your lap.
For a while it was grand being prize pawn; for both women, fast breaking from the strain of liquor, whoredom, moneymaking and battle, thought they truly loved him—but as a clean young animal they had not finished soiling. Their lives infinitely lacked freshness. They were as stale as the two-dollar rooms upstairs. Innocence continued to exist in him for them, since they were not able to see anything wrong in what they did with him. He enjoyed it and after all he was nobody’s husband.
And if guilt feeling did exist, as perhaps it did on Sunday mornings in the Baptist church, when they outdressed all the women in town and outshouted half of them, it was a minimal and momentary uneasiness, fanned into a pleasurable passion of repentance by inflamed readings from the Scripture. They shouted out their sins in paroxysms of enjoyable grief. The righteous cleanliness of their souls hardly outlasted the service.
12
M ATTERS CAME TO a head for Brownfield when he saw Mem walking for the first time with a man, a teacher like herself. Suddenly he felt he might be passing up a great chance. He felt injured by her choice. Had Mem bypassed him because he was not a well-taught man? His pride was hurt. Gloomily he thought of his poverty and his dependence on Josie and Lorene. All he owned were the clothes on his back and they were none too new.
One night he spied on Mem and her upright, clean-living beau and knew he must have her for his wife. And coming in that night, with him standing in the unlit doorway gazing out at them, Mem brushed past him with tears in her eyes. That was the first time he knew she loved him, and that she was forcing him out of her life by womanly design, and that if he didn’t do something soon she would be lost to him. He caught her in his arms as she was going up the stairs and vowed in words and kisses never to let her go.
The next day he went out into the country, to a plantation not far from where he was born, to a man he had heard was fair. They talked of farming on shares for two years, or until Brownfield could make enough money to take his bride northward.
The next week Mem and Brownfield left Josie and Lorene still fighting each other over him, each claiming the other had pushed Mem on to “ketch” him. Brownfield borrowed a wagon from the man he was now working for, and Mem sat beside him on the splintery wooden seat.
“We ain’t always going to be stuck down here, honey. Don’t you worry,” he promised her while she sat quietly, holding her veil in her warm brown hands, and looking and smiling at him with gay believing eyes, full of love.
13
T HREE YEARS LATER when he was working the same farm and in debt up to his hatbrim and Mem was big with their second child, he could still look back on their wedding day as the pinnacle of his achievement in extricating himself from evil and the devil and aligning himself with love. Even the shadow of eternal bondage, which plagued him constantly those first years, could not destroy his faith in a choice well made. For Mem was the kind of woman who sang while she cooked breakfast in the morning and sang when getting ready for bed at night. And sang when she nursed her babies, and sang to him when he crawled in weariness and dejection into the warm life-giving circle of her breast. He did not care what anybody thought about it, but she was so good to him, so much what he needed, that her body became his shrine and he kissed it endlessly, shamelessly, lovingly, and celebrated its magic with flowers and dancing; and, as the babies, knowing their places beside her as well as life, sucked and nursed at her bosom, so did he, and grew big and grew firm with love, and grew strong.
They were passionate and careless, he and Mem, making love in the woods after the first leaves fell, making love high in the corncrib to the clucking of hens and the blasting of cocks, making love and babies urgently and with purest fire at the shady ends of cotton
For a while it was grand being prize pawn; for both women, fast breaking from the strain of liquor, whoredom, moneymaking and battle, thought they truly loved him—but as a clean young animal they had not finished soiling. Their lives infinitely lacked freshness. They were as stale as the two-dollar rooms upstairs. Innocence continued to exist in him for them, since they were not able to see anything wrong in what they did with him. He enjoyed it and after all he was nobody’s husband.
And if guilt feeling did exist, as perhaps it did on Sunday mornings in the Baptist church, when they outdressed all the women in town and outshouted half of them, it was a minimal and momentary uneasiness, fanned into a pleasurable passion of repentance by inflamed readings from the Scripture. They shouted out their sins in paroxysms of enjoyable grief. The righteous cleanliness of their souls hardly outlasted the service.
12
M ATTERS CAME TO a head for Brownfield when he saw Mem walking for the first time with a man, a teacher like herself. Suddenly he felt he might be passing up a great chance. He felt injured by her choice. Had Mem bypassed him because he was not a well-taught man? His pride was hurt. Gloomily he thought of his poverty and his dependence on Josie and Lorene. All he owned were the clothes on his back and they were none too new.
One night he spied on Mem and her upright, clean-living beau and knew he must have her for his wife. And coming in that night, with him standing in the unlit doorway gazing out at them, Mem brushed past him with tears in her eyes. That was the first time he knew she loved him, and that she was forcing him out of her life by womanly design, and that if he didn’t do something soon she would be lost to him. He caught her in his arms as she was going up the stairs and vowed in words and kisses never to let her go.
The next day he went out into the country, to a plantation not far from where he was born, to a man he had heard was fair. They talked of farming on shares for two years, or until Brownfield could make enough money to take his bride northward.
The next week Mem and Brownfield left Josie and Lorene still fighting each other over him, each claiming the other had pushed Mem on to “ketch” him. Brownfield borrowed a wagon from the man he was now working for, and Mem sat beside him on the splintery wooden seat.
“We ain’t always going to be stuck down here, honey. Don’t you worry,” he promised her while she sat quietly, holding her veil in her warm brown hands, and looking and smiling at him with gay believing eyes, full of love.
13
T HREE YEARS LATER when he was working the same farm and in debt up to his hatbrim and Mem was big with their second child, he could still look back on their wedding day as the pinnacle of his achievement in extricating himself from evil and the devil and aligning himself with love. Even the shadow of eternal bondage, which plagued him constantly those first years, could not destroy his faith in a choice well made. For Mem was the kind of woman who sang while she cooked breakfast in the morning and sang when getting ready for bed at night. And sang when she nursed her babies, and sang to him when he crawled in weariness and dejection into the warm life-giving circle of her breast. He did not care what anybody thought about it, but she was so good to him, so much what he needed, that her body became his shrine and he kissed it endlessly, shamelessly, lovingly, and celebrated its magic with flowers and dancing; and, as the babies, knowing their places beside her as well as life, sucked and nursed at her bosom, so did he, and grew big and grew firm with love, and grew strong.
They were passionate and careless, he and Mem, making love in the woods after the first leaves fell, making love high in the corncrib to the clucking of hens and the blasting of cocks, making love and babies urgently and with purest fire at the shady ends of cotton
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