Belle went to the kitchen and returned with a plate of food for her brother-in-law. He asked, were there any more biscuits? If not, he’d love some corn bread.
Diane erupted: “You just ate breakfast!”
“Maybe he could eat again,” Belle said. “Could you let the Negro have some peace?”
Her brother-in-law offered thanks and shoveled into his plate. He didn’t see the women exchange their mocking smiles above his head. Their rolled eyes.
*
Down south, the old folks liked to say, trouble don’t last always. This was true in the City, too. The streets calmed, though sadness lingered. This time, however, when Belle showed up at the store, the plywood hadn’t been taken down. Miss Martha announced, she wasn’t gone bother because she was leaving the City. She had waited for Belle to come by; she’d wanted to see her and the baby before she left.
“What? Miss Martha, no!”
The baby squealed happily. When Belle handed her over, she slapped at Miss Martha’s chest and received a kiss on her forehead.
“Yes, child. I got to go.”
“But why?”
“Child, I’m too old for this foolishness. I’m going back home. Let my sons take care of me.” She handed the baby back and reached into her bosom for a slip of paper. “Here my address. Don’t you forget to write. And send me pictures, too.”
“Yes, ma’am. I promise.”
She sucked up tears, as Miss Martha hugged her, the baby between them. The old lady refused Belle’s help in packing her things, saying it would only make her sad.
The store sold quickly, and by that next week, there was a new owner behind the counter. A young woman with a juicy behind that hiked up a dress barely covering her thighs. And she told Miss Martha’s business easily.
“Me and my man got this store real cheap.”
“Well, welcome to the neighborhood!” Belle was hoping for a new friend, a Negro friend. Maybe she could take the store owner shopping and help her pick out a proper dress that would cover her privacy. “Where you from?”
“Right here in the City,” the woman said. “Born and raised.”
“Oh, okay.”
“You know that old lady Martha? I think she might have lost it.”
The new owner touched her head, and Belle felt her temper bloom. She reverted to her college voice, the consonants cut-and-dried. The vowels not as long.
“That is not true. Miss Martha was incredibly sharp. What would make you think otherwise?”
“I mean, why go back to the country, as bad as those honkies are? Blowing up shit and killing people. When the brothers take over, they’re going to change all that.”
Belle didn’t want to fight, but within a few weeks, she was further disappointed. The store had changed produce suppliers, and now the vegetables were wilted like at every other place. And the woman was “sometime-y”： one occasion, she might be friendly, and another coldly indifferent.
As spring gave in to warmth, there was no violence outside. No streets cherried over with fire, but Belle wanted to be back home. She longed to sit on the porch with the women of her family. To talk about nothing special, until the fireflies came. When she told Geoff that she missed home, he said she should be glad to be away from the south, with its Jim Crow laws and dangerous white men. And Belle was safe, but her longings stayed with her.
Born in the City, her husband wasn’t familiar with the taste of healthy, green food you had picked only hours before. The sight of earth not taken over by concrete. That in darkness, if there was no trouble, the only sounds came from small beings. He didn’t know that you could ache for a place, even when it had hurt you so badly.
Do Right Woman, Do Right Man
In that same year that Belle’s grade-school principal assured her Negro students the world was about to change, Belle had begun to tell folks she wasn’t ever getting married. Her listeners would laugh at her and say one day she’d change her mind, because didn’t she want babies? And the only way a good girl could have babies was to get married.
Belle had come to her decision after an insemination of one of her father’s cows. It was in April that year, so Cross Eye was the heifer who needed to get pregnant. In the fall, Spot would be the one. That way, the Driskells would be kept in milk and butter and cheese throughout the year. When the calves got big enough, Hosea Driskell would sell them for meat, and that would make Belle cry, thinking about a cute animal being killed.
To impregnate his cows, her father had borrowed a bull from J.W. James, a tenant farmer who lived on the premises of the large farm owned by Cordelia Pinchard Rice. J.W. didn’t work for shares anymore; he only paid rent for his land. It had been ten or more years since there had been sharecroppers on Wood Place. J.W. and Hosea Driskell were buddies, so J.W. didn’t charge his friend money for the use of the bull, the way he did the other Negro men.