by Mary Monroe
“You is Frank’s oldest girl,” Muh’Dear reminded with a hiss. “And how she look like you is a mystery to me, since you took after me.”
“Well, I take after Daddy, too. Listen—I’m tired and I really need to get some sleep. It’s been a long day. I’ll call you again tomorrow.”
“I still can’t get over what possessed Jerome to let you go down there, by yourself, to prance around with—”
“Jerome didn’t let me do anything, Muh’Dear. He doesn’t own me and I do have a mind of my own. You should know that by now.”
“Which is why you still single at thirty-five and I ain’t got no grandchildren.” Muh’Dear let out a heavy sigh before she started grinding her teeth. I rolled my eyes and shook my head as she continued. “Where is that Frank at now? Up in some bootlegger’s house gettin’ drunk and lookin’ for another white woman to joog his pecker up in, I bet.”
“He’s in bed. He’s not well, Muh’Dear. I think his barhopping days are over. And for the record, the lady friend he’s got now is Black. Miss Pittman.”
“Oh. Well, you try to enjoy yourself down there. Like I told you before you left, all I want is for you to be happy. And…and I’m glad Frank still in the Church. You can tell him I said that.”
“I will, Muh’Dear.” I hung up and smiled. I couldn’t wait for that arrogant old cat to finish the pork chop. He dragged what was left of it across the floor as I shooed him back out the door.
CHAPTER 8
L
ong after Clyde the cat had disappeared from the kitchen, I stood in the doorway looking out into the night. Even with the back porch light on, I couldn’t see much. Green vines crawled up the sides of the porch walls. There wasn’t much of a backyard. But it had a clothesline, an old picnic table with three mismatched chairs, and what appeared to be an orange tree. In the yard of almost every one of the sorry shacks I had shared with Muh’Dear and Daddy during my childhood, we’d had an orange tree. I felt like I had come home. In a way, I had.
I was surprised to turn around and find Lillimae standing by the table in a muslin nightgown that barely covered her body.
“I hope you don’t think I was eavesdroppin’ on your conversation with your mama,” Lillimae said, removing a pitcher from the refrigerator. She poured us both a glass of water and waved me to a chair at the table as she sat down across from me.
“That’s okay. I don’t really have anything to hide from you,” I said, plopping down with a groan, drinking water I didn’t want. “Uh, that reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about all evening.” I drank some more water, wishing that it was something stronger sliding down my throat.
There was a blank look on Lillimae’s face. “What’s that?”
“I know you must be hurting right now about your mother.”
Lillimae sighed and clutched her glass with both hands. “And you’re probably wonderin’ why I care about a woman who don’t care about me.”
“She does care about you,” I said firmly.
Lillimae gasped and gave me a dry look. “How would you know that? You didn’t know her. And what about the way she behaved at the vegetable stand this evenin’?”
“I didn’t want to tell you,” I paused because I could barely form my sentences. “Your mother came outside as we were getting back into your car. She had a smile on her face, but she looked like she wanted to cry when we drove off. I bet if her boss hadn’t been around, she would have run out to the car and said something to you.”
Lillimae started blinking hard and biting her bottom lip. “Sure enough?”
I nodded. “I would have told you sooner or later. I guess the sooner you know she cares, the better.”
Lillimae folded her arms and glanced around the kitchen. “Now that I know where my mama works, maybe I’ll go back over there and slip her a note, tellin’ her to meet me somewhere where we can talk. Would you go with me? I don’t think I can do it otherwise. I am not as bold as you.”
I nodded. “I’m sure your mother would appreciate you taking that step.” I heard the toilet flush, so I glanced toward the doorway. Every time Daddy was out of my sight, I got nervous. It was like I couldn’t look at his face enough. Because my beloved stepfather had recently died, I had been afraid that Daddy would die before I could see him again. I blinked even harder and returned my attention to Lillimae.
