God Don’t Like Ugly (2 page)

The rain was really coming down by then, and it was dark enough for Mama to light the lamp so she could sit in the living room and sew. She occupied the couch, and I sat on the floor next to Daddy on his footstool. Just a few minutes later, the tornado came roaring at us like a runaway train.

Nobody said anything, but we all knew what to do. Mama blew out the lamp, grabbed me by the arm, and we followed Daddy into the bedroom, where we all crawled under the blanket on the mattress and waited. The hardest part was not knowing if we were waiting to live or waiting to die. Tornadoes were tricky. One could destroy everything in its path including people’s lives and dreams, it could tease then move on to another area or it could suddenly cease. This storm was a teaser. Our house shook violently one moment, then was still the next. The window on the side of the bed exploded, and most of the glass ended up on the mattress with us. Mama prayed, Daddy cussed. I didn’t do anything but lie there and cling to my daddy. He had one arm around me and one around Mama. The storm gave the house a real hard jolt, so hard Daddy stopped cussing and started praying along with Mama. God must have been listening because not long after that the storm ceased. By then it was morning.

The next morning we cleaned up the glass, then checked to see how much damage we had to deal with. Miraculously, our house was still intact. But our backyard outhouse was gone. We found out later that a shack occupied by an old Seminole Indian man had been relocated to a field in the next county with the old man still in it, dead.

Somebody’s frantic and confused hog ended up in our backyard, but ran into the woods as soon as it saw our faces.

Daddy put on his work clothes, and Mama fixed breakfast like it was just another day. But it was not just another day. He said he didn’t have time to eat. Instead he started walking around the living room like he was nervous and glancing out the window every few minutes. He looked at me a long time standing in the middle of the floor watching him. Suddenly Daddy left the room and returned a few minutes later holding one of our shopping bags in one hand and a lunch bag bulging with baloney sandwiches in the other. “Annette, you better be good,” he said in a low voice. He started walking toward the door but turned around and ran over and kissed me on the forehead.

“Daddy, what’s the matter?” I wanted to know. I was puzzled and afraid when Daddy didn’t answer me. Mama followed him out the door, and I heard them arguing on the front porch. I couldn’t tell what they were talking about, but both of them were cussing.

I ducked back into the kitchen, grabbed a biscuit, then ran to the living-room door in time to see a white woman in a dusty green car drive down the hill toward our house. Daddy jumped in the car while it was still moving. I stood on the front porch next to Mama, watching the car turn around and shoot back up the hill.

“Mama, who was that white woman? Is she giving Daddy a ride to work today?” I asked with my mouth full.

“Finish your biscuit, girl,” Mama said tiredly. Then she went to the kitchen and started sweeping and crying. We spent most of the day cleaning up the mess the tornado had left behind. She kept sweeping, wiping, and cleaning the same spots over and over, and yelling at me every time I tried to get her to tell me why she was crying. “You ain’t nothin’ but a child! You don’t know nothin’ about nothin’!” she insisted. “Get that broom yonder and get busy.”

I did so much sweeping that day my arms got sore. Later, Mama started sewing on a quilt she was making for a lady at church. When she ran out of things to do, she went to the mattress and fell facedown and cried some more.

The days seemed so long when Mama and I didn’t go to her work. With no friends and hardly any toys, there was not much for me to do but eat. I left the bedroom and went to the kitchen to finish off a blackberry pie. After I felt good and stuffed, I went back to the bedroom.

“Mama, what’s the matter?” I asked again. I sat on the edge of the mattress and patted Mama’s trembling leg. The only other times I had seen her cry was when we were running from the Klan. “The Kluxes coming again?”

“Go to the yard and see if the storm messed up my garden,” she ordered. Her eyes were red and so swollen she looked like she had been beaten. “Lickety-split!” She dismissed me with a wave toward the door. I ran to check on the garden and returned to the bedroom within minutes.

“It’s got a bunch of nasty old water in it, and the onions popped up out the ground. The greens and everything else look all right though,” I reported.

“Good. We’ll still have somethin’ to nibble. Least ’til I can figure out what to do,” she sniffed, smoothing her hair back with her hand. She had cried so much there was a spot on the bed that was soaked with her tears.

“Mama, what’s the matter? We moving again?” I attempted to rejoin her on the mattress, but she pushed me away with her ashy bare foot.

“Go in the room yonder and find somethin’ to do, girl.”

“Ma’am?”

“Read 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, we poor?” I asked, several weeks after we’d left the house we shared with Daddy.

“Not in the 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.”