And, sure, they knocked off a few stiff drinks after putting in time like that. It took the taste of the docks out of their mouths and let them cuss the boss man, so they could go back the next day and do it all over. Glad for the work a lot of people weren’t getting and glad that they were working like men. Taking it like men. If my people coulda done something else, I don’t think they would have. Nobody messed with colored longshoremen. Not even the meanest Irish cop would press them but so far when he got called into one of their joints to break up a fight. If they were real real drunk, and there was a whole lotta blood, the cop might get away with calling them boys: All right now, boys. Let’s lay off it, boys. You going before the judge on this one. But if it was just your regular cut-’em-up and they were still half-sober, that Mick called them men: Now you men know I can’t be having this shit on my beat. I’ll run your black asses in, I will. His language had to get rougher to make up for having to address ’em as men. Cause that cop knew there was no way he—or a whole police force—would leave that bar the way they walked in if they called ’em anything else. When I was coming up I only heard the men in my family called niggers when they were talking to each other. Nobody gave it a second thought, cause it had a special meaning coming out of their own mouths. And the way they figured it, if you ain’t paid the dues, you don’t join the club.
It takes a real strong woman to make a home for men like that, or you just wouldn’t have no home. She’s gotta be able to dig her toes in and give it back one for one. And take no junk when her rent money is short; cause the Bell men made a lot and spent a lot—too often on the wrong things, especially the wrong females. Like the ones living at a different address from where he got his light bill. They were men with big appetites. And their women had to know how to feed ’em. A large spread on the table and plenty of loving when the sun went down. Or a ready can of lye and sugar water if he hadn’t made it there by the time the sun was up. But Mother always told ’em, You do right by the woman who has your kids. Don’t care what you may think of her, them are your kids. Now, I can’t say the Bell men were always married to the mother of their children, but they sure married them children. Every payday they’d go by and leave something for diapers and milk, a pair of shoes. Help her meet the gas bill if she needed it. Even if it meant being cussed out for their trouble. And even if she had a new man, they’d send the money by me or Mother. They were brought up to believe another man shouldn’t be asked to take care of their kids. Mother drummed that into their heads, guess cause she had it so hard bringing us all up without a daddy—or more like, daddies.
I don’t know how that old woman did it. People think the docks are awful now, but they’re sugar tit compared to her time. Whenever my brothers would start acting up, thinking they gonna bad-mouth her, using their liquor as an excuse, she’d show ’em that big scar running straight across her belly—push her skirt band right down and show ’em: I got this cause I wouldn’t take no shit from a man; you think I’m gonna take it from a boy? She’s talking to something over six foot now, something near about thirty years old and mean drunk enough to chew iron. And Mother could say boy and make it sound worse than nigger, make it sound like something diseased. They looked in her eyes and they saw the sea. Saw them early dock shanties and what she had to do to survive—and they apologized right quick. It wasn’t out of pity or nothing. Power knows power. Women like that breed daughters like that, and the docks were full of ’em for the Bell men to marry. My brothers respected every woman they took up with—any other kind wouldna lasted down there.
It was a big shock when I married into the Kings and went to Sugar Hill. Those women got treated any old way and took it. I don’t mean being slapped upside the head or any such thing; they figured that was the kind of treatment I saw around me growing up. Well, I had sometimes, but there are worse things than hitting a woman. Like having your husband call you stupid and lazy in front of a whole roomful of people while you stand there and smile and smile. No, the man wouldn’t use the exact words stupid or lazy, but it amounted to the same thing. And if I could figure it out with my lack of education, surely she could, and still she smiles and smiles and smiles. Yeah, there are worse things. Like having the girlfriend and the wife at the same dinner table. Like the wife knowing about it all the while, and the husband knowing she knows, and him getting a thrill out of it all. Cause the wife’s not going to say a word. Cause this son of a bitch is a doctor somebody or a lawyer somebody—or maybe just a man somebody that she feels she’s nobody without. Women up there look at other women as nothing unless they’re attached to some man’s name. And attached they stay, no matter what he does. And personally, I knew a few of them who actually got their butts beaten worse than some women down on the docks. But they got beaten by stone sober men behind stained-glass doors. And with all their money, they couldn’t afford to cry.
