Natchez Burning

  In the claustrophobic darkroom, they developed a slow but effective rhythm, a primitive, serpentine dance, slowly building toward ecstasy. Tom felt as though they were suspended in water, intertwined like nether creatures fulfilling some ritual that had sustained their species for millions of years. The experience transcended anything he’d ever felt with a woman. Apart from his wife, Tom’s sexual experience was limited to two prostitutes in Japan during the war. But even so, he sensed that if he’d coupled with a dozen gifted courtesans, this experience would surpass them all. There was no color in the darkroom—and barely any form, it seemed—yet his senses had never felt more alive to every stimulus. The enforced silence of their coupling drove them deeper inward, until only the oceanic pounding of blood in his ears competed with the electrical hum of the developing machine against the wall. Deprived of light and visual cues, his inner ear became confused, and the sense of being in water gave way to something still more surreal. He felt as though they were making love on some distant planet that dwarfed the earth, their bodies twenty times as dense as normal, his penis harder than it had ever been, her breasts as resilient and hard-tipped as those of a woman who’d lived in this environment all her life.

  He cursed the fact that he was behind her. He longed to kiss her mouth, her neck, her breasts again—he hadn’t even seen them!—but with the gift for anticipation she’d always possessed, Viola tilted back her head and opened her mouth to his. As he explored this alien space with his tongue, her clitoris grew so hard that it felt masculine under his fingers. He kissed and rubbed her, kissed and rubbed. At last she tore her mouth away and bit into his arm, her body convulsing in the dark. His back slammed against the door, and for a moment Tom feared it would burst open, but then his own spasms began and he abandoned all fear of being caught.

  When he finally sagged against her, Viola leaned back and nuzzled her hair in the hollow of his neck. The feeling of heightened density slowly faded. Now they were levitating in the dark, floating inches above the floor, hovering in their sealed capsule while outside the world moved in barely controlled chaos.

  “Can you reach the safelight?” he asked, still inside her.

  Viola extended her long, slender arm and pressed the switch that bathed the closet in a soft red glow. He slipped out of her then, and she slowly turned until she faced him. Her eyes were black pools in the eerie glow, but her face radiated happiness.

  “That’s the first time I’ve done this since James died,” she said softly.

  He hugged her gently. “This is the first time I’ve ever done anything outside my marriage.”

  Viola closed her eyes, and he realized what a stupid thing that was to say. “Do you think anybody heard?” he asked.

  “They’ll think we were banging on the machine to make it work.”

  When at last she opened her eyes again, he felt a mixture of unreality, guilt, and euphoria that would not diminish for many weeks. More than one boundary had been crossed in that room. The sin of adultery paled in comparison to the tribal law they had broken. Only one taboo was greater—a white woman sleeping with a black man. Viola was forbidden fruit in more ways than one, and Tom wondered how much of the intensity he’d experienced might be attributed to that fact.

  “I’ve got a problem,” she said, her voice disturbingly practical.

  “What?”

  “One of those witches from up front is liable to be waiting right outside this door.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  Viola took his hand and guided it along her inner thighs. Her panty hose were soaking wet.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, taking down a refill bottle of developer for the machine. He removed the cap and splashed some of the chemical across his shirt and trousers, more onto the floor, and some onto Viola’s panty hose.

  “We’ll tell them I was on the floor working under the machine, and you spilled this in the dark. You can go home to shower, and I’ll do the same.”

  “What about fixing the machine?”

  Tom lifted the black sheet of film from the tray atop the developer and held it up in front of the safelight. He saw the white outlines of a hip joint, its ball and socket clearly visible. “I think we fixed it the old-fashioned way.”

  “That chemical’s stinging me,” Viola whispered. “Ohh. I need to get to the bathroom.”

  Tom swallowed hard. This was the kind of moment Gavin Edwards would handle with the suave detachment of Hugh Hefner, but Tom felt only confusion and guilt.

  “It’s all right,” Viola said. “I don’t know what to say, either. But I do need water down there.”

