Solemn (34 page)

“We ain't raise you like this girl!” some of them shouted. They had, in fact, raised her like this, since she was theirs and she was doing it.

“She gone come up pregnant,” others groaned. They knew, because they had.

By thirteen, Majority promoted herself. If not for the fact she had an address and the keys to it, she would have been just like the others. She kept the batteries of the outside to herself. No, to them, her family, her elders, she would be all smiles and bravado on the subject of her alternate life: easy entrance to the single-bar nightclubs, Chrysler car rides, lace gloves, strappy stilettos, plum lipstick, shoplifted mink eyelashes, gleaming red nails and toes, professionals (in training) to spruce up her makeup and hair. She secretly devoured all the cod-liver oil and Sucrets in the cabinets at home after a night of hoarse screaming with other girls over the whereabouts of the money they were supposed to split evenly. Before she got into the elevator of her building, or walked up sixteen or nineteen or twenty-one flights (depending on which relative or latchkey kids she planned to use in alibi), she threw away the one shoe left behind on the nights she had lost the other in a sprint from uncertain outcomes: buzzing police lights, detectives in unmarked cars, drunk pimps wondering why the girls were all standing and talking but no one was screwing, or simply a bus that refused to show up because three buses were covering close corners all at once. She tore through boxes of Epsom salts at home to soak the calluses and corns so much walking and posturing gave her every week. She reserved the missioned ballet slippers some University of Chicago kid had paid some do-gooder student club money for, as the antidote to rest her feet at home.

She had not known her father too well, but few of them had. Rather than whimper into helplessness about it, the women wore their broken family tree like a badge of honor, not a reason to ho. So what an uncle high on heroin dropped four blind puppies her pit bull birthed from the sixteenth floor, because he thought they were rats, and he would have done the same thing to their mother, had she not gouged out his stomach between her jaws Majority had to release on her own? So what they had closed down her main junior high school to put her on the train to a neighborhood where she had not one cousin or friend tribaling her—but an instant group of foes? So what her Social Security number was foraged by relatives she barely knew, to turn on the lights, phone, cable, electric, and gas for those who had bad credit—so she would have to pay off theirs before she got her own? So what one of her mother's boyfriends liked to rub her legs and another one liked to boss her for the hell of it? So what they used the bathroom in the bathtub when the toilet backed up and it took a week for a janitor to come? So what? So what? So what?

Her people found no explanation for it but the music. Yup. All the radio and television's fault. Every movie on the TV had wild-haired women with bright red lipstick and shiny dresses. Every song on the radio was about getting to bed, or what was going to happen once they got there. All the girls wanted to look like a rapper's CD cover. They expected to glow in honey and plunge into water with magical powers to keep their hair straight after they came out. They wanted to look mixed. Well, Majority was really mixed—even better. So, the grown folks complained of all this, observed it, and took note—but none of them turned it off. Same for the new cables. Especially late at night, when the blush-washed shows came on in thirty-minute stints. Little story. Less lines. No memorable names. Just a mysterious man shown up to find a woman who had been waiting for him on a different soundstage, in a different outfit, with a different score.

By fifteen, and 2003, Majority's people were sick of her. She was an embarrassment. They consulted on a solution that would have made no sense if they were black or fifty years before: to turn back. She was to leave the city in the North and head to the Bible Belt relatives who never thought a Northern voyage was proven enough. She was to trade elevators for porch steps, buses and trains for walks, concrete for dust, skyline for horizon, cable for radio, fast food for gardens. She was to help out a great-aunt blinded by cataracts and the housemates who all cursed arthritis. She was to be bussed to a high school and make friends with girls. She was to reconnect with virginity and be watched.

Two uncles took off work from an Old Style brewery in Wisconsin to fetch them in Chicago. Majority's mother sat in the backseat with her for twelve hours. During them, she broke down the family tree in a notebook of names and photos Majority had ignored before. She secretly took note of the nearest road with many cars. Once they arrived in a plot of Magnolia, Mississippi, no map could assist them. She strained to hear something more than a little music on a porch where no one sat or a dog barked from its rope chain. She stared, aghast, at the young-people attire she saw, with no fashion or trend in the dress codes. She arrived at the powder-blue house of peeling paint and a top floor/attic with her nose in the air, but not at all high enough to negate the undercurrent of pee and pork no amount of Chinatown perfume could overshadow. A meal was ready.

