Mama said she hadn’t known anybody like that, like the queen bee. But she said she would be more scared to be the queen bee than to be any of the men.
“Suppose you really loved somebody,” Mama said. “You’d be scared to love him.”
Miss Billie said she hadn’t never looked at it that way, but it must be hard on the queen bee too.
“Couldn’t love who you wont to, have to love who you didn’t wont to,” Miss Billie said.
I sat in the living room with my hands on my knees.
“I know you ain’t had to go to the toilet that much. What you in there doing, woman?” Elvira gave another hard laugh.
I sat back down on my cot.
“Scared to do it in here . . . Naw, you ain’t crazy. When you first come you was crazy, but you ain’t crazy now. They gon keep thinking it, though. Cause it’s easier for them if they keep on thinking it. A woman done what you done to a man.”
“You the pot or the shit?” I asked.
I lay down and turned my back to her. I watched two cockroaches on the wall.
“What’s the matter, Eva? What you thinking?”
I watched the cockroaches and wondered how small cockroach turd was, how much liquid was cockroach piss.
“What do you want?”
Freddy Smoot’s mother standing in the doorway kissing a man. She had on a tight-waist dress and purple lipstick. Got it on the man, he wiped his mouth off, kissed her again, wiped his mouth off. She had long thick hair and dark lines around her eyes. She got real close to the man and kissed him with her tongue out. Mr. Logan tried to show me his thing. I ran in the house and shut the door before I could see it. He had white stuff in the corners of his eyes. “Hoot. Hoot. Hoot. Hoot.” His stick has a bubble in it.
I felt her breath on my neck, but when I turned around she was laying on her cot with her eyes closed.
“I know what’s wrong,” she said.
The cockroaches on the wall got close together.
“What does Miss Calley think about all of this?” Mama asked. Miss Calley was Otis’s mother. She was my mother’s sister, but old enough to be her mother. Otis was older than my mother by two or three years, and Alfonso was almost as old as she was. So Mama had always called her sister Miss Calley, and when I saw Alfonso and Otis, I thought of them more as uncles than cousins.
“She don’t know what to think. She always have thought Alfonso was crazy. You know, like she say our Uncle Nutey went off his rocker, she thought maybe Alfonso might’ve inherited some of it. I ain’t even told her about the last two times Fonso beat up on Jean. You know, she told Jean that she could come stay with her, but Jean say she didn’t wont to. Actually, what Mama thinks is that Jean just as crazy as Alfonso and that they need each other.”
“Miss Calley still making those clothes and selling them to people?”
“Yeah, you go in there and she still got those clothes hanging up in there all over the house. Only thing is she still using a lot of them old patterns she got and people just ain’t wearing them kind of clothes any more. You know, sequins all up over the top and everything. It’s all right when people get her to make something specific for them, but some of them clothes just hang up in there.”
“They’ll come back in style. That’s the way clothes do.”
“Yeah, I reckon. Me and Alfonso send her money. That’s the only reason I hated to come out here, leave her alone like that. I mean, Daddy’s there, but he’s down at the garage most of the time, and she got so she had all her family with her. But, you know, I feel like I’m the only one that can handle Alfonso. You know what I mean.”
Mama nodded.
“You know the one question that’s always been in my mind?” He took his arm off the back of the couch and leaned forward.
“What is it?”
“It’s how long and hard he would beat on her if I hadn’t come all them many times, because every time he’s started beating on her, I’ve been there to stop it . . . Do you think he would’ve ended up beating her to death?”
Mama said nothing. She just looked at him. “Somebody would’ve stopped it,” she said finally. “The cops would’ve come and stopped it.”
“Naw, I be scared he’d turn on the cops, and then he be getting his self killed then.”
Mama said maybe he was right.
“Yeah, I know I’m right,” Otis said. He stood up stretching. “I wish I could do something to help,” Mama said.
“Naw, I didn’t come here for you to help,” Otis said. “I don’t think there’s nothing anybody can do. I think the onliest person could do anything is Jean, if she’d leave, but she won’t leave . . . Except maybe she’s right, though. Maybe he be worser off if she did leave and he didn’t
