Read Online Corregidora (Bluestreak) by Gayl Jones - Free Book Online Page A

when it comes her time? Do you know what I mean? But she was telling me about Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Hirshorn and something that happened in the kitchen. She was a young woman, about my age. She lived in during the week and every morning at six o’clock she had to get up and get Mr. Hirshorn’s breakfast because he was the supervisor in a plant, and his wife stayed in the bed sleeping. He always waited till she called him, but one morning he was sitting at the table while she was fixing coffee. “You pretty, Catherine, you know that? You pretty, Catherine. A lot of you nigger women is pretty.” She kept thinking he was drunk, and wished he’d stayed in the room with his wife till she called him like she always did. But he kept sitting, thumping on the table, watching her, her bare arms in a housedress. “You ought to let me watch you straighten your hair sometime. Beatrice said you were in there straightening your hair.” She was saying nothing and then when she’d got the can of coffee grounds down and was opening it to pour in the pot, he was behind her, touching her arm, and she dropped the can, and it banged and rolled across the kitchen floor spilling grains. He jumped back, and she was stooping trying to clean it up when his wife came in. “What happened, Tom?”
    “That clumsy nigger. I won’t have time to eat breakfast this morning, sweetheart.”
    While she was bending, she could see him bending to kiss his wife’s mouth, then he went out the kitchen door, stepping over coffee grounds.
    “You made a mess,” his wife said, and went back to bed.
    “I wanted to come back home to my own bed and not be made a fool of. You know what I mean?”
    I said nothing. I waited for her to calm down. She kept watching me. I waited till the trembling stopped. I must have waited fifteen minutes.
    “You over your hysteria now?” I asked.
    “Don’t judge me,” she said.
    “I won’t judge you.” I looked at her.
    She was waiting for an embrace that I refused to give, then she stood up.
    “Things pass over you like that,” she said.
    I didn’t know what she meant, but didn’t ask. She kept looking at me. I wouldn’t look up at her.
    “This means the end of it, I suppose.”
    “Whatever you feel it means,” I said.
    “I guess you didn’t tell him. ”
    “No.”
    “You won’t, will you?”
    I said nothing.
    She waited a moment, then she said, “They never let you live it down.” She went out.
    “Yes, if you understood me, Mama, you’d see I was trying to explain it, in blues, without words, the explanation somewhere behind the words. To explain what will always be there. Soot crying out of my eyes.” O Mister who come to my house You do not come to visit You do not come to see me to visit You come to hear me sing with my thighs You come to see me open my door and sing with my thighs Perhaps you watch me when I am sleeping I don’t know if you watch me when I am sleeping. Who are you? I am the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of Ursa of currents, steel wool and electric wire for hair.
    While mama be sleeping, the ole man he crawl into bed
    While mama be sleeping, the old man he crawl into bed
    When mama have wake up, he shaking his nasty ole head
    Don’t come here to my house, don’t come here to my house I said
    Don’t come here to my house, don’t come here to my house I said
    Fore you get any this booty, you gon have to lay down dead
    Fore you get any this booty, you gon have to lay down dead
    “… There were two alternatives, you either took one or you didn’t. And if you didn’t you had to suffer the consequences of not taking it. There was a woman over on the next plantation. The master shipped her husband out of bed and got in the bed with her and just as soon as he was getting ready to go in her she cut off his thing with a razor she had hid under the pillow and he bled to death, and then the next day they came and got her and her husband. They cut off her husband’s penis and