The insemination of the bull was a secret affair, and Belle’s daddy had waved her away from the barn, telling her it won’t no place for a little girl to be. This was grown folks’ business. Belle walked away—her daddy didn’t like to be disobeyed—but even yards from the barn, she could hear the loud cries of Cross Eye and her kicking the floor of the barn. The chuffing of the angry-sounding bull and Cross Eye being hurt some way. In a half hour or so, the men carefully coached the bull back into the metal cage on wheels, and then they enjoyed a picnic in the yard in front of the house. There were sawhorse tables set up and food brought by the wives of the other farmers, along with the chickens provided by Belle’s daddy, who was known to be a wonderful host, and the men gathered in their own group, telling rough jokes about how big and long that bull’s thing had been, and saying if they were Cross Eye, they wouldn’t want no part of that, neither.
As the men ate their chicken and sipped their mason jars of moonshine, Belle sat quietly on the front steps of her house and eavesdropped. Her daddy had said, “grown folks’ business,” before prohibiting her from the barn. And whenever her parents used that phrase, it meant something between a woman and a man, after a bedroom door was closed. Belle wasn’t quite sure about the logistics, but if whatever had happened in that barn with the bull and Cross-Eye was the same as between her mama and daddy, she wasn’t going to do that. Ever.
She had witnessed other marital models that concerned her as well, such as J.W. James and his wife. While J.W. didn’t appear to be any older than twenty-five, he was in his mid-forties. Jolene, his wife, while four or five years younger, was prematurely worn down and had let herself go. She was meriney with skin like red dirt before it’s been rained on, or the shade of a ripe peach. Before her four children had been born, she’d been a pretty woman, especially by color-struck standards. And J.W. definitely had been a color-struck man: when he’d been courting Jolene, he’d announce to anybody who’d listen that he didn’t like no dark woman, even though he was very dark himself. He liked to tell folks that he had some Cherokee in him, and he wore his curly black hair styled with grease and brushed until it lay down. As if that mattered, because when J.W. had been born, the midwife had written Negro quite clearly on his birth certificate, when she got around to registering the paperwork with the courthouse.
In church, Jolene followed behind her husband with her head down and her long hair was mostly gray in the old-lady bun she wore. She’d sit down on the pew with a sigh, but when the elder gave his sermon, Jolene was the first to start shouting. It was the only time anybody saw her with a smile on her face—maybe because J.W. was a well-known cheater, even though he was a church deacon. Colored folks said he could have been head of the church, if he didn’t have that other woman in town. After all, his granddaddy had been the very first elder of Red Mound.
J.W. even had two children with that mistress, who was much younger than his wife. The mistress who left her children alone in the house on Saturday nights so she and her children’s father could be seen together at the juke joint out in the woods. Then J.W. got up on Sunday mornings, bathed, dressed, drove back out to Wood Place, and walked to Red Mound to praise the Lord. Unlike Jolene, the mistress hadn’t let herself go. Her figure was slim in the tight-fitting, brightly colored dresses she wore at the juke joint. And J.W.’s tastes certainly had changed, because the woman was even darker than he was and wore red lipstick on her round, full mouth, as if to accentuate that not only was she was beautiful, she knew it. Her night-brown eyes were luminous and there wasn’t a strand of gray in her straightened, gleaming hair.
The folks in town said J.W. wasn’t the first man to step out on his wife, but the problem was, he didn’t have no shame with it. That he acted like the mistress in her tight, bright dresses was in fact a second wife, as in the old ways of matrimony, back in African times. Because J.W. not only was with the woman at the juke on Saturdays; after a few years, he began to stay overnight at her house in Chicasetta’s Negro neighborhood, Crow’s Roost. Except for the few homes of Negro professionals, the residences in Crow’s Roost were small and very close together. Thus, when J.W. came to visit his mistress, he was seen by everyone, and when he left her little house in the early mornings to drive his pickup back to the country to work his fields, he was seen as well.
But then there came that night when J.W. did not arrive in Crow’s Roost. The morning when he did not walk down the steps of the tiny house of his mistress, who worked at the factory in town. And another night and another morning and those dark and light intervals added up to two weeks. The mistress could not call her lover, because in the late 1950s, there were only two Negroes in town who had phones installed in their homes, Dr. Thompkins and Miss McLendon, who’d become the principal of the recently constructed colored high school in town. Those phones were only for show, though, because if nobody else Negro had a phone, who was going to call the doctor and Miss McLendon?