Three Days Before the Shooting ... (68 page)

Bliss turned to look at Daddy Hickman, seeing the curved flash of his upper teeth and the swell of his great chest as with arms outspread he began to sing…. When suddenly, from the left of the tent he heard a scream. It was a different note, and when he turned he could see the swirling movement of a woman’s form, but strangely, no one was reaching out to keep her from hurting herself, or from jumping out of her underclothes and showing her womanness as some of the ladies sometimes did. Then he could see her coming on, a tall, redheaded woman in a purple-red dress, coming on screaming through the soprano section of the big choir where the members, wearing their square, flat-topped caps, were standing and knocking over chairs, letting her through as she dashed among them striking out with her arms as she moved forward toward the front.

She’s a sinner coming to testify
, he thought….
A white—? Is she white …?
hearing,

He’s mine, mine! That’s Cudworth, my child. My baby. You gypsy niggers stole him, my baby. You robbed him of his birthright!

Yes, she is white
, he thought, seeing the wild eyes and the hair streaming like a field of wheat coming toward him now at a pace which seemed suddenly dream-like.
What’s she doing here, a white sinner? Mov
in
g
toward him like the devil in a nightmare, as now a man’s voice boomed from far away, Madam, Lady, please—this here’s the House of God! But even then not realizing that she was clawing and pushing her way toward him; thinking,
Cudworth? Who’s Cudworth?
Until suddenly there she was, her hot voice screaming
in his ear, her pale face shooting down toward him like an image springing out of a toppling mirror, her green eyes wide, her nostrils flaring. Then he felt her arms lock around him and his head was crushed against the hardness of her breast, hard into the sharp, sweet woman-smell of her.
Me, she means me
, he thought, as something strange and painful stirred within him. Then, as she crushed him closer, he could no longer breathe, squeezing and shaking him and he felt his Bible slipping from his fingers and tried to hold on, but she screamed again with a sudden movement, her voice bursting hot and shrill into the sudden hush. And he felt his Bible fall away in the well-like echo now punctuated by the heavy rasping of her breathing. It was then he realized that she was trying to lift him from the coffin. Tearing at it to get him out.

I’m taking him home to his heritage, he heard. He’s mine. You understand. I’m his mother.

It was strangely far away, like a scene unfolding under water.
Who is she?
flashed through his mind.
Where’s she taking me? She’s strong. But my mother went away. Paradise, up high…. A ghost…

Then he was looking at the familiar faces, seeing their bodies frozen in odd postures like Body and the others when they played a game of statue. He thought:
They’re scared. She’s scaring them all…
. Then his head jerked around and he could see Daddy Hickman leaning over the platform just above them, bracing his hands against his thighs, his arms rigid, with a look of amazement on his great laughing-happy face as he violently shook his head.

Then he was twisted again and as his head came around, his teeth clicking, it was as though a stick had stirred quiet water. He could see the people all standing looking on, one woman still rapidly fanning herself, while some were standing on chairs, holding on to the shoulders of those in front of them, their eyes and mouths wide with disbelief—until the scene crumpled like a funny paper burning in a fireplace and he saw their mouths open to utter the same words so loud and insistently that he heard only a blur of loud silence. Yet her breathing came hard and clear. His head came round to her now, close up, so that he could see the light fringe of freckles shooting across the ridge of the straight, thin nose like a covey of quail flushing across a field of snow, the wide-glowing green of her eyes. Stiff copper hair was bursting from the white temple like the wire of Daddy Hickman’s red rubber “electric” hairbrush. Then the scene swirled again and he heard a calm new sound bursting in.

JUST DIG MY GRAVE, he heard, JUST DIG MY GRAVE AND READY MY SHROUD, ‘CAUSE THIS HERE AIN’T HAPPENING! OH NO, IT AIN’T GOING TO HAPPEN. SO JUST DIG MY GRAVE!

It was a short, stooped black woman, hardly larger than a little girl, whose shoulders slanted straight down from her neck and into the white collar of
her oversized black dress, from which her deep and vibrant alto voice seemed to issue as from some source other than her mouth. He could see her coming through the crowd, shaking her head and pointing toward the earth, crying, I SAID DIG IT! I SAID GO GET THE DIGGERS! the words so intense with negation that they sounded serene, the voice rolling with eerie meaning as now she seemed to float in among the white-uniformed deaconesses. And he could see the women turning to stare wonderingly at one another, then back to the little woman who moved between them, grimly shaking her head. Then suddenly he could feel the arms tighten around his body and he was being lifted up out of the coffin and the redheaded woman screamed past his ear, Don’t you blue gums touch me! Don’t you dare!

