Sugar (11 page)

And now she spoke in her small voice, the one that sounded lost in a cave deep inside her large body. Everyone was quiet, waiting for Clair Bell to tell what she’d heard. She seemed not to remember that she’d spoken at all, instead she moved her chair back from the table, raised one stockinged foot and placed it in her lap. She examined the off-color nude nylon that enclosed her foot and then began to massage her swollen protruding bunion.

The women quietly watched her for a while in disgust. All except Pearl were disgusted at the very fact that she would begin a statement of such magnitude and then forgo it to massage a bunion. Pearl, on the other hand, was disgusted that Clair was massaging her bunion right at her kitchen table.

“Well . . . what they say?” Minnie asked after the quiet and the lack of information began to take hold of her neck like a suffocating grip.

“Hmmm.” Clair Bell looked up from her feet. Her face and eyes always retained somnolent characteristics, and she yawned, suggesting that it was more than a look.

“Gibson. What did he say?” Shirley pushed, leaning in closer.

“Say ’bout who?” Clair Bell was truly lost.

They all exhaled loudly. Shirley sat back and crossed her arms over her sagging breasts and rolled her eyes up in the air in disgust. Minnie shook her head in dismay and turned to look at Pearl.

“What did Gibson say about the woman Sugar,” Minnie said slowly, making sure she left time and space between each word so that Clair Bell could fully grasp what she was trying to say.

“Oh . . .” Clair Bell stopped and tilted her head slightly upward, searching the air for the words she needed, and then very calmly she said: “He said she a whore.”

There were just hearts. Hearts beating loud and excitedly, and finally they all remembered to breathe.

It was said; the damage was done. Clair Bell went back to her bunion untethered by the excitement her words caused.

“Oooh wee! Hot dang! I knew it! Right here in Bigelow . . . a whore! Lawdy, Lawdy!” Shirley’s eyes sparkled behind her thick lenses.

Pearl’s mouth was slightly open in disbelief and Minnie was holding her stomach and laughing loudly.

“You got the whore of Babylon right next door . . . and you call her friend.” The word
friend
came out slick as blood. “Running ’round town with her like ya’ll was cut from the same cloth. What you think about her now?” Shirley was pointing a crooked accusatory finger in Pearl’s face.

“Take your finger outta my face.” The words moved out of Pearl’s mouth like steel pellets, her face turned to ice, her glare moved from Shirley and fell hard on Clair Bell. “That’s a terrible thing to say ’bout someone. You spreading rumors, and that ain’t right. How you fix your mouth to say such a thing? You don’t even know her.” Pearl’s chest was rising and falling quickly as she struggled to take in and release air. Her heart was beating wild with anger. But her mind stepped back to a hot, heavy day when the sun refused to shine and field peas lay in waiting on the kitchen table between herself and Sugar. She remembered the questions she asked about Sugar’s life and the answer she got:
“I cleaned up in a women’s home.”
The words echoed false in her mind, just as they did when Sugar first uttered them aloud. Pearl ignored the warning bells that went off in her soul.

Clair Bell raised her eyes to Pearl’s and smiled a little. “I ain’t sayin’ it, I’m repeatin’ it . . . there’s a difference.” She said this in the small childlike voice that was characteristic of Clair Bell, but the usual innocence it carried was gone. Challenge took its place.

Pearl lowered her eyes and then raised them again. She placed the cards face down on the table and got up curtly. Tears stung at her eyes as she turned her back to the women and peered out the window. “It ain’t right no matter how you put it. You don’t know that girl from Adam and here you are dragging her name through the mud based on hearsay. Ya oughta be ashamed!”

Who was she to protect Sugar and why should she? Didn’t Jesus protect the whore by asking those who were without sin to throw the first stone? Pearl questioned herself and her actions. How much did she really know about Sugar? Not much, when you got right down to the nitty-gritty of things. Sugar hardly spoke and when she did it wasn’t about anything that had to do with her directly. She spoke in circles. Pearl didn’t want to prod and probe her, she could see that though Sugar had a menacing look about her, she was really very fragile. Pearl had come this far with her, had been in her home, sat with her on the porch quietly watching the sunset or listening to the sounds of life that surrounded them. Too far to let it go to waste. She was near to bringing her into the fold, presenting her to God as a saved member of the Bigelow First Baptist Church. And then there was her face. The face that reminded her so much of Jude. She couldn’t turn her back and let all of that go. She wouldn’t.

