Wrestling/Sharecroppers
1966
IT WAS THE SUMMER before my junior year in high school, which was my last year—so, technically, I guess I was a senior, although I was only fifteen. I didn’t have much time for Marianne or Catfish that year, but I sneaked to the Quarters every month or so. Rodney didn’t come when I was there and I told myself he was over me, and that was probably a good thing, seeing as how dangerous it was. I was stupid enough to risk it, but then, what was the risk for me? I was white.
When we talked at the Esso station he said how good it was to see me and he always told me I looked beautiful. He seemed genuine and I believed him. Sometimes he passed a note or a poem to me by sticking it in the slit where the window disappeared. Most times we gave our notes to Marianne and she would begrudgingly deliver them when I came to the Quarters and when she saw Rodney at school. I wondered whether she lectured Rodney every time, like she did me.
“You two have got to stop this,” she’d say and turn her head in disgust.
“There’s nothing to stop, Mari,” I’d say. “We haven’t been together except for that one time two years ago.” But she didn’t believe me and she worried constantly that something would happen to Rodney. We never talked about what could happen to me. Turns out she told Rodney about the beating I got when my dad found out I went to the Quarters and the two of them, Mari and Rod, decided it was too dangerous for me, too. Here I was trying to protect him and years later I discover he was trying to protect me, which is why he never came to the Quarters on Wednesdays—although I didn’t know any of that at the time or that Marianne, well, she tried her best to protect us both.
Marianne was needy and clingy when I was with her, but I didn’t care. We finally came to an agreement about sex—I liked boys and she liked girls, but we loved each other.
“It’s hard for me,” Marianne said to me the day we finally had that difficult conversation. “I’m attracted to you.”
“No you aren’t, Mari,” I said. “I’m just the only girl you are close enough to think that way about. Once you find other girl friends, you’ll be attracted to someone else.”
“That’s not going to happen because none of the girls like me,” she said. She pouted and her bottom lip stuck out so far it could catch flies.
“That will change when you get out of this podunk town,” I said.
“You’ll be leaving next year, but I might never get to leave.”
“You’ll go off to college, won’t you?”
“I don’t know, Susie. We don’t have the money and, well, Mama can’t do without me.”
“Let’s get jobs and start saving now, so you can go to Southern University. That way we’ll both be in Baton Rouge.” We talked a good game, but, other than babysitting jobs, my parents wouldn’t let me work. It would make them look bad if their daughter, “worked.” Marianne and I didn’t talk about Rodney except when she’d get angry about our notes and would lecture me about the Klan.
Sometimes, when I left the Esso station and looked in the review mirror I could see Rodney watching the back of my car. He would stand there until I turned the corner on Marble Avenue. I wanted to turn around, go back, jump out of the car and throw my arms around him and say, “Dang all of you who think the color of someone’s skin can dictate who they love.” But, of course I didn’t.
It was August and I had returned to Jean Ville High School the previous week for my final year. I was afraid to graduate and go off to college, but with all the tension and escalating violence at home, I needed to move on and learn to take care of myself.
It had been two years since the “accident,” that landed me in the hospital and Daddy wouldn’t let me out of his sight unless Tootsie was at home. If he had somewhere to go at night, I had to tag along, even if I didn’t want to.
My dad had promised to take the boys to a wrestling match at the Cow Palace, a place where livestock auctions were held during the day. He insisted I go with them.
“I don’t want to go to a wrestling match,” I said. “It’s gross. There won’t be any girls or women there, only men and boys.”
“You are coming with us, don’t argue.”
“I have homework.”
“You can do your homework when we get home. Be in the car in five minutes.” He started for his bedroom to tell Mama goodbye, then he turned and said, “You should thank me for this.” I didn’t know what he meant. Later I realized he was protecting me from Mama—but who was protecting me from him?
The smell in the arena was horrible. It greeted me outside the Cow Palace and grew in intensity as I reached the front doors. Inside, the stench was almost unbearable—horse and cow dung, pig slop, stagnant muddy water where flies and fleas hovered, and male sweat. The entire area from the parking lot to the main arena was a cesspool. Past the concession area with its concrete floor was a huge open area with a stinky mud floor and bleachers on two sides with views of where they auctioned livestock in the daytime and set up a wrestling rink at night.
“You’ll get used to it,” Daddy said.
