The Wilful Daughter (42 page)

The men didn’t find her especially beautiful since these college girls, these girls with the gift of money and education and families who didn’t want to lock them up and throw away the key took such good care of themselves. Those with the darkest skin had the smoothest skin and the shapeliest bodies. Those with the kinkiest hair got it done every other week. They wore clothes that accentuated their femininity and they walked down the streets as if they owned them. Those who could have passed for white didn’t. They might have thought themselves superior but if they mentioned it, they were ignored.

She found they read books because they liked to and talked about history because they liked to and wanted to be teachers because they wanted to.

They were allowed to make choices-and they choose to make them away from home. Choices she had never been allowed. Choices her sisters, her old maid sisters who were probably still tied to the Blacksmith’s apron strings, didn’t know about. Things might have been different had she been allowed to make choices. But her father was the Blacksmith and he assumed in his world he was king.

She was going to like the North, even though Washington, DC, wasn’t real North.

She sang at the clubs at night and returned home to Mama Jeffries earlier than her son or the rest of the band. She would sleep happily thinking of how they looked dancing before her, all her young people, her free young people with plenty of education and life around them. Lovers who stared at each other in the middle of the floor (she had learned to tell that these types had never been between the sheets by the way their eyes longed for one another), and there were those who moved to impress those they were not dancing with - those they wanted. There were those who sat and touched hands as if this was as intimate as they were going to get. June loved these people.

When she finished singing, she might sit with them if asked. They were amazed that she knew anything about Shakespeare and Beethoven and the great painters of Europe. They talked to her because she was gifted, talented all on her own. Nobody here knew she was a Blacksmith’s daughter. Nobody cared.

“
I left college to sing because it was my passion,” she told a few of them.

A handsome young man told her: “I understand that feeling. I wandered through the South and the North like you but I fear the retaliation from both whites and blacks when I return to my home. Things down South don’t change much or often.”

They’d talk and she’d talk until sometimes she wasn’t sure she would be able to sing the next set. But she could. For them. Her children.

The intellectuals would ask her what a song meant, and she would tell them: “Every line means something different to every singer.”

“
Why sing a song so sad, so backwoods and so forlorn?” they’d ask her in their proper university-educated tones.

She’d tell them: “Because you feel it.” And before they could ask what the feeling was she’d add: “That isn’t something you can explain.” Then they’d get lost in a discussion of what you can’t explain and she’d leave them arguing amongst themselves.

Her children. She enjoyed her moments as one of them so much.

It was in DC that she met Roger. Roger with his green bedroom eyes, Roger who played the piano like the wind, Roger who seduced her as she had never been seduced before.

He didn’t use the piano, for he couldn’t play as well as the Piano Man. He didn’t sweet-talk her like Madman or try to take her by force like Bo had.

He was the first man that made her feel like a real woman.

There were dates; dinners after she finished the clubs at some of the nice places that colored could go. He introduced her to dressmakers and clothing shops and hairdressers that he thought she might need to know in her profession. He paid for the dinners and asked for nothing in return.

Madman hated him. Each time Roger showed up with flowers, each time he held the door for her as they walked out together, each time he appeared in the room, Madman’s face would turn inside out with envy. “I could do that crap if I had a mind to,” he told Red.

“
Naw you couldn’t,” Red replied. “June told you once she didn’t want you. Besides, Madman, look at the boy. He got class. None of us country singing boys got that. June likes his class.”

It wasn’t his class, although June liked it. What she really liked was being courted and his understanding of her: her need to sing and her need to be loved.

He took things slow at first. He even requested the first kiss he got from her. He assumed nothing.

Madman stopped trying to get next to June as soon as Roger was in the picture, but he didn’t like having him around. Roger had one of those classy little bands that only played in the best of places, usual white places and he knew Roger was in the market for a singer. The last one he had drank herself to death. He told June this was why he didn’t want the man near her.

“
He’s trying to take you away from me, from the band I mean,” Madman told her one night as they sat on his mother’s porch.

“
Don’t be silly,” June told him and patted his hand. He pulled it away. Lately he had started doing that a lot. “He hasn’t even mentioned it. Besides I wouldn’t go if he asked. I belong with you and the boys. You taught me everything I know.”

Madman knew that wasn’t going to be enough to keep her in the long run so he said: “Maybe not now, but once that Negro gets you in his bed he’s gonna make you do whatever he wants. Mark my words.”

She frowned in the darkness. “What makes you think that’s gonna happen with him?”

“
He’s working on you, ain’t he?” Madman lit a rolled cigarette. “He’s bringing you flowers, taking you to fancy places and you think he’s courting you for your high yeller looks but he ain’t. He can have any girl, no matter what color, that he pleases. He’s courting your voice.” Then he lowered his own voice so she barely heard him. “When he gives it to you watch, you gonna sing. You gonna sing whenever he tells you too ’cause you gonna like what he does to you.”

She had wanted to slap him, but she knew she had too much class to do that. Besides if he was right, he’d always be able to say he told her so.

Unfortunately Madman had been right. It proved to her how little she knew about men.

After a month of coming to hear her sing, of taking her out to dinner and showing her the right places and the right people it happened.

He showed up one night when she was expecting him to take her out, but he was tired. “My day was long and well, could we make it some other night? I’m not up to going out and being with people.”

June was sweet. “That’s fine. Just sit and rest.”

As she gently touched his arm he suggested: “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind coming back to my place for a little while.”

“
Sure,” she told him as she thought about all his kindnesses and the fact that sitting in Madman’s parlor with his mother upstairs bathing the children was probably going to be uncomfortable. “Let’s go.”

