by Mary Monroe
“Uh-huh,” I said, nodding. And as strange as it was, I did. I didn’t think it was right for a person to use somebody, then go on their merry way and not look back. “I wouldn’t let somebody treat me like that and get away with it, either. I would make their life a living hell.” I had no idea how prophetic my words were at the time. “But I can’t give you my uncle’s address or phone number, because he made me promise not to.”
“When you do talk to that gold-digging scalawag, you tell him he can go to hell! And make sure you tell him I said his dick was too small for me anyhow! I still might sue his ass!” Raymond hollered. When he left a few seconds later, he slammed our front door so hard, the large family portrait of me, Mama, Uncle Albert, Janet, and Ernest fell off the wall.
Mama galloped back into the living room with a rolling pin in her hand. I knew she would have used it on Raymond if he had not already left.
“Raymond sure is mad, Mama,” I said. I squatted down and picked up the picture, wiping dust off the edges. “I hope he doesn’t sue Uncle Albert.”
“Well, if he do, Albert deserves just what he gets. He brought this mess on hisself. See, that’s what happens when you piss somebody off. They can drag you into a legal situation. You remember that with that boyfriend of yours,” Mama warned.
Uncle Albert rarely wrote or called, and when he did, I was usually the only one he communicated with.
Two years after he had left Alabama, and after several dead-end jobs, Uncle Albert called home and told me that he’d been hired to work as a secretary for an engineering company with offices all over the world.
I was reluctant to share the news with everybody, but I did so a few days later, during dinner.
“Secretary? Him being a nanny wasn’t bad enough, I guess,” Mama shrieked. “I declare, I should have known he’d go all the way to California and get another sissified job.”
“If you thought the boy was one of them thangs before, him living out there in fag heaven is going to doom him to hell for sure,” Aunt Hattie mumbled. My aunt was my mother’s older sister. Her only child had died at birth forty years ago. When her husband died ten years ago, Aunt Hattie began to spend so much time at our house that people thought she actually lived with us.
“I might move to California myself one of these days,” I chirped. “I can stay with Uncle Albert.” I had just graduated from high school a few weeks ago. Mama and Aunt Hattie looked at me at the same time. I couldn’t decide which one gasped the loudest.
“Stop talking crazy, girl,” Mama advised. “Ain’t nothing out there in California for you. You got a nice boyfriend here. That should be enough for you.”
Jeffrey Morgan and I had been going together since eleventh grade. My jet-black hair was thick and long, a feature that every boy I knew liked. I had a pretty good shape, and my face was attractive, even without my make-up. However, my brown eyes were not big enough for me, my nose was too sharp, and I didn’t have the luscious, full lips like some of the black females I knew. But that didn’t stop people from telling me I was pretty, so I ran with it. I had a lot of confidence, and I carried myself in a way that made me stand out. Despite my looks, I still had to work hard to get and keep a cute boyfriend. Jeffrey was the cream of the crop, and a lot of girls were just waiting to get their paws on him.
Everything was beautiful between Jeffrey and me. We had eyes only for each other, or so I thought. A month after we had received our diplomas, I started hearing rumors that he was sneaking around with a girl named Rita Wallace. She had just moved to Coffeeville from Barbados. All the girls I knew, even the white ones, were concerned about Rita. Not only was she too beautiful and exotic for words, and not only did she have a shape like a movie star’s, but she also had no shame. Mama told me that the girl’s mama had sent her to live with her daddy in Alabama because she had slept with her own sister’s husband. I had no respect for girls who would stoop that low. So, like every other girl, I avoided Rita.
I needed to focus on more important things than Rita. One was money. Income was tight in our house, so I wanted to do something to help lighten Mama’s load. Two days after my graduation, I began to look for a job.
I had to put college on hold, but Jeffrey, his daddy being the manager of a huge restaurant, was going to go off to Morehouse in the fall, and it would be months before I saw him again. With that in mind, I wanted to spend as much time with him as possible.
