In Love and Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page A

Nothing.
    Then, before she got up from her knees, she thought about the intense blackness underneath the headboard of the bed. She had not looked there. On her side of the bed on the floor beneath the pillow there was nothing. She hurried around to the other side. Kneeling, she struck something with her hand on the floor under his side of the bed. Quickly, down on her stomach, she raked it out. Then she raked and raked. She was panting and sweating, her ashen face slowly coloring with the belated rush of doomed comprehension. In a rush it came to her: “It ain’t no woman.” Just like that. It had never occurred to her there could be anything more serious. She stifled the cry that rose in her throat.
    Coated with grit, with dust sticking to the pages, she held in her crude, indelicate hands, trembling now, a sizable pile of paperback books. Books that had fallen from his hands behind the bed over the months of their marriage. She dusted them carefully one by one and looked with frowning concentration at their covers. Fists and guns appeared everywhere. “Black” was the one word that appeared consistently on each cover. Black Rage, Black Fire, Black Anger, Black Revenge, Black Vengeance, Black Hatred, Black Beauty, Black Revolution. Then the word “revolution” took over. Revolution in the Streets, Revolution from the Rooftops, Revolution in the Hills, Revolution and Rebellion, Revolution and Black People in the United States, Revolution and Death. She looked with wonder at the books that were her husband’s preoccupation, enraged that the obvious was what she had never guessed before.
    How many times had she encouraged his light reading? How many times been ignorantly amused? How many times had he laughed at her when she went out looking for “his” women? With a sob she realized she didn’t even know what the word “revolution” meant, unless it meant to go round and round, the way her head was going.
    With quiet care she stacked the books neatly on his pillow. With the largest of her knives she ripped and stabbed them through. When the brazen and difficult words did not disappear with the books, she hastened with kerosene to set the marriage bed afire. Thirstily, in hopeless jubilation, she watched the room begin to burn. The bits of words transformed themselves into luscious figures of smoke, lazily arching toward the ceiling. “Trash!” she cried over and over, reaching through the flames to strike out the words, now raised from the dead in glorious colors. “I kill you! I kill you!” she screamed against the roaring fire, backing enraged and trembling into a darkened corner of the room, not near the open door. But the fire and the words rumbled against her together, overwhelming her with pain and enlightenment. And she hid her big wet face in her singed then sizzling arms and screamed and screamed.

The Child Who
Favored Daughter
    “That my daughter should
    fancy herself in love
    with any man!
    How can this be?”
    —Anonymous
    S HE KNOWS HE HAS READ THE LETTER. He is sitting on the front porch watching her make the long trek from the school bus down the lane into the front yard. Father, judge, giver of life. Shadowy clouds indicating rain hang low on either side of the four o’clock sun and she holds her hand up to her eyes and looks out across the rows of cotton that stretch on one side of her from the mailbox to the house in long green hedges. After an initial shutting off of breath caused by fear, a calm numbness sets in and as she makes her way slowly down the lane she shuffles her feet in the loose red dust and tries to seem unconcerned. But she wonders how he knows about the letter. Her lover has a mother who dotes on the girl he married. It could have been her, preserving the race. Or the young bride herself, brittled to ice to find a letter from her among keepsakes her husband makes no move to destroy. Or—? But that notion does not develop in her mind. She loves him.
Fire of earth
    Lure of