Throughout the service I caught myself watching her demure beauty recollecting itself from the earlier release. Each exquisite movement was in itself a distraction. My mind raced. What had the wink meant? Had she felt me as I had felt her? Or was she merely thanking my spirit for moving hers? I refocused my thoughts on the day’s lesson and back to my duties as organist.
My legs still ached from the earlier workout. Nearly an hour had passed since service ended. Pastor congratulated me on my “spirited playing” and joked about how I continued to raise the bar for him to inspire the congregation. I nodded and smiled, thinking of the particular congregant who had inspired my playing.
I rushed out of the church, knowing in my heart that she had already gone. I looked to the lot across the street and my heart sank. My car was the only one there. I gathered the strap of my music bag, slung it over my shoulder, and headed toward the foot of the stairs and the street. As I moved toward the curb, I lowered my head and bemoaned the lost opportunity. A horn blared and chased away my reverie. I looked up in time to catch a glance of Miss Mavis Dupree, her slender arm waving through the driver’s side window of the silver Mustang as it roared by. I floated two feet off the ground to my car and winged my way home.
The following Sunday came after an excruciatingly slow week. Every morning I rose counting the days to Sunday’s return. And when it finally arrived, I was on the steps of of the church at seven for the eight A.M. service. By 9:45 I was frantically searching the burgeoning crowd for Miss Mavis’s face. She didn’t disappoint me. Again, she sat on the left side of the church. Her hair was pulled back and pinned in the same tight bun. Her skirt, long and unadorned, accentuated the A-line of her frame. Her heels added two inches to her height.
I started the music off slowly, the melodies framed by sweet harmonies above and below. “Jesus on the main line…” Sister Eveline, the soloist, crooned dramatically as the choir chimed in, “Tell him what you want.…” The crowd was being massaged. Their toes were tapping, fingers popping, heads bopping. Sister Beulah’s crew began clapping, snapping, and tapping. Sister Wrigley began her step; Brother Edwards wandered over to some unsuspecting pretty young thang in a long, flower-print dress.
I took it up a notch and gave Sister Martine her cue. The attendants rushed, fans in hand, to her side. Lloyd Jr. grabbed hold of those congas and beat the black right out of them. It was on. My bass notes dueled with his drums and matched Sister Jean’s bass guitar. Sister Etta Wrigley broke into full dance as the choir sang, arms flying, robes raised in full wing like angels.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her. Her head thrown back, hair undone, shirt buttons bursting as she threw her chest forward and proceeded to dance. She came out of her shoes as the spirit moved her torso shaking, shimmying across the church. This time, I turned and watched as I pounded those keys. My fingers stroking ivory, my feet pounding wood, my behind rising and riding her shouts of “Yes, oh yes, oh yes.… Thank you. Yes, Father. Oh, Lord, yes.” Our voices rang out in unison, “Yes, yes. Oh, Lord, yes.…” I played and watched her as she danced and watched me, the smiles in our eyes creeping to the corners of our lips.
That Sunday after service, I was the first one out of the church. And Sister Mavis wasn’t far behind. I invited her to dinner. We ate, and talked, and drank a little wine. She told me her story of being a P.K.—preacher’s kid—who’d never learned to let herself go till she stepped foot in the Divine Deliverance Tabernacle and felt for herself what she’d witnessed women doing all those years back home in her daddy’s tiny church.
I listened to the soft voice that held contrast to the shouts of praise I’d heard earlier. I watched the quiet, almost sacrosanct figure who seemed so small now at dinner, but who loomed large in her worship of her Creator. I listened intently, as she softly spoke about how my music moved her—not just the music itself, but also the idea that a woman such as me, big-framed with large hands, heavy in weight, and so obviously strong, handsome, and masculine, could elicit such spirit from an organ. She stopped and then quietly intoned, “If you could so masterfully do that to an organ, I wonder what you would do to me.”
That night, in the quiet of her room, beneath the bristles of the boar’s hair brush, I felt the length and weight of her hair cascade down her narrow, athletic back. I kissed the nape of her tiny neck, stroked the slender curve of her shoulders, held the arc of her waist, and watched with envy the tender kiss of her hair as it brushed her naked breast when she removed first her shirt, then mine.
