Corregidora by Gayl Jones
Author:Gayl Jones
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
III
I couldn’t have been more than ten the year the Melrose woman committed suicide. Mama had come into the house. Gram said something to her and then they started hushing each other because I was in the room. I saw the way they was looking, but Mama sent me back in the kitchen to light the oven because she was going to bake some rolls for dinner. I went back in the kitchen. They didn’t think I could hear them, but I could. We had one of them three-room, straight-back shotgun houses. They was in the front room, and with just one room in between us, I could hear them. When I finished lighting the stove, I just sat down at the kitchen table and listened.
“Yeah, they found her over in Hawkins’ alley,” Mama was saying.
“Anybody know why yet?”
“They thought it must’ve been some man, you know, got her pregnant or something, but she wasn’t pregnant.”
“Had to been some man,” Gram said. “I ain’t never known a woman take her life less it was some man.”
“I reckon,” Mama said. She sounded weary. I didn’t hear them say anything else, and finally Mama said she was going back in the kitchen and start supper. I put my head down on the table, so she wouldn’t see my eyes.
It wasn’t until later that I knew what they were talking about. I was down at Mr. Deak’s store, and him and these men were talking. They weren’t like Mama and Gram. They didn’t care if I was there or not. Mama had sent me down for some corn meal. I thought it had happened in Bracktown, but it wasn’t Bracktown, it was up in Versailles that it happened, but the girl was from Bracktown—one of Mr. Melrose’s girls. She was in her twenties.
“Melrose is up there now,” Mr. Deak was saying. “Her mama is all to pieces. He told her to stay here, and he go take care of it. They gon move her body down here. But you know why he didn’t wont Miz Melrose there, because he gon try to find out what man’s responsible, buddy, it’s gon be some fireworks in Versailles.”
Mr. Deak was a little dark man who wore suspenders all the time, and stood with his thumbs under his suspenders, not up near his chest, but down near his waist. He must’ve been in his twenties, but I thought he was old then.
“You ain’t forgot what your mama wanted, did you, missy?” he said to me.
“Naw, sir.” I went and got the corn meal. I didn’t take it over to the counter, I just stayed standing there.
The other man started talking. “How her daddy gonna find out, and the whole police couldn’t?”
“A daddy got ways the police ain’t. Anway, she wasn’t nothing but a nigger woman to the police. You know they ain’t gon take they time to find out nothing about a nigger woman. Somebody go down there and file a complaint, they write it down, all
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