by Bill Harris
Reece showed up late that next morning, Monday.
He had word that the people Champ and Perce worked for had gone to City Hall and gotten his brothers out of jail so they could go on back to work.
“I ain’t got no white folks to stand for me,” he said. “You got to pack up,” he told Pearl, “we’ll go on back home . . .”
She cut him off. “I’m at home.”
“Naw, naw. We got to go back to Church Creek for a while till this blow over and then we’ll see . . .”
Pearl said she’d already seen what she needed to see.
She was cooking bacon in a skillet on the stove.
“I am not going back to work on no farm.”
“But I got to go back till this blow over, Pearl.”
“What did I tell you when we left the country?”
He thought before he answered. “That you wasn’t ever going back.”
She forked the bacon over to its other side. She nodded.
The baby was crawling under the table by his daddy’s feet.
“Did you take that for a joke?”
“Well I got to go back or go to jail.”
“Going back’ll be the same to me as me being sent to jail. I ain’t. That’s my last word on it.”
Reece played what he thought was his hole card. “How you think you going to make it with you and the baby—without me? What you going to do?”
She turned to face him. “The same way I left the country is the same way I’ll leave you. Now you want grits, or not?”
12
The Flowers That Attracted the Bees
Mardalwil County, Bantock, Alabama, 1933
She’d just shown up, saying she’d heard that Mr. Fong needed a washerwoman and chambermaid. They did not know she had heard it from some of the people had been around her sorry husband, Reece, who’d done some business of one kind or another for the Chinaman.
Pearl was hard working and bright and she’d brought her little boy with her, not that it was the proper place for him, or her, or them either, but he knew how to keep out of the way when he should, and how to make everybody’s day brighter with his smiling and talking and everything while Pearl washed and swept and swabbed and emptied and aired out and listened.
Mistaking her for a wayfaring innocent, the girls—Victoria, White Mary, Iris, Sara, and Alice, and sometimes Ilene—took her under their ruffled wing. She listened to their stories of what not to do, paths not to take, temptations to avoid, and ways not to be in order not to follow their fate.
Then, after not too long, they listened to her and her story. Her husband. What he did. How she couldn’t stand it anymore. How she got away from him but had no place to go. How she and her son were turned away from door after door of houses, businesses, and churches until they arrived at Mr. Fong’s establishment and were taken in. They listened when she told them she wasn’t going keep on being treated the way she had been, and added, they didn’t either, far as that went.
What?
Then she told them who they were: they were the flowers that attracted the bees, it was their honey made the money, and although they only believed her a little bit they began to listen to her to save and savor as much as they could while they could, because they knew, in their innate knowing, that one day the mother and son would be gone, a long way from there, and not south. They didn’t know how, but they believed Pearl did, and that they—Victoria, White Mary, Sara, Iris, and Alice, and sometimes, depending on the demand, Ilene—would still be in Mr. Fong’s, or on the outskirts of some place worse, if they were anywhere at all.
They asked her things and got straight, commonsense answers that anybody else would have given them if they’d had anybody else to ask, not that they could do anything with the advice, being as they were stuck and sinking where they were, doing what they were doing.
Little by little they came to believe Pearl had more husk, was the smartest and maybe savviest and surely the least afraid of any colored woman they had ever known, and could do something they couldn’t do, she could reach the Chinaman in his fewer and fewer moments of clarity in the cloud of dope smoke he floated in night and day. They believed she could make the Chinaman listen to her—and maybe even make something happen, and none among them might could do that.
It wasn’t much they were asking, knowing it wasn’t much they were going to get, but what there was, it was Pearl was their go-between, speaking on their behalf, taking their side, putting it so the Chinaman could see how it was to his benefit.
—What—?
A less contentious whore, she reminded Mr. Fong, was a harder working whore. She told him that fines for infractions rather than beatings, that an extra day for the girls’ monthlies, that an occasional kind word would, overall, improve their dispositions. It would keep things from all the time being upset. He would have more satisfied girls, more satisfied customers, and more coins for his big boss, the Kimbrough Company’s coffer.
