Free Shake Loose My Skin by Sonia Sanchez Page A

time and place. I relaxed as my hands moved across the paper like one possessed.
    I wasn’t sure just what it was I heard. At first I thought it was one of the boys calling me so I kept on writing. They knew the routine by now. Emergencies demanded a presence. A facial confrontation. No long-distance screams across trees and space and other children’s screams. But the sound pierced the pages and I looked around, and there she was inching her bamboo-creased body toward my back, coughing a beaded sentence off her tongue.
    “Guess you think I ain’t never loved, huh girl? Hee. Hee. Guess that what you be thinking, huh?”
    I turned. Startled by her closeness and impropriety, I stuttered, “I, I, I, whhhaat dooooo you mean?”
    “Hee. Hee. Guess you think I been old like this fo’ever, huh?” She leaned toward me, “Huh? I was so pretty that mens brought me breakfast in bed. Wouldn’t let me hardly do no work at all.”
    “That’s nice ma’am. I’m glad to hear that.” I returned to my book. I didn’t want to hear about some ancient love that she carried inside her. I had to finish a review for the journal. I was already late. I hoped she would get the hint and just sit still. I looked at her out of the corner of my eyes.
    “He could barely keep hisself in changing clothes. But he was pretty. My first husband looked like the sun. I used to say his name over and over again ‘til it hung from my ears like diamonds. Has you ever loved a pretty man, girl?”
    I raised my eyes, determined to keep a distance from this woman disturbing my day.
    “No ma’am. But I’ve seen many a pretty man. I don’t like them though cuz they keep their love up high in a linen closet and I’m too short to reach it.”
    Her skin shook with laughter.
    “Girl you gots some spunk about you after all. C’mon over here next to me. I wants to see yo’ eyes up close. You looks so uneven sittin’ over there.”
    Did she say uneven? Did this old buddha splintering death say uneven? Couldn’t she see that I had one eye shorter than the other; that my breath was painted on porcelain; that one breast crocheted keloids under this white blouse?
    I moved toward her though. I scooped up the years that had stripped me to the waist and moved toward her. And she called to me to come out, come out wherever you are young woman, playing hide and go seek with scarecrow men. I gathered myself up at the gateway of her confessionals.
    “Do you know what it mean to love a pretty man, girl?” She crooned in my ear. “You always running behind a man like that girl while he cradles his privates. Ain’t no joy in a pretty yellow man, cuz he always out pleasurin’ and givin’ pleasure.”
    I nodded my head as her words sailed in my ears. Here was the pulse of a woman whose black ass shook the world once.
    She continued. “A woman crying all the time is pitiful. Pitiful I says. I wuz pitiful sitting by the window every night like a cow in the fields chewin’ on cud. I wanted to cry out, but not even God hisself could hear me. I tried to cry out til my mouth wuz split open at the throat. I ’spoze there is a time all womens has to visit the slaughter house. My visit lasted five years.”
    Touching her hands, I felt the summer splintering in prayer; touching her hands, I felt my bones migrating in red noise. I asked, “When did you see the butterflies again?”
    Her eyes wandered like quicksand over my face. Then she smiled, “Girl don’t you know yet that you don’t never give up on love? Don’t you know you has in you the pulse of winds? The noise of dragonflies?” Her eyes squinted close and she said, “One of them mornings he woke up callin’ me and I wuz gone. I wuz gone running with the moon over my shoulders. I looked no which way at all. I had inside me ’nough knives and spoons to cut/scoop out the night. I wuz a-tremblin’ as I met the morning’.”
    She stirred in her 84-year-old memory. She stirred up her body as she talked.