Authors: Toni Morrison
Love (20 page)
I had to stop him. Had to.
Just as well they fought over my menu, looking in it for a sign of preference and misreading it when they did. Heed’s grasp of handwriting skills was limited, but she had to wonder in 1971 if the “sweet Cosey child” her husband was willing property to in 1958 was neither her nor Christine but a baby on the way. They never saw the real thing—witnessed by me, notarized by Buddy Silk’s wife—leaving everything to Celestial. Everything. Everything. Except a boat he left to Sandler Gibbons. It wasn’t right. If I had been allowed to read what I signed in 1964 when the sheriff threatened to close him down, when little children called him names and whole streets were on fire, I might have been able to stop him then—in a nice way—keep him from leaving all we had worked for to the one person who would have given it away rather than live in it or near it; would have blown it up rather than let it stand as a reminder of why she was not permitted to mount its steps but was the real sport of a fishing boat. Regardless of what his heart said, it wasn’t right. If I had read it in 1964 instead of 1971, I would have known that what looked like seven years of self-pity and remorse was really vengeance, and that his hatred of the women in his house had no level. First they disappointed him, then they defied him, then they turned his home into a barrel of quarreling she-crabs and his life’s work into a cautionary lesson in black history. He didn’t understand: a dream is just a nightmare with lipstick. Whether what he believed was true or no, I wasn’t going to let him put his family out in the street. May was sixty-one; what was she supposed to do? Spend her old age in a straitjacket? And Heed was almost forty-one. Was she supposed to go back to a family who had not spoken to her since Truman? And Christine—whatever she was into wasn’t going to last. There wasn’t but one solution. Foxglove can be quick, if you know what you’re doing, and doesn’t hurt all that long. He wasn’t fit to think, and at eighty-one he wasn’t going to get better. It took nerve, and long before the undertaker knocked on the door, I tore that malicious thing up. My menu worked just fine. Gave them a reason to stay connected and maybe figure out how precious the tongue is. If properly used, it can save you from the attention of Police-heads hunting desperate women and hardheaded, misraised children. It’s hard to do but I know at least one woman who did. Who stood right under their wide hats, their dripping beards, and scared them off with a word—or was it a note?
Her scar has disappeared. I sit near her once in a while out at the cemetery. We are the only two who visit him. She is offended by the words on his tombstone and, legs crossed, perches on its top so the folds of her red dress hide the insult: “Ideal Husband. Perfect Father.” Other than that, she seems content. I like it when she sings to him. One of those down-home, raunchy songs that used to corrupt everybody on the dance floor. “Come on back, baby. Now I understand. Come back, baby. Take me by the hand.” Either she doesn’t know about me or has forgiven me for my solution, because she doesn’t mind at all if I sit a little ways off, listening. But once in a while her voice is so full of longing for him, I can’t help it. I want something back. Something just for me. So I join in. And hum.
ALSO BY TONI MORRISON
FICTION
Paradise
Jazz
Beloved
Tar Baby
Song of Solomon
Sula
The Bluest Eye
NONFICTION
The Dancing Mind
Playing in the Dark:
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A
.
KNOPF
Copyright ©
2003
by Toni Morrison
All rights reserved under International and
Pan-American Copyright Conventions
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Morrison, Toni.
Love / Toni Morrison.
p. cm.
1
. African American women—Fiction.
2
. Seaside resorts—Fiction.
3
. Hotelkeepers—Fiction.
4
. Rich people—Fiction.
5
. Death—Fiction. I. Title.
PS
3563.
O
8749
L
68 2003
813’.54
—dc
21 2003052737
eISBN: 978-1-4000-4185-5
v3.0