His eyes were so black, I was afraid I would be hypnotized by them. I was taking his blood pressure when the room started to slip sideways. The earth shook me like a nervous child, and I fell into his wide, blue arms. My mind was racing so fast I could see through him. I could see you. Me being earth and him being sky, I knew we would have an angel child. And we did. I wanted to name you Angelita, Walks with Angels, but he said no, so we called you Mariah after his mother.”
Other times the story went: “It was winter in New York. It was so cold the day I met your father, my eyelashes froze, and he melted them, with his breath.”
Sometimes in her memory, they discovered each other on a windswept Caribbean beach: “Your father was at the top of a tall ladder the first time I saw him. A strong wind blew him right into my arms. When we first met, he painted pictures of me every day. Orange bodies with yellow faces, purple arms and red hair. He drank raspberry beer and rubbed my feet with mint leaves. When I met your father there was a strong wind in my hair twisting my mind like a hurricane.”
In my mother’s stories my father was always handsome and always, always there was pale blue paint all over his face and arms. I grew to love him too.
At school, me and my friends Meera and David, the blue-eyed boy from Arkansas, played Army during recess. We invented wars and fought against invisible armies of dragons and sea creatures. We always won by the time recess was over and what I liked most was that we were always on the same side.
Mama’s beautiful blue script was replaced by shaky, uncertain block letters written in pencil or with a broken red crayon. The words on the slips of paper began to change. Vieja…lluvia...ve, ve…lagrimas… mohosas…x’s and o’s. Once she filled a small square of paper with z’s and q’s. Sometimes the paper was wet with her tears. Her writing became hard to read, the lines no longer separated or curved, going nowhere. She seemed hurt and nervous, as if she were afraid of every thing. One morning she forgot to give me a word altogether. When I reminded her she pulled a torn scrap of paper from the pocket of her uniform. Her fingers were trembling and couldn’t hold the pencil I gave her, so she pressed the paper to her lips twice, then crushed it into my hand. At lunchtime, after eating the slice of dry bread and bruised banana in my lunch bag, I unfolded the paper Mama gave me and pressed it to my lips. I closed my eyes and tried to feel the warmth of her paper kisses.
One time Mama took me to the hospital where she worked. I waited out in the emergency room. One of the nurses gave me a lollipop and asked me if I could do any of the new dances. I said, “No, but I can sing.” I stood up on a chair and opened my mouth. I don’t know why Billie Holiday came out. “God Bless the Child” haunted the air. Sometimes Mama sang it when she was sad. The nurses and some of the sick people clapped when I was done. Mama’s doctor friend was there; he said it sounded like there was an angel in my throat. I explained to him that I put clouds there for safekeeping. He said I was just like my mother. I liked him even though he was the one my mama always seemed to be crying about. I let him kiss me because Mama said it was all right. Up close he smelled sweet, like a woman not my mother.
HELEN ELAINE LEE
[1961–]
NOVELIST HELEN ELAINE LEE WAS AN ATTORNEY BEFORE turning to writing, attending Harvard Law School with the encouragement of her father, also a lawyer. In time, however, she realized that she did not share her father’s passion for legal practice, preferring instead to write fiction. Among the short stories Lee had written during her nine years as an attorney was a dramatic, lesbian-themed story about abortion entitled “Water Call.” Eventually, the piece was expanded into her debut novel, The Serpent’s Gift (1994), which won a First Novel Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Lee has also published a second novel, Water Marked (1999), while her short fiction has appeared in Callaloo, Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing, and Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present. She teaches in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This excerpt from The Serpent’s Gift depicts the sexual life of Ouida, a beautiful young black manicurist employed at a barbershop in the 1920s. After succumbing to the persistent advances of a white traveling salesman, as well as furious, wordless sex with one of the barbers, Ouida finds herself sexually unsatisfied. She then becomes irresistibly drawn to Zella, a woman who “ain’t normal,” according to one coworker, with this attraction blossoming into a passionate coupling.
from The Serpent’s Gift
[1994]
Just as LaRue was getting to know Olive, Ouida was having her own summer of discovery. She was finding out about choosing, and about a woman she had never expected to know.
