by Mary Monroe
“I don’t know why. You feel stiff as a plank,” he complained. “If something or somebody is bothering you, you need to let me know. I’ll straighten things out.”
“I know you would, baby. But it ain’t that simple. What’s bothering me is how Joyce and Odell treat us sometime. It seem like every time me and her conversate, she say things that hurt my feelings.”
“Ain’t we gone over this before—more than once?”
“Yes, and we’ll keep going over it.”
“Whatever,” he tossed in with a shrug. “Joyce ain’t got no reason to want to say nothing that’ll make you feel bad, especially now that y’all done got closer.”
“I know. But like I told you before, I don’t think she even realize she doing it. I don’t like feeling bad about myself.”
“What I’d like to know is, How can a tough cookie like you let a prissy woman like Joyce keep getting under your skin?”
“What you getting at?”
“Before we got married, when somebody disrespected you, you didn’t let them get away with it. Remember the night at Delroy’s when a woman throwed a drink in your face because she thought you was flirting with her man? You knocked her out with one punch. And I bet Lester’s balls is still throbbing after the hurting you put on his crotch.”
“Aw, Milton, I ain’t about to do nothing physical to Joyce. I don’t settle things with violence no more. I just wish . . . wish she would stop making me feel so bad.”
Milton looked so exasperated, I was sorry I had brung up the subject. “You need to tell me what you want me to do about the way Joyce be talking to you. If I can stop her, I will so you won’t keep harping on this issue. I’ll even set her uppity Queen of Sheba ass down and tell her to stop low-rating you.”
My body stiffened even more. “No. That would make things worse. But it’s nice to know you’d be willing to do it.” I laughed. “Whenever she provoke me, I do a little low-rating on her to her face, too. That’s a step in the right direction, I guess.”
“Good. Keep going in that direction. Just remember we still looking at them as our cash cows, so don’t go too far off the rails and run them out of our lives completely.” Milton stopped talking and gave me one of the most loving looks he’d ever gave me. “Yvonne, no matter what nobody say about you, you my Queen of Sheba.”
“And you my Prince Charming.”
CHAPTER 15
MILTON
IT DIDN’T MAKE NO DIFFERENCE TO YVONNE THAT I WOULDN’T WIN no blue-ribbon prizes for my looks. Right after she got to know me, she said it was the beauty of my soul she’d fell in love with. And that this was more important to her than a handsome face and a world-beating body. That was why she’d married me. I was everything she’d been looking for in a man. When she needed to get something off her chest, my ears was always open. I just wished she hadn’t done it tonight, while we was dancing.
“Don’t pay no mind to what Joyce says about you,” I suggested.
“It ain’t just that. Another thing that’s been bothering me lately is the fact that they’ve only invited us to their place one time. And the whole time we was there, they kept looking at the clock, like they couldn’t wait for us to leave. You should have seen the way Odell’s eyebrows shot up when you put your feet on their coffee table. After I used the bathroom, Joyce rushed in and fanned the air with a magazine. And I hadn’t even left no stink!”
“She done the same thing when I used the toilet that evening.”
“And they supposed to be Christians! Do you think they behave the same way with their other friends when they visit?”
“Maybe they do. If that’s the case, we shouldn’t take nothing personal. Anyway, I try not to let petty bullshit like that get to me too often. But if it really bothers you, we need to do something about it.”
Yvonne leaned her head back and rolled her eyes. “And just how would you fix something like them not wanting to invite us into their house?”
“Easy. We’ll invite ourselves.”
“I don’t know about that. When I dropped in uninvited one Saturday afternoon, she had company. Some white woman and her husband. The way Joyce was sucking up to them turned my stomach inside out. I can’t stand to watch colored people act as giddy as trained monkeys when they get around white folks. I thought Joyce was smart enough to know that it don’t do no good to try to impress crackers.”
“That’s the way the so-called ‘good’ white folks expect us to act.”
Yvonne glanced around for a few seconds. Willie Frank was dancing with Dee Dee only a few feet away, so she whispered, “Our hillbilly and his family don’t expect us to act like that.”
