I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots

by Susan Straight

  As Marietta carried Nate to the blanket one day, she smelled cold dust, dark and bricked-moist, in his hair, and she wheeled around to Aint Sister. “I smell it,” she hissed. “They been in there.”

  “They beena play with Mr. Ray son. He try fe play hide-go-seek.”

  “I tell you I don’t want em in there. Never,” she said.

  “You think I want em in there? I get em out, but they play. Mr. Ray son want play there, you have fe live with it.” Aint Sister laid Calvin beside Nate. “I not go cross Mr. Ray son. Mr. Ray temper high right now. Look.” She pointed to a broken window near the piazza. “Some guest call fe cancel, I hear he holler and then he go fe hit the winder. He wife run inside.”

  The hole in the glass was a starry flower from where they stood, and Marietta said, “I too glad no man round me for yell and stomp all the time.”

  “Huh. No man round you fe make money and chop wood, neither.”

  “Yeah. No man round me tell do this and give me that.”

  “Them two do that soon enough,” Aint Sister said. “They stubborn.”

  “They go in that old jail again, they be sore, cause I whup em,” Marietta said. “They ain’t gon tell me nothing. I have fe go work.”

  Mr. Thomas sweated under his hat and coat. “Now will come a period of comparative rest,” he told them all. “The ricebirds should begin their annual migration now; they usually arrive in August. This will confer twofold benefits, because while you will have fewer tasks during this time, we have booked two families from New York. The ricebird hunting will offer them some diversion.”

  Marietta and the women weeded in the garden and then sat weaving baskets with Aint Sister; they all moved to the shade of the huge oak down the lawn. Mr. Ray and the two men guests, with their teenage sons, went out near the fields in the early morning, and Jerry and Willie shooed the birds. Shots poked through the air for most of the day, and the two wives sat on the piazza with magazines. In the evening, they all went to Charleston, their car behind Mr. Thomas’s, and it was quiet when Laha came out to join them.

  Now Marietta could see how hard it was for Aint Sister to keep the boys near her. Since Mr. Ray was busy with the guests and didn’t want his son tagging along, the little boy, Randy, was in the yard all day. He was six. He took Nate and Calvin to the edge of the grass again and again, leading them into the woods or near the barn; they loved him, screaming and chasing him, taking the twigs and rocks he gave them with adoring solemnity. Sometimes they all disappeared around the corner of the house and Marietta jumped up to see that they didn’t go down the slope to the water, where Randy liked to play on the landing.

  At home, they were content to stay in the swept-clean circle until she told them to come on and they followed her to the field or the peach tree. They carried a bucket each, and struggled to lift them half-full of peaches. On the porch, they held the huge peaches with two hands and bit; Marietta laughed, holding her breath, waiting for them to find the taste. When their tongues accidentally dipped to the sweat-salt left above their chins, when Calvin’s tongue swept below his mouth and Nate copied him, she laughed at them licking that sour-sweet ring again and again. She remembered sitting on these steps near her mother, wearing a stinging spit-circle around her mouth.

  But Randy called them—“Come here!” and “Hey, monkeys!”—and they scrambled to follow him. He had cookies in his pockets, play pistols and trucks. And Aint Sister was slower in the morning, all day, saying her back and her bones and her breathing ached where the piece of wood had hit her. “Take a long time old people fe heal,” she said, trying to reach the spot between her shoulder blades where it hurt. “Hard fe take breath.”

  Sometimes Marietta came back from the fields where Mr. Thomas had them check the heads of ripening rice, and the boys were nowhere in sight. Their voices were hidden by the clinking of dinner plates and glasses on the piazza, or the hunting shots from the men. “There, your boys are in the woods, I think,” one of the eating ladies said, pointing to the trees where the lane began, and she found them digging holes and moving army men Randy kept in boxes. “It’s so hot, I told them to stay in the shade of the forest or the granary,” Mrs. Ray said. “Little Randy is very fair, and I prefer him to keep out of the sun.”