Her kisses were like nighttime secrets, and Ouida swore that her laugh, like the rain, made things grow. Zella Bridgeforth touched her somewhere timeless, held her, compelled her with her rhythms, and Ouida answered her call. She chose her, after all, but the path that led to Zella took her, first, through other choices.
The summer of 1926, the summer they had met, Ouida would later think of as her “swan song.” She had swung her corset-cinched body along the streets of the city with long steady strides, smiling but never meeting the eyes of those who paused from whatever they were doing to partake of her radiance. Just divorced from Junior, she was finished, finally, with trying to will their union into rightness.
As soon as she had landed her manicurist job and rented her flat, she had surveyed the range of the possible from the vantage point of her manicurist’s table, feeling, for the first time in her life, that she owned the choice. From the spin of options, she made assessments. And she did some choosing.
She chose Johnston Franklin, the middle-aged white man who stopped in the shop on his business trips from Louisville. He came in and stared at her while waiting for a chair, and she met his glance, her chin in the air, and kept working. While he sat for his haircut and shave, he asked Alton, one of the barbers, who she was. When Alton didn’t answer, Johnston Franklin turned in the chair, his face halfcovered with lather, and addressed Alton with a demanding look. Alton turned away and stirred his soap, assessing the cost of defiance. Finally, he said, “I think she’s married, sir. Least that’s what I’ve heard.”
Johnston Franklin laughed and said, “Well I’m not interested in her husband. What is her name?”
Alton stirred his soap some more and then answered, “Ouida Staples. Miss Ouida Staples.”
Ouida had noticed the exchange and could see Johnston Franklin coming her way out of the corner of her eye, but she refused to look up. She sat at her table humming while she polished and arranged her instruments, the edge of his gold fob, a crisply creased pant leg, and the tip of an expensive shoe just within view. Finally, when he realized that she wasn’t going to look up at him, he sat down and ordered a manicure. She took his hands and began her task.
“I understand your name is Ouida,” he said, “and that’s an unusual name.” She lifted her eyes slowly, as if it was an effort, assessed his face in an instant, and returned to his hands. The barbers watched to see what she would do.
“And how are you today, Ouida?” Johnston Franklin tried again.
“Oh, I’m just fine,” she answered with a hint of insolence as she lifted her eyes, “sir.”
“Well…I don’t recall seeing your lovely face in this establishment before…” Ouida kept filing, silently.
“I come in here every month or so…here on business, quite regularly, and I will certainly make it a habit to visit this establishment more often.” She filed his nails silently, thinking how soft and pale his hands were.
“Well…,” he ventured, “this town sure is different from my home… it’s the city, all right, and I do like, now and again, seeing something besides trees…of course, this town doesn’t compare to New York…now that’s a different story, that’s the real city. Have you ever been to New York, Ouida…Miss Ouida?”
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p; She shook her head, and kept working on his nails. And receiving neither information nor interest, he jerked his hand away as she was finishing up, paid his bill, and left. He returned the next week, and the next, watching her from the barber chair, and when he was finished being shaved, he came up to her and leaned over her table until she met his eyes. Matter-of-factly, he said, “It would be my pleasure if we could spend some time together…tonight, perhaps.”
She looked at him, her head tilted, and measured the choice. She saw a square pink face, not so different from many she had seen, well fed and well tended, and even though it wasn’t a face that moved her much, she thought she could look into his restless moss green eyes for a little while. It was a face that held the promise of things she couldn’t afford, and their delivery with a kind of homage.
She glanced over at the barbers, Alton and Regis, who watched the whole thing unfold and waited for her to resist sweetly, and their expectations bred defiance. The other barber, Flood, never looked her way.
