Coming of Age in Mississippi (6 page)

Times really got hard at home. Mama was trying to buy clothes for the three of us, feed us, and keep us in school. She just couldn’t do it on five dollars a week. Food began to get even scarcer. Mama discovered that the old white lady living in the big white two-story house on the hill sold clabber milk to Negroes for twenty-five cents a gallon. Mama started buying two or three gallons a week from her. Now we ate milk-and-bread all the time (milk with crumbled cornbread in it). Then Mrs. Johnson started giving her the dinner leftovers and we ate those. Things got so bad that Mama started crying again. And she cried until school was out.

One Saturday I went to get some clabber milk and the old white lady asked me to sweep her porch and sidewalks. After I had finished she gave me a quarter and didn’t take the quarter Mama had given me for the milk. When I got home and told Mama, she laughed until she cried. Then she sent me up there every day to see if the old lady wanted her porch swept. I was nine years old and I had my first job. I earned seventy-five cents and two gallons of milk a week.

Soon after I started working for that old lady, I stopped drinking her milk. One evening, I was cleaning the back porch where she kept it, when a little Negro boy came to buy two gallons. She came in to get them while he waited out in the backyard. She kept the milk in three old safes with screen doors. I saw her open one of them and pour some milk out of a big dishpan. Then she went out to the yard, leaving the safe
door open. Now this old lady had eight cats that also lived on the back porch. About five of them scrambled into the open safe and began lapping up the milk in the dishpan. She was fussy about her cats so I didn’t yell at them or shoo them away. I just let them eat. “She’ll run them out and pour that milk out when she come back in,” I thought.

But when she came back, she just let those cats help themselves. When they had had enough, she pushed them away from the milk and closed the safe door. I stood there looking at all of this and I thought of how many times I had drunk that milk. “I’ll starve before I eat any more of it,” I thought.

I could hardly wait to tell Mama, but when I did she didn’t believe me. “She probably is gonna give the rest of that milk to them cats too. I don’t think that woman would sell us milk she let cats eat out of,” Mama said. I didn’t argue with her. “I will still bring the milk home,” I thought. “Y’all can eat it but not me.”

I didn’t keep that job long. That big old white house had the biggest porches I had ever seen. It had a porch on the bottom and top floors circling the entire house, which gave the house a rounded look. Pretty soon the old lady even had me sweeping the inside of the house downstairs where she lived and dusting the furniture. She started keeping me up there all day. Mama didn’t like that. One day she kept me up there until after dark. Mama came up there and got me.

“What she got you doing she have you up there all day?” Mama asked me when we got home.

“I sweep the porches and dust the furniture and sweep the bottom house. I was washing out some stockings for her today,” I told her.

“You go up there tomorrow and you tell her you ain’t gonna come back no more, you heah. She been trying to kill you for seventy-five cent and that little shittin’ milk she gives you. Tell her you gotta stay at home with Adline and Junior.”

The next morning I went and swept the porches and cleaned the house and stayed up there all day. When I had
finished, I told her what Mama told me to tell her. I didn’t really want to quit working for her. I got a good feeling out of earning three quarters and two gallons of milk a week. It made me feel good to be able to give Adline and Junior each a quarter and then have one for myself.

When school started again things were still pretty rough, so Mrs. Johnson got one of her friends, Mrs. Claiborne, to give me a job. Mrs. Claiborne taught Home Economics at the white school. I worked for her every evening after school and all day Saturdays. I really liked this job because I made almost as much as Mama. Mrs. Claiborne paid me three dollars a week and the work was easy compared to what I had been doing for seventy-five cents. Now I could pay our way to the movies every Saturday and then give Mama two dollars to buy bread and peanut butter for our lunch. Besides that I was learning a lot from Mrs. Claiborne. She taught me what a balanced meal was and how to set a table and how to cook foods we never ate at home. I’d never known anything about having meat, vegetables, and a salad. I enjoyed learning these things, not that they were helpful at our house. For instance, we never set a table because we never had but one fork or spoon each; we didn’t have knives and didn’t need them because we never had meat.

