by Mary Monroe
CHAPTER 6
YVONNE
I DIDN’T REGRET TAKING LESTER’S MONEY OR KATY’S BIKE. BUT I DID regret emptying my bowels on her bed. I had never done nothing like that before and didn’t plan on ever doing it again. Milton was a clean man, so I didn’t think he would appreciate me doing something so yucky. I decided not to tell him that part about my latest theft. If Katy or Lester told people about it and it got to Milton, I’d deal with it then.
Things couldn’t get no better for me. I was happier than I’d been since I was a little girl. Before I met Milton, I had felt like only part of a woman. He made me whole. But his words described us better: “I’m the grits, and you the butter.”
All my other boyfriends had been just dry runs in the bedroom. Sex with Milton was so good, there was times when there’d be so much love juice after we got done, we’d actually slide out of bed the next morning.
When I ran into Lester and Katy in public, they acted like they didn’t even see me. She had moved in with him a week after I left. They spent a lot of time peeping out their front window when me and Milton was sitting on our porch. And they did a heap of mean-mouthing about us to some of our neighbors. Their antics didn’t even faze me. I thought it was a shame that they didn’t have nothing better to do with their time. I had too much going on, so I didn’t waste my time keeping tabs on them. But the neighborhood gossips kept me posted. One woman told me that Katy had lost her job because she couldn’t get to work after somebody snuck into her house and stole her bicycle, and that was the main reason she had moved in with Lester so fast. The same woman told me that before the bike incident, another thief—or maybe the same one—had broke into Lester’s house and took all his money.
The money I’d took had really put him in a bind. And since Katy wasn’t bringing in a paycheck no more, she couldn’t help pay his rent or none of his other expenses. When he got three months behind, his landlord told him he had to move. The sheriff was scheduled to escort him and Katy out of the house, but they packed up and snuck off in the middle of the night the day before the sheriff’s visit. The gossips told me that they had moved to Tuscaloosa, which meant I wouldn’t have to worry about Lester coming after me again or about running into him and Katy on the street. She must have been too embarrassed and squeamish to tell folks about the stinky parting gift I’d left on her bed, because nobody never mentioned it to me.
After the way them devils had betrayed me, I wasn’t anxious to make no new friends. But I didn’t waste no time getting close to Milton’s best friend, a hillbilly named Willie Frank Perdue, whom he’d met in prison. Other than the white folks I’d worked for, I avoided them as much as I could. But Willie Frank wasn’t no ordinary white man. He had found Jesus while he was locked up, and he had a good heart, so he became one of my best friends, too.
Willie Frank came to our house several times a week to drop off a supply of the alcohol that him and his folks brewed in their still. Sometimes he came over just to visit and eat supper with us. He was a good-looking man, too. His silky blond hair and sky-blue eyes was his best features. The only problem was, several of his front teeth was missing. Every time he smiled, he reminded me of a jack-o’-lantern. But the ladies still loved him—especially the colored prostitutes he frolicked with on a regular basis. And he could afford to pay for his escapades. On top of them side jobs of breaking into houses that him and Milton pulled, which earned a nice profit, he sold alcohol to some of the other bootleggers and jook-joint owners.
“Do you ever have trouble with the laws and them meddlesome revenuers?” I’d asked him last night, after we’d unloaded several jugs of moonshine off his truck.
“Heck naw,” Willie Frank had told me, waving his hand. “I got everything sewed up. Me and my folks been paying them boogers off from day one, so we ain’t got to worry about nothing.” He paused and took a deep breath and told me in a low tone, “Besides, my uncle Lamar is close friends with Sheriff Potts. Whenever somebody in my family get tangled up in a legal situation, he straightens it out.”
“Is that right?”
“Uh-huh. When I cut the man that caught me in his bed with his wife, the law wanted to send me to the slammer for ten years. But Uncle Lamar went up to the district attorney, who happens to be his niece’s husband, and got me off with only five.”
Now that I knew Willie Frank had a connection to the law, I felt better about being a bootlegger. But it wasn’t a easy job. For one thing, we had to get the word out so everybody would know we was in the game now. The first few weeks, me, Milton, and Willie Frank buddied up to people in jook joints and houses run by other bootleggers. We let them know how much cheaper our stuff was, and that we offered complimentary snacks. Having me in the mix serving drinks attracted men who liked to be in the company of a pretty woman. But that wasn’t all we had going for us. Being in our early thirties and knowing how to have fun had a lot to do with it, too. Our rivals was dull and middle aged or older. Almost every single one had health issues that caused them to shut down business for days at a time, several times a month. If all that wasn’t inconvenient enough, some made their own booze, and it was nowhere near the high quality of what we got from Willie Frank. Our stuff got folks drunker faster. The few that did have women helping hired ones with faces and bodies that only their preachers and mamas could love. It took us about a year to get our business up to a level that suited us.
