The Fat Lady Sang
By: Pagliacci
Tags: Texas, Class, Racism, Fiction

I don’t know what it was about the Negro woman that intrigued me, I had an unexplainable attraction to her, it was with the force of lust, but without it’s lewdness, it seemed like Love, yet lacking the appeal required for it, so you see why I used the word "Intrigued".

It all started when I heard her sing.

Texas in the 60’s was your average American state, heavy on segregation of the whites from the negros. There was an uptight feeling in the air back then. I had a bar back in the days, an all white bar, and i had some black workers working menial temporary jobs, importantly jobs where they would have minimum interaction with the whites as possible. I like to think those years were the darkest of my life, I was a drunk and a compulsive gambler. My business suffered greatly due to my habits. In order to salvage the situation, I decided to organize a “sing off” to boost sales.

I got some pamphlets printed and asked my workers to take them around town, what I expected was they’d know by "around town" I meant white neighborhoods.

The day finally arrived, the people who wanted to contest were about 20, which was a fair number for a local bar, there was also, good incentive — the prize money of $100.

By 8pm the bar was packed full of people who wanted to watch, I made sure to get an entrance fee charged, and made it mandatory to get at least one drink to stay in the bar.

As each contestant sang, I got drunk, and more drunk, the contestants varied from The Good, the bad, and the terrible.

At the end of the day, after 19 people had sang, the judges - my permanent staff (excluding the negroes. Had almost decided who won, till a Negro Overweight woman stepped on stage almost,t out of nowhere.

The audience probably thought she wanted to solicit for help, as that wasn’t uncommon, till she said "I saw the ad for tha sing off, mind if I sing?" the audience shifted uncomfortably in their seats, like you would if you smelt beans enabled flatulence.

One of the judges was about to Chase her offstage when I shouted in my drunken frenzy

"it ain’t ova, till the fat lady sings!"

You could see the visible shock on people’s faces, not that I bothered, even the black staff were shocked, and this was practically their doing! And then she sang, I’d like to say she caught everyone off guard with how good she was, but frankly she wouldn’t have won the sing off, she was your average singer, but what happened next made it impossible for a winner to be announced.

People began to exit the bar, the new faces, the regulars, my staff, even my Negro staff! I didn’t really bother about the whites that left, but the negroes? It seemed like I’d broken some unspoken rule, the reaction from them at that point, the look of disappointment on their faces, seemed to spell some kind of class breach, the kind that exists when White male tips a black bartender, or how a Chauffeur would feel when his boss hugs him randomly, but this was worse, I breached a race, class and social divide!

Minutes after, it was just Clarisse the fat lady and i left in the bar, she tried to apologise, and so on, but I was enamored by her, she wasn’t of peculiar beauty, perhaps it was her courage which impressed me, I don’t know, I do know that I sheltered her in my home that night, the next morning my bar was burning, not that it mattered, for I had started making plans to elope, you see our county was a small one, you couldn’t get away with such an affront to the law, I could be excused from it’s full Brent, but she wouldn’t have survived it, so I told her my plans and we eloped in the middle of the night the next day.

We got married after settling in a county in Louisiana, we never had kids, and after 20 years, I’m still enamored by her, perhaps that’s why I write this while staring at her body, which I preserved after her death, perhaps I couldn’t bear to lose her, so I kept her after cancer took her. I really don’t know.

I really don’t know.