As she grew older, Violet could neither stay where she was nor go away. The well sucked her sleep, but the notion of leaving frightened her. It was True Belle who forced it. There were bully cotton crops in Palestine and people for twenty miles around were going to pick it. Rumor was the pay was ten cents for young women, a quarter for men. Three double seasons in a row of bad weather had ruined all expectations and then came the day when the blossoms jumped out fat and creamy. Everybody held his breath while the landowner squinted his eyes and spat. His two black laborers walked the rows, touching the tender flowers, fingering the soil and trying to puzzle out the sky. Then one day of light, fresh rain, four dry, hot and clear, and all of Palestine was downy with the cleanest cotton they’d ever seen. Softer than silk, and out so fast the weevils, having abandoned the fields years ago, had no time to get back there.
Three weeks. It all had to be done in three weeks or less. Everybody with fingers in a twenty-mile radius showed up and was hired on the spot. Nine dollars a bale, some said, if you grew your own; eleven dollars if you had a white friend to carry it up for pricing. And for pickers, ten cents a day for the women and a case quarter for the men.
True Belle sent Violet and two of her sisters in the fourth wagonload to go. They rode all night, assembled at dawn, ate what was handed out and shared the meadows and the stars with local people who saw no point in going all the way home for five hours’ sleep.
Violet had no talent for it. She was seventeen years old but trailed with the twelve-year-olds—making up the last in line or meeting the others on their way back down the row. For this she was put to scragging, second-picking the bushes that had a few inferior puffs left on the twigs by swifter hands than hers. Humiliated, teased to tears, she had about decided to beg a way back to Rome when a man fell out of the tree above her head and landed at her side. She had lain down one night, sulking and abashed, a little way from her sisters, but not too far. Not too far to crawl back to them swiftly if the trees turned out to be full of spirits idling the night away. The spot she had chosen to spread her blanket was under a handsome black walnut that grew at the edge of the woods bordering the acres of cotton.
The thump could not have been a raccoon’s because it said Ow. Violet rolled away too scared to speak, but raised on all fours to dash.
“Never happened before,” said the man. “I’ve been sleeping up there every night. This the first time I fell out.”
Violet could see his outline in a sitting position and that he was rubbing his arm then his head then his arm again.
“You sleep in trees?”
“If I find me a good one.”
“Nobody sleeps in trees.”
“I sleep in them.”
“Sounds softheaded to me. Could be snakes up there.”
“Snakes around here crawl the ground at night. Now who’s softheaded?”
“Could’ve killed me.”
“Might still, if my arm ain’t broke.”
“I hope it is. You won’t be picking nothing in the morning and climbing people’s trees either.”
“I don’t pick cotton. I work the gin house.”
“What you doing out here, then, Mr. High and Mighty, sleeping in trees like a bat?”
“You don’t have one nice word for a hurt man?”
“Yeah: find somebody else’s tree.”
“You act like you own it.”
“You act like you do.”
“Say we share it.”
“Not me.”
He stood up and shook his leg before trying his weight on it, then limped toward the tree.
“You not going back up there over my head.”
“Get my tarp,” he said. “Rope broke. That’s what did it.” He scanned the night for the far reaches of the branches. “See it? There it is. Hanging right there. Yep.” He sat down then, his back resting on the trunk. “Have to wait till it’s light, though,” he said and Violet always believed that because their first conversation began in the dark (when neither could see much more of the other than silhouette) and ended in a green-and-white dawn, nighttime was never the same for her. Never again would she wake struggling against the pull of a narrow well. Or watch first light with the sadness left over from finding Rose Dear in the morning twisted into water much too small.
