Love
Authors: Toni Morrison
TONI MORRISON
LOVE
ALFRED A
.
KNOPF NEW YORK
•
TORONTO
2003
Table of Contents
The women’s legs are spread wide open, so I hum. Men grow irritable, but they know it’s all for them. They relax. Standing by, unable to do anything but watch, is a trial, but I don’t say a word. My nature is a quiet one, anyway. As a child I was considered respectful; as a young woman I was called discreet. Later on I was thought to have the wisdom maturity brings. Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all by themselves with no help from the mind. Still, I used to be able to have normal conversations, and when the need arose, I could make a point strong enough to stop a womb—or a knife. Not anymore, because back in the seventies, when women began to straddle chairs and dance crotch out on television, when all the magazines started featuring behinds and inner thighs as though that’s all there is to a woman, well, I shut up altogether. Before women agreed to spread in public, there used to be secrets—some to hold, some to tell. Now? No. Barefaced being the order of the day, I hum. The words dance in my head to the music in my mouth. People come in here for a plate of crawfish, or to pass the time, and never notice or care that they do all the talking. I’m background—the movie music that comes along when the sweethearts see each other for the first time, or when the husband is walking the beachfront alone wondering if anybody saw him doing the bad thing he couldn’t help. My humming encourages people; frames their thoughts like when Mildred Pierce decides she has to go to jail for her daughter. I suspect, soft as it is, my music has that kind of influence too. The way “Mood Indigo” drifting across the waves can change the way you swim. It doesn’t make you dive in, but it can set your stroke, or trick you into believing you are both smart and lucky. So why not swim farther and a little farther still? What’s the deep to you? It’s way down below, and has nothing to do with blood made bold by coronets and piano keys, does it? Of course, I don’t claim that kind of power. My hum is mostly below range, private; suitable for an old woman embarrassed by the world; her way of objecting to how the century is turning out. Where all is known and nothing understood. Maybe it was always so, but it didn’t strike me until some thirty years ago that prostitutes, looked up to for their honesty, have always set the style. Well, maybe it wasn’t their honesty; maybe it was their success. Still, straddling a chair or dancing half naked on TV, these nineties women are not all that different from the respectable women who live around here. This is coast country, humid and God-fearing, where female recklessness runs too deep for short shorts or thongs or cameras. But then or now, decent underwear or none, wild women never could hide their innocence—a kind of pity-kitty hopefulness that their prince was on his way. Especially the tough ones with their box cutters and dirty language, or the glossy ones with two-seated cars and a pocketbook full of dope. Even the ones who wear scars like presidential medals and stockings rolled at their ankles can’t hide the sugar-child, the winsome baby girl curled up somewhere inside, between the ribs, say, or under the heart. Naturally all of them have a sad story: too much notice, not enough, or the worst kind. Some tale about dragon daddies and false-hearted men, or mean mamas and friends who did them wrong. Each story has a monster in it who made them tough instead of brave, so they open their legs rather than their hearts where that folded child is tucked.
Sometimes the cut is so deep no woe-is-me tale is enough. Then the only thing that does the trick, that explains the craziness heaping up, holding down, and making women hate one another and ruin their children is an outside evil. People in Up Beach, where I’m from, used to tell about some creatures called Police-heads—dirty things with big hats who shoot up out of the ocean to harm loose women and eat disobedient children. My mother knew them when she was a girl and people dreamed wide awake. They disappeared for a while but came back with new and bigger hats starting in the forties when a couple of “See there, what’d I tell you?” things happened at the shore. Like that woman who furrowed in the sand with her neighbor’s husband and the very next day suffered a stroke at the cannery, the grappling knife still in her hand. She wasn’t but twenty-nine at the time. Another woman—she lived over in Silk and wouldn’t have anything to do with Up Beach people—well, she hid a flashlight and a purchase deed in the sand of her father-in-law’s beachfront one evening only to have a loggerhead dig them up in the night. The miserable daughter-in-law broke her wrist trying to keep the breezes and the Klan away from the papers she’d stolen. Of course nobody flat out saw any Police-heads during the shame of those guilty women, but I knew they were around and knew what they looked like, too, because I’d already seen them