by Pat Parker
At least once a month, her father would decide that he’d earned enough money to take care of his family and they would go fishing. She loved to go fishing with her father. When she was eight, he had bought her her own rod and reel. Now instead of sitting with a line and old meat hoping to snare a crab, she got to sit on the banks with him and fish like the grown-ups. Sometimes they took the rest of the family. She didn’t like those times. Her sisters and mother would complain all the time about going home. When she and her father went alone, they would stay out all day and well into the night.
Those were the good times; but she also knew her father on the days when there were no tires to cut. Then the house was silent with the fear of his rage. The chickens and rabbits were inspected very carefully. If the animal’s water seemed the least bit yellow, she would be whipped. Any little thing wrong and his belt would be off his waist, wrapped around his hands, and flying through the air at his target. She had seen him and felt him whip her and her sisters until her mother had grabbed him. Seen her mother stand painfully by and watch until he seemed out of control and then take him into the bedroom to find the man again. And she had learned not to cry. She was whipped more often and longer. His face would contort and his words would shatter sanity, but she would not cry. And her mother would stop him and she would lead him into their bedroom, his shoulders slumped and his step heavy. She would stand and watch, her eyes glaring, standing very tall. She would not cry, and she was the victor.
There was a new store. The vacant building behind the green pole that served as a signal for the Pioneer Bus Line to stop and pick up the black people and take them from one ward to another had been transformed into an ocean of shoes. Frances stood and peered in the window. The large cardboard figure of Buster Brown and Ty smiled back at her and she thought of the commercial. “My name’s Buster Brown, I live in a shoe. This is my Dog Ty. He lives in there too.”
Red and Terry approached her. “Hey Frances, let’s play some peg.” “Naw, I don’t want to.” Red and Terry were her friends. Each day after school, they would come to the bus stop and play games while waiting for the green bus to take them home. They couldn’t play together in school. The boys and girls were each sent to their respective parts of the playgrounds. Frances hated playing with the other girls. They didn’t like football or baseball. They only wanted to play silly girl games and giggle. But after school, she could play what she wanted. If the ground was dry, they would produce little sacks of marbles, and fire missiles into the crude circle to destroy their opponents. If the ground was wet, they would produce rusty pocket knives and play peg. They were good friends. They always returned each other’s marbles, and they never tried to break each other’s knife in peg.
This day she didn’t want to play. She watched the man in the store put one pair of shoes here, another there. She had never seen so many different kinds of shoes. Her entire world of shoes consisted of brown-and-white saddle oxfords for school, black patent leather for Sunday, and sneakers for play. Here in this store were red shoes, blue shoes, white shoes, sandals, boots, grown-up shoes, kid shoes, the high-laced old-lady shoes, all kinds of shoes.
“Hey Frances, here comes the bus.”
All the way home, Frances thought about the shoes. She imagined herself rich and having all of those shoes in her house. She watched herself changing shoes every hour and then throwing them away. She would never have to polish shoes again. She would never have to take off a pair of shoes before she could play. She could run in the mud or water and not worry about getting whipped. She wouldn’t have to have taps to keep them from running over. She spent the rest of the day feeling good. Tomorrow she would get to see the shoes again.
Frances stayed after school that day and helped her teacher clean the boards and check the desks and cloakroom for forgotten articles. She knew that Red and Terry would be at the bus stop wondering where she was. But she didn’t want to see them. They would want to play some game. She would take her time and let them go home. Then she could look at the shoes. They wouldn’t understand if she told them about the fantasies. They would laugh. It would be better if she just let them go home.
When she reached the bus stop, they were gone. She walked to the window and looked in. She saw herself a great dancer on television wearing the blue ballet slippers. People stood up and applauded her performance, throwing roses on the stage. She took her bows and smiled.
“What are you doing?”
“Huh! Nothing… sir.”
Frances looked up at the white man. She had almost forgotten, but the memory of her recent whipping swept across her mind. She had seen this man before. Yes, he was the man in the shoe shop. She smiled.
“What’s your name, little girl?”
“Frances, sir.”
“You live around her, Frances?”
“No, sir, I live in Sunnyside. I’m waiting for the bus.”
“Sunnyside. That’s a long way from here. You know how to go all that way by yourself?”
“Yessir. I do it every day. I’m a big girl now. I’m in the fifth grade.”
“Would you like to come inside and look at the shoes, Frances?”
“Oh, yessir.”
Frances couldn’t believe what was happening. This had to be the nicest man in the world. She felt really important. It was almost like she was going to buy some shoes.
“It’s almost time for me to go, so I’m going to close up the shutters, Frances. You go ahead and look around.”
Frances walked slowly around the display tables. Barely touching first one shoe, then another. She would wear that shoe to the movie, and that shoe to the park, and that shoe to the rodeo, and that shoe to the circus, and-
“Would you like to go in the back and see where we store the shoes?”
“Yessir.”
