God Don't Like Ugly. Mary Monroe

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, aged hard in every way. Her brutal face was round and heavily lined with wrinkles and a continent of black freckles sprinkled all over her honey-colored nose. She wore a matted red wig and a lot of makeup. She was real heavy-handed with her lipstick; some days she spread on so much some of it ended up on her teeth. 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, СКАЧАТЬ