It had not been Jolene’s intention to kill J.W. If that had been the case, she could have done that so many nights. She could have poisoned him. She could have stabbed him in his sleep. She could have cut the brake lines on his pickup truck. It had not been Jolene’s intention to stop him from going to see his mistress, either, for any man who wants to misbehave will find the time and energy to do so. Jolene had only wanted to bring wisdom into the carefree specter of her husband’s Saturday nights, so that every time he took off his shirt in front of his gorgeous paramour, the woman would know that she wasn’t dealing with an unattached, beautiful boy in his twenties, one who was at the beginning of his life, instead of in the middle. The mistress should know that she was sleeping with a tenant farmer who was the father of soon to be five children by his gray-headed wife, along with several other offspring he’d dropped by the wayside. And if Jolene had to deal with what her life had become through the years, then the mistress had to deal with that as well. No one in this situation could be free.
Until her husband died, Jolene would remain with her husband, whether or not J.W. decided to stop cheating on her. That’s what Negro women did; they remained.
*
After Dr. King’s assassination in the spring of 1968, Belle was forced to confront change. Though weeks had passed since the reverend’s death—and there had been no more riots in the City, either—police sirens still rang through Belle’s neighborhood. Cops were everywhere, hemming up young men on the sidewalks and beating them for no reason.
And there was an entirely new vocabulary, too. Within days of cleaning the riots’ debris—sweeping the broken glass, towing away burned-out cars—the young folks in her northern neighborhood had decided they were no longer “Negro.” Suddenly, they were “Black” with a big B. They began to proclaim themselves “Black and beautiful” and reference Africa at every juncture. Men and women began to refer to each other as “brother” and “sister,” titles Belle only heard previously at her home church, down in Georgia. They let their hair travel on the metaphorical journey to Africa, too.
Brothers stopped going to the barbers every week, and sisters stopped pressing. Kinky defiance was in abundance, as was disgust over Patrick Moynihan’s report, that ream of paper that white dude working for the Man’s government had written, insisting that brothers had no power anymore in their own households. Sisters were in charge of families now, Patrick Moynihan had written in his report, though he’d still called Black folks Negroes. Sisters called all the shots and paid the bills. Even though Moynihan hadn’t used the term “castration,” he’d implied that sisters were running around with scissors pointed at the crotch levels of brothers.
Belle didn’t understand the Black anxieties tripping through the streets. For example, she carried Geoff’s last name, and her mother carried the last name of Belle’s father, too. If somebody had asked both women, they would have said their husbands were the heads of their households. However, as Belle did for her small family, her mother handled the finances in her own home. Whatever her father made, he gave the entirety of it to Miss Rose, and she gave him back five dollars a week for gas and his walking-round money. This covered the cost of those peanut butter candy bars he loved, and the beers he drank with his friends on Saturday nights down at the juke joint. Other than that, Belle’s mother didn’t care what her husband paid for. She told her daughter, if her daddy could chase women with whatever change was left over from that five dollars, God bless him.
Though Belle really couldn’t afford the long-distance charges, she began calling her mother several times a week, asking, how were things down home? She figured, if the country village where she was born was changing as well, maybe what she saw up in the City wouldn’t feel so extreme.
Her mother didn’t have much news. “They done built a new furniture factory, going toward Milledgeville. Your brother got hisself a job there. Good money, too.”
“Are the folks down home calling themselves something besides Negro?”
“Like what, baby?”
“Like, Black?”
“Why they want to do something like that? That ain’t a nice thing to call nobody.”
Belle tried one more time. “What you think about me letting my hair go home? I mean, if I stopped straightening it.”
“Belle, you ain’t got the grade for that.”
“I was just thinking.”