“Hush up,” Mama said to me. Like an afterthought, she grabbed another pig foot and aimed it at my mouth. When she saw I was still gnawing on the first one, she pressed her lips together, shrugged, and put the pig foot back in the bowl in the middle of the table.
The rain was really coming down by then, and it was dark enough for Mama to light the lamp so she could sit in the living room and sew. She occupied the couch, and I sat on the floor next to Daddy on his footstool. Just a few minutes later, the tornado came roaring at us like a runaway train.
Nobody said anything, but we all knew what to do. Mama blew out the lamp, grabbed me by the arm, and we followed Daddy into the bedroom, where we all crawled under the blanket on the mattress and waited. The hardest part was not knowing if we were waiting to live or waiting to die. Tornadoes were tricky. One could destroy everything in its path including people’s lives and dreams, it could tease then move on to another area or it could suddenly cease. This storm was a teaser. Our house shook violently one moment, then was still the next. The window on the side of the bed exploded, and most of the glass ended up on the mattress with us. Mama prayed, Daddy cussed. I didn’t do anything but lie there and cling to my daddy. He had one arm around me and one around Mama. The storm gave the house a real hard jolt, so hard Daddy stopped cussing and started praying along with Mama. God must have been listening because not long after that the storm ceased. By then it was morning.
The next morning we cleaned up the glass, then checked to see how much damage we had to deal with. Miraculously, our house was still intact. But our backyard outhouse was gone. We found out later that a shack occupied by an old Seminole Indian man had been relocated to a field in the next county with the old man still in it, dead.
Somebody’s frantic and confused hog ended up in our backyard, but ran into the woods as soon as it saw our faces.
Daddy put on his work clothes, and Mama fixed breakfast like it was just another day. But it was not just another day. He said he didn’t have time to eat. Instead he started walking around the living room like he was nervous and glancing out the window every few minutes. He looked at me a long time standing in the middle of the floor watching him. Suddenly Daddy left the room and returned a few minutes later holding one of our shopping bags in one hand and a lunch bag bulging with baloney sandwiches in the other. “Annette, you better be good,” he said in a low voice. He started walking toward the door but turned around and ran over and kissed me on the forehead.
“Daddy, what’s the matter?” I wanted to know. I was puzzled and afraid when Daddy didn’t answer me. Mama followed him out the door, and I heard them arguing on the front porch. I couldn’t tell what they were talking about, but both of them were cussing.
I ducked back into the kitchen, grabbed a biscuit, then ran to the living-room door in time to see a white woman in a dusty green car drive down the hill toward our house. Daddy jumped in the car while it was still moving. I stood on the front porch next to Mama, watching the car turn around and shoot back up the hill.
“Mama, who was that white woman? Is she giving Daddy a ride to work today?” I asked with my mouth full.
“Finish your biscuit, girl,” Mama said tiredly. Then she went to the kitchen and started sweeping and crying. We spent most of the day cleaning up the mess the tornado had left behind. She kept sweeping, wiping, and cleaning the same spots over and over, and yelling at me every time I tried to get her to tell me why she was crying. “You ain’t nothin’ but a child! You don’t know nothin’ about nothin’!” she insisted. “Get that broom yonder and get busy.”
I did so much sweeping that day my arms got sore. Later, Mama started sewing on a quilt she was making for a lady at church. When she ran out of things to do, she went to the mattress and fell facedown and cried some more.
The days seemed so long when Mama and I didn’t go to her work. With no friends and hardly any toys, there was not much for me to do but eat. I left the bedroom and went to the kitchen to finish off a blackberry pie. After I felt good and stuffed, I went back to the bedroom.
“Mama, what’s the matter?” I asked again. I sat on the edge of the mattress and patted Mama’s trembling leg. The only other times I had seen her cry was when we were running from the Klan. “The Kluxes coming again?”
“Go to the yard and see if the storm messed up my garden,” she ordered. Her eyes were red and so swollen she looked like she had been beaten. “Lickety-split!” She dismissed me with a wave toward the door. I ran to check on the garden and returned to the bedroom within minutes.
“It’s got a bunch of nasty old water in it, and the onions popped up out the ground. The greens and everything else look all right though,” I reported.
“Good. We’ll still have somethin’ to nibble. Least ’til I can figure out what to do,” she sniffed, smoothing her hair back with her hand. She had cried so much there was a spot on the bed that was soaked with her tears.
“Mama, what’s the matter? We moving again?” I attempted to rejoin her on the mattress, but she pushed me away with her ashy bare foot.
“Go in the room yonder and find somethin’ to do, girl.”
“Ma’am?”
“Read the Bible,” Mama growled.
I didn’t know how to read yet, but I still fished out our old Bible with no covers from one of the shopping bags in a corner in our living room. The pictures were interesting enough to keep me occupied for a while. When I went back to the bedroom Mama had closed the door. I put my ear to it and could hear her crying again.
At my usual time of the day, when the sun began to disappear, I went to sit on the front-porch steps to wait for Daddy to come dragging down the hill. To pass time, I got up every few minutes to stir a stick around in some of the puddles still in our front yard.
When he didn’t come home at the time he should have, I went in to eat with Mama. It was the first time we’d eaten dinner without Daddy. I didn’t even bother trying to pry any information out of Mama anymore. Her eyes were even redder by then. She was not eating. She just kept staring at the wall and pushing beans and neckbones around on her plate.
I took my plate with what was left on it and went back to the porch steps to finish eating. When it got dark enough for the lamp, Mama came to the door and poked her head out. “Annette, carry that plate in the kitchen and get ready for bed,” she told me.
“But I have to wait for Daddy—”
“Your daddy gone!” she snapped, waving both arms. She already had on her nightgown. “Now, go get in your sleepers and get to bed like I told you. And wash that nasty plate.”
“Daddy gone where?” I whimpered. My voice trembled as I stumbled into the house. I didn’t believe what I was hearing. My daddy would not just run off and leave us! “Where he go and didn’t take us? When he gonna come back to get us?” I choked.
“Your daddy’s a good man in a whole lot of ways. But like all of us, he ain’t perfect. He had weaknesses of the flesh. One was white women. Before you was born I was hearin’ about him and this white woman and her money. He just got fed up and tired of stressin’ over havin’ such a hard life and rilin’ them Kluxes. When this hussy was ready to take him, he was ready to be took,” Mama said sadly. “Things like this happen every day.” She let out a long sigh and shook her head. There were tears in her eyes, but she managed a weak smile. “We’ll be fine. Colored women stronger than colored men anyway, you’ll see. Now—like I said, get ready for bed before I get my switch.” Mama hugged me and kissed me on the cheek but she still thumped the back of my head with her fingers.
I washed my plate, dried it with the tail of my flour-sack smock, and put it on top of the ones Mama had already washed and set on the counter. My head felt like it was going to explode, I had so many questions in it that needed to be answered. The only thing I knew was that my daddy was gone, and he had left us with a white woman in a green car.
After we went to bed Mama cried in her sleep. With no glass in