Besides being unbelievably smelly, it was noisy and filthy. Men cheered and hollered, drinking beer and pulling pint bottles of hooch from their back pockets. I watched those dirty, bearded men, with wads of tobacco in their jaws, drink from the same bottle. Gross!
After my dad, brothers and I were settled in the stands, I excused myself to go to the ladies’ room. I tramped through the muck and the mess in my new brown leather penny loafers, still stiff, and tried to avoid animal waste. I walked slowly, watching my feet and planning my steps carefully.
When I reached the entrance to the concession area, the concrete floor was a welcomed relief from the muddy surface inside the arena. I grabbed a couple of napkins from the concession counter and bent to clean my shoes. I walked slowly and continued to swipe at mud and straw attached to my pants and sweater in various places.
I wasn’t looking where I was going, but I knew I was moving towards the restrooms under the staircase. I could see the feet of people as they went around me. Just before I reached the door to the ladies room I bumped into someone. It was inevitable, I wasn’t looking where I was going.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Or that’s what I think I said, then I looked at the brown boots that were toe-to-toe with my loafers, and at the creases in the legs of the blue jeans. My eyes traveled slowly up to the light green oxford shirt tucked in behind a brown leather belt, to the full lips and amber eyes of, guess who? Rodney!
I’d run right into Rodney Thibault.
I froze. I couldn’t speak or breathe. I barely felt my body stiffen and my mouth fall open. Rodney’s arms rose in slow motion and rested on my shoulders. His touch sent shivers down my back and landed in my crotch where I could feel the prickly beginnings of wetness. I stared at him and tried to speak but I only stuttered and stammered.
I had relived our time in the Quarters hundreds of times over the past two years and felt his strong arm across my shoulder, his humming in my ear. Each time I saw him at the gas station I remembered, and re-enacted it in my mind again, but there was always a barrier between us—the car. This time, at the cow palace, there was no physical barrier, and I forgot, for a minute, that there was an audience.
Something came alive inside me—something that had been dormant for two years. I stood under the staircase in a trance and stared at him. Neither of us spoke, at first. All the questioning I had done about whether he felt the same about me, whether he loved me, whether he remembered, whether his kiss meant as much to him as it did to me—all of those questions were answered by looking at him, and those fears fell away because I saw, in his face, a look I’ve never forgotten—complete love and submission.
I noticed for the first time how tall he was—he towered over me by at least a head. He was taller than James, who was a little over six-feet.
And gorgeous. Oh, God, Rodney Thibault was gorgeous.
He said, “Hi. ”
“Hi.” I think I said, and I swallowed, hard.
I felt a sinking feeling in my tummy and the moisture in my panties. I tingled all over.
Later I was unable to remember our exchange.
*
Rodney and Marianne said that Adams High School was a dump, but it had dedicated teachers, football and a gym where kids could shoot hoops. Marianne told me that Rodney’s coach said he was a natural leader, that’s why he was such a good Quartersback. Rodney told Marianne he didn’t play football because he loved the game, or because he needed the fraternity of other guys, he played because it kept him going, made him want to get up in the morning, helped him to forget, for a time, that he was colored and all the limitations that put on him. He said he never thought about the drawbacks of being Negro until he met me—like the fact that he couldn’t go to the white school that had a library and where all the kids were given textbooks they could take home, or that he only had two choices for college. But he told Marianne that the thing that made him the maddest was that he wasn’t even allowed to love who he wanted to love. How could anyone make a law about love, he asked her? She said she didn’t have an answer.
Rodney said his limitations made him more determined to rise above what his race told him he could be. He told me that he was going to be a lawyer, to become respected, show the world that, just because he was a Negro didn’t mean he couldn’t do and be everything a white man could. Marianne said he was a serious student, that he studied hard and made good grades and that his teachers told him he had, “potential.” That he could make something of himself.
He later told me that the biggest problem he had in high school was that he couldn’t stop thinking about me. And we both knew that was a dead-end street. He said he was no longer interested in other girls, so he just quit dating. I’m not sure I believed him because Marianne would tell me, every chance she got, about how all the girls loved him and chased him. She did tell me, in an off-moment, that his friends on the football team teased him and called him a faggot, because he no longer paid attention to the pretty girls who tried to get his attention.
That was the closest Marianne ever came to telling me Rodney loved me. I asked her whether Rodney’s friends really believed he was gay, and she laughed and said he was too macho for that, especially on the football field, but that the guys couldn’t understand why he quit taking advantage of the girls who were willing to let him have whatever he wanted.