Milton taught me a lot during that time. “Girl, no matter what you do, do it good and you’ll be very successful. If you going to be a thief, be the best. If you go in a store to swipe a few items, always wear comfortable shoes, in case you have to make a run for it.” He had me sew some deep, wide pockets inside one of my jackets, like he’d done with his. That way when I went in a store to lift something, I didn’t always need to carry no purse to hide it in. I took what I wanted and slid it into my secret pockets. “If you take something a little at a time, store clerks won’t notice. It’s when you get greedy that you get caught.” I paid attention to Milton’s advice. When I got a itching for some new silverware, I went to three stores on different days and took all I wanted. I used the same routine when I seen a three-piece outfit I just had to have.
“Do you ever feel guilty about taking stuff?” I asked Milton the day I came home with a bunch of candy bars and some rouge that I’d slid down the front of a girdle I’d swiped the week before. I wore it when the weather was too hot for me to wear my jacket with the inside pockets.
“That’s a odd question coming from you,” he snickered, helping me wiggle out of the girdle.
“Well, I felt kind of bad when I took them knives from that new store on Morgan Street,” I admitted. “It was the last set they had.”
“Girl, guilty is a bad word in our line of business. I ain’t never felt that way about nothing. If somebody is stupid enough to leave jewelry and other items laying around for folks like me and Willie Frank and you to lift, the least we can do is teach them a lesson to be more careful by taking it. Shoot.”
* * *
Milton did everything he could to keep me happy. He helped with the cooking and all the other household chores. What more could a woman ask for? Three months after our wedding, he got me hired on as a waitress at Cunningham’s Grill, where he was the head cook. It was a full-time day job, so I was able to quit working in the sugarcane field.
In June of ’39, Milton told me that there was finally a nice house available on the upper south side and that the owner had told him we could move in right away. I was amazed that my life had improved so much in less than two years. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
“Milton, you mean we’ll finally get to live around doctors and other high-class colored folks?”
“Uh-huh. And the house is close to the bus lines. People will be glad to come drink at a house in such a nice, quiet location.”
Our new residence was just what I’d always wanted. All the rooms was on one floor. And like most of the other houses on our
street, it had a big attic, a pantry for me to store canned goods and knickknacks, a large front yard and backyard, and a picket fence. Milton was convinced that this was the home he’d been dreaming about.
The day we moved in, he went back to his sign-painting friend and had him print up a new HOME SWEET HOME sign without the question mark. When he got back to the house, he hung it on our bedroom wall facing the bed.
“How come you didn’t put it in the living room, where folks can see it?” I asked.
“Because that’s where we will be doing most of our business, and drunk folks give out negative energy,” he told me. “Nothing can fuck up happiness like bad energy.”
I was a little concerned about how our high-class new neighbors would react when they found out bootleggers had moved from the shabbiest part of town to their territory. But on the first day in our new home, the couple that lived one house over dropped in and welcomed us to the neighborhood.
I didn’t know what to make of Joyce and Odell Watson at first. She worked at a school as a teacher’s assistant. He managed MacPherson’s, a moneymaking country store that her mama and daddy owned. They had retired, and now Odell was running the show on his own. Him and Joyce was right snooty. I’d picked up on that ten minutes after they walked through our front door together the first time. They bragged about their jobs, their great marriage, how often they ate at expensive restaurants, and all the nice things they had in their house. For them to be so well off, I was surprised that they didn’t waste no time accepting drinks on the house.
* * *
The first couple of months flew by fast. We spent a heap of time socializing with Joyce and Odell, mostly at our house. I got the impression right off that they was particular about who they invited to their place. They had fancy, expensive furniture, a telephone, a car, and no telling how much money stashed away, so I could understand why they had such big heads. But that didn’t make me feel no better. Me and Milton had agreed from the get-go that they was the type of people that thought they was special and everybody else—meaning folks like us—was in the mix for their benefit. Odell was more uppity than Joyce in some ways. He lived closed enough to MacPherson’s so he could walk to work if he wanted to. But he was so highfalutin, he drove to work every day. And even though he had enough time to give Joyce a ride to her job, she rode with one of her coworkers or she walked! That gave us more unpleasant details about them: she was a fool and he was self-centered.
“I can’t believe how much nerve Joyce got,” I told Milton one evening, after we’d been in the new house two and a half months. She and Odell had just pranced out the door after guzzling down three free drinks apiece.
“What did she do?”
“She refused to drink water from the same dipper me and you and everybody else started using when we ran out of jars and cups. ‘The only person I drink after is Odell, because I know where his mouth has been,’ she told me. Humph! I offered to pour her some water in a pan, and she didn’t waste no time telling me to make sure it was clean.”
“Baby, don’t let that woman get under your skin. Odell done said worse things to me.”
“Like what?”
“Well, one night I complimented him on how dapper he always look, and how much I wish I could get my hair to look as sharp as his. Instead of being humble and thanking me, he told me that with the right clothes and grooming, any man could look good. His eyes roamed over me, and then he said, ‘Even you . . .’”
I gasped so hard, I lost my breath and couldn’t get the words out fast enough. “He all but called you ugly! What did you say?” I croaked.
“I laughed it off, because it was funny coming from a man married to a plain Jane.”
“Baby, from now on, let’s feed them with long-handled spoons.”
