away day in March when he drove his father’s two-tone Ford over to her house for two bottles of wine. Milkman was much sought after and depended upon to secure the liquor he and his under-twenty-one friends believed vital to a party. When he got to Pilate’s he walked in on a domestic crisis.
Reba’s new man friend had asked her for a small loan and she had told him that she didn’t have any money at all. The man, who had received two or three nice presents from her unasked, thought she was lying and was trying to tell him to shove off. They were quarreling in the backyard—that is, the man was quarreling. Reba was crying and trying to convince him that what she’d said was true. Just after Milkman opened the door, Hagar came running from the bedroom, where she’d been looking out the back window. She screamed to Pilate, “Mama! He’s hitting her! I saw him! With his fist, Mama!”
Pilate looked up from a fourth-grade geography book she was reading and closed it. Slowly, it seemed to Milkman, she walked over to a shelf that hung over the dry sink, put the geography book on it, and removed a knife. Slowly still, she walked out the front door—there was no back door—and as soon as she did, Milkman could hear Reba’s screams and the man’s curses.
It didn’t occur to him to stop Pilate—her mouth was not moving and her earring flashed fire—but he did follow her, as did Hagar, around to the back of the house, where, approaching the man from the back, she whipped her right arm around his neck and positioned the knife at the edge of his heart. She waited until the man felt the knife point before she jabbed it skillfully, about a quarter of an inch through his shirt into the skin. Still holding his neck, so he couldn’t see but could feel the blood making his shirt sticky, she talked to him.
“Now, I’m not going to kill you, honey. Don’t you worry none. Just be still a minute, the heart’s right here, but I’m not going to stick it in any deeper. Cause if I stick it in any deeper, it’ll go straight through your heart. So you have to be real still, you hear? You can’t move a inch cause I might lose control. It’s just a little hole now, honey, no more’n a pin scratch. You might lose about two tablespoons of blood, but no more. And if you’re real still, honey, I can get it back out without no mistake. But before I do that, I thought we’d have a little talk.”
The man closed his eyes. Sweat ran from his temples down the sides of his face. A few neighbors who had heard Reba’s screams had gathered in Pilate’s backyard. They knew right away that the man was a newcomer to the city. Otherwise he would have known a few things about Reba, one of which was that she gave away everything she had and if there was a case quarter in that house she’d have given it to him; and more important, he would have known not to fool with anything that belonged to Pilate, who never bothered anybody, was helpful to everybody, but who also was believed to have the power to step out of her skin, set a bush afire from fifty yards, and turn a man into a ripe rutabaga—all on account of the fact that she had no navel. So they didn’t have much sympathy for him. They just craned their necks to hear better what Pilate was telling him.
“You see, darlin, that there is the only child I got. The first baby I ever had, and if you could turn around and see my face, which of course you can’t cause my hand might slip, you’d know she’s also the last. Women are foolish, you know, and mamas are the most foolish of all. And you know how mamas are, don’t you? You got a mama, ain’t you? Sure you have, so you know what I’m talking about. Mamas get hurt and nervous when somebody don’t like they children. First real misery I ever had in my life was when I found out somebody—a little teeny tiny boy it was—didn’t like my little girl. Made me so mad, I didn’t know what to do. We do the best we can, but we ain’t got the strength you men got. That’s why it makes us so sad if a grown man start beating up on one of us. You know what I mean? I’d hate to pull this knife out and have you try some other time to act mean to my little girl. Cause one thing I know for sure: whatever she done, she’s been good to
The man struggled for breath and Pilate eased up on his throat but not his heart.
“Lemme go,” he whispered.
“Hmmmmm?”
“Lemme go. I…won’t never…put a hand on her. I promise.”
“A real promise, sugar?”
“Yeah. I promise. You won’t never see me no more.”
Reba sat on the ground, her arms around her knees, staring through her unswollen eye at the scene as though she were at a picture show. Her lip was split and her cheek was badly bruised, and though her skirt and hands were stained with her effort to stop the blood pouring from her nose, a little still trickled down.
Pilate plucked the knife out of the man’s shirt and took her arm away. He lurched a little, looked down at the blood on his clothes and up at Pilate, and licking his lips, backed all the way to the side of the house under Pilate’s gaze. Her lips didn’t start moving again until he was out of sight and running down the road.
All attention turned to Reba, who was having difficulty trying to stand up. She said she thought something was broken inside in the place where he’d kicked her. Pilate felt her ribs and said nothing was broken. But Reba said she wanted to go to the hospital. (It was her dream to be a patient in a hospital; she was forever trying to get admitted, since in her picture-show imagination, it was a nice hotel. She gave blood there as often as they would let her, and stopped only when the blood bank was moved to an office-type clinic some distance away from Mercy.) She was insistent now, and Pilate surrendered her judgment to Reba’s. A neighbor offered to drive them and off they went, leaving Milkman to buy his wine from Hagar.
He was delighted with the performance and followed Hagar into the house to laugh and talk excitedly about it. She was as tranquil as he was agitated, as monosyllabic as he was garrulous.
“Was that something? Wow! She’s two inches taller than he is, and she’s talking about weak.”
“We are weak.”
“Compared to what? A B-52?”
“Every woman’s not as strong as she is.”
“I hope not. Half as strong is too much.”
“Well, muscle strength is one thing. I meant women are weak in other ways.”
“Name some. I want you to name some for me. Where are you weak?”
“I don’t mean me. I mean other women.”
“You don’t have any weakness?”
“I haven’t found any.”