Frances followed the man into the little room. She stopped inside the door and he turned and beckoned her to a small stool. She sat and looked around the room. There were rows and rows of boxes. It was more fun to see the shoes in the other rom. She wondered if the man would give her a pair of shoes. He closed the door and turned to her.
“Do you like candy, Frances?”
“Yessir.”
At first she hadn’t noticed the man walk up to her. He had unzipped his pants and was holding a large red thing, stroking it back and forth. His eyes were funny looking, like he was nervous.
“Do you know what this is?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, this is like candy, and I want you to suck it. And when you’re finished, I’ll give you a present.”
Frances looked at the large red thing. It didn’t look very much like any candy she had seen. It looked like a long, large, red mushroom. There was something white in the middle coming out of a hole. She looked at the man.
“Go on Frances, suck it.”
He tilted her head and pushed the large red thing into her mouth. It felt hard and much too big. And didn’t taste sweet at all like candy. The man had his hand around Frances’s neck. His grip tightened.
“Suck it, up and down, like candy.”
Frances was frightened. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t like this candy. She didn’t like the way the man sounded. His voice was mean like her father’s. She felt like she was going to throw up, and was afraid she’d be beaten. All of a sudden the man let out a cry. He pulled away from her and she stared as white cream came spurting from the large red thing, which was becoming smaller. She didn’t know what to do. She had knocked over the stool and backed away from the man. He had taken a handkerchief from somewhere and was wiping the red thing. He pushed it back into his pants.
“Now, didn’t you like that, Frances?”
“Yessir.”
“Tomorrow, after school, you come back and we’ll do it again. But you mustn’t tell anyone about it. It’s our little game. Okay?”
“Yessir.”
The man led Frances to the door. He reached into his pocket and handed her a qu
arter. He unlocked the front door and let her out.
“Now remember. It’s our private game.”
Frances didn’t answer. She saw the green bus and ran to it. She didn’t like the game. She looked at the quarter clutched in her hand. She dropped it on the floor of the bus.
She was very quiet that evening at home. Her mother checked her forehead to see if she had a fever. She went to bed that night and she did not think about the shoes.
The next afternoon after school, Frances talked Red and Terry into catching the bus at the next bus stop. She told them the man in the shoe store would probably take their knives if they played peg in front of his store. They never played there again.
“Shoes” first appeared in True to Life Adventure Stories,
Volume One, in 1983.
Mama and the Hogs
My fourth year was the beginning of an adventurous time. My family moved from the city. We moved to what is now a residential section of Houston, but then it was the country. There was our house and about two miles away was another house. We kids were really excited about this new place. There were fields and fields of blackberry bushes and no concrete in sight. There were also snakes and rats, not mice, rats and wild dogs but that didn’t bother us a bit. It bothered my mother a great deal.
See, no one had told my father about the Black matriarchy. And he didn’t tell my mother about buying the new house. My father was a prideful man, and he didn’t like the idea of his family living in the projects. I mean for sure the houses were spacious and warm and brick, and the yards were cut and trim, but it was still the projects. And he, my father, knew this guy who just happened to have a house for sale that he could buy without a large down payment and low installments. My father had to agree to keep the man’s horses, but he didn’t mind at all. My mother minded.
Now we kids thought the house was great. It was made out of tin. You know the tin with waves in it. And when it rained, which it did a lot of in Houston, the drops would bounce off that tin and make such a racket that it was really great.
There were four rooms in this house. The biggest being about nine feet by twelve feet. My sisters and I all had to sleep in this one double bed. Two of us with our heads at one end and the other two at the other end. It wouldn’t have been too bad, but Smokey and I hadn’t quit wetting the bed, and Sister and Red weren’t know for their patience and consideration. The mid-morning accidents came to be an issue of considerable passion.
The only thing I didn’t like about the house was the toilet. There was none. You had to go outside to an outhouse; and when the weather was warm that’s okay, but most of the time the weather was wet or cold, plus the people who build outhouses never seemed to take the size of children into consideration. Your feet never touch anything. I was always afraid I was going to lose my balance and fall in among the shit and maggots. I offered a prayer every time I had to go to the toilet.
By now you must realize that if there was no bathroom, there was no bathtub or shower. And that was okay by me; I’ve never been too fond of excessive amounts of water on my body. Now, I know my mother knew that my color wouldn’t wash off, but sometimes it seemed like she was trying awfully hard to do that. To this day, I can’t stand to scrub carrots, I empathize too much. Anyway, the bathing process was really fun. My mother had this washtub. You know the round wide tub made of some sort of metal. And she would heat water and that’s how we bathed. And since there were four of us kids at home that meant she had to heat a lot of water and carry it back and forth. So the number of required baths diminished greatly. But then we had to do the washoff trip. You get a pan of water and wash your body standing up, but after a little practice, you learned to hit and miss real good. You could complete the entire process in two minutes if Mama wasn’t watching. And most of the times he’d be busy doing something else.