Let me tell you, that was not the case in my house. And I had the biggest brownstone up there, married to a King. Yeah, I was head wife cause the Kings owned most of everything in Sugar Hill. Those who didn’t call ’em landlord had to call ’em sir, cause they dabbled in politics too; and from what I heard knew where a whole lot of skeletons were buried, even in the basement of Tammany Hall. That’s what I was used to, colored men that other men respected. And it was why I even considered marrying my husband. But folks wondered—and they wondered loudly—why he ever married me. And that handkerchief-head, Uncle Eli, led the band on that one. Even went so far as to say I slipped some kind of secret potion in his drink when I met him that night at the Savoy. How in the hell you gonna find some juju potion that lasts nineteen years? Nineteen good years.
Weren’t nothing secret about my marriage. I got him the same way I kept him—with the best poon tang east of the Mississippi. And just cause it was 1924, don’t let people tell you that nice girls didn’t. They did then, they do now—and I’ll bet my grandma’s drawers they always will. But it’s the smart girls—nice or not—who understand that men have a short memory in that department. So you gotta find ways of reminding ’em of how good it was while promising them it’s gonna get better still. And the hardest part is to remind them without saying a word. If you spoke about such things out loud, you would be indecent. You see, the real secret is that men don’t give a second thought about marrying girls that do as long as they stay ladies.
I can’t say I was what you might call a nice girl when he met me. He wasn’t my first man, but he wasn’t my fiftieth either. He damn sure was my last. And don’t think some of his friends didn’t try. I mean, some of his so-called best friends. And I was the one who always threatened to leave. All that phoniness and crap up on Sugar Hill. Them bad-mouthing me almost from the day I came. But I stayed because I loved my husband, and from the very beginning he understood about her.
What goes on in our home, goes on in our home, he said; I rule here. If only that had been true. Like the rest of the Kings, he feared Uncle Eli. And for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why. Just a tired old man and an Uncle Tom at that. I don’t even think he was my husband’s real uncle. I don’t think he was anybody’s uncle cause that woulda meant he had to be somebody’s mother’s child. A woman wouldna birthed him. A woman woulda seen the hate in his eyes for us the minute he slipped out of her, and she woulda crushed his puny little head between her knees. It didn’t surprise me to learn he’d never been married, the things he said about women. And the way you’d catch him looking at them sometimes would send a chill up your spine. The same kind of look you get from those men who buy white roses for Esther.
My husband was different. Way different. He loved everything about women. I mean, even little things like how I managed to get the seams in my stockings straight or how I penciled in the beauty mark over the right side of my lips. He’d watch me trying to arch my eyebrows for a whole hour, just fascinated, you know? Not so much that I was doing it, but that it was being done—this thing that women do. You gotta keep tight reins on a man like that,
cause Maybelline made a whole lot of those pencils. So Mama went where Papa went, or Papa didn’t go out that night. He’d get tickled over my being a little on the jealous side, and if truth’s told, I played it up a bit more than I really was. Makes a man feel special that way. And thinking about it, he was special cause I never had a problem about her.
My biggest problem was at the dinner table. A new bride, mind you, so I’m putting on the hog. Frying catfish. Washing and chopping collard greens. Baking biscuits. Smothering pork chops till they cried for mercy. Macaroni salad with homemade mayonnaise. And he’d just pick and pick at his food. He’d be smiling all the while, but I could see he was having a hard time swallowing. Now, if I knew anything, I knew how to cook. So I’m trying to figure out what it is until one night I set a platter of buttered cornbread and a steaming bowl of oxtail soup in front of him. He plays around in the soup with his spoon for a while, brings up the oxtail, and asks me timid-like, Wife, what kind of meat is this? I coulda fell off my chair. A colored man, brought up in Harlem, who didn’t know what oxtail soup was? Then it all comes out. Uncle Eli never let the Kings eat like that. He called it slave food—that old Tom. Well, Mother, I saw the sorry mess I had on my hands. So I began his education right quick.