His name was Joseph, and even before the sun rose, when it was still hidden in the woods, but freshening the world’s green and dazzling acres of white cotton against the gash of a ruby horizon, Violet claimed him. Hadn’t he fallen practically in her lap? Hadn’t he stayed? All through the night, taking her sass, complaining, teasing, explaining, but talking, talking her through the dark. And with daylight came the bits of him: his smile and his wide watching eyes. His buttonless shirt open to a knot at the waist exposed a chest she claimed as her own smooth pillow. The shaft of his legs, the plane of his shoulders, jawline and long fingers—she claimed it all. She knew she must be staring, and tried to look away, but the contrasting color of his two eyes brought her glance back each and every time. She grew anxious when she heard workers begin to stir, anticipating the breakfast call, going off in the trees to relieve themselves, muttering morning sounds—but then he said, “I’ll be back in our tree tonight. Where you be?”
“Under it,” she said and rose from the clover like a woman with important things to do.
She did not worry what could happen in three weeks when she was supposed to take her two dollars and ten cents back to True Belle. As it turned out, she sent it back with her sisters and stayed in the vicinity hunting work. The straw boss had no faith in her, having watched her sweating hard to fill her sack as quickly as the children, but she was highly and suddenly vocal in her determination.
She moved in with a family of six in Tyrell and worked at anything to be with Joe whenever she could. It was there she became the powerfully strong young woman who could handle mules, bale hay and chop wood as good as any man. It was there where the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet grew shields no gloves or shoes could match. All for Joe Trace, a double-eyed nineteen-year-old who lived with an adopted family, worked gins and lumber and cane and cotton and corn, who butchered when needed, plowed, fished, sold skins and game—and who was willing. He loved the woods. Loved them. So it was shocking to his family and friends not when he agreed to marry Violet, but that, thirteen years later, he agreed to take her to Baltimore, where she said all the houses had separate rooms and water came to you—not you to it. Where colored men worked harbors for $2.50 a day, pulling cargo from ships bigger than churches, and others drove up to the very door of your house to take you where you needed to be. She was describing a Baltimore of twenty-five years ago and a neighborhood neither she nor Joe could rent in, but she didn’t know that, and never knew it, because they went to the City instead. Their Baltimore dreams were displaced by more powerful ones. Joe knew people living in the City and some who’d been there and come home with tales to make Baltimore weep. The money to be earned for doing light work—standing in front of a door, carrying food on a tray, even cleaning strangers’ shoes—got you in a day more money than any of them had earned in one whole harvest. Whitepeople literally threw money at you—just for being neighborly: opening a taxi door, picking up a package. And anything you had or made or found you could sell in the streets. In fact, there were streets where colored people owned all the stores; whole blocks of handsome colored men and women laughing all night and making money all day. Steel cars sped down the streets and if you saved up, they said, you could get you one and drive as long as there was road.
For fourteen years Joe listened to these stories and laughed. But he resisted them too, until, abruptly, he changed his mind. No one, not even Violet, knew what it was that permitted him to leave his fields and woods and secret lonely valleys. To give away his fishing pole, his skinning knife—every piece of his gear but one, and borrow a suitcase for their things. Violet never knew what it was that fired him up and made him want—all of a sudden, but lat
er than most—to move to the City. She supposed that the dinner that tickled everybody must have played a part in Joe’s change of mind. If Booker T. was sitting down to eat a chicken sandwich in the President’s house in a city called capital, near where True Belle had had such a good time, then things must be all right, all right. He took his bride on a train ride electric enough to pop their eyes and danced on into the City.
Violet thought it would disappoint them; that it would be less lovely than Baltimore. Joe believed it would be perfect. When they arrived, carrying all of their belongings in one valise, they both knew right away that perfect was not the word. It was better than that.
Joe didn’t want babies either so all those miscarriages—two in the field, only one in her bed—were more inconvenience than loss. And citylife would be so much better without them. Arriving at the train station back in 1906, the smiles they both smiled at the women with little children, strung like beads over suitcases, were touched with pity. They liked children. Loved them even. Especially Joe, who had a way with them. But neither wanted the trouble. Years later, however, when Violet was forty, she was already staring at infants, hesitating in front of toys displayed at Christmas. Quick to anger when a sharp word was flung at a child, or a woman’s hold of a baby seemed awkward or careless. The worst burn she ever made was on the temple of a customer holding a child across her knees. Violet, lost in the woman’s hand-patting and her knee-rocking the little boy, forgot her own hand holding the curling iron. The customer flinched and the skin discolored right away. Violet moaned her apologies and the woman was satisfied until she discovered that the whole curl was singed clean off. Skin healed, but an empty spot in her hairline…Violet had to forgo payment to shut her up.