in 1942 when some hardheaded children swam past the safety rope and drowned. As soon as they were pulled under, thunderclouds gathered above a screaming mother and a few dumbstruck picnickers and, in a blink, those clouds turned into gate-mouthed profiles wearing wide-brimmed hats. Some folks heard rumbling but I swear I heard whoops of joy. From that time on through the fifties they loitered above the surf or hovered over the beach ready to pounce around sunset (you know, when lust is keenest, when loggerheads hunt nests and negligent parents get drowsy). Of course most demons get hungry at suppertime, like us. But Police-heads liked to troll at night, too, especially when the hotel was full of visitors drunk with dance music, or salt air, or tempted by starlit water. Those were the days when Cosey’s Hotel and Resort was the best and best-known vacation spot for colored folk on the East Coast. Everybody came: Lil Green, Fatha Hines, T-Bone Walker, Jimmy Lunceford, the Drops of Joy, and guests from as far away as Michigan and New York couldn’t wait to get down here. Sooker Bay swirled with first lieutenants and brand-new mothers; with young schoolteachers, landlords, doctors, businessmen. All over the place children rode their fathers’ leg shanks and buried uncles up to their necks in sand. Men and women played croquet and got up baseball teams whose goal was to knock a homer into the waves. Grandmothers watched over red thermos jugs with white handles and hampers full of crabmeat salad, ham, chicken, yeast rolls, and loaves of lemon-flavored cake, oh my. Then, all of a sudden, in 1958, bold as a posse, the Police-heads showed up in bright morning. A clarinet player and his bride drowned before breakfast. The inner tube they were floating on washed ashore dragging wads of scale-cluttered beard hair. Whether the bride had played around during the honeymoon was considered and whispered about, but the facts were muddy. She sure had every opportunity. Cosey’s Resort had more handsome single men per square foot than anyplace outside Atlanta or even Chicago. They came partly for the music but mostly to dance by the sea with pretty women.
After the drowned couple was separated—sent to different funeral parlors—you’d think women up to no good and mule-headed children wouldn’t need further warning, because they knew there was no escape: fast as lightning, nighttime or day, Police-heads could blast up out of the waves to punish wayward women or swallow the misbehaving young. Only when the resort failed did they sneak off like pickpockets from a breadline. A few people still sinking crab castles in the back bays probably remember them, but with no more big bands or honeymooners, with the boats and picnics and swimmers gone, when Sooker Bay became a treasury of sea junk and Up Beach itself drowned, nobody needed or wanted to recall big hats and scaly beards. But it’s forty years on, now; the Coseys have disappeared from public view and I’m afraid for them almost every day.
Except for me and a few fish shacks, Up Beach is twenty feet underwater; but the hotel part of Cosey’s Resort is still standing. Sort of standing. Looks more like it’s rearing backwards—away from hurricanes and a steady blow of sand. Odd what oceanfront can do to empty buildings. You can find the prettiest shells right up on the steps, like scattered petals or cameos from a Sunday dress, and you wonder how they got there, so far from the ocean. Hills of sand piling in porch corners and between banister railings are whiter than the beach, and smoother, like twice-sifted flour. Foxglove grows waist high around the gazebo, and roses, which all the time hate our soil, rage here, with more thorns than blackberries and weeks of beet red blossoms. The wood siding of the hotel looks silver-plated, its peeling paint like the streaks on an unpolished tea service. The big double doors are padlocked. So far nobody has smashed their glass panels. Nobody could stand to do it because the panels mirror your own face as well as the view behind your back: acres of chive grass edging the sparkly beach, a movie-screen sky, and an ocean that wants you more than anything. No matter the outside loneliness, if you look inside, the hotel seems to promise you ecstasy and the company of all your best friends. And music. The shift of a shutter hinge sounds like the cough of a trumpet; piano keys waver a quarter note above the wind so you might miss the hurt jamming those halls and closed-up rooms.
Our weather is soft, mostly, with peculiar light. Pale mornings fade into white noons, then by three o’clock the colors are savage enough to scare you. Jade and sapphire waves fight each other, kicking up enough foam to wash sheets in. An evening sky behaves as though it’s from some other planet—one without rules, where the sun can be plum purple if it wants to and clouds can be red as poppies. Our shore is like sugar, which is what the Spaniards thought of when they first saw it. Sucra, they called it, a name local whites tore up for all time into Sooker.
