was the blackest person I’d ever seen. A magnificent, unreal blackness. Burnt black. Shiny. Obsidian. Almost iridescent, the way the light danced across his skin, like the feathers left by the flock of black birds that blotted out the sun and set down in our backyard every winter on their way south, like our house was a place on a map.
The way folks told it, the full-hipped wife found out that her burnt-black husband was cheating with a younger woman who was known to lie down under older men. So one night, as the man sat watching television with the children, his wife stepped from the bedroom, drew her gun, and aimed at the back of his head. The children screamed. The man jumped and turned. The bullet meant for his head caught him in the stomach. As he lay bleeding out his black belly like a stuck hog, she dressed the children and took them to the Webster Parish Fair in Minden, a town fifteen miles west of Gibsland, leaving the man to die while folks munched on cotton candy and plucked numbered plastic ducks from a false stream.
Infidelity was license to kill. There was a bullet or a knife or a kettle of boiling water or a pot of hot grits waiting for any lover who dared lay up with a “Jody” or a “Clean Up Woman.” There were people all around who bore the marks of their sins—a chin-strap scar from a cut throat, leathery skin from a scalding, the nub of a shot-off arm. I had learned early in life that the wages of betrayal were meted out at the end of a gun barrel.
No one called the police before a bad thing happened. The police came only after the body fell. And besides, there was just one police officer in town and no real jail, save an abandoned red calaboose, set beside the shallow ditch that divided the town into black and white.
When someone felt wronged, they ignored the code of law and invoked the code of honor, leaving the details for God to sort out later.
In the case of the full-hipped woman, God saw fit to let her husband live.
And God saw fit to let my father live. Or maybe it was just my mother who had seen fit to let him live. Surely she could have hit him, if in fact she was aiming to. The distance was too short, her view too unobstructed. She was a better shot than that for sure. I believe that it was love that blurred her vision and bent the barrel. A heart still works even when it’s broken.
So that was it. My mother was done. She had let him back in to lie with her in her new bed, his body making the same old promises, promises that he had no intention of keeping, saying tender, lovely things that could only be passed through the press of flesh and the tips of fingers by a person with whom you shared a past and from whom you’d split apart.
But it seemed to me, even in their language without words, that his body must still have told lies. So many lies. Smooth, easy lies. The kind that fill women’s minds like smoke fills a hive. The kind that make women drunk with hope, thick blinding hope, the dangerous kind of hope that makes them lose their grip on good sense.
But no more. Not for my mother. She should have been done the night she kicked him out the window and their marriage shattered, but he patched things up. But what they had could not truly be fixed. It had to be abandoned. He was more trouble than he was worth. He and his lying body. She would be a fool for no man. This was the new, or renewed, mama. The strong mama. My mama. My father never slept over again. In fact, no man did.
After that, she began to talk openly about my father’s shortcomings—talking more to herself than to us. Each comment was an affirmation, a reminder, that no matter how hard we now had it, we were better off without him. She reminded us that he never paid his child support—only $25—although he regularly came to our house with a pocketful of uncashed work checks.
My mother’s derision widened the breach between my father and me into a gaping void, filled with the shards of broken promises,
The way folks told it, the full-hipped wife found out that her burnt-black husband was cheating with a younger woman who was known to lie down under older men. So one night, as the man sat watching television with the children, his wife stepped from the bedroom, drew her gun, and aimed at the back of his head. The children screamed. The man jumped and turned. The bullet meant for his head caught him in the stomach. As he lay bleeding out his black belly like a stuck hog, she dressed the children and took them to the Webster Parish Fair in Minden, a town fifteen miles west of Gibsland, leaving the man to die while folks munched on cotton candy and plucked numbered plastic ducks from a false stream.
Infidelity was license to kill. There was a bullet or a knife or a kettle of boiling water or a pot of hot grits waiting for any lover who dared lay up with a “Jody” or a “Clean Up Woman.” There were people all around who bore the marks of their sins—a chin-strap scar from a cut throat, leathery skin from a scalding, the nub of a shot-off arm. I had learned early in life that the wages of betrayal were meted out at the end of a gun barrel.
No one called the police before a bad thing happened. The police came only after the body fell. And besides, there was just one police officer in town and no real jail, save an abandoned red calaboose, set beside the shallow ditch that divided the town into black and white.
When someone felt wronged, they ignored the code of law and invoked the code of honor, leaving the details for God to sort out later.
In the case of the full-hipped woman, God saw fit to let her husband live.
And God saw fit to let my father live. Or maybe it was just my mother who had seen fit to let him live. Surely she could have hit him, if in fact she was aiming to. The distance was too short, her view too unobstructed. She was a better shot than that for sure. I believe that it was love that blurred her vision and bent the barrel. A heart still works even when it’s broken.
So that was it. My mother was done. She had let him back in to lie with her in her new bed, his body making the same old promises, promises that he had no intention of keeping, saying tender, lovely things that could only be passed through the press of flesh and the tips of fingers by a person with whom you shared a past and from whom you’d split apart.
But it seemed to me, even in their language without words, that his body must still have told lies. So many lies. Smooth, easy lies. The kind that fill women’s minds like smoke fills a hive. The kind that make women drunk with hope, thick blinding hope, the dangerous kind of hope that makes them lose their grip on good sense.
But no more. Not for my mother. She should have been done the night she kicked him out the window and their marriage shattered, but he patched things up. But what they had could not truly be fixed. It had to be abandoned. He was more trouble than he was worth. He and his lying body. She would be a fool for no man. This was the new, or renewed, mama. The strong mama. My mama. My father never slept over again. In fact, no man did.
After that, she began to talk openly about my father’s shortcomings—talking more to herself than to us. Each comment was an affirmation, a reminder, that no matter how hard we now had it, we were better off without him. She reminded us that he never paid his child support—only $25—although he regularly came to our house with a pocketful of uncashed work checks.
My mother’s derision widened the breach between my father and me into a gaping void, filled with the shards of broken promises,
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