By and by longing became heavier than sex: a panting, unmanageable craving. She was limp in its thrall or rigid in an effort to dismiss it. That was when she bought herself a present; hid it under the bed to take out in secret when it couldn’t be helped. She began to imagine how old that last miscarried child would be now. A girl, probably. Certainly a girl. Who would she favor? What would her speaking voice sound like? After weaning time, Violet would blow her breath on the babygirl’s food, cooling it down for the tender mouth. Later on they would sing together, Violet taking the alto line, the girl a honeyed soprano. “Don’t you remember, a long time ago, two little babes their names I don’t know, carried away one bright summer’s day, lost in the woods I hear people say that the sun went down and the stars shone their light. Poor babes in the woods they laid down and died. When they were dead a robin so red put strawberry leaves over their heads.” Aw. Aw. Later on Violet would dress her hair for her the way the girls wore it now: short, bangs paper sharp above the eyebrows? Ear curls? Razor-thin part on the side? Hair sliding into careful waves marcelled to a T?
Violet was drowning in it, deep-dreaming. Just when her breasts were finally flat enough not to need the binders the young women wore to sport the chest of a soft boy, just when her nipples had lost their point, mother-hunger had hit her like a hammer. Knocked her down and out. When she woke up, her husband had shot a girl young enough to be that daughter whose hair she had dressed to kill. Who lay there asleep in that coffin? Who posed there awake in the photograph? The scheming bitch who had not considered Violet’s feelings one tiniest bit, who came into a life, took what she wanted and damn the consequences? Or mama’s dumpling girl? Was she the woman who took the man, or the daughter who fled her womb? Washed away on a tide of soap, salt and castor oil. Terrified, perhaps, of so violent a home. Unaware that, had it failed, had she braved mammymade poisons and mammy’s urgent fists, she could have had the best-dressed hair in the City. Instead, she hung around in the fat knees of strangers’ children. In shop windows, and baby carriages left for a moment in the sun. Not realizing that, bitch or dumpling, the two of them, mother and daughter, could have walked Broadway together and ogled the clothes. Could be sitting together, cozy in the kitchen, while Violet did her hair.
“Another time,” she said to Alice Manfred, “another time I would have loved her too. Just like you did. Just like Joe.” She was holding her coat lapels closed, too embarrassed to let her hostess hang it up lest she see the lining.
“Maybe,” said Alice. “Maybe. You’ll never know now, though, will you?”
“I thought she was going to be pretty. Real pretty. She wasn’t.”
“Pretty enough, I’d say.”
“You mean the hair. The skin color.”
“Don’t tell me what I mean.”
“Then what? What he see in her?”
“Shame on you. Grown woman like you asking me that.”
“I have to know.”
“Then ask the one who does know. You see him every day.”
“Don’t get mad.”
“Will if I want to.”
“All right. But I don’t want to ask him. I don’t want to hear what he has to say about it. You know what I’m asking.”
“Forgiveness is what you’re asking and I can’t give you that. It’s not in my power.”
“No, not that. That’s not it, forgiveness.”
“What, then? Don’t get pitiful. I won’t stand for you getting pitiful, hear me?”
“We born around the same time, me and you,” said Violet. “We women, me and you. Tell me something real. Don’t just say I’m grown and ought to know. I don’t. I’m fifty and I don’t know nothing. What about it? Do I stay with him? I want to, I think. I want…well, I didn’t always…now I want. I want some fat in this life.”
“Wake up. Fat or lean, you got just one. This is it.”
“You don’t know either, do you?”
“I know enough to know how to behave.”
“Is that it? Is that all it is?”
