shrunk and now drooped like the shoulders of a man who had yoked a heavy load far longer than he should have. He had never had much of a butt. But now his backside was as flat as a board, making it look like he had a very long back supported by a pair of frail, slightly bowed legs. His belly resembled a huge cummerbund.
“It took you long enough to get here,” Daddy snapped, weaving toward me, his bathrobe dragging the floor. The booming voice I remembered had been replaced by a weak, scratchy growl. “I sent you your airplane fare five years ago!” His eyes watered as he stared at me like he was seeing me for the first time.
“I’m sorry, Daddy. I had a lot of things to take care of first,” I explained, rising. “Muh’Dear…she didn’t want me to come back down here.”
At the mention of my mother, Daddy stopped and turned away, tossing the towel on top of a goosenecked lamp in a corner behind him.
“I figured that,” he mumbled, shaking his head. His exasperation was obvious, but that didn’t faze me one bit. I was just as exasperated as he was. Maybe even more so. “Ain’t you around forty-somethin’ now, girl?” Daddy asked, facing me with one eyebrow raised.
“Me? Oh—well, I’m thirty-five. My birthday was last week,” I stammered. My words hung in midair while I groped for more. I pressed my lips together and blinked stupidly.
Daddy grunted and made a sweeping gesture with a hand so gnarled, it looked like it had never been straight. “Oh yeah, that’s right. You was born durin’ dog days. Well, that’s old enough for you to be doin’ what you want to do. I was beginnin’ to think that I wouldn’t get to see you again ’til the Rapture. Ain’t that right, Lillimae?”
Lillimae chuckled. “Daddy got a notion in his head that the world’s goin’ to end any day now. He won’t even buy nothin’ on credit no more.”
I was too nervous and confused to go to my daddy. I wanted to hug him and slap him at the same time. More than thirty years was a long time to be separated from somebody you loved. He had a reason to be angry with me for taking so long to come see him, but I had even more of a reason to be angry with him. He was the one who had run out on my mother and me at a time when we needed him the most. It was time for him to answer for what he had done.
CHAPTER 3
I was devastated that long-ago morning when Daddy deserted my mother and me, leaving us in a run-down shack with just ten dollars and some change to our names. A tornado had swept through Miami the night before, destroying most of our few possessions. That had been enough of a trauma. For many years I had blamed that storm for helping destroy my family, but Daddy had put his plan in place even before that.
His cruel departure was unexpected and thorough. I knew he wasn’t coming back, because he took everything he cared about with him.
Everything but my mother and me.
I never got over losing my daddy. He had been the most honorable, gentle, dependable man I knew back then. He’d loved us with a passion and I had adored him. Like a slave, he had worked in the fields from sunup to sundown almost every day to support us and we had depended on him. He’d kept my mother and me happy by spending most of his meager wages on us. He would wear his shoes until the soles flapped, his clothes until they fell off his body, and sometimes he’d go without eating a meal so we could have seconds. But like it was a rug, he had snatched that security from under us and left us struggling around like we didn’t know which way to turn. And we didn’t. It was almost like being blind. I always knew that someday I would track Daddy down and make him sorry.
My mother had shed so many tears and spent so much time in the bed those first few days, I felt like the parent. I had to help her bathe, comb her hair, and cook. And all that had frightened me. It had been a heavy burden for a three-and-a-half-year-old child.
I had grieved, too, but behind my mother’s back. I could not count the number of times I’d wallowed on the ground behind an old orange tree in our backyard crying until I’d made myself sick. I didn’t want my mother to know that I was in just as much pain as she was.
“Don’t worry. We’ll be all right,” I assured her. My mother must have believed me because right after I said that, she stopped crying and leaped out of that bed.
It didn’t take long for us to spend that last ten dollars and change. After we ate all the food in the house, we ate berries from a nearby bush and oranges from the tree that I’d cried behind. My mother didn’t believe in going to the welfare department for assistance. Other than a distant aunt we rarely saw, there were no other relatives that I knew of for us to turn to. Both of my parents had taught me that it was wrong to steal, but that didn’t stop my mother and me from sneaking into other people’s yards in the middle of the night to steal fruit, vegetables, and anything else edible. One night we got caught snatching a chicken out of a man’s backyard. The man turned a dog loose on us that chased us all the way back home with that doomed chicken in a pillowcase squawking all the way. We got our best meals at church each Sunday and from food we stole out of the kitchens of some of the white people my mother did domestic work for.
Like an answer to a prayer, one of my mother’s female friends moved to Richland, Ohio, and shortly afterward encouraged us to join her. She even sent us the money to cover our fare. In the middle of the night, my mother and I tiptoed out of our house owing back rent and loans, taking only what we could carry. Just like thieves. A segregated train took us from one pit of despair to another.
That year was 1954.
It was hard to believe that I’d made it to 1985.
As weak and sad as Daddy now looked, I would make sure that he knew just how much he had hurt us by sacrificing us for that white woman. And I would never let him forget that because I couldn’t. Anger consumed me as I looked at him. The knife that had been in my back for so long only shifted its position.
I managed to postpone my wrath and wrapped my arms around my daddy. His body was as rigid as a tree trunk. He had the strong, musky smell of a man who didn’t waste money on man-made fragrances. He leaned back and stared through me as if I were not there, bug-eyed and unblinking, like a dead man.
Finally, Daddy hugged me back with limp arms that trembled. He hesitated for a moment before he rested his knotty head on my shoulder. “Annette, I am so, so sorry for what I done to you and your mama. I can’t change the past, but I swear to God I’ll be there for you from now on.” Then, my daddy cried like a baby.
And so did I.
CHAPTER 4
As much as I had hated living in Ohio those first few years, I made the best of it. Living in shacks and wearing secondhand clothes were the only things I’d ever known, but to lighten our load, my mother took in an elderly boarder. Mr. Boatwright, a homely, one-legged man with beady black eyes, a suspicious smile, and a mysterious past was a poor substitute for my daddy but he’d made my life easier. For a little while, at least. He showered me with the things I enjoyed the most, like toys and money. And even though I was already the largest first-grade student at Richland Elementary, which he complained about all the time, he helped me grow even larger by stuffing me with unnecessary snacks.
Within months after Mr. Boatwright’s arrival, he revealed a side of himself that nobody but me would ever see. When we were alone, he no longer treated me like the granddaughter he never had. He treated me like a secret lover. He spent more time in my bed than he did his own. I got to know his tired, plump body as well as I knew mine. The endless wrinkles that covered him like a suit of armor, nappy gray hair, and the stump where his leg used to be all formed a grim picture that has been permanently seared into my brain.
In his scratchy voice, spraying my face with foul, yellow spit, he told me, “You ain’t the prettiest gal in the world and I could do a lot better. Ain’t too many men would touch a child as black, fat, and ugly as you. You done good to open up my nose, girl. I’m real particular.” He added threats that kept me silent for years. “You ever was to tell about that little thing we do, I’ll have to kill you….”