It all must have made some sense to the Chinaman because he didn’t stop her or the girls from any of their suggestions, and things quieted down and business picked up.
13
Mr. Fong’s Establishment
Bantock, Alabama, c. 1933
Mud-moving motherfuckers; niggers so tough the mules was jealous.
Taming nature by force and the belief, come Hell or high water, they could do it with their grit and pig-iron toughness as they imposed their will on land and beasts, on each other, and Lord help them, on the snatch housed at Mr. Fong’s two-story pussy emporium out at the end of the no-named road run back through the clump of red maples in that narrow neck of Bantock, Alabama.
Iris, lip bleeding, already hushed and rushed from her crib by the head woman who was standing there now, the lantern held face high in her left hand, the door flap draped over her arm. He saw no one with her to back her play. No man, no nosey whores, or curious others from his crew.
From downstairs the vet from the Europe war was bugling a slow draggy dirge he’d otherwise been tapping his toe to.
She motioned him back, back up against the wall. Naked from waist to ankles and manacled by his jumper and drawers, he shuffled the four steps back.
“She bit me,” he said. He held up his left hand with the bloody teeth marks.
“Did you pay her to?”
Her right arm out of sight behind her, a pistol in her hand sure as dog shit.
“No.”
“So she bit you ’cause you hit her.”
Well the house woman wasn’t the only one with a weapon. Thing was, his razor, effective as a pistol up close, was in the breast pocket of his jumper, his jumper in the tangle around his muddy boots.
He’d been mad since early noon. It was all Big Pepper’s fault.
“She’s got soft feelings and is sometimes nervous,” the woman said, talking about Iris, “but she’s eager to please, if asked right.”
Her voice so low he had to strain to hear her. She nodded for him to pull up his clothes to cover himself.
“Either way,” the woman continued, “I’m all the discipline Iris needs.”
He had seen her signal to cover himself but still stood, unbending.
Mad at Big Pepper for causing the delay. Mad at Walking Boss for sparking a needless strain for some outcome not worth the purpose. They knew Walking Boss was the Boss; the knife-edge of the system’s sword that hung over them by a thread. It was a lesson learned when the birth blood was being washed from them. They knew they were the two-legged mules who made possible the advantage and wealth given to whites but denied to them. They needed no reminder, like they needed no help to reestablish the lost rhythm Big Pepper caused. They knew how to stack up sufficient sandbags of numbness to wall off the individual and collective unconsciousness, and turn themselves back into the coordinated, single-purposed beast, unburdened by the nagging consideration of the uncompensated nature of their labor.
But still Walking Boss made it worse by putting it into words. Sa
ying he stood for no woman-weak, drag-ass niggers in his crew!
Her telling him she hoped he’d enjoyed his time with that child, because if he raised his hand inside Mr. Fong’s establishment again, Iris’s would’ve been his last dip in some snatch. She didn’t limit her prediction to Mr. Fong’s.
The time didn’t seem proper for arguing with the house woman on the fine distinctions of it, but Iris, with her mule-muscled flanks, and her knowing when to Gee and Haw was a far piece, in years or ways, from being a child.
Big Pepper was ass-dragging, true. And, interdependent as they were, it didn’t take but one of the twenty-odd of them to throw the whole business off just a hair, just enough to pull them out of the rhythm: skiff loaders piling dug up bottom clay, for the skinners to cart up the embankment, for the dumpers to pile, for the graders to form into an artificial breach against the future of the rising of the Daddy of Rivers, fickle as a pretty woman. On the orders of somebody in a suit in an office somewhere the decision was made to corral the mighty river to man’s puny desire for control of its flow and floods. And against all sense, the way they do when they get something in their minds, that anonymous white man’s order moved through the boards, committees, and panels of federal, state, municipal, and private agencies; was mapped and charted and graphed by cartographers and engineers, was parceled and with sufficient palms greased; was awarded to the Kimbrough Company, and finally, down through their board and committees and offices to the Walking Boss. And it trickled down to them, down to the levee niggers, clothed in mud, head to boots, to get it done. For somebody’s reward, but sure not theirs, sure as hell not theirs, to—season after season, from near light till near black—block, divert or dam the river’s natural run: a human-plus-mule machine, clicking and ticking, all hands moving forward, with the regularity of a high-priced Elgin watch, or the switching hips of a black gal under her washed and bleach-thinned cotton summer dress.