“Is that all what is?”
“Oh shoot! Where the grown people? Is it us?”
“Oh, Mama.” Alice Manfred blurted it out and then covered her mouth.
Violet had the same thought: Mama. Mama? Is this where you got to and couldn’t do it no more? The place of shade without trees where you know you are not and never again will be loved by anybody who can choose to do it? Where everything is over but the talking?
They looked away from each other then. The silence went on and on until Alice Manfred said, “Give me that coat. I can’t look at that lining another minute.”
Violet stood up and took off her coat, carefully pulling her arms trapped in frayed silk. Then she sat down and watched the seamstress go to work.
“All I could think of was to step out on him like he did me.”
“Fool,” said Alice and broke the thread.
“Couldn’t name him if my life depended on it.”
“Bet he can name you.”
“Let him.”
“What did you think that was going to solve?”
Violet didn’t answer.
“Did it get you your husband’s attention?”
“No.”
“Open my niece’s grave?”
“No.”
“Do I have to say it again?”
“Fool? No. No, but tell me, I mean, listen. Everybody I grew up with is down home. We don’t have children. He’s what I got. He’s what I got.”
“Doesn’t look so,” said Alice. Her stitches were invisible to the eye.
Late in March, sitting in Duggie’s drugstore, Violet played with a spoon, recalling the visit she had paid to Alice that morning. She had come early. Chore time and Violet wasn’t doing any.
“It’s different from what I thought,” she said. “Different.”
Violet meant twenty years of life in a City better than perfect, but Alice did not ask her what she meant. Did not ask her whether the City, with its streets all laid out, aroused jealousy too late for anything but foolishness. Or if it was the City that produced a crooked kind of mourning for a rival young enough to be a daughter.
They had been talking about prostitutes and fighting women—Alice nettled; Violet indifferent.
Then silence while Violet drank tea and listened to the hissing iron. By this time the women had become so easy with each other talk wasn’t always necessary. Alice ironed and Violet watched. From time to time one murmured something—to herself or to the other.
“I used to love that stuff,” said Violet.
Alice smiled, knowing without looking up that Violet meant the starch. “Me too,” she said. “Drove my husband crazy.”
“Is it the crunch? Couldn’t be the taste.”
Alice shrugged. “Only the body knows.”
The iron hissed at the damp fabric. Violet leaned her cheek on her palm. “You iron like my grandmother. Yoke last.”
“That’s the test of a first-class ironing.”
“Some do it yoke first.”
“And have to do it over. I hate a lazy ironing.”
“Where you learn to sew like that?”
“They kept us children busy. Idle hands, you know.”
“We picked cotton, chopped wood, plowed. I never knew what it was to fold my hands. This here is as close as I ever been to watching my hands do nothing.”
Eating starch, choosing when to tackle the yoke, sewing, picking, cooking, chopping. Violet thought about it all and sighed. “I thought it would be bigger than this. I knew it wouldn’t last, but I did think it’d be bigger.”
Alice refolded the cloth around the handle of the pressing iron. “He’ll do it again, you know. And again and again and again.”
“In that case I’d better throw him out now.”
“Then what?”
Violet shook her head. “Watch the floorboards, I guess.”
“You want a real thing?” asked Alice. “I’ll tell you a real one. You got anything left to you to love, anything at all, do it.”
Violet raised her head. “And when he does it again? Don’t mind what people think?”
“Mind what’s left to you.”
“You saying take it? Don’t fight?”
Alice put down her iron, hard. “Fight what, who? Some mishandled child who saw her parents burn up? Who knew better than you or me or anybody just how small and quick this little bitty life is? Or maybe you want to stomp somebody with three kids and one pair of shoes. Somebody in a raggedy dress, the hem dragging in the mud. Somebody wanting arms just like you do and you want to go over there and hold her but her dress is muddy at the hem and the people standing around wouldn’t understand how could anybody’s eyes go so flat, how could they? Nobody’s asking you to take it. I’m sayin make it, make it!”