“That's a long ways away.”
“It's a lot closer than the moon!”
“I reckon so, but nobody's been to the moon before.”
“So you reckon you will be the first?”
He hung his head. “Maybe not.”
She still held his hand and squeezed it. “Maybe you got just as much chance of going to the moon as I got of getting to New York City.”
“Don't say that,” he said. “Don't say that.”
She took her hand away from his and rubbed the inside of her other palm. “I don't reckon so. Not really so. You and me and all the rest, we stuck here, Jimmy Lee. This our life for real no matter what we dream about. You working for Mr. Jacks and me cooking for Maribelle's. Seem like God didn't give us much of a life. I sometimes wonder why, ‘cause it ain't fair. And Papa, worked all his life right here.”
“Don't say that.” He took her hand and held it for a long moment, until she smiled and pulled it back.
In the week after they brought Deacon home, Jimmy Lee had continued to come to help, morning and evening, and Beah had continued to feed him. He couldn't say exactly when it happened, but it began to feel just right—unnecessary, but unavoidable at the same time. He went to her place early, fed her pigs and chickens, milked her cow, and then came to the house with the half-full milk can swaying in one hand, fresh well water in a bucket in the other. She had breakfast ready. He washed his face and hands, and they both sat and ate as the sun peeked above the trees and began to brighten the rooms. Then he worked for Mr. Jacks—all day long in the sun—caring for his animals, raking his hay. The tenants and sharecroppers worked the cotton, cane, and soybean fields; he worked Jacks's stock. In the evening he returned to help Beah. He cared for her animals, chopped wood, weeded the garden, made a repair or two. Then he helped to bathe and feed Deacon. Later she'd have a supper ready. Then he'd wash and she'd give him a clean shirt, either one of Deacon's or one of his own.
The first time he was shirtless in front of her, he had wished to make love to her. He was embarrassed the moment the thought crossed his mind. She had held Deacon's shirt out to him, and as he took it, he felt the need to have her admire him, to say he had a strong body, that he was good-looking.
She had said nothing. They ate. He went home.
For more than a week, things went that way. Then one evening when he came in from the chores, she had a bath waiting for him in the mudroom. He took off his shirt, but she did not leave the room.
“Give me your pants, Jimmy Lee,” she had said matter of factly, as if she had always been asking for his pants. “I'll wash them for you.”
He hesitated. “Ain't you gon’ turn your back?”
She smiled. “I think we know each other well enough.” Then her throat trembled. “Jimmy Lee, there is something about you that makes me feel good. I don't know what it is. You're a handsome man, but that's not it. I never took much notice of you before, but having you here, helping me, I have gotten to know you. I like you, Jimmy Lee.”
He had nearly choked on a sudden rush of emotion. It wasn't passion, exactly. It was like a rush of something warm and so happy it made him want to cry. “I like you too,” he said, hardly breathing.
She had taken a step back. “Now, you know people gon’ say this is wrong, but it feels right for us, I think.”
He loosened his belt. Already he was getting hard. She pulled the waist of his pants over his rump and down to his knees. “People gon’ talk.”
“They are already talking,” she said.
NOW, HAVING MADE LOVE, he nestled his chin over the back of her head and his hands cupped her breasts, which rose and fell with the rhythm of her breathing. Slowly, his breath fell into rhythm with hers, and he began to dream of water.
A stream rose up in his dream. First as a metronomic dripping, a lovely tenor with a hollow core and a melodic rippling, each ripple a blossom, until the blossoms were a field swaying with the chorus of dripping, a pleasant rain shower or a night full of tree frog song. Then everything went into motion and he and Beah were drifting on a river, moving in the moonlight and through air heavy with the scent of summer rain, swinging around the stones, sliding down the riffles, and floating across the flats. In the distance were the silhouettes of willow oaks and sycamores. The slanting moonlight shone like silver paint of the old bridge that crossed the Tombigbee, just down the road from Jacks's Plantation. They were floating on the Tombigbee, the so-called undertakers’ river for the Indian undertakers who used to live on it. He chuckled to himself when he recognized where they were in the dream, first by the old bridge where the road ran into town, and then by the little Tupelo swamp, and then they were in the big bend. They could meander all the way down to Mobile on this river. He had never been to Mobile. He had heard it was a great city, something like Chicago. From here, he was dreaming, they could go anywhere, he and Beah, to New York City or to the moon, or to anywhere in between.
Poetry
Why I Will Praise an Old Black Man
HONOREE FANONNE JEFFERS
for Herman Beavers
Who lays in the cut, leaning back
in the dusty front seat of a long car he bought
on ancient credit, Al Green or a song
even deeper playing on the eight-track,
song about a working brother's calloused
pain, dismissed but throbbing the same.
This is the countrified, steady paycheck
man who braved sorrow song days, toiled
until his bones protested at last.
Who will die clean and grieved
like Charlie and Ambrose
and Vess and Lil Jinx.
