callin’ my sister a liar?” he hollered, stabbing me in my chest again. This time the sand he left on my top bothered me and I wiped it off.
“Well, she must be if she told you I knocked over your bike,” I said, attempting to leave. I figured he was just trying to show off in front of his friends. But as much as I liked him, I was not willing to let him do that at my expense.
Chester blocked my way and then grabbed my shoulder. “Look, I ain’t playin’ with you, girl! I want my goddamn money!”
I gasped as Chester’s two friends stood on either side of him with anxious looks on their faces. All three of these boys were sweating like hogs, but I was as cool as a cucumber.
“I don’t have no five dollars no-how,” I said, walking around Chester.
“Crazy Legs, don’t you be walkin’ off while I’m still talkin’ to you. Shit.” He kicked some sand on my leg. The oily lotion I had waxed my legs with made the sand stick to me. Then Chester took a long step toward me. He grabbed the back of my arm and spun me around so hard I fell. I landed on my side on top of the four cans of corn in the plastic bag. As much as it hurt, I didn’t do anything to let Chester and his friends know I was in pain. While I was on the ground, Chester hawked a wad of spit the size of a walnut onto the sidewalk, missing my leg by a few inches. I jumped up, brushed off my scratched-up thigh, and started walking away again.
“Where you think you goin’?” With a sinister laugh he added, “Don’t you know I’ll break them crazy legs of yours in two? I ain’t through with you yet, girl.” His friends laughed so hard they had to squat down on the ground.
“Well I’m through with you.” I slapped his hand, an indication that I was about to lose my cool, but he didn’t know that. Before I realized what was happening, he lunged at me. But I moved so fast that he missed me and fell face first to the ground. His friends stood back up but kept laughing as I stepped over Chester’s long body. With sand covering his face like a cheap mask, he jumped up with his hand poised to slap me. Before he could touch me, I closed my eyes and I started swinging the plastic grocery bag in his direction. At the same time, I saw what seemed like a flash of light, even with my eyes closed.
To this day, I never heard another human being howl the way Chester did that afternoon when I hit him. When I opened my eyes, he was wallowing on the ground. Blood was pouring from a wound on the right side of his face about two inches above his eye. The plastic grocery bag had broken, and one of the cans of corn was on the ground next to Chester’s head. The top of the can was covered in his blood.
I never ate corn again after that day, and it had been one of the few vegetables I tolerated. I didn’t know at the time that I would not hit another person again, until seventeen years later when history repeated itself.
CHAPTER 7
Belle Helene, Alabama, an hour’s drive north of Mobile, had about forty thousand residents when I was growing up. Meridian, Mississippi, was closer, which was where a lot of Belle Helene’s six thousand Blacks worked. Most of the Black men in Belle Helene worked for the turpentine or logging companies. There was a garment factory near Lake Mead, between Mobile and us, and several downtown department stores and a mall where a lot of the Black women I knew worked.
Our house was in Belle Helene on Heggy Street in what we all considered a middle-class Black neighborhood. Our houses looked a lot alike, just different colors. We all had nice, neat front and back yards complete with barbecue pits and surrounded by fruit and pecan trees. Every house had a two-car garage and at least two vehicles. A lawyer and his wife lived on one side of us. A retired airline pilot lived on the other side.
My daddy, Charles, was a mechanic and owned a garage in Mobile. My uncle Redmond and four other men worked for my daddy, so Daddy didn’t have to go to Mobile that often. But he loved fiddling around with cars so much that the garage and driveway of our three-bedroom house always contained two or three cars to be worked on at all times.
Though we lived in the deep South and there was an occasional incident involving the Ku Klux Klan and other run-of-the-mill racists, we all got along well with the white folks we had to deal with. But Mama and Daddy, who had both served in Vietnam and marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the sixties, never let us forget how far Black folks had come. I couldn’t count the number of times I heard from Daddy, “When me and your mama was young, we couldn’t even eat or go shoppin’ where we wanted to down here. We even had to ride on the back of the bus. Y’all kids nowadays got a lot to be thankful for.” I usually heard comments like that when I got lazy about going to school.
Daddy made good money, but Mama worked, too. She was a hairdresser and, like a lot of the older Black women who dressed hair, she worked out of the kitchen in our house. After she had tended to wounded soldiers in Vietnam, where she had met Daddy, Mama had given up nursing to do hair and stay at home to raise my older sister Babette and me. Mama didn’t have a beautician’s license and had not been formally trained, but she had a long list of regular clients. She even had a few white women on her list that thought cornrows were so “awesome.”
Behind the large, marble-topped table facing the stove in our kitchen was a large wooden chair with a high back. Mama had strapped a pillow to the seat to make her customers more comfortable while she pressed, curled, permed, and braided their hair. In a drawer in the same cabinet with the silverware were several straightening combs, a pair of curling irons, and other assorted hairdressing tools. The smell of exotic pomades that Mama used on her clients’ hair overpowered the smell of her fried chicken and collard greens, but that never bothered her or us enough to move the chair and her hairdressing items to the den behind our living room. Besides, by working in the kitchen, Mama could look out of the window over the sink and enjoy nature. She was particularly proud of her flowerbed in our front yard and the oak tree where my Uncle Redmond had tied a hammock.
Mama was a busy woman. She was active in the church and she never missed a PTA meeting. She dragged Daddy to movies, plays, and a few other things he hated. On any given day, she had up to four customers, all of them wanting her to perform magic on their hair. Somehow she found time to keep our house clean and Babette and me out of trouble. I spent a lot of my time in front of the TV in the living room next to the kitchen, listening to conversations between Mama and her customers.
One of Mama’s best customers and her best friend was a cook named Mozelle Tupper. Miss Mozelle was almost baldheaded, but Mama dressed what little hair she had once a week. One thing I liked about Miss Mozelle was the fact that she lived in a big beige house right next door to the house where Chester Sheffield lived. In addition to the house he lived in then, Chester’s parents owned Miss Mozelle’s house and the one a few blocks away that Chester would eventually share with Desiree. Miss Mozelle’s son Burl was a grade ahead of me at Belle Helene Junior High. He and I were not really friends, but I used him as an excuse to go to Miss Mozelle’s house, just so I could be closer to Chester. This was especially important after I had hit Chester with the canned goods. Part of my punishment was, I couldn’t visit Chester’s house to hang out with his sister Kitty.
Chester stayed mad at me for over a year after the incident with the canned corn. When I saw him at church or on the street, he just rolled his eyes at me or ignored me completely. When he worked in his daddy’s store, he waited on me, but he wouldn’t talk to me and practically hurled my change at me. And when I called his house to chat with Kitty, he’d hang up on me without calling her to the telephone. By that time, Kitty was already into boys big time and didn’t have a lot of time to spend with me anyway.
“Girl, Chester ain’t never gonna get over what you done. That spot on his head where you hit him gonna be soft from now on,” my second best friend, Regina Witherspoon, told me. Regina lived with her widowed mama in a two-bedroom apartment in the Pike Street projects. We’d been friends since third grade. One night at the age of eleven, Regina slipped out of her house to visit me. While her mother was out looking for her, their apartment caught fire and all six of her younger siblings burned to death. I never told her or anybody else, but I felt responsible for that tragedy. I had nightmares for months after the mass funeral. If I had not coaxed Regina into hanging out