The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

  “Yes, ma’am. I promise.”

  She sucked up tears, as Miss Martha hugged her, the baby between them. The old lady refused Belle’s help in packing her things, saying it would only make her sad.

  The store sold quickly, and by that next week, there was a new owner behind the counter. A young woman with a juicy behind that hiked up a dress barely covering her thighs. And she told Miss Martha’s business easily.

  “Me and my man got this store real cheap.”

  “Well, welcome to the neighborhood!” Belle was hoping for a new friend, a Negro friend. Maybe she could take the store owner shopping and help her pick out a proper dress that would cover her privacy. “Where you from?”

  “Right here in the City,” the woman said. “Born and raised.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “You know that old lady Martha? I think she might have lost it.”

  The new owner touched her head, and Belle felt her temper bloom. She reverted to her college voice, the consonants cut-and-dried. The vowels not as long.

  “That is not true. Miss Martha was incredibly sharp. What would make you think otherwise?”

  “I mean, why go back to the country, as bad as those honkies are? Blowing up shit and killing people. When the brothers take over, they’re going to change all that.”

  Belle didn’t want to fight, but within a few weeks, she was further disappointed. The store had changed produce suppliers, and now the vegetables were wilted like at every other place. And the woman was “sometime-y”: one occasion, she might be friendly, and another coldly indifferent.

  As spring gave in to warmth, there was no violence outside. No streets cherried over with fire, but Belle wanted to be back home. She longed to sit on the porch with the women of her family. To talk about nothing special, until the fireflies came. When she told Geoff that she missed home, he said she should be glad to be away from the south, with its Jim Crow laws and dangerous white men. And Belle was safe, but her longings stayed with her.

  Born in the City, her husband wasn’t familiar with the taste of healthy, green food you had picked only hours before. The sight of earth not taken over by concrete. That in darkness, if there was no trouble, the only sounds came from small beings. He didn’t know that you could ache for a place, even when it had hurt you so badly.

  Do Right Woman, Do Right Man

  In that same year that Belle’s grade-school principal assured her Negro students the world was about to change, Belle had begun to tell folks she wasn’t ever getting married. Her listeners would laugh at her and say one day she’d change her mind, because didn’t she want babies? And the only way a good girl could have babies was to get married.

  Belle had come to her decision after an insemination of one of her father’s cows. It was in April that year, so Cross Eye was the heifer who needed to get pregnant. In the fall, Spot would be the one. That way, the Driskells would be kept in milk and butter and cheese throughout the year. When the calves got big enough, Hosea Driskell would sell them for meat, and that would make Belle cry, thinking about a cute animal being killed.

  To impregnate his cows, her father had borrowed a bull from J.W. James, a tenant farmer who lived on the premises of the large farm owned by Cordelia Pinchard Rice. J.W. didn’t work for shares anymore; he only paid rent for his land. It had been ten or more years since there had been sharecroppers on Wood Place. J.W. and Hosea Driskell were buddies, so J.W. didn’t charge his friend money for the use of the bull, the way he did the other Negro men.

  The insemination of the bull was a secret affair, and Belle’s daddy had waved her away from the barn, telling her it won’t no place for a little girl to be. This was grown folks’ business. Belle walked away—her daddy didn’t like to be disobeyed—but even yards from the barn, she could hear the loud cries of Cross Eye and her kicking the floor of the barn. The chuffing of the angry-sounding bull and Cross Eye being hurt some way. In a half hour or so, the men carefully coached the bull back into the metal cage on wheels, and then they enjoyed a picnic in the yard in front of the house. There were sawhorse tables set up and food brought by the wives of the other farmers, along with the chickens provided by Belle’s daddy, who was known to be a wonderful host, and the men gathered in their own group, telling rough jokes about how big and long that bull’s thing had been, and saying if they were Cross Eye, they wouldn’t want no part of that, neither.

