Mae looked at the twisted sheet and giggled. “Looks like a winding sheet,” she said. “A shroud—” Laughter tangled with her words and she had to pause for a moment before she could continue. “You look like a huckleberry—in a winding sheet—”
He had to talk persuasively, urging her gently, and it took time. But he couldn’t bring himself to talk to her roughly or threaten to strike her like a lot of men might have done. He wasn’t made that way.
He never could remember to refer to her as the forelady even in his mind. It was funny to have a white woman for a boss in a plant like this one.
“Excuses. You guys always got excuses,” her anger grew and spread. “Every guy comes in here late always has an excuse. His wife’s sick or his grandmother died or somebody in the family had to go to the hospital,” she paused, drew a deep breath. “And the niggers is the worse. I don’t care what’s wrong with your legs. You get in here on time. I’m sick of you niggers—”
“You got the right to get mad,” he interrupted softly. “You got the right to cuss me four ways to Sunday but I ain’t letting nobody call me a nigger.”
He stepped closer to her. His fists were doubled. His lips were drawn back in a thin narrow line. A vein in his forehead stood out swollen, thick.
And the woman backed away from him, not hurriedly but slowly—two, three steps back.
And he thought he should have hit her anyway, smacked her hard in the face, felt the soft flesh of her face give under the hardness of his hands. He tried to make his hands relax by offering them a description of what it would have been like to strike her because he had the queer feeling that his hands were not exactly a part of him anymore—they had developed a separate life of their own over which he had no control.
He felt his hands begin to tingle and the tingling went all the way down to his finger tips so that he glanced down at them. They were clenched tight, hard, into fists. Then he looked at the girl again. What he wanted to do was hit her so hard that the scarlet lipstick on her mouth would smear and spread over her nose, her chin, out toward her cheeks, so hard that she would never toss her head again and refuse a man a cup of coffee because he was black.
“Aw, come on and eat,” she said. There was a coaxing note in her voice. “You’re nothing but an old hungry nigger trying to act tough and—” she paused to giggle and then continued, “You—”
There was the smacking sound of soft flesh being struck by a hard object and it wasn’t until she screamed that he realized he had hit her in the mouth—so hard that the dark red lipstick had blurred and spread over her full lips, reaching up toward the tip of her nose, down toward her chin, out toward her cheeks.
And he groped for a phrase, a word, something to describe what this thing was like that was happening to him and he thought it was like being enmeshed in a winding sheet—that was it—like a winding sheet. And even as the thought formed in his mind, his hands reached for her face again and yet again.
