Mama Black Widow

  I said, “Yes, Dorcas, and he’s a great guy.”

  Cecil constructed a grotesque smile and mumbled something that sounded like . . . “nice young fellow.”

  He extended a sinewy hand, and in the distracting presence of Dorcas I thoughtlessly held out my hand. His paw seized it in a lightning quick pincer and crushed tears to my eyes.

  In the glow of the street lamp I saw the muscles in his heavy wrist cording. He was saying nice things about me and grinning at Dorcas behind me as he went on torturing me.

  My left hand was buried in my trouser pocket frantically trying to open the needlepoint blade of an inch-long miniature knife. Cecil was putting so much pressure on my hand I was getting faint.

  Finally the midget blade opened. I brought it out in my palm. Cecil said hello to an elderly lady who passed us and stopped to chat with Dorcas. I aimed the little razor-sharp stiletto at a fat, pulsing artery in the fleshy web between his thumb and index finger and viciously plunged it in.

  He stiffened and freed my aching hand. He held his wounded hand stiffly at his side and stole a surreptitious glance at the dark dots speckling the sidewalk.

  He looked down at me with insensate hatred and rammed his stabbed hand into his trouser pocket. He abruptly stepped past us and almost bowled over the elderly lady hobbling down the sidewalk in his frantic wake as he pumped his long legs urgently toward the funeral home.

  Dorcas turned and watched him with a puzzled look on her face and shook her head. We got in the car and pulled away. Cecil’s nerve-mangling handshake had lasted only a few seconds. But my hand was hurting and throbbing like he had tortured me for hours.

  She frowned and said, “Cecil acted so peculiarly. Surprisingly, he seemed to approve of you. So it wasn’t that. I don’t understand him tonight.”

  I said, “Baby, he probably remembered something that had to be done right away. A big shot guy like him is bound to have sudden emergencies in his life. I wouldn’t worry about it, darling.”

  She gave me a searching look, but she didn’t say anything. We went to the Music Box on Sixty-third Street and had several bottles of beer. Then we went for a ride all the way to the Thirties.

  My heart leaped when she drove down Thirty-first Street and passed the corner at Indiana Avenue. I remembered that night Railhead and Junior spotted Sally and stalked her and forced her to show us Bessie’s butchered corpse.

  Near South Parkway we passed a storefront Holiness Church. A portly black woman was going inside. We got a brief glimpse of frantic pandemonium and heard the raw rhythm of ecstatic feet and tambourines.

  Dorcas pulled to the curb and said, “Let’s go in for a few minutes.”

  We went into the oven heat and sat on metal chairs in rear. The long room was packed with swaying, sweating, shouting enemies of Satan.

  A dozen black women grimacing in orgiastic bliss danced voluptuously in the funky aisle. They cast torrid eyes up at a gigantic picture of a lustful, blue-eyed, golden-haired Christ hung high on the wall behind the shrewd-faced woman minister standing calmly in her battered pulpit and gazing blandly down on the licentious presence of the Holy Ghost and The Fire.

  As we walked to the car I thought, I wonder how many fanatically religious black women like those back there close their eyes in sex with their black husbands and sweethearts and imagine that their adored, dazzling, white Christ has made an especial divine visitation so their Jim-Crowed black cunts can host his pristine, pink prick.

  While driving up South Parkway Boulevard, Dorcas said, “I suggested that we go in that church. Frankly, I went out of curiosity and perhaps callously to be entertained.

  “I am not especially religious. I’m afraid that I didn’t give your feelings a thought when I dragged you in there like we were going to a circus. You might have deep feelings about religion. I hope you weren’t offended.”

  I laughed and said, “I believed in all that jazz, and it was important to me when I was a little kid down on the plantation and my Papa preached from-the-heart gospel.

  “Papa was like a saint all his life. I can’t think of one hateful thing he ever did. But, baby, devout Papa didn’t have God in his corner. Before Papa crawled away to die, my heart would break listening to him praying for a job—just for a chance to feed and shelter his family so he could hold onto his manhood and self-respect.