  As the men ate their chicken and sipped their mason jars of moonshine, Belle sat quietly on the front steps of her house and eavesdropped. Her daddy had said, “grown folks’ business,” before prohibiting her from the barn. And whenever her parents used that phrase, it meant something between a woman and a man, after a bedroom door was closed. Belle wasn’t quite sure about the logistics, but if whatever had happened in that barn with the bull and Cross-Eye was the same as between her mama and daddy, she wasn’t going to do that. Ever.

  She had witnessed other marital models that concerned her as well, such as J.W. James and his wife. While J.W. didn’t appear to be any older than twenty-five, he was in his mid-forties. Jolene, his wife, while four or five years younger, was prematurely worn down and had let herself go. She was meriney with skin like red dirt before it’s been rained on, or the shade of a ripe peach. Before her four children had been born, she’d been a pretty woman, especially by color-struck standards. And J.W. definitely had been a color-struck man: when he’d been courting Jolene, he’d announce to anybody who’d listen that he didn’t like no dark woman, even though he was very dark himself. He liked to tell folks that he had some Cherokee in him, and he wore his curly black hair styled with grease and brushed until it lay down. As if that mattered, because when J.W. had been born, the midwife had written Negro quite clearly on his birth certificate, when she got around to registering the paperwork with the courthouse.

  In church, Jolene followed behind her husband with her head down and her long hair was mostly gray in the old-lady bun she wore. She’d sit down on the pew with a sigh, but when the elder gave his sermon, Jolene was the first to start shouting. It was the only time anybody saw her with a smile on her face—maybe because J.W. was a well-known cheater, even though he was a church deacon. Colored folks said he could have been head of the church, if he didn’t have that other woman in town. After all, his granddaddy had been the very first elder of Red Mound.

  J.W. even had two children with that mistress, who was much younger than his wife. The mistress who left her children alone in the house on Saturday nights so she and her children’s father could be seen together at the juke joint out in the woods. Then J.W. got up on Sunday mornings, bathed, dressed, drove back out to Wood Place, and walked to Red Mound to praise the Lord. Unlike Jolene, the mistress hadn’t let herself go. Her figure was slim in the tight-fitting, brightly colored dresses she wore at the juke joint. And J.W.’s tastes certainly had changed, because the woman was even darker than he was and wore red lipstick on her round, full mouth, as if to accentuate that not only was she was beautiful, she knew it. Her night-brown eyes were luminous and there wasn’t a strand of gray in her straightened, gleaming hair.

  The folks in town said J.W. wasn’t the first man to step out on his wife, but the problem was, he didn’t have no shame with it. That he acted like the mistress in her tight, bright dresses was in fact a second wife, as in the old ways of matrimony, back in African times. Because J.W. not only was with the woman at the juke on Saturdays; after a few years, he began to stay overnight at her house in Chicasetta’s Negro neighborhood, Crow’s Roost. Except for the few homes of Negro professionals, the residences in Crow’s Roost were small and very close together. Thus, when J.W. came to visit his mistress, he was seen by everyone, and when he left her little house in the early mornings to drive his pickup back to the country to work his fields, he was seen as well.

  But then there came that night when J.W. did not arrive in Crow’s Roost. The morning when he did not walk down the steps of the tiny house of his mistress, who worked
at the factory in town. And another night and another morning and those dark and light intervals added up to two weeks. The mistress could not call her lover, because in the late 1950s, there were only two Negroes in town who had phones installed in their homes, Dr. Thompkins and Miss McLendon, who’d become the principal of the recently constructed colored high school in town. Those phones were only for show, though, because if nobody else Negro had a phone, who was going to call the doctor and Miss McLendon?

  It was a Saturday morning, but the mistress of J.W. dressed for the night, though this time she didn’t leave her children at home while she rode out to the juke joint. Instead she packed the two children into the car that she had borrowed from a neighbor and drove out to the twenty-five acres that J.W. worked on Wood Place. She told her children, come on and get out the car. She had dressed them in church clothes, and the three of them walked up to the door of the house that J.W. had built his wife in the third year of their marriage, after they had moved out of the house with his parents.

