Mama said that I needed to go. That Uncle Sugar wanted to see how life had been treating me. I took it that she had opened the letter at the foot of the bed. I suppose she felt guilty for having it sit there in her bedroom and collect dust when a man’s life had been detailed in the words. A man who hadn’t seen the sun in years, who was privately suffering like she was and had only a Bible, a free Word, to help him keep his sanity.
“Maddy,” Mama said, looking at me in the rearview mirror, “did you remember to pack those sandwiches?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Stop by the post office, Faye.” Daddy unfolded his wallet and took out a toothpick. He pricked a piece of hair from the tip of it and put it in his mouth. “Diamond say he got some spare change for me, since I helped him tend the cows.”
“Chevrolet,” said Mama, letting off the gas and taking one hand from the wheel, putting it on her hip, “you do what you have to do for the whites. They don’t do a damn thing for us. Besides, that Pillar girl got this town hog-tied.”
He had threatened her one night. He told her never to say “Laurel” around him. So she said “that Pillar girl” instead, as if Laurel had done her something, as if she was nobody’s child and deserved what she had gotten.
“Shit, Faye,” he said, “can’t I have something for myself? Every time I get up, you steady trying to knock me down. Goddamn.”
“You just a nigger to him,” she said, in one of those rare responses when the housework had gotten to her.
“All right, now,” he said.
“That mean you trust him,” said Mama, nodding and reassuring herself that she was the right one.
“That don’t mean I trust him. That mean if anybody, I mean anybody, don’t care what color, tell me that they got some money for me, I’m going to get it.”
“That mean you trust him,” she said, leaning her chin forward.
“How you know, Faye?”
“’Cause we wouldn’t be going if you didn’t trust him,” she said.
“You say that,” he said, “but if I got some money in there, you gone be the first one to have your hand out asking for some o’ it.”
“Is it green?”
“What you mean is it green? Yeah it’s green.”
“Then I can work with it,” she said. “You don’t seem to have no problem putting a hand on mine.”
“Watch yourself,” he said. “You hear?”
The tires screeched as she pulled over onto the grass. “I know you think my head ain’t got no bottom in it,” she said, turning to look him in the face. “Yeah,” she said, pointing at me, keeping her eyes on Daddy. “I clean them white folks’ toilets. I scrub their floors. But I don’t do it for you. I do it for my child. Maddy is my child. You may have helped her come into this world, but dammit, she’s mine. All mine. And as long as I see a book in her hand and she’s standing up to that Miss Diamond up there in that school yard, I’m gone keep on scrubbing them floors and saying ‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘no, ma’am’ and cleaning them floors so tough that I can see my child’s glory in ’em. No, Chevrolet. It ain’t my glory. It’s my child’s glory when my face shine.”
She cried in her hands. She had never mentioned one word about my back-talking Miss Diamond on the last day of school. Or the many times I’d been in detention for having my own beliefs. She never talked about it. Just a mother, a strong woman who carried her pride in her hands, working hard so I wouldn’t have to ever go through life without my own self-learned education. I loved her.
She pulled back onto the road, turning the radio up as loud as it would go. “Yeah, Chevrolet,” she said firmly. “I hear.”
“Slow down, Faye,” said Daddy, “you gone pass the post office up.”
Daddy used that harsh voice of his to remind her that he was still a man. He straightened up his shoulders and looked at her like he meant his words. She hadn’t taken anything from his manhood by talking like that in front of me. A black man had to be a man at all times. He didn’t own anything else. Nothing else belonged to him.
“All right, all right,” she said, slowing down.
She pulled up to the post office. The door had two small bells hanging from it to let Mr. Diamond know that someone was coming in. He had a habit of sleeping. It seemed like every time anybody went in there, he was sitting down in his recliner snoring out loud. He’d jump up when the bells rang, wiping the matter from his eyes.
“Go inside,” said Daddy.
“Yes, sir.”