“That day Mama left us, she took me aside and told me that I had to be stronger than Amos and Sondra because of the way I look.” A faraway look appeared on Lillimae’s face. “She was right.”
“You mean your color?”
“My lack of color would be more like it. I didn’t know what she meant, but it didn’t take me long to find out. Bein’ a Black girl in a white body ain’t no picnic. I’d give anything in this world to be as dark as you.”
“But don’t you have some advantages over the rest of us? When you go out alone, don’t white people treat you like one of their own?”
She nodded. “The ones that don’t know me do. But you don’t know how hard it is to be around Black folks and have them make jokes about me lookin’ white. You don’t know what it feels like when white folks on my job find out I’m Black. I can’t go around announcin’ to the world that I’m Black, but when they find out, it’s a whole different ball game. My first boyfriend’s mama was into that Black Panther stuff. The first time she got a look at me, she told me to my face that she wasn’t goin’ to be ‘eatin’ with the enemy’ or some shit like that.”
I pursed my lips and shrugged. “You can’t do anything about the way you look.”
“And don’t think I haven’t tried. I used to wear Afro wigs and dark makeup. When I got tired of that, I started wearin’ braids and all the things I saw the other Black girls wearin’. But that wasn’t me. I can’t be happy tryin’ to be somethin’ I’m not. Now my old man, Freddie Lee, ain’t too fond of white folks. But even before me, all his other girls was high yellow. That confused me. And it confused our boys when Freddie Lee put ’em in a all-white school tellin’ ’em he thought they’d do better goin’ to school with white kids. My babies would come home cryin’ every day because the white kids called them coons and niggers and spit on ’em.” At this point, Lillimae reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “You are so fortunate, Annette. People know what you are when they look at you and they treat you as such. You don’t give out no surprises.”
“I’ve had my share of abuse because of the way I look, too,” I said thoughtfully.
“But if you could change the way you look, knowin’ what you know now, would you?”
I smiled. “I don’t think so. Every person I’ve ever known has experienced some pain about one thing or another.”
Lillimae nodded and shrugged. We remained silent for a moment, but the crickets and other night creatures sounded like they had a symphony going on outside. The small window above the kitchen sink was open by a few inches. A moth that couldn’t make up its mind repeatedly flew in and out. I heard an old car rattle past the house before it backfired. The loud bang made us both jump.
Lillimae shut the window and returned to her seat with a groan. She had braided her hair and pinned it up on her head. Traces of face cream made her look even whiter under the glow of the weak lightbulb in the kitchen.
“Annette, I know you missed your daddy when you was growin’ up, but it sounds like you still managed to enjoy life. Didn’t your mama ever have any men friends livin’ in the house with y’all before she married your stepdaddy?”
It took me a moment to respond. “Just one,” I said stiffly, my eyes on the floor.
“Well, I hope he took up the slack that Daddy left behind.” Lillimae sniffed. “Was that man in the Church?”
“Uh-huh.” I cleared my throat and rubbed both my eyes. “But he wasn’t the kind of man I wanted to replace Daddy.”
“Regardless, a man was there to keep y’all company. My mother-in-law always tellin’ me that a piece of a man is better than no
man at all. She can’t wait for me to take that half-ass son of hers back so he can stop crampin’ her style. Every time I turn over in that big bed by myself, I know what she means. Bein’ alone ought to be a sin. If that man was willin’ to stay in the house with your mama, especially you bein’ by another man, that was a double blessin’. Wasn’t it?”
It took me a moment to respond. “Something like that,” I said vaguely. Yawning and stretching my arms, I rose and headed out of the kitchen.
I didn’t sleep much that night and when I did, Mr. Boatwright’s face dominated my dreams.
It was like he was still raping me.
CHAPTER 9
I
was glad Daddy got up early the next morning to go fishing. It was a ritual that he had started before I was born. I was surprised that he didn’t want to spend as much time with me as possible. But in a way, I was glad to have the space I needed to sort out my feelings. As happy as I was to be in the same house with him, I was still uncomfortable.