The next night I baked three sweet-potato pies. I mean, the heavy kind with lard in the crust and Alaga syrup bubbling all through them. And while my pies are cooling and he’s in the bedroom reading his newspaper, I run me a warm bath and throw a whole bottle of vanilla extract in the water. So I’m soaking in the vanilla, the pies are cooling, and we’re all ready about the same time. I go into our bedroom, carrying one of my pies, dressed the same way I stepped out of that tub. I made sure it was sliced real nice—six even pieces. And he’s looking at me like I’ve gone out of my mind, but I still take it all real slow. I laid back on the pillows. Took out a slice, without disturbing a crumb, mind you. And wedged it right between my legs. It was time for the first lesson. Husband, I said, pointing, this is sweet-potato pie. Didn’t have a bit of trouble after that. Except it was all the man wanted for dinner for the next month.
Over the years there were a lot of good times. And we’d have kept our home together if we had managed to keep Uncle Eli out of our business. Yeah, I got the reputation for being a real nasty bitch. And, no, I wouldn’t answer the door when I knew it was him out there knocking. But I knew what was at stake: let him worm in a inch and he’d be crawling around for any kind of dirt in every corner of our house. There was no way Uncle Eli—or even the other neighbors—would have understood about her. But my husband knew right up front, right from the beginning. She was with me that night at the Savoy. When you’re into women as much as he was, I guess you understand that somebody else might feel the same way about ’em at times like you do. And I respected my home; I never brought her there although he told me I could. Your friends are welcome here, Jesse, he’d say—even your special friend. But I knew better than that. There’s only so much you can expect even the best of marriages to take. My needs were my own. But so was my home.
But Uncle Eli didn’t have to know about that to hate me. He did it on general principle. He’d call the other wives Mrs. King, but whenever my husband forced me to go to his family parties, it was always, Why, good evening, Jesse Bell. Not that I cared; I was proud to be a Bell. He just had this nasty old way of rolling it over his tongue like it was dried spit. And I’d shoot right back: Why, good evening, Uncle Eli. Mister Bell and I are so happy to be here. And my husband would just fall out laughing until Uncle Eli gave him one of those crazy old stares—and he’d shut right up. See, that’s how my husband was. He’d talk about being his own man, but he wasn’t. Sure, he’d rebel at times. I guess marrying me was part of that. Still, a part of him believed in what Uncle Eli said. All that lift-the-race this and lift-the-race that. To raise something, you gotta first see it as being low-down. And I didn’t see a damn thing wrong with being colored. And where did Uncle Eli want us to be lifted up to? Why, white folks. And not even the honest ofays who worked with my uncles and brothers at the docks. Real white men. Naw, he meant the dicty white folks. The ones with money. I got so sick of his preaching. White folks are looking at us. White folks are judging us. They were Uncle Eli’s god. And it was a god I wasn’t buying. But he was always up in my face, thinking he could tell me how to act and dress. How to decorate my own house. I let it go in one ear and out the other and did just what I wanted to do. But the Kings had always listened to him. And I have to admit they’d gotten very far, believing in his god.
When I had to go to his parties, I went. But I out and out refused to eat there; I didn’t care how insulted he got. And he got insulted plenty, but I didn’t trust nothing at his table. It didn’t look like nothing I grew up eating. When the Kings wanted to grease back, they’d sneak over to our house. And I would put on a spread. Uncle Eli had a natural fit when he heard some of them were doing that. Besides the fact it meant they were eating slave food, it meant they were rubbing elbows with other members of the Bell family. I always had my people over. Big house like that, and only me and my husband. Sure, I wanted company and kept plenty of it. And Mother was always welcome in my home. We’d sit her at the head of the table, where she belonged, and have ourselves all kinds of fun.
