Your Blues Ain't Like Mine : A Novel

"ABSORBING...COMPELLING...HIGHLY SATISFYING." --San Francisco Chronicle "TRULY ENGAGING...Campbell has a storyteller's ear for dialogue and the visual sense of painting a picture and a place....There's a steam that keeps the story moving as the characters, and later their children, wrestle through racial, personal and cultural crisis." --Los Angeles Times Book Review "REMARKABLE...POWERFUL." --Time "YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE is rich, lush fiction set in rural Mississippi beginning in the mid-'50s. It is also a haunting reality flowing through Anywhere, U.S.A., in the '90s....There's love, rage and hatred, winning and losing, honor, abuse; in other words, humanity....Campbell now deserves recognition as the best of storytellers. Her writing sings." --The Indianapolis News "EXTRAORDINDARY." --The Seattle Times "A COMPELLING NARRATIVE...Campbell is a master when it comes to telling a story." --Entertainment Weekly YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE won the NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Work of Fiction

The music was as much a gift as sunshine, rain, as any blessing ever prayed for.

Lily woke up when the singing began. She lay quiet and still in her bed until her head was full of songs and the strong voices of the fieldworkers from the Pinochet Plantation seemed to be inside her. Part of the song was soft like a hymn; then it would rise to the full force of vibrant gospel and change again to something loud and searing, almost violent. The music was rich, like the alluvial soil that nourished everything and everyone in the Delta. Lily began to feel strong and hopeful, as if she was being healed. Colored people's singing always made her feel so good. Much too quickly, the song was over, without even leaving an echo to keep her company. Years later, she would fight to hum even a scrap of the notes that floated to her from the Pinochet Plantation that day, but by then the song had seeped into the land like spilled blood, and its vanishing echo was just another shadow on her soul.

As Lily lay in bed looking out the window into the wee hours of that Mississippi morning, it seemed as if someone had drawn down a heavy black curtain on the world. She felt lonely and adrift in the sudden quiet. Daylight was at least an hour away, and she couldn't fall back asleep. She groped in the dark toward the still body of her husband, who was lying next to her.

With movements as quick and furtive as a thief's, Lily pressed her breasts into Floyd's bare back; she wanted him to wake up feeling the tips of her nipples against his skin, the slight undulating movement of her groin rotating against his behind. It was like the ticking of a clock, the way her crotch burrowed into him: a small relentless movement. He'd been gone for nearly ten days and had returned earlier that evening. She felt frightened and weak when he was away from her. It was as though she didn't exist when he was absent. As she pressed into him, rubbing his shoulder blades with the tips of her nipples, she thought of how excited he would be when he woke up. She smiled, thinking of how she could make him want her, remembering the times he even begged. Maybe he would plead with her this time. She might yawn a little and act uninterested, which would only make him hotter. She gently stroked his behind with her thigh over and over again. Lily squeezed her small, white body against Floyd's back and rested the side of her face on his shoulder blade. She kissed his spine and thought: If I can get him to give me three dollars, I'll get me another Rio Red lipstick; ain't had a lipstick in going on three months. I might can buy me some Evening in Paris and a scarf too. And maybe some rose-colored nail polish. The thought of the lipstick, the bottle of perfume, the scarf, and the nail polish made her breath come heavy and fast. She calmed herself because the trick was to wake Floyd softly, to let him discover her squeezed against him, to make it seem coincidental that the front of her nightgown was undone, her breasts exposed. Wanting her had to be his idea; he didn't like it the other way around. Floyd said only whores acted that way.

Looking out the window, Lily could see that a soft, drizzling was coming down. It had rained almost the entire time that Floyd had been gone, a hard driving rain that rattled the tin roof and leaked into the pots and pans she placed strategically throughout the house. Not that it made a dent in the September heat spell they'd been seeing in Mississippi, Lily thought. Probably just fatten up the old mosquitoes and breed new ones. She wondered if her husband would ever fix the roof.

Lily's body was soft and slightly damp, like the weather. She could smell the musty odor coming from between her legs and clamped her thighs shut to keep the scent away from Floyd. When they put in a bathroom, she would take baths every night. Bubble baths. Beneath the thin sheet, she could feel her husband's first waking movements. She wrapper her arm around his waist and her husband's neck--which was speckled with dirt he hadn't bothered to wash off--about the $67.58 in his pants pocket, pay for a week of construction work in Louisiana. Then, just seconds before he woke up she fell away from him, so that only her nipples grazed his back. It was easy to let her mouth fall open, to push a soft, sleepy moan from her lips. She thought: I can make him do what I want now.

Lily opened her eyes slowly when he touched her. Fully awake, they admired each other. They were beautiful in similar ways; the people in the town used to mistake them for brother and sister. They both had glossy, dark curls, the same full lips and bright green eyes. They were a pair, all right. Lots of folks told them that they were the best-looking couple in the Delta.

"You are a very pretty thing," Floyd said. He put his hands on Lily's breasts, then wriggled down in the bed and began sucking one of her nipples, gently at first and then with growing force. He pushed her gown up, then grabbed her hips, pulling her into his groin; he put his fingers between her legs and pushed up inside her. Lily felt a sudden fire. She wanted her cry out, "Harder!"--she often wondered what the harm would be--but she said nothing. As Lily closed her eyes, bright colors swirled around her head. She could feel herself opening up in sweet anticipation.