“The Perdue family is just as righteous as they can be. Like us, they take their religion serious. Folks that really got the spirit don’t look down on nobody. And don’t use that word around them. Especially Willie Frank. He is the last person in the world I’d want to upset. We need him, and I really like having him in our lives.”
“What word?”
“Hillbilly. That’s a low rating to a redneck.” I stopped talking and gave Yvonne a curious look. “I wonder if the folks you seen with Joyce was the same elderly pair I seen Odell grinning at and fawning all over last week, when I popped into the store?”
“No, it couldn’t have been them. The folks I seen was in their thirties. The woman’s family own a café in Mobile, and the husband work in the sheriff’s office. He must be a deputy or something like that.”
“Sheriff’s department, huh? That’s ominous news any way you look at it. Nothing good never came to me when it involved somebody connected to the law.”
“Me neither.”
“Well, if we go next door again and that couple is visiting, we won’t stay long. We won’t get too friendly with none of their white friends, period. Now that I know Joyce and Odell a little better, I can tell that they the kind of Goody Two-shoes white folks like to buddy up with so they can make it look like they care about colored people. I figured that out a long time ago. Peckerwoods will do all kinds of good deeds for colored folks to help ease their conscience and make them feel less guilty about slavery and segregation. But they’ll turn on a dime and cause all kinds of problems if they take a notion. Shoot! That’s their nature. And I especially avoid white women.”
“What about Lyla Bullard and Emmalou? You going to ‘avoid’ them, too?”
“Pffft!” I snickered and waved my hand. “They cut from the same cloth as Willie Frank’s female kinfolks, so they ain’t nothing to worry about.”
“Make one mad enough and see.”
“Stop talking crazy. You know what I mean. I wouldn’t give none of them white women we friends with no reason to turn on me. It’s them other ones I’m talking about. Like the ones we pass on the street. I don’t even look at them pale-faced heifers. I ain’t going to give nary one a chance to accuse me of rape. When I was nine, the Ku Klux Klan stormed my uncle Roland’s house while I was spending the night. They lynched him in his own front yard, with me, his wife, and his four kids watching. And all because a white woman claimed he had looked at her like he wanted to rape her.”
“Milton, I know all about the Klux’s handiwork, so we don’t need to go there. I’m more interested in talking about Joyce and Odell. She claimed she was going out with a friend this evening. That’s why she left so early. But she didn’t go nowhere.”
“How do you know that? We been pretty busy tonight, so you ain’t had time to be keeping tabs on her.”
“I ain’t too busy to peep out the window every now and then. That lying wench was on her porch, beating a rug, a little while ago. If a car had pulled up over there, I would have heard it.”
“She must have changed her mind. Or maybe her friend had to cancel.”
The music was still going, but I stopped dancing and steered Yvonne to a corner. We started talking in a low and more serious tone.
“Baby, stop wasting time fretting over things we can’t change,” I said. “Th
ink about all the money we saving by swiping stuff from the store. Next time I go up in there, I’m going to take so much snuff and chewing tobacco and sell to them hillbillies, we’ll have enough to pay our light bill for the next few months. And as bad as we want a telephone, as long as we can use theirs, we ain’t got to spend no money getting one put in our house for a while.”
“Hmmm. That is a good point.”
“And they got that car, so when we need a ride, we can go to them.”
“Oh yeah? Odell wouldn’t give us no ride home today, so we can’t always count on them for transportation.”
“Maybe not all the time. Anytime we can get a free ride is better than nothing. Listen up, Yvonne. Let’s be cool for now. We’ll milk them cows next door while the milking is good. They could turn out to be good friends in the long run. And even teach us how to be more polished citizens like them. I would love to see what it’s like to be looked up to and respected by folks that’s been looking down on us all our lives.”
“I would like that, too.”
“Odell used to be lowly—doing handyman work in a whorehouse and farm labor. Look where he at now.”
“I realize that.” Yvonne let out a long, heavy sigh. “I see some jars that need to be refilled. Let’s stop yakking and get back to serving drinks.”