  “Then I saw that corrupt pastor of Mama’s church living in the lap of luxury. I could never understand why God failed Papa, who loved him, and rewarded the crook.

  “Then I realized that sweet, good people like my sister Carol were punished too. When I went to grammar school, I used to pass a house where an old, old man sat on the front porch in nice weather.

  “Many times I saw an old woman fussing around him to make him comfortable. One day I heard older kids say that the old man had killed the old woman who was his daughter and the only friend he had in the world. Then he killed himself.

  “He had done a terrible thing like that without any reason except that he was past a hundred years old and had become senile and lost his judgment.

  “I remember how I first started wondering if God was like the old man. Maybe he had just grown so old he didn’t realize he was doing horrible things to good people who loved him. Maybe God had had his awful lucid moment and was overcome with guilt at the infinite carnage and heartbreak he had wrought even among innocent children, like the old man who destroyed himself. Dorcas, I decided that whatever the case, I’d better not get too involved with him.”

  Dorcas looked at me oddly, and then changed to a pleasantly light topic.

  Dorcas and I saw each other at least once a week and often twice a week during the summer of 1945. We hadn’t sexed, but we were close and devoted to each other.

  Many times when we met I sensed that Dorcas was burning for sex with me, but somehow, I managed to avoid sexing her without coming to crisis.

  I had to know that the psychological moment was perfect for me before I attempted to make love to her because I couldn’t afford to fail.

  It was good for both of us that we used up a lot of potentially erotic energy swimming in Lake Michigan and playing tennis in Washington Park.

  Dorcas’s father apparently never mentioned to her that our first and only meeting had had slightly savage aspects. To avoid another meeting with him, I explained to Dorcas that despite the fact that Cecil and I had rather good thoughts about each other, I wanted to stay away from the funeral home. I knew how fond he was of Ralph Cecil, and I didn’t want to make things awkward for Cecil.

  In the last part of August, Dorcas picked me up at the El station, and she was wearing the sexy pink dress and satin shoes she had worn months before and that I loved to see her in.

  We went to the Play House on South Parkway Boulevard and drank draught beer and danced to jukebox music.

  We were catching our breath in a booth when Dorcas looked serious and said, “Ralph called from overseas the day before yesterday. He is going to be mustered out of service next month.

  “It was heartbreaking the way he poured himself out to me, and like our parents, he is certain we will marry when he comes home. I am not the least bit certain about that. But I couldn’t hurt him. I didn’t try to dissuade him from his thinking. Perhaps I should have. I just don’t know. I am so confused. He loves me . . . It wouldn’t be a bad life with him at all. Let’s forget it for now and drink lots more beer and dance the soles off our shoes.”

  I danced and laughed and drank mechanically. Dorcas went to the restroom and left me alone in the booth.

  I thought, Gorgeous Ralph is coming home with all those sleek muscles and a marriage license in one hand and an honest to Pete stiff dick in the other hand.

  She’s carnal, and I’m the screwed up bastard that touched her cunt and flirted with a straitjacket. But she’s forgiven me because she’s acting fuckish tonight. And she’s never been sexier. She’s got a hot, juicy one all right.

  Goddamnit! I’m getting hard! It’
s bigger and longer than I remember. I am hard! I got quite a tool. I got that feeling! I’ll make her holler. Tonight I’m going to turn tiger and kill the freak, Sally. I have to hurry and get Dorcas in a bed while I’m hard and feeling powerful like this.

  Dorcas came back to the booth and held out her arms to dance.

  I got up and said, “Baby, I feel carnal. Let’s get in the wind.”

  Her face lit up, and she went quickly toward the door. We went out South Parkway Boulevard to the Park Vernon Hotel at Sixtieth Street and Vernon Avenue. It overlooked the section of Washington Park where we had parked for hours that first day we met.

  I felt wonderful. But I took no chances. I kept my right hand busy in my pocket stroking my tool to keep its readiness.

  Dorcas’s eyes shone brightly and looked larger and prettier than ever as we went to our third-floor room. We reached our room. I unlocked the door and moved slightly aside so Dorcas could go in first.

