course!”
Hemmingway handed him the bag.
They walked along in silence until they reached the bridge that connected Candle Street to Nigger Row.
After offering a curt thank you, Hemmingway reached for the bag, but Mingo held it away.
“I’ll carry it all the way to your front door.”
“So my daddy can tear my behind up for being with the likes of you? No thank you.”
“What’s so wrong with me?” Mingo asked, handing the bag over.
“I think you know,” Hemmingway snorted, and walked off.
Mingo leaned into the splintered wood railing of the bridge and removed the cigarette from behind his ear. He pulled a long matchstick from the breast pocket of his shirt and swiped it against the heel of his shoe. By the time he brought the flame to the tip of the cigarette, Hemmingway was already on the north shore.
He took a long and thoughtful drag of the cigarette and wondered if Hemmingway Hilson would be as feral a lover as her mother had been.
Doll was coming down the road from Cole Payne’s house when she saw Hemmingway and Mingo. She ducked behind a tree and watched Mingo watching her daughter. Only after he flicked the cigarette butt into the river and walked away did she step from her hiding place. Doll started to follow him, but stopped when the reason for her pursuit suddenly vanished from her mind. You see, Doll thought she was suffering from lapses in memory. And I guess that would be the best way to explain away the periods in her life when Esther’s will overpowered her own.
For Doll, childhood memories were choppy and gray. The months leading up to her marriage to August were cloudy. She could only recall bits and pieces of her pregnancies—although the labor and delivery of the children were vivid. Their escape from Tulsa in 1921 was quite clear in her mind. She remembered the night sky lit morning bright by the fires the white people set to the black-owned properties and the air filled with the scent of gunpowder and kerosene. Dead bodies scattered in the street.
Although she had been living here with me for more than six years, she could not remember when they arrived, or the photo that had been taken of them on the front porch of their new home. The names and faces of the people here came and left from her mind just as quickly as the hours moved through the day. She suspected that her daughter didn’t like her; the boy, however, seemed to worship the ground she walked on.
Even the moments before that moment, which found her standing in the middle of the road staring longingly at the Mingo Bailey’s retreating back, were hazy. What was bright in her mind was leaving home that morning headed to the Payne house to deliver johnnycakes. The next fresh memory was slipping behind the tree. She was sure that somewhere between the Payne house and the immediate moment she had consumed coffee, because it was swishing loudly in her stomach. She asked herself, Why in the world would I drink coffee when I abhor the taste of it?
Doll gave her head a hard shake, praying that the movement would retrieve the lost hours, but all it did was free a memory that Doll could only fathom as a dream.
In that dream, Mingo was headed to town with a pair of loaded dice in one pocket and two dollars in change in the other. His mind was so fixed on the money he intended to cheat his way into winning, that he barely noticed Doll waving at him from across the road.
“Mingo? Mingo Bailey?”
“Ma’am?”
“Can you help me to the bridge with these oranges? They’re heavier than I expected.”
Mingo looked toward the center of town and then back at Doll.
“Just to the bridge,” she reiterated.
“Okay.”
She hummed as they walked, and greeted passersby with bright, sunny hellos. When the humming stopped she raised her hand to her throat and began to stroke it.
At the bridge, Doll looked around and saw that there wasn’t a soul in sight.
“Mingo?” she said in a voice far away from the one that had beckoned him from across the road.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Would you like to have me?”
“Ma’am?”
“Have me. You know, the way you’ve had so many other women.”
“Ma’am?”
“Fuck me. Do you want to fuck me, Mingo?”
He looked across the bridge toward Nigger Row. “I must be losing my goddamn mind,” he muttered with a laugh.
“No, you’re not,” Doll assured, and pressed her hand against his crotch.
Beneath the bridge, on the Candle Street side, Doll became an animal; a spitting, scratching wildcat that Mingo struggled to gain control of. Above them, the sounds of shod feet, bicycles, and the clomping of hooves and the rolling wheels of buggies masked the sound of their lovemaking.
“Our Father, who art in heaven—” Doll croaked as Mingo pounded into her.
“Stop that!” he warned.
“Hallowed be Thine name …”
Mingo closed his hand over her mouth.
After he was done with her—wait, I think the correct thing to say here is: After she was done with him— Mingo patted Doll on her ass and said, “Fix yourself up, you look a mess.”
She hadn’t taken offense when Mingo pressed his filthy hand over her mouth, but for some reason the pat to her bottom struck her as impolite and disrespectful.
“How dare you,” she hissed, and then struck him hard across his face. “Don’t you know that I am the wife of a reverend?”
The assault took Mingo by surprise. His hand curled into a ball. “W-woman,” he stammered between clenched teeth as he patted the damp soil in search of his cigarette. When he found it, he slipped it between his lips and began to laugh at the absurdity of the situation.
“What’s so funny?” Doll asked.
He didn’t answer her question, he just kept laughing, even as he tugged his trousers up around his waist.
August was sitting in the living room when Doll walked into the house covered in mud. At the sight of her, he sat straight up and his face went bright with alarm.
“Doll, what happened to you?” he asked as he stood and moved toward her.
Doll looked stupidly down at her soiled clothing. “I think I fell down the river bank.”
August frowned. “You think?”
“I did,” Doll mumbled. “I slipped down the river bank.”
“My goodness!” August declared as he took Doll gently by the elbow