The levee niggers took pride in their self-controlled effectiveness, like a close-ordered army unit. It was one of the few prides they could strut, and Big Pepper was dragging, dragging ass and throwing the whole mechanism off. And Walking Boss, who was a watchmaker when it came to the regulation of the labors of his crew of mud daubers, was about to make an adjustment; fine-tune his muscle and blood apparatus when something, some sorrowful thing in Big Pepper sprung loose.
Maybe he was sick, or, maybe the hardest rolling of their hard rolling crew was, God forbid, tired. Maybe sick and tired, and that caused his breaking the rhythm, or maybe the rhythm just broke, the way the river just crested and overflowed, and the break allowed his mind to wander, off back home, and the un-dammed thought was so sweet till whooo—he just couldn’t make himself pretend like he was satisfied.
Ooooowhhooo—for never being able, one time, to walk in and slap down a wad of dollars on her dresser, tell his woman it was hers without condition or fret, or for missing the sight of her boiled white underthings sun-drying on the line, or for a son he could make a meaningful promise to and keep his word, or lack of a cold drink whenever one crossed his mind—for the moment, or maybe till kingdom come, he just couldn’t make peace with the truth of his life and prospects. And that set off the hair-triggered humming from deep inside him. More holler than hum, Oh Lord—more moan than holler—Lord—and longer, Lord Lord—as if being squeezed out of him like sweet potato meat from its skin, wavering up from his bowels through his belly, up his windpipe, and out his mouth and nose.
Big Pepper wasn’t holy-roller-tongue-talking like the sanctified, his humming wasn’t sent from On-High, but dredged from deep below the layers of earth and clay they skinned and moved. And they knew what he was feeling even without the words.
“Oooooooooooooooooooooo-Ooooooooooo,” wavy as washboard tin.
“Whewhoooooooo, ummmmuuummmmmMMMmmmed.”
More yowling like a bobcat or yodel than just a holler, and the others, the hard-muscled, hard-eyed, hard-fisted crew couldn’t listen, and they couldn’t not.
Wailing wailing wailing for all he was worth, for all the next to nothing he was worth. Which between Jim Crow, the commissary, and the walking boss came to just a, a gut-language humming nigger on his knees—grunts and groans strangled—from deep, deep, down, down in him by a system with more constricting arms than an octopus. Something ignited in him like a slow-burning fuse from the end of his umbilical cord, tiny sparks giving no warning, as it smoldered along its length till it exploded, or imploded in Big Pepper.
“We do business here,” the woman said. Her point was that beating on one of her girls wasn’t prohibited, but its execution was, necessarily, negotiable, as was everything; it was never the possibility that was in question, it was the price.
He was still standing full up, jaybird-naked from the waist to his ankles.
This fore noon, he thought, if he’d had that pistol she sure as shit got hid behind her back, he’d’ve snapped one off in that cracker Walking Boss; no maybe drawed a bead on him and said his name and give him time to be clear on who was doing the saying. Then squeeze the first one off, POW! Open a nickel-sized peephole between his milky, peckerwood eyes; see who whistled coconut head then.
Drawing blood costs extra, she explained. Seventy-five cents.
Him taller by shoulders and his head than her, and her only a couple strides from his callused, big-knuckled fist, but, he thought, a pistol behind her back, or his name wasn’t Oscar, and the Mississippi wasn’t muddy.