One thing Rodney and I had in common was our love for books and the library. When I’d go to the Esso station he’d tell me about a recent trip there and some of the things he’d read. Even though he wasn’t allowed to check out books at the public library because he was colored, there was a section in the back where he could read current events and articles on the micro fish reader. He said there were rarely any people in the coloreds section so he didn’t have to hide the materials he read. He told me that he researched laws that prevented coloreds from marrying whites, especially in the South and that he read about a case that might go to the Supreme Court—a mixed race couple from Virginia who sued for the right to be married. He was eager for the decision in that case and told me about the progress from time-to-time.
Marianne said he was obsessed with Loving v The Commonwealth of Virginia case and even wrote a term paper about it. He told her that the decision in that case would give him some idea about his future. He really believed a law to legalize mix-race marriage would change our circumstances. We were both naive back then.
Rodney told me he just wanted to be able to talk to me, like he said in one of his notes.
Susie,
I’ve been thinking about how unjust it is that we can’t even be friends, can’t talk to each other without worrying someone will see us. What kind of laws do we have in this country that can legislate how a person feels and who he loves? Have you thought about that?
I think about you all the time. I’m not sure what can or will happen between us, but I can’t give up on you, on us.
I miss you,
R
Rod,
I’ve thought about it a lot—all the things that would have to change if you and I are ever going to be able to do simple things, like have a burger together, or take a ride, or go to a movie. It makes me sad. I feel helpless.
Yours truly,
S
Susie,
I went to mass with my family this morning and I prayed for you. Somehow I feel like you need prayers. Are you okay? Are you in trouble?
Something inside me says you are struggling with something. I want to protect you, to take care of you. I feel helpless.
I miss you,
R
Rod,
I wonder if, when you love someone, you have an inner voice that tells you things about them? It’s just a thought. Are you okay? I’ve worried that something will happen to you since I saw you at the Cow Palace.
Yours truly,
S
*
Rodney was always more hopeful than I was that things could work out between us. I lived on the white side of the law, so I saw things differently. Rodney was ever the optimist. Even though he didn’t know for sure how I felt about him, he never gave up. He said he read and re-read the short notes I wrote him until they were frayed, torn and the pencil marks were smudged. For all he knew, I could have had a white boyfriend, but he hung in, believing that one day we’d be together. I didn’t, anyway—have a boyfriend, that is. How could I when I was in love with him?
The last time I went to the Esso station his dad was inside and I was the only customer. Rodney asked me if he could see me alone sometime, maybe in the Quarters. I looked around to see if someone was hiding and could hear.
“I’m afraid, Rodney. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“If we get caught, I’m not sure what will happen.”
“Will someone hurt you?”
“Maybe, but what’s worse, someone will hurt you.”
“Who?”
“I can’t say. I’ve got to go.” I drove off before he could say anything more and I cried for an hour on my bed when I got home.
I never thought we’d see each other outside of the gas station. Then we literally ran into each other at the Cow Palace. Of all places. He didn’t think before he put his hands on my shoulders and spoke.
“I love you Susie. You are all I think about.” I stepped back and looked at him. Time hung in the air like a thick fog that shielded the sun from the earth—and it shielded us from the rest of the world, temporarily.
I came to my senses when I heard his voice and realized where we were, who we were, and the consequences if anyone saw us together. I turned and hurried away, into the ladies’ room. It just happened so fast neither of us could have predicted what might happen next.
*
Rodney later told me that he was in a stupor when his dad and brother approached him under the stairs, waiting to go up to the colored section to watch the fight. He didn’t hear Jerry when he asked, “Who was that white girl I saw you talking to? You touched her. You could get arrested for that.”
Rodney said he looked from his brother to his dad, who had perspiration on his forehead and a red face. That jerked Rodney back to reality.
This is what Marianne told me happened next.
“Let’s go, boys,” his dad said.
“We just got here,” Jerry said. Rodney knew they had to leave when he looked around and saw twenty or more white men staring at him.
“I said, ‘Let’s go.’ Now!” His dad led the way and the boys followed him out the double doors, into the parking lot and to their car. Jerry had two cokes in his hands and their dad had one. Rodney’s hands were deep in the pockets of his jeans, toying with the tickets. His fingertips tingled.
