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My body is the battleground for my husband’s affliction.
hope you know and understand the duties of a wife, because a woman can make or ruin a man. It takes both working together, but the woman is the main one when it comes to making a happy home.”
The day I left home, just two weeks before my fourteenth birthday,
We’re all weak from hunger, and I don’t see how the tide will change before I lose one, or both, of them.
Polk Swamp has no mercy. I’ve pulled leeches as big as baby garter snakes off my girls, and their feet got ulcers on them from the constant wet. The swamp is a beastly place. It’s ripe with things nobody wants to know.
She’s a fine old lady. Her hair is done up, and she wears a green dress with white pearl buttons at the neck. I know some about her. I know she’s got electricity in this house. She’s registered to vote and raised five kids, but one hung himself in the barn when he was still a boy. I know
His body floats in the reeds. Easy prey.
Electricity, the automobile and now the telephone have made it clear that possibility is endless for an enterprising mind. I can only imagine what it must have felt like to navigate a flat earth only to discover its roundness. But the astonishing part, for me, is what comes after any great discovery. The “aha” of wonder fades, and the “why not” takes up its rightful place in the world.
his birthday for fear of school. His will is there, but his courage is still in its infancy, but better late than never, even at forty-eight. I’ve
I know the talent my children possess just as well as I know their weaknesses.
don’t celebrate the small movements forward, we forget they existed at all.”
This attic has so many things compartmentalized and hidden away it’s a wonder our past doesn’t collapse in on us.
to me, God is no more real than the Easter Bunny. I’d rather place my faith in science. Still,
Worry is something I’ve never understood. What good does it do, except drain possibility from the day?
Fifteen years it’s been since I’ve seen my girls. I know
That’s what the Bible says clear as bells on Sunday morning. You believe in Me and you get eternal life. He don’t give eternal life first. He makes you a deal.
Black folk is fine to do the work long as they don’t have an opinion.
I mean to keep my promise to the Lord. This child is my burden. If I save her life, I save his. The air between us is heavy.
You got to settle yourself with death. I been able to do that with everybody but Odell. Losing him would kill me. I’ve said to him more than once, “If you die first, just wait for me there, I won’t be but a minute behind.”
Nobody died under my roof today, but somewhere a creature died. For something to live, something had to die. The redbirds promise that.
But what sin is worse, the sin of living in squalor with no hope as a prisoner in the place that’s supposed to be your haven or the sin of murdering your husband? You
And if what Mama said is true, about the woman being the main one to make a happy home, then the sin of killing Alvin is no worse than the life I built for my children. I will carry it on my shoulders. I will take it and swallow it and bear it if it means a chance for them girls to live with food in their bellies.
will go to hell or jail, whichever comes first, but if they have a chance, I mean to give it to them, even if killing casts a shadow on their name.
“Can’t always stand to the side, Oretta. Sometimes you got to try to change what you don’t like.”
She is a good girl and does as she’s told. Mr. Coles swoops her up. The child hangs limp in his embrace like a lamb in the mouth of a lion.
see the man for what he is. No worse, no better than his son. He is the root of the tree he grew.
“I ain’t crying ’cause Daddy’s left. I’m crying ’cause I’m glad he’s gone. That’s a sin. Will I go to hell?” “No. One sin ain’t bad.”
life. When a woman marries and takes her husband’s name she is forever bound by his action and not her own. It ain’t right, but that’s the way
I told her no, thank you, I had to get home to my husband. I was thinking I can’t be seen sittin’ on no porch with a white woman sipping tea, what would people say?
all them men are looking at Pete from PeeDee like he’s from a foreign land. The man that don’t have enough sense to know not to talk to the Negro help when he is a guest for dinner at a table
happy? He was a rotten egg from the start, always itching for a fight. Always found something to occupy myself with when I saw him in the street. Most everybody I know did the same. Some meanness you got to steer clear of, otherwise it finds its way to you.
Before I turn back to the road, before I free myself of this promise I made four long days ago, I am flushed with a blinding heat, so hot I fear my knees will give way. My vision is disrupted. The yard and all the air around is filled with black dots that blink wherever I turn my eyes. But they ain’t dots, they’re bugs. Black bugs, swarming and clouding all I see. They come in a frenzy, sounds and all, and leave just as quick when I shake my head to get them loose of me and come back to my senses. What was beautiful and simple only a moment before, this reunion of family, is tainted by what I
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We was so happy. I was too young to know there is no such thing as any one thing. Everything, even great happiness, has another side. Turn over a leaf and see how the front and back differ.
Getting a man to talk about what troubles him is like digging in winter soil. So
depending on my wife to provide.” There it is. I asked and there it is.
We live over and over in the happening only to be left with what’s already done.
Mary, you bought our bread for this week and next. We are much obliged.” She was solemn as could be. “You’re welcome, Mama.”
Though none of them asks, I see how they look at my face. All of them know, or know somebody, who’s been marked by a man’s fist.
From where I stand, I see what she’s hidden from me, what I should have seen for myself but didn’t. I see what I don’t want to see and now must, why she’s mad and why she fought me. The rise of her belly and swell of her breast ain’t natural for a thirteen-year-old girl. This is what she and that Harlan boy have wrought. After all I have done for her. A great blackness swallows me. No amount of money can fix what this is.
Misery, like illness, is insidious, and my daughters have the virus. Some people need to blame others for their unhappiness. Parents are always easy targets.
He most certainly needs the help, but to ask for it seems some sort of weakness. My sons are men in the prime of their lives, with the whole world at their doorstep, but they are like two crippled old bachelors. If one blinks, the other is blind.
If one blinks, the other is blind.
She don’t know nothin’ about the world or how to live in it. I reckon I got some blame in that, but she made her choice and it ain’t us. She’s turned womanly in a little girl’s body with a little girl’s mind and no idea what’s about to happen. Ain’t nothing or nobody can stop it. Her life is laid out in front of her like a dark sky, only she’s too dumb and headstrong to know what hand her actions have dealt.
He stopped letting me touch her until she stopped reaching for me.
How do you fight evil? Mama would help me if she was alive. She would have been a light for my girls. She would’ve loved them the way she did me. They could have had something beautiful to remember like I do.
wasn’t a good mother, that much is fact, but I was the only kind I knew how to be.
witness. There is a time and place for memories, and old age is where they often come to reside. I used to gather them one after another, thinking, I won’t forget, I won’t forget. But it is the details that leave first and in their wake is only the one big moment. Maybe
Such a deliberate act; at any point he could have changed his mind, stood and walked away—twelve years old and already weary of the life he had with us. It’s a terrible thing to lose a child. Many women endure it and many more will long after I am gone. Some become weak and frail from such a blow, but not me. I became hard, as if a layer of armor grew over my skin—some impenetrable ancient alligator.
waited ’til he saw me there, saw his fate, every human needs to reconcile their life, but I shot him in the back of the head
I did not think what Alvin’s death would un-do, only what it could do. The killing of him released the fury in him. In death a spirit’s force is greater. Alvin’s anger never stopped.