It embarrassed Daddy to have to ask Mr. Diamond for the money. Daddy was a gambler. What sense did it make to pay a gambler? Gamblers didn’t last long. They hustled their green and spent their green as fast as they made it. Green didn’t sit in their hands. They spent it and prayed for the gold. Jesus didn’t bless gold. And Daddy knew that Mr. Diamond wasn’t about to give him the money. Please. The brother of a convicted rapist? Never.
The bell rang when I opened the door. Mr. Diamond rose up from the fragile recliner, awakening himself from a deep sleep. Once he saw it was me, his facial expression showed disgust. He walked away from the counter, grabbing a small towel from a drawer on the other side of the room. His receding hairline made an arch around the crown of his skull. The upper part of his torso was large, like he used to be a bodybuilder but stopped working out and the calories caught up with him. His stomach hung over his belt, and when he bent down, the long, winding hairs on his back turned blond in the fluorescent light. I imagined him naked sometimes, with his testicles lifting his penis to the forefront. I paid more attention to him now, since my mama’s words and the magnitude of them. All those details that meant nothing to me before meant something because now they had to. I had to know what type of white world I belonged to, paying closer attention to mannerisms.
The floors were white as a ghost. Willie had them shining so Mr. Diamond could walk across them with that post-office ink on the bottom of his shoes, dragging along the linoleum.
“Can I help you?” he asked sarcastically, walking back toward the counter.
“Forty-three, please.”
He knew the routine. I said the box number. He gave me the mail. It seemed he wanted more time to look at me with those hateful eyes, to remind me of that dreadful day I had with his wife, Miss Diamond.
“Let’s see,” he said, going over the numbers with his glasses hanging from the tip of his nose, “forty-three. Forty-three.”
He walked carefully through the place, leaving the numbers and going to take care of other business. The mail had been neatly stacked. The boxes were alongside the back wall, separated by orange and yellow markers that stood out on the cubicles. He picked up a handful of brochures about “how to get moving in the right direction,” a ream of typing paper, and a tape measure. He walked up to the counter, put them down, walked back toward the numbers.
“Nothing but a bunch of junk mail here,” he said, turning to me with his lips moving a little. “Do you still want it?”
“Yes, sir.”
He breathed hard, as if it was killing him to wait on me. He coughed before walking back to the counter. His eyebrows were connected in the middle, just above the bone in his nose.
“Here you are, missy,” he said, slowly passing it to me with the same rigid, teach-you-a-lesson sarcasm in his voice.
I gave it to Daddy through the passenger-side window. He quickly went through it and told me to “just come on and get in the car.”
“Goddamn,” he said, rubbing his head, “he didn’t have no money for me?”
“No, sir,” I said, buckling down.
I couldn’t ask Mr. Diamond for something he never would have given my daddy in the first place. I had to lie. The lie was how we survived, learning the lie and becoming familiar with it. There was no other way.
“I told you,” said Mama.
“Leave it alone, Faye,” he said.
She started the car. As she put it in reverse, Willie peeked out from the side of the post office, t
urning his large eyes at me. I smiled at him, thinking about those words he said to me that day after school. I hadn’t really thought of them much after that day, but his presence brought them back to me. He seemed confused by what he was to do in return. He just stood there with that scar going over the tip of his ear, shining in its own ray, thick and maneuvered. The doctors went in there and fucked something up. I heard that his brain had worked a little bit after the windshield cracked his head open, before the doctors went in there and changed him. He stood there, tall and strong, with his face lying flat on the side of the building.
“Remind me to tell your mama to stop by the store,” said Daddy, turning his head sideways so I could hear him clearly. “I gotta get Sugar some cigarettes.”
“I will.”
“Now, Chevrolet,” said Mama, interrupting, “you know they ain’t gone let you take no smokes in that place. Is you crazy? Last time we went in there, they checked us for fleas.”
