At this moment, she feels Ansel’s eyes looking at her from a depth of pain she did not know could exist, and she is sorry she allowed her summertime boredom to lead her to agree to taking a walk with Zeph.
When she asked her father if it was all right for her to go with Zeph, she had thought, had hoped he would say no. She saw the “no” in his eyes and how quickly it was replaced by fear, but not a fear for her. It was the fear of what might happen if he said no to a Davis. The church depended on the generosity of the Davises.
Mary Susan was surprised by the contempt she felt for her father at that moment when she needed him to protect her from herself. Instead, he was asking her to protect him.
Then she walked out of the trees and saw Ansel. When her family had moved to town last summer, he had been the only boy whose look gave her to herself, whose look did not make her feel like eyes were unbuttoning her blouse and pulling down her skirt.
“Well, well, well,” Zeph says, looking down at Ansel and Willie. “If it ain’t the nigger lover with his tar baby.”
Zeph Davis is sixteen, the great-grandson of the Zephaniah Davis who gave his name to the town, the son of Cap’n Davis, who owns the largest plantation in that part of the state, as well as every building in the center of town, including Anderson’s General Store.
Willie has finished wrapping his line around the pole and securing the hook. He gets up and walks away without looking at anyone.
Ansel does not want him to go, does not want to be left alone with Zeph, does not want to be left alone with Zeph and Mary. But he, too, pulls his line from the water.
“Where you goin’, Tar Baby?” Zeph calls after Willie.
Willie knows he cannot walk away when a white person speaks to him. He stops and turns. He is careful not to look Zeph in the eyes, careful not to look at Mary Susan at all, and focuses his gaze on a spot in front of Zeph’s boots.
“I don’t want no trouble, Mister Zeph, suh. Don’t want no trouble.”
Zeph laughs. “You a good nigger, boy. You can go on.”
“Thank you, suh,” and Willie turns and runs into the stand of trees.
Zeph laughs his high-pitched, strangled laugh, then makes an exaggerated motion of sniffing the air. “Smells better already. I know niggers wash with soap, but can’t nothing get rid of that nigger smell, can it, Mary?”
Ansel has finished fixing his line and hook to his pole. He stands up and looks at Mary Susan.
“Where you going, nigger lover?” Zeph asks.
Ansel is glad when Mary Susan says, “Don’t call him that.”
“But that’s what he is! What’s wrong with calling him by his right name? And why do you care? I know you and him are sweet on each other, but nobody but another nigger lover would be sweet on a nigger lover. And I know you’re not one of them. Are you?” There is a menacing tone to his voice.
Ansel’s eyes plead with Mary Susan to say something, but she won’t look at him.
Zeph pulls her closer and gives her a hard, clumsy kiss on the lips.
Tears come into Ansel’s eyes, and afraid Zeph and Mary Susan will see, he runs into the trees.
Zeph’s shrieking laugh follows him.
2.
Willie is sitting on the ground, his back against the store, his thin arms crossed tightly against his chest, his fishing pole leaning against the doorjamb.
Ansel takes the poles and the can of worms he remembered to bring and puts them just inside the back door. Then he sits down next to Willie.
They are silent, but this silence is that of an anger that knows its name but dares not speak. But Willie must speak, or the anger will claim him, body, soul, and mind.
“Zeph Davis” is all Willie says.
“You know him?”
“Know that noise he calls laughing.”
“Where you know him from?”
“He come out to the quarters all the time. He have a pistol jammed in his belt. One time he shoot Cousin Dan’s coon dog that was sleeping in the yard just because he could.”
“Why did he do that?”
Willie looks at Ansel, eyes contemptuous with knowledge. “Why you think? If he see a nigger girl he wants, he just takes her. He’ll take her into the cabin where she live at, and make her mama and papa watch while he has his way with her. When he come out, he be laughing, but my mama say it sound to her like he be crying.”
Ansel looks toward the creek, wondering if Zeph is having his way with Mary Susan.
3.
As Ansel walks away, Mary Susan wants to call out to him to wait, that she is sorry, that she does not know why she is standing there letting Zeph Davis put his arm around her as if she is his property.
Perhaps she would have said something, have done something if Zeph had not jerked her head around and started pressing his lips against hers. She is so surprised that for a moment she does not know what is happening.
When she does, she tries to pull away from him, but he puts one hand behind her head and pushes her lips even harder against his.
This is not how she imagined her first kiss, and certainly she had never dreamed it would be from Zeph Davis. Her first kiss was supposed to have come from Ansel, and it would have been soft and gentle and kind.
Suddenly, she feels Zeph’s tongue poking at her closed mouth and does not know what he is trying to do until his tongue is inside her mouth, and she can taste his day—the sausage he had for breakfast, the cigarettes he smoked, the mouthwash he gargled to cover the smell, the dust that billowed up from the road and into the truck he drove around his father’s plantation. She does not want the knowledge of him in her mouth, and she bites his tongue as hard as she can.
“Bitch! You goddam bitch!” Zeph yells, involuntarily releasing his grip on her.