One Saturday afternoon in the middle of July, I decided to go to Jeffrey’s house to make sure he was okay. I hadn’t heard from him in a week, and he had not returned any of my calls. I knew his parents and two younger siblings were on vacation at Disney World. Since he had the house to himself, I assumed he’d want to get jiggy. When I got to his house and knocked on the front door for at least two minutes, he didn’t answer. I knew he was home, because his old jalopy was in the driveway and that boy never walked anywhere. For all I knew, he could have been injured and was unable to get help, so I knew what I had to do next.
I was as familiar with the Morgans’ residence as I was with my own. I knew that the lock on the side door was broken. That was how I entered the house. It didn’t take me long to figure out what Jeffrey was up to. I followed the moans and groans to his bedroom in the back of the house. I realized he had wanted to get jiggy, but not with me. I kicked open his bedroom door, and there he was, humping that island girl like it was going out of style.
“Rita, turn over, baby! I want to hit it from behind!” he panted.
“You son of a bitch,” I said through clenched teeth. He was so into what he was doing, he didn’t even hear me! But Rita did. She whipped her head around, and when she saw me, she pushed Jeffrey so hard, he fell to the floor. He wobbled up to his feet, with a stunned look on his face.
“What the hell—” Jeffrey didn’t even have time to finish his sentence. I shot across the floor, grabbed the lamp off his nightstand, and started swinging it at him. I pummeled Jeffrey until I got tired. I left him curled up on the floor in a fetal position, with his tears, snot, and blood all over his naked body.
I ignored Rita, who was cowering on the bed, looking like she’d seen a ghost. Apparently, she was too frightened to even get up and run or to scream. I casually left the room, but when I got outside, I took off running. I ran the six blocks to my house, with Jeffrey’s blood on me from head to toe. When I got home, I snuck in through the kitchen door. Before I could make it to my room, Mama came out of nowhere and accosted me in the hallway leading from the kitchen.
She threw her hands up and screamed, “Rachel, what in the world happened to you? Did you kill somebody?”
“I don’t know, Mama.”
“What do you mean by that? Whose blood is that all over your clothes?”
Before I could respond, Ernest entered the hallway. He swallowed hard and looked from me to Mama. He spoke for the first time in three weeks. “Two cops just walked in the door. They come for you, Rachel.”
Jeffrey had called the cops, and they had come to arrest me for breaking and entering and aggravated assault.
Mama begged and pleaded with the cops not to take me to jail, but they handcuffed me and took me in, anyway. I waited in a cell for seven hours, while Mama scrambled around to borrow enough money to bail me out.
The next day she visited Jeffrey in the hospital and begged and pleaded with him to drop the charges against me. To my surprise, he did. However, his meddlesome mama made him take out a restraining order against me, and he did just that as soon as the hospital released him.
I was not allowed to go within five hundred feet of him for the next three years. That was all right by me, because I never wanted to see his cheating face again, anyway.
Chapter 30
Rachel
COFFEEVILLE WAS SUCH A SMALL TOWN, THERE WAS NO WAY I could go on about my business and not run into Jeffrey from time to time. It seemed like everywhere I went, there he was. From a distance, I watched as he brazenly romanced the same girl whom I’
d caught him in bed with. Each time I saw them together, I got mad as hell. I was afraid that sooner or later I’d snap and commit violence against Jeffrey again.
What bothered me the most was the way Jeffrey had started bashing me to our mutual friends. People told me he was going around saying things like “I had to drop that ignorant bitch” and “She ain’t got nothing to offer me, nohow.” I recalled how he used to tell me that it didn’t bother him that I lived in a low-rent neighborhood and that my family had so little, but now he was singing a different tune, and that bothered me. I was proud of my family, and it didn’t bother me that we didn’t live in the upscale neighborhood he lived in. I knew I had a lot to offer in a relationship, and I knew that someday the right man would realize that.