  He kissed her forehead. “I just want you to know this meant something to me.”

  She smiled and touched his cheek. “I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t know that.”

  He took a deep breath, then opened the door and let in the harsh light of the real world.

  What followed this incident was a forty-five-day period of mutual obsession that oscillated wildly between panic and bliss. Sleep was impossible, but Tom realized that the euphoria he experienced during the hours he spent with Viola somehow made up for the deficit. Yet that euphoria was punctuated by paralyzing episodes of fear. They tried not to make stupid mistakes in the clinic, but it was impossible to endure a day without one at least closing a hand around the other’s, and most days they did more than that. Thanks to clever sabotage by Viola, the X-ray developer broke down frequently during this period. They spent so many hours “repairing” it that even Dr. Lucas—a noted skinflint—offered to buy a new machine. Four times during those weeks they met at the clinic after hours: twice to “inventory surgical instruments,” once to “make a purchasing plan” for a new autoclave and instruments, and once with no excuse at all. Craziest of all, three times Tom went to Viola’s home while pretending be on late-night house calls.

  Those hours in Viola’s house were the most revelatory of Tom’s life. Viola had always seemed modest in the clinic, but in the privacy of her home she shed her modesty with her clothes. She had no difficulty granting Tom’s desire that she sit or stand and be stared at from all sides, while he tried to take in the profound simplicity of her beauty. Her skin was soft and without blemish. This perfection was partly youth, he knew, but even with young white women, whom he saw unclothed on a regular basis, he had the impression that no limb was quite aware of what the others were doing, that the whole was very much a collection of parts. Viola was all of a piece. Each part flowed into the next with seamless fluidity, so that medical terms like ventral, dorsal, medial, and distal blurred into meaninglessness.

  Her abandonment of modesty extended much further than nudity. In her daily role as a nurse, Viola was a model of self-possession, politeness, and rectitude. With some adult patients she spoke only when spoken to; with others she was as intimate as a family member, providing comfort while moving things along without the patients becoming aware they were being “handled.” Throughout, her rich voice remained carefully modulated, like a cello being played by a master of control. In her own house, though, Viola spoke without restraint. She purred, keened, groaned, shrieked, sang—all without a trace of self-consciousness. The first time Tom heard her laugh with complete freedom, something in his heart leaped, as it had when hearing the trilling of a bird in the forests of his youth. It was then that he understood something of what those children must have felt when she focused all her attention upon them in the clinic, chanting softly, entrancing them with the Creole language of her girlhood.

  It was only the second time that he visited her house that he began to notice his physical surroundings. Viola made the most of her modest salary, saving and spending wisely, so her home was much better kept and decorated than the Negro houses Tom had visited on house calls. But compared to the furniture and fabrics that filled his house, her possessions were almost junk. Ironically, Peggy Cage had started life as poor as Viola Revels (and Tom hadn’t had it much better). But the institutionalized obstacles that had b
locked Viola’s upward path were monumental compared to the difficulties that he and Peggy had perceived as hardships. And that, Tom realized, was an injustice of immeasurable magnitude. Because Viola was as smart as he was. That was a fact, yet she would never be given an opportunity to prove it. Thankfully, she seemed less troubled by this situation than he was. The practical impossibility of a colored girl born in 1940s Mississippi becoming a physician meant that Viola had discounted such a future from the beginning. But Tom knew the truth: in every way she was his equal, yet accidents of birth had separated her from him as surely as a French peasant from Louis XIV.

  Viola displayed only two photos of her husband in her house. One showed James Turner in his army uniform, looking confident and proud. The other appeared to have been taken at a high school dance. James looked as uncomfortable in a rented tuxedo as Tom had felt in his own in 1950; Viola, on the other hand, looked so serene in her gown that she seemed destined for a red carpet somewhere. Gazing at that picture, Tom realized how little he knew about the dreams of the woman whose bed he now shared. Yet he didn’t ask. For to hear the disparity between the dreams of that gowned girl and the uniformed reality that Viola lived every day might have been unbearable.

