Perfect Peace (10 page)

“You
couldn’t
choose him, even if you wanted to!” Pearlie sneered.

“Guess not.”

Emma Jean filled her bucket, then began filling her sisters’. “Do y’all think I’m pretty?”

Pearlie hollered. “Of course not. But you nice, and that counts for somethin’.”

Gracie agreed. “Everybody ain’t gotta be pretty, Emma Jean.”

“But I wanna be pretty.”

They couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Momma’s dark like me, and she’s pretty, ain’t she?”

Their silence surprised her.

“You not ugly,” Gracie said. “And, like I said, you’re real smart and sometimes that’s worth more.”

“But I wanna be pretty, too.”

“Your looks come from your daddy,” Pearlie explained, “and
your
daddy’s people are real black jes’ like you. He jes’ happens to be yella.”

“But cain’t chu be dark
and
pretty?”

The sisters frowned and said in unison, “No.”

Emma Jean’s head fell as though guillotined.

“Don’t worry about it,” Gracie said. “Everybody’s pretty in their own kinda way.”

“You jes’ look like yo’ folks,” Pearlie repeated. “You cain’t help that.”

“How you know how my folks look?”

“ ’Cause I done seen ’em! They live down in de Bottoms. It’s a lotta dem Lovejoys runnin’ ’round. They breed like rats, Momma said.”

Emma Jean was glad she didn’t live among them.

“Yo’ daddy jes’ happen to be light, but de rest o’ his folks is real black. That’s where you get it from.”

Gracie softened Pearlie’s blow. “You can still make somethin’ outta yo’self though. If you try real hard. Like you could be a hairdresser or somethin’. They make good money!”

Emma Jean wanted to be a dancer, but Mae Helen wouldn’t hear of it. She’d said, “Is you ever heard of a black nigga dancer, girl? Huh? Is you?” Emma Jean shook her head slowly. “Well then! Do somethin’ you can do.” When Emma Jean mentioned nursing, Mae Helen clutched her hips and said, “Girl, find a man who’ll have you and have as many babies as you can. Good as you sweep and clean up, you oughta be somebody’s wife. If they’ll have you.”

Emma Jean told Gracie, “I don’t wanna do hair!”

“Well, you oughta want to!” Pearlie interjected. “Then maybe you could do somethin’ with that briar bush o’ yours! And who knows? Maybe you could help all your people
down there
.” She pointed toward the Bottoms.

Emma Jean swore she’d never step foot in the Bottoms long as she lived. The last thing she needed was to encounter, in the face of some ashy black woman, her own spitting image. Maybe her daddy was one of the bottom people, but she promised not to be caught dead down there.

“What if Claude Lovejoy ain’t my daddy?” she mumbled.

“Then who is?” Pearlie asked.

Emma Jean didn’t say. She certainly couldn’t claim Sammy Hurt since she shared none of her sisters’ features, and, anyway, Mae Helen reminded her constantly whose child she wasn’t.

To Emma Jean’s chagrin, Claude Lovejoy appeared one day out of nowhere. The girls turned and there he was. Emma Jean was almost nine.

“Howdy, y’all,” he said kindly.

As though spooked, Pearlie and Gracie ran into the house, screaming, “Momma, Momma! That man’s back! He’s here!”

“Who’s here?” Mae Helen asked, walking onto the porch. When she saw who it was, she sucked her teeth and said, “Aw, shit! That ain’t nobody. I thought y’all was talkin’ ’bout somebody important,” and walked back into the house, allowing the screen to slam behind her.

Emma Jean lingered only because Claude was staring at her.

“You’s real pretty, honey. Black and beautiful jes’ like my momma. Your
name’s Emma Jean Lovejoy, ain’t it?” He smiled and sat on the edge of the porch. “You my baby girl.”

“My name’s Emma Jean
Hurt
,” she corrected nastily, “and if you is my daddy, you a sorry one ’cause I ain’t never seen you in my whole life.”

Claude’s smile vanished. “I been workin’ on de railroad, baby. I wanted to come see you, but seem like every time I got a day off, I was either dog tired or called back to work. I thinks about you all de time, sugar. Really I do. Don’t chu neva think yo’ daddy don’t love you.”

