by Fauna Hodel
Pat spent all of her time with Big Momma, shopping, or running errands. Four or five nights a week, she took Pat and Johnny to church, attending services or helping the minister. On Sundays, from nine o’clock in the morning until late at night, they were at the church.
Pat thought that going to church was exciting, watching all the people jump up and down and scream “hallelujah” and “the Lord be praised, I’m saved.” After a few visits she knew who the sinners were; they were the ones who always sat up front and faced the congregation, confessing their wicked ways. Pat never got bored with any of it, even though the same people were saved each week.
Each day was the same routine, Big Momma would wake the child up with a big hug and kiss and then make her breakfast, help her get dressed and then they’d be off either to someone’s house that needed cleaning or to church.
When they returned home, Big Momma would work in the garden with Pat at her side.
“What’s you puttin’ in the ground?” Pat asked.
“Planting seeds. When you want something to grow, you just plant them in the ground and give them a little water and a little sunshine and they come up real, just like these.” Big Momma pointed to her gardenias.
“What can I put in?”
“You can put anything you want child, even your wishes. If you put your wishes on a little piece of paper and place it into God’s earth, He will hear you. And His angels will make the wish come true.” She smiled at Pat with eyes of love and tenderness, and then gave her a big hug.
Pat was the happiest she had ever been. They had a special feeling for each other. She would sit Pat on her lap and tell her stories, sometimes about the Bible, but mostly about her own family. She’d tell some of the foolish things that Jimmie Lee did when she was a youngster and how everyone thought she was the prettiest girl in Canton, Mississippi. She told Pat that Jimmie Lee always wanted to be famous and she was always showing herself off. Pat felt secure within her care.
Pat was in the parlor coloring in her book, as she did many times before. She wasn’t paying much attention to Big Momma who sat on her favorite chair knitting a doily for the upcoming church bazaar.
“Ohhh, Lord,” Big Momma moaned, “I’m not feeling so right, I feel a little dizzy.”
Pat looked up to see Big Momma’s ashen face in pain, her movements were slow and she was holding her arm. Pat grimaced as Big Momma painfully wiggled herself to the edge of the chair.
“Why you makin’ them funny faces?” Pat asked.
Pat noticed tears roll slowly down the woman’s cheeks as she said, “Big Momma don’t feel well, Pat. I think I’d better call Aunt Lucille to take care of. . . .” She stopped in mid-sentence, stood up and reached out in front of her with one hand, gasped and then fell into the glass doors that led onto the porch, shattering splinters of wood and glass.
Pat began to whimper. “Big Momma, Big Momma, stop it! You’re scaring me.” Pat shook her hands and backed away from her fallen guardian. She tried to get out of the house as quickly as possible, but part of the door was lying on Big Momma’s leg, blocking her way. Pat stepped over her large body, looked back at her as the woman grasped for a breath of air, with a painful moan. “You okay? Big Momma? Big Momma? You okay?”
When there was no answer from the considerable body lying awkwardly on the floor, with blood now forming a small puddle. Pat carefully stepped passed the debris and rushed down the steps to the house next door, beating on the screen door.
A short middle-age black woman suddenly appeared at the screen. “Little child, what’s all this noise about?”
“Big Momma’s on the floor. She won’t get up!” Pat said.
“What’s this? Oh dear!” She said as she rushed to the aid of the stricken woman, the child in tow.
Within a few minutes, the ambulance arrived on the scene and took Big Momma away. Jimmie’s sister, Lucille came to stay with Johnny and Pat while her mother was in the hospital. Pat missed her Big Momma and prayed to God for her angels to help.
Although Big Momma recovered within a few days, she remained bedridden for a few weeks. But for Pat, that was great news. Not only was her Big Momma saved, but she now knew that when she prayed to her angels, her prayers worked, just like she was taught.
Little Johnny and Pat did what they could to make it easier for Big Momma, trying not to make as much of a mess as usual. Pat overheard Lucille say that she had a stroke. At the time Pat didn’t know what that meant, but knew it was serious. She knew that Big Momma was too sick to spend as much time with her as before she fell down. She wondered what would become of her now.
Jimmie came down again from Sparks to check on Pat and Big Momma. She made the trip often over the next few months. Sometimes her brother Willie, who had a car, offered to drive to Sparks and pick her up because he liked to gamble. All the family—Willie, Lucille, Jesse, Jimmie, and Dolly—helped out with the expenses of Big Momma whenever they had a little extra cash. Jimmie would leave Pat with Big Momma on and off, sometimes for a few days, sometimes for a week at a time. Jimmie liked to have fun with her friends in LA just like she did in Reno.
Among the many cousins that were part of the family in Los Angeles, Pat’s favorite was Poochie, Dolly’s daughter, a girl twice Pat’s age, just old enough to be a real idol.
“I’m goin’ outside, Mom,” Poochie said.
“I’m going, too,” Pat added.
