Jacinda Townsend
Excerpt from the novel Saint Monkey,
forthcoming from W.W. Norton and Company
Back when Audrey’s daddy died, she cried like a whitegirl, with that look on her like she’d just left all of us and weren’t coming back. Her mama ain’t cried one drop, and she give Audrey tissue to fresh up her face but Audrey pushed it away—just let them tears roll down her face and then down her chin to salt up the neck of her sweater. What really did it is when she bit her lip, just like a whitegirl, in a way that said this will hurt me forever and I’m just going to let it, like her mind wasn’t ground down by balcony-sitting and Colored restroom-using and bushel count-cheating and general whitefolk treatment, like her mind was free enough, with time enough, that it could skip around in whitegirl spaces and grieve. Like she ain’t have to have the same strength as everbody else trying to scrape up two nickels, and that’s when I first knew Audrey thought she was better’n the rest of us. ‘Cause she wouldn’t stay cool at a funeral.
And then there was her whole to-do about that house out in the county, which anybody else would of give their eye-tooth to live in. Out there on that meadow, she didn’t last one week. “Caroline, you got to come see this mess,” she told me. Me, tossing out dead mice in the morning and raising myself up ladders to patch shingles on my grandmama’s roof, and her, complaining about an upstairs-downstairs dream. Her mama’d moved them out there with big-bellied Mr. Barbour, who’d been watching Danaitha’s ass for years. Miss Ora Ray down Seventh Street had finally passed on (though Danaitha celebrated so much in the three days after, she was too drunk to make it to the lady’s funeral), and since she didn’t have a night job no more and no excuses neither, Mr. Barbour say why don’t she just move on in with him. Mr. Barbour’s people in Indiana in the house renting business, and he has more money’n he know what to do with nohow, so he started hisself a tobacco farm and built a house what every corner is seven degrees off.
“Seven degrees,” he explained to us, when I finally got the time to go out there and see for myself. “Seven is a powerful number.” It might and it might not be, but I was studying those wood floors, sanded clean as limestone without a knot anywhere. Them windows in the front room, big enough to let the whole day through. The three climbing stones of the walkway, carried in from the Camargo quarry by Mr. Barbour hisself and laid into the hill up to the yard, at an 83 degree angle from the road. Danaitha moved them in there and out of her father-in-law’s house thinking peculiar meant fine—Audrey’s mama, too, believes deeply in fineness—but them corners upset Audrey something fierce.
“Looka this,” she said to me, in a parlor that was a trapezoid. Mr. Barbour’d been baling all morning and was then asleep on the couch, looking forty ways to gruesome, with his eyes half open and drool running all out his mouth.
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