If I go back there, I'm going to get my Daddy's watch and have it engraved to read, TO R.B. FROM M.E. I don't feel like laughing, but I can just see R. laughing at my joke. I can just see him open the satin-lined leather box. He'll understand; he expects me to play with letters. He taught me how to read in bed. I praised him for it. His stomach was my first paper, lip rouge was my pencil, and the cleaning rag was my tongue. We learned me well. R. gave me the tools. I learned to write, right on his belly.
He's used to buying women and ladies and buying them jewelry. I'm going to give him some of his own back. I like to give R. things. I like to give him what he's used to paying for.
Sometimes when we are in bed and he's sucking on one of my breast, pulling hard and steady so the pull only brings me the pleasure, sometimes when he's nursing on me, I smile, because he can't get what he wants here. I'm dry. But I let him suck himself to sleep. And sometimes there comes over his face a look of peace. Sometimes when I'm riding astride him and my gals dangle toward his face, he snaps at them like the foxes snapping at grapes dangling just above their mouths, and I laugh. Once, just after that, he pushed so hard into me that something broke inside and we were touching without anything between us, like a fever came over me, and he had the same sickness. Then I closed my eyes and I saw Other.
She was old enough to walk. She walked right past me, past Lady, she walked right past Lady and me, over to Mammy, reached up for Mammy, and my Mama reached down to pull Other up onto her hip. Other reached into the top of Mammy's dress and pulled out my mother's breast. "I want some titty-tip," she said, and I ached in some place I didn't know I had, where my heart should have been but wasn't. I've come to believe that was the very first time I ever felt my soul, and it was having a spasm. It clinched again, pushing the air out of me in a hiccup. I flushed in a rage of possession as those little white hands drew the nipple toward the little pink mouth, then clasped on.
I turned to see the delicate Lady. She was clutching at her cinched waist and staggering back. I ran toward her; she steadied herself, using my head as a kind of crutch or prop. I started fanning the flies off her and I kept fanning.
Wasn't it then Planter walked out on the whitewashed porch and smiled? Did he say, "My peculiar heaven, my peculiar, particular heaven"? I believe that's what he said. That's what he says when I remember it. His frail wife near faints and is fanned by the fairest of pretty pickaninnies, M.E., and he's pronouncing, "My peculiar heaven."
The rosebud mouth attached to the black moon in the brown breast, the curving back of the loving woman lifting the child to her pleasures, as the child, awake, untouched by stays and hoops, stands on tippy-toe to get her fill of pleasure, all raven-haired and unashamed of hunger. Him laughed. For his first-born daughter the pangs of hunger were as delightful as a mosquito bite, something to scratch in the next moment, the promise of pleasure to come.
He didn't see me hiding behind Lady's skirts or see the look Mammy gave me over Other's head. Planter only saw his daughter taking pleasure where he himself had done.