Surprisingly, I felt particularly at ease alone with Lillimae. Her looking so much like me helped.
Lillimae and I ate a huge breakfast of grits and bacon before we retreated to the front porch glider. Still in our bathrobes, we sat fanning our faces with old magazines as we watched one noisy, beat-up old car after another crawl down the street.
The sun had already started its assault. The people in the houses on both sides of us had come out on their porches trying to cool off. The same old man I had seen watering his lawn when I’d arrived was watering that same lawn again.
I was glad that my half-sister was the type who liked to talk. She seemed to enjoy telling me about how proud she was of Daddy and how he had raised her and her two siblings alone.
“We didn’t give Daddy half the trouble a lot of kids give their folks. Oh, our baby sister Sondra was a little on the wild side durin’ her teen years. She got pregnant when she was fourteen, but she couldn’t stop dancin’ up in the clubs long enough to carry the baby to full term. She settled down after her miscarriage long enough to finish school and join the army. Our brother Amos, he fooled around with some of them drug dealers and gangs, but he came to his senses after somebody shot at him on the street one night. I was glad when he joined the army, too.”
“Do you miss not having a relationship with your mama’s family?” I asked.
A weak smile crossed Lillimae’s face. She sniffed and nodded.
“Somebody pointed out my mama’s mama to me one day when I was eleven. She was workin’ the cotton-candy stand at a carnival. I went up to her and introduced myself.”
“What did she say?”
“She didn’t have to say anything for me to know where I stood with her. She hawked a wad of spit as big as a walnut in my face. Me, her first granddaughter. I heard she treats the other two daughters my mama had with her white husband like queens.”
Just then, a noisy, dusty blue Chevy, dented in the front, a red door on the driver’s side, crawled around the corner and stopped in front of Lillimae’s house. A young white woman, glancing around nervously, kept the motor running as she rolled down her window.
Lillimae gasped. “That’s my uncle’s wife. That’s Roxanne. The one I told you about.” She clutched my arm. Her knee started shaking against mine as she rose from her seat, pulling me up with her. Lillimae started waving with both hands to the woman in the car.
But the woman shook her head and yelled, “Lillimae, your mama died!” Then she rolled her window back up and drove off, leaving Lillimae and me on the porch staring in slack-jawed amazement until the car turned the corner.
Lillimae and I sat on the front porch in silence for about five minutes after the woman had delivered the news about Lillimae’s mother’s death. Finally, she turned to me and spoke through trembling lips that suddenly looked so dry I thought they’d crack. “What do you want to eat for dinner?” She sniffed and scratched the side of her neck, her eyes blinking hard. I noticed that when Lillimae was upset or angry, her eyes looked darker. Right now they looked as dark as mine.
“I’m not that hungry. Anything you fix is fine with me. Uh…I’m sorry about your mama.”
Instead of speaking again, Lillimae sighed and gently rubbed my thigh. The glider squeaked like it was in pain as we wobbled up to our feet at the same time and shuffled into the living room. I followed Lillimae into the kitchen where she grabbed a dish towel off of the table and started wiping her face.
Standing next to her, reared back on my legs, I asked, “Is there anybody you can call?”
She whirled around to face me. Her eyes were now red with dark shadows already forming beneath them. “For what?”
“About your mama. Don’t you want to know how she died?”
Lillimae shrugged, sucked in her breath, and shook her head. “I’ll find out soon enough,” she told me, narrowing her eyes.
CHAPTER 10
L
illimae and I spent the afternoon in front of the television watching game shows and The Phil Donahue Show. Around five, Daddy stumbled in with a bucket full of catfish. Two hours later, over a dinner of fish and more greens, Lillimae turned to Daddy and told him, “Roxanne came by today.” Lillimae had dabbed on some makeup, but it didn’t help. She couldn’t conceal her pain.
