me to a prayer meeting at a church across town on a dead-end street. A well-known visiting preacher from Jacksonville who promised miracles was the guest speaker. “It’s goin’ to take a miracle to get us on our feet,” Mama muttered to me, as we squeezed onto a bench near the back of the room.
“Could a miracle bring Daddy back to us?” I asked excitedly.
“Only miracle he care about these days got yella hair and blue eyes!” Mama snapped, rolling her eyes at me.
“You mean that white lady? Can’t we just go to her house and tell him to come home?”
“Girl…you so young.” Mama sighed.
The small church, lighted by coal-oil lamps, was packed with people needing the Lord’s special attention. There were people in wheelchairs, people walking with canes, a blind man, and people slobbering and babbling. I got restless and ran to the bathroom every few minutes. I ignored the spry little Reverend Mason skipping all over the stage with his eyes closed, his head and hands shaking, ordering people to “Lay down that cane! Get your rump out that wheelchair!” Two hours into the revival, the only miracle performed so far was a man spitting out a cancer (it looked like a piece of raw liver) after Reverend Mason massaged his shoulders, and hollered, “Heal yourself, brother!”
As far as Mama was concerned we received our miracle that night, too. The preacher had massaged our shoulders so hard mine were throbbing. Our miracle came in the guise of a woman. I had seen her staring at me, shaking her head as I dragged myself up and down the aisle. When the meeting ended, this curious woman, several years older than Mama, who at the time was thirty-eight, came up to us and placed her hand on Mama’s shoulder, and said, “Sister, I’m gwine to pray for your girl. How long she been had polio?”
Mama draped her arms around my shoulder, and told the woman, “Oh she ain’t got no polio. She just clumsy. It’s them brogans on her feet. And you can see she eat like a workin’ man,” Mama said apologetically.
The woman looked at the dusty clodhoppers on my feet, then made a sucking noise with her teeth. “Oh. Well I’m gwine to pray for her anyway. I came to the meetin’ this evenin’ to pray for my girl Mott. She mentally limited, and I got her in a home for now.”
Mama touched the woman’s arm, and told her, “I’ll pray for your girl, too.”
The woman started visiting us at the boardinghouse, bringing us food and clothes. I kissed her on the neck when she brought me a pair of black patent leather shoes to wear to church and a pair of red tennis shoes to play in. This mysterious woman quickly became Mama’s best friend. Her name was Mary. Everybody called her Scary Mary, a nickname a frightened boyfriend she had battered had given to her.
Within a week we moved in with her and the two nice ladies who lived with her. She lived in a big redbrick house behind the church that had sponsored the prayer meeting.
Her house was as grand as any of the white women’s houses we’d cleaned. Upstairs and down, the rooms had wallpaper with swans, some floating on a pond, some flying. Her furry brown-and-white furniture not only matched, it was so clean it looked new. She had a fireplace in her living room and great big beige lamps on her cream-colored coffee tables.
Tears appeared in her eyes when Mama showed her the coal-oil lamp we had been using. Mama and I shared Scary Mary’s spare bedroom off to the side of the kitchen.
“Is Scary Mary rich?” I asked Mama when she was putting me to bed that first night. She had bathed me in a bathtub for the first time in my life with store-bought soap. I put on some brand-new pink-flannel pajamas with ducks on them that Scary Mary had run out to buy earlier that day. The goose-down pillows on the bed were as big as I was.
“Yep. She rich. She blessed. The good Lord sent her a rich husband with a bad heart,” Mama said proudly, with a longing look in her eye, punching the pillows. She rebraided two of my braids that had come undone and kissed me long and hard on the cheek.
“There is rich colored men?” I gasped.
Mama laughed and tapped my head. “There ain’t no such a thing. One of her husbands was a rich white man from Ohio, a old banker she met when he was on vacation in Miami.”
Scary Mary made me wash dishes and sweep and dust a lot, but there were trees in her backyard that I could climb and hide behind and eat the food that I removed from the refrigerator behind her and Mama’s backs.
Scary Mary had gone through all the husbands she would ever have by the time we met her. “After my third husband I got so sick of changing my last name, I got me a lawyer to change it to ‘X’ nice and legal,” she told us, adding, “I kept it that way even after a few more.” She told us that the day before we met her she had just run off her last husband, a man she had described as a rogue, who was stingy and dull and who only bathed when she made him. She bragged about how easy it was to control a man just by bouncing a rolling pin off his head whenever it was necessary.
The only one she spoke fondly of was the rich white one from Ohio. “My poor beloved old Mr. Blake. It was a cryin’ shame he had such a bad heart and dropped dead on me within a year. But, I don’t question God,” she told us, shaking and staring hungrily at a shot glass full of bourbon.
Scary Mary called herself a Christian. But during those days, with the exception of the Jewish women Mama worked for, I didn’t know anybody, Black or white, who was not Christian. Even the Klansmen who had come after us did it in the name of the Lord. Even though Scary Mary was involved in all kinds of shady activities, like any good Southern woman, she knew her Bible. She only missed church when she was in jail. From one of her jealous, busybody female neighbors, we had heard that when Scary Mary was young, she’d supervised a chain gang. After that, she got a job in some kind of underground factory making bombs. Age and a cruel scar that ran from beneath her left eye to beneath her chin had slowed her down.
One day the police raided Scary Mary’s house. They charged her with running a whorehouse and selling alcohol without a liquor license and took her off to jail. Mama and I ended up back at the boardinghouse in the same room we had rented before! Scary Mary had to pay a big fine, and they put her on probation. A week later, she moved to Richland, Ohio.
A few days after she got there, she wrote Mama this long convoluted letter in her spidery handwriting telling her how blessed she was because the Lord had led her to such a wonderful place and that we would be better off up there.
“How would you like to move up North?” Mama asked me after reading the letter to me three times.
“Why?” I wanted to know. I didn’t know a thing about the state of Ohio, but I loved Florida and didn’t want to leave. I had gotten used to the boardinghouse and a girl my age next door named Poochie.
“So we can have a better life. The South is such a savage place for colored folks,” Mama explained.
I was tired of relocating, tired of having to get used to new surroundings and new friends. “I’m sick of packing up and moving all over the place, Mama,” I protested.
When Mama saw how unhappy the thought of moving again made me, she stopped talking about it for a while even though Scary Mary kept writing letters to Mama bragging about her good life in Ohio. When she started sending us money and pictures of her posing with prosperous-looking men, Mama gave in.
One night she left me alone at the boardinghouse to go use a pay phone across the street. I was in bed when she returned. “Get up and start packin’, girl. There’s a train at midnight,” she informed me.
“Where are we going?” I yawned.
“Scary Mary’s goin’ to put us up ’til we find a place.” Her eyes were wide, and there was such a big smile on her face I knew it would do no good for me to put up a fight.
Three months after Daddy had left us, we slipped off during the night, tiptoeing and whispering because we owed the boardinghouse woman a month’s back rent. I cried all the way to the train station.
“What’s wrong with you, girl?”