Floyd slid into her too fast, then began rocking and pumping and pressing, his fingers grabbing and kneading all the wrong places. Lily opened her eyes. Disappointment gripped her shoulders like an old friend. She wanted cry out, to tell him to stop, that her power was gone, that she would have to ride out the storm. Go numb.

She had learned to do that years before.

She bit down on her lip and there her around Floyd and held on as tightly as she could until she felt his shudders and hard spasms; then she closed her eyes and let out a practiced moan. When her last sigh faded, she fell away from him with relief.

Floyd smacked her on her behind, then reached for a pack of Winstons that lay on a rickety table next to their bed, and leaned forward, lighting two. He handed her one. "You know what?" Floyd said, blowing out smoke. "You know what? I'm taking you to Memphis."

She turned to Floyd. Words bubbled in her throat but wouldn't come out. Finally she managed, "For true? Memphis! Lordy!" Her disappointment, her pain, was pushed aside. Memphis!

"We gon' go for a week, after I come back from Little Rock. 'Round November or December. Be nice weather then. Cool. Couple of these boys around here owe me some money, and they'll pay up once the cotton's in. We can stay with some of my people. I got first cousins in Memphis. That make you happy?"

She flung her arms around him, grinning. He moved away from her and stretched. Frowning a little, he turned to her and said, "That girlfriend you useta set such store by, what's her name?"

"Corinne," Lily said carefully.

"She gon' take you to Memphis?"

"No, Floyd." Lily hadn't seen Corinne for months. Her old schoolmate no longer came around and neither did anyone else, except Floyd's family.

"And you sure can't take yourself."

"No, Floyd, I sure can't. I need you to take me. I need you for everything."

"He didn't try to hide his pleasure. "I want to go by the pool hall later and check on things," he said, smiling.

Lily measured her words so they sounded casual and spontaneous. "Can I come with you? Keep you company? Maybe on the way back we can run to town and stop at the drugstore. I need me a couple of things."

Floyd gave his wife another quick swat across her behind. "Fix me some cornbread this morning, will you? I got me a taste for cornbread."

After Lily got up, Floyd went back to sleep. She was hoping she could get breakfast cooked before her baby awoke, but just as she got a fire going in the stove, she heard Floydjunior's cries. She cooked with the boy on her hip, holding his bottle. "You hush now, " she hissed in the child's ear as Floyd came in. She scurried to the table while her husband washed his hands and face at the kitchen sink, which had the only running water in the house. By the time he sat down, she had finished putting the food on his plate.

After breakfast, Floyd and Lily walked down a dirt road that ran in front of their house. The air was scented with jasmine as they walked to his brother's home, passing houses that resembled their own: shotgun clapboards set up on cinder blocks, where the gardens in the back were haphazard affairs and the chickens and guineas were likely to wander into the front yard and even into the road. The string of homes owned by the poor whites in the area faced a long stretch of hedges. Behind the hedges was a dump and, in back of that, the Quarters, a compound of rented two-room tar-paper shacks where the filed hands and sharecroppers who worked the nearby plantations lived, surrounded by yards full of Johnson-grass and buttercups and an occasional net clapboard that some enterprising Negro had managed to erect.

They borrowed Floyd's brother's truck and left Floydjunior behind, heading for town, driving across land that was perfectly flat, punctuated only by acres and acres of Pinochet cotton, occasional splotches of rice, soybeans, and milo. They reached the city limits of Hopewell and were about to park where they could see the banks of the Yabalusha, which washed up along the east side of the delta town near the railroad tracks, when Lily said, "Floyd please drive through the Confederacy." She held her breath until the truck turned down a wide street, shaded by huge oaks and stately magnolias.

Even better than looking in the store windows, she like driving through the Confederacy, an area composed of General Lee Boulevard, General Jackson Road, and General Longstreet Avenue. On these streets, half hidden behind a bank of towering magnolias, were large brick two-story homes with screened-in front porches and meticulous lawns where the shiny black faces of sculpted lawn jockeys in red jackets and white pants were frozen in perpetual grins while inside, their living counterparts were equally accommodating. Lily often daydreamed about how it would be to live in one of these houses, the finest she'd ever seen. Of course, the sprawling plantation mansions of the Settleses and Pinochets, reminiscent of the antebellum splendor that was part of the region's mythology, were grander. But who could even begin to imagine living in one of those?

Lily didn't come into town very often, and the sight of the paved streets and the stores made her eyes open wide with expectation, even though the city was small, its business district no more than three or four blocks sandwiched between the two gins--both owned by the Pinochets--that made up the north and south boundaries. As they drove down Jefferson Davis Boulevard, the main downtown thoroughfare, she craned her neck in hopes of glimpsing the Chinaman and his family who ran the town's laundry and Chinese restaurant. Or maybe the Jew who owned the small department store would pass by. She yearned for something wild to touch, see, or feel. Some excitement.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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Excerpted from Your Blues Ain't Like Mine: A Novel by Bebe Moore Campbell
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