The Wilful Daughter (46 page)

“
I can’t take another Sunday at his house, another birthday, my birthday included, of cake and ice cream and family celebration. Nobody ever asks me what I want to do. Not my wife, not her parents. I am always told what to do and I hate it!”

More than anything else he hated being the Blacksmith’s son-in-law.

“
Nothing I have suffered or will suffer can be worse than this.”

On the front porch of what should have been his happy home, he collapsed into tears at all he had lost marrying the Blacksmith’s oldest daughter.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

On a June morning as the Piano Man was in his office preparing for the last week of the university and his mother-in-law was rubbing the back of his wife as her huge belly moved before her, a car crept up in front of the Blacksmith’s house and parked ever so gently. Two men got out, one went to the screen door to knock and when he didn’t get a response he said a loud: “Excuse me, hello?” The other waited by the rear car door.

Bira appeared, saw the bright, white, shiny, clean car and wondered what in the world had happened to bring this sight to her eyes. “Yes?” was all she could say to the bright eyes of the brown skinned man before her.

“
Ma’am, sorry to disturb you, but I’m looking for Mrs. Bira Brown. Would you be she?”

“
Why yes,” the Blacksmith’s wife replied and watched the man at the car wondering what he was doing.

“
I’m glad to hear that, Ma’am, eh, Mrs. Brown.” He turned and looked at the car, slightly pointing inside. “You see, I’m a friend of your daughter June and. . .”

“
June?” And without listening to a word he said, without thinking that what he said was important, she opened the door and sped past him running on short old legs to the car as if she knew this is how June would come home.

If she had listened she would have heard Madman Jeffries’ prepared speech (he had been coached by June) about how they had traveled all the way from the District of Columbia with her lying sick in back. How she had gotten sick in New York but didn’t really know it until she caught up with him in DC and how the man that hit her with the pipe, the man who robbed her (and probably raped her but June told him to leave that part out because it would just upset her mother) was now dead by unknown hands. Probably black hands. And lots of them.

Bira didn’t hear any of this as she pushed the man at the door aside and opened it to find her tiny daughter lying under one of Mama Jeffries’ finest quilts and shriveled up from pain and the inability to hold food on her stomach.

Bira put both hands to her mouth.

Minnelsa came to the door.

Ophelia, rubbing her mother’s stomach as she had been instructed to do by her grandmother when she had left to answer the door, didn’t know what to make of all the commotion.

“
Bring her in,” Bira said almost in tears. “Bring her in the house now.”

Floyd got into the car and gently heaved the tiny woman out, handing her over to Madman. Minnelsa held the door as Ophelia, still rubbing her stomach asked: “Who’s that lady?”

Bira shed the last tear she would ever shed on the subject, wiped her eyes with her handsome apron, and told them: “Put my daughter in the last bedroom on the right.”

“
Mama,” Ophelia asked Minnelsa who quickly sat down at the sight of her sister “Why they putting that little lady in my room?”

Minnelsa had no answer.

Madman carried June as if she were a prized package, a gift that had come from the gods. She was asleep in his arms and that was how he liked her, this tiny bundle usually so full of life. To look at him you would know in a minute he loved her. But no one was looking at him. They were all as concerned as he was about June. With the exception of his mother, who had read the pain on his face, he had told no one about this love he felt.

Mona Jeffries had known the day he had stepped into her house. That look remained in his eyes. “She got you bad, boy.”

“
Mama, what you talking about?” He had tried to push it off.

“
Oh, let’s see. How about the way you talk to her and about her? The fact that you have not gotten the girl in the family way, the fact that she adores you for your kindness and you ask for nothing in return.”

“
She said that?”

His mama laughed: “There’s also the fact that your blue-green eyes turn into bright shiny emeralds whenever she walks into the room. Son, you in love and don’t know what to do about it.”

All he could do now was take her home to be with her own family.

Minnelsa gasped at the sight of her sister and held her stomach afraid of what would happen if she gasped again. She got up and followed the procession to the bedroom that had changed little since June left. The red dress still hung in the closet under an old coat. They were all ashamed to touch it. And on the wall were paintings of June done by Willie. Minnelsa had thought her sister vain for putting the pictures there. “You wake up every morning and look at yourself twice: once in the mirror and then again on the wall where Willie has plastered pictures of you.” Now she knew that June had left the pictures there to encourage their brother to work, to make the most of his talents, to paint the pictures that he would never get to paint in Florida.

“
Mama!” little Ophelia said when she saw June’s face come from beneath the sheets. “That’s the lady in the picture, isn’t it?”

Minnelsa forgot about Ophelia the same as Bira forgot about her. But the little girl was still there, standing in the door as these strange men from the big white car put this strange woman in the bed in her room.

“
What happened to her?” Bira asked.

Madman didn’t hear the question because he was so busy looking at his June, the little singer that he had found after the Piano Man, trying to think of some way to get June out of the way, had told him to find her. So Floyd spoke up.

“
Well, ma’am, it be like this.” Floyd was good with the banjo and great with the guitar but when he spoke he needed not to. Most women found his slick hair wonderful and his lips luscious. Most women didn’t let him talk at all when he was with them. “We was in Washington about to play at this club see, when we hear the Miss June is back in town at Mama Jeffries.”

“
Mama Jeffries?” Bira was stroking the brow of her daughter.

“
My mother, ma’am.” Madman interjected. “She met June some years ago before she got famous.”

“
Famous?” Minnelsa said from the door.

Floyd started talking again. “Oh, yes, ma’am. Why she be one of the most famous colored singers in New York City. Be on the same labels in Chicago with Bessie Smith. It wasn’t her own record. I mean she was singing with some other people, but I hear that. . .”

