“Pearl, you don’t have to go on, not if you don’t want to,” Macon cautioned.
“I told you what he did, but I never told you how it started,” Pearl said, turning from the window to face Macon.
“The first time I was twelve and Mama was away. A relative nearby was sick and she’d gone to tend to them. I remember him coming in the room in the dark and waking me up. I remember his hands, his breath, his voice, as he hustled me out of bed. By that time he and Mama didn’t sleep together much. He slept, most nights, on a small cot in the living room. When it started I just closed my eyes and pretended I was dreaming. I felt so small laying beside him. So small. And he said, ‘Just touch it one time, Jessie,’ he said. ‘It won’t hurt and it’ll make Daddy feel real good. Since your mama ain’t here.’ I knew I shouldn’t do it. I was scared what Mama would say and I put my hands under my back. He grabbed my hand and forced me to touch it. Like he was pulling my arm out of the socket. It felt wet and clammy and cold. And for some reason I thought at that moment about all the dead people I’d ever seen. Touching it made me feel the same way I felt when I looked at somebody dead. Then he put it between my legs and I could feel it inside me and nothing had ever hurt me so much. It’s like I could feel it in every part of my body, and it’s like it was pushing everything that was in me out of me. Nothing ever hurt me so bad. Not before or since. I tried to scream, but he covered my mouth with his hand.”
Taking a deep breath, Pearl rushed on. “He made me wash up good afterward and told me not to tell anybody or he’d hurt me worse. He kept it up, even when Mama was there.” She told Macon this, closing her eyes tightly, shaking her head as if she could not believe her own story. “The worse it got, the more Mama stayed out of his way, pretending not to know. And when I’d try to tell her, she wouldn’t listen. That’s when I started hating her, maybe even more than I hated him. And to this day, I don’t know why I never got pregnant. The only explanation I can think of is that there is a God somewhere.”
“Do you want me to go with you?” Macon asked, walking across the room, her arms open to Pearl.
“No, Macon. I have to do this alone.”
REQUIEM
SHE TOLD HERSELF she would not cry. Not for her father. Yet standing beside his casket, looking at his face—a placid, seamless mask in death—Pearl did cry. Love and hate had merged, reshaping memory with a finally perfect hand.
The house on Davis Road had been torn down long ago. Mae Ann’s husband Tyrone had helped to purchase a new house for Chester and Olive Foster. But the new house, like the old one, was a haven for secrets. It was in the kitchen of this house that Chester Foster’s children sat unearthing the past he had bequeathed. Their inheritance was as substantive as an illusion, as damning as a fingerprint.
In the years after Pearl left home, Chester Foster was one of the first blacks hired by the Columbus police force. Leaving his job as janitor behind, he studied for and gained his GED. He served on the force for nearly twenty years before his health was racked by repeated and serious illnesses. Once in uniform, he gained a reputation as the cop who could keep blacks in line.
Earlier that day the living room had been filled with police officers, stern-faced, officious, offering condolences to Olive Foster. The sight of the police officers entering the living room in a small but obtrusive phalanx, hushing conversation, made Pearl shiver. They’ve come years too late, she thought, years too late.
NOW THE HOUSE was quiet. The guests had left and Olive Foster had retreated to her room. Pearl sat across from her brother Willie, his bearded face a volatile map of competing emotions, his eyes fearsome shining sparks.
Pearl had told him, hugging him on Mae Ann’s porch the day before he left for Viet Nam, “Come back, Willie, please come back.”
He had returned, but with stubborn accusing voices lodged in his head, with flashbacks that transported him to hell in seconds. He had left a leg and a more substantial part of himself in some jungle he could no longer name.
In the end Willie had conquered the flashbacks, sealed himself against the voices and found steady work. It only took fifteen years. Pearl had clung to Willie all that day—at the cemetery, in the hearse, in their mother’s house—holding onto him as he whispered stories about his visions in her ear, translated the curses the voices rained upon him, told her how he had found a way to heal. They had sat apart from the others on the front porch as Willie showed her the carvings he had begun to make once again. Sitting on the porch at dusk, Willie had held a beautifully carved eagle in his palms.
“For a long time when I came back,” he told Pearl, “these animals kept me from turning the knife on myself.” A shop in Jackson had begun to sell his carvings and Willie was hoping to be able to devote more time to producing them.
Now, at the kitchen table, Willie told Pearl, “When I came back from Nam and told Daddy about the voices I was hearing, the funny thing was he understood. He was about the only one who didn’t say I was crazy.”
“What was he like at the end?” Pearl asked, longing but afraid to hear the answer, not daring even to look at Willie this time.
“He never said he was sorry,” Willie laughed. “He changed but he was still the same. When that paralysis got to him real bad and he couldn’t get around so good, or use his hands, he didn’t have nothing to do but think, and I know he started seeing things different. It wasn’t anything he said. But I could feel it in him. I’d come by the house, all crazy and feeling lost, sometimes not knowing what I was gonna do or was capable of doing the next second and I’d sit down and he’d tell me about the things he saw when he was in the Navy during World War II. He was a cook but he was close enough to war to get a smell of how awful it was.”
