I held his ankles. It was like I didn’t know how much was me and Mutt and how much was Great Gram and Corregidora—like Mama when she had started talking like Great Gram. But was what Corregidora had done to her, to them, any worse than what Mutt had done to me, than what we had done to each other, than what Mama had done to Daddy, or what he had done to her in return, making her walk down the street looking like a whore?
“I could kill you.”
He came and I swallowed. He leaned back, pulling me up by the shoulders.
“I don’t want a kind of woman that hurt you,” he said.
“Then you don’t want me.”
“I don’t want a kind of woman that hurt you.”
“Then you don’t want me.”
“I don’t want a kind of woman that hurt you.”
“Then you don’t want me.”
He shook me till I fell against him crying. “I don’t want a kind of man that’ll hurt me neither,” I said.
He held me tight.
Beacon Press
25 Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892
www.beacon.org
Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
© 1975 by Gayl Jones
Originally published by Random House, Inc. in 1975
First published by Beacon Press in 1986 by arrangement with Random House, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
10 09 21 20 19 18
This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specification for permanence as revised in 1992.
Cover design: Stark Design
Cover photography: Kate Swan and Jason Beaupré
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jones, Gayle.
Corregidora
eISBN 978-0-8070-9698-7
ISBN 978-0-8070-6315-6 (pbk.)
(Black women writers series)
I. Title. II. Series
[PS3560.0483C6 1986] 813'.54 86-47512