  Jolene would tell the story to Miss Rose Driskell, who was her best friend and whose first, Christian name actually was “Miss,” so that white folks had to respect her, even when they didn’t want to. When Jolene opened the door and saw the mistress, she wasn’t mad. She didn’t think about fighting this tiny-waisted, long-legged woman who didn’t look as if she had labored to push two children out of a little bitty hole. Jolene had churned away her anger in the early years of her marriage, back when she, too, had a waistline. When her breasts had stuck out in expectation of the good-looking boy who became her husband. Even after her first child had been born, she and J.W. had sneaked in their love when the baby and J.W.’s parents went to sleep. Back then it had still felt like their courting days.

  Jolene was pregnant again. This would be her fifth child, and she felt the mistress staring at her belly. There was a hurt look on the woman’s face, but Jolene’s newest pregnancy had been a mistake, though the loving hadn’t been. At her age, Jolene had thought she was going through the change of life early, like her own mother had, so she’d gotten careless. She’d conceived this pregnancy in the aftermath of an argument with J.W., when he’d promised Jolene that he’d do right this time. He’d give up the fast life, and Jolene had laughed at him. She didn’t care about what he did with his privates, she only cared that he was spending money at the juke joint when she needed to buy groceries for her children. She knew he was lying. He wasn’t giving up nothing, but when he walked up with that way of his, she let him think he was convincing her to do something she didn’t want to. She’d let J.W. beg her into bed, but she hadn’t made him get up before he took his satisfaction, because she’d been so busy getting hers.

  This mistress wasn’t the only one J.W. had cheated with, neither. Beside her two “outside” children, he had three more children scattered across Putnam County. Surely the mistress had known this, but for some reason, she was fool enough to think she was special. Yet only as this dolled-up woman stared at Jolene’s round belly was she was learning what Jolene had known for a while: what J.W. was giving felt good, but it wasn’t special, and neither was he. Pretty as he was, he was only a regular man.

  At this point in the story, Miss Rose had sucked her teeth. “That hussy deserve what-all she got. Trying to break up somebody’s home.”

  “You ain’t seen it, girl,” Jolene said. “A woman like that, getting gussied up to come to another woman’s house. She must have been in a powerful bad way.”

  “You shole is a Christian, ’cause I would have whipped that heifer’s tail.”

  But Jolene didn’t propose violence to her husband’s mistress. She told the woman and her children, come on in. Sit down. She offered everybody some pie, and cut her own self a slice, so the mistress wouldn’t think somebody trying to put some roots on her.

  Jolene’s oldest daughter was already out the house, a married schoolteacher, and her oldest son was plowing the fields. Her two youngest were running around on the property somewhere, so there was room at the kitchen table. Jolene sat, and the mistress sat, and the outside children sat, and pie was eaten, and Jolene pretended this was an ordinary, nice visit, until the mistress asked about J.W. She said she was worried, because he hadn’t been to see her two Saturdays in a row, and this was the third one. The mistress was bold, meeting Jolene’s eyes. Telling her man’s wife that they had a steady thing going on, but Jolene told her that J.W. was lying in the back bedroom. The mistress could see him if she wanted, and there was surprise on her face.

  When Jolene walked the woman back to the bedroom, Jolene was worried about whether she’d cleaned in the corners, those tiny spaces where the wood floor joined the walls. But she didn’t care about what the mistress and her husband would say to each other, as J.W. lay in their marital bed, his entire chest covered with salve and bandages to help him recover from the steaming pot of stone-ground corn grits that Jolene had thrown on him. She left the mistress and her husband in the bedroom, as the mistress wept loudly, and J.W. croaked out his few words. She went back in the kitchen and told the outside children, she had some chicken left over from last night. Did they want some, and maybe some more pie?