“
Will you shut up, Floyd?” Madman finally said. He swallowed, turned to Bira and told her: “Sorry. We’ve been traveling for four days, ma’am, maybe more. But we were traveling slow, didn’t want to jostle her. She’d been asking to come back here ever since the accident in New York.”

Bira said nothing so Minnelsa asked: “What accident?” Ophelia crept into the room unnoticed.

“
This man admired her singing,” Madman tried to explain. He was trying to do it just the way June had told him to do before she started sleeping all the time. That’s what the colored doctor in Maryland said she would do: sleep until she could wake up and face what had happened. “He started following her. White man in New York. One night he asks her to go home with him and she tells him to leave her alone. She’s on her way back to her. . . apartment (he thought that sounded better than a tiny room in a Harlem hotel) and he follows her. He hits her in the head with a pipe and steals her purse cause he wants something to remember her by.” That was all he was supposed to say.

Bira turned and looked at him as if to say: “Boy, do you think I’m a fool?” But Madman didn’t utter another word. Even Floyd didn’t open his mouth.

“
He liked her that much?” Minnelsa asked naively and Madman nodded his head, and soon Floyd’s head flopped up and down in eager agreement.

“
When they found her, the men she was singing with found her, Miz Brown, they took her to a doctor in New Jersey because they thought she might die. I just think she had had enough, ma’am cause he said the blow wasn’t that bad to her skull, it was the blow to her heart that did it.” Bira still looked at him. “She didn’t want to be out there singing and performing anymore, ma’am. That’s what the doctor, that’s what we believed.” He crossed his hands in front of himself and stood there waiting for absolution from a lie. Only it wasn’t a lie.

Still under a thin veil of sleep June was weakly listening to it all. Madman was right, she had lost the will to live with them, to be an up-south Negro in the North.

She told no one what happened, not Madman, not even Mama Jeffries. She hadn’t told them how he had followed her as she left the club to have a cigarette and had lit it for her. How he had explained that he could give her anything she wanted if she gave him everything that he wanted. When she said no, he called her a nigger bitch and gave her the oh-so-tiring, oh-so-famous, ‘who do you think you are?’ speech. Men gave it all the time, black or white.

Black men gave it with the twang of: “You think you better than me ’cause you can get a job in the white man’s house?”

White men gave it with the twang of: “You must think you as good as a white woman but they ain’t shit either.”

She had heard it often enough to make her sick.

Men looked at her and automatically wanted her- the perfect skin, the curvaceous tiny doll like body. They didn’t think she had the right to tell them no.

Why should she? She had no husband, no lover to vouch for her. She had a voice and she was pretty but that didn’t count for much when you were trying to tell a man that was a hundred pounds heavier than you that his breath stank, that his wife was looking for him or that you just plain didn’t want to be bothered.

The white man had given her the speech as she kept on walking. She didn’t stop. And that must have made him mad because he came after her and grabbed her by the throat and threw her down on the ground.

He tore at her clothes and she screamed, screamed like he had no right to her body, like he had no right to do what he wanted to do to her.

He told her to shut up and she screamed again.

Then he hit her. Hit her with a heavy pipe that was lying nearby.

She was coming to when she realized he was inside her and being pulled out rather quickly. Men were standing over her, men of various shades of brown. A woman covered her, and three black men, one of them she was sure was Roger, beat the man, and then took what was left of him she didn’t know where.

She woke up at the office of the doctor, a tired colored doctor whose office smelled of poverty and of a great deal of pride. He stopped the bleeding, cleansed her where she had been raped and told them to get her out of town. With the white man dead and his desire to have her well known, everybody would put two and two together soon enough.

It was Roger’s idea to take her to Mama Jeffries. It was Madman’s idea to send her home. Not with Roger but with her own son. Maybe on the way Madman would say how he felt. Maybe on the way she would say she needed a husband and they would settle down and get married. Mama Jeffries liked her. Mama Jeffries wanted her son happy. She was a mother and she could hope.

Now June was at home, her mother was rubbing her head, soon she would touch where the pipe hit, the lump was still there. Mama, you mustn’t touch there. She was trying to wake up and talk to her mother so she opened her eyes.

The first thing she saw was Ophelia.

Her baby.

She couldn’t speak, not because of the wound but because the baby, the little girl (she was almost five now wasn’t she?) was so beautiful.

They all saw her open her eyes but no one spoke.

Except Ophelia.

“
Grandma, that’s the lady in the pictures!” she said again with the innocence only a child could have. When she spoke June noticed that she was rubbing Minnelsa’s belly. Her sister was pregnant, must be having her third or fourth child June thought. Things seemed alright. The Piano Man was taking care of business.

She tried to focus enough to look about. Jewel was there and Fawn. They weren’t married yet? Where was Rosa?

Her father was not there.

“
Mama,” her voice was weak and she was so tired she couldn’t really speak. Perhaps it was being in her old room, maybe it was seeing her daughter, maybe it was not being in the north anymore. Suddenly she was thirsty.

“
Mama, water please.”

“
I’ll get it.” Minnelsa forgot her own condition and scurried off to the kitchen.

“
Ma’am, she keeps bringing everything back up. We can’t make her eat a thing.” A calm and dignified Floyd provided the information.

“
Did she ask you to feed her?” Bira said looking at him and then at Madman. They shook their heads. “Then she didn’t want it. The body asks for what it needs.” She turned from them to her child. “You want water, daughter?”

“
Yes,” June said dryly. For the first time in days she wanted water. And she wanted biscuits, and peach cobbler and ribs. She wanted to climb the peach tree and get that one piece of fruit that wouldn’t fall. She wanted to pinch a piece of dough while her sister wasn’t looking. She wanted to eat sweet figs out of season. “Mama, can I come home? Can I stay home with you?” she begged, a tiny hand wrapped around her mother’s tiny arm.