Lester I was going to marry him.”
“What did you tell him, then?”
“I told him I’d think about it.”
Chick stood up from the bed then and said, “Think about it? What’s there to think about?”
“There’s a whole lot to think about, Chick. There’s my life to think about. There’s my future to think about.” In the voice of her mother, Barbara Jean heard herself say, “I’ve got to be a forward-thinking woman. And a forward-thinking woman looks out for herself.”
Chick’s voice cracked as he spoke. His usual deep, smooth tone went high, almost childlike. “I thought you were going to let me look out for you. I thought you were going to be with me.”
“I can’t be with you, and you know it. We’ve been back here playing around and pretending like it could work out, but we both know it can’t.”
“We can get married. It’s been legal here for two years.”
“Legal’s one thing. What they’ll beat you down and string you up for is another.”
“Then we’ll get married and go someplace else. We’ve talked about it before. We could go to Chicago or Detroit. There are couples like us there and nobody even thinks a thing about it.”
“Haven’t you heard the news? The Promised Lands are on fire. If we tried walking down the street together in Chicago or Detroit, we wouldn’t make it half a block before our heads got busted open.”
He said, “I’ll figure out a way to make it work. There are plenty of other places we can go.”
“No, there aren’t, and you know it. The best we can hope for is to run away somewhere and find somebody like Big Earl who’d let us hole up in a little dump of a room like this.” She gestured around the storeroom. “And what about your brother? He’s been driving up and down the street for months now waiting for his chance to catch you outside alone just because you work for a black man. Now you want to tell him that you’re going to have a black wife? Do you honestly think he’d let you shame him by marrying me? You think he wouldn’t hunt you down and hurt you worse than he ever has? And wherever we go, we’d be lucky to get through a day without getting spit on. Chick, you don’t know what it’s like to have everybody look down on you, point at you, and treat you like you’re less than nothing. You think you know, but you don’t. I lived that way almost all my life until this last year and I can’t go back to it. I can’t.”
“What are you saying, Barbara Jean?”
She took a deep breath and tried to hold back the tears that wanted so badly to come out, and then she said what she had avoided saying all week. “I’m saying I’m going to marry Lester.”
Chick didn’t try to, or couldn’t, stop tears from flowing down his cheeks as he yelled, “You love me. I know you love me,” making it sound like an accusation.
She answered automatically and honestly without thinking. She said, “Yes. I love you.” Barbara Jean felt her will beginning to dissolve. She wanted to grab him and pull him into the bed with her with no thought of who might find them together. But then she felt the hand of her mother pushing her toward the door of the room just as surely as if Loretta had been alive and breathing. As Barbara Jean backed out of the storeroom, Loretta used her daughter’s mouth to say, “But love ain’t never put a bite of food on any table.”
She couldn’t face her friends or the gossipmongers in the dining room of the All-You-Can-Eat, so Barbara Jean slipped out the back door. In the alley behind the restaurant, she felt her stomach lurch and she had to bend over and gasp for air. When she got her nerves and her stomach calmed down, she walked around the block. Then she hurried over to the alley behind the next street, so she could enter Big Earl and Miss Thelma’s house from the back and not be seen by her friends at the restaurant. By the time Barbara Jean let herself into the back door of the house, she had started to feel a little bit better. She told herself that she had done the right thing for herself, and for Chick, too. This was the first step into a new and improved life, the life she deserved.