“S-Sugar?” she said warily. “What you doing out of bed child.” She tried to make her tone light and rushed as if she had better things to do, but would take the time anyway. “C’mon, back to bed, you ain’t near well enough to be—”
“Pearl, please.” Sugar’s words came stronger now. “You look worse than me.” Pearl half-laughed, and moved into the small light that spilled in from the hallway. The swelling had gone down in Sugar’s face but it was easy to see it had been used as a punching bag. Her brown eyes were nothing more than brown pools of water. Her lips were puffed and black.
“You, well, you and Joe have done all you can for me. Look at you, here all day every day. All night every night. You got your own to worry about.” She coughed and Pearl took a step toward her. Sugar raised her hand to keep her away. “Stop, Pearl. You been doing for me for a long time. I don’t even know how long, but I knows it been a while. I want to thank you.” Her voice cracked. “Ain’t many people would have taken the time to care for the likes of me, and at first I gotta say that I was mad at ya’ll for doing it. Dead was the only place I wanted to be, but in time I realized that no matter how much I wanted it, I wasn’t getting it. Life’s funny like that sometime. I also wanna thank you for keeping the law outta this. It would have made no sense, really. Lappy like to be the devil himself, reporting what he done to me could only bring more harm than good. Thank you.”
She moved slowly to the couch and sat down, leaning forward briefly to put out her cigarette. Pearl was shaking. She had wanted with all her heart to call the police. She wanted Lappy Clayton to be hung from the nearest tree and his body left to whatever would have him. But Sugar had whispered no in her ear so many times after Pearl found her that she’d dreamed the word dancing around her for two nights straight. And so she did nothing, but hoped that Sugar, after she healed, would think differently and want justice to be done.
“I’m better now, not good as new, but I ain’t never been new, just borrowed, lent and given like secondhand things usually are. I am who I am, Miss Pearl, can’t no amount of soap and water change that.”
“Sugar.” Pearl felt despair clogging her throat, forcing tears from her eyes.
“I ain’t deserve a lot of what I got here in Bigelow,” Sugar continued. “I mean the good things, the things that made me smile, laugh and sing. I ain’t do much good for people in my life and so I really don’t know why so much good has come to me.” She shook her head in disbelief. “But I suppose that will all end now, seeing what I went and done to Seth.” Sugar found it hard to say his name now. Saying it was like a blade being dragged across her heart. “I ain’t get a chance to say sorry.” Her voice choked with emotion.
“You planning on leaving. To go where?” Pearl asked, trying to sound casual, to masquerade the panic that was growing inside of her. She wiped at her tears and forced a smile.
“Don’t know yet.”
“When you thinking about going?”
“Soon.”
Pearl looked around her. She tried to imagine herself without Sugar. She didn’t know who that might be, the person that existed before Sugar’s arrival was buried deep into the hard, dry memory of Bigelow next to the rotting bones of her baby girl. How could she be anything more with the loss of two in her life now?
It would do no good to beg against Sugar’s decision. Just as it had done no good to force Sugar into a role that she was unprepared for. Look at the damage that had been done already. Pearl could have kept Sugar close and not changed a thing about her, she was really fine as she was. Dark, loud and full of energy and song. Who said she had to be demure, low-key, with an unpainted face and a Christian clean soul? Does that make a good human being, a good and decent friend?
They would all have to learn to live with the misjudgment they’d made.
Sugar had another burden to bear, another secret to hide. Every time she looked at Joe or Pearl she heard Lappy’s words echoing in the forefront of her mind. Her decision had been made as soon as the words rolled out of Lappy’s mouth. If she lived she would never tell. Telling would only open old wounds that were still healing. Pearl and Joe didn’t deserve that kind of pain.
Jude was there all the time now, popping up beside her, hiding behind her eyelids and inviting herself into her dreams. The mirror reflecting her face, sometimes with those sad eyes, sometimes just her sweet face with deep black holes where her eyes should have been.
She was always there. A piece of lint on the blanket, a moon ray on the wall. Just there, floating and waiting. Taunting Sugar with her presence.
Sugar didn’t know whether she was trying to get her to stay or push her away. “What!” she would yell. “What do you want from me!” Those sad, wet eyes just stared back at her.
Sugar sat slumped on the bed. Staring at nothing in particular. Her sight was turned inward. Every once in a while her body would quiver and tremble, but just for a moment. And then her head would lift and she’d survey the room with quick darting eyes. She was afraid to take too much of it in at one time. The room where she carried out the business of pleasure, the room where Lappy Clayton had tried to carry out the business of killing. She blinked back the memory and shuddered.
It was during one of those episodes that she spotted the box. Small, wrapped in brown paper, resting on the dresser. Probably brought in by Pearl or Joe during one of their vigils. She walked over and examined it. It was a package, delivered through the mail. Her name and address was scrawled on top:
Sugar Lacey
#10 Grove Street
Bigelow, Arkansas
In the far corner, the return address was written:
Mae Lacey
Duncan Road
Short Junction, Arkansas
Sugar stood there for a moment, not sure if she should open it or not. She cocked her head sideways, trying to help her mind tell her what to do next.