“Did he ever talk about me?”
“All the time. One day, I’ll never forget, we were watching television and we saw you doing a commercial for some kind of aspirin, or painkiller, and he near about fell off the sofa. He started calling Mama to come and see but by the time she came in the room you were gone from the screen. Couldn’t nobody get a word out of him the rest of the day. He started watching TV from the moment it came on in the morning until it went off at night, just looking for a sight of you.”
“I don’t know why or how but I loved him,” Pearl whispered.
“He was your daddy. He was your blood. Nothing you could do about it.”
“Can you believe it? He’s the only man I ever did love. And what he did kept me all these years from loving anybody else.”
SHE HAD PROMISED not to cry, and swore never to forgive her mother. But when Willie and Mae Ann left, Pearl climbed the stairs to her mother’s bedroom. She knocked on the door and heard her mother’s voice inviting her in. Olive switched on the lamp beside her bed, and turned on her side to face Pearl. She patted a spot on the bed, inviting Pearl to sit beside her. A rotund, silver-haired woman quivering with energy, Olive Foster said gently, “Come here, Jessie, come here and tell me everything.”
“Oh, Mama,” Pearl whispered, “he’s dead. And I don’t feel one bit better.”
Olive reached for her daughter, and held her as Pearl had not allowed her to do since her arrival that morning. Pearl had greeted her mother stiff with anger and grief, and the determination to hold Olive accountable blazed in her eyes. Now Olive felt her daughter’s weary body grow pliable and suddenly surrender in her arms.
She would not talk to her this time about God. She would not ask her to forgive. For in the days since her husband’s death, she had found herself unable to pray. Chester Foster was dead. And suddenly the idiom, the syntax of salvation, was erased from her tongue. She had to find her daughter. Then God would inspire her once again. But tonight she wouldn’t put God between them, she’d reach out to Jessie with nothing but the truth.
The two women lay on the bed a long time—mother, daughter, stranger, enemy—the nearness of their bodies, their hunger for each other, articulating what they could never say.
But because they
had been stripped so wrenchingly of speech, and by that of a means to find one another, Olive Foster broke the silence and said, as she stroked the thick braids of her daughter’s corn-rowed hair, braids that reminded her of Jessie’s hair at eight and ten sliding across her nimble fingers, “You done right well for yourself, Jessie. Right well. I’m proud of you.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Tell me what it feel like when you be acting in front of all those people. How it make you feel?”
“I feel free, Mama. Like nothing bad ever happened to me. And nothing bad ever will. It’s like the moment I’m in right then and there is the only moment that counts.”
“You making a lot of money?”
“Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t. But the money is like a bonus. I’d do it, I’d act for free, if I had to.”
“How come you never got married, Jess?”
“How could I, Mama?”
“Wasn’t there nobody ever loved you? Ever wanted to marry you?”
“One time there was.”
“And children, Jess, you ever want children?”
“Mama, I never did. Never. I fixed it so I can’t have any.”
“I guess you must hate me.”
“There’s been times I did, Mama. But hate wore me out, beat me down so much I had to let it go.… Mama, how come you never made him stop? How come you never said nothing?”
“Jessie, you don’t know. You just don’t know. You an actress so you think words come easy, think they’s always there for you. But between a man and a woman, a husband and a wife, sometimes words is the first thing to go, the first thing they lose. And feelings is all they got left. And because there’s no words for the feelings, the feelings turn on you, get all messed up, locked up, stored up inside. And when they come out they come out the wrong way.”
Pearl felt her mother’s hand heavy and tense on her shoulder, heard her anguished breathing.
“How could I ask him to stop doing something I didn’t even want to think about? Jessie, you just don’t know. You just don’t know.”
Olive released Pearl and moved to her bureau where she brought out a cotton nightgown. In front of her daughter she removed her clothes and slipped into the gown and a robe. Then she sat down in a rocking chair near the window, and told Pearl, “When I met your daddy, I’d been preaching around at some of the little churches in Columbus for about three or four years. Preaching, can you imagine that? Nobody had never seen nothing like it, a little girl in the pulpit. But I got called, directly by God, when I was thirteen. I spoke in tongues, and do you know I even healed folks, healed folks with these hands.” Olive held her tiny hands before her as though presenting Pearl with conclusive evidence of a miracle. “These hands. All the churches around Columbus would be filled when I’d be preaching, preaching from instinct, from something that had been planted deep inside me long before I studied the Word. My folks didn’t have nothing really, they was just like all the other folks in the Delta and they was hoping my preaching would give em something. I hoped so too. Even the ministers that thought because I was a little girl it had to be Satan speaking through me and not God would ask me to preach at their churches cause I could fill em up. And I started to making a little extra money from all that preaching and was able to help my family some. By the time I was fifteen or so, I knew a normal woman’s life wasn’t for me. The feeling you say you get when you be acting, well that’s the feeling I got preaching, like it wasn’t nobody there in the room but me and God. And I was glad to be His instrument.