They drove home in silence with Rodney in the backseat, alone.
When they pulled up to their house, his dad put the car in park but didn’t turn off the ignition. He put his arm across the back of the front seat and twisted his body to look at Rodney. Jerry stared through the front windshield, trying to be invisible.
“What were you thinking, Rodney?”
“I’m not sure I was thinking.”
“That’s Bob Burton’s girl.”
“I know.”
“Bob’s my friend.”
“I know, Dad.”
“If this gets back to him ... well, I don’t know what will happen.”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
“I’ll say! Not thinking!” Jerry said. “Shoots, the Klan could come calling if they find out.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You don’t have to do anything. I’ve told you and your brother a hundred times—don’t even look at a white person in the eye. And never, and I mean never, look at a white female. Don’t look at the hem of her skirt. Don’t tip your hat, don’t say, ‘Hi, Miss,’ nothing. If you see one coming towards you, go to the other side of the street. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m not sure how to handle this until I see what the fallout is. Let’s just go inside. Don’t mention this to your mother or sisters. Don’t ever mention it again, not to anyone. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” Jerry said.
“Yes, sir,” Rodney said.
When they got out of the car, Rodney’s dad hung back and let Jerry get ahead of them. He took Rodney aside and whispered.
“What’s this all about, Rod?”
“It’s nothing, Dad.”
“Oh, it’s something, all right; and we are going to stay outside in this heat and get eaten by mosquitoes until you tell me.”
“I. I. Uh, I. Dad, I’m in love with her.” He looked at his feet.
“You’re what?”
“I can’t help it. I just am.”
“Oh, God, Son. You can’t be. This can’t be. You get that, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir. I get it.” Rodney was sobbing as he glared into his dad’s eyes. “But I don’t have to like it.” Ray Thibault put his arm around Rodney’s shoulder and pulled him close. At six-feet, three-inches, Rodney was a few inches taller than his dad, so he bent his head and rested his cheek on his dad’s shoulder. The tears rushed out. He couldn’t stop them.
“Does she love you?”
“No. Well, I don’t know. Maybe.”
“What’s the history?”
“We talked. I held her hand and kissed her cheek. That’s all.”
“Oh, God! When? Where? I don’t want to know. You just have to let this go. It’s an impossible situation. This is Louisiana. It’s 1966. You could go to prison for talking to her. I read in the newspaper that just last week, the KKK hung a boy in Natchitoches because he carried a white girl’s books for her.”
“I know, Dad. It’s just that I ...” he couldn’t stop crying.
“It’s going to be okay, Son. Just cry it out, then accept it. And let’s hope no one important saw you touch her.”
They stayed outside a while, then went into the house and Rodney went to the bedroom he shared with Jerry who was on his bed reading a book and drinking his coke. Rodney picked up the extra coke off the table between the two twin beds. The ice was melted and it was watered down, but he sipped it anyway. He and Jerry didn’t talk. Rodney told Marianne he didn’t think a 15-year-old could understand, then he remembered that he was fifteen when he fell in love with me. Maybe Jerry would understand about loving a girl, but no one could understand about loving a white girl.
He hated his life, the South, the situation. It was so unfair.
A couple days after the night at the Cow Palace Rodney went to visit Marianne in the Quarters. She told me that he asked her if she had seen me, and she told him I hadn’t been there in two or three months. Rodney told Marianne that the few times he saw me at the gas station, I was distant and acted like I hardly knew him.
“I mean, she smiles and makes small talk, but nothing personal. It’s like she forgot about that day.”
“Maybe she has a boyfriend,” Marianne told me she said. “A WHITE boyfriend.” But, she said, he wasn’t buying that.
“Hummm. Maybe so... . but what would that have to do with her not coming to see you ... or Catfish ?” Rodney asked her.
“Not sure. There are things you don’t know. Things that she’s afraid of, that she should be afraid of.”
“What? Tell me.” Marianne said he pleaded with her to tell him what she knew, but she refused.
“I can’t tell you, Rodney. But her life is not what you think it is. Besides, I think she’s more worried about what might happen to you. You could be lynched for looking at her. You have to stop this, now! It’s insane.”
Marianne said that Rodney knew she was right, but that he said he couldn’t give up. He told her that he just needed a plan. He went back to the library that week and discovered that interracial marriage was legal in Washington, DC—there were a number of mixed-race couples in the north. It seemed people turned a blind eye up there, like it didn’t matter. It wasn’t legal or illegal. The case in Virginia was going to the Supreme Court soon. Rodney wondered whether the case would change things.