She felt the room cool. The wind suddenly died outside her window, but she felt a breeze pick up around her ankles. It swirled slowly, almost lovingly around her calves, edging its way up her thighs, hips and waist, until finally she was enwrapped.
“Mama?” Sugar muttered and then jumped at her own voice. Her hands went up to her mouth and her fingers touched her lips in awe.
With trembling hands she tore at the brown paper that secured the box. Tore through its many layers—layers that at times seemed like skin—until she reached the lid. She removed the top and her nose was accosted with the scent of lavender. Dozens of aged yellow envelopes that carried her name in delicate, fading black ink lay before her.
She removed the envelopes, one by one, first bringing them close to her nose and smelling the lavender, then moving them across her cheek and down her neck. She could feel her mother. For the first time she could really feel her mother. She laughed, a tearful sorrowful laugh as she opened the letters.
Each envelope held thin sheets of paper that carried words so unbelievable, yet so believable that there would be no decision for her to make. It had been made while she lingered in her mother’s womb, a wisp of balled flesh, a secret not yet known.
They all began the same: “My dear sweet child.”
And closed simply: “Mother.”
The letters revealed a life filled with suffering. They told of a sliver of time when Bertie took love for herself beneath the watchful eye of the moon and her glowing children. It explained her choice to abandon a perfect ebony child because of her fear of inherited madness and the cancerous guilt that manifested itself into the tumor that consumed her body and finally extinguished her life.
“. . . He knows nothing about you and I hope he never will.”
Sugar’s hands trembled violently as she held each letter and read aloud the life of a woman she never knew. She hoped her father’s name would be revealed to her among the words that spilled out in jagged black ink. But it never was and then she came upon the picture.
There was her mother, young and beautiful, her hair pulled back, her
skin glowing, a shy smile across her face, nothing like the sadness that blanketed her in the first picture Sugar had. A young man stood bashfully beside her, tall, dark and incredibly handsome. Their bodies didn’t touch as they posed awkwardly for the camera. Sugar pulled the picture closer to her face, even though it was quite evident who the man was. She saw her own features sketched in his face. She saw Seth’s features in his face. She turned the picture around and her mother’s handwriting confirmed what she already knew to be true: Me and Joe 1939.
Days later, Sugar set her bags just inside the entrance of the church doors. Visible for all to see. She wanted them to know that they’d won. Their God had heard their prayers. She was leaving.
“On the eve of our Lord’s birth.” That’s what the Reverend called it, and that’s the way Sugar would always remember it.
Pearl looked up in surprise when Sugar appeared beside her. She nudged Joe to scoot down some so as to make room for Sugar in the pew. Even when the space was made Sugar stood staring at them for a good long while. Her focus moved slowly from Pearl to Joe, resting on him for some time before it moved back to Pearl.
She looked as she did when she waltzed into Bigelow behind the crazed winter of ’54-’55, except her skin was the color of what flames leave behind after they danced across the walls of a poor man’s house. Her eyes, never much to sparkle, were now black holes.
Pearl’s hands went up and across her mouth. Sugar looked so vulnerable and at that moment she looked more like Jude than ever before.
Whispers filled the spaces between the Reverend’s words as the people of Bigelow muttered under their breath. Word had gotten out about the attack, and no one was up in arms about it. Who was Sugar? Certainly not a Jude. She belonged to no one and nowhere. A whore.
At the height of the Reverend’s sermon, Sugar stood up. Tiny waterfalls of sweat spilled down his face and his voice rose to a holler while his hands gripped the sides of the podium, steadying his Jesus jumping. He caught sight of her and stopped dead. The congregation was thrown and turned to see what he was looking at. Sugar was walking now. Straight toward him. Her feet hit the floorboards hard and with great intent. The Reverend had taken more than a few steps backward. His heart raced. His thoughts filled with the memories of the wicked, stolen pleasures he’d shared with the woman that was now in his face. He held his breath and felt the blood drain from his head down to his feet.
Sugar was looking at the Reverend, but not seeing him. She turned on the congregation. A combined breath was taken and for a moment, there was no sound at all. Sugar looked down on the people of Bigelow and they looked back at her. Waiting.
Then suddenly, like a fledgling breeze before an approaching storm, whispers rose up from the pews, filling the emptiness until the church walls groaned and the whispers became a raging gale of shouts and screams.
“Sit down, girl!”
“You done lost your mind? The Reverend is preachin’!”
“Lord, she ain’t got the good sense God gave her.”
Sugar stood before the congregation, her head hanging heavy on the stick that was her neck. And then she spoke with a voice that betrayed her grief and disguised the hopelessness that was eating away at her senses.
“Ain’t but two of ya’ll in this church ever made me feel welcomed here,” Sugar began. She raised her hand and pointed a shaking finger toward Joe and Pearl.
Clair Bell, Minnie and Shirley twisted uncomfortably in their seats, and pulled at the collars of their dresses. “I’m leavin’ here tonight,” she continued, “but not without sayin’ some things that need to be said.”
The men who’d laid down with her squeezed their legs shut and scratched at the spaces behind their ears and beneath their chins, bracing themselves against the truths they thought she would tell.
