He kept saying that over and over. I was so scared. I kept feeling that after he tore all her clothes off, and there wasn’t any more to tear, he’d start tearing her flesh.
3
A naked hanging light, a bed, a table, a yellow shade torn on the side. He made patterns with his fingers on my belly.
“Do you want me to use a rubber? I mean, when we do it?” he asked.
“Naw, not if you don’t wont to.”
I was seventeen when my cousin Alfonso and his wife came from Kansas City, Kansas. My mother said they were the cowboy part of the family. Some had stayed in Georgia, but some had gone West. She said she was the only one of the family who had come north, and she wouldn’t have done that if Daddy hadn’t wanted to make the move.
Now Alfonso and his wife, Jean, and Alfonso’s brother Otis had come to live in new York. They couldn’t get themselves a place to stay at first, so they stayed over at some hotel. Mama said she wished she could let them stay with us, but they saw what kind of space we had.
Jean and Otis came and visited us every now and then, but Alfonso was over there nearly every other day. He’d keep getting mad at something Jean did—we never did know what it was she did—and then he’d be over to our place. Mama said it must’ve been something she did back in Kansas City, and he just kept it in his memory. Otis never did know what it was either, but he said when they were in Kansas City, there was a certain hotel in Kansas City, and every time Alfonso got mad at Jean—it was like a spell or something that come over him—every time he got mad at Jean, he would take her down to this hotel and start beating her out in front of it. He wouldn’t take her inside, he’d beat her outside. Couldn’t nobody do nothing with him, and they would send for Otis. Otis was the only one that could do anything with him, and he didn’t even know how.
“All I would do is go down to the hotel,” Otis said.
He was sitting on the couch in the living room. He was a big man but not fat. He had come by himself one day.
“Yeah, I would just go down to the hotel. I wouldn’t do nothing, I would just kind of grab hold of his arm and say, ‘All right, Alfonso. That’s enough, Alfonso,’ and he would stop. And there Jean would be bruised all up. I don’t know why she ain’t left him. It was my idea we come here. I told Alfonso he probably have more opportunity here, you know, but the real reason was I wanted to get them away from that hotel. I thought it might help.”
“Has anything started up since they been here?” Mama asked. “Yeah, that’s what I came here to tell you, Marie. He got drunk last night and took her down in front of that hotel—the one we staying in—and started beating on her. But the woman stay with him, though. That’s what I don’t understand. She stay with him. If I was her I would’ve packed my bags a long time ago.”
Mama said nothing.
“You know,” Otis said quietly, as if somebody might overhear. “I almost suggested to him that maybe, you know, something was wrong with him, you know. But I ain’t asked him since.”
“What did he do?”
“It ain’t what he did, it’s the way he looked. If anybody had a look that could kill, it was that one, and I ain’t lying. The way I look at it now, it’s her that’s staying with him. If she can stand getting beat . . . You know what I’m trying to say?”
Mama nodded. She was staring down at her nails.
“I do what I can. Whenever he starts I go over there and touch his arm or take him by the shoulder and say, ‘That’s enough, Alfonso, all right, Alfonso,’ and then he stops.”
He had his arm thrown over the couch. Even though he didn’t take up the whole couch, it looked like he did. Me and Mama were sitting in chairs.
It was late one night a few days later when I heard it: “Never know how you’re going to love me.”
“Open the cell, please. I want to go to the toilet.”
“You must have bad kidneys,” the guard said.
“What do you want?” Elvira asked, late one night.
I hadn’t been sleeping, but thought she was asleep. I told her I didn’t want anything from her.
“Well, you ain’t getting nothing from that nigger of yours, neither, cause he’s dead.”
She started laughing. It was an almost noiseless laugh.
“It’s like you sitting on a pot, sitting right on a pot, but afraid to shit,” Elvira said.
I asked her if she was the pot or the shit.
She laughed hard this time. It was a short hard laugh, not a long one.
“I seen one of these men the queen bee got a hold of,” Miss Billie had said. “He was laying in this restaurant on the floor. Some woman had shot him. Naw, it wasn’t the queen bee that done it. What happened was that somebody told this woman this man of hers was down in such and such a restaurant with another woman. And what happened was