“Pffft! We already doing that. If they keep saying stuff we don’t like, we’ll just have to start feeding them with longer spoons. If they don’t make one of us snap the way Lester did when he came to my house, everything will be hunky-dory. Shoot. With all the resources they got, they might turn out to be the best things that ever happened to us, huh?”
“Yup,” I agreed.
CHAPTER 7
MILTON
September 1939
“MILTON, WE GOT A LATE NOTICE FOR LAST MONTH’S WATER bill yesterday. I thought you paid it.”
“Huh? I thought I did, too! Hmmm. I guess my memory ain’t what it used to be.”
“I guess it ain’t. In case you thought you paid the electric bill, you didn’t. We got a late notice about that one, too. You better stop being so irresponsible with our money, or I’ll start handling it.”
Yvonne glared at me across the breakfast table. Steam was rising from our coffee cups and the huge piles of grits on our plates. That wasn’t what was making me sweat, though. It was her chastising me. I was the man of the house, but she wore pants as often as I did.
“Do you hear me?”
“Yes, baby. But I know I paid the electric bill. That’s got to be a mix-up on their end. I’ll go down there today, on my lunch break, and straighten out them goofy folks.”
“No, I’ll go. Now, give me the money I gave you to pay this month’s bills.”
I lifted my coffee cup and took a swig before I swallowed and said in a raspy tone, “I . . . I ain’t got it.”
“What did you do with it?” That was one question Yvonne could answer herself, and she did. “You lost it gambling.”
I blinked and nodded.
“Milton, what’s happening to you? You used to be so responsible.”
“Sugar, I’m still responsible, but I ain’t perfect,” I pouted. “I’ll try and borrow the money.”
“You better try real hard! What do you think our snooty neighbors would say if we got our lights and water cut off—in this nice big house a few doors down from a doctor? Now, if you want to gamble again anytime soon, you better borrow enough money for that, too. I’m going to keep a close watch on all our bills for a while.”
“It ain’t going to be easy borrowing more money. See, I already owe a lot of folks,” I admitted. “They been hounding me so much to pay them back, I can hear them in my sleep. That’s why I been having them headaches . . .”
It didn’t take much to make Yvonne feel sorry for me. She gave me a pitiful look and reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “Well, we can’t afford for you to get sick and have to miss work at the grill and cut back on our bootlegging hours. I’ll pay the water and electric bills with the money I been saving up to buy some new curtains and a wig hat to send Aunt Nadine for her birthday. But you still better find somebody who’ll let you borrow money for your next gambling escapade. And I hope it’s somebody that won’t badger you to pay them back and cause you to have more headaches. How about going up to Odell next door? His pockets is deep enough to plant a tree. He is so easygoing about lending you money, and too much of a gentleman to ask for it back if you don’t repay him on time.”
“That’s a good idea, sugar. I don’t want to wear out my welcome with him, though. I just paid him back a loan three days ago.”
“Okay, don’t ask him, then. We don’t want our new neighbor to think we trying to take advantage of him.”
I had to turn my head because I didn’t want Yvonne to see the sheepish grin on my face. I was way beyond the point of just “taking advantage” of Odell Watson. I’d been blackmailing him since I’d busted him with another woman a couple of months ago. If I had knowed before I started shaking him down that he was such a pushover, I wouldn’t have even paid back none of them previous loans I’d hit him up for. Fool. A man as weak as he was made me suspect he was a sissy, too. If he did have some sugar in his tallywacker, it couldn’t be more than a spoonful. I came to that conclusion because him and Joyce had told us how hard they was trying to have a baby. And he had that pretty piece on the side named Betty Jean—the woman I’d busted him with!—whom he kept tucked away over in Hartville and who he had had three babies with.
Of all the things Odell had going for him, brains had to be at the bottom of the list. The stupidest thing a married man could do was tell the outside woman too much of his business. He could have humped Betty Jean and never told her his real name or where he lived. Like me and other smart men done when we creeped on our wives. If he had done that, all he had to do when she got pregnant was disappear. Then he wouldn’t be doling out money to her—and now me.
One thing that amazed me was how he’d been smart enough to convince Joyce to marry him five years ago, when the only job he had in her folks’ store was stocking shelves. Before that, he had been dragging along as a handyman at a whorehouse. Even though Joyce was educated and worked at a fancy school, she was still naïve as hell. To her, Odell was a blue-ribbon prize. And according to the gossips, she had been so desperate to get married, she would have married a baboon. Landing a handsome joker like Odell was probably rapture to her. He hadn’t just pulled the wool over her eyes; he’d swaddled her whole body in it. Lucky for him, and me, Odell had easy access to all kinds of money. Joyce was the only child of one of the few wealthy colored couples in town. They was just as gullible as she was when it came to Odell. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be running the store her family had made such a huge success. And he sure wouldn’t be living like the Prince Charming he thought he was.
One good thing about my arrangement with Odell was that I could make changes to it whenever I felt like it. Every time I went to him for more money, other than what we had agreed to, he got ugly with me. That didn’t rattle me at all. I was used to it by now, so I was prepared to listen to him fuss when I paid him another visit this afternoon.