The Women of Brewster Place (2 page)

Ben and his drinking became a fixture on Brewster Place, just like the wall. It soon appeared foolish to question the existence of either—they just were. And they were the first sight encountered by Brewster Place’s third generation of children, who drifted into the block and precipitated the exodus of the remaining Mediterraneans. Brewster Place rejoiced in these multi-colored “Afric” children of its old age. They worked as hard as the children of its youth, and were as passionate and different in their smells, foods, and codes from the rest of the town as the children of its middle years. They clung to the street with a desperate acceptance that whatever was here was better than the starving southern climates they had fled from. Brewster Place knew that unlike its other children, the few who would leave forever were to be the exception rather than the rule, since they came because they had no choice and would remain for the same reason
.

Brewster Place became especially fond of its colored daughters as they milled like determined spirits among its decay, trying to make it a home. Nutmeg arms leaned over windowsills, gnarled ebony legs carried groceries up double flights of steps, and saffron hands strung out wet laundry on back-yard lines. Their perspiration mingled with the steam from boiling pots of smoked pork and greens, and it curled on the edges of the aroma of vinegar douches and Evening in Paris cologne that drifted through the street where they stood together—hands on hips, straight-backed, round-bellied, high-behinded women who threw their heads back when they
laughed and exposed strong teeth and dark gums. They cursed, badgered, worshiped, and shared their men. Their love drove them to fling dishcloths in someone else’s kitchen to help him make the rent, or to fling hot lye to help him forget that bitch behind the counter at the five-and-dime. They were hard-edged, soft-centered, brutally demanding, and easily pleased, these women of Brewster Place. They came, they went, grew up, and grew old beyond their years. Like an ebony phoenix, each in her own time and with her own season had a story
.

The rattling moving van crept up Brewster like a huge green slug. It was flanked by a battered gypsy cab that also drove respectfully over the hidden patches of ice under the day-old snow. It began to snow again, just as the small caravan reached the last building on the block.

The moving men jumped out of the front of the van and began to unload the back. Mattie paid the driver and got out of the cab. The moist gray air was as heavy as the sigh that lay on her full bosom. The ashen buildings were beginning to fade against the gentle blanketing of the furry gray snow coming from the darkening sky. The sun’s dying rays could be felt rather than seen behind the leaden evening sky, and snow began to cling to the cracks in the wall that stood only six feet from her building.

Mattie saw that the wall reached just above the second-floor apartments, which meant the northern light would be blocked from her plants. All the beautiful plants that once had an entire sun porch for themselves in the home she had exchanged thirty years of her life to pay for would now have to fight for light on a crowded windowsill. The sigh turned into a knot of pity for the ones that she knew would die. She pitied them because she refused to pity herself and to think that she, too, would have to die here on this crowded street because there just wasn’t enough life left for her to do it all again.

Someone was cooking on the first floor, and the aroma seeped through the misted window and passed across her nose. For a moment it smelled like freshly cut sugar cane, and she took in short, rapid breaths of air to try to capture the scent again. But it was gone. And it couldn’t have been anyway. There was no sugar cane on Brewster. No, that had been in Tennessee, in a summer that lay under the graves of thirty-one years that could only be opened again in the mind.

Sugar cane and summer and Papa and Basil and Butch. And the beginning—the beginning of her long, winding journey to Brewster.

“Hey, gal.”

A cinnamon-red man leaned over the Michaels’ front fence and clucked softly to Mattie, who was in the yard feeding the young biddies. She purposely ignored him and ran her fingers around the pan to stir the mash and continued calling the chickens. He timed the clucking of his tongue with hers and called again, a little louder. “I say, hey, gal.”

“I heard you the first time, Butch Fuller, but I got a name, you know,” she said, without looking in his direction.

His long, upturned mouth, which always seemed ready to break into a smile, spread into a large grin, and he raced to the other edge of the fence and gave a deep exaggerated bow in front of her.

“Well, ‘cuse us poor, ignorant niggers, Miz Mattie, mam, or shoulds I say, Miz Michael, mam, or shoulds I say Miz Mattie Michael, or shoulds I say Miz Mam, mam, or shoulds I…” And he threw her a look over his bowed shoulders that was a perfect imitation of the mock humility that they used on white people.

Mattie burst out laughing and Butch straightened up and laughed with her.

“Butch Fuller, you was born a fool and you’ll die a fool.”

“Well, least that’ll give the preacher one good thing to say
at my funeral—this here man was consistent.”

And they laughed again—Butch heartily and Mattie reluctantly—because she realized that she was being drawn into a conversation with a man her father had repeatedly warned her against. That Butch Fuller is a no-’count ditch hound, and no decent woman would be seen talkin’ to him. But Butch had a laugh like the edges of an April sunset—translucent and mystifying. You knew it couldn’t last forever, but you’d stand for hours, hoping for the chance to experience just a glimmer of it once again.

“Now that I done gone through all that, I hope I can get what I came for,” he said slowly, as he looked her straight in the eyes.

The blood rushed to Mattie’s face, and just as her mouth dropped open to fling an insult at him, he slid his eyes evenly over to the barrel at the side of the house. “A cup of that cool rain water.” And he smiled wickedly.

She snapped her mouth shut, and he looked down and kicked the dust off his shoes, pretending not to notice her embarrassment.

“Yup, a scorcher like today is enough to make a man’s throat just curl up and die.” And he looked up innocently.

Mattie threw her feed pan down and walked sulkily to the rain barrel. Butch intently watched the circular movements of her high round behind under the thin summer dress, and he followed her rising hemline over the large dark calves when she bent to dip the water. But when she turned around, he was closely inspecting a snap on his overalls.

