God Don't Like Ugly. Mary Monroe

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 Bahamas?”

      “All them white women I worked for in Florida went there all the time. And for days after they got home, that’s all they talked about. Remember?”

      “I remember that time Mrs. Jacobs brought me some seashells back from the Bahamas,” I replied.

      “It ain’t just the money. I know I could scrape up enough to go…if I let a few bills slide for a few months or…uh…be nice to Scary Mary and do her a few favors. It’s just that I can’t afford to take the time off from work. White folks is so fickle and helpless. I was to leave for a day or two, and I’m liable not to have no job to return to. I can’t take that chance.”

      “But, Mama, you can always find maid work. And even the meanest white folks would probably let you take a few days off if you asked.” Mama went to work even when she was sick. Sunday was the only day she had off, and she sometimes worked up to twelve hours a day. “Just wait until I get a good job. You won’t have to work so much. You can spend as much time in the Bahamas as you want, stretched out on a beach with somebody fanning you for a change.” Mama smiled and hugged me so hard it hurt.

      CHAPTER 5

      After two years, I still didn’t like Ohio, but I liked Franklin Elementary School. There were a lot of other kids in my first grade class who had come from down South. Because of our Southern accents, almost every time one of us spoke, the Ohio kids made fun of us. My accent was not nearly as thick as some of the other kids because right after moving north, I had started imitating the way the Northern kids pronounced certain words.

      I had a nice teacher, who encouraged me to learn as much as I could. “Education is the key to success,” Miss Nipp told me. Mama worked for her three days a week, so Miss Nipp was nicer to me than to the other kids. Sometimes she gave me a ride home in her shiny blue Buick.

      We were living in a gloomy, three-bedroom house on Mahoning Street in a run-down part of Richland, the neighborhood where most of the people on welfare and the criminals lived, when Mr. Boatwright moved in. Right across from us was the city dump. Day and night you could smell fried food and marijuana fumes coming from the houses and foul odors from the dump.

      One evening when Miss Nipp drove me home, she stopped at a hot dog stand and bought me a foot-long hot dog. “I hope you have a pleasant evening, Annette,” she said when the car stopped in front of our house. The people in our neighborhood were not used to seeing fancy cars driven by white women on our street. I frowned at the nosy faces staring out of the windows in the house next door.

      “I will, Miss Nipp,” I said, СКАЧАТЬ