Sugar by Bernice McFadden Page A

circles. Pearl didn’t want to prod and probe her, she could see that though Sugar had a menacing look about her, she was really very fragile. Pearl had come this far with her, had been in her home, sat with her on the porch quietly watching the sunset or listening to the sounds of life that surrounded them. Too far to let it go to waste. She was near to bringing her into the fold, presenting her to God as a saved member of the Bigelow First Baptist Church. And then there was her face. The face that reminded her so much of Jude. She couldn’t turn her back and let all of that go. She wouldn’t.
    Confident, she turned to meet their gazes. She knew of their indiscretions. Their dirty little secrets, the ones they themselves had forgotten existed. She looked at them with eyes as black as coal.
    “Maybe Gibson is confused . . . maybe he mean someone that look like her. Maybe someone told him about some one time , long ago thing that happened to her. Something she trying to forget that done caught up with her.” The women listened to the excuses as they spilled one after the other from Pearl’s mouth. Their eyes shifted between each other and then back to Pearl.
    “Everybody gotta past, something they ashamed of.” Pearl paused and looked directly at Shirley. They held each other’s eyes for one long moment, Pearl revealing, with one look, what she’d known for years. Shirley’s eyes were confused and then, as if a light went on, tears of comprehension, shame and then anger filled her eyes. She turned her head sharply away and lowered her eyes.
    Pearl knew the story as did everyone else in Bigelow. But Pearl was the only woman bold enough to confront Shirley with it. And she would if Shirley pushed, she’d repeat what she’d heard from her own mother’s mouth, if Shirley pushed her.
    It was a story that was told amongst the colored kitchen help while they cleaned up after a birthday party or the field hands as they stole sweet relief from the sun beneath the shade of a magnolia tree. They would chew tobacco or drink heavily from tin cups filled with fresh well water and lean their backs against the bark of a tree or lay themselves down on the earth and speak of small things that had happened in their lives, or others they knew. Eventually, someone would start to speak of Crazy Ciel Brown.
    “Her daddy was the white man from over in Ashton. He usta own the cannery and a few other things that ain’t worth mentioning because they ain’t no where ’round here. I believe his name was McHenry. Had lots of money, a wife and a pair of look-a-like girls. But I guess all that wasn’t enough for him. He had to have himself a colored woman too.”
    “How you know so much?” a doubting Thomas would ask.
    “I knows ’cause my cousin on my daddy side who usta cut cane down in Florida, knew the hairdresser by the name of Rebecca, who was acquainted with one of the maids that worked there who seen it all go down—her name be Belle. Belle Mason.”
    That explanation was usually good enough for any disbeliever.
    “Anyways, like most low-down crackers that God seen fit to give abundance to, he felt like he should be able to have anything and anyone that happened to be under his roof. ’Sides, his wife wasn’t no more good to him. She couldn’t meet his needs. She was a drinker.”
    “I can’t say that I blame a man for strayin’ away from a wife who put away more liquor than him. I mean, a man’s got needs, you know?” The same disbeliever would interrupt, yet again.
    “Will you hush and let the man tell the story?” someone would say in an irritated voice.
    “Like I was saying,” the storyteller would continue, “the woman of the house be passed out somewhere, while her man just be a tipping on down to the maid’s quarters, pick out the one he wanted and hop up on top of her like she was one of his horses.”
    “What the woman name be?”
    And uncomfortable silence would rise like thick smoke.
    “Man, if you