“Here’s your water.” She almost threw it at him. “I couldn’t even deny a dog a drink on a day like today, but when you done drunk it, you better be gettin’ on to wherever you was gettin’ before you stopped.”

“Lord, you Michael women got the sharpest tongues in the county, but I guess a man could die in a lot worst ways than being cut to death by such a beautiful mouth.” And he threw his head back and drank the water.

Mattie watched the movement of the water as it passed
down his long throat, and she reluctantly admired the strong brown contours in his neck and arms. His skin looked as if it had sparks of fire in it, and the sun played against the red highlights in his body. He had clean, good-natured lines in his movements which seemed to say to everyone—I’m here and ain’t complaining about it, so why are you?

“Thank you, Miz Mattie, mam.” He handed the cup back to her with a special smile that beckoned friendship on the basis of the secret joke they now shared between them.

Mattie understood, took the cup, and returned his smile.

“And since you inquired on my wheretos and whereabouts…”

“I did no such thing.”

He continued as if she hadn’t spoken, “I’m on my way to the low ground to pick me some wild herbs. And then I plans to stop by the Morgans’ sugar cane field near the levee. They just made harvest, and there’s some nice fat canes left around. So if you care to come along and pick you out a few, I’d be more than obliged to carry ’em back this way for you.”

Mattie almost agreed. She loved cane molasses, and if she found some really good ones, she could cut them up and boil them down and probably clear at least a pint or two of molasses. But her father would kill her if he heard she had been seen walking with Butch Fuller.

“Of course, now, if a big woman like you is afraid of what her daddy might say?”

Mattie grew defiant, realizing that he had been reading her thoughts.

“I ain’t afraid of nothing, Butch Fuller. And besides, Papa took Mama to town this afternoon.”

“Why, well, just as I was saying…A big woman like you ain’t got no cause to be scared of what her daddy might say. And as for them foul-minded old crows up on the hill who might run back to him with a pack of lies—why don’t we just take the back road to the cane field? No point in letting them get sunstroke runnin’ down the hill to tell something that really ain’t nothin’ to tell to somebody who
ain’t even here—right?” His voice was as smooth and coaxing as his smile.

“Right,” she said, and then looking straight into his eyes added slowly, “now, just let me go into the house and get Papa’s machete.” She waited for the flicker of surprise to widen his eyes slightly and then continued, “To cut the cane with—of course.”

“Of course.” And the April sun set in its full glory.

The back road to the levee was winding and dusty. And August in Rock Vale was a time of piercing, dry heat—“sneaky heat,” as the people called it. The moisture-free air felt almost comfortable, but then slowly the perspiration would begin to crawl down your armpits and plaster the clothes to your back. And the hot air in your lungs would expand until you felt that they were going to burst, so to relieve them you panted through a slightly opened mouth.

Mattie didn’t think about the heat as she walked beside Butch. They were almost perfect company because he loved to talk and she was an intelligent listener, knowing intuitively when to interrupt with her own observations about some person or place. He amused her with slightly laundered tales of the happenings in the town’s juke joints—places that were as foreign to her as Istanbul or Paris. And he scandalized her with his firsthand knowledge of who was seeing whose spouse down by the railroad tracks, just hours before they showed up at her church Sunday morning. He told her this gossip without judging or sneering, but with the same good-natured acceptance that he held toward everything in life. And Mattie found herself being shown how to laugh at things that would have been considered too shamefully ugly even to mention aloud at home.

She was so engrossed with Butch that she didn’t see the approaching team of mules and wagon until it was almost upon them.

“Oh, no, it’s Mr. Mike, the deacon of our church,” she whispered to Butch, and stepped a full foot away from him and began to swing the machete as she walked.

The wagon and mules pulled up to them. “How do, Mattie. How do, Butch.” And the old man spit a jawful of tobacco juice over the side of the wagon.

“Hey, Mr. Mike,” Butch called out.

“Going to cut cane, Mr. Mike,” Mattie chimed up loudly, and give the machete an extra swing to underscore her words.

Mr. Mike grinned. “Ain’t figure you to be goin’ catfishing with that knife, gal. Ain’t you all taking the long way to the levee, though?” He sat watching them, chewing slowly on his tobacco.

Mattie could think of nothing to say and swung the machete as if the answer lay in the widening arc of the blade.

“Too much sun on the main road,” Butch said easily. “And since black means poor in these parts—Lord knows, I couldn’t stand to get no poorer.”

Butch and Mr. Mike laughed, and Mattie tried not to look as miserable as she felt.

“Gal, stop swingin’ that knife ’fore you chop off a leg,” Mr. Mike said. “You plan on boiling up some cane molasses?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Mike.”

“Good then, if you get enough, bring me a taste Sunday. I love fresh cane syrup with my biscuits.”

“Sure will, Mr. Mike.”

He hit the reins and the mules started moving. “‘Member me to your ma and daddy.”

“Yes, sir.”

“See you in church Sunday, Mattie.” He called over his shoulder, “See you there doomsday, Butch.”

“Or somewhere thereabouts, Mr. Mike.”

The old man chuckled and spit over the side of the wagon again.

Mattie and Butch walked in silence for the next five minutes. He still had that crooked smile on his face, but there was something about the stiffness of his gait that told her that he was angry. He seemed to have closed off his spirit from her.

“My, Butch, you sure can think fast,” she complimented,
in way of reconciliation. “I just didn’t know what excuse to give him.”

“Why give any!” The words exploded from his mouth. “‘Going to cut cane, Mr. Mike,’” he mimicked in a falsetto. “Whyn’t you just haul up your dress and show him that your drawers was still glued to your legs? That’s what you meant, wasn’t it?”

“Now, why you gotta go and get nasty? Ain’t nobody thinkin’ ’bout that.”