And again it was far away, beneath the water in a dimly lit place where nothing responded as it should. For at her scream he seemed to see the little woman and the deaconesses pause as they should have paused in the House of God as well as in the world outside the House of God—then she was lifting him higher and he felt his body come up until only one foot remained caught in the pink lining and he looked down just as she swung him in her arms and he felt the coffin hard against his foot. Then it was going over, slowly like a turtle sliding off a log. It seemed to rise up of its own will, lazily; then one of the sawhorses moved and it seemed to explode.

He felt that he was going to be sick; for, glancing downward from the woman’s tightening arms, he could see the coffin still in motion. It seemed to rise up of its own will, lazily, sleepily, like Daddy Hickman turning slowly in a pleasant sleep—only it seemed to be laughing at him with its pink frog-mouth. Then as she moved him again, one of the sawhorses shifted violently and he could see the coffin tilt up at an angle and heave.

It seemed to vomit now, spilling Teddy and Easter Bunny and his glass pistol with its colored-candy BB bullets, like prizes from a paper horn-of-plenty And now even his white leather Bible was spilling out, its pages fluttering open for everyone to see. He thought,
He’ll be mad about my Bible and my bear—
and he felt a scream start up from where the woman was squeezing his stomach, as now she swung him swiftly around, causing the church tent, the flares and the people, to spin before his eyes like a great tin humming top. Then his head snapped forward and back, rattling his teeth, and in the pause he could see the deaconesses spring forward even as the spilled images from the toppling coffin lingered vividly before his eyes—gone like a splash in the sunlight, as a tall woman with short, gleaming hair and steel-rimmed eyeglasses shot from among the deaconesses, her lenses glittering harshly, and he could see her mouth come open and the other women freezing in their places, making a great silence beneath the upward curve of his own screaming voice and her head went back with an angry toss, and he could feel the high shrill slap hard against him.

What! Y’all mean to tell
me?
the woman shouted, Here in the HOUSE OF
GOD?
She’s going to come in
here?
Who?
WHO!
JUST TELL ME! WHO BORN OF MAN’S HOT CONJUNCTION WITH A WOMAN’S SINFUL BOWELS?

And like an echo now, the larger voice of the smaller woman, seeming to float up from the floor,

JUST DIG MY GRAVE, JUS’ READY MY SHROUD! I SAY JUST … the voices now booming and echoing beneath the tent.

And it was as though something heavy had plunged from a great height into the water, throwing the images into furious motion. His face was pressed hard against the red hair as now the women moved. They came like shadows flying before a torch tossed into a darkened room, their weight seeming to strike him and the strange woman who held him out of a single slow, long-floating, space-defying leap, sending the woman staggering backwards and causing her tightening arms to squash the air from his lungs so that his chest ached as it did whenever he held his breath too long between sobs. Their faces, hallowed with wrath, loomed before him, seeming to enter where his breath had been, their widespread hands beginning to tear at his body like the claws of great cats with human heads, lifting him clear of earth and coffin, and he felt himself suspended there between the redheaded woman, who now held his head, and the sisters who had seized his legs, arms, and body. And again he felt, but could not hear, his own throat’s painful
Aaaaaaaaaaaaah!

The Senator’s eyes rolled, the taste of fever filled his mouth. It was as though the stream of memories had reopened his wounds. His fingers found the button with which he could ring for the nurse but he hesitated. The large, kindly face was still looking across at him, the hoarse voice moving mellow, still evocative and compelling around him. He would wait, this time he wouldn’t run. Not now…

“Well sir, Bliss,” Hickman was saying, “here comes this white woman pushing over everybody and up to the box, and it’s like hell done erupted at a sideshow. She rushed up to the box….”

“Box?” the Senator said wearily, “You mean
coffin
, don’t you?”

Hickman looked quickly down, slightly frowning. “No, Bliss, I mean ‘box.’

It’s not a coffin ‘til it holds a dead man…. So as I was saying, she rushed up and grabs you in the box and the deaconesses leaped out of their chairs and folks started screaming, and I looked out there for some white folks to come get her, but couldn’t see none, so there it was. I could have cried like a baby, because I knew that one miserable woman could bring the whole state down on us. And there she is, out of nowhere like a puff of poison gas, right smack in the middle of our Emancipation exaltation. Bliss, it was like God had started playing practical jokes.

