Mama said, “Maybe.”
Otis grinned at me, and told Mama goodbye, and left.
Miss Billie said, “Yeah, I guess I would be more scared if I was her than him.”
I used to think the queen bee looked like a bee and went around stinging men, but once we were walking down the street and Miss Billie said, “There she is.”
“Who?” Mama asked.
“The queen bee,” she said under her breath.
She didn’t look any different from Mama or Miss Billie or Freddy’s mama.
“You just sitting right on a pot and scared to shit,” Elvira said. “Sitting right on one.”
“Naw, I ain’t never got into nothing over no woman,” Davis said. He was playing with my ankles.
I closed my eyes. He was laying with his feet toward my face, playing with my ankles.
“Why did you come here, Eve?”
“My name’s Eva.”
“Why’d you get so angry?”
“I don’t know. I just never liked to be called Eve. I don’t know why.”
“All right, Eva, baby. You don’t mind if I call you baby, do you?”
“Naw, I don’t mind.”
He squeezed both my ankles. “You a good-lookin woman,” he said. “A real good-lookin woman.”
“You looking at my feet,” I said, laughing.
“Honey, baby, I know what your face look like. By the time I get through with you, I want to know you inside out.”
He didn’t see the lines in my forehead. I looked down at his shoulders, the back of his head.
“You know that song. I don’t want to love you outside, I want to love you inside,” he said, laughing. “Go something like that.”
“Yeah,” I said, and laughed some. “Eva, Eva, sweet Eva,” he said.
“You could be so sweet to me, if you wanted to,” Elvira said. “I’ll help you stuff a candy bar up your ass,” I said.
“You ain’t so hard as you think you are. You just wait. You ain’t near so hard as you think you are. You think cause you can bite off a man’s dick, you can’t feel nothing. But you just wait. You gon start feeling, honey. You gon start feeling.”
She laughed her laugh.
“They told me hysteria was one of your problems,” I said. “Yeah, and I know what yours is. Got to go pee, my ass . . .”
“Y’all ain’t the only people in the world. There’s more people in the world than y’all,” some woman from another cell hollered. “Honey, we know you here too,” Elvira said.
“Eva, sweet, sweet Eva.”
He ran his hands between my thighs, and stopped when he hit my bloomers, the sanitary pad.
“I hope you got enough of these things,” he said. “Yeah, I brought enough.”
“Cramps any better?”
I nodded. He kept his warm hand on the inside of my thighs. “Shit or piss one,” Elvira said.
The gypsy Medina, sitting in my great-grandmama’s kitchen, said, “There’s something in my eyes that looks at men and makes them think I want them.”
“Why did you come over and say something to me in the first place?” I heard Mama ask Tyrone.
“There was something in your eyes that let me know I could talk to you.”
“Didn’t you see anything in the other women’s eyes?”
“Naw.”
Davis said, “There was something in your eyes.”
“What?”
“I could tell by your eyes how you felt. I could smell you wanted me.”
“I couldn’t help looking.”
I told Davis what the gypsy Medina and her husband did. They told Great-Grandmama they had a sick baby in the wagon, and said they didn’t have any food, and asked her if she could give them some food for the sick baby. Great-Grandmama was still living in Georgia, in the country, and kept chickens. She gave them two of the chickens, and some milk and ham. When they left, Great-Grandmama’s cousin who lived down the road came up to the house and said, “I seen them gypsies” wagon stop up here. You didn’t give em no food, did you?” GreatGrandmama said, “Yeah, I gave them something.” Her cousin said, “I didn’t give em nothing. I went out there and looked in the wagon and that baby was as big as I am.”
Great-Grandmama said she liked Medina, though. She would have given them the food just for themselves. When my grandmother was born, she named her Medina.
Davis said, “Don’t look at me that way. Don’t look at me that way until you’re through bleeding.”
“You know where they keeping his penis,” Elvira said. “They keeping it in the icebox, so it won’t get all shriveled up, so they can use it for evidence. They took it out of that silk handkerchief you had it in and wrapped it in Glad Wrap. When you go to court, though, they gon put it back in that silk handkerchief. Which one of em had to show the penis around? Did they try to make you look at it?”
“Yes, but I wouldn’t.”
“Just like in that Bible story, ain’t it? Except got his dick on a platter.”
“Yes.”
“You lied. They said you didn’t bite it all off, like you told me.”
“I did.”
The gypsy Medina sat in my great-grandmother’s kitchen. Her hair was thick gypsy hair. She said she had gone to those white people’s house and these white people had sent them around to the kitchen where the negroes was.
My great-grandmother’s cousin said, “They was up there to my place talking about these peckawoods. They peckawoods too. They don’t even know they peckawood. You know, like that old man from Syria that keeps that store down at Frogs Crossing.”
Great-Grandmama nodded.
“He come talking to me about what the peckawoods done to him. I told him he’s a peckawood too.”
Great-Grandmama said, “If he don’t think he’s one, he ain’t one.”
Her cousin said, “Shit.”
The gypsy Medina, Great-Grandmama said, had time in the palm of her hand. She told Great-Grandfather, “She told me to look in the palm of her hand and she had time in it.”
Great-Grandfather said, “What did she