“Aw, baby,” said Daddy, “them guards just as ol’ and senile as dirt. Besides, I don’t believe they gone do too much checking today.”
“How you figure?” she asked.
“The good Lawd say so.”
“Since when you know anything ’bout ‘the good Lawd’?” asked Mama.
“Since I learned the Way,” he said.
She huffed at him, flashing a hand to him as if he bothered her.
We were leaving Pyke County. The people were outside sweeping the dust from their porches, watering their flowers to keep them from drying out in the coming of summer. The word had gotten out that we were going to visit my uncle. I felt it from the old men hanging around in their front yards, watching the car go up the road as we drove by.
“It’s gonna be a hot one,” said Mama, merging into the interstate traffic. “I can feel it.”
“If it’s any hotter than last summer,” said Daddy, “we gone all burn in hell.”
He pulled a cigar from his shirt pocket and put it in his mouth, then struck a match on his jeans. A thick cloud of smoke arose throughout the car. It smelled like hickory. My stomach was weak from it. I rolled my window down and watched the smoke fade into his Afro, around his neckline.
“Chevrolet,” said Mama, fanning Daddy’s cigar fumes, “I wish you wouldn’t smoke so much.”
“I got problems.”
“Hell,” she said, “we all do.”
“I ain’t hurting nobody, Faye,” he said.
“Lawd,” she said, turning the mirror sideways, to the left, the right, until she had fixed it on the cars behind us, “seem like forever since I last saw Sugar.”
She was nervous. The thought of the drive had done something to her. A country girl leaving the only place that had been home to go into the city. Anything outside the limits of Pyke County was the city to her. She had been up all night praying for God knows what, pacing the hallway in front of my door, with her arms in a circle, looking up at Him through the roof of the house, to the sky.
“He taught you how to talk, Maddy,” said Daddy, raising his voice a little at the end of the line. “You know that?”
“I never heard of it,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “your mama had been up all night trying to get you to open your mouth. But Sugar … Sugar was a natural. He didn’t know that you didn’t like your ribs tickled. He put his hand on you, the next thing we know, your first word come out: ‘stop.’”
His cheeks thickened on the sides of his face. He smiled high. The cigar hung from his lips. He rolled his window down a little more, and I smelled the smoke on his breath. He kept talking to me, with the words fading from his mouth, into the wind.
“Did you hear me, Maddy?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, “I heard you.”
My period had come down. I spent the first day soaking in the tub, watching the water turn a scarlet red when the blood drained.
“Don’t let your daddy forget those cigarettes, Maddy,” Mama said, snickering at Daddy.
“I won’t, Ma.”
The flesh hung from her arms, jiggling each time the road got rough. She looked over at Daddy to see if he saw that it was still moving, long after the bump. She wanted to change that part of herself. She thought she had become larger over the years. She was afraid that Daddy noticed the extra weight, the loose skin on her arms. That he would leave her because her arms had grown heavy, loose when she hit a bump in the road.
“Lawd help,” said Mama.
We were going to see a rapist. I read it in her eyes. She peered over at Daddy. He kept his eyes off the road and was now looking up at the sky for that dead man she saw in the clouds. She took one hand off the wheel and watched him. Her fingers were light on the back of his neck. One stroke to his backbone. A thin, delicate stroke alongside the carrot-orange hairs on the nape of his spine. He felt her there as she rested her arm on the back of the front seat and played with him. She had stood beside him through the rape, the arm cutting (bathing him twice a day in turpentine and herbs), the fucking of her sister, the whispers, the snoring, the whores.
The wind picked up the sleeve of his missing arm. It flapped and made a noise much like that of an old maid stepping off the front porch to stretch the quilt over the clothesline, using the broom to beat the dust out of it. That loose octopused nub flapped in the rough air and hung into a fistful of fat, an enlarged shape of a snail moving up the side of his shoulder.
“You send that letter to the warden like I tol’ you?” he asked.
