You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down Read Free Page A

that’s lined with magnolias. Do magnolias grow on mountains? I was wondering. And you come to lakes and you come to ponds and you come to deer and you come up on some sheep. And I figure these two is sposed to represent England and Wales. Or something out of Europe. And you just keep on coming to stuff. And it’s all pretty. Only the man driving my car don’t look at nothing but the road. Fool. And then finally, after all this time, you begin to go up the driveway. And there’s more magnolias—only they’re not in such good shape. It’s sort of cool up this high and I don’t think they’re gonna make it. And then I see this building that looks like if it had a name it would be The Tara Hotel. Columns and steps and outdoor chandeliers and rocking chairs. Rocking chairs? Well, and there’s the boy on the steps dressed in a dark green satin jacket like you see folks wearing on TV late at night, and he looks sort of like a fat dracula with all that house rising behind him, and standing beside him there’s this little white vision of loveliness that he introduces as his wife.
    He’s nervous when he introduces us and he says to her: This is Gracie Mae Still, I want you to know me. I mean…and she gives him a look that would fry meat.
    Won’t you come in, Gracie Mae, she says, and that’s the last I see of her.
    He fishes around for something to say or do and decides to escort me to the kitchen. We go through the entry and the parlor and the breakfast room and the dining room and the servants’ passage and finally get there. The first thing I notice is that, altogether, there are five stoves. He looks about to introduce me to one.
    Wait a minute, I say. Kitchens don’t do nothing for me. Let’s go sit on the front porch.
    Well, we hike back and we sit in the rocking chairs rocking until dinner.
    Gracie Mae, he says down the table, taking a piece of fried chicken from the woman standing over him, I got a little surprise for you.
    It’s a house, ain’t it? I ask, spearing a chitlin.
    You’re getting spoiled, he says. And the way he says spoiled sounds funny. He slurs it. It sounds like his tongue is too thick for his mouth. Just that quick he’s finished the chicken and is now eating chitlins and a pork chop. Me spoiled, I’m thinking.
    I already got a house. Horace is right this minute painting the kitchen. I bought that house. My kids feel comfortable in that house.
    But this one I bought you is just like mine. Only a little smaller.
    I still don’t need no house. And anyway who would clean it?
    He looks surprised.
    Really, I think, some peoples advance so slowly.
    I hadn’t thought of that. But what the hell, I’ll get you somebody to live in.
    I don’t want other folks living ’round me. Makes me nervous.
    You don’t? It do?
    What I want to wake up and see folks I don’t even know for?
    He just sits there down table staring at me. Some of that feeling is in the song, ain’t it? Not the words, the feeling. What I want to wake up and see folks I don’t even know for? But I see twenty folks a day I don’t even know, including my wife.
    This food wouldn’t be bad to wake up to though, I said. The boy had found the genius of corn bread.
    He looked at me real hard. He laughed. Short. They want what you got but they don’t want you. They want what I got only it ain’t mine. That’s what makes ’em so hungry for me when I sing. They getting the flavor of something but they ain’t getting the thing itself. They like a pack of hound dogs trying to gobble up a scent.
    You talking ’bout your fans?
    Right. Right. He says.
    Don’t worry ’bout your fans, I say. They don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground. I doubt there’s a honest one in the bunch.
    That’s the point. Dammit, that’s the point! He hits the table with his fist. It’s so solid it don’t even quiver. You need a honest audience! You can’t have folks that’s just gonna lie right back to you.
    Yeah, I say, it was small