God Don't Like Ugly. Mary Monroe

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СКАЧАТЬ eyes of the Lord,” Mama replied.

      We were walking home after cleaning and cooking for Mrs. Jacobs, an unpredictable old woman with hair on her chin and breath as foul as cow dung. Of all the white women Mama worked for, the Jacobs woman was the only one I disliked because we never knew what to expect from her. Some days she was nice and would send us home early with extra pay and leftover food. When she was in a real good mood, she’d have her chauffeur ride us home. When she was not in a good mood, usually when she was mad at her husband or one of her children, she treated us like trash. She would throw away good food rather than give it to us, but we’d always fish it out when she wasn’t looking. She suffered with severe flatulence and would pass gas right in front of us and not say excuse me. As soon as she entered a room, Mama stopped whatever she was doing and opened a window. One particular day, right after her husband had slapped her, she marched into the kitchen where Mama was sitting at the table shelling some crowder peas. I was glad all the windows in the kitchen were already open because the old woman started farting right away. I was standing next to Mama with both my hands full of peas. Mrs. Jacobs raised her cane and shook it at Mama, and roared, “Gussie Mae, you get back in that bathroom and shine that commode like I told you! Put some elbow grease on it!” Mama looked up at her, and said, “I just finished shinin’ the commode, Mrs. Jacobs.” Still farting, the old woman whacked my mama across her back so hard Mama fell out of her chair. I was horrified. “You leave my mama alone—you old heifer!” I screamed. I ran around the table and bit Mrs. Jacobs on the leg so hard she bled. That was the only job Mama ever got fired from. I expected Mama to yell and scream at me all the way back to the boardinghouse, then whup me once we got there. “I was sick of slavin’ for that fartin’ old witch anyway,” was all she said on the subject. “God’ll take care of us.”

      Mama bought a newspaper on the way home that day. There was a whole column of domestic jobs advertised. She started working for another white woman two days later, a sweet-smelling woman who hugged me and encouraged me to play with her kids on a swing set in her huge backyard. Mrs. Myers, a woman with eyes like blue marbles and hair the color of carrots, was always nice to us. “Annette, you lookin’ mighty spiffy in those blue pedal pushers,” she told me one day, handing me a glass of ice-cold orange NeHi pop. “You should have seen me yesterday! I got some green ones just like these!” I exclaimed, grinning so hard my mouth hurt.

      Every day after work Mama and I went through trash cans behind restaurants and stores on our way back to the boardinghouse. We often found food that looked like it had not been touched and a few items for our room. I’d even found a pair of shoes, clodhoppers with cleats. They were boys’ shoes that were too big and so heavy I dragged my feet. People started looking at me the same way they looked at Mr. James, a man at our church they hauled around in a child’s red wagon because he had been born without arms or legs. I hated those damn shoes, but they were better than the ones I’d been wearing, brown moccasins with pins holding them together. With what help we could get from church and God, we survived.

      One day I asked my mama, “We happy?”

      Mama smiled for the first time in weeks and squeezed my cheek. She wasn’t even mad about me eating up some lamb chops Mrs. Myers had given to us. “We got more than the Lord ever had him, and He was happy,” she answered.

      CHAPTER 3

      About a month after we had moved to the Miami boardinghouse, Mama took 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 СКАЧАТЬ