Rice
G. JACK FERGUSON

Sometimes I gets tired of talkin'. Oh, I loves to talk, love talkin' all my life and talk, too, you know that. One time Ray Jr. said to me, "Well, Mae, talk don't cook nobody's rice, do it? Talk don't make no beds, and talk don't wash no dishes." Come tryin' to talk to me 'bout talk. But he's wrong, you know. They's all kinds of talk and folks talk to do different things. They's talk like that woman Ida Wells my mama used to tell me 'bout. Talk you write down, talk like the words Billie sang to "Strange Fruit." Ain't no one kinda talk for everybody, and ain' no one thing that talk do: some talk'll clean a house out better than any broom on this earth. Talk can be mother's milk, and talk can be ripe blackberries like behind Preacher Brown's house on Red Dirt Road. Talk can be the faded blue blanket I useta wrap you in. Talk's like all them things, talk's like a heap of things. Preacher-talk and baby-talk, love-talk and back-bitin' talk, talk like these here talks I'm alla time tryin' to have with you, hopin' to talk with you, but I'm preachin' now and again anyway. Forgive me.

You was almost three years old 'fore you got started to talkin' but then we couldn't keep you quiet, couldn't listen enough, didn't have ears or bowls or teacups or bathtubs big enough for the first teardrops of your voice, and then coffee-cups full and then washtubs and then livin-room sized and then back porch too and then back yard and tow-acre plot of land sized talkin' you did us over up and down with. Didn't know whether to be proud or laugh. Mama say baby boy's sure gotta little mouth on him, don't he? Sound to me like you talked and talked like you was tryin' to fill a great hole you saw all around us and to put up a little barbed wire fence around yourself and to run some kind of a string through that wire from you to the rest of us, the family, even while you was careful to keep one eye peeled for the big, alla time gettin' bigger, hole of a blood place we was in. Talk was that place and your way of gettin' outta that place even though talk's how you got into that place in the first place.

Now, yo daddy didn't play nothin'-nothin' but the radio every night, but yo uncle R. J. picked the guitar kinda put you in mind of one of these blues boys hereabouts nowadays. Every evening, he set on the back porch, pickin'. Every evening, I set on the back porch, listenin'.

After while seem to me like alls the mens I ever loved listens to jazz, listens hard, real hard, maybe too hard. Old folks say "let all them with ears, hear," but look to me like sometimes you can hear too much too soon. Me, I didn't usually pay too much 'tention to it. By time I was 22, I had already watched my first boyfriend, Sweet Alfred, go crazy for Basie; then JT chase Lunceford's band half-way cross the country. Every night, half the night's gone, nearly daylight 'fore my older brother Curtis come on home. Lemme put it to you this way: many's the night my first husband Ray Jr. woke up whisperin, "Kansas City, Kansas City."

Like I say, I didn't usually care too much about it, 'cept if some body really special come on, come on the radio, pass through town, somebody like Prez or Lady Day. Seem like then, when Billie sang, you could climb on the notes, climb on up into the notes, long blue notes comin' one after another just like pearls on a string-fine and just a-shimmerin' like raindrops and inside, quiet, inside was all kinda room, with dark blue-black paint on the walls, room after room-I never felt so much rooms in the night, night moves through the sky like stars they were our stars, but she was like a horse rollin' in the Big Moon's lap, after all there's no contentment, is there?

I knowed you was gonna be a pretty baby just 'cause I could feel you turning to that sound, those sounds that circle your head, your mouth, your teeninchy toes every night for months before you was born, but my mama said the Lord don't like ugly and I'm wonderin' what's ugly gots to do with it? If Jesus don't like Basie, well then let 'im start His own damn band, but don't crowd the bandstand tonight, ain't that right? Lord, yes, get out the way while I stitch me some memories and some dreams into this patch quilt of song. I'll be your Big Mama passin' on this sound, these little round rooms, those little notes from after hours are ours are yours to pass on.

Play or talk. Talk and sound. Talk was all of us together and you cryin' lonely still. Talk was talk even when it wasn't, when nothin' was said or hinted, signified or lied about, trumpeted or whispered, eagle-rocked or jitterbugged. We never went nowhere without it, and it never left us alone. But still, still I want someday to talk to you and to hear you talk to me in that talk, that talk that knows no name, don't be afraid of it, just another kind of talk, that's all. They say, "all talk's talkin' to oneself," 'cept some talk I'm still thinkin' and rememberin' and dreamin' 'bout a time when you can talk my talk to me as talk.