“Next thing I know she’s got you by the head and Sister Suzie Trumball’s got one leg and another sister’s got the other and some others are snatching you by the arms. Talking about King Solomon, he didn’t have but two women to deal with—I had seven, and one convinced that she was a different breed of cat from the rest. Yes, and the others were chock full of disagreement and dead set to probe it. I tell you, Bliss, when it comes to chillen, women just ain’t gentlemen, and the fight between her kind of woman and ours goes way back to the beginning. Back, I guess, to when women found that the only way they could turn over the responsibility of raising a child to another woman was to turn over some of the child’s love and affection along with it. They been battling ever since. One trying to figure out how to get out of the work without dividing up the affection, and the other trying to hold on to all that weight of care and those cords of emotion and love for which they figure no wages can ever pay. Because while some women work and others don’t, to a woman a baby is a baby. She ain’t rational about it, way down deep she ain’t. All it’s got to be is little and warm and helpless and cute and she wants to take it over, just like a she-cat will raise a litter of rabbits, or a she-bitch dog will mama a Maltese kitten. I guess most of those deaconesses had been nursing white folks’ chillen from the time they could first take a job and each and every one of them had helped raise somebody’s baby and loved it. Yes, and had fought battles with the white women every step of the way. It’s a wonder those babies ever grow up to have good sense with all that vicious, mute-unspoken female fighting going on over them from the day they was passed from the midwife’s or doctor’s hands into his mother’s arms and then from the minute it needed its first change of swaddling clothes, into some black woman’s waiting hands. Talking about God and the Devil fighting over a man’s soul, that situation must make a child’s heart a battleground. ‘Cause, Bliss, as you must know by now, women don’t recognize no rules except their own—men make the public rules—and they knew all about this so-called psychological warfare long before men finally recognized it and named it and took credit for inventing something new.

“So there this poor woman comes moving out of her territory and bursting into theirs. Mad, Bliss, mad! That night all those years of aggravation was multiplied against her seven times seven. Because down there her kind always wins the contest in the end—for the child, I mean—with ours being doomed to lose from the beginning and knowing it. They have got to be weaned—our women, I mean, the nursemaids. And yet, it just seems to make their love all the deeper and the tenderer. They know that when the child hits his teens they can’t hold it or help it any longer, even if she gets to be wise as Solomon. She can help with the first steps of babyhood and teach it its first good manners and love it and all like that, but she can’t do nothing about helping it take the first steps into manhood and womanhood. Ha, no!
Whoever heard of one of us knowing anything about dealing with life, or knowing a better way of facing up to the harsh times along the road? So the whole system’s turned against her then from foundation to roof; the whole beehive of what their folks consider good—’quality,’ we used to say—is moved out of her domain. They just don’t recognize no continuance of anything after that: not love, not remembrance, not understanding, sacrifice, compassion—nothing. Comes the teen time, what we used to call the ‘smell-yourself’ time, when the sweat gets musty and you start to throb, they cast out the past and start out new—baptised into Caesar’s way, Bliss. Which is the price the grown ones exact for the privilege of their being called ‘miss’ and ‘mister.’ So self-castrated of their love they pass us by, boy, they pass us by. Then as far as we’re concerned it’s ‘Put your heart on ice, put your conscience in pawn.’ Even their beloved black tit becomes an empty bag to laugh at and they grow deaf to their mammy’s lullabyes. What’s wrong with those folks, Bliss, is they can’t stand continuity, not the true kind that binds man to man and to Jesus and to God. My great-great-granddaddy was probably a savage eating human flesh, and bastardy, denied joy and shame, and humanity had to be mixed with my name a thousand times in the turmoil of slavery, and out of all that I’m a preacher. It’s a mystery but it’s based on fact, it happened body to body, belly to belly over the long years. But then? They’re all born yesterday at twelve years of age. They can’t stand continuity because if they could everything would have to be changed; there’d be more love among us, boy. But the first step in their growing up is to learn how to
spurn
love.
They have to deny it by law
, boy. Then begins the season of hate AND SHAMEFACEDNESS. Confusion leaps like fire in the bowels and false faces bloom like jimsonweed. They put on a mask, boy, and life’s turned plumb upside down.