*
After I saw Rodney at the Cow Palace, I knew I had to go to the Quarters to talk to Marianne. I was worried sick about Rodney. A lot of people saw us talking, saw him touch me, saw him bend to whisper in my ear. Oh, God! What would happen to him? I could think of nothing else.
Catfish looked so much older when I climbed the steps and woke him from his peaceful slumber in the rocking chair. He seemed glad to see me and returned my hug more forcefully than usual. I kissed his cheek and sat in the other chair as if I had all the time in the world, while inside, a clock was ticking. I needed to talk to Marianne and find out if Rodney was okay.
“Missy, I’m glad you’re here. I been thinking about telling you what happened after my daddy came to be free.”
“I’d love to hear that story, Cat. We are studying the Civil War in Social Studies this year. Anyway I want to write about you and all your stories one day. I told you that I’m going to be an author. I’m going to make sure everyone knows how badly they treated your people.”
“That’s good, Missy. I want people, especially my family, to remember where we come from. It’s important. Keeps you grounded.
*
Sharecroppers
“When the slaves were freed after the war ended in 1865, my granddaddy, Samuel, was fifteen,” Catfish said. “This is ‘fore he married and had children. He didn’t want to leave Shadowland, where would he go? So he became a sharecropper.
“Mr. Van let my daddy move into an empty one-room cabin, next to George’s house—that’s the one burned several years ago when the Klan came. You remember?”
“I remember, Cat,” I said.
“Now, George stayed on to take care of the livestock and help with planting and picking when he was needed, but he was paid wages, five dollars a week plus room and board for him and Audrey. Most of the other slaves left the plantation for the north or for wages on larger plantations. Freedom meant they could go wherever they chose and work for who-so-ever they pleased.
“Simon and Jacob never healed from the scare they had the night them men and dogs ran ‘em up the tree. When they was teenagers, they, along with my daddy worked in Mr. Van’s field for $20 a month each. They saved their money, so they could leave the South some day and head North,” Catfish said. “My granddaddy tole the story bout that time, just like he tole us those other stories.”
‘Up North black men are treated like they’s white,’ Simon told my daddy when they were teenagers.
‘Yep,’ Jacob said. ‘They got jobs pay $100 a month and black men wear suits of clothes like the white men and can even go to a real school.’
‘You should come with us, Sammy,’ Simon said.
‘I’m not going up North.’ my daddy said. ‘And I wish you would stay here with us.’
‘No, we going,’ Simon said. ‘You just staying here cause you sweet on that little girl works up at the house taking care of Mr. Henry.’
“Maybe,’ Daddy said. Miss Maureen was the head housekeeper up at Shadowland and she had a pretty daughter named Mary, who daddy ended up marrying and she was my Mama and that was one reason he didn’t go with Simon and Jacob.
‘There’s other reasons,’ Sammy said. ‘I don’t want to leave Mama and Daddy. And I think there’s opportunity for us here, down the road. Mr. Van’s a good man.’
‘You do what you want, Sammy,’ Jacob said, ‘But we going as soon as I turn sixteen and Simon is seventeen. They say you need to be legal age or with someone legal age to travel on the train through the south, that’s seventeen.’
“My daddy told that story with tears in his eyes,” Catfish said.
About 1895, when Simon came of age, a group of young men, including Big Bugger and Wes and Lila’s eighteen-year-old son, Norman, was going north and Simon and Jacob joined them. Lila was a lady went to church with my granny and grandaddy and them. Well Miss Lila would sit on the porch with my Granny in the evenings and they would weep together. Granny had taught her boys to read and write and hoped they would send letters, but Lila’s children ain’t been interested in lessons, so Norman wouldn’t be able to write to his mama.
‘Thank God, I still have Sammy,’ Granny would say.
“My daddy, he was always the responsible one. He took care of his brothers and helped his mama and daddy. He worked in the field and did anything Mr. Van axed him to do. In return, Mr. Van paid him $20 a month and took special interest in him. My granddaddy groomed the livestock, built out-buildings, repaired the house when needed, replaced windows and kept it white washed year-around.
