rubbed his eyes. “It’s a good thing we got here early. You can’t get in this place after six o’clock. You want a plate to carry with you on the plane?” Daddy asked, grinning with greasy sauce shining on his lips like lip gloss. The barbecue sauce was so spicy and hot, it made our eyes water.
“They’ll feed me on the plane, Daddy,” I said, sniffling and cracking a thin smile at the same time. Daddy leaned across the table and wiped my eyes with his napkin. It wasn’t just the barbecue sauce that had me shedding tears. It saddened me to know that I would soon leave my daddy. All of the pain that he had caused me didn’t matter anymore.
Before we finished our dinner, Daddy called every employee in the place over to our table to meet me. Four grinning men, shiny with sweat, black rubber aprons covering their big bellies, lined up in front of our booth and inspected me like I was a hog on an auction block. “This is my girl by my first wife. Ain’t she fine?” Daddy patted the top of my head and beamed like a lighthouse.
It annoyed me when the elderly cook tried to flirt with me and it must have annoyed Daddy, too, because he gave the man a threatening look. “Old nigger, you lay a hand on my child and I will beat your brains out,” Daddy snarled. He looked at me and winked. “I’ll kill any nigger that try to take advantage of you, girl. I ain’t gwine to let nobody damage you.”
I wanted to tell Daddy that he was too late. After being raped by Mr. Boatwright for ten years, I was way past being just damaged. But I had survived that ordeal. Just like I had survived the ordeal of confronting my daddy. Now that I finally felt at peace, I was more than ready to go back to Ohio.
I wish now that I had refused Lillimae’s offer to take me back to the airport the next morning. We had to stop twice on the way at gas stations for Daddy to use the bathroom. Each time, he made it by the skin of his teeth. Another stop and I would have missed my flight back to Ohio.
My suitcase was several pounds heavier than when I’d arrived in Miami. A hefty skycap had to use two hands to wrestle it from the trunk of Lillimae’s car.
“Annette, I slid some smoked hamhocks and some smoked ham steaks into your suitcase that I fished out the freezer. Ain’t no use in me lyin’—that freezer got way too much meat in it for just me and Daddy,” Lillimae volunteered between sobs, offering a long hug and wetting my shoulder with fresh tears and my cheek with sloppy kisses. The well-worn beach sandals she had on kept sliding back and forth on her feet. One slipped completely off as she and I embraced. People stared at us as I leaned down to retrieve my sister’s shoe and return it to her foot. In my mind, I imagined that the looky-loos assumed I was Lillimae’s maid, even though I had on a sharp white blouse and new-looking slacks and she had on a faded, voluminous muumuu and a scarf carelessly looped around her damp blond hair. I was sick and tired of caring about what other people thought. I hauled off and kissed Lillimae on her cheek.
Standing next to Lillimae on the sidewalk in front of the airport wearing a shirt so freshly starched it looked like his suspenders were glued to it, Daddy blinked hard to hold back his own tears. But I had already heard him sniffling in the backseat of Lillimae’s car throughout the ride to the airport. He’d blamed his discomfort on his mandatory, frequent visits to bathrooms, but I knew better. “Uh…I hope I see you again real soon, Annette,” Daddy managed, mopping his face with a large white handkerchief. He blinked some more and cleared his throat so hard he started coughing, using the same handkerchief to swipe his mouth.
“You will, Daddy. I’ll make sure of that,” I said, fanning my face.
I was not going to miss that blazing Florida sun. Putting on makeup that morning had been a waste of time. Mixed with my sweat, it was now sliding down my cheeks like butter. Lillimae dabbed my wet lips with her thick finger. There was still a great heaviness in my heart, but I felt better than I’d felt in more than thirty years. I didn’t know what to expect before I got back to Florida, especially since I had left Ohio with so many mixed emotions. My anger had dissipated, but I had to wonder how my recycled feelings were going to affect my mother.
After I got settled on the plane, I tried to read a few chapters from Roots, a book I had already read twice. But my mind kept wandering to other things. Like my own roots. My reunion with Daddy had given me a certain level of peace but there was still a lot to my own past that I had to sort out. I needed to recall as much as I could so that I could prepare myself for my uncertain future.
Flying first class was a new experience for me. I would have taken a train to Florida, but it was Daddy who had insisted on paying for my first-class accommodations. That hadn’t impressed Muh’Dear at all. “Whatever that mangy dog payin’ for them first-class tickets ain’t puttin’ a dent in all the back child support he owe!” she had snapped when I told her. In the long run I was glad to be traveling in style. There was a lot more room and other advantages that allowed me to relax. I deserved and needed the huge glass of wine a flight attendant handed to me. As soon as the buzz kicked in, my thoughts wandered back in time.
To when my real pain started.
CHAPTER 14
I never found out the real name of the woman who had helped Muh’Dear and me after we moved to Ohio. But everybody called her Scary Mary. That name fit her because she was a tall, hard-drinking, tough, wig-wearing woman that just about everybody was afraid of. Even the police.
In addition to bootlegging alcohol, Scary Mary made a good living supplying women to lonely men. She had a lot of powerful friends so the law looked the other way as she managed several prostitutes that she had wooed off the streets.
Scary Mary looked at every man as a golden-egg-laying goose. She had had several prosperous husbands. The men that didn’t divorce her up and died. She often bragged about the numerous divorce settlements and life insurance benefits that she had collected.
We had lived in the same house with Scary Mary and her girls our first few months in Ohio. I was amused as I watched all the men parade in and out of that big house, leaving with empty wallets. Especially since some of those prostitutes were homely and mean. One of the regular tricks was married to a woman who had once won a beauty contest. What confused me was the fact that my own daddy had traded my beautiful mother for a less attractive woman. Since Scary Mary seemed to know so much about men and their habits, I approached her with my concerns.
Scary Mary was a woman with plain but rough looks, bronze skin, and a scar on her face that she had sustained in a barroom fight. In a voice that sounded like it belonged to a man, the old madam told me, “Annette, it ain’t the beauty, it’s the booty. Especially when that other booty is white. Your daddy ain’t no worse than no other man. They all weak. We women got all the strength. Long as I’m alive, you and your mama ain’t got nothin’ to worry about.” Those words appeased me to some degree and for the first time since Daddy left, I felt safe. But then I hadn’t met Mr. Boatwright yet.
Richland, Ohio, was a typical small northern city. We had a town square that contained a sorry wishing well full of coins and rocks, some cheap benches, shit-dropping pigeons that drove everybody crazy, and a sturdy statue of a bronze horse with a bronze man straddling the horse’s back. By the looks of the man’s features, he was white. However, there was a mural on the side of the viaduct that connected the southern part of the city to the northern part that made up for that white bronze man on the horse. On the mural was the likeness of a handsome Black man in overalls and a hard hat, swinging a sledgehammer. Next to him was a heavyset, sturdy-looking Black woman with a grimace on her face, a plaid scarf knotted around her head, on her knees scrubbing a floor. That wall represented a lot to me. It was a reminder that Black people would do whatever was necessary to survive.
Richland had a few Black professionals. And on the outskirts of town were several steel mills and brickyards that kept most of the blue-collar men employed. Nearby farming communities like Marlboro and Hartville wrapped around the outskirts of Richland like a low-slung belt. A lot of the people I knew made money working on the farms.
In addition to looking after Mott, Scary Mary’s adult, severely retarded daughter, I made money doing chores for the prostitutes who worked for Scary Mary. Those women were some of the nicest people