Now my father always wanted to be a farmer, but he knew he couldn’t really afford to try that with a wife and four little kids. My brother, Billy, was off in the Navy by this time. So by buying this place he could have the best of two worlds. He could go to work every day and earn money and at the same time he could raise chickens, and ducks, and rabbits and geese and guineas. A sort of mini-farm. He was able to get away with this for my entire life in Houston. After other people moved to our community, he bribed them with chickens and pig meat not to call the city about our illegal farm.
My mother on the other hand had been raised on a farm in Paris, Texas and wanted no part of another one; but she’d also been taught that a wife does what her husband wants her to. But my grandparents didn’t teach her that she had to smile and be happy about it. So she very rarely smiled or was happy about this part of our lives.
First off, the house was too small. It couldn’t accommodate one fourth of the furniture that we had, and my mother decided that she was not going to leave her furniture. So when we moved, all the furniture came with us. She had furniture stacked on top of each other. You could climb all the way to the ceiling which wasn’t that tall to begin with and in and out of chairs and tables and vanity chests. It was great; but my mother was still bugged by our new dream castle.
Living on a farm all her life had not diminished her fear of certain animals. She could handle mice, but she couldn’t deal with rats at all. I don’t know how much you know about rodents, but we had what we called wood rats. Wood rats are big. No cat in its right mind would ever take one of them on.
My mother also didn’t have a particular fondness for snakes either. And she didn’t want to hear no shit about poisonous or not. She only related to the word snake period.
In addition to keeping the man’s horses, my daddy had agreed to take care of his hogs too. And this particular job my mother really hated. In those days no one was talking about, “pigs like clean environments,” so what we had was a mess of stinking hogs. And if the wind was blowing the wrong way, well, it was very difficult to cope. In a matter of a short time, my mother learned to hate those hogs. It was bad enough that she had to take care of them, but they weren’t even ours. And of course kids are very good at picking up vibrations. And Sister was a master at it. She figured out that if anything were done to those hogs it wouldn’t subject the culprit to a great deal of punishment.
Now the pig pen was in two parts. The first part was a little shed with a tin roof of course. And the second part was an open pen with the usual mud and feeding troughs. And there was this gate, actually, it was more like a passage way. And there was a top on it that you could lie on and the gate swung back and forth. Sister used to take Smokey and Red on top of the shed. I was too little. Then they would stomp up and down on the roof and the hogs would freak and come running out of the shed, through the gate and out into the pen. Then my sisters would lie across the gate and hit the hogs with sticks as they came through. They would do this every day.
Now there was one hog that had good sense. After the first few times, he refused to leave this shed. All the rest would still come charging out of the shed, but not this hog. He was a big mother, white with brown spots and Sister built up a real case with that hog. In fact, he became an obsession to her. She tried her damnedest to get that hog, but she just refused to leave that shed.
Smokey and Red finally got bored with the hog hitting game, but Sister would threaten them with all sorts of bodily harm to get them back on top of that shed and mess with that hog. And my mother was well aware of what they were doing, but she hated those hogs so much herself that she never stopped them or told my father about it. And the guy who owned the hogs could never figure out why his hogs were acting so strange after a while.
From time to time my mother would get so fed up that she would leave. She didn’t really have any place to go, so she would just strike out walking. And we’d fall in line behind her. She’d walk up to the highway which was called the Chocolate Bayou Road. The fact that only Blacks lived in that part of town had everything to do with the name. Anyway she would take off and Sister would gather us all to
gether and we’d go after her. We’d be crying, “Mama, Mama,” and she would just be walking and crying her own self. It was a sight to see. This woman walking, actually striding, down this road and maybe fifteen feet behind her these four little kids. Yeah, it was a sight to see, except that there was no one there to see it. And after Mama walked for a ways, she’d turn around and we’d all go home. This happened about once a week. One time Mama really got mad and packed her things, told my daddy she had had it and was leaving. So we all piled in the car and off we go to the train station. She was sitting there with her arms crossed; when Mama got really mad she crossed her arms and wouldn’t say anything. And we get to the station and we’re all crying cause Mama is leaving and Daddy don’t know what to do cause she done told him to take the house, and the animals and us and well, anyway that she had had it. I don’t know what caused her to change her mind; whether it was us or daddy looking so pitiful or knowing that the minute she got back to Paris my grandparents would have sent her right back to Houston or what, but she changed her mind and left the train station and came on back with us.
But she still wasn’t happy. One day she got so mad at trying to fit everything in that place that she took an axe and a sledge hammer and knocked out all the walls. So instead of five little rooms we had one big room. When my daddy got home he liked to have died. He knew for sure the whole thing was going to cave in on us, cause Mama didn’t exactly redecorate according to code. But just knocking out the walls seemed to do her a world of good. And we thought it was great, cause then we could tie ropes on the rafters and play Tarzan swinging throughout the house. And Mama seemed calmer.