  When she smelled the dust on them again, she knew Aint Sister was hiding it from her. Before she gave them their baths, instead of the crushed grass in their scalps and the peach-juice sweetness everywhere else, she breathed iron sticking to their lips and foreheads, drying in the peach and sweat. “You been in that place again,” she said to them, and they shook their heads no, so hard their earlobes shivered. “I catch you in there, I gon get a switch.”

  But they didn’t listen to her the way they used to. They concentrated on each other. Their mouths were always shiny and loose, tongues just behind their teeth, ready to laugh or spit. After lunch or dinner, their bellies huge under the tiny, delicate railing of ribs near their arms, they looked for each other or Randy, laughing; they were instantly angry if someone took something away, and their open mouths would shift from laughter to screams in a moment. She could hear them yell at Randy, at Aint Sister. Their favorite word was “Don! Don!” At night when she tried to hold them, they screamed “Don!” into her chest, and then in the morning, Aint Sister’s “don” mixed with theirs until all Marietta heard was the poking threats.

  Laha had to come and get her in the fields when it happened. Marietta thought it was Aint Sister taken sick when she saw Laha’s blue headscarf on the road, and she walked along the bank of the field quickly. “Sister feel worse?” she called.

  “Uh-uh,” Laha said. “Nate and Calvin carry on something terrible with that boy. Miz Ray beena tell me get you fe take em home. They disturb the guest.”

  Someone had swung the heavy door shut; Mr. Thomas had the key, and he was in the woods with the men. Marietta stood outside the small building, listening to Nate and Calvin scream. Randy was in there, too, laughing and telling them to stop. Marietta’s back grew cold, and she turned on Aint Sister. “How you let em in there?”

  Aint Sister’s face was blank and smooth. “I cain tell Mr. Ray boy nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “He do what he want. Play in there what he want.”

  Marietta ran to the back of the granary, where the solid brick wall muffled their voices, and then she paced in front of the door, pushing Aint Sister’s hands away from her. She slid the knife from her boot and heard the ladies standing on the piazza. “Oh, my God, look at what she had! In her shoe!” The knife blade slid into the crack above the door handle, just as it had in Charleston when the footsteps came to her room, but nothing happened. She yelled through the sliver of darkness around the door, “Nate! Calvin! Hush you scream, Mama here.” They screamed louder, as if she should be able to get them out now, and the heat rose in her throat, choking her.

  The women gathered at the end of the piazza, and Aint Sister said, “Calm youself, now, they want fe talk.” But Marietta kept her back to the women, listening to the boys, and she stayed that way until Mr. Ray and the men walked into the yard.

  “What the hell’s going on that you have to send for me, get me all the way back up here?” he yelled at his wife, and she leaned over the railing.

  “Those little niggers are naked, their mother has a knife, and who knows what’s going on in there! They were running after Randy with no clothes on and he ran in there. One of em shut the door!”

  Randy’s voice rose when he heard his father. “Daddy! I closed the door and I can’t get out! The niggers are hurting my ears!”

  Mr. Ray looked hard at Marietta. She said, “I try open the door with my knife I use in the field, sir,” and he brushed past her to insert the key.

  Nate and Calvin rushed outside first and slammed into her. They shuddered when she tried to pry their faces from her thighs. Covered with dust and mud where they had cried, sweet sticky mud—she felt it on their arms. Leaning down, she could almost taste the peach juice all over
them.

  “They was licking theirselves like dogs!” Randy crowed. “Niggers lick theirself, like Bo does at home!”

  Peaches lay strewn and smashed on the cool dirt inside the doorway—the peaches she had brought for lunch. She knew what he’d seen—Nate’s and Calvin’s tongues reaching for the running sweetness on their arms and chins.

  “Even when they fall down, they laugh!” Randy told his father. “They take off their clothes—they do anything I tell em! I was putting juice on em so they would lick like dogs!”

  Marietta felt the boys rub their faces against her thighs, imagined Randy running across the lawn and the ladies gasping at the naked boys behind him. She knew when Nate and Calvin realized they were in the granary again they might try to run: they listened to her threats sometimes. But he slammed the oak door, pulling it shut and smearing more peach juice on them. He came closer to look at the backs of their heads now.