My fingers burned to make music with her, caress the song right out of her throat, draw the breath from her lungs and hear its tonal escape. My hands wanted to pound her keys, hit each right note, bang the inside chords, produce a perfect melody, blend a perfect harmony, strum the perfect beat. I listened for the pitch as my hands moved down her shoulders and along her back, my mouth sprang open, filled with nipples and breasts, and became its own instrumentalist. My hands slid down along her bottom and felt the contracting muscles as she raised her skirt and wrapped her thighs around mine. I pulled her closer.
I felt myself growing as the cotton pressed against my swollen clitoris. Her lips long ago had surrendered to the strength of my loving. I reached down, undid my pants, and let them slide to the floor. I gingerly stepped out of them and my shoes, unzipped the back of her skirt and raised it over her breasts, face, and hair. I carried her into the bedroom.
Miss Mavis Dupree.…Mmm Oh yes, what a woman. To say that night she re-created that shout at home with me would be an understatement. Miss Mavis had been wanting for many years to find that sweet release, surrender her body to that good gladness, not just in church, but also at home. In me, Marva L. Malcomb, she finally found the spirit that could set her free.
I lay on the bed and started to speak. Her fingers caressed my lips, as she shook her head, “No.” With the flick of a switch on the massive headboard frame of her bed, the room became filled with my music. I listened in awe as the music began to build. I watched Mavis’s face. She turned and looked at me, eyes wide open, and softly she smiled. She climbed on top of me and placed my hands on her narrow hips. Bending her knees up, she now squatted over me. Her eyes slowly closed, her fingers tapped the tip of my nipples in time with the music, her glutes kept time on her bottom, her torso began to rock and sway, her head fell back, and her hair tickled the inside of my thighs. “Oh God,” the words escaped my lips. “Yes,” Mavis replied. Her bottom began sliding across my belly and grinding along my pubic hair. As the music began to grow, so did I. I could feel her edging over me. Lloyd Jr.’s congas seemed to take over in the background and the beat lifted her bouncing along the top of my thighs, the contracting cheek muscles catching and pulling on me.
“Oh God,” I moaned.
“Oh yes,” she responded.
“Oh God.”
“Oh, yes!”
“Oh, God!”
“Oh…yes,” our voices cried out in unison.
She bent her knees under and slid the length of her body against mine. I felt her wetness and her hard clit push against my own. The friction between us heated our clits, and wetness streamed between our thighs. Her hair poured over my body, tickling and tantalizing it beyond belief. The choir clapping was ringing in my ears, the bass guitar strummed our heated bodies. We twisted and turned, banged and bonded, arms, fingers, teeth, hair, and juices a mass of motion, gyrating, grinding, pushing, and pumping in time with the music, its crescendo matched by our own.
“Oh God. Yes Father. Oh Jesus. Yes God. Oh God. Yes! Yes! Yes!” Mavis rose as I grabbed her cheeks with both hands. The music continued. We hit the bridge, and Hallelujahs went up everywhere. We could hear the tambourines shaking and the feet stomping.
I pulled Mavis’s nether lips to my mouth. Her sigh rose above me when I plunged my tongue deep inside her. Her body shook as I watched her rocking back and forth, struggling against the surrender. Her hands grabbed my shoulders as she tried to wrench away. With each lift
, her swollen pussy would void itself of my tongue and then hungrily pound me back into it again and again. She rode this way for several minutes, grabbing my hair and then the headboard, my shoulders, and then the sheets, seeking to find a merciful anchor.
And then it happened. The juices flowing between her thighs slid across my fingers. My thumb edged its way between them and found its way to that last virgin spot and, like an organ key, pushed in and turned on. Mavis rode it, reached around and pushed it further in, pounded my tongue, mouth, and chin with her soft, cavernous pussy. My bottom pounded the bed; my feet pounded the mattress; my fingers keyed her ass; and my lips played an embouchure to her organ. Her shouts reverberated through the night air.
