“Yes, there was a woman called the queen bee,” I said.
6
“She’s educated, though,” the captain said. “She spent two years at Kentucky State, then quit and went to work at
P. Lorillard tobacco company in Lexington, then she came up to Connecticut and got in tobacco there. Been on the road all her life, just like a man . . .”
I picked the loose skin from around my nails.
The foreman at the plant sent for me. “I thought maybe you could tell me how most of the niggers feel about the union. Whether or not they in favor of it.”
I said I didn’t know how anybody else was going to vote. I said I just knew how I was going to vote. He said there was ten percent more black people there since he was foreman, and that he liked people that showed gratitude. I said I didn’t know how anybody else was going to vote. He asked me how I was going to vote. I said I knew how I was going to vote. He said he had some money for me if I wanted it. I said I didn’t know how anybody else was going to vote. He said never mind that. He said he didn’t mean that. He said he had some money for me. I said by the time the voting was over, it would be time for me to be back on the road again. He said I didn’t seem like
I belonged around there anyway. He said I could be on the road before the voting was over. He sent me out and called somebody else in. He said he didn’t like people who didn’t know how to be grateful.
I picked the loose skin from around my nails. I sat on the bed. Davis scooted his chair up to me. He sat backwards, straddling the chair, his arms up over the back.
“You had that look in your eyes again,” he said. “What look?”
“Sometimes when I look at you and you don’t know I’m looking at you, you set your jaw a certain way, and then you get this look in your eyes.”
“What kind of look?”
“I don’t know what kind of look. It’s just there . . . You hard to get into, you know that.”
“I didn’t think I was so hard.”
“I don’t mean that way,” he said.
I grinned at him. He grinned back at me, then frowned.
When the psychiatrist told me his name was David Smoot, I laughed. He asked me what was wrong. I said nothing. He had a mustache and goatee and reminded me of the musician.
“Why did you kill the man, Eva?” I didn’t answer.
“Did Davis know why you killed him?” I still didn’t answer.
He leaned toward me. He said he didn’t just want to know about the killing, he said he wanted to know about what happened after the killing. Did it come in my mind when I saw
him lying there dead or had I planned it all along. His voice was soft. It was like cotton candy. He said he wanted to know how it felt, what I did, how did it make me feel. I didn’t want him looking at me. I had my hands on my knees. My knees were open. I closed my knees.
“I want to help you, Eva.” I said nothing.
“Talk to me.” I wouldn’t.
“You’re going to have to open up sometime, woman, to somebody. I want to help you.”
I looked at him, still saying nothing. He sat watching me for a long time and then he said, “I’ll see you, Eva.”
He got up and left. I listened to his footsteps down the hall. I kept my knees squeezed tight together. I heard a woman a few cells down from me laugh, twice, then she was silent.
“I guess what you done excites people,” Elvira said.
“How did it feel, Eva?” the psychiatrist asked.
My mother got an obscene telephone call one day. A man wanted to know how did it feel when my daddy fucked her. “How did it feel?” Elvira asked.
“They told me you wouldn’t talk. They said I wouldn’t get one word out of you,” the psychiatrist said. “Did you feel you had any cause to mutilate him afterwards? Why did you feel killing him wasn’t enough?”
“How did it feel?” Elvira asked.
“How did you feel?” the psychiatrist asked.
“How did it feel?” Elvira asked.
“How do it feel, Mizz Canada?” the man asked my mama. She slammed the telephone down.
“Eva. Eva. Eva,” Davis said.
“My hair looks like snakes, doesn’t it?” I asked.
I don’t want to tell my story. Can I have a cigarette? Thanks. Why don’t you go away. Can I have another cigarette before you go away? You know, I used to make these things.
The gypsy Medina’s hair was as thick as a black woman’s. In a picture my grandmother’s hair was heavy against her face. My Grandmother Medina was married three times. She had fourteen children. About eight of them were born living. One of them was born choked by her own umbilical cord, another was born with the fever, another they couldn’t explain, another . . . Her hair was as heavy as a black woman’s.
“How much would you take for it?”
“I wouldn’t take nothing.”
“Five, ten, fifteen . . .”
“I said I wouldn’t take nothing.”
He sent me away, and called somebody else in. “I just spoke with one nigra, but she . . .”
“Alfonso—that’s my cousin—he used to beat his wife outside this hotel. He wouldn’t beat her inside, he had to always take her outside and beat her. And they used to always have to go get his brother to make him stop, because that was the only one he would listen to.”
Alfonso, sitting in the Froglegs restaurant, brought me a beer. “I’ll tell your mama you let me suck your tiddies.”
“Naw you won’t.”
“I’d have
