“Be easier if we knew who you was sleeping with instead of roaming around free.”
“So that’s what you think. If Bo came in and had his way with me, in fact if I allowed it, it would be better for you.”
“Well, yeah,” Clay added wishing she would put on some clothes and not tempt his lonely mind.
Red put his two cents in. “Then we wouldn’t have to worry about you causing a problem with our women. . .”
“Women we with always want to know where that June girl sleeps and what man she’s with,” Clay went on. “A woman is supposed to be with a man, that’s what we telling you.”
“You mean,” she huffed again hands on her hips leaving no imagination to the curves of her figure, “I got to pick one of you so things will be easy for the rest of you when you have a woman.”
They all nodded save Madman, who wanted to kill Bo for even thinking about touching the woman he hoped would one day be his.
“I am not picking anyone of you for anything more than hitting the right note when you supposed to. Having some man come feel up on you in the middle of the night in the back of some bar while he’s hoping his friends don’t see and you don’t complain, ain’t what I want. I came with you all to sing, that’s all I’ve ever wanted, to come on the road and be with you and sing. I don’t eat much, hardly ever drink, don’t gamble or give you any problems.” To Clay she sassed: “If you can’t keep a woman ’cause she’s worried about who I’m with then it means her mind isn’t on you!”
“But June,” Madman said, a little thankful she didn’t want Bo over him.
“But what?” she asked. Their heads were hung low, trying to avoid her stare, her questions and most of all, her body.
“None of you got anything to say?” The same silence fell. “What did I do to be treated like this? I have never invaded any of your privacy. When you have your women hanging off you, I stay far away. I do what I’m told and I help out by taking care of the mending and sewing and even the washing sometimes. That’s because that’s what I know how to do. If I could fix that car, I’d do that. If I could string a guitar, I’d do that. But I don’t know how. I carry my weight in this group, I have ever since you let me in. So it’s no need for you to tell me I got to get a man, or I need a man. ’Cause if one of you was my man, he sure as hell wouldn’t want me washing your clothes or mending your smelly old socks or even sitting next to you in a car. He’d want me to do for him and him alone. Am I right?”
They nodded in agreement.
“I may be young but I know that much. So leave me be.” To Bo she added: “Especially you. I’m gonna tell all of you for the last time: I don’t want no man.”
After that night they didn’t try much to change her. Bo didn’t stay long with the band. June guessed he was too embarrassed, since half the time he wouldn’t even look at her. And he had lost the feeling for the music when they did their duet. When she asked him why he didn’t do it right, he told her when he closed his eyes it didn’t feel the same as before.
Madman felt the loss in the music and took the number out. He tried to make June feel good even if the number was gone by telling her that if she was his woman she could do as she pleased. He could make Bo play right for her, or, instead of it being a guitar and her voice, it could be him on the piano. “You got to feel it when you sing it,” he told her.
Her reply had been equally standoffish. “I always felt it. I just didn’t feel it for the man I was singing with. Nothing says you got to feel it for the person you singing with. Everything I learned so far, everything you taught me, says you just got to feel.”
In time they got used to her not having a man. They got used to having her around, pretty as she was. They got used to her in a baby sister sort of way and she liked that. When men outside their circle tried to force their attentions on her they quickly thwarted their attempts if she couldn’t handle it. And she always tried to be able to handle it.
But they stayed in the South too long.
They stayed where you could get fresh biscuits every morning. They stayed where there was always the sound of a hammer ringing, a blacksmith singing, a woman waiting and blues that she could not let go of since she had lain down on the grass and pulled the Piano Man down on her.
She learned more about the South than she wanted to, more about where she had come from than she needed to and more about who her parents were than had ever crossed her mind.
They had been in some tiny town in backwoods Arkansas when she saw a woman that reminded her of her mother. A woman who, from a distance, looked white except for her coal black hair. A woman followed by of brood of seven children all of whom registered at least a part of her in their face and hair. Their skin was dark, almost coal black. The children were amazingly beautiful but the people treated them with disdain, white and colored people. The woman held her head down and didn’t look anyone in the eye. June couldn’t imagine Bira doing that, Bira who walked about with her head in the air because, as Bira told her time and time again: “It belongs up there with God.”
In another town June was sitting down thinking about the music, waiting to get up and sing when a fight broke out between two women who were sisters. They claimed they both belonged to the same man, a man who was sitting at a table with a third less attractive woman. The fight started because one sister said she had seen him first and her baby had been first, the other sister claiming that the first sister’s baby had been first only because of some hoodoo she had paid. That’s when the blows started and the man left with the third woman probably to impregnate her with his so called perfect seed.
She heard later that younger sister had died, murdered by the older sister’s hand. The older sister had gone mad over what she had done. “The children they talked about,” June asked the gossipy bar keep who was telling the story, “what’s going to happen to them?”