Grave-silent as all noises had stopped: the song-hollers and hooting hoopers and curses, men grunts, mule brays, suck of boots pulled from the mud, exhortations of the bosses, creak of trace lines and whinge of clay-loaded scoops hauled up the quay.
Silent.
The only sound was Big Pepper whose only words when there was a break in his hollers—“Too much, too much . . .”
Lying there rag-lank, without whim or wheeze, too pitiful for even the bosses to beat.
Coconut head nigger, Walking Boss said, calls his-self a levee man.
He shook his head in disgust and whistled for them to heft and haul him off, and for a twice-sized nigger named Natchez to step in Big Pepper’s place and to keep the rolling going, keep the rolling on.
Walking Boss reigned his roan into an about face; and its tail swishing back and forth, ambled with a steady gait on up the road, a ways on up the road.
It came to Oscar, as ashamed of it as he could be, that the bile of the memory of Big Pepper was no longer as sour on his palate. The gorge of the sight of his work mate lying curled like a baby, the sound from deep down wretched out, or worse, shriveled inside him, was swallowed now; only an after-collard green’s acidity lingering at the back of his throat and an acidy slosh in his upper gut. Getting some stank from Iris had been his maybe too easy antidote after the forced witness of the sand run out of a man.
As a way of introduction, “My name,” he said, not that she cared, “is Oscar Ashby. What’s yours?”
“Pearl,” she said offhanded.
“I tote my share of dirt yonder to the levee.”
Trying to tell her something about himself—about the self-betrayal he felt for, one, the work he did every day; for two, having near douched Big Pepper out of his mind so quick; and for three, for just now, with that big-hipped whore he’d hit. But no, the house woman with the pistol didn’t care anymore about him or his name than Walking Boss did; damn if he stayed, double damn him when he was gone.
“I don’t know what got wrong,” he said, the sound of bugled blues oozing up through the planed pinewood flooring.
“I didn’t come with mean intentions. Reckon that was just the fool in me.”
There was something in the hallway behind her, moving, something small. Had it been there all the time?
Oscar Ashby didn’t have the time or the words to say his sorrow at having hit the gal. Neither was it in his disposition to linger too long or too deep on his concern for Big Pepper. All notions of unease or connection along frater
nal tributaries had to be blocked. Just as he had to dam off considerations of that part that was in him that might admit to being brother to the river—free as the water spirit, seeking its own free way—but channeled, leveed, rerouted by his brute effort in concert with Jim Crow, toward intentions not the river’s own. Neither did he let himself think that was what Big Pepper, who had been the hardest roller on Kimbrough Company’s crew, had thought or questioned that morning, and that was what breached the barricade and broke loose the still water deep inside him. And Oscar Ashby did not consider that not asking or insisting on the need for an answer was the difference between Big Pepper, God knows where he was, and him, feeling fine, fresh off a prime piece of Mr. Fong’s cooter.
Even the (after) thought that he was probably not going to be with Iris again—not at regular rates if at all, it wasn’t so much her but who she reminded him of—his future way blocked by the woman with a pistol, probably cocked, who had him standing before her like a schoolboy who hadn’t learnt his times-twos. Hell, it’d be a bedtime story in camp to laugh at when the darkness got too quiet. How he had to stop himself from saying Yes ma’am.
Something short behind her. Still. Maybe it was a midget, no, maybe a toddling child.
Talking, almost making conversation now; for the tone of it, they could’ve been neighbors in a front yard.
“You roughneck levee niggers don’t know moderation,” she said.
A smile blew across her mouth like a breeze over a dandelion. She nodded at his Johnson. “Properly used, poking poor Iris with that pike should’ve pained her enough to suit you.”
His pride rose as he bent for his drawers. The bugle playing downstairs like she was playing with him. Was she letting him off the hook?
His drawers up. She was watching him intensely, but with the pretended ease the bosses sometime used late in the shift.
He smiled as he pulled his overalls up and hunched his shoulders in the straps.