Wisteria: Swamp Country

Stations

61 Stations it’s not like y’all domestics was like that, bowing and scraping, quiet, forgiving; not aunt Jasmine who would cuss them, call them stinking, nasty crackers while you and her be playing your cards on saturday night, sipping your beer, trying to get back all the dignity you give up all week-long. But you always would nod, but never say a evil thing ’bout them; and when aunt J. was gone, you would tell the wind that if she would love her own like they love their owns, maybe she would be doing better than drinking all that liquor, and messing with every man what come her way; that’s how you would say it out to the wind, quiet-quiet. Or the time when my titties was fulling out and the boys start to looking, and he ask me to touch them, that time when i said no and i started to tell y’all how sick he was, and aunt Jasmine start to laughing and hissing her teeth about how his Mama and Papa would go crazy 62 to know that the boy following his father’s path and sniffing after some “nigger pussy,” . . . and you turned red and told her to be quiet, and send me out to where children belong, and wasn’t two minutes before aunt Jasmine was going, head in the sky, backside rolling defiant, with you shouting at her back, “i don’t want them children to feel that all white folks is bad! they got better coming for them, that’s all!” and that was all i heard from you ’bout it. Can’t imagine what i’d a done when he come at me again, if aunt Jasmine didn’t take me aside to tell me not to let that cracker boy touch me and not to mind you, Mama, ’cause she say sometimes you wasn’t too sure which one of your kin you might meet on the way. i gather all these memories inside me still, and there’s nothing to do but line them up look them over, standing there like stations of my crosses, and your crosses, Mama; then i weep for love of you weep for love of you, Mama. ...