The Wilful Daughter (41 page)

Bo said nothing and just smiled a bright grin that made his two gold teeth shine. Everyone slapped him on the back, except June. She gently kissed his cheek, said thanks and walked away.

At that moment Bo was lost. Bo was in love.

She hadn’t paid attention to it at first, what with trying to learn the ways of the road, trying not to be so picky about where they stayed. The other guys hadn’t paid attention either. They were so busy trying to get as close to as many women as possible that they didn’t notice how many evenings Bo shied away from the prettiest girls and from the strongest booze. They didn’t notice how he ate the way Miss June did, chewing with his mouth closed, putting down his utensils between bites, not talking with food in his mouth. And they didn’t realize that whenever they got into the cars, he ended up in the same one as Miss June, most of the time sitting next to her.

They didn’t notice because they thought he was too quiet and too shy. They thought that while they talked he listened to them.

One evening June made casual conversation with the man who smiled seldom and just looked at her with big eyes.

“
You got a girl, Bo?” she asked as the men talked about the music and the night before.

When no one looked at him, when no one paid attention, when they kept on letting their lips flaps he told softly: “Had a girl but she wanted to get married. I wanna play my music. She didn’t understand. So she left me and married somebody else.”

“
Did you love her?”

“
I guess so, Miss June, ’cause they say loves hurts and it hurt when I discovered she was going to marry somebody else. Yeah, I guess I did.”

She touched his hand and smiled, trying to share something with him - the loss of love or somebody you loved. She squeezed his hand hoping that he understood that he was now her friend.

However Bo didn’t understand.

On many of the nights when they couldn’t travel in the darkness, or try to get out of town before the law or, as Madman called them, the “White Hands of God” found them and strung them up, they slept in the places they played. Sometimes in the room itself still smelling of grain alcohol and cheap gin, sometimes in an adjoining barn, sometimes outside.

If there was a nice sofa or anything that looked like a bed, the boys gave it to June, unless she was being noble and was saying it was someone else’s turn. But on this particular night the place they played had a big dressing room with a cot and a smaller room with another cot. The floors were well swept and the cots looked new, even though June didn’t want to think what they were really used for.

June had the little room to herself and took off as many of her clothes as she felt the door that separated her from the boys would allow. They had never interrupted her sleep when she was in the same room or the same car with them, so June felt safe to strip all the way down to her slip and pretend that she was sleeping in a real bed, the one thing she missed about having a home.

Red spied Bo in the wee hours before dawn getting up. Since Red had always known that Bo was a little crazy he asked the man where he was going.

“
To my girl,” Bo replied softly, taking off his smelly socks so as to tip toe away even quieter.

“
What girl you talking about?” Red asked. He told Madman later that it was the first good night’s sleep he had had in months without that woman looking so good and smelling so sweet and being always underfoot. He wasn’t about to let some fool disrupt it.

“
My girl. June.”

“
June?” Red almost shouted and grabbed Bo by his arms. He felt for his shoulders and discovered the man was shirtless. “Bo, what you talking about?”

“
Don’t you know about us, man? That’s my girl in there.”

Red wanted to get up and stop him, but then he thought, maybe he’s right. Maybe June’s come down off her pedestal and started acting like a woman what travels with a band. A woman that likes men looking at her and thinking about her and touching her. Red decided that he didn’t care.

Until June shouted something they had never heard from her before: “Negro, get out of here. Are you crazy?”

Bo laughed and said a smooth: “Ah, baby.” Then Red heard the little woman’s big piercing voice again.

“
Get out of here and get your hands off of me, you fool.” Red laughed as the noise woke the rest of the band. The men went to see what was wrong because if June screamed with those lungs of hers she might wake the wrong element, that being the White Hands of God.

“
What’s wrong?” Madman said rubbing his eyes. Clay had his pistol drawn and Red just stood there, softly giggling

June was on the floor, how she got there wasn’t clear yet, but Bo was on top of her, and the cot and its contents strewn about the tiny room.

“
Nothing,” he said. “Just me and my woman having a little argument. Go on back, she’ll be fine.”

“
Your woman?” Madman observed June’s chemise pulled up almost to her hips revealing pale thigh.

“
June?” Clay said, noticing Bo’s hand on her breast and her hand on his trying to move it away.

“
Get this crazy man off of me,” June shouted as she tried to kick and move.

Clay shook his head. He knew it was bound to happen.

They got Bo off of her but he was full of fire by then. About her loving him, about her leading him on, about her asking if he had another woman to make sure he was available.

“
I knew this was going to happen, Madman,” Red said angrily, and Clay nodded in agreement. “We ain’t never had no female singer that wasn’t either with one of the guys or. . .”

June was in his face, her chemise strap falling off her shoulder, her hair tousled and falling in her eyes. Her scent not as fresh as earlier in the day when she had bathed and washed but yet fresh, like that of a good, clean smelling woman who had just waken up. “Are you trying to say this is my fault?”

“
Yes,” Red snapped back at the petite woman. “If you had a man to attend to you. . .”

“
Attend to me? What am I, some farm animal?” Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. Red just grinned.

“
You need a man to protect you,” Clay said trying not to notice the tiny waist that he had himself thought about holding many a night.

She looked into each of their faces. “They’re supposed to be four men protecting me. What’s wrong with that?”

“
Be easier if we knew who you was sleeping with instead of roaming around free.”

“
So that’s what you think. If Bo came in and had his way with me, in fact if I allowed it, it would be better for you.”

“
Well, yeah,” Clay added wishing she would put on some clothes and not tempt his lonely mind.