As I said, it has been a year since that first Sunday. We’ve had fifty-one Sundays since. And on every one of them Sister Mavis Dupree re-creates that shout at home with me, Sister Marva L. Malcomb. Gotta go. She’s in the bedroom waiting to celebrate our anniversary. And I don’t want to keep her waiting. Oh no, no, no. Not Sister Mavis.
Miss Cicero
Dorothy Randall Gray
“There go Miss Cicero, every Saturday, just as regular as you please.” The Modeen sisters rocked in their chairs and nodded from the porch as she passed by.
“Yes, indeed. Ain’t it sweet how she walk halfway cross town just to read to blind old Mr. Thackeray?”
“Sure is. And she ain’t no spring chicken neither. She in her seventies and Mr. Thackeray’s older than that! He and her dead husband was tight as tits. Just like family, they was.“
“You have a nice day now, hear?” they called out as she tossed a nod their way.
Purple blossomed wisteria vines trailed along the sides of Mr. Thackeray’s small white house. The brick pathway bit a swath through the crew-cut lawn, past the figure of a white jockey with a bullet hole in its cap. Miss Cicero held onto the wrought iron railing, and pulled herself up the wide wooden steps.
“Come on in, Miss Cicero,” a deep voice called out before she could ring the bell. “My door ain’t never closed to you.” She locked the door behind her, unpinned the straw hat, and hung it on the hall tree. She stood in the vestibule for a moment, blinded by the darkness of the half-drawn shades, the closed windows, and the smell of fresh roses.
“Pour yourself some lemonade, Miss Cicero. See, I picked you some flowers out my garden?”
“What’d I tell you ’bout using them sharp knives? You done already cut yourself more times than a dog has fleas!”
“I still got all the fingers I need to do what I got to do.”
Miss Cicero smiled beside the yellowed keys of the player piano. Slowly, she tipped across the braided rug, coaxed a few petals from the fragrant pink blossoms, and stuffed them into her brassiere.
She pulled striped candies from the cut-crystal bowl, resting her cane against the blue glass table. A pendulum shuttled back and forth behind glass doors of a grandfather clock as it stood guard over sepia photographs of high-collared faces.
“Miss Cicero? You done evaporated or something?”
“I’m fixin’ to get the lemonade!”
“Then what you tippin’ around the parlor for? I’m blind, but I ain’t deaf!”
“Well, maybe you just oughta be. You see too much with those ears. You want something to drink?”
“Liquids is life, ain’t they, Miss Cicero? I still got a lot of life left in me, if you know what I mean!”
Her hips pushed the rounded Kelvinator door closed. She drank in the frigid air escaping from the refrigerator, and balanced two glasses of lemonade and a straw bag toward Mr. Thackeray’s room.
“I thought you was never coming in here,” he said, patting the cushioned rocking chair beside his bed. “Was you meditatin’ or something out there? You ain’t into that New Age stuff, is you?”
“New Age? Shoot! I’m still trying to deal with old age. Here, take this glass so I can sit down.” Mr. Thackeray let the cool lemonade dampen the edge of his mustache. He ran his gnarled fingers along the outside of the tumbler, and brought it to his temples. Tiny violets on a field of white muslin surrounded the silk pajamas he wore over his thin, sturdy frame. His white hair was Fuller-brushed to perfection. He felt Miss Cicero watching his not being her husband.
“Think you gonna live through one more chapter?” she asked as she did every Saturday.
“If the creek don’t rise,” he answered as always. They sipped in the comfort of an ancient silence.
“By the way, Miss Valdosta sends her regards.”
“Well, I hope you didn’t bring none of them regards in my house! Ain’t that old white biddie dead yet? She got to be ’round a hundred years old by now.”
“No, she ’bout your age, I reckon, ninety-four, ninety-five. … Matter of fact, I think she kind of sweet on you, Mr. Thackeray.”
“What you talking about, woman? I’m eighty-six, and don’t be trying to start no foolishness with me!”
“Didn’t I hear something about yo’all fooling around up in her daddy’s barn, and you having to jump out the window half-naked when he almost caught you? Heard you was picking straw out your butt for a week!”
“Now, you know ain’t a bit of truth to that story, Miss Cicero!” Mr. Thackeray jerked forward, and shook out the pillows behind him. He leaned back against the mahogany headboard, his arms folded under tightened jaws.
