to do much to make herself attractive. But that didn’t stop her from wearing the tightest, shortest dresses she could squeeze her sexy body into. It was no wonder men couldn’t keep their eyes and hands off her.
“Ha!” my mama’s daddy screamed, stumbling into the room on his thick, crippled legs. “You mean that other woman’s husband’ll take care of y’all. This girl,” he pointed at me with the cane that he needed to get around with, “she’ll end up just like you, if you was to take her away from here where we tryin’ to set her a good example.”
Mama snapped one of our suitcases shut and then folded her arms, looking from her mama to her daddy. “Well, it didn’t do me no good livin’ all these years with y’all. All them preachin’ sessions and Scripture readin’ about somebody in the Bible begattin’ this or that, and chattin’ with a God they couldn’t see just made me want to do the opposite. Lula Mae, go empty your bladder and your bowels, so we can get up out of here. I’ll go crazy if I stay in this house another minute.”
As I ran to the bathroom down the hall, I heard my grandmother say to Mama, “Lula Mae is gwine to end up just like you. Layin’ up with men for money. Mark my word.”
It would be more than twenty-five years before my grandmother’s prediction came true. But a lot of other things happened along the way that drove me to that point. Things that I had tried to do to make sure that I didn’t end up laying with men for money like my mother.
My daddy, George Maddox, was married to a woman named Etta. Etta was not a bad-looking woman. She had a nice body for a woman her age, smooth high-brown skin, bright hazel eyes, and thick black hair she always wore in a braid wrapped around her head. She read her Bible every day and had a few good qualities, but people overlooked all that because most of the time, she was mean and hostile to people she didn’t care for. Like me.
Etta Maddox knew all about my mama and me. But she left us alone as long as we stayed out of her way. I don’t know what she would have done if she had known that every time she went to visit her relatives in Philadelphia, Daddy brought me and Mama to the big white house she guarded like a palace.
I knew about some of the nasty things Etta said about me and Mama. One day I passed her and one of her friends on the street. I overheard Etta talking about me like a dog. “Look at George’s little jungle bunny…only thing missin’ is a spear.”
I liked going to my daddy’s house when Etta was gone. I rooted through her things like a thief. That’s how I got back at her for talking trash about me and Mama. My revenge included me snapping her necklaces in two, tying her belts and scarves into knots, ripping holes in her gaudy underwear, and peeing in her cold-crème containers.
The apartment that Daddy moved Mama and me into was furnished and in one of the best parts of town. For the first time, I had a room to myself. Daddy bought me my own television set and more toys than I knew what to do with. He also bought us new clothes, a stereo, and a nice little car for us to get around in. Mama had him wrapped around her little finger, but she didn’t let that stop her from adding more men to her collection. The old man who owned the store next door to our apartment was always giving us something free. And, as far as I knew, all Mama had to do for him was smile and flirt.
Our landlord, a blind albino man named Mr. Green, couldn’t even see how pretty Mama was. But that didn’t stop him from coming around grinning like a Cheshire cat, scaring me like a ghost with his white hair, white skin, and haunting eyes. Some months when Daddy gave Mama the money to pay our rent, Mama would spend most of it and give Mr. Green the change, and it didn’t even bother Mr. Green. He would still grin every time he heard her voice. I never could figure out why Mama’s mercenary habits didn’t rub off on me until after that fiasco with Larry Holmes.
That first year away from my grandparents’ house was all good. But one day I came home from school and there was an ambulance in front of our house. I found out later that Mama was already dead when I’d left for school that morning. During the night, she had had a brain aneurysm. My grandparents, my daddy, and our landlord’s wife, the woman who had found my mama dead, were all in the apartment weeping and wailing when I got home. Before that day, the worst thing that had happened to me was the car wreck that had damaged my grandfather’s legs. Mama’s death was ten times worse.
I don’t know how I got through Mama’s funeral. There must have been a thousand things going through my head. I sat there on that hard pew, my body as stiff as a tree, listening to Reverend Newton go on and on about what a “wonderful daughter and mother” my mother had been. As much as I had loved and was going to miss my mama, the main thing on my mind was: what was going to happen to me? I didn’t have to worry about that too long, because right after the funeral, my daddy packed up all my stuff and took me to his house.
It was a big house with four bedrooms and a lot of corners and closets for me to hide in when I wanted to get away from my stepmother. I had a bedroom to myself, but it was more like a well-furnished prison. Every time I misbehaved, I got locked in my room.
While Daddy was at work, his wife treated me the way I’d always heard that stepmothers treated their stepchildren. She gave me all kinds of chores to do, and when I didn’t do them the way she thought I should have, she slapped, pinched, bit, and even kicked me. The one time that I did tell Daddy, she attacked me for doing that as soon as he left the house.
Back then, Daddy and his wife didn’t have any kids together, but Etta had a daughter from her first marriage. Verna was ten years older than me, and in some ways she treated me more like a daughter than Etta.
Even though Verna was her real daughter, Etta was often mean to her, too. It took me a while to figure out why. Verna was a lesbian, but that was not the word I heard. Both Daddy and Etta always referred to Verna as being “confused.”
“Confused hell! I ain’t confused. I know what I am. I just like to eat me some pussy,” Verna said to her mother, with me standing right there in the living room listening. It was my ninth birthday. The way Etta’s eyes bulged out, with her mouth open, I thought she was having a stroke. But all she did was shake her head and stomp out of the room, dropping pieces of my birthday cake all over the floor. “Lula Mae, the sooner you learn about life, the better off you’ll be. I ain’t never goin’ to hide nothin’ from you, girl. You done already seen more than a child your age should anyway,” Verna told me, a serious look on her face. Even though I was still a child, sassy and disruptive most of the time, Verna treated me with respect and affection.
She was a gentle person. But with her big moon face, beady black eyes, shaved head and barrel-shaped body, she looked like a truck driver. As a matter of fact, Verna was a truck driver. Daddy co-owned a trucking company with another man and Verna worked for them. Most of her jobs only took her across town to help somebody haul something to the junkyard, every now and then, she had to drive out of the state or to some other city in Mississippi to haul fruit or live chickens. I hated the days when Verna had to go out of town overnight.
Daddy was old, almost as old as my mama’s daddy. So, like most other older people, he slept a lot and was out of touch with a lot of things. Verna was the only person in my life at the time with whom I felt comfortable. When she was gone, I felt like I was all alone in a world that was so big and unfair, I never knew if I was coming or going. Attention seemed to be the one thing of which I could never get enough.
As old as Daddy was, he still had enough juice in him to get my stepmother pregnant with twin boys.
I was fourteen when Etta gave birth to Logan and Ernest. She wasn’t so young herself, so when her health started to fail, she took me out of school so that I could stay home and help her with the twins.
“Lula Mae needs a education,” my daddy said weakly. “I want her to be able to fend for herself.”
“Like her mama did? Either Lula stay home and help me with them babies, or you hire me a full-time nurse,” Etta told Daddy, from the bed she rarely left anymore.
“I can always go back to school, Daddy,” I said, peeping around the door to the bedroom he shared with Etta.
With a