And Do Remember Me

by Marita Golden

  When Lincoln took her, entering her slowly, carefully, because he did not know if this might be her first time, Jessie closed her eyes and the part of her that her daddy had got to first rose, walked across the room and watched Lincoln make love to what remained. Jessie feigned pleasure, her father had taught her how to do that too. When it was over, Lincoln fell asleep beside her and for that Jessie was grateful. At least he would not hear her cry.

  Once she was her mother’s favorite. The firstborn of Olive and Chester Foster, Jessie had reigned in her mother’s heart like the fulfillment of a prayer. Even when Mae Ann and Willie and Junior followed, it was Jessie on whom Olive doted, buying her the occasional new dress while the other children made do with hand-me-downs from the family Olive Foster kept house for. Three years separated Jessie’s birth and the arrival of the other children. In those years and the seven that followed, Olive Foster made Jessie a confidante, a friend, a rebuke to the weighty disappointment of her marriage.

  But when Jessie was ten, her mother went into the hospital for surgery. Aunt Eva had told her simply, “Your mama’s sick and she’s got to have something took out of her body, so she can be well again.” But when she returned home, Olive Foster, a woman who had spoken with angels in her waking moments, seen God in her sleep and who had once longed to preach, was never healthy again.

  She had had plans to study at a Bible college in Knoxville when she met Chester Foster, a friend of her brother’s who stayed at their house during Olive’s eighteenth summer. Chester Foster haunted her imagination like some exotic dangerous flower, the likes of which she had never before seen. When she walked demurely through the living room on her way to teach Sunday School, Olive prayed for forgiveness for the beating of her heart at the sight of Chester Foster’s thick muscled legs poking out from under the sheet covering him on the floor. Chester Foster smoked cigars and had a gold tooth that winked at Olive every time he smiled. He had met her brother Lonnie in the Navy, where they had both been cooks, during World War II. Chester Foster shot dice, huddled beneath the street lamps outside their house, and called Olive “baby.” And when he was ready, he plucked Olive as easily as reaching for an apple on a tree.

  That’s what her mother had told Jessie, in the days when she still talked to her about something other than the Lord. But in the wake of her illness, she concluded, “God put your daddy in my way as a test, to see what I loved more, the world or God, and I let the Lord down.” Olive’s voice bristled with a strange pride in the momentousness of her fall. When she discovered she was pregnant, Olive told her parents and Chester Foster married her as easily as he had taken up residence in their home.

  Within months of their marriage Olive began hearing rumors about Chester and other women. She had let the Lord down once. She decided she would not do that again. No matter what, she would remain his wife.

  In time, the children became a barrier between them. The love her husband had declared irrelevant she lavished on her children. Then a massive tumor, which she took as a sign from God, was found. Olive took increasingly to her bed and to the Bible. By the time Jessie was twelve, most evenings her mother entered the house, weary and drained from the demands of someone else’s home, and went straight to her room, leaving the younger children and the house to Jessie. She spent her extra money on medicines, visits to doctors, traveling to see root women. She bought herbs, and curious prescriptions came through the mail. In time, her children assumed the unkempt, suspicious demeanor of orphans.

  Her parents no longer slept together. Stacks of Watchtower and Daily Word were stationed on the bed stand in her mother’s room. And Jessie became the mistress of the house.

  “You ain’t my mama, so don’t be telling me what to do,” Junior scolded her brazenly when she attempted to enforce orders given by her parents.

  “You think you special cause she put you in charge, but I ain’t gonna eat no more of this slop,” Mae Ann, willful and cocksure at nine, shouted one night, pushing her bowl of greens and yams onto the floor.

  With Jessie in charge, the children bickered and raged, their anguish a brushfire consuming them. Jealousy, despair rained, like a storm of dry ashes, clinging to their skin.

  And her mother’s door remained closed to Jessie, who at the end of each day, her spirit mauled into a tiny quivering thing, stood before the door and wished it open. But the lock never turned. Soon she was gripped by headaches, bouts of fatigue, fainting spells.