Emma Jean almost jumped into his arms, but restrained herself. “Okay,” she said.

“I wanna take you to meet my folks so you know yo’ people. They’ll like you right off, pretty as you is.”

“No, thank you.”

“What chu mean, ‘no thank you’? Don’t chu wanna know yo’ family?”

Emma Jean heard the disappointment in her father’s flat voice, but her pride outweighed her empathy. “I already know my family,” she sassed, “so you can jes’ tell all dem bottom folks that I’m fine right where I am.”

Claude shook his head. “What’s wrong, baby? You actin’ like you hate me or somethin’.”

“Ain’t nothin’ wrong wit’ me. I jes’ don’t wanna go with you down in dem Bottoms. I don’t wanna go wit’ chu nowhere, so you ain’t gotta come back here no more if you don’t want to.” She turned to walk away.

Claude stood. “I don’t know what you done heard ’bout me, but I’s a good man and you got a whole heap o’ folks jes’ waitin’ to love you ’cause you mine.”

“No I don’t!”

“It’s fine though ’cause you can’t run from yo’self. Don’t care how hard you try, when you turn around, that self is starin’ back at you. You’s a Lovejoy, baby, and you gone stay one ’til de day you die. I jes’ hope I’m still livin’ when you come to yo’ senses. Yo’ momma and everybody else ’round hyeah done told you a bunch o’ mess ’bout me and my folks, but one day you’ll know de truth.” He wiped his eyes and left.

For a second, the thought of being shown off like a prize excited Emma Jean, yet fearful of her sisters’ ridicule, she decided to let Claude Lovejoy go.

Mae Helen returned to the porch. “Why didn’t you go with him? You coulda gone if you wanted to.”

“I jes’ didn’t,” Emma Jean mumbled.

“Well, you shoulda. You need to know yo’ people. You look jes’ like ’em.”

Emma Jean had hoped Mae Helen would say,
Oh, honey, I was so scared you was gon’ leave me. Thank God I still got my baby
, or something like that. Instead, she told Gracie and Pearlie, “Ump, ump, ump. Y’all almost had a bed to y’allself.”

For the rest of her life, her mother’s words lived in her head. Even in her dreams, she heard,
Y’all almost had a bed to y’allself, y’all almost had a bed to y’allself, y’all almost had a bed to y’allself
, as though someone were trying to convince her of her own selfishness.

By sixteen, Emma Jean was praying for Claude’s return. She promised herself that, if he came again, she’d accompany him to the Bottoms and wouldn’t care what Gracie or Pearlie or anyone else said. She might not even come back. That way, Mae Helen could forget she’d ever lain with Claude Lovejoy.

Yet the next time Emma Jean encountered her father, he was lying in a coffin. Some pretty black woman killed him, people said, for cheating on her with a white woman. The white woman confronted the black one—went to the Bottoms all by herself, they said—but the black woman held her peace. The next night, though, she stabbed Claude in his heart while he slept.

“He was already dying though,” Emma Jean overheard one woman tell another at the funeral. “Ain’t been right since he fooled with dat Mae Helen what’s-her-name.”

“Oh yeah!” the other woman said. “Dat uppity-ass heffa wit’ dem two yellow girls and that black one that’s s’posed to be his.”

“Yep. Dat’s her. He said he went up there to see ’bout his daughter but she didn’t want nothin’ to do wit’ him. Said she looked at him like he was crazy.”

“Get outta here, girl!”

“That’s what he told me. I was anxious to meet my niece, but he said she frowned at him like he was a dog or somethin’.”

“Ain’t no tellin’ what dat woman told dat girl ’bout Claude.”

“Well, whatever she told her, dat li’l girl missed out on the nicest man God ever made.” They nodded vigorously. “He said she was so pretty”—the lady smiled—“but she turned her nose up at him.”

“She didn’t know no better.”

“Guess not. But she gon’ want him one day.”