Miss Cicero’s whole body seemed to chuckle. She pulled the book from her straw bag and began ruffling through its pages.
“And don’t think I can’t feel you grinnin’ at me!”
She could no longer keep laughter from breaking past her lips, bouncing from the mirrored dresser to the fringe on the night table lamp, and landing on the corner of Mr. Thackeray’s reluctant smile.
“Woman, why you like to vex me so?” He held his hand out in a question mark, then let it fall to the edge of the bed. “You know I don’t be messing with no white meat!” Miss Cicero’s finger lightly traced the thick vein on the back of his hand.
“And what kind of meat do you like, Mr. Thackeray?” He shifted his body to face her words. She leaned back into the rocking chair and focused on the page. The grandfather clock struck one.
“‘…Janie wanted to ask Hezekiah about Tea Cake, but she was afraid he might misunderstand and think she was interested…’” she read.
Her voice filled the room’s corners and painted his darkness a lighter shade. He lay fully on his side, breathing in the cadence of her words and the lilac persistence of her hair. His vein remembered the touch of her finger and carried his hand across the narrow space between his desire and her chair.
Miss Cicero angled her body toward his outstretched arm and continued to read.
“‘…It was early in the afternoon and she and Hezekiah were alone. She heard somebody humming like they were feeling for pitch and looked toward the door.…’”
Mr. Thackeray found the soft grayness of her hair and stroked each strand as if it were a memory.
“Let it rain, Miss Cicero. Let it rain.”
Still reading, she guided his fingers toward the steel restraints holding her twisted bun in place. He removed the hairpins, letting them drop one by one onto the carpeted floor. Her hair, surprised by its sudden freedom, stayed nestled close to her neck.
The gentle toss of Miss Cicero’s head caused the wild silver waves to tumble down her back like a waterfall. His hungry fingers walked into the jungle of her hair and massaged her scalp with a spiral strength.
Miss Cicero felt his hand reach inside her for air, and push behind the rise and fall of her chest. She felt him walking the same path her mother had traveled, Cherokee fingers struggling to comb the African presence from her daughter’s hair. She sighed and pushed herself from the rocking chair, facing his bed, smoothing the back of her dress with one hand, and holding the book with the other.
“‘…The sounds lulled Janie to soft slumber and she woke up with Tea Cake combing her hair and scratching the dandruff from her sc
alp. It made her more com fortable and drowsy.…’”
Mr. Thackeray curled his arm around Miss Cicero’s heavy waist. He touched the sight of her face with his fingers, the high terrain of her cheekbones, the clear border surrounding her lips, the warm breath she paused long enough to blow onto his wrist.
She slid her hand inside his silk pajamas, and ran her fingernails up the valley of his spine. The words deepened and lowered her voice. A thin slice of sun slipped past the edge of the shade, casting a shaft of light toward Miss Cicero’s making no effort to put the book aside.
He loosened the buttons on her seersucker dress and buried his face in the bouquet of her bosom. His arm moved across the wide expanse of flesh below her waist, pressing a handful of her between his legs.
He kissed the scalloped lace of her black brassiere, moaning and inhaling the sweetness of her loose wrinkled skin. The river rose inside her. She held its waves under tight rein, pushing them back behind the dam. She captured the swell of his body in the hypnotism of her hips swaying from side to side.
“Miss Cicero.…” His body trembled.
She played in the coarse hairs at the nape of his neck. His breathing came in staccato exhalations. He squeezed the nipples inside the black fabric, then started to undo its front hooks.
“Oh God.…”
Mr. Thackeray pulled the soft dress up around her waist and let his hand glide past the elastic of her satin panties. Miss Cicero clenched her legs like teeth. Her waters beat against the walls of their confinement. The folds of skin floating from her stomach fell into the caress of his fingertips.
He reached into the space between her moist hairs and found it locked. She held onto his hand as he was about to unfasten the last hook. Words still trickled from the book’s pages. Bewilderment looked through Mr. Thackeray’s eyes. The dampness of his desire swept his pores, and gathered inside his parched throat.
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