We had never had a relationship with people that confused us as much as Joyce and Odell. We never knew when they was going to be fun to be around or say or do something to make us feel bad about who we was. I had to admit to myself that they was probably as confused and skeptical about us.
“Even if we don’t never get no respect from respectable folks, once we have all the things we want, we might not even want to associate with Joyce and Odell at all.”
“And that’s a fact, baby,” Yvonne agreed.
CHAPTER 16
YVONNE
FALL WAS MY FAVORITE SEASON, SO I WAS GLAD IT WAS OCTOBER now. I enjoyed the cooler weather and how all the brown and orange leaves fell off the trees and covered the ground. Every yard on our street looked like somebody had covered it with a patchwork quilt. This fall would be a big deal because Willie Frank would be celebrating his thirty-fifth birthday next month. Since it was a milestone for him, we had already started planning a big party. Me and Milton’s birthdays was in February, three days apart. We always threw a big shindig that week.
We decided to pay Joyce and Odell a visit when we got home from work the first Monday in October. We knew they had company, because there was a strange truck parked in front of their house, right behind their car. When we got up on their front porch, we could hear people inside laughing and talking. I had to knock twice and hard before Joyce came to the door.
“Where y’all going?” she asked, looking annoyed. For a woman smart enough to be working with schoolkids, I couldn’t believe she’d asked such a dumb question. She must have realized how ridiculous it was, because a split second later she tossed in, “I mean, we weren’t expecting y’all this evening. Is everything all right?”
She was looking at me, but Milton answered. “Yup. Everything is fine on our end. We ain’t seen or heard a peep out of y’all the past couple of days. We wanted to make sure everything was all right. That’s what good neighbors do, right?”
Joyce cleared her throat and gave us a testy look. “Thanks for the concern, but y’all don’t need to worry about us. Everything is fine on our end, too,” she claimed with a fake smile.
She had on a navy-blue, mammy-made dress; shiny, black, round-toed pumps, like the ones old ladies liked to wear; and make-up. She was still as plain as white rice, though. Poor Joyce. A fairy godmother couldn’t make her look cute. She always wore the wrong shade of face powder and rouge, but her maroon lipstick looked nice on her liver-colored lips. I was about to pay her a compliment, something I suspected she didn’t get too often. Before I could, she gazed at my hair and shook her head.
“Were you in a fight?”
“No. Why do you ask?” Her odd question threw me for a loop. I suspected she was about to say something else that would get a rise out of me. I was right.
“Because your hair is all over the place again.” She didn’t say it in a mean tone, but it hurt my feelings just the same.
I took such a deep breath, I could feel the air going all through me. “It’s windy, and I couldn’t find my scarf when I left the house this morning,” I muttered. I had no idea why she had to make a comment about my hair again. I thought it looked way better than them cockleburs on her head.
“I’ll get some scarves for you the next time I go to the store,” she went on, shaking her head again. Then she offered up another fake smile. “So, what’s up with y’all this evening?”
“Nothing much. We had some free time, so we thought we’d come see you and Odell for a little while,” I replied.
“We can’t stay long,” Milton threw in. “Willie Frank let us borrow his truck, because we got other places to go tonight. We stuck a note on the door, telling all the drinkers not to come back until after nine.”
“Well, we have company right now. But since y’all already here, y’all welcome to join us,” Joyce said with enough hesitation for me to notice.
Welcome? It was plain as day she didn’t mean it. I would have had more respect for her if she had been woman enough to tell us to come back when they didn’t have company. She waved us into the living room, where Odell and a homely middle-aged white couple in drab clothes sat on the couch. There was four empty glasses on the coffee table, some dominoes, and a huge, half-empty bottle of Calvert Extra whiskey, the most expensive store-bought brand available in Branson.
Odell looked at Joyce, then at us. From the corner of my eye, I seen her give him a shrug. “Yvonne, you and Milton come on in and meet Mamie and Jeb Wagoner,” he suggested with a smile as fake as Joyce’s. “They own a feedstore on the north side, right next door to their lovely home on Willow Street.”
