Mama Black Widow (24 page)

I got out of the car and went to Junior on the sidewalk. Sally was kneeling beside Tony and weeping. Railhead leaned on the Buick's front fender and stared stonily at her. There was the sorrowful cry of sirens, and then seemingly suddenly the police descended.

Junior left the sidewalk and walked toward two black cops in uniform who were looking at Tony and shaking their heads.

Junior held out his bloody hands pleadingly as he whined, “Ah ain't knowed he wuz out tu sho nuff kill th' peckahwood.”

Railhead, handcuffed and in the grip of two towering white cops, snarled, “Dummy up, cunt! It was self-defense.”

I slipped through the crowd and caught a jitney cab at Thirty-first Street and Indiana Avenue to Forty-seventh Street. I made it to Papa's rooming house where I was hysterical and thoughtlessly blurted out everything about Bessie and Junior.

I knew I had made a mistake when I saw how grey Papa's face got and how he shook like he had palsy. Soldier gave me and Papa a sedative and put us to bed. Then he went to contact Mama and to help her with the tragedies of Bessie and Junior.

Bessie's funeral was held in the chapel at the funeral home, and it cost Mama less than two hundred dollars with most of it on credit. Mama cried, but she didn't lose control like she had at Carol's funeral.

Papa collapsed at the chapel and couldn't go to the cemetery. Soldier
composed and delivered the eulogy. I cried harder after he'd said the beautifully poignant things about Bessie than I did at the grave.

Soldier looked like a magnificent Indian chief as he stood at the lectern and said, “Bessie Tilson, she was in her early pretty teens the first time I saw her. She was a good girl, fresh from a Mississippi plantation.

“Old big evil Chicago had excited her though. I remember the wild music in the little girl laughter. And now that she's no longer pretty and lies here dead, I can remember a sad thing about her in life.

“I remember that no matter how gay and happy she seemed to be, there was always a shadow—a little girl lost look in her eyes.

“She was starved for love and affection like everyone must be who has been denied Mama's bosom. She sought them in the jungle and found death.

“Perhaps like the multitude of trapped black females she drank to push back the awful walls of despair and loneliness. I know that whenever I hear a young girl's bubbly laughter, I'll remember Bessie and that little girl lost look in her eyes.

“She's gone and left the flashy dresses and men she loved so much. She's escaped the torment of that dark world where innocence is reviled and evil applauded.

“Perhaps her mischievous spirit is somewhere way out there in the blue of heaven watching us saying good-bye to her here and laughing with that long-ago music in her voice and with a little girl ‘found' look in her eyes.”

I
visited Papa at least three times a week after Bessie's funeral. He had started to cheat on his strict no-sweets, low-fat diet, and he looked drawn and weak.

Soldier told me Papa was even drinking wine again and often had to be reminded to take his insulin shots. Soldier told me that somebody at Bessie's funeral had inadvertently let Papa know about Carol while extending sympathy.

Railhead and Junior went to trial for first-degree murder in Criminal Court, several weeks before Christmas in 1940. Their lawyers from the public defender's office advised them to plead guilty and avoid the electric chair.

The black lawyer for Junior explained to Mama that with a hostile witness like Sally for the prosecution it was foolhardy to buck the white folks.

They took the lawyers' advice and each drew sentences of 99 years in Joliet Penitentiary. Grief-stricken Ida Jackson, Junior's girlfriend, was drunk and called the prosecutor a dirty motherfucker in court. She got thirty days.

I was in a Criminal Court's corridor with Mama after the
sentencing. She was really in a bad way, what with Bessie's death, the tension of Junior's trial and then the shock of the sentence. Mama was wailing and clutching at Junior's lawyer. She just couldn't understand why Junior got such a stiff sentence since he had no prior record and Tony had been a pimp.

Finally, the harassed lawyer jerked himself free and said angrily, “Damn it, Mrs. Tilson. You should be bright enough to know why he got the book thrown at him. He helped to kill a white man in Chicago. He's lucky he didn't get the chair.”