  It had not been Jolene’s intention to kill J.W. If that had been the case, she could have done that so many nights. She could have poisoned him. She could have stabbed him in his sleep. She could have cut the brake lines on his pickup truck. It had not been Jolene’s intention to stop him from going to see his mistress, either, for any man who wants to misbehave will find the time and energy to do so. Jolene had only wanted to bring wisdom into the carefree specter of her husband’s Saturday nights, so that every time he took off his shirt in front of his gorgeous paramour, the woman would know that she wasn’t dealing with an unattached, beautiful boy in his twenties, one who was at the beginning of his life, instead of in the middle. The mistress should know that she was sleeping with a tenant farmer who was the father of soon to be five children by his gray-headed wife, along with several other offspring he’d dropped by the wayside. And if Jolene had to deal with what her life had become through the years, then the mistress had to deal with that as well. No one in this situation could be free.

  Until her husband died, Jolene would remain with her husband, whether or not J.W. decided to stop cheating on her. That’s what Negro women did; they remained.

  * * *

  After Dr. King’s assassination in the spring of 1968, Belle was forced to confront change. Though weeks had passed since the reverend’s death—and there had been no more riots in the City, either—police sirens still rang through Belle’s neighborhood. Cops were everywhere, hemming up young men on the sidewalks and beating them for no reason.

  And there was an entirely new vocabulary, too. Within days of cleaning the riots’ debris—sweeping the broken glass, towing away burned-out cars—the young folks in her northern neighborhood had decided they were no longer “Negro.” Suddenly, they were “Black” with a big B. They began to proclaim themselves “Black and beautiful” and reference Africa at every juncture. Men and women began to refer to each other as “brother” and “sister,” titles Belle only heard previously at her home church, down in Georgia. They let their hair travel on the metaphorical journey to Africa, too.

  Brothers stopped going to the barbers every week, and sisters stopped pressing. Kinky defiance was in abundance, as was disgust over Patrick Moynihan’s report, that ream of paper that white dude working for the Man’s government had written, insisting that brothers had no power anymore in their own households. Sisters were in charge of families now, Patrick Moynihan had written in his report, though he’d still called Black folks Negroes. Sisters called all the shots and paid the bills. Even though Moynihan hadn’t used the term “castration,” he’d implied that sisters were running around with scissors pointed at the crotch levels of brothers.

  Belle didn’t understand the Black anxieties tripping through the streets. For example, she carried Geoff’s last name, and her moth
er carried the last name of Belle’s father, too. If somebody had asked both women, they would have said their husbands were the heads of their households. However, as Belle did for her small family, her mother handled the finances in her own home. Whatever her father made, he gave the entirety of it to Miss Rose, and she gave him back five dollars a week for gas and his walking-round money. This covered the cost of those peanut butter candy bars he loved, and the beers he drank with his friends on Saturday nights down at the juke joint. Other than that, Belle’s mother didn’t care what her husband paid for. She told her daughter, if her daddy could chase women with whatever change was left over from that five dollars, God bless him.

  Though Belle really couldn’t afford the long-distance charges, she began calling her mother several times a week, asking, how were things down home? She figured, if the country village where she was born was changing as well, maybe what she saw up in the City wouldn’t feel so extreme.

  Her mother didn’t have much news. “They done built a new furniture factory, going toward Milledgeville. Your brother got hisself a job there. Good money, too.”

  “Are the folks down home calling themselves something besides Negro?”

  “Like what, baby?”

  “Like, Black?”

  “Why they want to do something like that? That ain’t a nice thing to call nobody.”

  Belle tried one more time. “What you think about me letting my hair go home? I mean, if I stopped straightening it.”

  “Belle, you ain’t got the grade for that.”

  “I was just thinking.”

  Her mother let out a cackle. “You need to think about something else, ’less you want to be walking ’round looking nappy and crazy!”

  * * *

  Belle’s husband did his part to embrace his heritage, as the neighborhood changed. Though he was very light-skinned, his acquired pimp stroll and serious kinship nod to other brothers carried the day. His hair couldn’t go “home”: it was straight as corn silk, but he began wearing brightly colored dashikis over his jeans, patterns that sang of Africa. And he was concerned about what he called “the movement,” the progress of the Black folks that they lived around.