“No you’re not,” Poochie shouted back.
Pat put on her sad and rejected face long enough for her aunt to notice. Dolly fixed the sadness quickly, “Oh yes she is, girl, or you ain’t going nowhere.”
So off they went, Poochie, who had a reputation of being tough among the other kids, with Pat in tow, off to see her black friends from the neighborhood. They were no more than a block or two away when Poochie’s friends, all older than she, between eight and eleven years old, started making noise about the little white Patty. Two of the friends wanted to get Pat and Poochie to fight each other. “What’s you doin’ with that whitey? You know they don’t belong in this neighborhood,” asked a girl who was about eleven years old.
“Oh, she says she’s mixed, got colored blood in her,” Poochie responded.
“She’s too white. Hair is white, eyes is white. She’s all white, ain’t no color in that girl,” said another.
“Colored blood! She don’t have no colored blood. If she did she’d be that color all the way through.”
“How she know she got colored blood?” Another asked.
Poochie just stared at Pat and shrugged her shoulders. “My Aunt Jimmie is her momma and she says her daddy’s Negro.”
“Your Aunt Jimmie ain’t her momma,” said the girl again, “your Aunt Jimmie is as black as black, so that means her Daddy must be whiter than white for this white Patty to be as white as she is.”
Pat stepped up and shouted, “My momma says I’m white on the outside and black on the inside.”
“Then we jus’ got to open her up and see for ourselves, if she’s got the blood. She either has or she hasn’t.” Said another boy. “You brought her Pooch, you cut her and see what she bleeds.”
“Yeah, Poochie, cut her throat to see what color she’s got,” said the boy again. “Here, use this.” He handed her a small pocketknife.
One of the older girls grabbed Pat by the arm and pulled her over to Poochie. She squirmed free, but for just a moment. Poochie grabbed the knife and held it in her hand while trying to hold onto Pat’s arm, but Pat kept wiggling. The other kids were all trying to get Poochie to cut her and continued yelling. “Cut her Poochie, see what she bleeds.” Pat finally broke free and started to run. Poochie started to take chase but then stopped. Pat made it home by herself.
When Pat made it back to the house, her cheeks were streaked with tears. She tried to tell Big Momma what happened, but her incoherent cries and sniffles made everyone uneasy. She was used to most blacks outside of her immediate family looking at her with disapproval becaus
e she was a different color. But this was the first incident that forced her to feel the hatred. This time it was very personal and it scared and confused her.
Dolly was furious at her daughter for not taking care of Pat, and when confronted with the incident, Poochie denied that she was involved. “It wasn’t me who tried to see her blood, it was the other girls. I tried to get them to stop. I told them that Aunt Jimmie said she was half and half, but they didn’t believe me. They wanted to see for themselves. I tried to grab her away from them.”
Dolly didn’t buy into Poochie’s account and punished her accordingly. No one in the family was prepared to explain Patty’s whiteness, except Jimmie.
CHAPTER 7
“Pat, I’m having a rough time watching out for you,” Big Momma said softly to her. “With things the way they are in the world, and you looking so much whiter than you’re supposed to, I think you’d be better off with your own people.”
Pat’s scrunched-up nose and puzzled expression said it all, “Who’s my own people?”
“Someday you’ll know . . . someday.” Big Momma knew that Jimmie was not capable of raising Pat. Even if she was, she still didn’t think it was safe for a little white-skinned child with blue eyes to be living among the Negroes, particularly during the mid-fifties. The Supreme Court had just ruled against segregation and the reaction in the ghetto was more hostility and anger than fear. But the old woman was uneasy about the child’s safety.
When Big Momma was well enough to get around, she thought more seriously about what to do with Pat. A foster parent or adoption by a white family was the only answer, and Mrs. Rolstadt, a married woman with no children, was her first and only choice. Pat got along with her each time they met. She asked the woman if she and her husband would be interested in adopting a light skinned baby of mixed race. When Mrs. Rolstadt discovered who the child was, she quickly consented and began arrangements for an adoption.
The very next day Big Momma’s other daughter Lucille, and her son Jesse’s former wife, Isoli, were visiting.
“I don’t think I’m going to be able to take care of this child much longer,” Big Momma said while sitting at her kitchen table.
“Oh, Momma, don’t be silly, you’re gonna be fine,” Isoli said.
“Well, that may be, but this child is getting bigger and she’s going to need some schooling. How am I supposed to get her into school? It would be much better if she was with her own people.”
Lucille asked, “Only Jimmie knows who her own people are, and she sure ain’t about to tell anyone.”
“No, I don’t mean her real mother,” Big Momma said, “I mean her own people, white people. She’d be better off with them. And besides, I already made the arrangements.”
“You made arrangements with who?” asked Lucille.