Mrs. Claiborne was in charge of selling candy, peanuts, and hot dogs during the Friday night football and basketball games at her school. On Saturdays when I went to work she would give me the leftover wieners and some of the peanuts and candy. Now, when I got off work on Saturdays, I’d run all the way home with what she had given me. Adline and Junior would be sitting out in the street waiting on me. I’d give them some of the peanuts and candy and take the wieners to Mama. On Sunday she’d make them for us. The wieners and the three dollars a week that I earned kept us from being hungry at school and at home.

Mrs. Claiborne’s husband was a businessman. The only thing I knew about businessmen at the time was that they carried briefcases, smoked cigars, and wore suits every day. Mr. Claiborne was nice, so I thought all businessmen were nice. One Saturday I was setting the table for them and he asked me to set up a place for myself. I sat down with them—the first white people I had ever eaten at the same table with. I was so nervous. We sat in silence eating. Dessert was served and then they started talking to me.

“Essie, how do you like school?” Mr. Claiborne asked.

“Oh, it’s all right,” I answered.

“What kind of grades you make?” he asked.

“I make A’s in everything but arithmetic and I make B’s in that,” I said.

“See, I told you she’s very smart,” Mrs. Claiborne said.

“What would you like to do after you finish school, Essie?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Mama say I could be a teacher like Mrs. Claiborne and Mrs. Johnson,” I said. Mr. Claiborne just nodded his head.

When I was doing the dishes Mrs. Claiborne came to help me and she told me that Mr. Claiborne thought that I was very smart. She said that she didn’t know many ten-year-old girls who worked to keep herself and her sister and brother in school. After that Saturday, I ate with them every time I was there for a meal. They started treating me like I was their own child. They would correct me when I spoke wrong, and Mrs. Claiborne would tell me about places she had traveled and people she met while traveling. I was learning so much from them. Sick or well, I went to work. I was afraid if I stayed home I would miss out on something.

I came home from work one day and it seemed as though Mama’s belly had gotten big overnight. I knew she was going
to have another baby. And I also knew it was for Raymond. Now that she had gotten fat he wasn’t coming by anymore. He hadn’t been to the house in almost a month. Again Mama started crying every night, like she did when Junior was a baby and my daddy was staying with Florence all the time. Then I thought Raymond had left her for that yellow woman his people wanted him to marry. When I heard Mama crying at night, I felt so bad. She wouldn’t cry until we were all in bed and she thought we were sleeping. Every night I would lie awake for hours listening to her sobbing quietly in her pillow. The bigger she got the more she cried, and I did too. I cried because I thought she would make me quit school and work full time for Mrs. Claiborne to take care of all of us. It seemed as though any day she would have to quit work.

I had worked late for Mrs. Claiborne one evening and when I got off work, it was raining. I didn’t have an umbrella or anything. By the time I got home, I was soaking wet. I was so mad because I had on my first new dress in almost two years. Mama had bought five yards of beautiful pink flowered material for a dollar at the bargain store. She had a lady make dresses for me and Adline. We had both worn our dresses to school that day. Now mine was all wet and had lost its newness. All the way home, I was thinking about my wet sagging dress and Adline’s new dress hanging against the wall still looking new.

When I walked in the door, Mama was singing. I forgot about my wet dress. Instead of looking depressed and sick as usual, she seemed so happy. Dripping wet, I stood in the door a long time just looking at her. I didn’t know why she was happy and I didn’t really care. I was just glad to see her like this. She was walking around carrying her big belly like it was as light as a feather.

“Take that wet dress off before you git a cold!” she said as she noticed me standing in the door. Any other time she would have said something like, “Look how wet you is. Why
didn’t you wait till it stopped raining!” That night I listened to see if she would cry and she didn’t. So I didn’t have anything to cry for that night, either.

