Woman's Worth

ONE Bull Run, Alabama Chicken could be one mean motherfucker. I knew this the moment I laid eyes on him. Short and tough, with sandy hair slicked all over his head, it was easy to see how he got his name, and the way Old Man Wilkes slaved him out at that Snatch Hatch . . . shucks, when a scrawny yellow nigger like him felt ugly, all hell was bound to break loose. It was hot for September when I met him. Indian summer, Poppa Daddy called it. The kind of day that spotted bass jumped out the waters of Black Shoals Lake and teenage girls swam half-naked in Dudson Creek. Chicken had just gotten out of jail, and I sat sweating under the awning of Millie's Fabric Storechewing on a string of black licorice and watching Jessie-Belle Lawson's hips as she and her daddy strolled up and down the open market, squeezing peaches, sniffing melons, and piling onions and peppers on top of big hunks of roasted chicken and sausage. Sugar Baby, my granmaw, had gone inside to buy some fabric for the Bull Run Girls Junior Drill Team, and I rocked back and forth on a wooden crate diggin' the happenings on the crowded street. Jessie-Belle looked good, even on a dog day. A church girl gone bad, she sat next to me in senior lit, and every brother on the campus of Bull Run High had fantasized about those curves circling 'round her curves, coming off of her curves, but none more than me. Today she'd decked her banging body in a white skirt with a halter top and a pair of high heels, and as she strutted past I took off my baseball cap and covered my johnson, which had swollen up like a snake that's ready to spit. Jessie-Belle, or Jezza-Belle as she was known in the bottoms, was on a short leash, but that had never stopped her. She and her father, a squat-necked preacher who once played defensive end for the Dallas Cowboys but now made guarding his daughter's virtue his full-time job, walked back and forth between the vendor tables, portable carts, and makeshift stands. Every so often the good Reverend Lawson would turn around and bust me eyeballing Jezza-Belle's assets, and I'd squint up into the sun and make like I was admiring the beauty of J.C. Himself. The glare on his face told me he wasn't fooled. It also told me what he'd do if I ever got close enough to his daughter to do more than just look. I'd been in Bull Run for eleven years. Eleven years since the night my father saved my life, then walked back into a burning house to die in my mother's arms. Eleven years since my grandparents, Ike and Sugar Baby Armstrong, had flown to Oakland to fetch me, Malcolm Marcus Mosiah Armstrong, the only son of their only son. I leaned back on the crate as the sputtering of a strained motor drifted down the street, its engine backfiring, the popping sounds getting lost in the noisy crowd of Saturday shoppers. As fine as Jezza-Belle was, and as hard as I was diggin' on her, I also kept one eye trained across the street on Fleck's Pharmacy, where Barney Judd and his boys stood outside smoking and joking, bumping into passersby, and generally cuttin' the fool. More than thirty years had passed since the days of Jim Crow, and Bull Run was still a town divided. The only place black and white went together was on book pages and piano keys, and poor white trash like Jimmy Stone, Ralph Dobson, and Barney Judd fed on our color conflicts and kept them raging full steam. Me, Ralph, and Barney went way back. As kids, we'd boxed together over at Dockside Gym, where I was the only brother fighting on the roster. By the time I was thirteen I had a left hook like a mallet, and my Poppa Daddy decided to tear down his old barn and build a place where I could win in the ring without having to provePrice-Thompson, Tracy is the author of 'Woman's Worth', published 2004 under ISBN 9780375506505 and ISBN 0375506500.