“Ursa Corre. I know what the ‘U’ stands for but I keep getting the last one wrong. Corrente. Corredo.”
“Corregidora. Old man Corregidora, the Portuguese slave breeder and whoremonger. (Is that whay they call them?) He fucked his own whores and fathered his own breed. They did the fucking and had to bring him the money they made. My grandmama was his daughter, but he was fucking her too. She said when they did away with slavery down there they burned all the slavery papers so it would be like they never had it.”
“Who told you all ‘at?”
“My great-grandmama told my grandmama the part she lived through that my grandmama didn’t live through and my grandmama told my mama what they both lived through and my mama told me what they all lived through and we were suppose to pass it down like that from generation to generation so we’d never forget. Even though they’d burned everything to play like it didn’t ever happen. Yeah and where’s the next generation?”
He nodded but said nothing.
I asked,”How’s Cat?”
“She said she didn’t have no complaints. I was passing down the street and she said, ‘You got U.C. up there, ain’t you?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ I thought she was going to say something, you know. She said, ‘Come on in here. I fixed her up some chicken soup I wont you to take over there. I didn’t wont to take it up myself, cause she just got back and women get evil after something like that I don’t like to mess with no evil women. Tell her I be up to see her when she feeling all right.’ ”
“Yeah, I wondered why she didn’t come herself. Tell her I stopped cussing.”
“Yeah?”
“Uh hum.”
“I went in there and it smell liek she had somebody’s head on fire…They ain’t told me shit.”
“What?”
“I man like your grandmama told you. I guess some people just keep things in.”
“Well, some things can’t be kept in. What I didn’t tell you is old man Corregidora fathered my grandmama and my mama too.”
Taddy frowned, but he said nothing.
“What my mama always told me is Ursa, you got to make generations. Something I’ve always grown up with.”
Tad said nothing. Then he said, “I guess you hate him then, don’t you?”
“I don’t even know the bastard.”
He frowned and I knew he hadn’t meant the old man, but I went on as if he had.
“I’ve got a photograph of him. One Great Gram smuggled out, I guess, so we’d know who to hate. Tall, white hair, white beard, white mustache, a old man with a cane and one of his feet turned outward, not inward, but outward. Neck bent forward like he was raging at something that wasn’t there. Mad Portuguese. I take it out every now and then so I won’t forget what he looked like.”
“You didn’t know who I meant?”
“I didn’t know until after you’d said it.”
He said nothing. He didn’t make me answer. He left me and went downstairs again.

A Portuguese seaman turned plantation owner, he took her out of the field when she was still a child and put her to work in his whorehouse while she was a child. She was to go out or he would bring the men in and the money they gave her was to turn over to him. There were other women he used like that. She was the pretty little one with the almond eyes and coffee-bean skin, his favorite. “A good little piece. My best. Dorita. Little gold piece.”
Great Gram sat in the rocker. I was on her lap. She told the same story over and over again. She had her hands around my waist, and I had my back to her. While she talked, I’d stare down at her hands. She would fold them and then unfold them. She didn’t need her hands around me to keep me in her lap, and sometimes I’d see the sweat in her palms. She was the darkest woman in the house, the coffee-bean woman. Her hands had lines all over them. It was as if the words were helping her, as if the words repeated again and again could be a substitute for memory, were somehow more than the memory. AS if it were only the words that kept her anger. Once when she was talking, she started rubbing my thighs with her hands, and I could feel the sweat on my legs. Then she caught herself, and stopped, and held my waist again.
“…He was a big strapping man then. His hair black and straight and greasy. He was big. He looked like one a them coal Creek Indians but if you said he looks like an Indian he’d get mad and beat you. Yeah, I remember the day he took me out of the field. They had coffee there. Some places they had cane and then others cotton and tobacco like up here. Other places they had your mens working down in the mines. He would take me hisself first and said he was breaking me in. Then he started bringing other men and they would give me money and I had to give it over to him. Yeah, he had a stroke or something and that’s what turned his foot outside. They say he was praying and calling in all his niggers and telling them he’d give them such and such a amount of money if they take it off him but they all said they didn’t put it on him. He got well, though, and didn’t die. It just turned his foot outside and he behave like he always did. It did something to his neck too, because he always go around like he was looking for something that wasn’t there. I don’t know how he finally went, because by then I was up to Louisiana, but I bet he didn’t go easy. Yeah, he have that took afterward. I stole it because I said whenever afterward when evil come I wanted something to point to and say, ‘That’s what evil look like.’ You know what I mean? Yeah, he did more fucking than the other mens did. Naw, I don’t know what he did with the other.”
Sweat inside her hands. Her palms like sunburnt gold.

Pages 8-12

“…His wife was a skinny stuck-up little woman he got from over in Lisbon and had her brought over here. He wouldn’t sleep with her, so she made me sleep with her, so for five years I was sleeping with her and him. That was when I was from about thirteen to eighteen. Then she started looking real bad and then she died on account of the climate. But they had me sleeping with both of them.”
“You telling the truth, Great Gram?”
She slapped me.
“When I’m telling you something don’t you ever ask if I’m lying. Because they didn’t want to leave no evidence of what they done- so it couldn’t be held against them. And I’m leaving evidence. And you got to leave evidence too. And your children got to leave evidence. And when it come time to hold up the evidence, we got to have evidence to hold up. That’s why they burned all the papers, so there wouldn’t be no evidence to hold up against them.”
I was five years old then.

Pages 13-14

Needs publisher

 

~ Gayl Jones