  Beneath the thin covers at night she could feel anger slicing her insides into pieces, chewing her up, swallowing her whole. When she woke up in the mornings, she held her breath as her hands rediscovered her body, trying to see if she was still there. Her father stepped in, however, and offered her a facsimile of what she had lost. He pressed spare change into Jessie’s hand to show how he appreciated the work she did in the house. Sometimes when he got home late at night, he’d come in the room Jessie shared with Mae Ann and check on her, his hands fondling her beneath the covers. Alone in the house with Jessie, he’d sit her on his lap and rub her against his groin. Once he kissed her on the mouth, letting his tongue slide through her lips. Jessie thought she would vomit. The hard steel-like thing rising between her legs frightened her even more than the kiss. When she fought him he grabbed her by the shoulders and said, “You my baby, Jessie. I can kiss you if I wants to. There’s nothin’ wrong with that.” She believed him. He was her father. He loved her. Even the night he woke her up for the first time from sleep and hustled her into bed with him, he’d told her that. “I’m your daddy. I love you.” Jessie, confused and frightened, was grateful that in the dark, in her father’s bed, in his arms, he talked to her, touched her, held her. That part did feel like she thought love was supposed to.

  Inside his daughter in the dark, Chester Foster felt as small, invisible and minuscule as she, releasing into her every hurt. All the memories lapping at his brain obliterated forgetfulness. The awfulness of the act made him unreal, and in those moments the feel of his daughter’s small breasts against his skin, the terrified hushed song she sometimes sang to wisk herself from his grasp, froze his heart. All this terribleness made him forget sometimes Hector Beaumont, the one-eyed owner of the general store, who made him kneel before him, take his member in his mouth, beating Chester until he did it without resistance, the scent of tobacco, licorice, old cheese and sweat swirling around the back room where Hector Beaumont unzipped his pants and claimed Chester Foster for three years that lasted forever.

  And women were just a blur, all one face to him, one body. He came to hate his wife because she had not broken the hold of memory, had not snapped the back of nightmare. In Olive’s arms he was the little boy again, each time, vulnerable and afraid. But when he took his daughter he became Hector Beaumont, instilling fear, not feeling it. Mornings after, he woke sick, unsatisfied, wondering what he had done. Knowing all too well. If he could kill himself, he thought, it would be over. But he’d never do that. Some poison was in him. Now that he had started, it was impossible to stop. Mornings after, Jessie stumbled from bed, already in the hold of a skillful, perfect amnesia that erased the night from memory while burying it in her soul.

  And so, theirs was a house where everyone had a secret. Mae Ann never said a word about Jessie returning to their room in the dark, and slipping back under the sheets beside her, smelling of their father’s cigar, his whiskey clinging to her like a second skin. She said nothing, but began to run away from home so often that after a while, no one took notice anymore, for they knew she would come back eventually.

  Junior, the youngest boy, got into fights at school, and was sent to a juvenile home for stealing sneakers from a department store downtown. Nobody in the family talked about Junior’s behavior, or about the beatings his father inflicted with a savage sense of mission. Willie took refuge in utter, complete silence. He carved hundreds of tiny animals out of wood—mice, dogs, squirrels. Jessie found them one day in a box beneath his bed. He was so quiet they thought he was d
umb. Chester Foster beat Junior because he was bad. He beat Willie because he was afraid he wouldn’t be a man.

  When her father touched her, Jessie tunneled deep inside herself. There she hovered quiet, unmolested, untouched. Daydreams became the texture of her life. While cooking, she learned to transport herself in her mind to a foreign country they had studied in school, to sweep the floor and hear the amusing, subtle laughter of imaginary friends. And there was always Aunt Eva.

  Jessie often stopped by Aunt Eva’s beauty shop on her way home from school or from the Bullocks’. She sat in the tiny shop, surrounded by the scorching scent of straightening combs and curlers, the acrid smell of shampoo and dye. The beauty shop was a confessional. Here women flaunted secrets, told raucous tales of lovers, recounted arguments with husbands and employers, divulged their fears for their children. Jessie swept the floor, gathering great balls of hair on the dustpan, cleaned the sinks, washed the towels and listened to the women unfold precious covert longings, draping them over the dreary exterior of their lives. When Eva gave Jessie a ride home, she noticed how Jessie was reluctant to move once they drove up to her house, asking Eva more than once, “How come I got to come back here? How come I can’t go with you?” Concerned, Eva began visiting her sister’s house when she wasn’t expected and instantly sensed the chaos. She began taking Mae Ann and Jessie to her house for the weekends. When Chester Foster argued that they were needed to work in the house, Eva snapped at him, “Let them hardheaded boys of yours do some work, they got hands.”