He tries to slap her, but some instinct causes Mary Susan to move away from his avenging hand.
“You try to hit me one more time, and I’ll kick you so hard in a certain place you won’t be able to get out of bed for a month.”
Fear comes into Zeph’s eyes.
“Just because I’m the preacher’s daughter, it don’t mean that I don’t know things.”
“You goddam bitch!” Zeph snarls again, but his voice is tinged with wariness.
The two stare at each other for a moment, he waiting for her to leave first so he can feel like he won, she waiting for him to leave first because she is afraid to turn her back on him.
Finally, he flings another “goddam bitch” at her and walks away.
Mary Susan waits until she is sure he is gone, then tears of anger and fear, of disgust and confusion fill her eyes and trickle slowly down her face. She sits down at the edge of the creek, sits down where she thinks Ansel was sitting.
She does not understand what she’d been thinking by going with Zeph. She doesn’t even like him.
But she was flattered that an older boy, the son of the richest man in town, would be interested in her.
He was taller than she was, and she didn’t have to look down at him like she did Ansel. He also wore regular clothes—a shirt, pants, and shoes.
Zeph reminded her of the boys in Atlanta, where her father had had a big church, not a little country church like this one. But something had happened. She didn’t know what, but the next thing she knew they were living here where the most exciting thing to happen was a bird shitting on the statue in the square.
She liked Ansel, but seeing him in his overalls and no shirt nor shoes, he was everything she hated about Davis.
What was wrong with wanting a little excitement, something to break the monotony of one hot day after another, something to disrupt the enervating boredom of seeing the same faces day after day after day?
She sighs deeply. What has she done? Why wasn’t life like a blackboard that you could write on, and if you made a mistake, you could take an eraser, wipe the mistake away, and start over?
What was going to happen now? How could she ever look at Ansel again? And Zeph.
/> She doesn’t know what she is more afraid of now, Ansel’s hurt or Zeph’s anger.
Mary Susan wipes the tears from her face, gets up, and walks slowly through the trees and across the field to the back of the store.
Ansel isn’t there.
4.
“Crazy bitch!” Zeph mutters to himself, tasting blood in his mouth as he comes out of the trees. He sees Ansel and the nigger boy sitting behind the store. But when they see him, they get up and hurry inside.
Zeph smiles and chuckles to himself.
He moves his tongue gingerly against the backs of his teeth. It still hurts but not as bad. Zeph continues along the dirt road at the back of the store until he comes to the street.
On the other side is the cemetery. Next to it is the church where Mary Susan’s father is the preacher, then the parsonage.
Zeph had thought she would be sitting on the porch with nothing to do. That’s why he walked by.
She was certainly very pretty, but he didn’t know if he would have wanted her if she hadn’t been the preacher’s daughter. Well, that and them new titties of hers sticking out like an invitation to a party.
Wouldn’t it be something if he got a piece of that!
Just thinking about it made Zeph grin.
Then he remembered what she said she would do to him, and his lips return to their customary position of barely suppressed rage.
“Goddam bitch!” he mutters again. If he says it enough times, maybe the words will eradicate his humiliation, but he only gets more angry.
He is afraid she will tell Annie Forest, her best friend, and Annie Forest couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended on it, and before he knows it, everybody in town will know.
Instead of turning right and going to the center of town, he turns in the opposite direction. A short distance beyond the church he comes to a little bridge that goes over the same creek where Ansel and Willie had been fishing.
Instead of crossing the bridge, Zeph slides down the embankment and walks under it. He takes a pocketknife from his pocket. Then he squats and waits.
He is silent and still except for the fingers of his right hand, which idly caress the folded knife.
He doesn’t have to wait long before he sees what he is waiting for.
For someone else, the frog would have been hard to see against the dirt and in the deep shadows beneath the bridge. But not for Zeph. He has been doing this as long as he can remember.
The frog hops. Then stops. It waits. Detecting no movement, it hops again. Then stops. Waits.
Like a snake, Zeph does not even blink. His fingers cease their idle stroking of the knife. He watches the frog hop closer and closer to him.
The frog is next to his right shoe, but Zeph waits. The frog waits.
The frog’s next hop brings it to the space between Zeph’s right and left shoes, and with a sudden swiftness that would have surprised everyone who knew him, he grabs the frog just as it is preparing to spring, having not sensed danger.
Zeph holds it so that its legs frantically move back and forth, try to leap but have nothing to push against except air.
While still holding the frog firmly in his left hand, Zeph puts the fingernail of his right thumb into the notch at the end of the knife’s blade and flips it open.
He keeps the blade of his knife as sharp as hatred. You never know when you might come upon a snake, a baby bird, a kitten, or a frog.
He puts the frog on the ground, pressing hard against its back, forcing its legs to splay outward.
With surgical precision he slices off one of the frog’s hind legs, then takes away the hand that is holding it down.
Frantically, the frog moves its remaining leg back and forth, back and forth, trying to take a giant leap from a cruelty it did not know existed. Unable to leap, it nonetheless goes through its instinctive kicking motions, but to no avail.
