She was high up, herself, up on a branch or a burden. She looked at the garden, her face coming down, away from my eyes. “When you was in my stomach, my titties swole up,” she said. “You was so tiny, so tiny and …”
There was no egg in her throat now.
“… I thought my titties would smother you.”
She put her fingers back inside my mouth. “’Cause we all got milk, you see,” she said, “but it don’t come out the same way.”
Her finger was on the muscle now, the tongue, pinning it down. My mouth began to fill with saliva. I swallowed it.
“I need to be close to her now,” she said. And when she took her fingers out of my mouth, she closed her eyes and smelled them, taking the air in her lungs.
The clouds were opening up. Somewhere in heaven, Willie’s own mother was putting her fingers in his mouth and sliding her nipple inside him. Because all things end where they begin.
chapter
eighteen
It had been a long day in Pyke County, where the darkest of black folks rose their hands to the clouds and swore they saw Jesus standing on the edge of the pastor’s collarbone. He stood there fumbling through the pages of Deuteronomy and planting the words in a more solid, physical step forward, beckoning the church folk to come to him, saying: “And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live.” He pulled a white handkerchief from his coat pocket and wiped his forehead. “Let the church say amen,” he said. The church said Amen. “His word is the only true word,” he said, looking down into the Book for help. “God is not only the truth. He is the answer.” I looked up at him, watching the verse fold over in Mama’s lap where she had touched the pages so many times.
We sat on the last row. It seemed like Mama prayed more now than ever. She prayed for everybody: the dead, the living, God and His bad headache that the world gave Him. She kept her eyes on Daddy. It had been a long time since he came to church. He was dressed in a black suit that was too small for him. The church folk kept turning around in their seats, whispering to one another, as the usher passed the offering tray to the row in front of us. She knew we didn’t have the money. We had given it all to Jesus.
Daddy lowered his head. I sat between him and Mama—sometimes leaning my head on his nub and feeling the heat from it on my temples. He hung out at the pool hall so many nights that the cigarettes and liquor were in his clothes. A large fan centered at the back of the church blew all his sins into the small room. The church folk whispered.
“We will now read from First Corinthians, chapter ten,” said the pastor, signaling for the ushers to count the money and post it on the Sunday-school blackboard. “There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification.” He loosened his tie, wiping his forehead again with the white handkerchief. The church said Amen. His suit was shiny, a whale blue that seemed stitched too tightly at the hem. “Y’all don’t hear me today.” He walked away from the pulpit and threw his long arms toward the aisle, away from the microphone. “I said, y’all don’t hear me.” Willie’s grandfather put one hand in the air. “Yes, Lawd,” he said. He stayed neat. An old, neat man who had already taken my place. He had seen the dead, touched it, smelled it, let it go. A grandfather who dealt with Willie’s death suddenly. The only thing he ever had to remember was the sound of a white man’s motor, playing like a guitar in his mind.
“We must all come to Thee,” said the pastor. “All the sinners, those living in hell as we speak.” He raised those eyes to the walls of the church and pointed to the Apostles that were drawn by the Sunday-school children. “Look there, people. Now, you tell me that He can’t live unless we want Him to.” The church said Amen. “I don’t know how much you love Him. But I love Him today.” A lady said: “Tell ’em, pastor. Preach on now.” He stepped backward and pulled on that whale-blue suit like it was all he had. “You can go to any other country in the world and see the king buried there. He just as dead as he can be, just laying there in a man’s body. But the Lawd. Everybody looked. Everybody searched for His spirit in the Land, and nobody, not one Man, can tell you they saw His face.” He shook his head. “Are you listening to me?” That same lady responded saying, “After while.” “If you go to the Place, you won’t find Him. Lemme tell you something church. If we could find Him, we wouldn’t need Him.”
The sweat from Daddy’s nub dripped onto the bench, wetting the fabric in his pants. He grew nervous, widening his fingers along the thread of his clothes. His bare skin, across his knuckles with nothing but calluses and dark brown circles on them. Mama stared at him. She wore those shoes she loved. They were low-heeled, the bottoms rough and peeling. Those same shoes that Grandma squeezed lemons in before she became too old to walk in them. We sat there on the bench, just us three, listening to the whispers and the sound of that huge fan ticking in the back of the aisle.
