The wig didn’t cover her Elvis-like sideburns, but she did dye them so that they matched the wig.
One day, marching like a soldier, she entered her cluttered kitchen, where Mama and I were sitting at the table eating greens and corn bread. “Gussie Mae, get up off your rump and come he’p us out. Lorene got the cramps, and everybody else tied up,” she barked.
Mama gave me a strange look. Scary Mary looked from Mama to me, then back to Mama. It seemed like they were talking without using words.
I had no idea what was going on until years later. Mama’s friend was running a whorehouse, and she often pressured Mama to work for her. “Annette, you go round up Mott and y’all go to the store to get me some chawin’ tobacco and a jar of Noxzema face cream. Take your time,” Scary Mary told me, caressing her chin.
“Can I get me some candy?” I asked with a pleading look.
“You can get you one jaw breaker. One,” Scary Mary croaked. She slapped a five-dollar bill into my palm. I stood there looking at the money in my sweaty hand. “One more thing, you can keep the change. Just take your time gettin’ back…”
I took my time getting back from the store, but it wasn’t enough time away for me to miss what Mama was up to. I was sitting in the living room, gnawing on candy bars with Mott, when Mama stumbled from upstairs with two fat white men. Both of them were hugging her. She looked at me, then looked away real quick.
“I thought you was at the store, girl.” She shooed the men toward a back room and rushed up to me. “There is things here you don’t need to see!”
“I didn’t see anything, Mama,” I told her. Even if I had seen “something,” I would not have known what I was seeing.
It wasn’t long before Scary Mary ended up in trouble with the police again. Something about her batting a man’s head with a frying pan over some money he owed her. “A slight misunderstandin’. Them kissy-poo po’lice ain’t goin’ to hold Scary Mary for too long,” Mama insisted with a shrug.
We packed again and left Scary Mary’s house the next day. A family from our church took Mott in, and Mama and I moved in with one of the nervous white men I’d seen at Scary Mary’s house. I dreaded the thought of another basement, but there I was once again, sleeping on a pallet between a furnace and a washing machine.
Mama was always tired at the end of her workdays, but she always had time for me. She would read the Bible to me or sit around with her friends and brag about me. “My girl, she so smart. She read books and can speak proper as any white girl. Oh, she goin’ to go real far. She goin’ to be a big success. Just like me.”
I was smart. Smart enough to know that I was not about to be somebody’s slavish maid like my mama. I didn’t have to be. I wasn’t going to work myself into premature old age or an early grave like Mama seemed to be doing. At least not cleaning up behind a bunch of lazy white folks.
One evening, when we were in the kitchen of the next house we lived in preparing dinner, Mama said tiredly, “I want you to stay like you are forever; smart and good. It’ll keep you on the right track, and you’ll always be happy.”
Her voice seemed so weak and sad, I wanted to cry. It hurt me deeply to see her suffer so much just so we could continue living in such an ugly world. But what choice did we have?
“Yes, Ma’am.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mama staring at me with pity.
“I pray no man don’t make a fool out of you.” It saddened me further when she shook her head.
She started washing collard greens in the sink. I was standing next to her, picking bugs off the greens.
“When I get grown we won’t have to eat greens every day. I’m going to get a good job in an office making lots of money,” I chirped. We had some type of greens almost every day. Greens and some creature like a coon or a rabbit that some man from our church had caught.
“Office job? You? Go read your Bible,” Mama ordered. Her threatening look told me I had a whupping on the way. She moved from the sink to the counter, where she started to cut up a yam to lay on the pan around the coon she was going to bake.
I was still standing at the sink rolling my eyes at that dead coon that still had his head on in a roasting pan on the counter.
“You know how many little colored girls would love to be in your shoes?”
“No, Ma’am,” I muttered.
“I slave every day so we don’t have to go on welfare. I’m realistic. We colored. I know ain’t nothin’ else I can do but cook and clean and raise white women’s kids. I don’t like it. It ain’t somethin’ I dreamed about doin’ when I was a young’n. All I ever really wanted was my own restaurant, where I would be the head cook. The kind of dream you talkin’ about—you might as well be talkin’ about gettin’ elected president of the U.S.A. It ain’t goin’ to happen. Except in your dreams. You ain’t got the moxy Scary Mary got. She didn’t get where she at that easy.”
“They put her in the jail—again,” I gasped.
Mama mauled the side of my head with her fist.
“Fix your lips! Anyway, you got to be…a certain type to get one of them uptown office jobs. Folks runnin’ offices, they don’t set girls like you at no desk to answer phones and greet folks. You…”
“I know I’m ugly, Mama,” I said seriously. “I hear people saying so all the time. And, I’m fat.” Somehow I managed a smile. “I see ugly people all the time, and they get good jobs. Like Miss Garra, that dog-face lady you worked for. You told me she work with the mayor now in his office.”
“She white.”
“Well, Reverend Snipes say beauty only skin-deep. Real beauty come from the inside.”
Mama chuckled and shook her head. Then she moved across the floor and snatched a bowl from the table and started mixing some corn bread on the counter. “Oh, child, that’s just somethin’ plain people say to make them feel better.” She sighed, waving the bowl at me. “There ain’t a handsome person alive would trade places with no ugly person.”
“You think I’m ugly, too, Mama? People say…God don’t like ugly.” I left the sink and slid into a chair at the table and folded my arms.
Mama stirred the corn-bread mix with a long-handled spoon so hard she started sweating. She glanced at me for a moment with an exasperated look on her face. “You beautiful inside and out to me. It’s ugly ways God don’t like. Worry ’bout bein’ good, not ugly.” She paused long enough to pour the corn-bread mix into a greased skillet and slid it into the oven. “If you goin’ to fantasize, fantasize about somethin’ practical. A husband with a good job, good friends, a nice home full of young’ns that mind you and know the Lord.” Mama’s voice got real low, and she kept her eyes on the floor while she talked. “I only got one fantasy,” she revealed. “And it’s as big a fantasy as yours about workin’ in a big fancy office. It’ll never come true. At least not for me…”
“What is it?” I left the table and went to stand in front of Mama next to the hot stove. She sighed, then went to the sink and started cutting up the greens.
She shrugged. “Oh…it ain’t nothin’. Just a pipe dream that ain’t got no chance of comin’ true. I don’t care about no minks and furs and mansions like all them white folks I work for got. Compared to the white folks, I want so little out of life and seem like it’s goin’ to take me my whole life to get it, if at all. Just a whiff of luxury. Luxury all the white folks I work for knowed all their born days. Me, I’d be happy livin’ just two or three days of the good life, praise the Lord.”
Mama left the room and returned moments later with her hands full of travel brochures. Very shyly and without looking in my eyes, she said, “Other than runnin’ my own restaurant, the only other thing in life I want is to see the Bahamas before I die.”
“The