Nobody could get enough of our weather except when the cannery smell got to the beach and into the hotel. Then guests discovered what Up Beach people put up with every day and thought that was why Mr. Cosey moved his family out of the hotel and built that big house on Monarch Street. Fish odor didn’t used to be all that bad a thing in these parts. Like marsh stench and privies, it just added another variety to the senses. But in the sixties it became a problem. A new generation of females complained about what it did to their dresses, their appetite, and their idea of romance. This was around the time the world decided perfume was the only smell the nose was meant for. I remember Vida trying to calm the girlfriend of a famous singer who was carrying on about her steak tasting like conch. That hurt me, because I have never failed in the kitchen. Later on, Mr. Cosey told people that’s what ruined his business—that the whites had tricked him, let him buy all the oceanfront he wanted because the cannery, so close by, kept it unprofitable. The fish smell had turned his resort into a joke. But I know that the smell that blanketed Up Beach hit Sooker Bay only once or twice a month—and never from December to April, when crab castles were empty and the cannery closed. No. I don’t care what he told people, something else wrecked his resort. Freedom, May said. She tried hard to keep the place going when her father-in-law lost interest, and was convinced that civil rights destroyed her family and its business. By which she meant colored people were more interested in blowing up cities than dancing by the seashore. She was like that, May; but what started out as mule-headed turned into crack-brained. Fact is, folks who bragged about Cosey vacations in the forties boasted in the sixties about Hyatts, Hiltons, cruises to the Bahamas and Ocho Rios. Truth is, neither shellfish nor integration was to blame. Never mind the woman with the conch-flavored steak, customers will sit next to a privy if it’s the only way they can hear Wilson Pickett or Nellie Lutcher. Besides, who can tell one odor from another while pressed close to a partner on a crowded dance floor listening to “Harbor Lights”? And while May kept blaming Martin Luther King every day for her troubles, the hotel still made money, although with a different clientele. Listen to me: something else was to blame. Besides, Mr. Cosey was a smart man. He helped more colored people here than forty years of government programs. And he wasn’t the one who boarded up the hotel and sold seventy-five acres to an Equal Opportunity developer for thirty-two houses built so cheap my shack puts them to shame. At least my floors are hand-planed oak, not some slicked-up pine, and if my beams aren’t ruler smooth, they’re true and properly aged when hoisted.
Before Up Beach drowned in a hurricane called Agnes, there was a drought with no name at all. The sale had just closed, the acres barely plotted, when Up Beach mothers were pumping mud from their spigots. Dried-up wells and brackey water scared them so, they gave up the sight of the sea and applied for a two-percent HUD mortgage. Rainwater wasn’t good enough for them anymore. Trouble, unemployment, hurricanes following droughts, marshland turned into mud cakes so dry even the mosquitoes quit—I saw all that as life simply being itself. Then the government houses went up and they named the neighborhood Oceanside—which it isn’t. The developers started out selling to Vietnam veterans and retired whites, but when Oceanside became a target for people thrown out of work onto food stamps, churches and this affirmative action stuff got busy. Welfare helped some till urban renewal came to town. Then there were jobs all over the place. Now, it’s full of people commuting to offices and hospital labs twenty-two miles north. Traveling back and forth from those cheap, pretty houses to malls and movieplexes, they’re so happy they haven’t had a cloudy thought, let alone a memory of Police-heads. They didn’t cross my mind either until I started to miss the Cosey women and wonder if they’d finally killed each other. Who besides me would know if they were dead in there—one vomiting on the steps still holding the knife that cut the throat of the one that fed her the poison? Or if one had a stroke after shooting the other and, not able to move, starved to death right in front of the refrigerator? They wouldn’t be found for days. Not until Sandler’s boy needed his weekly pay. Maybe I best leave off the TV for a while.
I used to see one of them driving along in that rusty old Oldsmobile—to the bank or in here, once in a while, for Salisbury steak. Otherwise they haven’t left that house in years. Not since one came back carrying a Wal-Mart shopping bag and you could tell by the set of her shoulders she was whipped. The white Samsonite luggage she left with was nowhere in sight. I thought the other one would slam the door in her face, but she didn’t. I guess they both knew they deserved each other. Meaner than most and standoffish, they have the regular attention that disliked folks attract. They live like queens in Mr. Cosey’s house, but since that girl moved in there a while ago with a skirt short as underpants and no underpants at all, I’ve been worried about them leaving me here with nothing but an old folks’ tale to draw on. I know it’s trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it’s all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that.