A lady stood up and shouted. Her back was arched like those bones in the encyclopedia. I didn’t recall the spelling of that part either. It was different from the bone in Aunt Pip’s body. The lady took to her bones. She added a type of blackness to it, African blackness that moved like a white man had never put his hands on it. Those withering hands in the air, bitter and frail across the church walls. The ushers came to her side. “It’s all right, sister,” said one of them, fanning the lady’s backside.
“Yes, Lawd,” said the lady. Her eyes rolled in the back of her head. She put her weight in their arms and, with the mark of her shoulders, fell back toward the bench. She collapsed. The ushers looked around for the pastor.
“Give yourself up to the Lawd,” he said. “When your way get muddy, you can’t see no farther than the clouds, call on Him.”
He picked up the Book and ran with it, picking up one knee between each step and calling on God. “I’m tired now.” The bags under his eyes sweated down into his skin. “I say I’m tired now.” A man took out a magnifying lens and turned around in his seat as if something were aching him. “We hear you, pastor,” he said. “Preach to me.”
Mama shook that leg back and forth against the wooden bench. She just couldn’t keep still. The hairpins in her Goodwill hat were coming loose. She retightened them inside her crawling hair and pushed the alabaster hat down over her eyes. She tried her best to hide the tears. But I saw them. Daddy saw them. What he lost at the pool hall was one day’s work for Mama. The more she put in the jar, the more she paid to Jesus, the more she took out for him. I realized that I had seen it with my own two eyes, Grandma going out to that hog pen slinging his arm over the gate. The blood from his body there on the floor and the funk throughout the house that I still smelled sometimes, because it had been so thick.
The pastor wiped his eyes: “Most of us live our lives on the ground when a ‘mustard seed of faith’ can relieve you of all things holding you down.”
A thin line of chills ran up Mama’s arm. That knee stopped shaking as she turned to look at Daddy sitting on the other side of me. The years were long between the two of them. She needed him to give up his long nights at the pool hall, stop drinking so much and straighten up his life. She didn’t want to work for the white folks anymore. Always said she had to play the fool with them white folks, saying “yes, sir” and “no, sir” to them like she didn’t have her own house to run. Those long days at the Sandifers’ wore her down. Her back ached at night sometimes, when Daddy was down at the pool hall running up his bill with Jesus. She hated working for those white folks, but a married woman, with very little education. Simply put—a maid.
“Ann,” Daddy said, stretching his hand across mine and finding it hard to grab hold of hers. She turned to look out the window.
“I know,” she whispered.
The pastor stepped down from the pulpit with the Book in his hands. “
If there be any testimony set forth by the children of God, let it be said at this hour.”
No one said a word. The ushers walked up and down the aisle, pointing to the mothers of crying children, motioning for them to keep them quiet while the pastor was standing. “Now’s the time to get that heavy burden off the line,” he said. “Speak. The Lawd hear every word.”
“Once,” said Mama, looking clear through the church windows, her eyes wandering skyward, “I told my mama that I cleaned the fat between my eyes.” The church folk turned around and looked around for the woman’s voice. They mumbled. “I didn’t have nothin’ to give any man ’cause I came out with this fat between my eyes. If I frown too much, seem like it gone crawl clean off my face.” Mama sat there with Daddy’s hand in her lap, rocking herself back ’n’ forth on the wooden bench. “But Mama. She say don’t worry ’bout that none, ’cause that part be my birthmark.”
The church folk whispered loudly. The pastor put his hands in the air. “Let her be,” he said. “Go ’head, sister.”
Daddy looked at her as if he wanted to quiet her down. His hand pulled tighter around her fingers. She embarrassed him by talking like that. It was embarrassing enough with him just sitting there with folks who knew more about what was going on in his house than he did. He wasn’t a man with her sitting there telling them church folks all his business. But he knew that the townspeople were never too mean to Mama. They wanted to be, but she was such a hardworking woman that her fingers gained her the respect she deserved, even if the respect was cruel.