Red put his two cents in. “Then we wouldn’t have to worry about you causing a problem with our women. . .”

“
Women we with always want to know where that June girl sleeps and what man she’s with,” Clay went on. “A woman is supposed to be with a man, that’s what we telling you.”

“
You mean,” she huffed again hands on her hips leaving no imagination to the curves of her figure, “I got to pick one of you so things will be easy for the rest of you when you have a woman.”

They all nodded save Madman, who wanted to kill Bo for even thinking about touching the woman he hoped would one day be his.

“
I am not picking anyone of you for anything more than hitting the right note when you supposed to. Having some man come feel up on you in the middle of the night in the back of some bar while he’s hoping his friends don’t see and you don’t complain, ain’t what I want. I came with you all to sing, that’s all I’ve ever wanted, to come on the road and be with you and sing. I don’t eat much, hardly ever drink, don’t gamble or give you any problems.” To Clay she sassed: “If you can’t keep a woman ’cause she’s worried about who I’m with then it means her mind isn’t on you!”

“
But June,” Madman said, a little thankful she didn’t want Bo over him.

“
But what?” she asked. Their heads were hung low, trying to avoid her stare, her questions and most of all, her body.

“
None of you got anything to say?” The same silence fell. “What did I do to be treated like this? I have never invaded any of your privacy. When you have your women hanging off you, I stay far away. I do what I’m told and I help out by taking care of the mending and sewing and even the washing sometimes. That’s because that’s what I know how to do. If I could fix that car, I’d do that. If I could string a guitar, I’d do that. But I don’t know how. I carry my weight in this group, I have ever since you let me in. So it’s no need for you to tell me I got to get a man, or I need a man. ’Cause if one of you was my man, he sure as hell wouldn’t want me washing your clothes or mending your smelly old socks or even sitting next to you in a car. He’d want me to do for him and him alone. Am I right?”

They nodded in agreement.

“
I may be young but I know that much. So leave me be.” To Bo she added: “Especially you. I’m gonna tell all of you for the last time: I don’t want no man.”

After that night they didn’t try much to change her. Bo didn’t stay long with the band. June guessed he was too embarrassed, since half the time he wouldn’t even look at her. And he had lost the feeling for the music when they did their duet. When she asked him why he didn’t do it right, he told her when he closed his eyes it didn’t feel the same as before.

Madman felt the loss in the music and took the number out. He tried to make June feel good even if the number was gone by telling her that if she was his woman she could do as she pleased. He could make Bo play right for her, or, instead of it being a guitar and her voice, it could be him on the piano. “You got to feel it when you sing it,” he told her.

Her reply had been equally standoffish. “I always felt it. I just didn’t feel it for the man I was singing with. Nothing says you got to feel it for the person you singing with. Everything I learned so far, everything you taught me, says you just got to feel.”

In time they got used to her not having a man. They got used to having her around, pretty as she was. They got used to her in a baby sister sort of way and she liked that. When men outside their circle tried to force their attentions on her they quickly thwarted their attempts if she couldn’t handle it. And she always tried to be able to handle it.

But they stayed in the South too long.

They stayed where you could get fresh biscuits every morning. They stayed where there was always the sound of a hammer ringing, a blacksmith singing, a woman waiting and blues that she could not let go of since she had lain down on the grass and pulled the Piano Man down on her.

She learned more about the South than she wanted to, more about where she had come from than she needed to and more about who her parents were than had ever crossed her mind.

They had been in some tiny town in backwoods Arkansas when she saw a woman that reminded her of her mother. A woman who, from a distance, looked white except for her coal black hair. A woman followed by of brood of seven children all of whom registered at least a part of her in their face and hair. Their skin was dark, almost coal black. The children were amazingly beautiful but the people treated them with disdain, white and colored people. The woman held her head down and didn’t look anyone in the eye. June couldn’t imagine Bira doing that, Bira who walked about with her head in the air because, as Bira told her time and time again: “It belongs up there with God.”

In another town June was sitting down thinking about the music, waiting to get up and sing when a fight broke out between two women who were sisters. They claimed they both belonged to the same man, a man who was sitting at a table with a third less attractive woman. The fight started because one sister said she had seen him first and her baby had been first, the other sister claiming that the first sister’s baby had been first only because of some hoodoo she had paid. That’s when the blows started and the man left with the third woman probably to impregnate her with his so called perfect seed.

She heard later that younger sister had died, murdered by the older sister’s hand. The older sister had gone mad over what she had done. “The children they talked about,” June asked the gossipy bar keep who was telling the story, “what’s going to happen to them?”

“
They with him and his wife. Bet you didn’t know he had a wife and all them women all along. The wife didn’t want nobody talking about his children roaming around, since they was boys and hers was girls and if they didn’t know, she said, whose children they was, they might end up married to each other and having crazy babies.” It was more then June had ever wanted to know.

But when the barkeep smiled at her with a big lip one-tooth grin and asked: “Where your babies be?” she gave him the appropriate answer: “I don’t got none.” It was time to leave. Even the men she traveled with had started to complain they had stayed in the South too long.

When the car hit the Virginia countryside and the sign said: “Washington, DC, 72 miles”, June became a new person.

With Mama Jeffries she was happy. That woman didn’t care how proper June talked, just as long as she didn’t sleep around in her house, not pick up after herself or take the Lord’s name in vain.

There were lots of little places in Washington to play, especially the clubs where the college crowd hung out. When she met them she realized they were some of the youngest young people she had ever met. Most of them her age, all of them feigning sophistication and shaking their tails whenever the music played. All of them dumb as dirt when it came to life and the real world.