“Chevrolet,” said Mama, “you know better. ’Course I sent it.”
He looked at her with aggravation. “All right.”
He lifted his head from the seat in midair and looked at her. He wanted her to say it without his having to ask. Why had she made him ask? Didn’t she know how much it bothered him to be reminded of his illiteracy? Sure enough, she had helped him get along, but there were times when she hurt him, made him feel that his dependence on her validated him. Every word came from her or me, carefully attended by some arrogance she had acquired, some air of dictatorship, because she held his vocabulary in her hands, as stiff and forward as an iron hoe going into a row of untouched earth.
She felt him staring at her. “What?” she said. “What did I do?”
He rested his head back on the seat, sideways. “Nothing,” he said.
And I saw his face in the mirror, subconsciously thinking about the long drive, the changed wife he had married once, when he was able to hold her in his arms with both hands.
A booth was just ahead of us. A red-haired man looked out from the box-shaped window and opened a book that appeared to be lying on the counter in front of him. He was in uniform, his round, motionless face taking up the limited space around him.
Daddy began to reach in his back pocket to search for the Mississippi identification card that the state had given him on account of his driving around a sick woman, my grandmother, when they were on good terms. Instead, the picture of me that he cherished fell out. He looked at it and smiled before finding the card behind it.
The red-haired guard looked at Mama. “How many?” he asked.
“Three,” said Mama.
“Your name on the list?” he asked.
She paused and looked at Daddy, some part of her hoping that she had planned everything out all right. “Yes, sir.”
“Give ’em to me,” he said.
While calling out the names, she suddenly appeared nervous. Was he going to ask her what the prisoner had done? If he was as violent as the other numbers? He looked at her, then at Daddy, before asking for identification. Mama gave it to him.
He scrolled down the pages of the book. “The name?” he asked.
“Sugar,” she said. “’Scuse me, mister. I mean Paul Ray Dangerfield.”
The engine was hot from the drive. The fumes rose from the hood of the car, going upward into the air around us. The guard pulled his finger back from the catalog of numbers.
“Three up!” he said, holdi
ng up a walkie-talkie.
The prison was a cold place. There was razored barbwire aligning the entrance, coiled into circular rows atop an iron fence. The heat rose from the concrete. And the clouds were not lazy anymore. They had dropped off a while back, the paleness of them breaking up into an imperfect motion.
Mama kept the cards in her pocket, nervously hanging on to Daddy’s arm. Before leaving the house, she had asked me to help pull her panties up on her. She said that going to a lockup was not the same as sitting house. You had to wear an extra pair of panties underneath your stockings so the numbers wouldn’t smell your private parts. They had kept themselves busy dreaming about the hairs of a woman’s vagina, locating the spot below her navel and putting their fingers in it. When I was done helping her, she pushed me into my room and told me to do the same.
Another guard walked up to us. He patted Daddy down, then Mama and me. He opened the door, and the smell of urine emerged. Toward a distant corridor, a man yelled out a collection of words that Mama told me never to repeat. I wanted to trail the echo of his voice, find him, and ask him what he was doing there. From the moment you enter the place, you are no longer human. There is a lump in your throat the size of a brick wall. It blocks the uprising of saliva, and you will feel it sliding back through the canal of your esophagus, coming up only to be cut off by fear. You want to know many things. This is the place where they keep the punished, the dead, the dying.
We opened a steel door the color of a newly hatched yard egg. There were many people seated in tin chairs, a line of old ladies, men, fathers, uncles, cousins, and mothers waiting their turn.
The energy of the wait yawned throughout the rectangular room. There were two small windows, one to the right of the building, another in back. The smell of ammonia had grown thicker. The visitors looked at us and returned to their activities. There was a seat between a woman and a little boy that hadn’t been taken. Mama took it and pointed to two other seats alongside a distant row. I took Daddy’s hand and waited beside him.
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