Her great-aunt Suzette and the other ladies, Bonnie and Doris, were devastated caricatures of the pictures Majority had been shown. In her eyes, they looked and sounded like men, with the balding heads to prove it.

Majority's mother took up for her. “Chicago is just so dangerous now,” she explained. “The niggers up North way different from the ones down here. They love the trouble. And we couldn't afford to live nowhere where the school didn't have fifty kids in the classrooms.”

“It's fifty kids in the whole school 'round here,” Suzette assured.

“And so many churches, you know,” Majority's mother continued, “but with everybody working and tired and fighting the city, I have to tell you, we never went.”

“Elder Bellamy come pick us up every Sunday at seven,” Bonnie explained.

“And, you know, Majority trying to be a good girl and go on to college. I tell you. All the niggers 'round the corners and in our building … Oh yeah, it's nice and high and pretty just like you all see from the pictures, but … it's a lot to look out for in there.”

“We tell 'em she ours and nobody touch her,” Doris declared.

Majority's uncle and mother spent just one night twisted and discomforted on floor pallets. Majority got the couch that was hers from now on. In the morning, the adults awoke stiff and cranky but confident of what was best. Bonnie and Doris cursed arthritis to cook everyone breakfast. On the way out to the car, Majority saw her uncle press several bills into Suzette's hands, as she reached out with no insurance of the count. While Doris walked her mother and other uncle to the car, Majority saw Bonnie counting the bills. For her. Just like in Chicago.

*   *   *

“So finally, I threw my aunt's stanky ass on her kitchen floor. Then I pushed Bonnie round that house with a bread knife till she showed me where the money my people sent was. And I punched her before I left the house, while they friend was sleep.”

“My mama would strangle me if I thought about talking back.”

“My mama wasn't there. She was in Chicago, sending money to these bitches for my care and they wasn't doing nothing but drinking whiskey and chewing snuff with it.”

“Where you go when you left the house?”

“Now see, that's when I should have your country ass with me. You used to all this … this … dark. I walked 'round like a damned nigga in the old times. I ain't have that massa on a horse with a whip. I member the North Star. That was it. Just 'cause I 'membered it didn't mean I could find it. And even if I had found it I didn't know where North would take me there. I just walked around with no bags and money in my bra till I heard or saw or felt or I don't know … something in them woods.”

“What?” Solemn leaned her face straight on to Majority's. She had met her match.

“I don't know what it was. It was something. Can't call it. Wasn't gonna let it just tap me on the shoulder so I could find out. I know I turned my ass around.”

“You went back there?”

“I didn't have no choice.”

“Least you had sense enough to turn around. What happened back there?”

“Them old bitches grabbed me by the throat soon as one of 'em heard me coming up the porch. They beat my ass like a team. Just ganged up on me. Then they called the police. They kicked me out on the porch and left me there till the POPOS came.”

Majority said she choke-held pit bulls and had sex. Three canes took her down?

“What?” Solemn moaned.

“They didn't even bother to call my people first. Just threw me out, kid. Called it robbery and assault. I beat them and take my family's money … it's assault and robbery. Some family beat me and keep my money … it's a whipping and ‘Oh, we forgot.' I got here last Easter. Two years to go.”

“Or less, for good behavior,” Solemn reminded her.

“Who you think you talking to? Shit. I'm Majority. I don't know how to behave.”

 

TWENTY-EIGHT

How? Just how?

How can you live with yourself, you old uneducated and unenlightened damned fool? You sitting here in your camper truck, trailer, manufactured home, whatever you call it. Your “property.” Returning telephone calls. Grinning from ear to ear. Nodding.

“Oh, she doing fine.”

She is?

