Sugar (15 page)

Mamma. Home.

Those two words seemed to burn into her mind.

Sugar looked from the telegram to Mary and then back again.

Mary stood in front of her, her breast heaving up and down with excitement. Sugar didn’t speak. Couldn’t speak.

“I almost forgot ’bout it, but like I said it’s been quite a while.” Mary stopped. She sat down because her legs were shaking. She breathlessly began again. “I sent word back sayin’ you weren’t here. I told them that you’d gone off to Detroit when you left here, but no telling where you could be by now.”

Sugar blinked and reread the words again.

“Oh, Sugar, ain’t it wonderful. Your mamma done come back for you. I know you grown and all, ’course it don’t matter how old you are, you always need your mama. Lord knows I wish mine was still around. Lord have mercy, Sugar. It’s like getting a second chance.” Mary was grinning from ear to ear.

Second chance? I never had a first chance. I suppose this should be considered as my only chance,
she thought to herself.

Sugar didn’t know what she was feeling. Something was whirling inside of her, causing her to swoon. Was it happiness? Anger? Sadness? Did this woman who abandoned her, now after thirty years, deserve to have her?

She grabbed for the table to steady herself. Mary moved in close and took her face in her hands. “It’s time,” Mary said in a tender voice. Mary’s face was so close to Sugar’s that she could smell the Juicy Fruit gum Mary chewed by the pack. She could see the stained yellow teeth and the scar that was barely visible on the tip of her nose. But what she concentrated on were her eyes. Mary’s eyes were calm and all knowing. “You got to go. Not to California, but Arkansas. Home,” she said with such quiet strength it shook Sugar to the bone.

“Baby, everybody got their own reasons for doing things they do in life. It don’t matter what her reason was at the time, what matters is she come back for you, and even though you might think it’s too late, it ain’t never too late where a mother and her child is concerned.”

Chapter Ten

W
EEKS
later, the banging was becoming irritating enough to drag Sugar kicking and screaming from the precious little sleep she could manage to steal. Sugar sat straight up and waited for the sound to come again, not sure if it was inside her head or outside her front door. It came again, a demanding knocking at her front door that caused her to jump, knocking over the nearby ashtray filled with butts and roaches.

Reefer was a new soothing friend in her life. A joint and a drink made everything okay. Veiled her vision and made the tricks she turned bearable. Yes, it was a magic plant and it was helping Sugar to play the greatest trick of them all on herself.

Lappy Clayton introduced it to her the first time they fucked. She liked the way it made her feel, how it lifted her out of herself while at the same time allowed her to go deeper into herself. It made her laugh uncontrollably until her sides ached and tears fell in floods down her cheeks.

He had taken to bringing her at least two joints every time he paid Sugar a visit, which was as much as twice a week now. “Consider it a tip,” he said one early morning as he dressed, the morning sun rays dancing across his cream-colored back.

There was a part of Lappy that Sugar was comfortable with. The part that reminded her of herself, the part she wouldn’t admit existed inside of her, the innocent side that at thirty years old still remained untouched by the type of life she lived. The side that came out and took in the sun and skipped rope on a St. Louis sidewalk. She liked that side of herself and she saw it in Lappy Clayton too. Behind the slicked-back hair, fine suits, hip talk and gold tooth of the man Lappy, was the boy Lappy.

Sugar caught a glimpse of that boy, white on top, all black beneath. She saw it when he booked her for the whole night and showed up with fried chicken dinners and Coca Cola. The nights they laughed away. On those nights he didn’t want to fuck, he just wanted to talk shit and laugh. He brought a record player over one night and a few seventy-eights. They kicked back and listened to T-Bone Walker and B.B. King. Lappy bragged that he had met both men. “They always be down at my man’s place, the Memphis Roll. You can’t come through Arkansas and not play the Roll.”

Sugar found herself there too, among the hand clapping and loud laughter of sharecroppers, house mammies and uncles celebrating their blackness, full of their sires’ spirits, getting down but not laying down for no one, not even the almighty whitey. Sugar was swept up in the raw, pulsating madness the people and the music produced. Liberated by drink and smoke, she found herself on stage next to a blind man that sang the blues so slow and sweet, people spoke on it for days afterward.