Confident, she turned to meet their gazes. She knew of their indiscretions. Their dirty little secrets, the ones they themselves had forgotten existed. She looked at them with eyes as black as coal.

“Maybe Gibson is confused . . . maybe he mean someone that look like her. Maybe someone told him about some
one time
,
long ago
thing that happened to her. Something she trying to forget that done caught up with her.” The women listened to the excuses as they spilled one after the other from Pearl’s mouth. Their eyes shifted between each other and then back to Pearl.

“Everybody gotta past, something they ashamed of.” Pearl paused and looked directly at Shirley. They held each other’s eyes for one long moment, Pearl revealing, with one look, what she’d known for years. Shirley’s eyes were confused and then, as if a light went on, tears of comprehension, shame and then anger filled her eyes. She turned her head sharply away and lowered her eyes.

Pearl knew the story as did everyone else in Bigelow. But Pearl was the only woman bold enough to confront Shirley with it. And she would if Shirley pushed, she’d repeat what she’d heard from her own mother’s mouth, if Shirley pushed her.

It was a story that was told amongst the colored kitchen help while they cleaned up after a birthday party or the field hands as they stole sweet relief from the sun beneath the shade of a magnolia tree. They would chew tobacco or drink heavily from tin cups filled with fresh well water and lean their backs against the bark of a tree or lay themselves down on the earth and speak of small things that had happened in their lives, or others they knew. Eventually, someone would start to speak of Crazy Ciel Brown.

“Her daddy was the white man from over in Ashton. He usta own the cannery and a few other things that ain’t worth mentioning because they ain’t no where ’round here. I believe his name was McHenry. Had lots of money, a wife and a pair of look-a-like girls. But I guess all that wasn’t enough for him. He had to have himself a colored woman too.”

“How you know so much?” a doubting Thomas would ask.

“I knows ’cause my cousin on my daddy side who usta cut cane down in Florida, knew the hairdresser by the name of Rebecca, who was acquainted with one of the maids that worked there who seen it all go down—her name be Belle. Belle Mason.”

That explanation was usually good enough for any disbeliever.

“Anyways, like most low-down crackers that God seen fit to give abundance to, he felt like he should be able to have anything and anyone that happened to be under his roof. ’Sides, his wife wasn’t no more good to him. She couldn’t meet his needs. She was a drinker.”

“I can’t say that I blame a man for strayin’ away from a wife who put away more liquor than him. I mean, a man’s got needs, you know?” The same disbeliever would interrupt, yet again.

“Will you hush and let the man tell the story?” someone would say in an irritated voice.

“Like I was saying,” the storyteller would continue, “the woman of the house be passed out somewhere, while her man just be a tipping on down to the maid’s quarters, pick out the one he wanted and hop up on top of her like she was one of his horses.”

“What the woman name be?”

And uncomfortable silence would rise like thick smoke.

“Man, if you don’t shut your mouth and let the man tell the story!” someone would hiss.

“I believes her name was Shirley Brown. Don’t know where she at now, or if she even still alive. But back then she was just a young thing, barely thirteen years old from what I hear,” the storyteller would say in a voice filled with innuendo.

“When Shirley got big, they say McHenry known it was his because he was the only one she had been with and he had the bloody sheet to prove it!”

A gasp would emanate as they shook their heads in loathing.

“Now ya’ll don’t think that the missus of the house didn’t know what was going on. She knew! And ain’t say one single solitary word about it!”

“A colored woman would have bust him in his head!” someone would shout out and the crowd would fall out in uproarious laughter.

“That is the truth! But ya see, she was doing her own midnight tipping down to them stables. Now whether she was laying with man or beast, ain’t for me to say, ’cause I wasn’t there and don’t know one who was.”

“Uhmph!”

“When Shirley got too big to ignore it any longer, McHenry sent her away to have that baby. His wife said she wasn’t going to be shamed by what he’d done. She had to be able to go to town and them functions white people are so fond of, and hold her head up. Couldn’t have people whispering behind her back.