“Lawd knows,” she said, pulling that Goodwill hat down from her crawling hair, “I got sinners in my house. I know every house got sinners. But for some reason or else, the umbrella is over mine. It stay dark there.” She grew still for a moment.
The pastor walked down the aisle. “Tell it, sister,” he said. “You in the Lawd’s house now. Tell it.”
“Oh yes,” she whispered. “It’s always raining in my house. It rain, I cry. It rain harder, I cry some more. I cry so much my birthmark wearing thin now. It be shining like a river shine when the children ain’t there no more. It just shine.” She smiled, looking away from the whispers with her still eyes. “I wonder why I work so hard ’n’ don’t see one penny of my money. Why sometimes it seem like the devil got his arms so tight around my neck that I can’t breathe. He just take me. He whip me all the time. He just have his way with me.”
“Testify,” said the pastor, unfastening the buttons on his whaleblue suit.
“Pip ailin’, yawl. She ailin’ and I ain’t done nothing for her. What He gone do with me now? I ain’t done nothing. She ailin’ and I ain’t passed a glass of water through her kidney.”
Although Mama had not told me, I knew that Aunt Pip was dying—the cancer had spread to her other breast, echoed. I remembered those nights when Aunt Pip was asleep, the nights when I could feel the lump move under her flesh: like the eyes of a dead bird, a dead hog with the weight of its head coming down over a sharp blade. I felt her now. And I knew that there was nothing the doctors would be able to do to crush the spoiled milk inside of her breast, her bones.
“Amen!” shouted a voice.
The pastor walked behind our bench and waved his hands over our heads. Daddy sat there with his chin down, afraid to look up at the many faces staring at him. He had gambled so much with Jesus that he didn’t know what to do. The guilt was worse now. He sat there, clinging on to that black suit, his sins forming a cobweb around him.
“All I know is that He ain’t done with me yet,” said Mama. “Keep praying for me. Lawd knows, He ain’t done.”
The pastor touched her on the forehead, and she slid down under the wooden bench in front of us, on the floor like God had touched her. She screamed and yelled and the pastor kept his hands on her, crawling over the seat with his patent-leather shoes screeching on the panel. I moved over. Tears welled. That was my mama there hollering with her white panties falling to the crack of her ass. The ushers, with their white gloves, came rushing to her side. Strange black faces that I never would have trusted had I been on the outside. I pushed them away. Their hands smelled of olive oil as they touched Mama’s backside, reaching out to feel the sweat on her.
“Let God,” said a man. I heard him say it again and again, telling the crowd to get out of his way.
It was Willie’s grandfather. Daddy got up from the bench, guiding his face from the crowd with his arm. They watched him walk down the aisle. Daddy had a rough life, but he had chosen that life. Mama had chosen her life too. But it was his Jesus that she had praised, not her own. And now she was reclaiming the one, the only, Jesus.
“Let us pray,” said Willie’s grandfather. We bowed our heads. “We come to you, Lawd Jesus. Me and the pastor here and the church. Take it from her, dear Lawd. I gave you my grandboy. You didn’t steal him from me. It was his time. And I ain’t had a better night’s sleep in all my days. Pass that omega, dear Lawd Jesus. If I have any strength in me, give it to her. She need it, Lawd. Pass it to her, dear Father. You say not to stand under no shadow unlessing it’s a tree—something made by You. Under no shadow of man shall one soul stand.”
He put his hand on my forehead and spoke in tongues. His palm was sweaty. One of the ushers passed him a capful of olive oil. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dowsed it with the oil before putting it on my forehead. Their voices seemed distant to me now. These strange black haunting voices that kept at me, lowering, raising my head with their rough fingers witnessing to me. “Rebuke him!” said the usher. They came down on me, grabbing my arms and speaking in those tongues that only God knew. I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel or if that was what Aunt Pip felt when nobody understood—those doctors in Jackson touching her, the night she whispered Jesus’ name on the front porch, the lizard crawling across her windowsill. Or what it felt like for Mama, who was trying to change her life and get her spirit right with God. I wondered what it was like to send me inside Aunt Pip’s house and not be able to go herself, to stitch a pouch for the lizard so he wouldn’t sneak outside the yard without her, what it was like being a woman who felt she made the wrong decisions, a lonely, miserable black woman scrolling through the pages of Deuteronomy.