“But when I got a good bit older I wanted to be a normal woman too. God’s hand began to feel real heavy on me, Jess, real heavy. I was preaching bout love thy neighbor and I’d look out on the congregation and covet the men staring up at me. Got to a point, Jess, where God wasn’t enough. Wasn’t nobody I could tell this to, cause I had been chosen, I was special. And I knew to go against my calling would be a sin.
“Then I met your daddy. He stayed with us the summer of ’47. From the moment I saw him, it was a battle between him and God for me. All the feelings I’d been having, the longings, come to rest on him. But maybe that’s why I wanted him. Everything that had come out of my mouth, everything I’d done, everything I’d thought, had to be good in the eyes of the Lord. But then why did the Lord give me the feelings your daddy stirred up in me? Why, Jessie, why?” Olive asked, her face a tangle of confusion beneath the room’s mute shadows, her voice clear and thin.
Clutching the collar of her robe, Olive said, “My mama and daddy was always threatening that summer to throw my brother Lonnie and your daddy out the house for coming in all hours, gambling, running after women. But they’d give Mama and Daddy a few dollars to help with the food and that would buy em off. I couldn’t get enough of just looking at your daddy. The more I prayed to resist him, the more I felt myself sinking. Then it seemed like he got tired of chasing whores and wanted something else. It was my duty to witness to him, to try and save his soul.
“One day when we was in the house by ourselves, I just walked up to him, and sat down beside him with the Bible in my hand, and told him, ‘Chester Foster, the Lord wants your soul.’ He smiled at me, that gold tooth of his shining, and he says, ‘Miss Reverend Olive, if you here on the Lord’s behalf, you can have my soul and anything else you want.’
“Pretty soon, near about everything I said to Chester Foster or did with him, I had to try to hide from my folks and ask the Lord to forgive. I was confused, Jessie, so confused cause all the feelings your daddy was stirring up in me was real feelings. They didn’t feel bad, not all the time, like I’d thought they would. Then, when I got pregnant, we got married. He wasn’t headed nowhere, except the next crap game, but it surprised me how he married me, without a thought, didn’t even try to get out of it, like I thought he would. But he still run after the women and the good times.
“Wasn’t no pulpit I could stand in now. And so I give it up, just give it up, my gift and its promise. He wasn’t always mean, Jess, not all the time. There was times when there wasn’t no women in his life cept me, from what I could tell. There’d be times he was a good husband. But then it would start all over again. Me never being enough for him. Him having to have other women too.”
“But why did he start bothering me, Mama, why?”
“You want me to give you an answer that’ll make all the pain you’ve suffered go away. I can’t give you that, Jess. I was afraid, and small and sick. I had these tumors growing inside me and I was bleeding all the time. When they took out the tumors, Jess, I didn’t feel nothin no more. Not a thing. I was tired and I was hurting all over. I felt bad, but I never could feel good. When your daddy touched me, I’d feel pain. When my body couldn’t feel good it’s like my mind couldn’t neither. Then he started with other women again. I think, Jess, you was just another woman to him. Just another woman. When he was doing those things to you, you was just another woman.”
“No, Mama, I was me. And I was his daughter.”
“You want to hate me because I was weak, because I didn’t stand up for you? Jess, I never stood up for myself. And after you left, I was gonna leave too. Seeing you run like that broke my heart, but give me courage. I was gonna leave. But when I told him, he got that old rifle he kept around the house and said if I did, if I left with his children, he’d kill hisself, stood in front of me with the rifle cocked, pointing at his stomach, and said he’d do it. So I stayed. Then when Mae Ann and Willie and Junior left home I was so used to staying I couldn’t think of leaving. He was sick by that time and he couldn’t hurt me no more than he already had.”
“Mae Ann told me he said he’d kill me if I came back,” Pearl said, nearly choking at the memory of the threat.
“Jessie, after you left, he was always walking around the house threatening to kill hisself, did she tell you that? He was scared you was gonna tell what he did. Scared folks would know.
“And all the time you locked me out too, Mama, why? Why me too?�
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“I didn’t know what to say. Every time I looked at you I saw how I was letting you down. After a while, it was easier not to look at you at all. All those years I lost you, Jessie. Losing you was the worst.”
That night Pearl slept beside her mother. And in the middle of the night she woke up, woke in the midst of sleep the way she used to. She shivered beneath the cool breeze coming in through the window and moved closer to her mother. There was nowhere else to go. Pearl snuggled against her. She lay, her mother’s echo, her linear frame.
There would be no more sleep tonight. She was still lost. But she had found her way home. Her mother had said, “Jessie, tell me everything,” but where would she begin? Once she started, where would she stop? Mothers are daughters, their yearnings transposed, voices seeking perfect pitch. What would she say? she wondered. Dare she tell what living had required her to forget? Mothers are daughters choosing the end of their own story, guiding others to sculpt their own. Mothers are daughters too. Her mother’s bitter song still rang in her ears. Until dawn arrived, she would be obsessed with her mother’s plea, “Jessie tell me everything.” In the morning, she would try.
About the Author
MARITA GOLDEN is the author of Migrations of the Heart, A Woman’s Place, and Long Distance Life. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and numerous other publications. She teaches in an M.F.A. program at George Mason University and lives with her husband and son in Washington, D.C.
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