You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (2 page)

I wonder if you are writing any more songs?

Sincerely,

Traynor

I wrote him back:

Dear Son,

We is all fine in the Lord’s good grace and hope this finds you the same. J. T. and me be out all times of the day and night in that car you give me—which you know you didn’t have to do. Oh, and I do appreciate the mink and the new self-cleaning oven. But if you send anymore stuff to eat from Germany I’m going to have to open up a store in the neighborhood just to get rid of it. Really, we have more than enough of everything. The Lord is good to us and we don’t know Want.

Glad to here you is well and gitting your right rest. There ain’t nothing like exercising to help that along. J. T. and me work some part of every day that we don’t go fishing in the garden.

Well, so long Soldier.

Sincerely,

Gracie Mae

He wrote:

Dear Gracie Mae,

I hope you and J. T. like that automatic power tiller I had one of the stores back home send you. I went through a mountain of catalogs looking for it—I wanted something that even a woman could use.

I’ve been thinking about writing some songs of my own but every time I finish one it don’t seem to be about nothing I’ve actually lived myself. My agent keeps sending me other people’s songs but they just sound mooney. I can hardly git through ’em without gagging.

Everybody still loves that song of yours. They ask me all the time what do I think it means, really. I mean, they want to know just what I want to know. Where out of your life did it come from?

Sincerely,

Traynor

1968

I didn’t see the boy for seven years. No. Eight. Because just about everybody was dead when I saw him again. Malcolm X, King, the president and his brother, and even J. T.. J. T. died of a head cold. It just settled in his head like a block of ice, he said, and nothing we did moved it until one day he just leaned out the bed and died.

His good friend Horace helped me put him away, and then about a year later Horace and me started going together. We was sitting out on the front porch swing one summer night, dusk-dark, and I saw this great procession of lights winding to a stop.

Holy Toledo! said Horace. (He’s got a real sexy voice like Ray Charles.) Look
at
it. He meant the long line of flashy cars and the white men in white summer suits jumping out on the drivers’ sides and standing at attention. With wings they could pass for angels, with hoods they could be the Klan.

Traynor comes waddling up the walk.

And suddenly I know what it is he could pass for. An Arab like the ones you see in storybooks. Plump and soft and with never a care about weight. Because with so much money, who cares? Traynor is almost dressed like someone from a storybook too. He has on, I swear, about ten necklaces. Two sets of bracelets on his arms, at least one ring on every finger, and some kind of shining buckles on his shoes, so that when he walks you get quite a few twinkling lights.

Gracie Mae, he says, coming up to give me a hug. J. T.

I explain that J. T. passed. That this is Horace.

Horace, he says, puzzled but polite, sort of rocking back on his heels, Horace.

That’s it for Horace. He goes in the house and don’t come back.

Looks like you and me is gained a few, I say.

He laughs. The first time I ever heard him laugh. It don’t sound much like a laugh and I can’t swear that it’s better than no laugh a’tall.

He’s gitting fat for sure, but he’s still slim compared to me. I’ll never see three hundred pounds again and I’ve just about said (excuse me) fuck it. I got to thinking about it one day an’ I thought: aside from the fact that they say it’s unhealthy, my fat ain’t never been no trouble. Mens always have loved me. My kids ain’t never complained. Plus they’s fat. And fat like I is I looks distinguished. You see me coming and know somebody’s
there.

Gracie Mae, he says, I’ve come with a personal invitation to you to my house tomorrow for dinner. He laughed. What did it sound like? I couldn’t place it. See them men out there? he asked me. I’m sick and tired of eating with them. They don’t never have nothing to talk about. That’s why I eat so much. But if you come to dinner tomorrow we can talk about the old days. You can tell me about that farm I bought you.

I sold it, I said.

You did?

Yeah, I said, I did. Just cause I said I liked to exercise by working in a garden didn’t mean I wanted five hundred acres! Anyhow, I’m a city girl now. Raised in the country it’s true. Dirt poor—the whole bit—but that’s all behind me now.