The chain of violence and tragedy that had claimed three of the Tilsons locked around Papa less than a week after the New Year of 1941 came in.

Papa had crawled behind a pile of junk furniture in a storage room in the basement of his rooming house and died of diabetic coma. He was found with an almost empty quart bottle of cheap muscatel wine.

Soldier was convinced Papa had hidden himself away from the possibility of taking or being given his lifesaving insulin shots.

Soldier notified Papa's father who had disowned Papa when he married Mama. The old man sent money to a Southside mortuary to prepare the body and ship it down South.

For weeks I moved about like a sleepwalker. I avoided Mama as much as I could. It was sickening the way she hugged me and sweet-talked me and tried to alibi away the evil things I had seen her do.

The sharp hurt in what had happened to the twins, Junior and Papa dulled as the year 1941 staggered by.

I took an interest in school and the library I had never had before. Most of the time I could keep sad things off my mind and not be lonely. But between midnight and dawn, I often awoke screaming out of nightmares about Carol's baby and Bessie's butchered body.

A few days before the attack at Pearl Harbor, Connie, our landlady suffered her second stroke. Hattie Greene was dressing Mama's
hair for a visit to Junior. She was telling her about how Connie was lying helpless in her house down the street.

Hattie said, “Sedalia, I knocked and knocked on her front door to pay my rent early yesterday morning. I went to the back door and saw her through the glass lying on the kitchen floor in all her clothes.

“Her funny eyes were wide open looking at me, but I thought she was dead because she wasn't moving her body at all. I was turning away when I saw the dirty bitch move her eyes. I realized she was paralyzed.

“A few minutes ago I went and peeped at her, and she ain't moved a peg. She abused and robbed black people all her life. She'll be dead and stinking before I help her.”

Mama and Hattie recounted Connie's bad deeds and laughed about her plight until I got a headache and went to bed. I lay there long after Mama had gone to bed. I tossed about, alternately worried and angry. I worried about Connie lying crippled and all alone in the darkness.

I got angry with myself for worrying about her when I knew so well how crooked and rotten she was. But what could I do to help her? She was probably locked in. And even if I got in some way, I couldn't lift her or anything.

My kid's mind kept busy. I thought,
It's no use. Mama and everybody in the block hate her. If I help her, they'll hate me too.

Finally, I argued myself out of bed and into my clothes. I eased out the back door with the intention of calling a hospital or the police about Connie.

I realized when I reached the deserted street that it was close to two
A.M.
and I couldn't wake up anybody to make a phone call for Connie, and I didn't have a nickel to use a pay phone blocks away.

I walked by Connie's dark house several times before I got the courage to go down the walk to the rear of the house. I went across the screened sun porch to the kitchen door. I peered through the door glass.

In the dimness I saw a dark form that could have been Connie
sprawled on the bright-colored linoleum. My hand trembled as I twisted the doorknob. The door was open.

I stepped inside, and the stink of feces bombed my nose. I stood at the door and tried to see a light switch. Then I noticed a tall refrigerator near the form on the floor. I went gingerly to it and swung open the door.

Light leaped and spotlighted Connie's hard pale face. Her round bird-of-prey eyes seemed to glow with vivid blue light as they stared up into mine unblinkingly. She was drooling from the corner of her tiny mean mouth.

I looked at her cruel face and remembered Woodrow Spears, the little black guy she had cheated, and how she'd called Carl, the cop, and his buddy to cave in Woodrow's skull.

I scowled and started to step around her to leave. I stopped cold. She was rolling and crossing her eyes frantically. It was strange and weird to see the sweat pop out on her face as she desperately manipulated her eyes to plead for my help.

I went through a doorway into the dining room. I flipped a wall light switch and looked about for a phone. I walked into the living room and turned on a table lamp. There was a phone on a table at the end of a sofa.

I sat down and thumbed through a memo book. I saw the office and home phone numbers for a Doctor Holzman. I woke him at home and told him about Connie.

He asked who I was and would I stay until he came. I told him the back door was unlocked and hung up. I took a hassock to the kitchen and propped up Connie's head and shoulders. She sipped a little water through a glass iced tea straw.