Emma Jean walked away. The only reason she had gone to the funeral was because, at twenty, she couldn’t remember exactly what Claude looked like, and she knew this would be her last chance to see him. When the family processed,
she stood with other tertiary attendees and marveled to see herself replicated, to varying degrees, in almost every mournful face. During the eulogy, when the preacher said, “Claude Lovejoy left this world with only a daughter to mourn his passing,” Emma Jean covered her mouth in shame. He went on to speak of Claude as a man with an enormous heart, one any child would have been lucky to have as a father. Emma Jean resented that he kept looking at her.

At the end, after family members had recessed, she asked the officials if she might have one final glance at the body. They said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but once we close the casket, only next of kin—”

“I’m his daughter,” she whispered softly, and immediately they raised the lid. Death had darkened him, she noticed, and now she saw the irrefutable resemblance. Emma Jean nodded her thanks and asked the officials not to repeat what she had said.

Gus told Bartimaeus never to divulge their activity at the Jordan. People wouldn’t understand, he said, and no mother—Mae Helen had been a desperate exception—would ever let her daughter marry a man
like that
. As long as they kept their mouths closed, folks’ gossip would always be just that—gossip. It was a private affair anyway, Gus said, and the first lesson of manhood Bartimaeus needed to learn was how to keep other folks out of his business. So the two set about their daily chores as though the previous day’s cleansing had never occurred. Woody joined them, cleaning out the cruddy woodstove while James Earl and Authorly split logs under the bright morning sun. Sol and Mister attended the house, the best they could, and half-burned enough breakfast to go around.

Moments later, they took Emma Jean a plate of biscuits, molasses, eggs, and burnt salt pork.

“Y’all tryin’ to burn my house down?” she teased.

“No ma’am. We jes’ tryin’ to help out.”

Their long faces made Emma Jean feel ungrateful. “Oh, I’m sorry, boys. I know y’all mean well. I really do thank you.” She took the plate. “I’ll be back to my old self in a day or two.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Momma,” Mister said. “We don’t mind takin’ care o’ you.”

Emma Jean forced herself to eat. She knew the day would come when Bartimaeus would accompany his father to the place of purging, but she didn’t know it would come so soon. What would she tell the neighbors about that other voice? How had Bartimaeus gotten to the river anyway? And why couldn’t he and Gus cry like normal people?

Perfect squirmed, and Emma Jean retrieved her from the bassinet. Rocking her gently, she offered her nipple and Perfect suckled gratefully. All Emma Jean wanted was to protect her and make her happy. She’d definitely have to sacrifice to provide the kind of life she envisioned for her only daughter, but she was determined to do it even if she had to do it alone. Of course she’d be the only one attending to Perfect’s personal needs, but that was as it should be. Menfolks ain’t got no business in womenfolks’ affairs, she had told Gus and the boys months before the birth. They were all relieved.
Good
, Emma Jean now thought.
This is working just like I need it to.

Truth be told, Gus had been more relieved than the boys by Emma Jean’s edict. He knew about boys, but a woman’s world was as foreign to him as China. Even when he and Emma Jean used to do
it
—as he called sex—it was always in the dark, and Gus liked it that way. He had seldom seen Emma Jean naked. He had certainly felt her many times, but he would have failed miserably had he been required to draw or describe the contours of her body. He knew how the vagina felt, wrapped like a warm, moist blanket around his throbbing penis, but exactly how it looked he didn’t know. It never occurred to him to look at it—much less taste it, as Emma Jean once suggested. Yet he loved Emma Jean’s fellatial performance. Penetration was the extent of Gus’s sexual participation and once he climaxed, he simply rolled over and went to sleep. On one occasion, Emma Jean spoke his name as they did
it
, and Gus stopped altogether, asking, “Huh? What is it?” She reverted back to their silent exchange and Gus decided that women call men, even during sex, when they obviously don’t want anything. Gus never knew that women climaxed, and once Emma Jean stopped dreaming of it, they marked his overflow as the aim and the end of
it
.

Authorly and James Earl stacked the wood neatly against the west side of the house.

“Daddy and Bartimaeus sounded funny yesterday,” James Earl said out of nowhere.

At first, Authorly didn’t respond. Then he slurred, “Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay. But they was real loud.”

“I said don’t worry about it!”

James Earl shuddered and began to cry.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt yo’ feelin’s. It’s just that what Daddy and Bartimaeus do ain’t nobody’s business. You know what I mean?”