The foreman—Darlene eventually heard him answer to the name How, probably short for Howard—maybe ’cause he seened her almost run off that first morning, ain’t wanna put her on none the easier jobs. He ain’t let her hide inside that shady bus and arrange them melons into no neat pile—his buddies, the dudes he joked with about *, got them jobs. He put her in the middle of the human chain, where she had to catch the Sugar Babies with her gut. Once or twice they knocked the wind outta her. She breathed deep, pretended she ain’t hurt, and hurled the next melon to the next catcher, who handed it up to the guy on the bus.
This supervisor How seem to enjoy putting Darlene down, always reminding her that she had wanted to come out and harvest watermelons with the men. He’d pretend that she on a baseball team and do a play-by-play of her throws or her catches and snicker when she fucked up. But she ain’t never broke none, she kept saying to herself. She never dropped a single one. Her forearms bruised up, she jammed her finger, broken nails scraped melon skins sometimes, but she ain’t never dropped a single one.
The season went on, and the melons changed type till they turnt into some humongous, child-size, lead-heavy boulders. Darlene always thinking that they weigh what Eddie used to weigh when he smaller, and that made her ask could she call home, but then it’d get too complicated or pricey and she’d hang with me instead. She got near the pay phone, but she ain’t never had no money. She dialed a number and it said some crazy shit she ain’t never heard a pay phone say. It’d go, Please deposit five dollars for the next five minutes. And she be like, That’s twenty quarters!
Once when she picking melons she stopped and wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her wrist and stood there all sporty-like, waiting for the next one, and How giving her a hard time ’bout it.
He go, Bet you wanna cut one of them Charleston Grays open and sit down on that rock over there, eh?
It wasn’t the first time he talked trash about picking watermelons that sounded like he tryna get the black folks’ goat. How called himself one hundred percent Mexican and talked a lot of shit on how Texas and California really belonged to Mexico and the gringos stole everything, and he teased the black crew members ’bout the Civil War and said that they belonged to him. He told the few Mexicans on the crew that he be a Aztec and they his POWs.
At first, in that roasting heat and that motherfucking unbreathable humidity, Darlene did dream ’bout stopping work and tearing open a Sangria melon with her bare hands, biting the red part off real slow and letting the juice drip down her cheeks and onto her neck and chest, sticking her face in and wetting it just to get cool. But on account a How’s comments she ain’t want him to know, ’cause it seem racist against herself to want so bad to stop work and eat a watermelon. This man How wouldn’t never cut that shit out, though.
You know you want that, right? How told her. He mocked her with a exaggerated grin. All you people want is some watermelon.
Fuck it, How, she spat. It’s one hundred degrees out here and we’re slinging around these twenty-pound fruits all dainty like they already belong to some white lady in the Garden District? If I want to stop and eat one myself, who cares if people call me a nigger just for wanting what anybody in their right mind would want? If eating and resting and surviving makes you a nigger, then sign me up!
The guy behind her on the chain goes, I hear that, and grunted and lobbed a Carolina Cross her way. Word.
It socked her in the gut and made her stumble backward a couple steps and then drop to one knee, but she held fast, like letting go even one a them suckers would splatter the last of her willpower all over the dirt. As she got up the strength to heave that damn monster up to the guy in the school bus, she feeling a intense need to hang with me again, so she could smoke and smoke and smoke until I filled up her empty insides with smoke, and we could do a spiral dance together up into that heavenly ballroom full of drugs way above the planet Earth.
8.
Driftwood
Darlene clutched at the bedclothes in her sleep that morning, mashing them into the shape of a blanket and winding up in the middle of the bed, sweating. The clock said 6:05 a.m. when she awoke, and Nat hadn’t come home. At 6:06, nothing; 6:10, 6:14, 6:59, still no husband, and she felt certain she knew what that meant. Her mind told her, An alive Nat would have called. Darlene’s internal organs seemed to shift positions; her lungs fell to her hips, her heart pulsed through her stomach. For the first time she allowed herself to think, He’s not alive. He offered to go to the store and get the Tylenol and now he’s not alive. If I hadn’t had a headache he would have stayed home safe. If I hadn’t worn those tight shoes that I know give me migraines I wouldn’t have asked for the Tylenol and he would’ve come back last night. If I hadn’t already taken a sedative, thinking it could substitute for Tylenol, I wouldn’t have fallen asleep.
They had gotten used to occasional threats and crank calls from their political opponents over the years, but after Nat spoke out in the local media against David Duke, the former Klansman who became a member of the House of Representatives, the Mount Hope Grocery got on the radar of a host of malicious detractors. In the past few weeks, Nat and Darlene had found a multitude of college-ruled-paper scraps shoved into their mailbox or underneath their door, covered in epithets. They both heard unpleasant words shouted from cars and endured a disturbing incident with the local police when two uniformed officers entered the store. The first fired his pistol into the ceiling apropos of nothing while the second bought a package of beef jerky from the terrified part-time clerk on duty. Sometimes the phone would ring, and on the other line somebody would breathe or bark a threat: We gonna string you up, nigger. Make your ass a human pi?ata.
Once Darlene picked up the phone, and after several moments of silence, she heard a radio crackling in the background. Finally, a raspy voice asked, Connie? That you? Hello, is Connie there?
Darlene let out an audible breath and told the caller, You’ve got the wrong number, ma’am, in a bright, relieved tone.