Dusting picture frames. Washing dishes. Reorganizing closets. Hanging clothes on the line. Collecting stuff for Helping Hands. Praying for the less fortunate. Reading the daily lesson. Tassel bookmark in your Bible. Pearl comb in your head. Lotion on your behind. Gold studs in your ears. Man in your bed. Food in the fridge. Bills in the mail. Wash sorted and done. Put away. Supper fixed. Now what?

Man don't touch you no more. You don't touch him. Not sure who started it.

You say now, “Lord, I'd give my life…” For what? Your reputation? A man? A marriage? A lie? What's the truth? Do you know?

“If I could go back…”

You can't. Don't nobody care if you cry. Who's wiping her tears?

“At the time…,” you say. Well, the time done passed. And some more gonna pass, too. You gonna do it too. Hard.

You having a hard time picking the colors for the hatbox to send. White polka dots on baby blue from Claude Julian's, basic brown from Leonards's. Don't matter. Not as much as you think it do. But go'n ahead. Make a fuss over it. Pretend. Keep the tissue paper smooth. That's right. Pat it down. Palms in center. Okay. Now fluff the ends. Check the wax paper 'round the brownies. Tighten the cheesecloth 'round the jerky. Take the bright orange discount tags off the panties and socks. Roll the nightgown so it don't wrinkle. You'll take the big books when you visit. Save postage. Put the top on. Won't fit. Rearrange it all. Pick the top up out of the corner. You didn't have to throw it over there.

He's avoiding you. He's ashamed. He's a liar. He's a cheat. He's a drunk, now.

Why didn't you just take her kicking and screaming and throw her in the well? Would have been more humane. And honest. You could have thrown her out in the storms. Waited for lightning to strike twice. Or traded places. Stephanie wouldn't have done Desiree like this. Felt sorry for folks, huh? Pitied the women. Thought you was a saint. Well, now it's you.

“She still got college…” No, she don't.

“I'm attending the Bible college.”

So? Made you feel good to brag about yourself for a change.

I raised my kids good…, you thought, knowing and seeing and feeling shit wasn't right. It wasn't right. Just wasn't right. You know. You have options. You have yourself.

Breaking dishes now, huh? Know you can't afford it. You gotta make the odd-job money stretch. Further now. Man don't like to eat on paper plates, that's what you told the girls, right? Yeah, you did that. Taught 'em how to be perfect ladies. Perfect is the problem. Lady good enough. Church praying for you, her, y'all. Now what?

When police tore you out the bed with nothing on but a gown, you should have told the child to hide. Hide, child. Hide …

But no. You uncovered her. Exposed her, like a thief in the night at the break of day. And for what? For what? A man? A marriage? A lie?

You believed a man. A man. A goddamned man. Like a fool. And you didn't believe him. You believed a story, not him. Then you pinned a tale on your daughter. You talked her into it, you witch. That's right. Just go to bed. Get on in there. Cover up, knowing you already too hot. Nothing else to do so might as well sweat. Wake up in the morning. I'll be waiting. What? Oh. Yeah, know you can't sleep. You shouldn't.

That cop knew your black ass was lying. So did you, Miss Holy and Miss Perfect. Even got the mother of your grandchilds in on it. And for what? For what? Half the money went to paying folks off anyway. And what else? Some bills? Steak? The movies?

Now what you got? Daughter-in-law ain't speaking to you. Son ain't got time to bring the grandkids. Man at work, or broke. But never too broke after work to go drink?

He gonna come in once you talking to yourself in your sleep, out loud, finally. He'll be on the couch. Resentful. Ashamed. Daughter locked up. House empty. Go on. Get out of bed. One last thing. Always. First is easy. Last never let you go. Set the package by the door so you remember to send it in the morning. Keep on. Give yourself something to do. Anything. Oh, is there a baby crying? Yes.

 

TWENTY-NINE

Pearletta Hassle's file was closed. That woman from Bledsoe, at Singer's Trailer Park, somewhere near Kosciusko, was long gone from their midst and her case was closed. It was in a file cabinet betwixt stacks of tall, dusty steel in a cellar of the precinct, where only relatives in denial or maybe the scant ambitious criminal justice students put in a request to walk through. Complaints filed. Scenes mapped. Witnesses deposed.