And they were parties, do you hear me, nothing but parties. They were not orgies. I think that lie, out of all the lies, hurt me the most. What would I look like with Mother in the house—my own mother—and having people running around buck naked and drunk, cutting each other up with knives and ice picks? And them saying Mother enjoyed it, that’s how she raised the Bells to be. Every time I think about it, even now, I see red. Please, devil, please, kick Uncle Eli’s ass again. Yeah, we played jazz and played it loud, the way it was meant to be heard. And them that wanted to dance, danced. If the truth be told, it was mostly the Kings up there on the floor begging us to teach ’em the new steps to the lindy or the fox trot. After the dishes got cleared, the Bells were just as happy to put a bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the table and sit around playing bid whist. And there is no way—no way—you’re gonna have a group of colored people, a deck of cards, and a game of bid whist going on (uptown, no trump) without getting into an argument. Somebody’s gotta be shouted down for not shuffling the deck good enough. Somebody’s gotta threaten to cut somebody’s dumb throat for throwing out the wrong card or bidding a book too high. And somebody’s gotta be accused of cheating when they’re adding up the score. Or what’s the point of playing? I had my parties often, and I had ’em loud. But that’s a far cry from being a loose woman.
And after my son was born, I only brought in a crowd once a month or so, and I quit having them sit up in my house until two or three o’clock in the morning. It left me too worn-out the next day to take care of him proper. Yeah, after my son was born, a whole lot of things started changing. Uncle Eli almost looked at me like I was a human being when we brought him home from the hospital. All the Kings were waiting in the front parlor, and I was too happy that day to argue when he practically snatched the baby from me to show him all around. Look what Jesse Bell has given us. That old man was so proud. A new King. I was proud too. And deep down I was thinking, Maybe now they’ll accept me. Deep down, I was tired of fighting. I knew my son could be a great man cause he had the blood of two good families in him. With the brains of the Kings and the spirit of the Bells, there’d be no stopping that boy. I shoulda listened more closely to what Uncle Eli was saying: Look what Jesse Bell has given us.
It started slow at first, you know. And in that quiet, sneaky way that people like them are so good at. I wanted Mother to live in and help take care of the baby. She wasn’t getting no younger and I figured it was a way to ease her out of that beaten-up old house by the docks. Uncle Eli wanted a nanny. I wanted him to go to school with the other kids in the neighborhood, so he could play stickball, get into the regular ruckus that boys do, and learn to take his knocks. Uncle Eli wanted a private tutor. Well, we g
ot the nanny—handpicked by him, of course. And we got the tutor, who came through the same route. And Uncle Eli used my husband to do his dirty work for him—after all, wouldn’t any father want the best for his son? And the best started to mean that he couldn’t spend the weekends with Mother and his other cousins down on the docks. That he couldn’t go fishing with my brothers during his summer vacations. You see, the best started to mean anything that had nothing to do with the Bells, and it ended up meaning anything that had nothing to do with me. I wasn’t fit to decide what friends should come to his birthday parties, what clothes he should take to camp, what books he should read.
You know I didn’t take it lying down, but all this didn’t come stringed together like I’m saying it; it came in little pieces, one thing this year, another thing the next. I can still hear my husband: Now, Jesse. Now, Jesse. Trying to convince me it was all in my mind. I was being—what was his words?—overly paranoid. Yeah, I guess it was paranoia when my sixteen-year-old son refused to go to Mother’s ninetieth anniversary party because he didn’t have anything in common with those people. And how could she have an anniversary anyway, since she’d never been married? First time in my life I ever laid a hand on him. Straight across the face. It was the anniversary of her life! And if she hadn’t been married to her life, his miserable little butt wouldn’t have been here. It might as well have been a dead woman ranting at him. I looked into that boy’s eyes and saw my words were lost, lost.
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