“Well, she ain’t no young woman. My mama’s a young woman.”
I started to tell him what my mama said about his mama, but I didn’t. He was laughing.
His mama was standing in the door kissing a man.
The light was swelling from the ceiling. Davis said I was pretty. He put my chin in his palm. “You so pretty,” he said. “Come lay on the bed with me, honey. I won’t do nothing.”
But his hands made rhythms in my belly. I could feel I wanted him already.
“Who are you? Where did you come from?” he asked playfully, stretched out beside me. He’d taken off his trousers. I was down to my panties, the sanitary kind, with the plastic strip in the crotch. I was still afraid I’d stain the bedspread, so he put a towel under me. He stroked my thighs.
“Sometimes I wonder myself,” I said.
He said he could smell perfume and menstruation. He said he didn’t like it. I kissed his mouth.
“I got all that egg smell out, and now you smelling up my room again.” He laughed.
I laughed back at him.
“Now if it was another smell . . .” he said.
I sat up in bed and started singing, the song about staying until it was time for going. He said he liked the song. I lay down beside him again, scratching under my breasts. I could tell he wanted to suck them, but he didn’t. I asked him to get closer because it helped the cramps.
“All that blood,” he said. “I never could help feeling it was something nasty, even with . . .”
“What’s wrong?”
He got up against my belly.
Freddy said him and his mama were moving to a house in Jamaica, new York, a house with a upstairs.
“So.”
“You gon miss me, ain’t you?”
“Naw, I ain’t gon miss you.”
He started laughing. “I’m gon miss you,” he said.
He kissed me on the cheek and ran upstairs. I put spit on my hand and wiped my cheek off. He ran back downstairs.
“Here.” He put it in my hand. “What is it?”
“A knife.”
It was a little pearl-handled pocketknife.
“I’m gon miss you,” he said, and ran back upstairs.
Miss Billie had on wooden bracelets. She had on five wooden bracelets on one wrist.
“I wish I could get Charlotte away from that boy. She’s just too restless. It ain’t right for no little girl to be that restless. If she was a woman it would be something different. Even if she was eighteen. I told her I would send her down there to her daddy in north Carolina. She said if I did, she would run away. Ain’t got nothing but that boy on her mind. I told her she gon get more than her hand stuck in the door if she don’t start thinking about something else. But they like that, though, ain’t they? They just won’t listen.”
“Eva said Freddy and his mama are moving to Jamaica,” Mama said.
“Well, I guess she musta found a better locality,” Miss Billie said.
Elvira asked, “What about when you close them? Do they stay closed?”
I asked her if she had another cigarette. She was going to light it for me, but I said I’d light it myself. She’d wanted to light it in her mouth and then pass it to mine.
I usually didn’t smoke, but every now and then I’d want one to give me something to do. At first they wouldn’t let Elvira have any cigarettes, and then when she started improving, they’d let her have cigarettes.
“Yeah, they thought I was too crazy to even have my own cigarettes,” she said, stuffing them back in the pocket of her dress.
She asked me again if once you closed your legs, did you keep them closed. I asked her what did she think.
Miss Billie gave me one of her wooden bracelets. That was when I started to school. She said they were ancestors bracelets. She put it on my wrist. She said something about being true to one’s ancestors. She said there were two people you had to be true to—those people who came before you and those people who came after you.
“They heirlooms, ain’t they? Ain’t you suppose to give those to Charlotte?” Mama asked.
“I wanted Eva to have one,” Miss Billie said.
Miss Billie said she was going to her husband in north Carolina. He was down there working in tobacco, and she said if she was going to have to work in a restaurant up north, she might as well work in one down South, and be with her husband.
“I’m going on account of Charlotte too. You know how I was all worried about her and that boy, and that once it happened I wasn’t going to be able to handle her.”
“Did anything happen?”
Miss Billie said the first time he tried to do something, Charlotte came home crying and said she didn’t even want to see him again.
He was up against my belly. “I ain’t never got in no trouble over no woman,” he said. “I know mens that kill on account of a woman. I ain’t even fought over no woman.”
“What would you do, just let her go?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’d just let her go. If she wanted to go, I’d let her go.” He started laughing, and squeezed my waist. “Now, if she didn’t want to go, that’s another story. If some man was trying to take her somewhere and she didn’t want to go, that would be different.”
“I knew a man that killed another man on account of a woman.”
“Was you the woman?”
“Naw. I didn’t know her. I just knew the man . . . My cousin told me about how this man killed another man and they put him in jail for seven years. He killed him in the same restaurant we used to go in. He said they wouldn’t even let him in that restaurant no more. He could come and peek in or he could send somebody in there
