Sugar (9 page)

“Don’t you want to meet people?” Pearl, exasperated, would ask Sugar.

To the women, Pearl would say: “She’s really very nice.” The women didn’t want to hear any more. They’d been hearing talk, seeing things that didn’t sit right with them, things that should not be going on in Bigelow. Things that hadn’t started happening until Sugar’s arrival.

The men, however, were more accommodating, friendly even. They always spoke, went out of their way to do so. Came toward Sugar and Pearl with large, all-consuming grins. They tripped over themselves to get to Sugar—tipping their hats as they came, greetings rolling from their half-open mouths and a sparkle of desire in their eyes.

Very interesting.

Pearl wanted to ask Sugar where her money came from. She seemed to be available at any hour of the day. Most times. Maybe, Pearl contemplated, she was a wealthy heiress hiding out among simple folk for a spell or maybe she was a criminal doing the same.

A lot was absent from their conversations despite the friendship that was growing between them. Some things can’t be broached so soon. Some things must be left unsaid for a while. Two months is not long enough to peel back the skin and reveal the truths that hide beneath it.

Sugar saw the curiosity in Pearl’s eyes. It was growing more and more every day. Expanding, lengthening and maturing. Sugar was trying to avoid it. She did not want to reveal her life before Bigelow and she convinced herself that she wouldn’t, no matter what. But something inside of her was weakening and she found the words of her life sitting on the tip of her tongue when she was close to Pearl and their hands brushed when planting or mixing dough for bread. Those words almost spilled out and she had to swallow quickly to keep them inside of her.

“Tell me ’bout up North. That’s where you were before here, right?” Pearl asked one day as they sat at the kitchen table separating field peas. The morning was wet and by afternoon an uncomfortable gray heat had settled in Bigelow, pulling buckets of sweat from foreheads and underarms, sending the mosquitoes on a feeding frenzy. Sugar’s hand slowed when the question was asked. “Oh, tell me about St. Louis. One of my childhood friends moved there,” Pearl continued. Sugar rolled one lone, brown pea beneath her index finger and then she raised her eyes to meet the top of Pearl’s head.

“Well?” Pearl said without raising her head. Her eyes remained focused on her chore. Her fingers moved quickly as she pushed the good peas to the left of the pile and the bad, bruised, discolored peas to the right.

“Ain’t nothing much to say.” Sugar’s mouth moved to say more, but only breath came out.

“Nothing?” Pearl’s head rose and her hand movements stopped. “C’mon, got to be something. What you do when you was up there?” Pearl’s tone was light on top but there was a pull beneath the words that would surely suck Sugar in if she did not step carefully.

“I—I worked for a woman,” Sugar said in a low voice.

“That true, doing what?” Pearl pushed. She leaned in.

“What?” Sugar asked stupidly, already tripping over the lie she was laying down.

“Yeah, what kinda work did you do for the woman?” Pearl’s voice probed.

“I, uh . . . well she ran a house for uh . . .” Sugar was searching for the wrong words, the words that wouldn’t tell the whole truth. The right words, the true ones, dangled before her and she had to shift her eyes and close her mouth lest they jump in and spill out.

“Well?” Pearl pushed again.

Sugar scratched at the heat rising around her neck. “She ran a house for—for women. I—I cleaned up around the place.” The words were out as quick as Sugar was up and out of her chair. Pearl’s eyes widened, but she said nothing else. She went back to pushing her peas. She let Sugar be, for now.

Sugar swallowed but it became harder to digest the truth about her time in St. Louis, Chicago and Detroit. She did not want to reveal her fifteenth year, the year she walked away from Short Junction. Small town ain’t fit for a woman that ain’t never had a mamma. It ain’t fit for a woman that never had any friends. It ain’t fit for a woman that dreamed beyond the confines and goings-on of the green and white Lacey home.

She picked up and left with the next man that said, “Sugar, girl, you somethin’ else! You something special! Oohh wee! Girl, I could really get use to this type of lovin’ six days a week and twice on Sunday!”

