You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [1]
Well, love it or not, I’m not so stupid as to let them do that without making ’em pay. So I says, Well, that’s gonna cost you. Because, really, that song never did sell all that good, so I was glad they was going to buy it up. But on the other hand, them two listening to my song by themselves, and nobody else getting to hear me sing it, give me a pause.
Well, one way or another the deacon showed me where I would come out ahead on any deal he had proposed so far. Didn’t I give you five hundred dollars? he asked. What white man—and don’t even need to mention colored—would give you more? We buy up all your records of that particular song: first, you git royalties. Let me ask you, how much you sell that song for in the first place? Fifty dollars? A hundred, I say. And no royalties from it yet, right? Right. Well, when we buy up all of them records you gonna git royalties. And that’s gonna make all them race record shops sit up and take notice of Gracie Mae Still. And they gonna push all them other records of yourn they got. And you no doubt will become one of the big name colored recording artists. And then we can offer you another five hundred dollars for letting us do all this for you. And by God you’ll be sittin’ pretty! You can go out and buy you the kind of outfit a star should have. Plenty sequins and yards of red satin.
I had done unlocked the screen when I saw I could get some more money out of him. Now I held it wide open while he squeezed through the opening between me and the door. He whipped out another piece of paper and I signed it.
He sort of trotted out to the car and slid in beside Traynor, whose head was back against the seat. They swung around in a u-turn in front of the house and then they was gone.
J. T. was putting his shirt on when I got back to the bedroom. Yankees beat the Orioles 10–6, he said. I believe I’ll drive out to Paschal’s pond and go fishing. Wanta go?
While I was putting on my pants J. T. was holding the two checks.
I’m real proud of a woman that can make cash money without leavin’ home, he said. And I said Umph. Because we met on the road with me singing in first one little low-life jook after another, making ten dollars a night for myself if I was lucky, and sometimes bringin’ home nothing but my life. And J. T. just loved them times. The way I was fast and flashy and always on the go from one town to another. He loved the way my singin’ made the dirt farmers cry like babies and the womens shout Honey, hush! But that’s mens. They loves any style to which you can get ’em accustomed.
1956
My little grandbaby called me one night on the phone: Little Mama, Little Mama, there’s a white man on the television singing one of your songs! Turn on channel 5.
Lord, if it wasn’t Traynor. Still looking half asleep from the neck up, but kind of awake in a nasty way from the waist down. He wasn’t doing too bad with my song either, but it wasn’t just the song the people in the audience was screeching and screaming over, it was that nasty little jerk he was doing from the waist down.
Well, Lord have mercy, I said, listening to him. If I’da closed my eyes, it could have been me. He had followed every turning of my voice, side streets, avenues, red lights, train crossings and all. It give me a chill.
Everywhere I went I heard Traynor singing my song, and all the little white girls just eating it up. I never had so many ponytails switched across my line of vision in my life. They was so proud. He was a genius.
Well, all that year I was trying to lose weight anyway and that and high blood pressure and sugar kept me pretty well occupied. Traynor had made a smash from a song of mine, I still had seven hundred dollars of the original one thousand dollars in the bank, and I felt if I could just bring my weight down, life would be sweet.
1957
I lost ten pounds in 1956. That’s what I give myself for Christmas. And J. T. and me and the children and their friends and grandkids of all description had just finished dinner—over which I had put on nine and a half of my lost