  Her sister’s marriage was the cause of her illness, Eva had concluded long ago. As she watched the two girls stuff a few things into a paper bag for the trip to her house, she wrestled with the impulse to go into her sister’s room and drag her out of the bed.

  Mae Ann and Jessie slept with Eva, watching movies till past midnight, drinking Dr. Pepper and eating barbecued potato chips. When Jessie asked her aunt why she never got married, Eva rolled her eyes and said, “What I need a man for? Just tell me that.” And once while Mae Ann slept at the foot of the bed, Aunt Eva asked Jessie in the dark, “You got anything you want to tell me, Jess, anything at all?”

  “Bout what?”

  “Bout why you don’t want to git outta my car when I take you home. Bout that no count daddy of yours. That’s what about.”

  “No, ma’am, I ain’t got nothing I want to tell,” Jessie whispered, images of disaster filling her mind at the thought of putting into words actions she could never truly describe.

  Eva turned on the lamp and gazed at her niece in disbelief that melted into understanding. Reaching for the girl’s hands, she said, “You know, Jessie, your mama coulda been a Daddy Grace, a Billy Graham. But your daddy broke her heart and snatched out her tongue. A woman can unravel mysteries the average man ain’t even heard of. Imagine that, Jessie, your mama living the life that was supposed to have been hers. Women don’t birth babies for nothing. Man can’t pull nothing outta his hat to beat that. And put a woman in touch with God, truly in touch, and you’ll see a miracle before your eyes. But, Jessie, your mama looked at your daddy when she was eighteen and thought she was in love. I looked at him and saw a cracked mirror, a black cat and seven years’ bad luck.” Squeezing Jessie’s hands tighter now, Eva said, “He snatched your mama’s tongue and stole her voice, Jessie. You don’t need to tell me a thing, chile, I can look at you and tell what he done took from you.”

  By the time these thoughts had unraveled, they lay like shards of glass strewn on the sheets between Jessie and Lincoln. When he turned over in his sleep, and whispered her name, Jessie scurried out of the bed, dressing quickly leaving him alone in the room, afraid to imagine what she would relive if he touched her again.

  AS MACON GAZED out the window of the pickup truck at the Sparks plantation, she saw the cotton field stretching before her for what seemed like miles. The field was placid, beneath the sun, content in the clear, afternoon sky. The bolls of cotton looked like flowers, resilient, staunch, clinging to the spidery vines.

  “You know what you’re made of when you work a full day doing that,” Jessie said, nodding toward the field.

  “Where’d you pick cotton?” Macon asked.

  “My mama’s daddy one time rented a acre or two and us kids would go there and help him out.”

  “But it’s so beautiful,” Macon wondered, turning back to the field.

  “Yeah, from over here it’s pretty all right. But you get up on it. Have to pick it with your fingers and let those burrs tear up your hands. You stoop over all day long, or pull a sack hitched to your shoulder, and see how beautiful you think cotton is by the time the sun goes down.”

  They had come to the Starks plantation to check on Glory Pickering, who had been attending the Freedom School and then suddenly stopped coming. Glory reminded Jessie so much of herself when she was a child that she had determined to try and get her to return to the school. During the drive, Macon had told Jessie, “You’ll have to handle this, I’m just along for the ride.” Jessie had begun to imitate Macon’s walk, the confident stride she noticed most often in men. She had even let her hair go, just stopped worrying about it, cut it short, so she could look like Macon.

  “What if her mama won’t let her come back?” Jessie asked.

  “There’s nothing we can do about that.”

  Macon parked on the highway and the two women walked across the road to the plantation. It was noon and most of the field hands had taken a break for lunch. Jessie and Macon walked slowly through the fields. The Starks plantation covered seventy-five acres and two dozen families sharecropped on the land.