The blind man had other one-night gigs to do, the chitlin circuit was sixty-five nights of giving yourself over to segregated toilets and drinking fountains, and scared white people that suspected your lyrics carried something other than sadness or happiness. Suspected that maybe those words carried seeds of contention.

So they couldn’t have him, but Sugar was just a forty-minute ride away, and her voice rocked the men like an over-heated lover and made the women fan beneath their dresses and decide against denial that night. The Memphis Roll claimed her for their own, and Sugar found extra income and a brief release for her troubled soul.

Then there were the other times, times when Lappy came in and said nothing, just walked past her and up to the bedroom. She could put it off on the tracks that ran up and down his arms—if it wasn’t for his eyes, wild and raging with madness. During those times he did not seem to know her, and treated her like a whore, forgetting that they had broken wish bones together. During those times he rode her until she begged him to stop. When he could not find release and ordered her to take it into her mouth, he’d ram away, cussing her if her teeth got in the way. She’d have to swallow his seed; he would not allow her to waste it in the piss pan she kept beneath the bed, she had to digest it. He paid her to do it, he enjoyed watching her do it. And then he would leave, car screeching into the night, leaving Sugar shaking and bleeding.

Sugar swung the door open and was knocked back by the brilliant August sunlight.

“I been thinking that maybe we could try this here thing one more time,” Pearl said, stepping in, sweet potato pie in hand, and closing the door behind her.

It’d been weeks since Pearl and Sugar spoke to each other. Each went about her life as if the other didn’t exist, both miserable without the other. Pearl confided in Joe, leaving out the real reason she and Sugar had fought.

“You call her friend, Bit?” Joe asked when she mentioned that Sugar and her had had words.

Pearl nodded yes.

“Friends forgive,” was all he said and the matter was solved as far as he was concerned.

Pearl made it clear to Sugar that coming to her home did not for one moment mean she approved of how Sugar made her money. She was there because she believed all of God’s people could change their ways, save their souls.

Sugar stifled a laugh and lit a cigarette.
I ain’t got no soul to save,
she thought to herself. “So I hear, Miss Pearl, so I hear,” she said and exhaled enough smoke to cloak the doubt that she was sure was evident in her eyes.

“Miss Pearl, tell me about Jude,” Sugar asked delicately, realizing that this was the cause of great pain for Pearl, and most recently Sugar. Sugar had felt uneasy after she and Pearl fought. Since Pearl had called her Jude, Sugar could not sleep without waking in a cold sweat and Jude’s name on her lips.

“They never found the killer?” Sugar asked again, unable to believe that a person responsible for a crime so abominable would be allowed, by God himself, to walk this earth unpunished.

Pearl shook her head. Her hands were shaking and her voice was barely a whisper, but she assured Sugar she was fine. “It’s still hard to talk about it even after all this time,” Pearl said and wiped at the mist in her eyes. “Now you. Tell me about you. How you came to doing what you do.”

Sugar’s mouth opened and then closed. She got up to get her cigarettes. This wasn’t going to be easy. She wouldn’t start at the beginning but in the middle where the pain was numbing.

Sugar arrived back in Short Junction by bus. Fifteen years hadn’t really changed Short Junction. It was still made up of clapboard houses and barnyard dogs, except now the dogs were older, their bark less threatening, and the houses slouched a little more.

People still moved like molasses and greeted each other with Mornin’ or Evenin’ whenever they passed you in town or along a quiet patch of dirt road. No, not much had changed.

Sugar paid a young, broad-necked boy to fetch her bags and to bring them on to the Lacey place. She wanted to walk. She needed to walk. Walk Chicago, Detroit and St. Louis out of her soul.

She made her way down Route 4. The rain had come during the night and left the road muddy in some parts. Sugar’s heels sank deep into the earth, holding her hostage for short periods of time. She removed them, allowing the cool earth to seep through her nylons and kiss the soles of her feet.

She stopped to admire a field of wildflowers, resting her head against the damp wooden post and plucking at the barbed wire that entwined it. She recalled her childhood and the easy joy she’d experienced among those brilliant flowers.