Oh well, he said, I didn’t mean to offend you.

We sat a few minutes listening to the crickets.

Then he said: You wrote that song while you was still on the farm, didn’t you, or was it right after you left?

You had somebody spying on me? I asked.

You and Bessie Smith got into a fight over it once, he said.

You
is
been spying on me!

But I don’t know what the fight was about, he said. Just like I don’t know what happened to your second husband. Your first one died in the Texas electric chair. Did you know that? Your third one beat you up, stole your touring costumes and your car and retired with a chorine to Tuskegee. He laughed. He’s still there.

I had been mad, but suddenly I calmed down. Traynor was talking very dreamily. It was dark but seems like I could tell his eyes weren’t right. It was like
something
was sitting there talking to me but not necessarily with a person behind it.

You gave up on marrying and seem happier for it. He laughed again. I married but it never went like it was supposed to. I never could squeeze any of my own life either into it or out of it. It was like singing somebody else’s record. I copied the way it was sposed to be
exactly
but I never had a clue what marriage meant.

I bought her a diamond ring big as your fist. I bought her clothes. I built her a mansion. But right away she didn’t want the boys to stay there. Said they smoked up the bottom floor. Hell, there were
five
floors.

No need to grieve, I said. No need to. Plenty more where she come from.

He perked up. That’s part of what that song means, ain’t it? No need to grieve. Whatever it is, there’s plenty more down the line.

I never really believed that way back when I wrote that song, I said. It was all bluffing then. The trick is to live long enough to put your young bluffs to use. Now if I was to sing that song today I’d tear it up. ’Cause I done lived long enough to know it’s
true.
Them words could hold me up.

I ain’t lived that long, he said.

Look like you on your way, I said. I don’t know why, but the boy seemed to need some encouraging. And I don’t know, seem like one way or another you talk to rich white folks and you end up reassuring
them.
But what the hell, by now I feel something for the boy. I wouldn’t be in his bed all alone in the middle of the night for nothing. Couldn’t be nothing worse than being famous the world over for something you don’t even understand. That’s what I tried to tell Bessie. She wanted that same song. Overheard me practicing it one day, said, with her hands on her hips: Gracie Mae, I’ma sing your song tonight. I
likes
it.

Your lips be too swole to sing, I said. She was mean and she was strong, but I trounced her.

Ain’t you famous enough with your own stuff? I said. Leave mine alone. Later on, she thanked me. By then she was Miss Bessie Smith to the World, and I was still Miss Gracie Mae Nobody from Notasulga.

The next day all these limousines arrived to pick me up. Five cars and twelve bodyguards. Horace picked that morning to start painting the kitchen.

Don’t paint the kitchen, fool, I said. The only reason that dumb boy of ours is going to show me his mansion is because he intends to present us with a new house.

What you gonna do with it? he asked me, standing there in his shirtsleeves stirring the paint.

Sell it. Give it to the children. Live in it on weekends. It don’t matter what I do. He sure don’t care.

Horace just stood there shaking his head. Mama you sure looks
good,
he says. Wake me up when you git back.

Fool,
I say, and pat my wig in front of the mirror.

The boy’s house is something else. First you come to this mountain, and then you commence to drive and drive up this road that’s lined with magnolias. Do magnolias grow on mountains? I was wondering. And you come to lakes and you come to ponds and you come to deer and you come up on some sheep. And I figure these two is sposed to represent England and Wales. Or something out of Europe. And you just keep on coming to stuff. And it’s all pretty. Only the man driving my car don’t look at nothing but the road. Fool. And then
finally,
after all this time, you begin to go up the driveway. And there’s more magnolias—only they’re not in such good shape. It’s sort of cool up this high and I don’t think they’re gonna make it. And then I see this building that looks like if it had a name it would be The Tara Hotel. Columns and steps and outdoor chandeliers and rocking chairs. Rocking chairs? Well, and there’s the boy on the steps dressed in a dark green satin jacket like you see folks wearing on TV late at night, and he looks sort of like a fat dracula with all that house rising behind him, and standing beside him there’s this little white vision of loveliness that he introduces as his wife.

