“Clean up this mess,” he told her, “and I don’t wanna see one ash when you done.”
She said nothing more, but busied herself tidying the couch cushions. Then Woodrow, after flicking the cushions a few times with his handkerchief, sat in the middle of the couch, and the couch sagged with the familiarity of this weight.
When Elaine had returned the room to what it was, her father said, “I want to know what you was doin in here with them boys.”
“Nothin. We wasn’t doin nothin. Just talkin, thas all, Daddy.” She sat in the easy chair, leaned toward him with her elbows on her knees.
“You can do your talkin down on the stoop,” he said.
“Why don’t you just say you tryin to cuse me a somethin? Why don’t you just come out and say it?”
“If you didn’t do things, you wouldn’t get accused,” he said. He talked without thought, because those words and words like them had been spoken so much to her that he was able to parrot himself. “If you start actin like a young lady should, start studyin and what not, and tryin to make somethin of yourself…” Woodrow L. Cunningham bein Woodrow L. Cunningham, he thought.
She stood up quickly, and he was sickened to see her breasts bounce. “I could study them stupid books half the damn day and sit in church the other half, and I’d still get the same stuff thrown in my face bout how I ain’t doin right.”
“Okay, thas anough a that.” He felt a familiar rumbling in his heart. “I done heard anough.”
“I wanna go out,” she stood with her arms folded. “I wanna go out.”
“Go on back to your room. Thas the only goin out you gonna be doin. I don’t wanna hear another word outta your mouth till your mother get home.” He closed his eyes to wait her out, for he knew she was now capable of standing there till doomsday to sulk. When he heard her going down the hall, he waited for the door to slam. But there was no sound and he gradually opened his eyes. He put a cushion at one end of the couch and took off his shoes and lay down, his hands resting on the large mound that was his stomach. All his friends told him that if he lost thirty or forty pounds he would be a new man, but he did not think that was true. He considered asking Elaine to bring his pills from his bedroom, for he had left the vial he traveled with at work. But he suffered the pain rather than suffer her stirring about. He watched his wife’s curtains flap gently with the breeze and the movement soothed him.
“I would not say anything bad about mariage,” his father had written to Woodrow after Woodrow called to say he was considering marrying Rita Hadley. “It is easier to pick up and walk away from a wife and a family if you don’t like it then you can walk away from your own bad cooking.” Woodrow had never been inclined to marry anyone, was able, as he would tell his lodge brothers, to get all the trim he wanted without buying some woman a ring and walking down the aisle with her. “Doin it to a woman for a few months was all right,” he would say, sounding like his father, “cause that only put the idea of marryin in their heads. Doin it to them any more than that and the idea take root.”
It had never crossed his mind to sleep with any of the women at Rising Star AME, for he had discovered in Georgia that the wrath of church women was greater than that of all others, even old whores. He only went out with Rita because the preacher took him aside one Sunday and told him it was unnatural to go about unmarried and that he should give some thought to promenading with Sister Rita sometime. And, too, he was thirty-six and it was beginning to occur to him that women might not go on forever laying down and opening their legs for him. The second time they went out, he put his arm around Rita and pulled her to him there in the Booker-T Theater. She smacked his hand and that made his johnson hard. “I ain’t like that, Mr. Cunningham.” He had heard those words before. But when he pulled her to him again, she twisted his finger until it hurt. And that was something he had not experienced before.
His father suffered a mild stroke a week before the wedding. “Do not take this sickness to mean that I do not send my blessing to your mariage to Miss Rita Hadley,” his father said in a letter he had dictated to Alice, his oldest daughter. “God took pity on you when he send her your way.” Even in the unfamiliarity of Alice’s handwriting, the familiarity of his father was there in all the lines, right down to the misspelled words. Until some of his father’s children learned in their teens, his father had been the only one in the family who could read and write. “This,” he said of his reading and writing, “makes me as good as a white man.” And before some of his children learned, discovered there was no magic to it, he enjoyed reading aloud at the supper table to his family, his voice stringing out a long monotone of words that often meant nothing to him and even less to his family because the man read so quickly.
His father read anything he could get his hands on — the words on feed bags, on medicine bottles, on years-old magazine pages they used for wallpaper, just about everything except the Bible. He had a fondness for weeks-old newspapers he would find in the streets when he went to town. No one — not even the squirming small kids — was allowed to move from the supper table until he had finished reading, hooking one word to another until it all became babble. Indeed, it was such a babble that some of his sons would joke behind his back that he was lying about knowing how to read. “Few white men can do what I’m doin right now,” he would say. “You go bring ten white men in here and I bet nine couldn’t read this. Couldn’t read it if God commanded em to.” Sometimes, to torment his wife, he would hold a scrap of newspaper close to her face and tell her to read the headlines. “I cain’t,” she would say. “You know I cain’t.” No matter how many times he did this, his father would laugh with the pleasure of the very first time. Then he would pass the newspaper among his children and tell them to read him the headlines, and each one would hold it uncomfortably and repeat what their mother had said.
When Woodrow woke, it was nearly five o’clock and his wife was sitting on the side of the couch, asking where Elaine was. “She ain’t in her room,” his wife said and kissed his forehead. A school cafeteria worker, Rita was a very thin woman who, before she met Woodrow, had lived only for her job and her church activities. She was five years older than he was and had resigned herself to the fact that she was not the type of woman men wanted to marry. “I’ve put it all in God’s hands,” she once said to a friend before Woodrow came along, “and left it there.”
Rita waited until seven o’clock before she began calling her daughter’s friends. “Stop worryin,” Woodrow told her after the tenth call, “you know how that girl is.” At eight-thirty, they put on light coats and went in search, visiting the same houses and apartments that Rita had called. They returned home about ten and waited until eleven, when they put on their coats again and went to the police station at 16th and V Northwest. They did not call the station because somewhere Woodrow had heard that the law wouldn’t begin to hear a complaint unless you stood before it in person.
At the station, the man at the front desk did not look up until they had been standing there for some two minutes. Woodrow wanted to tell him that the police chief and the mayor were now black men and that they couldn’t be ignored, but when the man behind the desk looked up, Woodrow could see in his eyes that none of that would have mattered to him.
“Our daughter is missing,” Rita said.
“How long?” said the man, a sergeant with an unpronounceable name on his name tag. He pulled a form from a pile to his left and then he took up a pen, loudly clicking out the point to write.
“We haven’t seen her since this afternoon,” Woodrow says.