I look to meet them in the yonder,
souls whose rheumy squints
have glimpsed tall trees over my head.
I have known some ugliness
but never at these hands that know how to whittle
from the wood's heart, that can gentle
a bad dog's growl with a slight wave.
That's why I got me a weakness
for the sharp-as-a-mosquito's-peter
creases in pin-striped pants, the Stacy Adams’
side-zipped shoe blues dance
of a dapper, old Black man.
Yes, his musty do-right smell of cedar,
yes, his deacon's bass resting
in his throat on fourth Sunday morning,
yes, the way he calls me daughter
and then I can sleep
unbroken through the night.
Acts of Love
KWAME ALEXANDER
You never know he loves you
You overhear that he works like a slave
And that freedom is expensive
So you pay the price
There are no hot dogs and soda pop summers
Because there are no baseball games
Your tongue is not sweet on cotton candy
Because there are no moonlit carnivals
Time is money, smiles are seldom
Home is serious business
With little time for little things like
Card games and Ping-Pong and talking
Conversations become instructions:
Write all messages here
Clean the gutters as such
Mow the lawn like this
You crave his touch
Some small ritual of precious contact
Perhaps a drop of water in noonday heat
Even a forehead scratch would do
You never know he loves you
You overhear that he works like a slave
And that freedom is expensive
So you pay the price
Family Meetings become trials:
Who took this message? Guilty
Why isn't the grass cut? Guilty
Did you finish up on the roof? Guilty
You never hear he loves
you Even in the car
Engine battling the hum of silence
Questions you're afraid to ask
Then one day in your Sunday proper
His sermon ended, the pews empty
You shadow his stillness
Hoping for some movement on this desert island
You look up into blinding sun
Cling to high mountain
His face, a golden moon, now beams
His hands, spring rain drizzling scalp
And then you know.
Nonfiction
When There's Trouble at Home
LONNAE O'NEAL PARKER
Don't start none, won't be none
SCHOOLYARD TAUNT
LAST November, I watched a nightmare sequence on the ABC television drama Desperate Housewives. The character Ly-nette is a former corporate type who gave up her high-powered job to stay home with her four children, and in the sequence, the kids were crying, beating pans together, and ratcheting up the stereo. Lynette yelled at them to “Stop, stop, why don't you listen, why won't you stop?” She slammed her fruit bowl to the floor and threw a jar of peanut butter out of the window. When she snapped back to reality and realized she was on the verge of a breakdown, she handed the kids off to a neighbor and sped off in her minivan.
Last year, in an op-ed column for the Washington Post, Ellen Goodman wrote that Lynette was a woman of her times:
It's Lynette who speaks truth to power—the power of the updated and eternal myth of momhood.
This “truth” is that even a woman who purposely chooses to be a full-time mom can be one nap away from losing it. The “truth” is that mothers who would throw their bodies in font of a truck for their children also fantasize about throwing their kids in font of a truck. Okay, a little wooden truck.
I related to that Desperate Housewives scene because sometimes I feel on the verge of a nightmare sequence of my own. Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only one in my house with vision powerful enough to see the socks lying on the dining room floor or the cornflake fossilizing in the corner of the kitchen. Sometimes there are so many people tugging at my hand, so many chores that require my attention, I can almost feel my body chemistry changing, telling me urgently it's time for fight or flight. There are times when my husband needs so much of my attention, he attacks even my briefest periods of quiet with a constant barrage of words. There are mornings when all three of my children call me so incessantly that I hate the sound of myself coming from their lips. Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! they call over and over again, until I want to scream What? What? What? What? What? Shit! What? Then, in my nightmare, my six-year-old cries and I want to comfort her because I know she's feeling hurt and abandoned, but in that moment, I cannot, because my margins are overrun. Because there is not enough air in my lungs for the measured softness of comforting words, there are too many programs open in my head, and patience requires more memory than I have available. Then I start to cry too, because now I know how my mother must have felt, but, my Lord, don't I know how my daughter feels as well.
The episode of Desperate Housewives ends with Lynette crying in the arms of her girlfriends. “Why didn't anybody tell me?” she implores as they try to soothe her. In her 1998 Washington Post essay “Nobody Can Tell You,” writer Cecelie Berry talks about the hard, lonely parts of motherhood we're not supposed to mind. She gives voice to her depression, the “bastard child” of her affair with domesticity, she says, and rages against a slow, agonizing erosion of herself. It is true of marriage and true of motherhood as well: There are some things you don't know until you're well into it. And sometimes that feels way, way too late. Sometimes, when there's trouble at home it is run through with ache and bitter disappointment. I always swore my household would be free from fights with my husband and hollering at my kids, but too often, my very best efforts aren't nearly enough to stifle the angry words rising in my throat.