I heard that that child, which is Ciel, was raised by an Injun couple over in Shepardsville. Well, she don’t look like she got an ounce of white blood in her no how, so no one was the smarter.”

“Yeah, git to the money part!”

“Well, once a month the couple would find money wrapped in cheesecloth and nailed to their door. People say McHenry was the one to send the money by way of his servants. The couple never knew where it was coming from and if they did, they didn’t say.

“That man provided for Ciel good and right! And after he died, I heard that he left her a whole heap o’ money!”

There would be an all consuming stillness, as the people digested the tale and drew their own conclusions from it.

No, Pearl wouldn’t repeat it now, not if Shirley backed down and found her place again in Pearl’s home. She wouldn’t speak it but she would think it. Think it so caustically that the thoughts themselves would burn from her mind and rest like flames on Shirley’s soul.

“How you all know it ain’t just a downright lie,” Pearl finished. Her tone challenged everyone in the room.

Clair Bell and Minnie stared mute. Shirley was afraid to raise her eyes, lest she see her past looking back at her again. Then Clair Bell spoke again.

“Well, he say he got a friend over in Hampton, who got a friend . . . some high yella boy that happen to got a little money.” She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. “Don’t know his name, though . . . well, he asked Gibson friend if he knew one of them type of women.” She tilted her head toward the open window, indicating Sugar’s house. Indicating Sugar. “And Gibson friend said, that he knew one of them type of women he was looking for. Told him her face wasn’t much to look at, but she made up for that in the bed.”

Silence.

“She, she, she! What that mean? Who is ‘she,’ she ain’t Sugar! She could be anyone. Could be you. Could be me!” Pearl was near to yelling, her words came out in waves of trembling emotion.

“True. He ain’t call her name directly. But he did say that she was over on Grove Street,” Clair Bell said.

“Grove Street run near a mile long,” Pearl said, running her open hands across her moist face.

“Uh-huh, that’s what the man said when he told him, but then he made it clear that he should look for her at number ten.”

Clair Bell’s words echoed in Pearl’s head. Shirley stood and placed her hands on her hips, a triumphant smile resting comfortably on her lips, her past sins forgotten for the moment. “Told you so, Pearl,” she said.

Minnie saw the darkness suddenly cover Pearl’s face like a widow’s veil. “C’mon ya’ll, I think it’s time we get going.” She could see they had pushed too far. She gathered the loose cards that had been forgotten on the table. “I think it’s about to storm out there,” she continued, feeling an appropriate excuse was needed. “Shirley, Clair Bell, let’s go.”

Clair Bell shot a questioning look at Minnie. The dark sky was speckled with brilliant stars and held no threat of rain. Minnie stretched her eyes wide and nodded her head a bit. “Let’s go,” she said again, stern this time.

“Shirley, you know you don’t want that piece of wig to get wet. It’ll smell like a dog when it do and take a whole week to dry.” The humor camouflaged Minnie’s growing nervousness. She was uncomfortable with what had been said there tonight. The look that blanketed Pearl’s face was all too familiar to her, she’d seen it roosting there for years after Jude was killed.

“Why you messin’ with me all the time—” Shirley started her attack on her sister, but Pearl cut her off.

“Out, now.” Pearl spoke in a low hushed voice, one that carried despair, loss and loathing. “Get out now.” Her anger and disappointment could not be repressed with politeness, not this time.

The women turned, open-mouthed, on Pearl and watched her as if watching a stranger. Shirley started to speak but Minnie pinched at the thick meat that was her waistline. Shirley sucked her teeth and slapped her sister’s hand away. It was now obvious that they had pushed Pearl to the edge, she was ordering them to leave her home, to get out. Not feigning a headache or claiming that she had to rise early for church. No excuses this time, they had taken her way past courteous and dropped her off somewhere near I don’t give a damn!

The women left, muttering under their breath and throwing cautionary looks over their shoulders at Pearl, who sat quietly at the table, her head resting in her hands. All uttered good-byes and the sound of clicking heels was replaced one hour later by an approaching Buick in need of a new engine. Joe walked in, his steps a bit unsure, his balance slightly off and the smell of beer swimming around him. He saw his wife, kissed her wetly on her cheek before heading upstairs. He only realized that she had not greeted him, verbally or otherwise, as his head hit the down-filled pillow and sleep claimed him.