  But she hesitated at the threshold, smiling slyly down at me, for one hellish, destructive fragment of a pounding, torturous instant!

  I felt my power draining from me and my precious, my magnificent hard-on, collapsing against my trembling fingertips. She tossed her head and her hips and went into the room. I stood in the hall staring at her back and feeling hatred for her shaking me for what I was positive she had been thinking at that awful moment of hesitation.

  My head was roaring with thought. She started to ask me to carry her across that threshold in a playful way, perhaps like Ralph, the muscle buff, had done the trillion times he has fucked her.

  I looked so goddamn puny and inadequate standing here, she didn’t have the heart to ask the impossible of me. Then the perverse bitch gave me that shitty smile when she toyed with the idea that maybe she should carry me across the threshold.

  I’m her little private freak show. Contempt is where her kicks are at. She’s getting revenge for that night at the lake.

  Dorcas went hurriedly into the bathroom without noticing that I hadn’t followed her into the room . . . I went in and sat on a chair near the window. She came out in panties and bra and walked to the closet and hung the diaphanous pink dress on a hanger. She came to me and turned her back.

  She said, “Undo my bra, Love.”

  I did. She slipped off the pink bra and panties and put them on the dresser top. She posed before me in all her voluptuous blue black splendor.

  Her thick bush had the luxuriant sheen of crow feathers, and a heart-shaped hairy carpet led to the rim of her belly button.

  I turned my eyes downward from the imperious invitation of her jutting velvet tits with nipples deliciously deformed to the size and color of black cherries.

  She dropped to her knees in front of me, and I shut my eyes against the vision of the strong, shapely curves in the long, powerful thighs. The sheer physical majesty and epic sexuality of her was terrorizing away my self-confidence and blowing all the fuses in my crotch.

  She kissed my closed eyelids tenderly and slipped off my loafers.

  She crooned, “Doll, fella, let’s shower and do something naughty.”

  I opened my eyes and gazed at her stupidly. Beer, frustration, the impact of her nude dimensions, ambivalence and her sweetly adroit handling of me had me in a kind of giddy trance.

  I remembered I was supposed to be angry with her. I knew it was something terrible she had done to me because I felt like bursting into tears as my mind tensed in its struggle to remember her crime. I made a solemn vow to remember as I followed her into the shower.

  The needles of the prickly water gave me a warm glow, and I felt an encouraging, flickering pull in my balls when Dorcas soaped my crotch.

  I lay in bed beside her switch-sucking and brutally gnawing the erected black cherries, and rapidly stiff fingering into the melon red slash in her fat, jet bush. She was writhing sensuously, and her guttural groaning was laced with a sharp whining high note of joyful pain.

  I raised my eyes and looked up at her contorted face.

  I thought, She’s savagely beautiful, like an African warrior in his death throes. And a tiger is going to conquer her—ME!

  And with that solitary, magical thought, I felt myself erecting gloriously—HARD!

  I uttered an ecstatic sob as I moved to mount her. I was going to spear into and master her crimson cunt and discover my eternal manhood in its pungent fire.

  I was raising myself on an elbow and swinging a leg across to top her when she squeezed my spear and suddenly rolled over on me—pressing her palms down on my chest and pinning my shoulders to the bed like a vanquished wrestler.

  She mounted me in a squatting position over my crotch and guided my quickly fading shaft into her. We stared into each other’s eyes as she frantically tried to stuff the shriveled limpness inside her.

  She said helplessly, “Did I do something wrong?”

  I was drained of imagination, hope and reason. I was a pathetic dwarf trapped beneath a clumsy colossus with my manhood imprisoned forever in the unreachable depths of her unconquerable bloodred cunt.

  Humiliation was strangling me, and rage was poisoning me.

  I said harshly, “Stop pulling on my thing. It won’t get hard any more. I feel terrible.”

  She flinched and said, “Don’t get panicky and nasty. And please don’t feel terrible. I’ll make it hard again.”

  I said, “I had a wonderful hard-on, and you killed it. I’ll never forgive you for that.”