Daddy stopped chewing and looked from Lillimae to me and back to Lillimae with his eyes bulging. “Well, now I know why you lookin’ so much like hell, that I can smell the brimstone.” He snorted. “What did Roxanne want?” Fresh black-and-gray stubble on Daddy’s rough face reminded me of a briar patch. He dragged his fingers through his knotty hair and sniffed. “Musta been somethin’ deep for her to come by here in broad daylight.”
“She came by to tell me that Mama died,” Lillimae muttered, her eyes on the plate of untouched food in front of her.
Daddy leaned back in his wobbly chair. Scratching the side of his face, he muttered to Lillimae, “Well, bless your soul.” Then he let out a loud, deep breath. “Them fish sure was bitin’ today. Them bad boys was all but jumpin’ out the lake into my bucket on they own.”
It was an awkward moment for us all. I forced myself to eat as much as I could. Without a word, Lillimae pushed herself away from the table and waddled back to the living room. Daddy turned to me with his eyes narrowed.
“I bet that piece of news about Lillimae’s mama made your day,” he hissed, his jaw twitching. His words shocked and angered me.
“Well, it didn’t,” I snapped, surprised that Daddy would think I’d celebrate the death of a woman I didn’t know. “My mama raised me better than that,” I added proudly, rising.
I didn’t know what to expect the next day or the rest of my visit but I had already prepared myself to expect the worst. She didn’t say it, but I assumed Lillimae wanted to be left alone. So instead of joining her in the living room, I decided to turn in for the night and try to get some sleep. I couldn’t hear the television but I did hear a brief, muffled conversation between Daddy and Lillimae in the living room. Then the house got ominously quiet. It was hours before I fell asleep.
I had forgotten how hot Florida could be in the morning. Even with the plastic curtains covering the window in the bedroom that Lillimae had put me in, the sun’s rays woke me up that next morning around seven o’clock. I would have cracked open the window, but through the curtains I could see the outline of a huge grasshopper on it outside, peeping into the bedroom.
I didn’t know what kind of money Lillimae made working for the post office or how much money Daddy got from his retirement fund. But I knew it had to be enough between them that they could have lived in a much nicer neighborhood. And I was sure that they could afford to put better furniture in the house. Every piece in the house was probably older than I was. The mattress on the bed I was in was so weak, it was practically on the floor. Even without me on it. It was a struggle for me to pull myself out of the deep valley in the middle. Like the other floors in the house, the linoleum on the bedroom floor had been
waxed to a brilliant shine. My bare feet stuck to the floor as I made my way around the bed to retrieve my bathrobe from the back of a chair in front of a closet with a blanket for a door. An ironing board that Lillimae had used the evening before to clean the fish on had been propped up in a corner by a door that had no knob. I had to open and close it with a piece of wire hanging from the hole where a knob should have been. I didn’t know why I was feeling the way I was about people living in such squalor. Before Mr. Boatwright had ruined my life, Muh’Dear and I had lived in places not even this nice and I had been happy. I smiled and got dressed.
If the sun hadn’t aroused me first, the aroma of the elaborate breakfast Lillimae was preparing would have. The smell of bacon was so strong it made my eyes water. I had all of my appetite back. I was comfortable enough to let myself relax. However, now Lillimae was the one with no appetite. She didn’t even sit at the kitchen table with Daddy and me. Instead, she paced around the kitchen nibbling on a piece of dry toast and swatting flies with a potholder.
The subject of Lillimae’s mother’s death was not mentioned again until we read the newspaper that arrived the next day. It was then that we learned Lillimae’s mother had been involved in a fatal car crash on her way home from work just hours after she had treated Lillimae so rudely.
“The funeral’s Saturday,” Lillimae informed me after a brief telephone conversation she had with somebody she did not identify. “It’s the last time I’ll get to see her so I have to go.”
I didn’t know what Daddy was thinking about that white woman’s death, because other than a few grunts, he kept his comments to himself. Then he went to his room where he remained until I called him out to eat dinner.