It was a Saturday morning, but the mistress of J.W. dressed for the night, though this time she didn’t leave her children at home while she rode out to the juke joint. Instead she packed the two children into the car that she had borrowed from a neighbor and drove out to the twenty-five acres that J.W. worked on Wood Place. She told her children, come on and get out the car. She had dressed them in church clothes, and the three of them walked up to the door of the house that J.W. had built his wife in the third year of their marriage, after they had moved out of the house with his parents.
Jolene would tell the story to Miss Rose Driskell, who was her best friend and whose first, Christian name actually was “Miss,” so that white folks had to respect her, even when they didn’t want to. When Jolene opened the door and saw the mistress, she wasn’t mad. She didn’t think about fighting this tiny-waisted, long-legged woman who didn’t look as if she had labored to push two children out of a little bitty hole. Jolene had churned away her anger in the early years of her marriage, back when she, too, had a waistline. When her breasts had stuck out in expectation of the good-looking boy who became her husband. Even after her first child had been born, she and J.W. had sneaked in their love when the baby and J.W.’s parents went to sleep. Back then it had still felt like their courting days.
Jolene was pregnant again. This would be her fifth child, and she felt the mistress staring at her belly. There was a hurt look on the woman’s face, but Jolene’s newest pregnancy had been a mistake, though the loving hadn’t been. At her age, Jolene had thought she was going through the change of life early, like her own mother had, so she’d gotten careless. She’d conceived this pregnancy in the aftermath of an argument with J.W., when he’d promised Jolene that he’d do right this time. He’d give up the fast life, and Jolene had laughed at him. She didn’t care about what he did with his privates, she only cared that he was spending money at the juke joint when she needed to buy groceries for her children. She knew he was lying. He wasn’t giving up nothing, but when he walked up with that way of his, she let him think he was convincing her to do something she didn’t want to. She’d let J.W. beg her into bed, but she hadn’t made him get up before he took his satisfaction, because she’d been so busy getting hers.
This mistress wasn’t the only one J.W. had cheated with, neither. Beside her two “outside” children, he had three more children scattered across Putnam County. Surely the mistress had known this, but for some reason, she was fool enough to think she was special. Yet only as this dolled-up woman stared at Jolene’s round belly was she was learning what Jolene had known for a while: what J.W. was giving felt good, but it wasn’t special, and neither was he. Pretty as he was, he was only a regular man.
At this point in the story, Miss Rose had sucked her teeth. “That hussy deserve what-all she got. Trying to break up somebody’s home.”
“You ain’t seen it, girl,” Jolene said. “A woman like that, getting gussied up to come to another woman’s house. She must have been in a powerful bad way.”
“You shole is a Christian, ’cause I would have whipped that heifer’s tail.”
But Jolene didn’t propose violence to her husband’s mistress. She told the woman and her children, come on in. Sit down. She offered everybody some pie, and cut her own self a slice, so the mistress wouldn’t think somebody trying to put some roots on her.
Jolene’s oldest daughter was already out the house, a married schoolteacher, and her oldest son was plowing the fields. Her two youngest were running around on the property somewhere, so there was room at the kitchen table. Jolene sat, and the mistress sat, and the outside children sat, and pie was eaten, and Jolene pretended this was an ordinary, nice visit, until the mistress asked about J.W. She said she was worried, because he hadn’t been to see her two Saturdays in a row, and this was the third one. The mistress was bold, meeting Jolene’s eyes. Telling her man’s wife that they had a steady thing going on, but Jolene told her that J.W. was lying in the back bedroom. The mistress could see him if she wanted, and there was surprise on her face.
When Jolene walked the woman back to the bedroom, Jolene was worried about whether she’d cleaned in the corners, those tiny spaces where the wood floor joined the walls. But she didn’t care about what the mistress and her husband would say to each other, as J.W. lay in their marital bed, his entire chest covered with salve and bandages to help him recover from the steaming pot of stone-ground corn grits that Jolene had thrown on him. She left the mistress and her husband in the bedroom, as the mistress wept loudly, and J.W. croaked out his few words. She went back in the kitchen and told the outside children, she had some chicken left over from last night. Did they want some, and maybe some more pie?