  But one night, without any prompting, Viola told him that she’d once yearned to be a rhythm-and-blues singer. Not a diva, she said, like Diana Ross, but one of the girls behind her, with matching satin gowns that swayed to perfectly choreographed dance moves. Tom couldn’t have been more surprised. Until then, he had only heard the French lullabies she sang to keep children calm while he sutured them. But when she ripped out a verse and chorus of “You Can’t Hurry Love” while dancing a trademark Motown routine, he believed. When Viola asked about his childhood dreams, Tom was embarrassed to confess that as a boy he had longed to be an archaeologist, poring over maps in the Valley of the Kings, searching for temples and tombs not yet plundered by grave robbers. Smiling, Viola had taken his hand, pressed it between her thighs, and said, “This temple hasn’t been plundered yet.”

  “It’s certainly been discovered,” he replied.

  “Has it?” Her eyebrows arched. “That’s what all the white explorers say. They stumble over some supposedly ‘lost’ city and then claim to have discovered it, when the natives have known about it for centuries.”

  “How many explorers know about this treasure?” he asked, rubbing her steadily.

  She lay back on her elbows. “Mmm … let me see. There’s you … and my husband … and a very pretty boy I went to school with … and—”

  “That’s two too many,” Tom said.

  Viola pretended to pout. “What do you expect, when you took so long to show up? What was I supposed to do all that time?”

  “You’re only twenty-eight.”

  “That’s ancient in my country.”

  This kind of playfulness, Tom reflected, was entirely absent from his marriage. He didn’t blame Peggy for their rather perfunctory sex life. He blamed her parents, and the long line of ancestors who had blindly embraced repressive strains of Christianity, with their puritanical separation of body and spirit, the equation of pleasure with shame, and the near deification of guilt. All that had led to generations of frustrated, lying men and guilt-ridden women. Tom knew those women well. He’d been reared by one, and he’d married another. Even when almost every fiber of Peggy’s being cried out for release, her relentlessly conditioned mind short-circuited her desire, burying the ancient urge with destructive consequences that no one had yet evolved a system to calculate. Tom had heard countless similar stories in his medical practice, and he saw the pernicious results. He sometimes wondered whether the myriad of vague female complaints he encountered—“nerves,” “vapors,” “hysteria”—might not be cured by a few nights of guilt-free sex. But for many of those women, that cure could not be accomplished without a pharmacological guillotine that would sever the body from the cerebral cortex. Until that existed, true sexual fulfillment for those patients would remain unattainable.

  In the previous century, when laws governing doctors were much less stringent, his professional forebears had approached this problem directly. Tom had read medical histories that described doctors using electrical vibrators of various types to treat women suffering from “hysteria.” The cure was simple: orgasm. Many female patients had never experienced orgasm, at least not with their husbands, who were frequently inattentive, ignorant of the existence of the clitoris, or both. Tom suspected that most of those long-suffering women had been the “beneficiaries” of a repressive religious upbringing, and thus could not bring themselves even to masturbate for relief. This sexual deprivation had obviously persisted into the 1960s, especially in the Bible Belt, but across the nation, too. One only had to look at the sexual primers and self-help books starting to climb the bestseller lists to find proof. Peggy had actually purchased a couple of these titles, but she’d yet to put any of their suggestions into practice. Tom almost dreaded the day that she would try. Watching someone struggle to break down rigid barriers in their personality was a difficult thing to witness—much less help with—after one had stepped into a world where sexual intimacy was effortless.

  In Viola Turner’s bedroom, shame had no place. Body and spirit were one. Viola might be a devout Catholic, but she made love without a trace of guilt. In Peggy’s world, desire was guilt. In Viola’s, desire was action. In Viola’s bed, the word no did not exist. If Tom asked her why she did a certain thing, her answer was always the same: “Because it feels good.” Viola would gaze steadily, almost tauntingly back at him, certain that her answer was true and irreducible. “Does it feel good to you?” she would ask. Such childlike simplicity, Tom realized, was the essence of sexual love. There was a darker side to sex, of course; sexuality had as many facets as the human personality. But the darker sides, he was coming to believe, grew out of repression rather than from the natural openness that Viola personified.

