Of Love and Dust by Ernest J. Gaines Read Free Book Online Page B

women everywhere—women, women, and more women. But he saw only one. She had on a red dress—no, not red; sort of wine color. Everywhere she turned he was looking at her. She had the prettiest brown skin he had ever seen. He wanted her, he didn’t care what it cost him, he wanted her. Every chance he got, he got in her way. Finally she noticed him and gave him a smile. Soon they were dancing and he was giving her a pile of his jive talk. He almost had her outside the door when all of a sudden somebody jerked him around and knocked him down on the floor. He looked up and he saw the same nigger he had won a pile of money from in the toilet that night. Oh yes, he said, he had forgot to tell me he had been gambling all evening and he had won a pile of money. Well, the samenigger he had won all that money from owned the woman he was trying to get outside. The same black sonofabitch—and he had a punch like a mule. When he fell he heard the nigger (they called the nigger Hotwater) telling his other nigger buddies to drag his ass outside. Before he could get to his feet, two of Hotwater’s boys had him by the ankles, and the next thing he knew he was out there on his back looking at that yellow light over the door. He jumped up and he really wanted to run, but there was nowhere for him to go. The people had made a big circle round him and Hotwater, and, he said, that big, sweaty nigger wanted just one thing—his ass. He kept backing away, backing away, and that big nigger kept coming on him. Every time the nigger hit him he went down. After a while he got tired falling and he stood up and started hitting back. He said the nigger was strong and could hit like a mule, but he didn’t know anything about covering up. The nigger kept his face unguarded, and he kept his fist in the nigger’s face like you keep your fist on one of those little punching bags. His left cut the nigger’s face so much it looked like beef liver. “You know how beef liver look?” he asked me. “Kind of blackish red?” “Yes,” I said. “I know how it looks.” “Well, that’s how I had the nigger’s face,” he said. “Reddish black. The red was his blood, the black was his face.” So when the nigger saw he couldn’t get his face from off his fist, the nigger wanted to change tactics, Marcus said. Now he wanted his knife. But by the time the nigger got out his knife, he had got out his own, too. He said he let the nigger get two good whacks at him (he always believed in playing fair, himself); then he threw that knife into the nigger’s belly far as he could. He said his hand was red when it came back. But by then the police was there, dragging him to the car.
    “They was probably there all the time,” he said. “But they just wanted to see one nigger kill another one. What they care.”
    “And soon as they threw you in jail, you sent word to your nan-nan, huh?”
    “Yeah.”
    “And she came to Marshall Hebert?”
    “That’s right,” he said. “I wasn’t going to spend no five years in Angola for a chickenshit nigger like that. If he had o’ fit me fair he wouldn’t ‘a’ been dead.”
    “And that’s all it means?” I asked.
    “That’s all it means,” he said.
    Just about then, we saw Pauline Guerin coming down the quarter.

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    Pauline wore a pink, flowery dress and a big white straw hat. She was walking slow—she always walked slow with her head high like she’s always thinking about something far away. As we came closer to her she smiled and waved at us. The next moment you couldn’t see her for the dust.
    “Who was that?” Marcus said.
    “Pauline,” I said.
    “I ain’t never seen her before.”
    “She lives down there.”
    “She pretty,” Marcus said. “That other woman was something like that. But she darker than that other woman was. She married?”
    “No, but you can say she is. She’s Bonbon’s woman.”
    “Bonbon?”
    “Bonbon,” I said.
    “Well, that sure don’t cut no ice with me,”