Growing up, there was weekly yelling in my house. Momma yelled at Daddy for drinking and running around and Daddy yelled at Momma because he was an alcoholic and a paranoid schizophrenic and his sickness always caused him to see her with men who weren't there. In good times, my parents bragged to relatives that I was bright and they affectionately called me Fifi because Momma says I was always such a prissy thing. But when I was reluctant with Saturday chores, or I needed Momma to listen to me when she was tired, my parents would sometimes snap angrily, cutting me with their words, accusing me of being lazy and too demanding. Still, both the yelling and the praise were secondary to the sustained periods of being largely unnoticed. Of being mostly unable to compete for attention with my father's alcohol abuse and mental illness and my mother's depression. Of getting so little feedback that sometimes I would hurt myself, just to double-check that I had mass and took up space. I also wasn't yelled at a lot because, until adolescence, I was too timid to do anything that would get me into trouble. And I sometimes try to explain to my own kids how easy they have it—how when I was a child, there was zero tolerance for attitude or protest in the house I lived in and all the places I visited. “Mommy, what would happen if you talked back?” my ten-year-old daughter Sydney, acting as her own attorney, once wanted to know. Because she actually, sometimes, gets to enter into negotiations with her parents and often lobbies for more favorable terms.
“We didn't talk back,” I told her.
“But what would happen if you did?” she persisted. And even after thinking hard, I could not come up with an answer. I didn't know what would have happened, I tried to tell her, because talking back was not something that existed in the realm of the possible when I was a child. It was not even a concept, so any violation felt beyond my capacity to fathom. That nonconcept is part of a couple of distinct schools I come from when it comes to discipline in my house now and the one I grew up in. They are schools with some parts I deeply want to keep and other parts I am yet hoping to overcome.
Although whippings are decried and sometimes even criminalized in places where methods of modern, mainstream parenting are debated, except for very recently, I've always known Black families to be harsh disciplinarians. To yell and especially to spank (except in Black places, the verb was “to whup” and it was usually done with a belt). Physicality was an inviolate part of the routine of families: kisses when you were good, pain when you weren't. My momma tells a story about inviting a little White girl from her neighborhood to their house for dinner when she was young and making an exaggerated production of chewing her food and rolling her eyes at the table to make her friend laugh. “Okay, Betty Lou, that's enough,” my genteel grandma Mabel warned her. But Momma continued. “All right, that's enough,” Grandma Mabel warned again, but after a brief interlude Momma was right back at it. Grandma Mabel didn't warn her a third time. She reached over and slapped Momma's face so hard that the food flew from her mouth and landed against the wall. Then they all finished dinner without further incident.
In her Washington Post article “A Good Whuppin'?” my colleague and friend Deneen Brown writes about the commonality, folklore, and ritual of punishment in the houses of Black folks.
Go outside and pick me a switch. And don't pick a small one either.
That command, for many, is part of being Black in America—part of a cultural tradition that sought to steel Black children for the world, forge their characters, help prepare them for the pure meanness that waited out there, just because of the color of their skin. Many Black parents who whipped felt more was at stake if they did not scourge their children.
Don't get it wrong. The wielding of the switch and the belt and the wooden spoon is not a practice unique to Black people. Most races spank their children, especially Southern Whites who are fundamentalist Christians. But the stories of beatings done in the name of love, beatings that were endured by many—not all—Black parents, are like a familiar song. There are some bad associations with slavery. There are some good associations with survival.
Feminist, abolitionist, and former slave Sojourner Truth had thirteen children and saw nearly all of t
hem sold. That didn't stop her from whipping her kids in the time that she had them. When Truth became a mother, writes Paula Giddings, “she would sometimes whip her child when it cried for more bread rather than give it a piece secretly, lest it should learn to take what was not its own.” She whipped because what do you imagine they did to slaves caught stealing? Black families would whip their kids because white people might kill them. Because the streets could consume them, because the police would jail them.
Tryiri'your best to bring the
Water to your eyes
Thinkiri it might stop her
From whuppin your behind
I wish those days could come back once more
(Stevie Wonder, “I Wish”)
They whipped because the stakes were high, missteps were costly, and Stop! Don't! and No! had to mean what they said the very first time since Colored people couldn't rely on second chances (as true for Emmett Till as it was for Amadou Diallo). Sometimes, we kids also suspected they whipped us because it felt good to them, because they were horrible and mean and / hate you! and I'm going to run away!That's sometimes what we were thinking—we just never, ever said so.
In his essay “The Black Belt,” journalist and children's book author Fred McKissack describes growing up in St. Louis on a block where his folks’ Black whuppin’ belt had reached legendary neighborhood status. He talks about being a schoolboy and hearing a White kid say to his parent, “I don't feel like cleaning my damn room,” and marveling that “all” he got was his mouth washed out with soap. “As recently as the last decade, for a Black child to curse at his parent could be reasonably regarded as a suicidal act,” McKissack writes. “Indeed, the daring youngster could wind up seeing a child psychologist and facing the following question: ‘Did you intend to end your life when you called your mom a bitch?’ “
It's All Love Page 19