Just like I’d always suspected, any white folks that Joyce and Odell invited into their home had to have money and prestige and had to live in the most expensive part of town, on the same street as our mayor. Odell moved from the couch to the easy chair facing it. The Wagoners looked dazed, but they nodded as me and Milton plopped down on the couch next to them. Joyce shuffled over to Odell and sat down on the arm of his seat. I was happy she didn’t look so annoyed now.
It didn’t take long for me to figure out that the Wagoners was just as snooty as Joyce and Odell. Mamie looked like she was going to pass out when Milton said we was bootleggers and lived one house over.
“I bet the politicians are kicking themselves in the butt for ending Prohibition. The bars, liquor stores, and restaurants are losing money left and right. The same folks that were drinking illegally are still going to the bootleggers, because it’s cheaper,” Mamie sneered. Then she sucked on her teeth and squinted her dull brown eyes. “Y’all ain’t afraid to let strange people come into your house to drink?”
“No, because we don’t serve no thugs,” Milton said, beaming like a lightbulb. I was glad he added, “Besides, the nice bars and restaurants don’t serve colored folks . . .”
“And that’s a fact. Anyway, I apologize for our ignorance, because we thought all the colored bootleggers lived on the lower south side with all those brutish types,” Jeb eased in. He had big, dingy teeth that clicked when he talked.
“Most of them do.” I couldn’t get the rest of the words out fast enough. “We used to live over there, until we saved up enough to move to this neighborhood back in June. With the low crime rate over here, we get more business and a better class of people. Besides that, we love our new location so much, we might even try to buy our house.”
“I see. I know bootlegging is a lucrative business. We have several houses in our vicinity. One arrogant, brazen scoundrel lives three doors down from us. He always wears a suit and hat—even when he takes out the trash! My Lord!” Mamie hissed, looking from me to Milton with one eyebrow raised.
Colored bootleggers didn’t make nowhere near the kind of money the white ones on the north side made. The white ones got all the rich white folks’ business, so them bootleggers always dressed to the nines, carried guns, drove fancy cars, and lived in houses that looked like palaces compared to ours. Willie Frank had told me some of the ones he supplied booze to hired cabaret dancers on the weekends and holidays to entertain their guests.
Mamie sniffed and went on, with both eyebrows raised now. “Y’all must be doing good to be looking so prosperous.”
“We doing all right for colored folks,” I replied, smoothing down the sides of my new green cotton dress. Milton was as sharp as a tack in his beige seersucker suit. We didn’t get dressed up just to visit Joyce and Odell. We had other plans for later today. Mr. Cunningham’s wife was still recovering, so we wanted to pay her a short visit. After that, we planned to go to Mosella’s for supper.
The Mamie woman exhaled and gawked at Odell, probably wondering what kind of relationship him and Joyce had with us. I decided to take care of her curiosity myself.
“Joyce, I hope you and Odell come over again later tonight. We got our piano tuned up yesterday, and Willie Frank dropped off some new spirits that I know both of y’all will like,” I said with a smirk. “Aunt Mattie’s coming with a couple of her girls.”
The Wagoners looked horrified. Everybody in town knew who Aunt Mattie was.
“Um, I don’t know if we can make it tonight,” Joyce mumbled.
“Well, since y’all regulars, drop by anytime, day or night.” Milton grinned.
Mamie and Jeb gasped at the same time and shifted in their seats. They left five minutes later.
It turned out to be a fun evening, after all. For us at least. We stayed another half an hour. Being around Joyce and Odell had become a sport, and me and Milton was big sports fans. They was the only people we knew who could make us jealous, mad, and amused all at the same time.
I almost busted out laughing when Odell complained about how bad the shoplifters had got at the store. “I’m fixing to hire a security man to help watchdog the aisles,” he said in a stern tone. “It’s a damn shame folks can’t run a business without having to worry about the customers robbing them blind! I would love to get my hands on some of them crooks! I’d whup their asses until they shitted, and then I’d whup them for shitting!”