to practice her steps, the way Mama and Daddy did when they went out dancing, or to a formal or a masquerade ball. She’d have to know which hand to hold out and which foot to move ’fore the next, when to turn, if the pull to the left meant turn right or turn left or just stop till the next measure. A girl had to practice her dancing, which is exactly what Betsey Brown was in the process of doing when Jane’s voice plummeted down the stairs once again.

  “Betsey, I thought I told you to turn that mess off!”

  As Jane’s reprimand sailed down the stairs, it muffled the little feet of Sharon and Margot eager to tease Betsey and still getta chance to hear a little blues.

  “Didn’t you hear Mama say to turn that mess off,” Margot whispered, turning herself to the arm of Greer’s favorite chair.

  “Yeah, didn’t you hear Mama say to cut that mess off,” Sharon giggled, doing the bop the wrong way.

  “I have my reasons,” Betsey said and kept on with the intricacies of everything she could imagine a colored boy trying to have her do on a dance floor without ever once opening his mouth, which would mean she was a good dancer cause you don’t have to talk to a good dancer, they just feel what the next step is and do it. That’s what Betsey had on her mind and her body sashayed and flung itself cross the carpet over to the speaker, past Sharon’s off-time little numbers, round Margot’s awkward turns and turn again.

  “Girl, you a niggah to your very soul.” Margot stopped, out of breath and envious. “I can’t imagine what a child like you is even doing in this house.”

  Sharon grabbed Margot’s hand and said something Betsey couldn’t hear, but surely had to do with stealing from Vida’s cookie jar and messing with Betsey’s mind. They ran off to the pantry together mimicking Jane. “Turn that mess off, Betsey. Betsey that niggah noise is disturbing my rest.”

  Betsey stopped dead in her tracks. She’d had enough of all of this. Every time she played music she was a niggah. If she mentioned Nasser, she was a communist. If she wanted to boycott her school, she was a rabble-rouser. If she wanted to eat at Howard Johnson’s, she was giving whites more than was their due. No matter what she said or did, it wasn’t right. In addition to the fact that she hadn’t been kissed since Eugene Boyd came calling that first evening. It was plain as could be to an
yone with good sense, with the head God put on her shoulders, that the only reasonable thing to do was run away. That was clear as day.

  Betsey turned the music way down low and let the rhythm help her figure her future. Her life wasn’t going to be another Nadinaola meets Duke Pomade affair. She was gonna be in the trenches for the race, she’d win the dance trophies, put the white folks in their place. She’d paint her nails and wax her bangs, she’d do everything the bad girls did. Oh, she was gonna run away and see what the truth of the matter was.

  Now, what should she call herself for this great journey? Sojourner she was not. The lady was still too much alive. Susan B. Anthony was a white woman. But Cora, Cora was a calling name. Cora Sue Betsey Anne with a “e” Calhoun (to make sure they’d know she was colored) Brown. Cora Sue Betsey Anne Calhoun Brown.

  “I’ma big girl now with ideas of my own. These crazy folks round here just won’t leave me alone. ‘Turn that mess off, Betsey.’ ‘Betsey you know you’re tryin your best to be a niggah.’ As if I had anything to do with that. That was God’s will is what it was. How can you try to be what you awready are? Sometimes these folks just don’t make no sense at all. ‘Betsey, you could do better than to let the whole world know you a niggah.’

  “These crazy people just won’t leave me alone and this is my mama I’m talking bout, my daddy, my home. I’ve gotta find some place to be on my own, where I don’t have to explain and where I’m never ashamed that I’m Miss Cora Sue Betsey Anne Calhoun Brown.”

  For some reason hearin Chuck Jackson singing made Betsey wanta get married. This is, after she’d run away and made a career of her own, like her mama had and Madame C. J. Walker. Oh yes, Betsey Calhoun would be coming to the altar with something of her own to offer, but who was to be the groom?