She walked around in that spell of happiness for three or four days. Then one evening I came home after work and found Raymond there. When I walked in the door he was rubbing her belly and she was blushing down. I got so mad standing in that door, I started trembling with anger. I felt like going up to him and slapping his hand off her belly. Mama was laughing now, I thought, but I knew she would be crying again as soon as her belly went down and he made it big again. When they noticed me standing in the door looking at him disapprovingly he jerked his hand away. Mama stopped blushing. They both could tell that I didn’t like it at all. In fact when he left, I didn’t say anything to Mama. I just went about the house doing anything I could find to do to keep from talking to her. Raymond had brought some candy for us. Adline and Junior were eating theirs and grinning, but I didn’t touch the candy Mama had left for me. If Adline and Junior knew Raymond had made Mama cry every night like I did they wouldn’t be eating that candy either, I thought.

Later that evening when I was taking my bath in the tin tub, Mama came in the kitchen. Without saying a word, she got down on her knees with her belly touching the tub and washed my back. She was still happy, but she knew I wasn’t. She was putting lots of soap on my back and scratching it and rubbing it good. Usually she fussed at us for using so much soap.

“We gonna be moving pretty soon,” she said.

I sat there stiff and didn’t say anything. “The Johnsons probably is asking her to move because she is too big to work,” I thought. She kept rubbing my back.

“Ray done built us a new house,” she said.

“What!” I yelled, almost jumping out of the tub.

“And you can quit working for Mrs. Claiborne as soon as we move,” she said.

“Mrs. Claiborne treat me good and I don’t want to stop working for her,” I said.

“O.K., you can go on working for her if you want to. But Ray will be able to take care of us now,” she said.

I cried that night because I was so happy. I no longer hated Raymond for feeling Mama’s belly. All night I lay awake thinking of how Mama must be feeling to have someone build a house for her after she had been killing herself for more than seven years working on one job after another trying to feed us and keep us in school and all. We had moved six times since she and Daddy separated. Now she would have a place of her own. And we were going to be moving off white people’s places probably for good.

We stayed at the Johnsons’ until the end of the summer. Then one day we moved. Raymond had built the house at the bottom of the Ash Quarters right off Highway 24. We were now living next door to Raymond’s mother, Miss Pearl, and all the rest of Raymond’s people. Somehow, by hook or by crook, Raymond and his entire family had bought land there, along the gravel road that formed the main street. On the very first day we moved there Mama already showed signs of nervousness.

Raymond, with help from his brothers, had built the house for us with his own hands. It was a green frame house with a gray front porch. There were five rooms, more than we had ever lived in—a living room, three bedrooms, and a kitchen. The only thing wrong was that we still had an outdoor toilet. Raymond and his brothers had also built Miss Pearl’s house and she had a bathroom. Raymond said that later on he would build a bathroom for our house too. We didn’t have running water in the house either but the water line had been run to our house and a water faucet had been put up in the front yard. At least we had plenty of water to fill that tin tub.

The inside of the house had not been finished when we moved in. Raymond and his brothers worked on it daily, sealing it with sheet rock. When all the sheet rock was up, Mama and I went to town and bought some beautiful flowered wallpaper for each room, except the kitchen. Then it was time to buy the new furniture. Mama always took me with her to buy things for the house.

“Mama, let’s get the beds first,” I said as we walked in to the only furniture store in Centreville.

“O.K.,” she said, “but don’t let me forget the icebox.” I think Mama was a little scared, because this was the first time she had ever bought furniture. Before, we had always been given old discarded furniture by other people. We looked over all the beds and Mama picked her bed in no time. She selected one with a solid mahogany headboard that was part of a mahogany bedroom set. But I still didn’t see my bed, the one I wanted for my room.

“Have you got a bed with big tall brown posts?” I asked the saleslady.

“Yes, we have one with posts,” she said. “Here, don’t you like this one?” she asked, pointing to a little mahogany bed with little straight posts.

“That’s not what I want,” I told her. “I want one with big tall posts and a cover over the top.”

“Where did you see that kind of bed?” she asked, looking at me as if I were crazy.

“The lady I used to work for had a bed like that,” Mama answered quickly.

“You got one like that?” I asked the saleslady again.

“No, we don’t carry them and it would cost too much for you. How old are you?” she asked me coldly.