Padgett Powell - Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men

I ain’t hard on the Negro, Genel Forrest say. Jesus hard on the Negro, buddyro.

* * *

Mrs. Hollingsworth was pretty pleased with that, and she knew that no raphead dufus rebel on a skateboard could come up with it (and she wondered how she knew of Braxton Bragg’s vendetta for Forrest), or sound like that if he did. It was her grocery list. She was no longer shopping for the mundane.

She sat her days at her kitchen table with a pot of something cooking slowly on the stove, a small blue flame and a small gurgle in the room with her. Anyone who saw her making this prodigious, preposterous list saw nothing awry. Her indistinct husband remained indistinct. She was beginning to enjoy a new kind of freedom, one that she hadn't suspected existed. She was shopping in heaven, and hell.

Eternity, Epiphany

Sally and Lonnie, after this weighing of her left orange by Lonnie’s lips, locked up their eyebeams, intertwixt and gratifying, for about a tenth of a second, which is all people can stand when there is the real intertwixtment and which seems like, or more like, about a eternity, which is the time required, or about the time allotted, for a epiphany.

They would neither of them again enjoy the intertwixtment, the crackle of iris to iris, the hope of pupil pooling pupil. Fried marbles and deep holes of loneliness suddenly alive, and answered prayers they had not known they were praying — not again. They would fancy it again, of course; they would have to, or they would die of despair. But it would never happen, the true spoiling of the film of their hearts, again.

Blues

The woman sits at the window, her vanilla flesh smart on the black-lacquered straight chair. Her breast catches an odd orange light glaring from the sill of the window. She sees Forrest blow through the square, his duster like a robe behind him, the jangle of tack and weapon like a badly reproduced music of some sort, or heard from far away Like, she thinks, country blues played over a plywood floor, amplified in weird imbalance balancing well with the congruently weird acoustics of the cheap tired joint the music is played in, heard from outside in the swamp near the roadhouse. A thumping is prominent, not unsexual, and a tinny kind of sweet but wounded melody plays over it, from strings that are stretched by callused fingers that picked cotton in ancestoryear—

— Do you always think elaborate hoohah like that? the man says.

— You can read my mind?

— I might as well. It’l1 save blather, don’t you think?

— Don’t look me in the eye like that. Look at my body. It is what I give you.

— I can accept that. Give it to me, then.

— Because if I was Sally, I am not now.

— Shh.

— We are skeletons with meat on them.

— You have godly meat.

— Thank you.

— Your godly meated skeleton can think Forrest a music heard in a swamp, though. A music that will not quit, or a thinking of it that can’t quit, even when the skeleton and the meat have quit.

— Do you always think hoohah like that?

— Only under force of circumstances.

— Such as?

— These. Don’t look me in the eye either.

Love, Self

If Mrs. Hollingsworth were to go to the store with this list, she was aware, it would not feed anyone in whatever combination she assembled the ingredients on it. There was not a satisfying meal to be made of it. There was in some rarefied sense a meal to the second or third power, perhaps what you could call a meal prime, which would satisfy only a hungry fool. That, she decided, was who, other than herself, she was shopping for. There was a hungry fool in the world with whom she had some’ thing in common, and maybe for whom she had something.

On her lawn outside were some boys cheering the 0.J. Simpson verdict, skateboards aloft like swords.

She wrote herself a note, as one does sometimes on a shopping list, a kind of rider reminder to the main reminder that is the list itself:

Dear Love,

How have you come to be a black-hearted woman with your come-and-go eyes? You is a storm of bad ideas. You will never be allowed to speak on National Public Radio.

You enjoyed Flaubert when you were a girl, that is true. How have you become Celine? I love you anyway

Love,

Self

Prevaricating & Procrastinating,

Shuckin & Jivin

— Man don’t know what state he in!

— Say his map bad.

— Worses map I ever hoid of.

— In trouble you don’t know what state you in.

— I saw boy one time, cuhn put this six-pack beer in paper sack. I say, Boy, you fumble widda piece a pussy like you fumblin widdat sack, you in trouble!

— What he say?

— He ain say shit. Turn red as a baby, a crab moreso. Bout to cry right in that sto.

— You talks funny, Erasmus. Say “widdat” and “sto,” and I bet you say “ho,” what hell else you gone say, but even you is not gerng say “Ise gwyne down to duh ribber,” or maybe, if the lady here will cooperate, you is. She ain know what she doin. She done put you and all us on her grocery list.

— I believe, Satch, that the departures in my diction from the true path are justified given the trail of travail our tongue has trippingly took to be at dis point. They is, as I know you know, and it bruise me to point this out to you, procrastinating and prevaricating on the one hand, which would be the white hand, since I am being so crystal clear this morning, and shuckin and jivin on the other hand, and we all know out here on the courthouse lawn whose hand that is. Speaking of which, I feel a bad breeze blowing somewhere, do you?

— I smell a horse. I am askeert of a horse.

— Something like ammonia blow through here.

— What state he in!

— I been loss, but never like dat!

— Amenhotep to that.

— Who?

— Jesus, another name for Jesus.

— Is?

— Might as well be. Jesus hard .

— That he is. That he is for sho.

The Land

Forrest could never talk this way, so Mrs. Hollingsworth made him:

Dark now only when the station wagon headlights do not illuminate it, rolling over its swell and slough, crushing what is left of its game, the urban-adapting coon, the strange-no-matter-where-you-put-him possum. The snakes are flattened to dust and blown away into herpetological archives. The alligator and the deer have received protection. All the rest have been allowed to perish.

The trees are under cultivation, bristling like large weeds, rent this way and that and spindly, after a not thorough job of weeding by a hasty, mad hand getting out of the garden before sunstroke sets in.

That is the land, the wilderness. The pristine tracts of the new wilderness are the fresh expanses of asphalt around the malls. A new petroleum air of virgin potential resides there, but only until the Volvos and the skateboards pull in. The Volvos discharge baby strollers and easy-listening FM, the skateboards the funk of boys, all taming the new wilderness.

Queers and Cigars

Forrest might talk like this, so she let him:

Hard on the Negro? Jesus is hard on the Negro, buddyro. Negro hard on himself too, Still, I will tell you something. Given Davis and Bragg over me, playing keep-away with the ordnance and men, and Bobby Lee wrapping his battle orders around cigars and giving them to the enemy, if the Negro were in charge today we’d stand a sight better chance of winning this fight. The Negro has not cost me one empty saddle at the end of a fight. Them what talk for a living has. The Negro does not talk for a living. Not yet.

Carp

The golden-floored room fills with golden carp. The oak is as hard and clean as marble slabs for fish in a proper poissonerie . The carp do not resist flooding into a rented room in Holly Springs Mississippi. The river has not been kind to them for some time. They relax. On the cot a man and a woman relax. The carp say, “Psst!" and the woman props up on her elbow and beholds them. “Why, y’all are just a bunch of lonely boys,” she says, affecting some kind of drawl that pleases the carp. The carp affect drawls themselves, among fishes, and they wonder how the woman knows to play with them like this, if she does know how and is not just goofing. The carp do not have time to speculate or to question the woman about this. Their time on the floor is limited, a fact they sense without knowing the limit.