  “Just wash em off with the hose there,” Mr. Ray said. “Stupidest thing I ever heard. What a mess—they’re so black the mud’s lighter than they are.”

  “But they hit me, Daddy,” Randy said next, and his voice changed now that his father had turned away and stopped listening. “That one hit me cause I wouldn’t let him out. See?”

  He had angry red scratch marks on his arms, raising themselves already on the pale, smooth skin. “He scratched me like Bo,” Randy said, lifting his arms to his father.

  Mr. Ray turned to Marietta. “You better wash em off. They look like hell. And then you better teach em not to hit no white boy. Let’s go—I want this shit over with now. I got things to do.”

  Marietta froze, with the boys’ faces stuck wet to her legs through her dress. “Scuse me, sir?”

  “Give em a whupping and then send em on home with Gramma here. She ain’t gonna sell nothing today anyway. I want em away from my boy for today.”

  “They too scare for whup right now, sir,” she said softly. “I whup em soon as I get home.”

  Mr. Thomas said, “We have weeds waiting for her in the fields, Ray. Maybe we should all just get back to work.”

  Marietta saw the women staring from the piazza, and one of the guests, the thin man with the beard and strange voice, said, “You really don’t need to completely recreate the plantation ethic, Ray. Look, the colored boys are scared to death.”

  “Y’all got wax in your ears? They need to learn a lesson. Look how big they are—they’re five, six years old, they need to know.” He stared at Marietta. “She knows better, too. If she don’t want to do it, Gramma there can go get a switch.”

  Marietta saw Aint Sister nod. She went to get the peach switch she kept beside her baskets, and when she handed it to Marietta, she whispered, “Beat em three time. Tell em so the hurt don come later, so buckra vex don kill em.”

  “I can’t understand half of what they say,” Mrs. Ray said loudly, and Marietta moved slowly. Tell em what? Tell em?

  She pushed them away and whipped the bending branch at their bare legs. Pee rushed from Calvin’s bladder and splashed the dust; Nate ran and she hit him once on the calf. “Don never hit nobody!” she screamed, chasing after him. “Never hit nobody!”

  She ran so that no one would see her crying, and he made it to the woods. Then she caught him easily, held him close, her tears dripping onto his face, and she crouched for a moment to let them clean him off. Everyone would think they were his tears.

  “I go next week after Saturday pay,” Marietta said in the kitchen. “I ax Johnny take me in he truck.”

  “You ain go nowhere,” Aint Sister said. She sat at the table, the food cold in front of her. The shudders that came after sobbing had stopped; the boys slept hard and silent.

  “No, I gone,” Marietta said. “You see he eyes when he look at em. ‘They five.’ They two-year-old.”

  “They so big almost to he son. They legs bigger than lil Randy legs.”

  “So? You beena help. You make my boy animal for whip,” Marietta said. “You make em dog.”

  “I make them two survive. Cause you have you daddy blood, and them two have it, too. That blood kill boy, not woman. Get a boy or man kill.”

  “So I gone. I ain’t have them scare and do what that white boy say. Mr. Ray and them smile at little nigger, like they puppy for play with. You see it!”

  “Girl, you best be look fe how Mr. Ray see you. He see you don do what he say. That man you maussa now. He pay you. What you gon feed them two, you run? Where you stay?”

  “I survive before.” She stared hard across the table at Aint Sister.

  “Heh, you come back here and hide before. You gon go out and get more baby? Survive real good.” Marietta felt as if she would upend the table, break the Mason jar of tea, but she stiffened when Aint Sister sucked her teeth. “You tell them two do what buckra say. So they don dead like they grandpa.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “I’ma tell you. Tell you right now. You mama big with you and we sit here, this table. Here, Marietta. Knock come and you daddy say, ‘Who that?’ White man holler, ‘Come on get you boat.’ You daddy say, ‘Stay here,’ and he go out to the porch.

  “That buckra want fish at night, like you daddy do sometime, and he tell you daddy, say, ‘Get you boat we go fishing in that place.’ Freeman tell he, say, say, ‘I tire and go fe sleep now.’ Buckra say, ‘I tell you come, you come, nigger. I ax you three time last week and you say you busy.’