He’s nervous when he introduces us and he says to her: This is Gracie Mae Still, I want you to know me. I mean…and she gives him a look that would fry meat.

Won’t you come in, Gracie Mae, she says, and that’s the last I see of her.

He fishes around for something to say or do and decides to escort me to the kitchen. We go through the entry and the parlor and the breakfast room and the dining room and the servants’ passage and finally get there. The first thing I notice is that, altogether, there are five stoves. He looks about to introduce me to one.

Wait a minute, I say. Kitchens don’t do nothing for me. Let’s go sit on the front porch.

Well, we hike back and we sit in the rocking chairs rocking until dinner.

Gracie Mae, he says down the table, taking a piece of fried chicken from the woman standing over him, I got a little surprise for you.

It’s a house, ain’t it? I ask, spearing a chitlin.

You’re getting
spoiled,
he says. And the way he says
spoiled
sounds funny. He slurs it. It sounds like his tongue is too thick for his mouth. Just that quick he’s finished the chicken and is now eating chitlins
and
a pork chop.
Me
spoiled, I’m thinking.

I already got a house. Horace is right this minute painting the kitchen. I bought that house. My kids feel comfortable in that house.

But this one I bought you is just like mine. Only a little smaller.

I still don’t need no house. And anyway who would clean it?

He looks surprised.

Really, I think, some peoples advance
so
slowly.

I hadn’t thought of that. But what the hell, I’ll get you somebody to live in.

I don’t want other folks living ’round me. Makes me nervous.

You
don’t?
It
do?

What I want to wake up and see folks I don’t even know for?

He just sits there down table staring at me. Some of that feeling is in the song, ain’t it? Not the words, the
feeling.
What I want to wake up and see folks I don’t even know for? But I see twenty folks a day I don’t even know, including my wife.

This food wouldn’t be bad to wake up to though, I said. The boy had found the genius of corn bread.

He looked at me real hard. He laughed. Short. They want what you got but they don’t want you. They want what I got only it ain’t mine. That’s what makes ’em so hungry for me when I sing. They getting the flavor of something but they ain’t getting the thing itself. They like a pack of hound dogs trying to gobble up a scent.

You talking ’bout your fans?

Right. Right. He says.

Don’t worry ’bout your fans, I say. They don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground. I doubt there’s a honest one in the bunch.

That’s the point. Dammit, that’s the point! He hits the table with his fist. It’s so solid it don’t even quiver. You need a honest audience! You can’t have folks that’s just gonna lie right back to you.

Yeah, I say, it was small compared to yours, but I had one. It would have been worth my life to try to sing ’em somebody else’s stuff that I didn’t know nothing about.

He must have pressed a buzzer under the table. One of his flunkies zombies up.

Git Johnny Carson, he says.

On the phone? asks the zombie.

On the phone, says Traynor, what you think I mean, git him offa the front porch? Move your ass.

So two weeks later we’s on the Johnny Carson show.

Traynor is all corseted down nice and looks a little bit fat but mostly good. And all the women that grew up on him and my song squeal and squeal. Traynor says: The lady who wrote my first hit record is here with us tonight, and she’s agreed to sing it for all of us, just like she sung it forty-five years ago. Ladies and Gentlemen, the great Gracie Mae Still!

Well, I had tried to lose a couple of pounds my own self, but failing that I had me a very big dress made. So I sort of rolls over next to Traynor, who is dwarfted by me, so that when he puts his arm around back of me to try to hug me it looks funny to the audience and they laugh.

I can see this pisses him off. But I smile out there at ’em. Imagine squealing for twenty years and not knowing why you’re squealing? No more sense of endings and beginnings than hogs.