They left Short Junction on a slow-moving train to St. Louis, surrounded by the sweet smells of fried chicken, sweet biscuits and by the steady buzzing of talk about the girl that was found dead in Bigelow, some twenty or so miles down the road. They said she was beaten so badly her own mamma didn’t recognize her. Women covered their mouths and gasped in shock. A man called out over the sea of “I don’t believe it!” and “Can you imagine?” and revealed the worst thing of all: “ Her—her . . . privates were cut out and laid on the ground beside her.”

Sugar didn’t believe the whole story, small-town folk will stretch a story until it became a tale. But she did believe that that was a sign that her departure was right on time.

St. Louis was where life began picking away at her with the same slow, steady reverence of the train that brought her there.

She was awed by the buildings that stood taller than the pine trees in Arkansas, her eyes burned against the bright light of day that bounced off of the glimmering sidewalks. Sugar was completely unprepared for the fast-stepping, high-fashioned, quick-talking black people that moved around her like bees around a hive. She wanted to be one of them.

He dropped her off with a woman he called his sister. She lived in a brownstone house that looked like every other house on that street—the only distinguishable qualities about them were the variety of potted plants that graced the windowsills and the color of their doors. Mary Bedford’s door was red.

Step behind the red door and you were accosted by the sweet smell of Midnight in Paris perfume. The perfume had been worn for so long by Mary and the women that worked there that it seemed to seep from the walls and move from room to room on the back of the air driven by the constantly whirling ceiling fans found in every room. Throughout the house the hardwood floors were so polished that you could look down and see what color drawers you wore.

The parlor had one small loveseat with a glass table in front of it. Other than those two items, the room was bare.

Farther down the hall was a small eggshell-colored kitchen. An ice box, stove and square white countertop table with two chairs filled the space to capacity, leaving little room for the sun’s rays to settle. A bathroom, painted years before in pink and mauve, was adjacent to the kitchen. You could often find yourself sitting on the toilet and craving for the bacon that sizzled right on the other side of the wall.

The basement was for gambling. Plenty of men had nearly lost their lives over ill thrown dice or a slightly bent card, but Mary didn’t play that shit, and would have you cut into unidentifiable pieces if you tried to pull a fast one.

He promised, without looking at Sugar, that he would be back in a while. Mary Bedford shoved some bills in his hand, closed the door behind him and told Sugar, “He ain’t coming back, so don’t look for him to do so. He’s a liar, a cheat and a thief. But you’ve laid down with him so I suppose you know all that.”

Mary Bedford was copper colored, short and stocky with breasts that resembled overripe melons. She wore a long black curly wig that touched her behind and often got caught in the spaces between chairs and sofas. Her laugh was loud and harsh and her teeth were yellow from smoking two packs of Luckys a day.

“You sure are black, gal” was the second set of words to her. And she reminded her of this fact every day after that.

“Your mamma black like you? Ah, it don’t matter, they got a lot up here that like ’em like you. What’s that they say? The blacker the berry the sweeter the juice?” She laughed.

Sugar was scared. Her heart beat a hundred miles an hour in her chest. The fear was plastered across her face and she fought to keep her tears from falling.

“Is your juice sweet, honey baby?” she asked her. Sugar could smell the left-behind scent of some man coming off her breath.

Sugar wanted to yell at her, hit her, but seeing she was standing in her house, she decided it was just better to leave and reached for the door.

“Gal, you don’t know a soul in St. Louis, so make it easy on yourself. You. Not me. So go on up to the first room on the left and take off all your clothes.”

All Sugar could think was:
This woman must be funny or something.
She’d heard tales about city women doing it with one another. Sugar had experienced quite a few things in her fifteen years, but laying with a woman wasn’t one of them.

“For what?” Sugar said in her most vicious Lacey voice, placing her hands on her hips.

Mary just laughed. “So’s I could check your hair for lice. Can’t have lice, you know. A lot of you country bumpkins got ’em.”

Sugar clucked her tongue and rolled her eyes. It was obvious to her where she’d been left. A whorehouse. Same shit, different state. “Shoot, I don’t need to get butt naked for you to check my hair.”

Mary just flipped a wisp of hair away from her brow and said, “You do for me to check them pussy hairs of yours.”

Sugar spent five years with Mary. They weren’t easy years—years done on your back never are—but they were years that could have been done harder somewhere else. Mary passed along forty years of know-how to Sugar and Sugar became second in charge of the house when Mary was away.