“They with him and his wife. Bet you didn’t know he had a wife and all them women all along. The wife didn’t want nobody talking about his children roaming around, since they was boys and hers was girls and if they didn’t know, she said, whose children they was, they might end up married to each other and having crazy babies.” It was more then June had ever wanted to know.
But when the barkeep smiled at her with a big lip one-tooth grin and asked: “Where your babies be?” she gave him the appropriate answer: “I don’t got none.” It was time to leave. Even the men she traveled with had started to complain they had stayed in the South too long.
When the car hit the Virginia countryside and the sign said: “Washington, DC, 72 miles”, June became a new person.
With Mama Jeffries she was happy. That woman didn’t care how proper June talked, just as long as she didn’t sleep around in her house, not pick up after herself or take the Lord’s name in vain.
There were lots of little places in Washington to play, especially the clubs where the college crowd hung out. When she met them she realized they were some of the youngest young people she had ever met. Most of them her age, all of them feigning sophistication and shaking their tails whenever the music played. All of them dumb as dirt when it came to life and the real world.
The men didn’t find her especially beautiful since these college girls, these girls with the gift of money and education and families who didn’t want to lock them up and throw away the key took such good care of themselves. Those with the darkest skin had the smoothest skin and the shapeliest bodies. Those with the kinkiest hair got it done every other week. They wore clothes that accentuated their femininity and they walked down the streets as if they owned them. Those who could have passed for white didn’t. They might have thought themselves superior but if they mentioned it, they were ignored.
She found they read books because they liked to and talked about history because they liked to and wanted to be teachers because they wanted to.
They were allowed to make choices-and they choose to make them away from home. Choices she had never been allowed.
Choices her sisters, her old maid sisters who were probably still tied to the Blacksmith’s apron strings, didn’t know about. Things might have been different had she been allowed to make choices. But her father was the Blacksmith and he assumed in his world he was king.
She was going to like the North, even though Washington, DC, wasn’t real North.
She sang at the clubs at night and returned home to Mama Jeffries earlier than her son or the rest of the band. She would sleep happily thinking of how they looked dancing before her, all her young people, her free young people with plenty of education and life around them. Lovers who stared at each other in the middle of the floor (she had learned to tell that these types had never been between the sheets by the way their eyes longed for one another), and there were those who moved to impress those they were not dancing with - those they wanted. There were those who sat and touched hands as if this was as intimate as they were going to get. June loved these people.
When she finished singing, she might sit with them if asked. They were amazed that she knew anything about Shakespeare and Beethoven and the great painters of Europe. They talked to her because she was gifted, talented all on her own. Nobody here knew she was a Blacksmith’s daughter. Nobody cared.
“I left college to sing because it was my passion,” she told a few of them.
A handsome young man told her: “I understand that feeling. I wandered through the South and the North like you but I fear the retaliation from both whites and blacks when I return to my home. Things down South don’t change much or often.”
They’d talk and she’d talk until sometimes she wasn’t sure she would be able to sing the next set. But she could. For them. Her children.
The intellectuals would ask her what a song meant, and she would tell them: “Every line means something different to every singer.”
“Why sing a song so sad, so backwoods and so forlorn?” they’d ask her in their proper university-educated tones.
She’d tell them: “Because you feel it.” And before they could ask what the feeling was she’d add: “That isn’t something you can explain.” Then they’d get lost in a discussion of what you can’t explain and she’d leave them arguing amongst themselves.
Her children. She enjoyed her moments as one of them so much.
It was in DC that she met Roger. Roger with his green bedroom eyes, Roger who played the piano like the wind, Roger who seduced her as she had never been seduced before.
He didn’t use the piano, for he couldn’t play as well as the Piano Man. He didn’t sweet-talk her like Madman or try to take her by force like Bo had.
He was the first man that made her feel like a real woman.
There were dates; dinners after she finished the clubs at some of the nice places that colored could go. He introduced her to dressmakers and clothing shops and hairdressers that he thought she might need to know in her profession. He paid for the dinners and asked for nothing in return.
Madman hated him. Each time Roger showed up with flowers, each time he held the door for her as they walked out together, each time he appeared in the room, Madman’s face would turn inside out with envy. “I could do that crap if I had a mind to,” he told Red.
“Naw you couldn’t,” Red replied. “June told you once she didn’t want you. Besides, Madman, look at the boy. He got class. None of us country singing boys got that. June likes his class.”
It wasn’t his class, although June liked it. What she really liked was being courted and his understanding of her: her need to sing and her need to be loved.
He took things slow at first. He even requested the first kiss he got from her. He assumed nothing.
Madman stopped trying to get next to June as soon as Roger was in the picture, but he didn’t like having him around. Roger had one of those classy little bands that only played in the best of places, usual white places and he knew Roger was in the market for a singer. The last one he had drank herself to death. He told June this was why he didn’t want the man near her.
“He’s trying to take you away from me, from the band I mean,” Madman told her one night as they sat on his mother’s porch.
“Don’t be silly,” June told him and patted his hand. He pulled it away. Lately he had started doing that a lot. “He hasn’t even mentioned it. Besides I wouldn’t go if he asked. I belong with you and the boys. You taught me everything I know.”