  In this atmosphere, sexual epiphanies occurred almost daily, and Tom felt alternately foolish and empowered by them. Never had he experienced the kind of protracted pleasure Viola gave him, nor had he seen a woman experience such heights of arousal and release. He tried to believe himself free of prejudice during these encounters, but ultimately he couldn’t fool himself on this score. At the deepest level, he felt as though he were coupling with some exotic creature brought from a distant land, or even another planet. When Viola rode him, single-minded in her focus, he saw clearly that “guilt” and “shame” were man-made constructs that, however deeply ingrained they had become in the Calvinist lineage of his people, had only been lightly grafted onto the surface of Viola’s tribe, and had never really taken. Tom knew such thoughts were inherently racist, but they were his thoughts nonetheless, and could not be denied.

  He didn’t speak of love with Viola—not in the beginning. And on the first day he found the word forming in his mouth, she read his mind and put a finger to his lips. When he tried to move the finger away, Viola shook her head and closed her eyes, squeezing tears from beneath her lids. She had never blocked out the truth that Tom denied like a little boy pretending he could fly from the roof of his parents’ house. The laws that precluded the two of them from having a future together were as absolute as the laws that would break the legs of the boy who leaped from a roof with only a red cape to hold him aloft. Yet despite this awareness, not even Viola could make herself stop the affair.

  For six weeks they courted disaster, dancing along a precipice that skirted a bottomless void. Thankfully Viola had no one to answer to, since she lived alone, and Peggy assumed that Tom was simply working harder than usual. During the sleepless nights beside his wife’s softly snoring form, Tom would lie stiff and sweating, his mind under assault by dangerous fantasies. But having tasted Viola, who could say what was sane or mad? After discovering portals to new worlds through an almost miraculously feminine woman, what man would not dream of a future with her? Of running off to a place where skin color meant nothi
ng? Viola swore that no such place existed, not even in Paris. That might be, Tom admitted, but the real obstacle to fulfilling that dream was his children. How many times did he rise from bed and pad into the rooms of his son and daughter? Jenny was sixteen then, Penn only eight. To look down at their innocent faces and imagine leaving was impossible. Yet Tom could not stop his mind from fleeing to that fantasy realm where he would awaken to Viola every day, to her liquid eyes, her effortless smile, and the fluid grace of her body.

  That dream ended forty-five days after it began.

  Nearly seven weeks after they consummated their desire in the X-ray room, Viola suddenly changed. The previous day, Tom had rendezvoused with her as usual, and her eyes had shone with boundless love. The next morning, when he saw her in the clinic, the light had gone out of her eyes, and impassable walls had been raised around her. When he tried to question her, she only shook her head and hurried on to the next patient. Without saying anything, Viola made it clear that Tom Cage was as irrevocably part of her past as her dead husband. At first he thought she must have received some bad news about her brother. But during a tense coffee break she told him that Jimmy was still hiding in Freewoods, though chafing to return to Natchez and “the struggle.” After two hours of dazed disbelief, Tom finally cornered Viola in an examining room and demanded an explanation for the distance between them.

  “You have a family,” she said with lacerating formality. “If we’d kept going, we would have destroyed that. We have no right to do that. You can’t build happiness on someone else’s pain.”

  Before Tom could answer, she brushed past him and went back to work. As the day wore on, Tom rehearsed a thousand arguments in his mind, but the more he tried to argue with her premise, the more right he realized she was. He’d been in denial from the beginning, and Viola had simply chosen to force him out of it. There were only two possible endings for their relationship: in Scenario One, Tom would keep his family and Viola would be alone, at least until she found someone new; in Scenario Two … well, Scenario Two was unthinkable. If Tom tried to possess Viola, he would destroy his family, his career, Viola, and possibly even himself.