She stopped two or three times to ask for directions to the Lacey home. Not because she was lost, but because she wanted to exchange words with the people of Short Junction. She needed to re-connect with what she was before she’d become Sugar the whore.

They never answered immediately; they’d have to take her in first, allowing their eyes to travel down the blue silk dress with the Chinese collar. The one with the tiny red embroidery around the neck and hemline. The one that held Sugar like a calfskin glove, one size too small. They had to take in the six-foot woman with the jet black skin, heavily shadowed eyes and blood red lips. Only after they had traveled the world that was Sugar would they point or nod (in that way country people do) in the direction she needed to go. She’d thank them and begin walking again, leaving an overall-clad old man staring after her, watching her behind roll and wiggle beneath the dress.

As she traveled farther down Route 4, moving closer to the outskirts of Short Junction, Sugar noticed that where sprawling fields of cotton once grew, now stood large homes. Great white structures with windows that traveled from the floor to the ceiling.

Her mouth fell open with astonishment. “When the hell did this all happen?” she said aloud as she stopped to marvel.

A colored woman opened the front door and stepped out, waving at Sugar as she did. Two small dogs, barely taller than her ankle, rushed out behind her and started to jump and yelp happily about her legs. The woman waved at Sugar again, smiling broadly.

Sugar stood staring. The thought of a colored woman living in a house this fine in Short Junction, Arkansas, was overwhelming.

The woman was walking quickly down the long walkway that led up to the house, trying not to step on the small dogs that encircled her feet. As she came closer, Sugar could see that the baby blue dress the woman wore was not a dress at all, but a uniform. Sugar understood now.

“How you?” the woman said breathlessly, a genuine smile resting on her lips. The dogs stopped their yapping and sat obediently at her feet, watching Sugar with their small black eyes.

“Lord have mercy, it’s gonna be a hot one today and only April,” the woman in the blue uniform exclaimed and pulled a handkerchief from her bosom, dabbing quickly at the perspiration forming above her lip. She gave Sugar a sweet smile.

“You the new girl?” she asked and snatched a quick look at Sugar from the neck down. The smile remained, but not as sweet.

“New girl?” Sugar repeated stupidly.

“Yeah, new girl. This here is the Floyd house, we expecting a new gi—maid today. You her?” The woman’s smile was visibly crumbling. “If you ain’t the new girl then what you doing ’round here?” The smile was completely gone and the voice was turning rancid like week-old milk.

Sugar leaned back hard on her heels. “I ain’t nobody’s girl or maid. I was just admiring the house, is all,” Sugar said, falling back into the Southern twang she’d so easily let slip away.

“Well, we don’t need the likes of you sniffin’ ’round here, so off with you,” the woman said and waved her hand at Sugar as if she was a bothersome fly.

The likes of you.

There was that phrase again.

“You live too far South to be so damn uppity. You and me, we the same. The likes of me is the likes of you!” Sugar said, her voice gutted with anger. She threw her bare arm out before the woman’s face so that she could see that their skin color was nearly identical.

The woman folded her arms across her bosom, rolled her eyes and clucked her tongue in disgust. Sugar’s words had left her agitated and speechless. She swung around and started back up the long walkway to the house. The dogs, startled by her sudden retreat, began yelping and jumping about her feet again.

As the woman turned, Sugar was struck by her sharp features and small slanted eyes. Like a brick, it hit her. This was the same little girl who’d questioned her so many years earlier outside Short Junction’s general store:
Ain’t you got a mamma?

The words stirred like a whirlwind in her head, preventing her from walking away. “Yeah I got’s a mamma!” she yelled to the back of the woman and waved the aged telegram like a victorious flag.

The woman turned, giving Sugar a brief puzzled look.

Later, Sugar found herself standing on the porch of the Lacey home. The once-white paint was now graying with age and peeling in large thin slices. The porch, in desperate need of repair, slouched heavily to one side.

The yard was absent of the roaming, clucking chickens that once filled the front and back yards. Sugar bent her head slightly to the left and could see that the pen that once held Shelby the hog was now empty and overgrown with weeds.