I felt a familiar hand on me: “Come,” said Daddy. He pried their praying hands off me and beckoned me to come with him. Mama pressed down on my legs with her hands. She meant it. I needed my Jesus. A man had cost her that, and it was all right if she lost it; but she would go to hell and back to make sure I had mine. There was no anger in Daddy’s eyes as he stepped away from the witnesses and disappeared into the crowd.
* * *
The following morning, Daddy was sitting on the edge of his bed, naked. His silence had taken the place of Mama’s. He picked up the Bible at the foot of the bed and put it down again. If only he had known how to read. If only he had paid attention to a different vocabulary, one outside of the bottles. He stood up, his penis hanging from his midsection, and closed the door.
Now he would not have to ask Mama what was wrong with her when she chose to lie nude on the pillows. Like her, it did not matter that he was missing something. He needed time to be alone with himself. How had it felt to be violated? What did women feel like when his hand went up their stomachs? Why couldn’t he hold a fragile thing inside his hand without wanting to paralyze it? He was asking himself these questions, I was sure of it, the words of Deuteronomy staring back at him.
chapter
nineteen
I woke up from the nightmare. I dreamt that I lay in a bed of feathers. In the tiniest distance, I saw a floating vagina. It belonged to a woman with no face. She coughed and the hole opened up. I put my fingers inside. Somewhere in my thoughts, in the most peculiar manner, I thought of Daddy and the women, how somehow I’d carried the desire to push my fingers inside a woman’s stomach. But I was not as he was. My desire was not of lust but of eagerness to see the power of a woman’s abdominal muscles. As the vagina opened, I put m
y head inside. There was a baby inside a line of soft flesh; her thumb was inside her mouth. Her eyes were closed, feet crossed one over the other. I touched her. Her eyes came open. The movement of her pupils was slow, kind. I touched her again. Upon impulse, her thumb slipped out of her mouth. We were floating in water. Suddenly, I was part of a violent whirlwind and became detached from her. I reached for the cord and pulled it. She and I looked up, realizing that it was the force of the mother’s cough that had separated us in the beginning. As I pulled the cord, she began to float toward me. She smiled at me as she grew closer. I was naked and cradling her head in a manner that required no human policy, only instinct. She sucked my nipple. It tickled at first. I wanted to believe that it hurt, but I couldn’t bring myself to commit to it. And when she was full, she fell asleep in my arms. Her mother coughed again, and the force of it unbalanced me. She had pushed me out of the hole with her stomach muscles. I landed on the feathers, wet and cold, watching the sleeping baby go back up the hole, her dark face traveling through the distance.
I looked down at myself. A long tube was stretched across the feathers. As I felt the pulling of my own body, I noticed three babies hooked to my umbilical cord, their boneless feet going over the tip of the bed. I tried to pull it, but they were too heavy. They went over the edge of the bed, all three of them.
My hair was wet. I had drowned in the nightmare. And that drowning had taken my energy. I lay in bed, waiting for the use of my limbs to come back again. I could not move or open my eyes. Something held me down. The thought of moving was greater than anything that I had ever imagined. But I could not carry that movement out.
I thought of Big Mama in the cornfield, what it must’ve been like for some man to hold her down, rape her. The vision came in and out of my head at times. The vision of her screaming loudly, the birds flying northward over her, the white man’s face turning red now, his eyes rolled back in his skull, Big Mama no longer screaming but lifeless. I pictured her sharp, angular voice. Raped. Her vagina being stretched apart from the outside in. The noise of strangers crossing an open road, those who could have neither stopped nor killed the rapist.
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