  Jessie spotted Glory, eating a sandwich, sitting on a blanket with a woman and two boys. The girl was barefoot, her legs caked with dust. The plaid dress she wore was ripped at the shoulder.

  “Miss Jessie, what you doin here?” Glory asked, amazed, scrambling up from the blanket.

  “I came to see why you stopped coming to the Freedom School.”

  “She got work to do here; we need all the hands we kin git,” the woman spoke up, pushing Glory back onto the ground.

  “She was doing real good in her classes,” Jessie said, looking directly into the woman’s eyes.

  “Ah’m her mama,” the woman said, moving forward, crossing her arms at her chest, standing firm between Jessie and her children. “She got to help put food in our mouths. Ah knew ah shouldn’t of let her come to them classes in the first place,” the woman worried, her dark face bunched up in fear. Sweat rimmed the edges of the blue bandanna covering her head and her life was etched in craggy stubborn lines across her face. Two teeth were missing in the front of her mouth and the remaining teeth were dark and stained and appeared capable of falling from her gums under the slightest pressure. Looking at her, Jessie didn’t know if Glory’s mother was thirty-five or fifty.

  “Did something happen? Did anybody threaten you?” Macon asked.

  “The boss man here come around to all us folks and say anybody what goes to try’n to vote or to that Freedom School is gonna git throwed off the land.”

  “He can’t do that. Not legally,” Macon said. “If he does, we could sue on your behalf. Sue the state through the Justice Department.”

  “What that mean, sue? Sue gonna feed my chilrens? Give em a place to live? Yall folks is trouble. Us gotta live here when yall gone.”

  Glory’s mother strode off to the fields, ordering the two boys and Glory to follow her. Glory gazed sadly at Jessie, then picked up her sack and trudged after her mother.

  “I thought you knew how to pick cotton,” Macon said.

  “I do.”

  “Well, why don’t you go on and let them know that.”

  “But what good’s that gonna do?” Jessie asked, afraid to approach the woman again alone.

  “Go on, Jessie,” Macon said, “I’ll wait over here.”

  Jessie took an empty sack from one of the boys in the field and began picking next to Glory’s mother.

  “Yo
u look like you know what you doin’,” the woman grudgingly admitted, having failed in her attempts to ignore Jessie.

  “I do.”

  “You from roun here?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, then, you knows what ah mean. These folks ain’t playin, they killin people over this silver rights business.”

  “I ain’t been alive long, ma’am, but I seen enough to know they ain’t gonna give us nothing without us pushing real hard to get it.”

  “She start sassing me since she been at that school,” Mrs. Pickering said, fondling a palm full of cotton bolls as she spoke. “Askin a whole lot a questions bout things I cain’t answer. Askin like she got a mind of her own. Come home and make me feel shamed. And even though ah made her stop comin to that school she ain’t changed back to like she used to be. Ah’d always told her not to look no white people straight in the eye. And she’d listened too. Then she come home wanting to know why she couldn’t look at em just like she look at me.”

  “I’m not asking you to do nothing that other folks haven’t done, Mrs. Pickering, nothing I haven’t done. Please let Glory come back.”

  “Ah respects what yall doin, but ah’m the boss of this family, and ah just cain’t take no risk like that.”

  Macon watched Jessie from several rows over. She could tell she wasn’t winning the woman over, yet Macon watched in amazement as Jessie turned away from Glory’s mother and picked two more rows of cotton, filling her sack, before handing it to Mrs. Pickering and saying good-bye.

  THE BLACK PEOPLE who walked into the Greenwood courthouse that summer to register to vote feared the required test as much as the phalanx of policemen and law enforcement officials who increasingly formed a protective flank in front of the building as picketing increased. The test consisted of a series of interpretative questions about the state constitution. The registrar, who administered the test, used his discretion in determining who passed. Negro Ph.D.’s had failed the test, legions of graduates of the voter registration schools had their tests marked invalid after a cursory ten- or twenty-second glance. Grown men returning for the fourth or fifth time and failing once again had sobbed like children in the hallways of the courthouse.