God Don't Like Ugly. Mary Monroe

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 the window, bugs, mosquitoes, and moths flew in and out of our bedroom. There was just enough moonlight for me to see a hoot owl fly up and perch on the sill. I kept my eyes on the owl until I finally fell asleep. When I got up the next morning, the owl was gone and Mama was still asleep. I got dressed and went to sit on the front-porch steps, hoping to see Daddy walking down the hill. After what seemed like an eternity, Mama came out on the porch holding a gray-and-brown clay jug Daddy used to drink from. It was where he kept moonshine he got from a man who lived on the other side of the lake. “We ain’t never goin’ to see Frank no more,” Mama told me again. I let out a long painful sigh. This time I really believed her.

      Immediately, our lives changed dramatically. Mama started working five days a week instead of two, and we had to hide from even more bill collectors. One day, about two weeks after Daddy’s departure, Mama was in the kitchen rolling out some dough to make dumplings. I was sitting on the footstool looking out the living-room window when another car pulled up in the yard. It was a green car. For a minute I thought it was the white woman bringing my daddy home. I gasped and leaned my head out the window, already grinning and waving. Before I could get too excited, a scowling white man in a black suit leaped out and rushed toward the house carrying a briefcase.

      “Mama, here come that old mean Raleigh man walking real fast!” I yelled over my shoulder. Raleigh men were individuals, usually white men, who patrolled the rural areas in cars loaded down with various items that they sold to people like us on credit. A month earlier, Mama had purchased a straightening comb and a mirror, some work shoes for Daddy, and two pairs of pedal pushers and some peanut brittle for me. The first time the man came to collect, she told him, “Come back Tuesday.” On Tuesday she told him, “I meant next Tuesday.” That Tuesday it was, “Come back on Friday.” This was his sixth visit, and we still had not paid him.

      “Oh shit!” Mama wailed. I heard her run across the floor. “Tell him I’m at the store in town, and you don’t know when I’ll be back!” Then she fell down to the floor behind the living-room couch.

      “Where is Gussie Mae?” The man started talking before he even got in the house. Before I could get off the footstool, he had snatched open the screen door and marched in.

      “She gone to the store in town to get some buttermilk,” I said nervously, rising.

      “Store, huh?” The man started looking around the room, twitching his eyes and screwing up his lips. I got even more nervous when he started tapping his foot. “Well, the next time she go to the store, tell her to carry her feet with her.” Then he left, slamming the screen door so hard the footstool fell over. I turned around just in time to see Mama’s feet sticking out from behind the couch before she leaped up and started brushing off her sleeveless gray-cotton dress.

      Mama made some baloney sandwiches, we packed our clothes that night, and left behind our broken-down furniture and that lumpy mattress. We spent the next few days eating baloney sandwiches and sleeping on a couch in the house of a lady from our church. We lived like that for three weeks, roaming from one church member’s house to another until we ran out of people willing to put us up. I felt more adrift than ever. Mama and I got on our knees and prayed harder than we usually did. By the end of the month we had found a place to live. “God done come through again,” Mama sobbed. We moved into a dank room in a run-down boardinghouse in one of Miami’s worst neighborhoods. The windows had plastic curtains you could see through, and there was a sink in a corner with a faucet that never stopped dripping. There was nothing else in the room. It reminded me of a prison cell I’d seen in a movie on television at one of the white women’s houses. Mama got us a hot plate, a pan, and a blanket from a secondhand store. We couldn’t buy any food that needed to be refrigerated. When we did, we had to eat it all up the same day.

      We ate our best meals behind the backs of the white women Mama worked for. One afternoon, peeping out of one of those women’s kitchen windows and talking with her mouth full, Mama told me, “Annette, hurry and finish that filet mignon steak before old lady Brooks come home! Wipe that grease off your mouth! Wrap up a few chunks of that good meat and slip ’em into our shoppin’ bag! Grab a loaf of French bread from the pantry! Grab them chicken wings yonder!” Whatever I managed to hide in our shopping bag, I usually ate behind Mama’s back. Every time I did that, she thumped the side of my head with her fingers and yelled at me all the way home. “You greedy little pig! For bein’ so hardheaded, God’s goin’ to chastise you and make you spend your life trapped in a body big as a moose.” Because of my hard head, our meals at the boardinghouse were usually baloney and stale bread, grits, some greasy meat, and greens.

      The boardinghouse had just one bathroom for the two floors of tenants. It was always either occupied, too filthy and smelly (people would use the toilet and not flush it), or out of order. We used an empty lard bucket that I had to empty every morning for a toilet. We heated water in the pan on the hot plate and bathed in the sink in the corner.

      “Mama, СКАЧАТЬ