What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day by Pearl Cleage

Author:Pearl Cleage [Cleage, Pearl]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Humorous, Literary
ISBN: 9780061807176
Google: RjdW8PLfPAoC
Amazon: B000FC14GW
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

• 11

the last of the Sewing Circus finally straggled home around midnight, arms full of sleeping toddlers and hearts full of revolution. Joyce was ecstatic. She got no drop-off in membership moving the group to the house, and being under siege brought out the best in them. Aretha, whose sociology class was studying the sixties, suggested picketing Sunday morning service, which Joyce thought was too confrontational. Tomika offered to kick the Reverend Mrs.’ ample ass, which Joyce confessed did appeal to her, but which she rejected as inappropriate behavior between black women.

Finally Joyce suggested that each Sewing Circus member express her feelings individually to the Good Reverend after church on Sunday. When they met next week, everybody could report on what they had said and what he had said before determining their next step. They thought that was a great idea, even though they probably didn’t suspect that it was Joyce’s way of getting them used to the idea of articulating their outrage to the people they allowed to control so much of their lives.

“If they can get in the Rev’s face,” Joyce said, “pretty soon they’ll be able to talk back at the food stamp office and be indignant at the Welfare Department, and from there? Sky’s the limit!”

Joyce flopped down on the couch, exhilarated and exhausted, and looked at me to share the excitement, but the truth was, I had hardly heard a word she said. I wanted to know why Eddie had been in jail. I asked Joyce if she knew.

“Of course,” she said.

“Why?”

“Ask him.”

Typical Joyce. “It isn’t anything really terrible, is it?”

“The worst,” she said.

“I’m serious.”

“Me, too.” She looked at me. “He won’t mind if you ask him. He probably thinks I’ve already told you anyway.”

“Then why don’t you?”

Joyce took a minute before she answered me. “Sometimes I meet people who already know what happened to Mitch because somebody told them about it. They’ve already had a chance to hear it, and picture it, and have whatever reaction they’re going to have to it. So when we get introduced, they think they know something about me, when all they know is a bunch of details.” She shrugged. “It’s not the same.”

I knew she would warn me if he was really dangerous or anything, so I wasn’t scared, but she had said the worst. I figured he must have killed somebody, which isn’t necessarily a problem for me. I think I’m capable of it. I knew a lawyer in Atlanta who said everybody can be a murderer under the right circumstances. More likely, under the wrong circumstances. Eddie was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There were a lot of reasons why you might have to kill somebody. Maybe self-defense. I just hoped it wasn’t a kid or a woman. I never really understood the reasons men kill each other, but the reasons they kill women and children are almost always about wanting to control things that don’t belong to them or some weird sex stuff.

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