“Not tonight,” she answered as she stood up and went to tend to some other job, making him wait until she returned to tell him when.
It was a timeless play, the choreographed conquest of strange exotic prey, and Ouida was willing to play it for a time. It was a variation on a role she knew, and even though she was familiar with the script, she liked to think that it was she, in fact, who controlled the hunt, fooling the hunter into thinking things moved along by his design. She figured she could learn something about the rest of the world from Johnston Franklin, about the places he visited that she had never been. She liked the challenge. She liked the gifts he brought. And she liked his liking, too.
Their first night of sex, Johnston Franklin had undressed completely and was waiting for her in the bed when she came in from the bathroom, and she had stood, fully dressed, and looked at him. “Well, you certainly are direct, Johnston Franklin. You get right to the point.”
She found herself calling him by his full name, even in bed. And after they had sex he talked to her of his business trips, of meetings and sales and the shops and restaurants he had visited. It was as if just being around Ouida made something in him loosen and spill out, the things he held separate from the rest of his life. Eventually, he started discharging the details of his day, his aspirations and his self-doubts, as soon as he saw her, and he talked all the way through undressing, right up to their first embrace.
He was captivated by her beauty, and her knowledge of its power, and he had seen it in the way she made him wait that first day he saw her, and had wanted it for his own, sensing there was something, some kind of magic, that she knew. He wanted to know it, too.
He wanted to know about the way she lived life up close. While he heard things and looked at colors and shapes from somewhere outside of himself, he could tell that when Ouida did something, she was right in the middle of it. He asked her to reveal to him her eye for things, and he asked her to give him the rich details she saw. “Tell me a texture,” he would say, as they lay in the rich linen of his hotel, and she would begin to describe some fabric she had seen.
“Silky, like a river in sunlight, and purple, with flaws that aren’t flaws, but just the way of the cloth. And it feels purple, Johnston Franklin. You know how purple feels? Rich, with a grain that’s both kind to and hard on the fingertips. Now it is your turn,” she said, lying back on the pillows. “Tell me about the trees you have at home.”
“Okay…well…let’s see,” he said and then stopped. “I can’t,” he protested, but she continued to prod him. “Okay, okay. The trees in my front yard are oak trees. They are live oak trees.”
“Live oaks,” she said.
“Yes. Live oak.”
“Well, that doesn’t mean a whole lot to me, Johnston Franklin. Are they shaped like fat stodgy men, or lithe like young girls? Are they dark, and do other colors show through in spots? Are they sheltering, or does the rain get past the leaves? And what does the bark feel like to the touch…does it stand away or cling to the wood?”
He leaned back against the pillow and tried to imagine them.
“They’re shaped…like oak trees are shaped, I guess. I never noticed. And they’re green…and brown, like I suppose most trees are.”
“Well, how does the trunk feel?” Ouida asked.
“They are like…they’re live oak, that’s all. I don’t know what else to say,” he stammered, as she shook her head and argued. “I know what you call them, Johnston Franklin, but what are they like to you?”
“We had them put in a long time ago…they’re what everyone has…and they’re old…and big…and they have leaves, like all trees. I don’t know what else to say. I don’t know, that’s all I see.”
Ouida looked at him, propped on her elbow, and then slid down under the covers and went to sleep.
Johnston Franklin visited weekly for several months, but Ouida began to withdraw from him as she felt him trying to hold her closer and closer, like a butterfly in a Ball canning jar. Waxed paper stretched across the top. Breathing holes punched through.
The last time they met, on one of his regular forays from his wife and family, he held onto her as she got up to leave, and demanded to know where she was going. Ouida pulled her arm free and gave him a decimating look as she got her things to leave. When she glanced back to look at him for the last time, she saw a child whose fingers held traces of the black and orange dust of captured butterflies.