  Marietta looked down at the wood, not at Aint Sister’s lips stretching. “You daddy say, ‘I tire and you ain nobody maussa.’ Then we hear buckra laugh, say, I got you maussa right here. He say come get you boat, boy.’ We hear Freeman foot down the step and we go fe look the door. He have a gun, that buckra—you can see by how he elbow bend.”

  Marietta imagined her father’s face, set and still like hers.

  “Nobody know you daddy place fe fish, in the swamp. They find him in the creek, swell up and think he drown. But I prepare he body—I find hole in he chest. Water don kill he. And buckra die, too, yeah, he die but they never find he body. He spirit rush me two, three time. Little white man in gray hat, smoke a fat cigar. He rush me in the lane, and I carry red pepper and salt fe throw on he head. I sing fe make he go.”

  A hat, a cigar—Marietta looked at Aint Sister, who stared into the fireplace. She had seen him—the man on the landing, the one she thought was a drifter watching her float down the waterway. The spirit standing on the rotted landing, the wood so soft Jerry and Willie had to beat it into the waterway and build a new dock.

  “Only temper white men buy that land,” Aint Sister whispered. “Only them kind. Get what they want, they temper make everybody scare fe jump. They happy when you jump.”

  “Mr. Ray ain’t care if I go. He ain’t come here with no gun,” Marietta said. The spirit on the landing had never moved toward her, only watched. “I just he worker, he find anybody work in he field.”

  “You ain do nothing special today, Marietta. You ain do nothing bad, nor new. You feed them two, don matter. They been burn, now they learn.”

  “Learn what?” She stood in the doorway, listening to them. “Learn how for bark like a dog next time?”

  “They learn what they do fe work. Play with white boy, that just they work now.”

  “White man burn in hell when he die.” Marietta spat into the fireplace.

  But Aint Sister laughed, and Marietta turned, surprised. “You think hell a hole and people do wrong fall in there and burn?” She laughed. “My mama tell me, say, ‘Hell ain no hole. A hole be full by now!’ You settle yourself, Marietta, quiet you head.”

  After she left, Marietta put her forehead on her wrists and breathed the table wood.

  The boys sat, wary and subdued, near Aint Sister. Randy danced around them, offering soldiers, until he grew bored and went into the house. He came out one day and announced to Aint Sister that he was leaving, to go to a school where he would live. “I’m gonna be a soldier,” he said, squatting near Nate at lunch.
“My mama don’t like it here. But I’ll be back next summer. Maybe before then.”

  They all left for Birmingham, Mr. Ray telling Mr. Thomas he’d be back in a few weeks. Then Mr. Thomas was in the fields every day, because it was harvest time.

  Marietta stood in the mud with Mary, Pinkie, even the men. The rice shook around her, near her waist and almost to the shoulders of Mary and Pinkie. They all swung curved rice hooks to cut down the plants, and the heavy heads of rice sounded like sparkles, she thought, when they rustled against each other. Sparkles like the shifting grains of black and white on Frank’s old television, when he had first turned it on for the day. She imagined the sparkle of fish scales on her hands, the clinking coins in the register, Frank’s gold tooth. Sinbad’s forehead glistening over her. She swung the hooks Mr. Thomas had shown them how to use, trying not to hear Charleston every time he spoke.

  “If Mr. Ray were cultivating the entire plantation acreage, we would be transporting the rice from the southernmost fields by flatboat, floating it down the creek to the yard. But as we are only harvesting these three fields, we will use the ox and cart.”

  The cutting was hard, and a hot spell came to make the harvest even faster, because Mr. Thomas said they needed to sheave the rice in the yard for it to dry. He was nervous, talking to them constantly, directing them to lay the rice on the stubble. The heat stayed in the house all day, and at night Aint Sister sat with Marietta while she lay on the floor, head to one side, her hands palm up, feeling the muscles in her back ache—the pads of meat at the bottom, the ones Aint loved to tear out of a chicken back, dense and chewy.