“Hell yes.”
“Oh.” She sounded disappointed, so I had to soften the blow.
“But it would be hard for me to find another woman as wonderful as you, and I probably wouldn’t. Because when God made you, he broke the mold.”
That compliment seemed to cheer her up. She smiled and squeezed my knee. “Do you think you could ever love another woman as much as you love me?”
“I don’t know about that.” I coughed and scratched the side of my face. Not only was this conversation making me uncomfortable, holding Joyce too long on my lap was no picnic. She weighed almost as much as I did now, which was over two hundred pounds. “Look, I don’t like to talk about things like this, and the only reason I’m doing it now is because you brung it up.”
“I just want to know what I’d have to face in case something did happen to you,” she pouted.
“If something happens to me and you don’t want to get married again, that’s your business. Whatever you decide to do, I hope you’ll be happy.”
“Thanks, baby. I feel better now. In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy every minute we have together and worry about the rest when and if it happens.”
“Good. Let’s talk about something else.”
Joyce let out a loud breath and glanced at the side of my neck again. She tapped it. I winced and let out a soft groan. “I’m sorry, baby.” She moved her hand and placed it on my shoulder. “So how did you get out of that sand trap?”
“Well, with them yellow jackets after my blood, I couldn’t take the time to use them tree branches. Right after I’d been stung a few times, I jumped back in the car and sat there until this young boy drove up in a pickup truck. He pushed me out. Come to find out, he was the son of the man that had chased me off with his shotgun.”
“Well, at least you got out of that mess all right. Did you have a good drive?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m glad to hear that. Pretty soon you’ll be so familiar with that old car, you’ll be able to drive it with your eyes closed. But I’m telling you now, you’ll be driving up and down the roads without me. If I had been with you today, I would have had a heart attack as soon as I saw those yellow jackets. Where all did you go?”
“Um, I drove through Scottsboro—”
Joyce wasted no time cutting me off with a gasp and a slap upside my head. “Scottsboro? Odell Watson! Have you lost your mind? You know how dangerous it is for colored men in that town! What’s the matter with you?” Three years ago, nine colored teenage boys had been accused of raping two white girls on a train in the hick town of Paint Rock near Scottsboro. They had all hopped on that train illegally so they could travel around to look for work. The Depression was responsible for a lot of colored men and boys doing some foolish things, but raping white girls wasn’t one of them. Even with no evidence, no witnesses, and one of the girls claiming later that she and her friend had lied about being raped, eight of the boys had been found guilty by an all-white jury and sentenced to death. The other boy got life in prison because he was only thirteen at the time of the bogus rapes. Newspapers all over the world covered the story. Some of the colored people who had lived in Scottsboro during the trial moved away. Things had cooled off over there, but it was still a dangerous place. I had enough sense to keep my distance, but the lie about driving through that town had rolled off my lips before I could stop it.
I rubbed the side of Joyce’s arm. “Calm down, sugar. I’d never rape nobody.”
“You don’t have to! Those boys didn’t either. But if a white woman says you did, that’s all the law needs to hear and your life wouldn’t be worth a fake nickel.”
“Joyce, I was born and raised in Alabama, just like you. You ain’t telling me nothing I don’t already know about the Jim Crow laws. One town is just as segregated and dangerous for a colored person as the next. We can’t keep living in fear of white folks and be happy. Until I have a problem with some peckerwood, I’m going to keep going wherever I want to go. And every white person ain’t crazy, or racist. I know a bunch of good crackers. They spend a lot of money in the store and treat us real nice.”
“I know all that. But that’s not enough to keep me from worrying about you. Just promise me, you’ll always be careful.”
“I promise you, I’ll always be careful.”
Joyce swallowed hard and looked pleased. But a split second later, her body got as stiff as cardboard and she started sniffing my neck. “Y-you smell like fish.”
“I ain’t surprised. I had my fishing rod with me so I tried my luck in Carson Lake before my run-in with them yellow jackets.”
“What did you do with the fish? I hope you didn’t leave them in the car to stink it up.”
“I caught a few blue gills but they was so small, I threw them back in the water.”
Joyce sniffed some more, frowning the whole time. When she leaned back and rubbed her nose, there was a puzzled look on her face. “You don’t smell like raw fish. You smell like fried fish,” she pointed out.
I was a good liar, even better than I was before I married Joyce. I could make up a believable fib at the drop of a hat. “I stopped off at this hole-in-the-wall restaurant along the way and picked