Zeph Davis watches the frog intently, fascinated by the creature’s spastic motions, by its desperate efforts to assert the life that is bleeding away.
As he watches the frog, anger starts leaving his body like the blood leaving the frog’s.
He doesn’t understand why, but any time an anger overtakes him, he has only to use his knife on a creature, and the anger seeps out.
It has been like that since he was little.
Not too many more moments pass before a cold calmness descends on him. The anger is gone.
Without emotion he plunges the knife into the frog’s back, pinning it to the ground. The creature shudders and then is still.
Holding the frog to the ground with a finger of his left hand, Zeph slowly pulls the knife from its body with his right. He goes to the creek and washes the blade in the cold water, then dries it with a few quick swipes on his jeans.
He returns to the now still body of the frog and stares down at it. Already ants are starting to swarm over the carcass.
“Don’t forget to say grace.”
He lets out a long slow breath and walks away. He feels better than even after he pleasures himself.
Tuesday Night
No emotion eats at your soul like shame, that feeling of having violated yourself, of having done something so wrong you can’t imagine how to go on living.
Ansel lay in bed that night unable to sleep. It was as hot inside as it was out. He could smell the smudge pots his father had put on the front and back porches in a vain attempt to keep the mosquitoes out of the house.
Neither the heat nor the mosquitoes bother him as much as the memory of Zeph’s arm around Mary Susan, as his lips on hers.
Over and over Ansel asks himself: Why didn’t I ask Mary Susan what she was doing with a piece of trash like Zeph? His father might own everything and everybody in town, but his son was a piece of trash.
Ansel does not understand why he had not gone to Mary Susan, taken her hand, and led her away.
But what if she wouldn’t have let him? What if she had said she wanted to be with Zeph?
Ansel didn’t know what he would have done.
He didn’t know anything about girls, and especially a girl from someplace big like Atlanta. Other boys were intimidated around her because she was the preacher’s daughter. Ansel was scared of her because she was from the big city. What could she possibly see in a short country boy like him?
Whereas Zeph was older, taller, and he had gone places with his father—Nashville, New Orleans, even Atlanta.
Ansel knows what would have happened if Mary Susan had refused to walk away with him. He would have cried.
Zeph and Mary Susan would have laughed at him and told everyone in town that he was a crybaby.
But lying there in the darkness he realized that the humiliation of her rejecting him would not have been as great as the shame he began living with that night.
He was to learn that shame is an emotion that takes up residence in your heart, and its pain does not diminish with time. It only intensifies with each passing year.
Wednesday Morning
1.
Ansel is at the back of the store, filling the wagon with bags of groceries and canned goods. Willie brings the mule over from the field and hitches it to the wagon. They do not speak.
The two are almost finished loading the wagon when Ansel hears a voice from inside the store, hears a voice saying his name, a girl’s voice, the voice he knows as well as his own.
He wants to see her, and yet, he never wants to see her again.
“Let’s go, Willie,” he says desperately, hurrying toward the wagon seat.
“Ain’t that her coming?” Willie asks.
“I don’t care. Let’s go!”
But he does care. That’s why he doesn’t want to see her.
“Ansel?” Mary Susan’s voice is soft, hesitant, trembling.
Ansel turns and looks at her. She is wearing an orange sundress and, to him, she is more beautiful than he ever dreamed a girl could be. But then he sees Zeph’s arm around her, and he remembers the times he
tried to put his arm around her and she moved away from his touch, saying, “What kind of girl do you think I am?”
“What do you want?” he asks, his voice harsh with hurt.
“About yesterday,” she begins timidly.
“What about it?”
“It wasn’t what it seemed like. I didn’t know he was going to do that, put his arm around me. He did it just when he saw you through the trees. I felt bad about all the things he said.”
“What are you doing being around somebody like that?” Ansel asks angrily.
“Like what? Zeph puts on this act to shock people. He likes to pretend he’s bad, but he’s not.”
She knows what she is saying is not true, knows she should not be defending Zeph, but Ansel’s anger at her combined with her own anger at herself is about to annihilate her sense of her essential goodness, and she is frightened.
“You talk like you just lost your mind. All Zeph wants from you is one thing!”
“And what’s that, Mr. Know-It-All?”
“You know. I don’t need to say it. Can’t you hear how Zeph would brag to everybody about what he did with the preacher’s daughter?”
“Your mind is nasty! I wouldn’t let him do that to me!”
“I didn’t see you move away from him like you do me when I try to put my arm around you. I didn’t see you saying no when he kissed you.”
Tears spring to Mary Susan’s eyes. She wants to tell Ansel how humiliated she felt with Zeph’s arms around her, how she had bit him, how she had gone home and rinsed her mouth out.
She wants to tell him how much she hated Zeph touching her, how much she wants Ansel to forgive her. But Ansel is looking at her with such anger, with such hatred.
If she tells him she is afraid, he will let her feelings drop into the dust at his feet or swat them away as if they were mosquitoes.
So she lashes out, wanting to hurt Ansel as much as he is hurting her.
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