In the meantime, I got a job on the day shift, waiting tables at Jimmie’s Soul Food Restaurant. Since it was one of the few black-owned restaurants in town, and they served excellent food, Jeffrey eventually showed up for lunch with Rita. It had been three weeks since I’d attacked him.
“You need to take the next table,” I told Vernell, the other waitress on my shift. “I don’t want to go to jail today.”
Vernell knew about my situation with Jeffrey, as did almost everybody else in town, so she didn’t ask any questions. She was from my neighborhood, and we’d been friends since elementary school.
“That punk has some nerve stepping up in here with that island monkey! You want to spit in his order before I serve it to him?” Vernell asked, giving me a mischievous wink.
“No, I don’t think so. The best thing I can do is stay away from that two-timing bastard. He’ll be leaving for college soon,” I replied.
But Jeffrey didn’t leave for college that fall. I never found out the reason he didn’t, but he started working as a cashier at the same grocery store I shopped in. I didn’t want to violate the restraining order, so I had to plan my movements around his. I couldn’t go grocery shopping at the market during the hours he worked. I changed churches, and I stopped going every other place I knew he went. Finally, I decided that Coffeeville was not big enough for him and me.
That was the real reason I decided to leave Alabama and move to California to live with Uncle Albert. I quit my job and got another one at a catering company, making a little more money. From the get-go I made it clear to my folks that I was saving my money to move to California, but nobody supported my decision.
“You must be crazy to want to leave this nice home and that good job you got to move to a jungle like California,” my aunt Hattie said.
“And it’s a lot more expensive to live out there than it is here,” Mama pointed out.
“I’ll have enough money to live on for a while, so I think I’ll be just fine until I get a job. Besides, Uncle Albert said I could stay with him for as long as I want to,” I assured them.
I missed Uncle Albert and couldn’t wait to see him again. He had always been like a big brother to me, and it had been nice to have a “normal” brother to look up to, one who didn’t have mental issues, like my real brother, Ernest. Just thinking about Ernest’s condition was painful, and I thought about it all the time.
We had always known that something was wrong with Ernest. He didn’t talk until he was three years old. And the first thing he said was that a flying pig had come into his bedroom the night before. He would sit for hours at a time, just staring at the wall. Mama didn’t take him to a doctor until he started running through the house, yelling that invisible creatures were chasing him. When the doctor told Mama that Ernest was autistic, it was a word that she had never heard before. Instead of trying to find out more about the condition, she and everybody else in my family just lumped my brother into the same category as retarded people, or people they called “slow.” Ernest was not retarded.
Despite my brother’s condition, he was very gifted in some ways. He attended regular school until Mama got tired of trying to get the school staff to stop the other kids from taunting him. Then she began to homeschool him. By the time he was seven, he could read as well as I could. He loved animals, and without any formal training, he trained almost every dog on our block.
Even though Daddy had loved Ernest and had treated him well, after a while he couldn’t cope with him the way Mama could. We never knew from one day to the next what Ernest was going to do or say. At the time, my sister, Janet, was in preschool, but she had begun to act strangely, too. But her mood swings, outbursts, and blank stares didn’t seem as serious as Ernest’s problems, so she didn’t get the attention she needed until it was too late. By then she was what some people referred to as “mad as a hatter.” After a while, Daddy couldn’t hide his frustration. The burden of having two mentally challenged children was too much for him. He began to spend most of his time at work cleaning the courthouse or with one of the women he had started fooling around with.