  She laughed nervously and said mockingly, “Sweetheart, don’t be that square. Your little ‘pee-pee’ will get hard at least once more before you die.”

  I blurted out, “Not for you it won’t. You’re rough and clumsy like a man. I don’t have any feeling for you. You’re burly. Maybe it would have been proper to carry me across the threshold when you got the idea.”

  She squeezed her face between her palms and shuddered from the raw shock of my stupidity. She stared at me with big stricken eyes. She moved her lips, but she didn’t speak. She kept looking at me and cocking her head from one side to the other like an inquisitive puppy trying to solve the riddle of a strange object.

  I said, “You’re mashing the shit out of me.”

  She rolled off me and stood at the side of the bed looking down at me piteously.

  She shook her head and almost whispered, “Otis, you were only seventeen like your mother told me. Poor little fella. You need to grow up. I thought I loved you, but I am through with you forever. I was foolish to call you after that experience at the lake. You’re not well. Get help, Otis. You’re in trouble.”

  She turned and gathered up her clothes and went to the bathroom.

  I lay there hearing the mild roar of the shower. I felt a pang of remorse for my rage. I remembered how lovingly she had bathed me.

  She came out of the bathroom fully dressed and with a serene face. She went straight to the door without so much as a glance in my direction. She opened the door. She paused and looked back at me.

  She said in a soft voice, “Otis, do you have carfare to get home?”

  I snapped, “Don’t worry about me. I’ll get home.”

  She stood there idly twisting the doorknob, scrutinizing me with misty intense eyes like she was going on a long lonesome journey and was engraving my image on her brain to cherish along the way.

  The love in her eyes pierced my soul and made me ashamed of my cruelty. I lowered my eyes so she couldn’t see my misery. There was utter silence. I heard her draw a deep breath and exhale. I looked up.

  She smiled wryly and said softly, “Bye now, Doll Fella. And the very best of luck always.”

  I mumbled, “Good-bye, Dorcas. The same for you.”

  The door shut, and she was gone.

  I lay there numbly, staring stupidly at the ceiling. Then it hit me. My precious, irreplaceable Dorcas was gone. I leaped from the bed, raced to the window and jerked it up. I stuck my head out and looked down on Sixtieth Street. The red Mercury was already pulling awa
y toward South Parkway.

  I shouted, “Dorcas! Dorcas, come back!”

  But the raucous wind muffled the sound of my voice, and the red Mercury disappeared.

  Pitifully, inanely, I lay my head on the sill and to the blank horror of the lonely street blubbered, “Dorcas, Baby, forgive me. How could you expect a little cotton-picking nigger from Mississippi to learn right away how to treat a classy lady who wears gloves even in the summer time? You’re perfect, tender, beautiful, and I love you. I love you. Come back. I need you, Dorcas. Come back and save me.”

  14

  MADAME MIRACLE’S STINKING LITTLE FAGGOT

  In a haze of grief, I dressed and left the hotel. I walked several miles through the chill late-August night before taking a streetcar home.

  Two days later I had Lucy call the funeral home for Dorcas. An employee told Lucy that Dorcas was out of town indefinitely. I figured that she had gone to one of the coasts to get away from me and to wait for Ralph to be mustered out of the service.

  I missed Dorcas as much as I had Carol. My days were spent jumping hopefully to answer the door and telephone. But it was never a telegram or a call from Dorcas. My sleep was riddled with nightmares.

  Mama saw that I was distraught and drinking quite heavily, and she knew it was because of Dorcas. I never told her the real reason Dorcas ended our affair. I lied and said Dorcas’s father had broken us up.

  I had struggled successfully against going wild and picking up some guy to use me like a woman. I guess I had that strength because all hope wasn’t dead that Dorcas would get in touch with me and give me another chance.

  I was reading a black paper in early October when I saw what I had dreaded. It was the inevitable photograph. Ralph Duncan was guiding Dorcas’s hand as she cut into the wedding cake. The accompanying story said they were to honeymoon in the Bahamas, after which the groom was to take an executive position in a new branch of the elder Duncan’s insurance firm in the East.