Once in his small but clean apartment, he wanted to lie back and rest on the sofa, and asked would she rub his head. Relaxing next to him, she massaged his temples until he sighed and she felt him lose his resolve and turn to kiss her. The kiss had too much passion for a man with a headache - and in the end - once she had been carried to his bed and had been startled by the fire he brought out in her, she laughed and was glad that he hadn’t been ill. She had to admit that this type of lovemaking was more appealing and satisfying. She enjoyed him.

But she didn’t love him.

“
He finally got to you, didn’t he?” Madman watched her come in one evening with that glow associated with lovemaking.

“
Madman, leave me alone. I’m not doing anything you don’t do.”

They argued and no matter what she said Madman would not let go of his hatred of Roger. “He gonna make you leave us. Its how men like him work. He don’t want you to love him. He wants you to sing for him.”

She finally told him after night after night of arguing: “You forcing me to make a choice. I never wanted to leave Mama Jeffries or the band, but I will not listen to you berate Roger, his talents, his bands or the fact that I care for him in a different way from you.”

Madman had enough. “You gon’ be with that punk one way you might as well be with him all the way.”

So she left to be with Roger. To have fun with Roger and get gifts from Roger.

Soon, very soon, she found out Roger wanted her just for her voice.

At first she didn’t mind singing in the nicer places, the places where she had to wait in the kitchen and enter from the back. Places where they listened to her and weren’t so drunk they didn’t hear the song, just felt the mood. Places where people didn’t pull knives on each other because of something that happened the year before.

Once she was walking down the street and saw a sign outside the club with her name on it. Roger said a picture was going to be taken of her soon in some fancy dress but she didn’t care. There were flyers all over town with her name on them. “Featuring Miss June Brown.” If only papa and mama and Willie could see how dreams come true.

With her Roger got more work, more of the good upper class gigs as he told his boys. And at night he was willing to use all his manly charms to make her happy in bed because she was making him happy on the stage. They did Washington, Chicago and Philadelphia like that. Happy on stage, happy in bed. She didn’t try to be a wife. She didn’t even try to be a lover. She was just Miss June Brown, a singer, lying in a silk gown next to a brown butt naked man who knew how to love her.

After two months of this happiness, in the last week they played in Chicago, a tall beautiful brown skinned woman walked into the joint. Every man she passed raised his eyes to look at her, some even raised their glasses. Even the women had to give her respect - all heads turned. She made two of June in height and her figure was more than June could ever hope for. She reminded June of the statues of Greek goddesses that she had seen in the art books at the college, except this woman’s features were not like that of any Greek.

The two men the woman shared the table with were old friends of Roger’s from Washington. They had not seen him perform since they had moved to the windy city. They smiled as June sang, they nodded their heads in time with the music, even patted their hands and feet with the beat.

But the woman eyed Roger all night long.

It was the first time June got jealous and the last time any man would ever make a fool of her.

She tried not to wait up for Roger but she knew he wouldn’t show. She pondered what she would say to him as she lie in that big bed, what she would ask him about his evening, where he had been and with whom. June thought about that big tall woman, her legs wrapped around her man and she cried herself to sleep. In the morning, when she woke to the empty pillow beside her, she decided to accept it. “I will not do the foolish things that many women do when they don’t want to realize its over between them and their man.” She didn’t pretend he was sick someplace, dead on the street or taking care of a sick friend. She knew the truth. Green eyed Roger was with that woman.

When she went out to get some coffee, she passed by one of the musicians’ rooms and heard Roger’s familiar moan of pleasure. She heard a woman’s passionate sigh of relief. She stood outside that door for almost an hour and listened and listened until she heard them get up and talk about what they were going to do today and what they were going to do tonight.

She couldn’t believe she was doing this, being just like an ordinary snubbed female. She couldn’t understand why her feet failed to move every time she thought about it, why every time she told them ‘take me out of here’, they failed her. How could she stay there and let herself be humiliated? But she clung to every sound, every word like some verbal voyeur who couldn’t get enough of the pleasure others were having. So this was the way they sounded when they made love. So this was what it meant to be outside yourself.

June didn’t love Roger but he was hers and she wanted to kill him. Since the incident with Bo, she had been carrying an ice pick for protection. All she had ever had to do with a man when he placed his unwelcome hand on her thigh and tried to plant an unwelcome kiss on her shoulder was open her bag and show it. They left her alone. Now she slowly opened her purse to pull it out. “When they come out that door,” she whispered to herself. Who would she stab-him or the girl? Kill them both, she decided right in the hall. Stab her in the heart and him in his sex. Yes, someone had once told her about a man who cheated on his woman and she got even with him by offering to bathe him from head to toe and then pouring boiling water on the offending parts.

Yes, she would hurt him there.

But when they turned the knob to leave the room, she ran, ran out of the building down the street and didn’t stop running until she couldn’t breathe anymore. She sank to the ground and started to cry. She reminded herself that she didn’t love Roger, but he had done her wrong.

June had stayed in the North too long. He was starting to treat her like one of those women that had to put up with whatever a man was doing so as to show a good front for the rest of the world. June decided she was not going to do that.

The first thing she did was remove all his belongings from the room they had shared and made it hers. She left them in a box outside the door of the room he had shared with the tall beautiful woman. Next she showed Roger two could play at the game by taking the first man that looked at her with longing to her bed. She did not remember the man’s face or his name and never again welcomed him to her body. Roger and June never spoke a word about what transpired. But June knew after that she had stayed in the North too long.