“Mr. Van taught him how to ride a horse when he was ten and when the mare had a foal in the spring of 1892, Mr. Van gave it to my daddy. He cared for that pony and it grew to be big, fast and reliable. He named the horse, ‘Jonesie.’ No reason, he just liked the name and thought the young thoroughbred looked like a, ‘Jonesie.’
“Daddy lived with my granddaddy and granny in their two-room cabin until his brothers left, then he axed Mr. Van could he rent the one-room shack in the Quarters where Big Bugger used to live. It was falling down, in disrepair, had no glass in the windows and the tin roof was half-missing, but daddy fixed it up good as new. He also axed Mr. Van could he have a small piece of land to share crop. This was a new practice my daddy heard about at church. The plantation owner would let the former slave farm a certain amount of acres. The freed man of color would plant and harvest and the owner would split the sale of the crop fifty-fifty.
‘I can still keep up with my work on your plantation and farm a piece of land, say about 50-acres, if you let me use your plow,” my daddy tole Mr. Van. “Jonesie can pull and I can do the rest after six in the evening,’ Sammy said.
‘We can try that for a season, Son,’ Mr. Van said. ‘Make sure you keep up your work on my place.’
‘I’ll do more than ever, Sir,’ Daddy tole him. ‘I appreciate the opportunity, Sir.’
Daddy done pretty well with the sharecropping while Granddaddy stayed on working for Mr. Van for regular pay.
“Grandaddy would help Daddy in the fields in the evenings and, with no children at home to care for, Granny joined them when they needed her. Granddaddy did repairs when the heat was too much for him to work in the fields and Granny kept the house, cooked meals, picked cotton in the fall and took in ironing for Mrs. Van. They was doing okay, for ex-slaves—freed men of color, was what they called ‘em after the war.
“It was about to be the turn of the century,” Catfish said.
*
Marianne came out of the back door of her house next door and stood on her porch. She had a bird in her hand with gauze wrapped around its leg. That was how she was, always taking care of injured animals and insects.
“What are you doing here, stranger?” she called.
“Oh, just came to see my best friends. What happened to the bird?”
“I think he got grabbed by the cat, or fell out of his nest. He’ll be fine in a few days,” she said. She started down the steps of her little house and I stood next to Catfish.
“You girls go on now and leave an old man to his peace,” Catfish said as he slouched in his rocker, stretched his legs in front of him and tilted his straw hat forward over his eyes.
“But you didn’t tell the whole story, Catfish,” I said. “You were just getting started.”
“Then you’ll have to come back, Missy, if you want to hear the rest.” He chuckled, pulled his straw hat down lower and pretended to sleep. I kissed him on the cheek, squeezed his shoulder and stared at him. In my heart I willed him to be my granddaddy.
I met Marianne at the bottom of the steps and we walked, slowly, towards the barn, both caught up in our own thoughts, not knowing how to turn them into words. She stroked the bird’s wing with her thumb and cooed in its ear.
The old wooden structure that had lived through one too many storms was hidden behind a line of pecan trees, about a hundred yards from the back porches of the cabins. It had a red façade that was peeling and had faded to a pale pink. The wide doors that once slid on wheels across a long piece of iron mounted above the opening were no longer there. As we approached the building from the side I could see one of the old doors leaning against the outer wall, the other had been taken apart to make a fence around Catfish’s garden to keep the rabbits and coons out. The two square openings for windows on the side of the structure never had seen glass or screens—they were there to create a cross draft through identical window openings on the opposite wall. Above where the doors once hung was another window, and one on the back side in the same position for air circulation in the hay loft.
We tried to make small talk, until we reached the barn and slid down its side to sit, thighs touching, in the thick St Augustine grass under the familiar canopy of the huge pecan tree that seemed to have grown another ten feet. I reached for Marianne’s hand, but she pulled it away.
“Are you mad at me?” I asked.
“No. I’m not mad. I don’t want to touch you then remember what it felt like when you’re gone.”
“It’s September. I’m not leaving until June. Lighten up.” She didn’t respond. We sat in our thoughts while flies buzzed around and a blue bird landed in the live oak a few feet away. I knew she was thinking that she would be stuck in Jean Ville, in the Quarters, while Rodney and I would both be off at school.
I broke the silence.
“Have you seen Rodney lately?”
“He was here Monday.”
“Oh, yeah? How is he?”
“He’s okay—at least, for now.”
“I’m worried. Did he tell you we ran into each other at the Cow Palace Saturday night?”
“He told me.”