When Janet turned five, things got really bad. It didn’t take long for us to realize her problems were just as serious as the ones Ernest had, maybe even more so. She was as cute as a button, but other kids avoided her because she did things that frightened them. She would stare off into space for hours at a time, and she would carry on conversations with animals. When Janet was six, she began to complain about invisible people whispering in her ear. Mama didn’t wait as long to take her to a doctor as she had done with Ernest. The first doctor she went to told her that Janet was bipolar and paranoid schizophrenic, more words that my mother had never heard before. When the doctor told Mama what to expect Janet to do, hallucinate and maybe even get violent, my mother got her tubes tied a month later because she didn’t want to take a chance on having another child with special needs. But that was like locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen. Daddy’s married lover’s husband shot and killed him the same evening Mama came home from the hospital.
A few days after Daddy’s funeral, Aunt Hattie barged into our house, clucking and complaining like a wet hen. She vented for over an hour. She had always “known” that some old gal’s husband was going to kill Daddy, and if she had ever gotten “proof” that her long-suffering husband, Marty, had cheated on her before he died, she would have killed him herself.
On this particular day, Mama and Aunt Hattie sat talking like fishwives, totally ignoring me as I sat at the kitchen table, helping them make a quilt for Ernest’s bed.
“I’m glad I got myself fixed. If I ever get married again, I don’t want to bring no more kids into this world that’ll have to be looked after as long as they live,” Mama stated.
Aunt Hattie took the conversation and ran with it. “Harrumph! That’s why I’m glad I couldn’t get pregnant again after my baby died all them years ago. Our family is cursed with all kinds of brain disorders. I know you ain’t forgot how Daddy used to get naked and run up and down the street when we was kids. And what about Cousin Nadine’s boy, Rollo? Last time I went to visit him in that military institution they put him in years ago, he told me he couldn’t wait to get out so he could go to a mall and kill a few folks and go down in history.”
That was how I found out that various forms of mental illness ran in our family. I didn’t even bother to ask any questions. What I had already heard was painful enough. Ironically, I still wanted to have children someday. I remained quiet as we continued to work on the quilt.
“Well, I’m glad I did have children, anyway. Ernest is a good boy when he’s medicated, and I know that with God’s help and the right meds, Janet will be just fine,” Mama said. “And look at how well Rachel turned out.”
“Harrumph!” Aunt Hattie said again. “Rachel’s weak and naive. I bet she’s going to marry some knucklehead who’ll make a fool out of her, like Marcus done to you.”
That was when I finally spoke up. “Y’all don’t have to worry about me. I’m not going to let a man make a fool out of me,” I vowed. I made up my mind that day that I would not let a man cheat on me and get away with it. “And if I do have children with special needs, I don’t care. There is
not one perfect person on this planet right now, and there won’t be until Jesus comes back.” My last statement shut Mama and Aunt Hattie up. We finished making the quilt in silence.
I really didn’t care if I had children with special needs. As far as I was concerned, everybody had special needs. Some more than others. My siblings just happened to be among the “others.” I didn’t love them any less, though.
After a while, Mama began to refer to Ernest and Janet as “still being worked on by God,” and I felt the same way. I didn’t balk when she asked me to stay home and babysit them when she needed to leave the house, or when she asked me to take one or both of them out for a walk. I didn’t even protest the day Ernest got hysterical and took off running down the street because some jackass had tossed a firecracker in front of us. It took me, Mama, a small army of neighborhood do-gooders, and Aunt Hattie several hours to track him down and bring him back home. A few hours later, I took a baseball bat and hunted down the boy who had tossed that firecracker. I had every intention of laying his head open with that baseball bat. But when he started crying and apologizing, I let him off the hook.
“Mama, I think you need to start thinking about putting Ernest in some kind of home,” I said after we had calmed Ernest down and had put him to bed.
“The boy is ‘in some kind of home,’” Mama defended. “This house is his home just as much as it is yours. If you don’t like what goes on in my house, you can either lump it or move out. And, in case you done forgot, Ernest ain’t the only ‘boy’ in this family with special needs. There is no telling what all Albert is into out there in that Babylon they call California with all them sissies.”
What I was never able to understand was why some folks, especially my family, thought that mental problems were acceptable but being gay was such a blight. It made no sense to me.