“Why, of all the men on this earth,” she said after I caught up with her and boldly told her to clear her calendar for that Saturday night, “would I think of going out with someone like you?” You can tell when girls are just being coy and want you to lay it on just a little thicker before they say yes. But there are others who have no facade, who are not seeking to be wooed, who give out smiles like each time they do it takes them a mile farther from heaven. And after they speak you’re a year older and a foot shorter. That was Kentucky.
She actually stood there for several long seconds as if waiting for me to give her some kind of fucking resume. Then she said, “I thought so,” and walked away. A thousand and one comebacks came much later, when I was trying to go to sleep.
You do manage to go on with your life. Over the next weeks and months, I had to put up with her coming in a few times a week, but for her there seemed to be no memory of me asking her out and she acted as though I was no more or less than the fellow who took her money and bagged her groceries. But her you’re welcome in response to my thanking her for her purchases contained no sense of triumph, of superiority, as I would have expected. I learned in bits and pieces over time that she lived in an apartment on Neal Place a few doors from 5th Street, was a year out of Dunbar, was a secretary with the government people, that her family lived in a house on N Street that her mother’s parents had bought….
About a fifth of Mrs. Jenkins’s customers bought things on credit and each purchase was carefully noted. On a chain beside the cash register she kept an elongated accounting book for nonmeat credit purchases. The meat case, with its small array of dressed chickens and parts, wrapped hamburger and stew beef, rolls of lunch meats, pork chops, etc., was catty-corner to the counter with the register. The meats had their own credit book, and perhaps no one — except maybe Mrs. Gertrude Baxter — had a longer bill than the Turner family. I rarely ever saw the father of the two Turner children and I came to know that he worked as a night watchman. The mother seemed to live and die for her stories on television, and I rarely saw her either. The boy and girl were in and out all the time.
“My mama said gimme a small box of soap powder,” one of them would say. “Gimme” meant the mother wanted it on credit. “My mama said give her a pound of baloney and a loaf a Wonda Bread.” “My mama said give her two cans a spaghetti. The kind with the meatballs, not the other kind. She said you gave me the wrong kind the last time.” If you got a please with any of that, it was usually from the little girl, who was about seven or so. Mrs. Jenkins had a nice way with every customer as long as they didn’t fuck with her, but the Turner girl seemed to have a special place in her heart. Which is why, despite what Mrs. Baxter went about telling the whole world, I know that Penny Jenkins would have done anything to avoid killing the Turner girl.
The ten-year-old Turner boy, however, was an apprentice thug. He never missed a chance to try me, and he was particularly fond of shaking the door just to hear that tinkling bell. He never messed with Mrs. Jenkins, of course, but he seemed to think God had put me on the earth just for his amusement. He also liked to stand at the cooler with the sodas and move his hand about, knocking the bottles over and getting water on the floor. Whenever I told him to get a soda and get out of the box, he would whine, “But I want a reeaal cold one….” He would persist at the box and I usually had to come and pull his arm out, and he’d back away to the door.
He’d poke his tongue out at me and, no matter how many old church ladies were in the store, would say in his loudest voice: “You don’t tell me what to do, mothafucka!” Then he’d run out.
Just before he dashed out, his sister, Patricia, who often came with him, would say, “Ohh, Tommy. I’m gonna tell mama you been cursin.” Then she would look up at me with this exasperated look as if to say, “What can you do?”
“Where me and you gonna retire to?” was the standard question Mrs. Jenkins would ask the girl after she had bagged the girl’s stuff.
“To Jamaica,” Patricia would say, giggling that standard little-girl giggle.
“Now don’t you grow up and run off somewhere else,” Mrs. Jenkins said. “There’s some fine, fine men in Jamaica, and we gon get us some.”
“Oh, no,” Patricia said as if Mrs. Jenkins had implied that the girl was capable of doing something horrible.
“And how we gon get to Jamaica?”
“On a slow boat by way a China.”
None of that meant very much to me then, of course. It was just so much bullshit heard over the hours of a long day.
By the summer of 1962 I was making forty dollars a week and that November I had enough to buy a used Ford from a longtime friend of my parents. “Always know where the seller lives in case the thing turns out to be a piece of junk,” my father once said. The first long trip I took in the car was to Fort Holabird in Baltimore, where Lonney was inducted into the man’s army. I came back to Washington and dropped his mother off at her house and then went back to work, though Penny had said I could take the day off. Perhaps it was the effort of trying to get through the day, of trying not to think about Lonney, that made me feel reckless enough to ask Kentucky out again.
Penny had waited on her, and I followed Kentucky out of the store. I waited until we were across O Street and asked with words that would have done my mother proud if I could take her to Howard Theater to see Dinah Washington that Saturday night.
“I’d like that,” she said without much hesitation. And because she was the kind of woman she was, I knew it was the simple truth, no more, no less. She set down her bag of stuff and pulled a pen and a slip of paper from her pocketbook. She began to write. “This is my telephone number. If you’re going to be late,” she said, “I’d like the courtesy of knowing. And if you are late and haven’t called, don’t come. I love Dinah Washington, but I don’t love her that much.”
I found her family a cold and peculiar lot, except for her little sisters, who were as passionate about the Washington Senators as I was. A few times a month we had dinner at their place on N Street. Her father was a school principal and talked as if every morning when he got up, he memorized an awfully big word from the dictionary and forced himself to use that word in his conversations throughout the day, whether the word actually fit what he was saying or not. Kentucky’s mother was the first Negro supervisor at some office in the Department of Commerce. She was a bit better to take than her husband, but she was a terrible cook and I seemed to be the only person at her dinner table who realized this.
The first time we slept together was that January. I had waited a long time, something quite unusual for me. I had started to think I would be an old man with a dick good for nothing but peeing before she would let me get beyond heavy petting. So when she turned to me as we were sitting at the counter at Mile Long one Sunday night, I didn’t think anything was up.
She turned to look at me. “Listen,” she said and waited until I had chewed up and swallowed the bite of steak sandwich I had in my mouth. “Listen: Thou shall have no other woman before me. I can take a lot but not that.” Which didn’t mean anything to me until we got back to her apartment. We had just gotten in and shut the door. She took my belt in both her hands and pulled me to her until our thighs and stomachs met. Until then I’d made all the moves, and so what she did took my breath away. She kissed me and said again, “Thou shall have no other woman before me.” Then she asked if I wanted to stay the night.