“Is he in trouble?”
“I’m not sure. The day he came here it was still too early to know. His dad had a talk with him, but he didn’t get a beating or punished, if that’s what you want to know.”
I didn’t respond. I nursed my memories, my secrets. I watched a bumble bee buzz from one azalea bloom to the next and could hear a far-off tractor engine growl through the fields. The heat and humidity made my T-shirt stick to me and I lifted the bottom of it and bent my neck to wipe the sweat off my forehead. Then I used it as a fan, pulling it away from my chest, then in, trying to trap some of the air inside. Marianne was twirling a long, brown tendril near her forehead, lost in thought.
“I think Rodney is in love with you,” Marianne finally said.
“Did he tell you that?”
“Not in so many words. But he’s taking chances. I’m not sure you understand how serious this is.”
“But Mari, we haven’t been together except that one time, more than two years ago. I don’t understand.”
Marianne didn’t say that Rodney was willing to take stupid chances just to see me. That he was so love-sick he wasn’t thinking straight and could get himself lynched. But she insinuated as much.
“It’s just that, I’m not sure Rodney sees it like you see it,” Marianne said.
“What do you mean?”
“He thinks that, if you love him, he can figure out a way. He’s just not sure how you feel.” I grabbed Marianne’s hand and turned to look at her, full-face.
“You have to tell him, Marianne. You have to tell him to give it up. Tell him I don’t love him. Tell him there’s someone else. I don’t want to see him get hurt, or worse.”
“You need to tell him yourself. That’s not a message I can deliver for you.”
“How can I tell him? I can’t see him, EVER!”
“Are you afraid your daddy will beat you to death? Is that why you avoid him?” I had never told Marianne, or anyone, that daddy beat me. She knew things were bad at home and I wasn’t sure how much Tootsie told her, but I avoided that subject with her.
The air hung stagnant between us. It was a thick silence, like a veil no one wanted to lift.
“I’m not afraid for me. I’m afraid for him,” I said. Marianne didn’t respond. She looked at me, deeply, as if she could see into the places I hid from the world. I felt raw and vulnerable, but Marianne acted as if I was hiding something, something deep and important.
“So, you do love him?”
“I can’t love him; don’t you understand?”
“But do you love him?”
“No, Marianne. I don’t love him! And you need to tell him that. Tell them there’s someone else.”
“I’m not sure I believe you; but if you do love him and if he loves you, do you believe there can be a way?”
“Oh, you are a hopeless romantic. Things don’t happen like that in real life, at least, not in my real life.”
“How do you know? Times are changing. Who knows what the laws will be like in a few years. You shouldn’t give up hope.”
“The laws could change tomorrow but that wouldn’t change who I am and who he is and where we live. Meanwhile I have to concentrate on getting through high school so I can go to LSU and get out of my house. I just have to.” I didn’t realize I said those last four words. They hung in the air like a secret let out of the bag.
Marianne squeezed my hand, but there were no words that could erase the weight I carried.
I walked back home without hiding along the tree line. I didn’t care.
I thought about my conversation with Marianne for days, how she said things were changing and that if we loved each other ... I rewound it in my mind and felt it in my heart. I wanted to grab that vision and hold onto it. Somehow I thought that, if I could do that, things might work out with Rodney. I knew I needed to see him, to make sure he was all right.
Late Saturday afternoon I went to the grocery store for Mama and drove to the Esso station to fill the car with gas. When Rodney saw me he came to the car window. I turned towards him. He leaned his arm on the top of my window and put his forehead on it. He was so close to my face I could smell the cola on his breath and the sweat that soaked his stretched out T-shirt. Gasoline fumes rose from the pavement like steam after a mid-summer rain and the odor was mixed with oil and dirt that somehow had a calming effect on me. I inhaled deeply. I wanted to swallow the smell of him and keep it inside.
“Hi, Beautiful,” he said. He acted like nothing was wrong.
“Rodney, we need to talk.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying to you for two years.”
“No, I mean, after what happened last week at the Cow Palace.”
“Oh... that.”
“Look, I can’t stay. Can you come to the Quarters next Wednesday about four?”
“I’ll see what I can do. I have football practice and work.”
“I’m sorry, that’s the only time I can be there,” I said.
“Susie, I want to be with you more than anything, I’m just not sure I can be there Wednesday.”
“I understand.”
“I’ll try. No promises.”