When it was just about finished with Johnston Franklin, Ouida chose the barber, Flood, who drew her with the economy of his attention, and looked at her from underneath his eyes. The other barbers flirted with her all the time, and played at asking her out. “You shore is one fine-lookin’ woman,” Alton would say, leaning on the arm of his chair as he waited for his first customer, shaking his head. “When, just when, are you gon’ marry me?”
“After she marry me and I leave her,” Regis answered, “ ’cause you know a woman fine as she is don’t mean nothin’ but trouble. I prefer the ugly ones, truth be told, ’cause that way you’re glad when they leave you.” She laughed at them playfully, and said, “You two are just no good. What about that devoted little lady of yours at home, Alton?”
“She would understand. She know I just married her ’cause I was waitin’ on you.”
Flood never joined in the joking, and he barely even smiled. Ouida didn’t even know if he was married, and as she wasn’t looking for a husband, she didn’t care. He never looked her way when Johnston Franklin came to the shop, and he never shaved him or cut his hair. He prepared all of his own lotions and tools, neither accepting nor offering help. He traveled solo, with a hardness about him that she wanted to work soft.
When Ouida had passed between barber chairs one afternoon in search of towels, and brushed against his arm, he hadn’t started, or looked at her, but she had seen the muscles in his forearm tense as he gripped his comb. After that she found reasons to go by his chair. Knowing that she would have to go after him, and thrilled by the pursuit, she brought him a cup of tea one morning and left it on the counter behind his chair. He let it sit all day, never thanking her and never drinking it. She did the same thing the next day, and the next, until, holding the cup with both hands, warming his palms, he lifted it to his mouth and drank. And as he lowered the cup, he looked at her with desire, and a trace of contempt.
The next evening, she waited until Alton and McGraw were gone, and she and Flood were left to lock up. Fiddling with his scissors and combs, he slowly cleaned up his chair and the floor around it, while she arranged and rearranged her manicurist tools, unable to speak. He went for his coat and hat and headed for the door. As he reached for the doorknob, she spoke.
“Flood?”
He stood with his hand on the knob and his back to her and then he turned, and she said nothing as he stood at the door waiting for her. They walked to her flat, and as soon as they got inside the door, they tore at each other’s clothes, and took each other on the bare floo
r, as if it couldn’t be helped, as if it had to be that way, the hard urgency a hurting they both wanted to feel. As soon as it was over, he dressed and left without saying good-bye, and Ouida didn’t think of the risk she had taken until it was too late.
At the barbershop, things didn’t change on the surface, and Ouida knew little more about Flood than before. What she did know was that the heat, the tension between them would make him return, and she waited for him to come to her again. At times she wondered if she had dreamed it, until a week later, she had stood watching him after Alton and McGraw had left, and he looked at her and grasped the back of his chair tight, until the leather squeaked. She knew he wanted her again; and again, he waited at the door.
In their fevered loving, Ouida saw Flood surrender, silently, to something in her. She wanted to be the one who reached him, against his will, the one whom he couldn’t help but come back to, the one who excavated his pain, his need, and for a time, she was willing to exchange peace for the intensity of the fight. Again and again, she tugged on the one string that joined them and she reeled him in.
When this was no longer enough, Ouida had tried to push it further, to find out who he was, but the two of them were stuck in a moment in time, repeating again and again the same act, moving nowhere. By the time she heard Zella’s call, she was letting go of what she had, and didn’t have, with Flood, and she chose Zella, rain-voiced, in whom she met herself.
The first time she saw her, Zella was standing on the corner waiting for a streetcar as it began to shower, and Ouida watched her digging in her bag from the barbershop window for something to shield herself, cursing as her hair got wet. As soon as she had pulled out a newspaper to cover her head, she had tossed it down and stood there laughing as her head got soaked. Ouida glanced up and saw her as she was putting her instruments away, and moved to the window to watch as Zella lifted her arms and face to the rain and shook her head, opening her generous mouth to taste the falling water.
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