One Sunday as they sat together in the kitchen, absorbing the street sounds and smells of summer, Mary turned to Sugar and stared at her long and hard. “You leaving soon, ain’t ya?” she said matter of factly. Mary never held her girls, they were free to go when they wanted to but hardly ever did.

“Thinking about it,” Sugar replied without looking up from the magazine she was lazily flipping through. Mary sighed and scratched at her head. Her face was absent of the Monday through Saturday stage makeup she wore. Her salt and pepper hair was braided in a hundred pickney braids that stood straight up in the air. She looked older than her forty-five years.

“Hmm, figured that. Lemme ask you something, Sugar. Why you act like you hate everybody? Especially men. You talk to them like they dogs in a gutter somewhere.” She continued, weary of waiting for her reply, “If you hate ’em as much as you act like you do, then baby, I’m sorry to say, you in the wrong business.”

Sugar had had little episodes with a few of the men that came to visit the house. She’d cuss ’em and maybe even get in a slap or two. “She a little spitfire ain’t she, Mary!” they’d say, wiping their lips on their way out through Mary’s red door. Then to Sugar, “I’ll see you next week, you little devil, you.” They always came back.

“First of all I don’t hate everybody. I don’t even hate anybody. Men . . . well, really no need to talk to them any better than I do. ’Sides, this here is business, a business that involves very little conversation,” Sugar replied.

Mary pondered that for a while.

“Still, I can’t believe you get all the requests you do when you never even offer a smile or a kind word—”

“Well, it ain’t hurting nothing, is it? It’s obvious they like the way I talk to them. Shit, Mary, I could talk about their mammas and they’d still come back for more.”

“Is it ’cause you didn’t know who your daddy was? Is that why you talk to men like you do, treat them like you do? All men ain’t like your daddy. All men don’t walk out and leave their babies—”

Sugar viciously cut her off. “It ain’t about me not having no daddy or no mamma, it ain’t about nothing, I just . . . I just . . .” She slammed her hands down on the table in frustration, causing Mary to flinch with surprise. Something in her wanted to let go, but she didn’t know how.

Mary was quiet for some time. They just sat and watched and listened to the children play and laugh below them.

“Sugar, ain’t you ever had no good times?” she said with a bit of sadness in her voice.

“What you mean?” Sugar said, knowing all too well what she was talking about. Sugar had seen good times being had all around her, in the Lacey house, in Mary’s house, but never had one that she could call her very own.

“It seems to me,” Mary began, and then decided to get up and stretch, “Whew, seems to me that I ain’t never see you look up from whatever you were doing and just smile.”

“Just smile? Smile at what? At who?”

“Smile into the air, girl!” she said and waved her arm through the air.

“That’s crazy . . . smiling into the air,” Sugar said and turned her head away.

“Naw, chile, it ain’t crazy, you smiling into the air ’cause a good long-time-ago thought caught you off guard. Not ’cause you crazy,” Mary said, sat down and looked back out into the world.

“I guess you right, then. I ain’t never had no good times.”

Sugar saw the way Mary’s eyes looked. Not hurt, but worried. Worried that she was sitting down with a twenty-year-old woman who had never had any good times.

“You better start, ’cause time is running and a life without good times ain’t a life worth having.”

Sugar left not too long after that conversation. There was something else she could do. Something that she’d been doing for years. First in the fields of Short Junction amongst the poppies and daisies and then later, alone in her bathroom, beneath the heavy sounds of the shower masking it away from the world. Or so she thought. Her voice had soothed Mary many nights as she listened to it filter through the walls of the house. Sugar could sing like an angel.

Mary hugged her tight at the bus stop. Sugar swore she saw tears swimming in her old eyes. Mary shoved a card in Sugar’s hand. “He’s an old friend of mine, lives in Detroit, owns a record company there. Tell him I sent you and he’ll be sure to talk to you.”

Al Schwartz - President

SAVOYRECORDS

Detroit, Michigan Ph. #KL-2-5893

Sugar hugged her back hard and thanked her. For the first time she felt different. Special. Not just Sugar Lacey from Short Junction, Arkansas, but Sugar Lacey, ready for the world. Sugar daydreamed all the way to Detroit. She believed her days of working on her back were over and done with.