“I wanna say to Joe”—she raised her head high and looked directly at him—“and Miss Pearl, that ya’ll been like family to me. I appreciate you looking on me with warm eyes, talkin’ to me like I was somebody, treatin’ me like I was your own.” She choked on “your own,” giving it all the meaning it deserved. The sound of those two words placed together caught some people’s attention as they slipped from her mouth.
Sugar’s eyes did not welcome those faces into view. Her eyes rested solely on her Joe and Pearl. Her words were meant for those two only. “I wanna say sorry for the things I did and the things I didn’t do and I wanna thank you, for everything.”
Anna Lee smiled and turned her head to exchange a triumphant glance with Fayline.
Sugar walked slowly down the aisle, away from the pulpit and toward the door.
A quiet peace had settled over Sugar. A peace she had never known in all her years. Even as she walked past the sad staring eyes of Joe and Pearl, the good-riddance looks from the Bigelow women and the forlorn glances of the Bigelow men, she was not fazed. Her hurt had been replaced with tranquility. The anger that had laid heavy in her heart for so many years was no longer present in her mind and soul. It had dissolved with each step she took toward the pulpit and each word she spoke to those who cared for her.
Pearl willed herself to stay seated. She kept telling herself, “She ain’t yours. Let her go.” She repeated these words over and over in her mind until they escaped from her mouth in a moan. She dug her fingers deep into the soft underside of Joe’s arm and rocked herself back and forth.
Joe’s eyes teared for the third time in his adult life. The first time was when he promised himself to his wife. The second time, when he lifted the cold, dead body of his baby girl, and now. He could not give reason as to why he felt so impassioned. It would be one year later before he would understand why his heart had opened and allowed his emotions to slip down his face.
Pearl was losing another one. Only this time, she would not have to bend over a pine box to say a final good-bye.
No, this was worse.
This time the sound would come like a flood. It started deep in Pearl’s belly and rose in her throat like lava; hot and steaming. Fifteen years of loss. Fifteen years of grief. Fifteen years of anguish finally spewed forth and shook the church’s insides and everyone who had the misfortune of being there.
Black John braced himself. He did not have the comfort of his straw hat. His hands moved around his lap, searching for consolation, until finally clasping on to those of his neighbor.
Sugar, already out the door, never heard the great wail of emotion released at her back. If she had, the depth alone of Pearl’s sorrow would have spun her around.
Sugar barely noticed the biting cold and brutal wind that had its way with her as she walked down the path that led from the church to the street that would place her firmly back onto the familiar road of her life.
One step forward, two steps backward. Two steps backward. One step forward.
AFTER
FALL 1956
I GOT some people from over in Carnery wanna come on over here and check out the house.” A white man with a beet-red face and a tan plaid jacket looked in at Pearl through the screen door. It was barely ten o’clock and the temperature had already soared to eighty degrees. “They told me that you all got the keys to the place,” he continued.
Pearl couldn’t tell if the heat was making him uncomfortable or the fact that he was talking to a black woman with a blank face. She looked him over and without a word, turned and walked away.
“Ma’am?” The white man was confused. He took out his paper and looked down at the name and address again. He was at the right place. He cussed under his breath and was about to turn to go back to his car when Joe came to the screen door. The white man was short, so he had to tilt his head way back to meet Joe’s eyes.
“You need the keys to number ten?” Joe pushed the door open a crack.
“Uh, yes,” the man said, scratching his head.
“Just a minute.” Joe let the screen door close again. When he came back he had one lone silver key in hand. “Lemme come on over there with you, the lock
is a little funny, you gotta jiggle it just right.”
The white man nodded and pulled his handkerchief out of his back pocket to wipe at his forehead and the back of his neck. He had to half run and half walk to keep up with Joe’s long strides. He finally caught up and stuck out his hand. “Tommy Cathers,” he said. Joe considered his sweaty palm and then took it into his own. “Joe Taylor.”
“Uh, this house been up for near a year now. We just got this listing two weeks ago. You had a lotta people out here looking at it?”
“A few.” Joe hesitated before he took the steps up to #10.
“Really. You know the people that usta live here?”
Joe didn’t answer; he was jiggling the lock. He hadn’t been in the house for almost as long as Sugar had been gone. A month after she left someone came and placed a FOR SALE sign in the front yard.
The door was open and Joe stepped back to let the man in.
“Thanks . . . Joe,” the man said and hesitantly stepped into the house.
Joe stood, peering into the dusty emptiness. He half expected Sugar to come swaggering around a corner or down the stairs. He closed his eyes and wished it hard, because Sugar had taken part of his wife with her. But when he opened them all he saw was the white man’s red face staring back at him. “You okay?” the man asked, genuine concern in his voice. That’s all he needed was this colored man to pass out or drop dead with no witnesses. Not with all of the civil rights stuff going on down there; he didn’t want to be blamed for anything.
“Yeah,” Joe said and turned to leave.
He was halfway back to his house when the white man came out to the porch, calling to him. Joe looked down and realized that he still had the key clutched tightly in his hand. “Probably want to keep it,” he thought to himself and turned back toward #10.
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