“They didn’t wont to let me in here to see you, since I’m not kin to you or nothing. But I got a woman I used to go with that works here, that spoke up for me. They was looking at me like they thought I was some kind of creature, or something.”
I laughed. “Well, they was.”
“You look nice.”
He said, “Thank you.” Then he said, “You look pretty when you open up. You look just like a flower.”
I said nothing. I hadn’t even combed my hair that morning.
I got into those moods and I wouldn’t comb my hair.
We sat there saying nothing for I don’t know how long. We’d look at each other and smile sometime, and then he got up and told me to take it easy, and he said, “Don’t think I’m not coming back, I be back.”
I nodded but said nothing. When I got back to my cell, I took my shoes off and lay down on the bed.
He came to see me the three months I was in the reformatory and the three months I was in jail. He would talk about all kinds of things. He would mostly tell me stories about people. He told me about this man who owned this store and these people wanted to take the store so they could tear it down and make a branch of the State Mental Hospital there, but in order to get it they had to prove the man was insane. They ended up proving the man was insane, but in a few years ended up moving him back out there on the same ground where his store had been. He said that was a true story. Then he told me where when he was in the army these whores in France would come over to you and tell you right out loud where everybody could hear what it was they could do for you. like come over to you and ask you right out loud if you wanted a suck job. He said the first time one asked him he was so embarrassed he just turned around and walked right out of the place. Then he excused himself—he said he had a lot of other army stories, but he was forgetting who he was talking to. I told him to tell me another one. He said okay he’d just tell me one more. He said the first time he heard about sodomy was when these men got together and put this mule in this tent and then lined up. I started laughing. He looked surprised that I thought it was funny and then he started laughing.
We’d sit in this little room with a table and both sit up to the table. He’d be leaning across the table, and our knees would sometimes touch.
The strangest thing he told me was a story he started telling me but it wasn’t really a story. It wasn’t an off-color story or anything. He just started saying, “There was a woman who couldn’t love any man and she didn’t even like sex or anything that had anything to do with lovemaking.” That was all he said and then he stopped, and we just sat there.
“What’s St. Vitus dance?”
“What?”
“St. Vitus dance.”
He said he didn’t know. He told me to take it easy. He left.
Joanne said she wouldn’t want to have a baby. She said somebody asked her wouldn’t she like to nurse a baby. She said naw, and then she said she told her the only reason she’d consider having a baby was so she would have milk in her tiddies so when her man sucked on her tiddies, she’d have milk coming out. A man sucking milk from his woman. I asked her what did the girl say.
“She didn’t say nothing at first. She just looked at me disgusted. Then she said it sounded gruesome.”
James put his hand in my blouse, then he opened my blouse, and sucked my breasts.
The man called up my mother and asked her how did it feel.
“She’s my woman,” the girl said. “I don’t wont you messing with her, cause she’s my woman.”
They moved Joanne into another section.
Alfonso came to see me. I said nothing to him. He said he heard that I’d gotten to be friends with James Hunn. No, he didn’t put it like that. He said he’d heard I’d gotten close to a man they called Hawk. I said we were friends.
“You remember that man I told you about, the one that killed this man over a woman.”
“Yes.”
“He’s the same man.”
He tells the story again, of how they got in a fight in a restaurant over this woman. She wasn’t even a good-lookin woman, just a woman. They got in a fight and Hawk lost his temper and killed this man. The woman was gone. They didn’t know where the woman went, but Hawk was put in jail for seven years. They say he still carries the gun he shot the man with.
I said James Hunn was a good man.
“I never said he wasn’t. He’s just got a bad temper. He’s a good man with a bad temper. He don’t hurt people he likes, though. He wouldn’t hurt you . . . But he’s not a man to get close to.”
I said I hadn’t seen him with a bad temper. Alfonso said again that he wasn’t the kind of man a woman should get close to.
I got close enough to him to marry him when I got out. The trouble didn’t start until we moved down to Frankfort, Kentucky. He said he wanted to put me through school, so I enrolled in Kentucky State. I didn’t see his temper. I didn’t know that anything was wrong with him until we moved in this house and there was a telephone there and he said he was going to take the
