to Poochie,” I sobbed.
“We’ll write her a letter soon as we get to Ohio. I ain’t goin’ to stay in Florida like Mama and Pa and the rest of ’em done and rot workin’ for no white folks. I’d rather be buried alive. Colored folks is so unambitious,” Mama told me, as we approached the train station.
During the fifties, just moving north meant having ambition to a lot of Black people, even though most of them left the fields in Florida to work in the ones in Ohio. Mama considered herself a step above the field workers. She cleaned white folks’ houses and cooked and took care of their kids in Florida, and that’s what she would end up doing in Ohio. “I praise the Lord every day. Look what he done for me.” Mama said things like that a lot. She was so proud of her work.
But I hated the fact that she had to work so much. As soon as she finished cleaning one woman’s house, she ran off to clean for another or to tend to somebody’s spoiled kids.
I used to wonder what white women were good for. Most of the women Mama worked for told her a lot of their business. They all seemed to be having an affair or seeing a therapist. They couldn’t clean their own houses or take care of their own kids or even cook. They sounded pretty useless to me. But I had to admit, white women had it made. They had the world at their feet. Oddly enough, I never wanted to be white. Besides, Mama told me white women didn’t age as well as Black women.
I slept during most of the long ride north on the segregated train, dreaming about the “white only” water fountains and restaurants we had never been able to enjoy in Florida. Mama had promised me we’d be able to drink and eat wherever we wanted to in Ohio. I woke up off and on just long enough to eat and stare through tear-filled eyes out the train window at the world going by me.
After we had arrived in Richland, Ohio, which was about a hundred miles south of Cleveland, we had to walk from the train station to Scary Mary’s house because we couldn’t get a cab driver who was brave enough to go into that part of town. It took us more than an hour to get there. By then I was so tired and weak I was dizzy. It was the middle of November and so cold I shivered for the first time in my life. When the urge to pee came over me, I had no choice but to run behind a building and do it there. I got hungry again, and Mama stuffed a baloney sandwich in my mouth.
An ominous feeling came over me as soon as me and Mama, hugging our tattered suitcases, walked up onto the porch of Scary Mary’s shabby old house, a house very much unlike her nice redbrick house in Florida. There was a bullet hole in one of her front-room windows! On the front door next to a wallet-sized, black-and-white picture of Jesus was a crude sign that said: NO CREDIT, NO PERSONAL CHECKS, NO WEAPONS ALLOWED. Stray dogs, cats, and people were roaming all over the run-down neighborhood. A policeman was sitting in his patrol car on the street sound asleep. We knocked on Scary Mary’s door for five minutes before a man leading a drunk woman down the street told us that Scary Mary was in jail.
“But we ain’t got nowhere to stay,” Mama told the man, dabbing at her eyes with a dingy handkerchief.
I could see that the man was sympathetic. He looked at us and shook his head. Old and shabbily dressed, he didn’t look like somebody in a position to help two homeless strangers; he could barely hold up the woman who was falling-down drunk. All he could do was give us the address to the welfare department, but since Mama refused to accept handouts from Uncle Sam, we didn’t go there. Instead, we returned to the train station, where I sat alone on a bench in the waiting area for four hours while Mama went to look for work.
“Don’t you say nothin’ to no strangers,” was all she said before she hurried away.
I ran to the window and watched her drag her weary feet down that cold, mean street. A large tear rolled down the side of my face. The tail of her tattered old coat had started to unravel, and her shoes were so old, the heels were completely gone.
Not long after I returned to my seat, a heavily made-up white woman wearing a floppy hat came up to me. First she let out this long low whistle, and then she said, “I just got to touch those pigtails. Can I?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied. The woman laughed, patted my rough braids, and slapped a penny in my hand.
“What a little nigger frog you are,” she said as she turned to leave.
I didn’t know if she had complimented or insulted me. I couldn’t think of anything uglier than a frog. But on the other hand, some people thought frogs were cute. The woman’s comment troubled me. Even at my young age, I knew that there was nothing complimentary about being called a nigger. So there I was, homeless, helpless, and a nigger frog.
Finally, Mama returned to the train station. I was shocked when I saw her crawl out of a big black car with a middle-aged, moon-faced white man behind the wheel. This was her new employer and we had a new home: his basement. I was glad when we moved into our own house a month later.
CHAPTER 4
We didn’t spend much time in our first house in Ohio, just four months. It was this lopsided pile of bricks on a dark rural road. Behind it were some train tracks and in front across the road was a cemetery. Every time a train roared by, the house shook. On both sides were deserted, boarded-up houses with CONDEMNED signs all over the place. Tramps that traveled on the passing freight trains hopped off now and then to sleep in one of the deserted houses and peep in our windows and go through our garbage cans. We had these great big rats that were so brazen they marched across the room right in front of us. They would even climb all over our bed with us in it. We never went into the kitchen without a baseball bat. That was the rats’ favorite room.
The house was falling apart, too. One night while Mama was sleeping, some plaster fell off the ceiling and almost crippled her. Another time, she slid through a hole in the kitchen floor that had been hidden under a thin rug. She was lucky she didn’t break both legs. The landlord was too cheap to repair anything. Lucky for us, most of the people Mama worked for, especially the men, wanted her there days and some nights. We became live-in help. I slept in so many basements, I developed a phobia, and to this day, I won’t enter one unless I’m good and drunk. One employer let us occupy his garage, where Mama slept in a big old easy chair with me on her lap. Our toilet was a big rusty bucket with no handle. We used old newspaper and brown paper bags for toilet paper. We bathed at the Rescue Mission facilities every other day.
At one house, when the weather was warm, Mama’s boss let me sleep in a large doghouse with some puppies. When the weather changed, I was transferred to his basement. I don’t know where Mama slept. But one night I slipped into the main house and headed for the kitchen. While I was standing there with my head in the refrigerator, I heard Mama’s voice coming from a back room. She said, “Hurry up, Mr. Cursey. My jaws is gettin’ tired.”
I followed her voice, which led me to the man’s bedroom. Mama was on her knees with her head between Mr. Cursey’s legs. He was butt naked. “Shet up, woman. You know you need this job, and you and your monkey need a place to stay,” he told her. I didn’t know what I was seeing, so I never told Mama.
A few days later, Mama made me pack again. Scary Mary was out of jail and we were moving in with her. She was now running a cheap boardinghouse for cheap women, and Mama was going to cook and clean for her.
I was told that I would be sharing a bedroom with Scary Mary’s daughter, Mott. I was happy about that until I saw Mott. She was fifteen and severely retarded. Though she looked normal, she had the mind of a three-year-old. At four, I was baby-sitting a teenage idiot who called everybody Mama, including me and the many men who came to the house, most of them white.
My life was far from normal. I was so unhappy it showed. Mama promised me that when the time was right, she would find us a decent home of our own, and I’d be able to be just like other little kids. Mama’s promise was the only thing that kept me from going off the deep end.
I liked Scary Mary. She was nice and generous, but she bullied people, so like everybody else I was afraid of her. The way she looked was enough to frighten anybody. She was so tall she towered over most people. Her voice was deep and throaty, almost a growl. She was a grim woman,