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And you don’t have to repay me, except by helping out in the house and the yard. So, you see, it isn’t pity, or charity, only a business arrangement to benefit all of us.”
She was the first black person I’d known, and though at first I’d felt ill-at-ease with her and a little afraid of her, two weeks of intimacy had taught me much. She was just another human being of another race and color, with the same sensitivities, hopes and fears we all had.
“Why have roses at all if they don’t reek of perfume?”
How could a stranger come so easily into our lives and give us love, when our own blood kin had sought to give us death?
“A reasonable excuse for murder?” I asked bitterly. “How could she dream up one clever enough? She’s not that smart.”
Love, it was such an encompassing word, different from sex and ten times more compelling.
“You don’t have to love me.” My head bowed to hide my face and my hair was something to hide behind as I shamelessly said, “Just use me when you need me, and that will be enough.” He leaned back in the chair and took his hands from my waist. “Catherine, don’t ever let me hear you offer such a thing again. You live in fairyland, not reality. Little girls get hurt when they play grown-up games. You save yourself for the man you marry—but for God’s sake, wait to grow up first. Don’t rush into having sex with the first man who desires you.”
“Don’t be ashamed of being human, Catherine. We all expect only the best from our mothers.”
If there’s one chance we poor humans have of reaching godliness, it’s in learning to forgive and forget.”
So don’t you dare talk to me of forgiving and forgetting! I don’t know how to forgive and forget! All I know how to do is hate! And you don’t know what it’s like to hate as I do!”
“You think only your mother commits crimes against those she loves—well, you’re wrong. It’s done every day. Sometimes it’s done to gain money, but there are other reasons.” He paused, sighed, then went on. “I hope when you’ve heard my story, you can go to bed tonight and forget about vengeance. If you don’t you’ll hurt yourself more than anyone else.”
“Was it raining that day in June when you put Julia and Scotty in the ground?” “What difference does that make? Any day you put someone you love underground it’s raining!”
Nobody is going to push me around and make me do what I don’t want to—never again!
Julian says he loves me and will take care of me. But I’m not sure what love is, or if he loves me at all or only wants me to help him reach his goal. But his goal is my goal. So tell me how I can tell if he loves me or if he only wants to use me?”
I was going to show everyone just what I was made of! Steel, covered over with frilly, silly tulle tutus!
Not once in all her nine years had Carrie spent a night in a room alone.
“We’ll find her,” assured Chris. “If we have to stay all week and torture each little witch here we’ll make them tell us where she is.” “Young man,” shot out Miss Dewhurst, “nobody tortures my girls but me!”
Why, Momma? Why did you have to love money more than you loved your children?
“If you aren’t the most conceited, arrogant person I’ve ever met. And I suspect you can be quite ruthless too when it comes to getting what you want.” “Right on!” he said with a following laugh. “I’m all of that and more too, as you’ll soon find out. After all, wasn’t I ruthlessly determined to get you where I want you?”
“It’s that old southern-belle tradition. Gals down south like guys to think they’re sweet, shy, demure, but underneath that cool magnolia exterior—sexpots—every one!”
Why should they believe the truth when a lie was so much more exciting?
A dancer without fire is no dancer at all.”
Then he held me close, caressed and cherished me, kissed and pleasured until we were again made one.
“I think I do owe him my life. You know how I felt when I came here. I thought no one could be trusted or depended on. I expected the worst to happen to us, and it would have too without him. And I don’t love him just for what he’s done. I love him because of who and what he is.
Because when you truly loved there were no problems that love couldn’t overcome. Me . . . and my ideas.
How was I ever going to learn to swim in an ocean of deceit?
You want me, you want him, you want security, you want adventure. You think you can have everything, and you can’t.
He had a cruel, dark side, I knew that. I’d experienced some of that . . . but I could tame him. I wouldn’t let him be my ruler and my judge, my superior or my master. We’d make it fifty-fifty, share and be equals, and eventually, one bright and sunny morning, I’d wake up and see his darkly stubbled face and know I loved him. Know I loved him better than anyone I’d loved before—anyone.
Julian was obsessively possessive of me. He was like an only child who needed constant pampering, and I didn’t mind, except when he tried to keep me from my family.
Would the past never set me free?
“You can’t tell me what I can do and what I can’t do! I’m your wife, not your slave!”
He was mocking me, though his need for me was that of a child needing his mother. That was what I had become—his mother, in everything but sex. I had to choose his suits, his socks and shirts, his costumes, his practice outfits, though he consistently refused to let me handle the household accounts.
“Angel, saint, Devil’s spawn, good or evil, you’ve got me pinned to the wall and labeled as yours until the day I die. And if you die first, then it won’t be long before I follow.”
Julian stole my reflection and made it his. Julian wanted to steal my strength and call it his own;
“I’m not his mother, or a priest, or God,”
“Kids are not good for people like us anyway.” “People like us . . . ?” “Yeah, people like us.” “How are we different?” He mockingly, sleepily laughed, bitterly too. “We’re not real. We don’t belong to the human race.” “What are we then?” “Dancing dolls, that’s all. Dancing fools, afraid to be real people and live in the real world. That’s why we prefer fantasy.
I used to think I loved someone else, because it seemed so unnatural to go from one love to another. When I was a little girl, I used to believe love came only once in a lifetime, and that was the best kind. I thought once you loved one person, you never could love another. But I was wrong.”
Graveyards with their marble saints, angels, all so sweetly smiling, so pious or sober—how I hated them! They patronized we who lived; we who were made of fragile tissue and blood, who could grieve and cry while they would stand there for centuries, smiling piously down on all.
Life offers many chances, not just one.
I watched the jealousy between them grow, and felt it was none of my fault—only Momma’s! As everything wrong in my life was her fault.
How wonderful to be understood, and never have to explain.
Oh, how fast the years go when you have a baby to fill all the hours.
“You got something eating at you, Catherine, Something gnawing at your guts. Something so bitter it simmers in your eyes and grits your teeth together! I know your kind. You ruin everyone who touches your life and God help the next man who loves you as much as my son did!”
But I had to do it—compelled by my own nature to seek the revenge in the place of our incarceration.
“Men don’t talk as freely about love as women do, Carrie. Some like to tease you, and that’s a pretty good indication you’ve got their interest, and it can grow into something larger. And the way you find out how much they care is by looking into the eyes—eyes never learn how to lie.”
“Darling, darling, I don’t know how to say everything right, but I’m going to try. I want you to understand that what is black to one person is white to another. And nothing in this world is so perfect that it is pure white, or so bad it is pure black. Everything concerning human beings comes in shades of gray, Carrie. None of us is perfect, without flaws.
God didn’t intend to make us pay the price for what our parents did.
Look at the world about us, Carrie. Look at the magazines and the movies that decent people go to and enjoy, and the stage plays with everyone naked, and the kind of books being published. I don’t know if it’s for the better, but I do know people aren’t static. We all change from day to day. Maybe twenty years from now our children will look back to our time and be shocked, and maybe they will look back and smile and call us innocents. Nobody knows how the world will change—so
“You can’t stay a boy with romantic notions when you go to law school and you are faced with the harsh realities of murder, rape, robbery, corruption. You have professors pounding dogmatic ideas into your head to drive out the romance. You go into law fresh and young, and you come out tough and hard, and you know every step of the way ahead you’ve got to fight and fight hard to be any good.
And you can stay one hundred years and get down on your knees and plead until your tongue falls out—I will still go ahead and do what I must!”