Madman knew that wasn’t going to be enough to keep her in the long run so he said: “Maybe not now, but once that Negro gets you in his bed he’s gonna make you do whatever he wants. Mark my words.”
She frowned in the darkness. “What makes you think that’s gonna happen with him?”
“He’s working on you, ain’t he?” Madman lit a rolled cigarette. “He’s bringing you flowers, taking you to fancy places and you think he’s courting you for your high yeller looks but he ain’t. He can have any girl, no matter what color, that he pleases. He’s courting your voice.” Then he lowered his own voice so she barely heard him. “When he gives it to you watch, you gonna sing. You gonna sing whenever he tells you too ’cause you gonna like what he does to you.”
She had wanted to slap him, but she knew she had too much class to do that. Besides if he was right, he’d always be able to say he told her so.
Unfortunately Madman had been right. It proved to her how little she knew about men.
After a month of coming to hear her sing, of taking her out to dinner and showing her the right places and the right people it happened.
He showed up one night when she was expecting him to take her out, but he was tired. “My day was long and well, could we make it some other night? I’m not up to going out and being with people.”
June was sweet. “That’s fine. Just sit and rest.”
As she gently touched his arm he suggested: “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind coming back to my place for a little while.”
“Sure,” she told him as she thought about all his kindnesses and the fact that sitting in Madman’s parlor with his mother upstairs bathing the children was probably going to be uncomfortable. “Let’s go.”
Once in his small but clean apartment, he wanted to lie back and rest on the sofa, and asked would she rub his head. Relaxing next to him, she massaged his temples until he sighed and she felt him lose his resolve and turn to kiss her. The kiss had too much passion for a man with a headache - and in the end - once she had been carried to his bed and had been startled by the fire he brought out in her, she laughed and was glad that he hadn’t been ill. She had to admit that this type of lovemaking was more appealing and satisfying. She enjoyed him.
But she didn’t love him.
“He finally got to you, didn’t he?” Madman watched her come in one evening with that glow associated with lovemaking.
“Madman, leave me alone. I’m not doing anything you don’t do.”
They argued and no matter what she said Madman would not let go of his hatred of Roger. “He gonna make you leave us. Its how men like him work. He don’t want you to love him. He wants you to sing for him.”
She finally told him after night after night of arguing: “You forcing me to make a choice. I never wanted to leave Mama Jeffries or the band, but I will not listen to you berate Roger, his talents, his bands or the fact that I care for him in a different way from you.”
Madman had enough. “You gon’ be with that punk one way you might as well be with him all the way.”
So she left to be with Roger. To have fun with Roger and get gifts from Roger.
Soon, very soon, she found out Roger wanted her just for her voice.
At first she didn’t mind singing in the nicer places, the places where she had to wait in the kitchen and enter from the back. Places where they listened to her and weren’t so drunk they didn’t hear the song, just felt the mood. Places where people didn’t pull knives on each other because of something that happened the year before.
Once she was walking down the street and s
aw a sign outside the club with her name on it. Roger said a picture was going to be taken of her soon in some fancy dress but she didn’t care. There were flyers all over town with her name on them. “Featuring Miss June Brown.” If only papa and mama and Willie could see how dreams come true.
With her Roger got more work, more of the good upper class gigs as he told his boys. And at night he was willing to use all his manly charms to make her happy in bed because she was making him happy on the stage. They did Washington, Chicago and Philadelphia like that. Happy on stage, happy in bed. She didn’t try to be a wife. She didn’t even try to be a lover. She was just Miss June Brown, a singer, lying in a silk gown next to a brown butt naked man who knew how to love her.
After two months of this happiness, in the last week they played in Chicago, a tall beautiful brown skinned woman walked into the joint. Every man she passed raised his eyes to look at her, some even raised their glasses. Even the women had to give her respect - all heads turned. She made two of June in height and her figure was more than June could ever hope for. She reminded June of the statues of Greek goddesses that she had seen in the art books at the college, except this woman’s features were not like that of any Greek.
The two men the woman shared the table with were old friends of Roger’s from Washington. They had not seen him perform since they had moved to the windy city. They smiled as June sang, they nodded their heads in time with the music, even patted their hands and feet with the beat.
But the woman eyed Roger all night long.
It was the first time June got jealous and the last time any man would ever make a fool of her.
She tried not to wait up for Roger but she knew he wouldn’t show. She pondered what she would say to him as she lie in that big bed, what she would ask him about his evening, where he had been and with whom. June thought about that big tall woman, her legs wrapped around her man and she cried herself to sleep. In the morning, when she woke to the empty pillow beside her, she decided to accept it. “I will not do the foolish things that many women do when they don’t want to realize its over between them and their man.” She didn’t pretend he was sick someplace, dead on the street or taking care of a sick friend. She knew the truth. Green eyed Roger was with that woman.
The Wilful Daughter Page 31