Before I left, I said, “Your doctor is coming. Please, please, don't tell anybody it was me that helped you.”

I got back into the flat and out of my clothes without waking Mama. I stood outside her bedroom and listened to her snoring. I thought about how much she hated white people and especially
Connie and how she'd get so furious she'd have to massage her chest if she had known I'd called Connie's doctor.

Then I got the realization that for the first time in my life I had been brave enough to defy her and had gotten away with it. I was dizzy with the thrill of it, and I felt like I was going to burst in exhilaration.

I went to the front window and watched for Connie's doctor. True to the extinct wonder of the good old days, he was there inside of twenty minutes. And within another twenty minutes Connie was being trundled into an ambulance. She passed away a week later and the whole block was ecstatic.

The hoopla and hysteria of the Second World War seemed to compress time. I was sixteen years old and graduated from McKinley High School in 1944. I liked casual clothes and dressed up salads. Girls were wild about me, but I never met one that really moved me.

I dropped them quickly and rushed desperately to a new one hoping to discover a steady sweetheart. Almost all of my sexual contacts with girls were fiascos. I either failed to get hard or I couldn't stay hard long enough to ejaculate.

I loved to get ravishing in drag and pick up studs on those rare occasions when I got high on gin. Guys really turned me on. I thrilled to the drunken core when they sodomized me and I could suck them off.

This recklessly freakish creature that surfaced I named Sally in contemptible memory of the “come dump” that had led big dumb Bessie to ruin.

Mama and I got along fine, that is, as long as I didn't let it slip that I had a mind of my own and that I wasn't preciously cuddlesome and adorable Sweet Pea.

Back in 1942, Prophet Twelve Powers caught a term in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, for using the mail to defraud.

Mama proved right away that the midnight trysts in the lair of
the sorcerer had been made with much more than sensual intent. He left her with a practicing knowledge of his craft and a bountiful stock of oils, candles, incense, dream books and, of course, enemy destruct powder.

Mama was, naturally, happy to quit slaving for the hated white folks who often forgot her name and addressed her “hey, girl.”

As Madame Miracle she was respected by her many clients who sought her good-luck products and counsel. After I finished high school, I worked full time with Mama. I answered the phone and received her clients from twelve noon to eight
P.M.
five days a week.

Mama was deadly serious in the role. She stopped using makeup altogether, and wore only loose-fitting long black robes. She wore her hair straight back and pulled into a neat bun at the back of the head.

I helped her as much as I could with grammar and reading. She helped herself until daybreak on countless occasions. She lost nearly all of her draggy Southern accent, and seldom made a glaring grammatical error in conversation.

She had enough money saved in 1944 to put down a sizable sum toward the purchase of the building where we lived.

Hattie Greene, Railhead's mother and the rest of the longtime tenants had moved away. Mama had a public image of dignity and wisdom. On the surface she seemed self-confident, free of inner turmoil, even happy.

But many late nights I heard her pacing the flat for hours from living room to kitchen. I guess terrible guilt about Papa, the twins and Junior was festering inside her.

Just to escape the possessive pressure of Mama's presence I went to a birthday party around the middle of May in 1945. I had turned seventeen on April 5 of the year.

The celebration was on the Southside at Fifty-sixth Street and South Parkway Boulevard. Ray, the guest of honor, was a horny young guy who had been in my gym class in school. Several times he accidentally pressed himself against me in the shower.

Ray's folks had gone to Wisconsin for the weekend, and there were a dozen teenage girls and guys smoking pot and drinking wine when I got to the party around two
P.M.

I didn't go for the pot. I nipped a little wine.

The wine was cheap. The apartment was hot and funky. And the guys and girls had evenly paired off with each other. Ray was stoned slobbery and sure he was for me.

I slipped away to the street. I went down the Boulevard to Fifty-fifth Street. I went into a drugstore on Fifty-fifth Street and Prairie Avenue. I sat on a stool at the fountain and sipped an icy glass of lemonade.