Big Momma hesitated for a moment and then said, “They’re are some nice white folks that I do cleaning for. They’re God-fearing people. The husband has a good job, they’re stable and mature, and most importantly, they already met Pat and they get along real good. So it’s all settled. I just wanted to let you know what was going on. Cause I don’t want anything to happen to this child.”
Lucille held on to Big Momma’s hand, “You sure you know what you’re doing? Did you tell Jimmie about this?”
“No, I’ll tell her when the time is right, after all the legal stuff is done,” Big Momma responded.
Isoli raised her eyebrows, walked out of the room and wasted no time in calling Jimmie in Sparks to let her know that Big Momma was planning to have a white family adopt Pat.
The very next day as Dolly was just putting the finishing touches on Pat’s sandwich for lunch, Big Momma heard someone pounding on the front door. “What’s all that noise?” she asked. “Who’s doing all that banging?”
Dolly eyed Pat with a puzzled expression, as if the child had an answer. She walked into the parlor and opened the front door. “Jimmie! What are you doing here?” Dolly asked.
“Where’s my damn baby? Where’s Patta?” Jimmie yelled, pushing Dolly out of the way.
“Pat? She’s in the kitchen . . . eating her lunch. Why didn’t you tell us you were coming down?”
“So Big Momma could sneak my daughter out of the damn house in the middle of the night!”
“What?”
“You heard me. You think I don’t know what she’s up to! Ha! She has to be a whole lot damn quicker to fool me!”
Big Momma slowly got out of her bed just as Pat rushed to her side. She noticed the child’s body stiffen as they listened to the shouts echo back and forth. It had been a long while since they heard Jimmie’s temper and from the snarl in her voice they both knew there would be trouble.
Within moments Jimmie was in the kitchen standing beside Dolly. “Patta, where you at?” Jimmie yelled.
Pat was out of the bedroom and into the kitchen in a flash.
“Get your things, I’m takin’ you back to Sparks with me!”
“Just hold on here. . . .” Dolly began to say.
Big Momma hobbled out of the bedroom. “What’s all the commotion about . . . did you come down here just to make trouble?” she said in a weakened voice.
“Oh! Here’s the one that’s trying to give my baby to some damn whiteys,” Jimmie snapped back. “Who do you think you are, anyway? I asked you to watch my Patta . . . my own daughter . . . and before ya know it, and behind my back no less, you’re trying to pawn’er off. You didn’t think I’d let ya get away with that shit, do ya?”
“Pawn her off! What do you mean? I just had a stroke. Don’t make me get upset. You know I can’t give that little baby all the love and attention she got to have! God knows you ain’t fit to take care of her. The family that wants to adopt her is a good Christian family . . . that’s a whole lot more than you could give her. Who told you about this anyway?”
“Never ya mind who told me. I got my sources,” Jimmie said angrily,
Big Momma and Dolly returned glances, but Jimmie didn’t let up.
“And thank God for that!” Jimmie said. “To think you’d give my baby away . . . to a damn white family no less . . . knowing that the white bastards gave her away in the first place! Well let me tell you something . . . I’ll see you dead first before I let you give my baby away!”
Big Momma was shaking. The skin on her soft, brown face hardened as the tears trotted down her cheeks; her eyes filled with sorrow. She never imagined that her own daughter would turn on her. Without a word, Big Momma held her chest and gasped for air. Pat began to cry. Dolly put her arms around Big Momma and led her off into her bedroom to rest, with Jimmie and Pat in tow. Dolly turned to her sister and said, “How can you do this to your mother? You know how sick she is . . . don’t you have any feelings whatsoever? If anything happens. . . .”
“You mind your damn business. Just get my baby’s things and let me get the hell out of here!”
Pat, her face flush, stood by out of the line of fire, shivering, as she watched Dolly pack a small satchel and place it near the front door. As the tears swelled in her eyes, she kissed her Big Momma good-bye. “Don’t worry, little child, everything’s going to be all right. Big Momma will always be here when you need me.”
“You promise?” Pat asked.
“I promise,” said Big Momma as she hugged Pat and tapped her on the head.
Jimmie grabbed Pat by the hand and pulled her out the door.
That afternoon they boarded the Greyhound Bus. Pat wasn’t looking forward to the long, hard journey back to Sparks. She remembered how unpleasant it was last time when she was anxious to visit Big Momma, and that was under more favorable circumstances. She hated the way strangers stared at her when she called Jimmie “Momma.” It seemed as though Pat had awakened from a long, charm-filled dream. The only thing that changed was that she was a little older and more aware of what was going on.
The twelve-hour ride through the California countryside was difficult for Pat. Jimmie let her stand on the seat
to watch endless rows of small trees and bushes that stretched from the mountains to the roadside, filling the small valleys, and covering each hilltop as if God had laid down a massive brown and green carpet. For a while, it kept her thoughts occupied, postponing the sadness of being absent from Big Momma. But the noisy hum from the bus and the foul smell of fumes brought Pat back to reality. Each time she sat back down, tears came to her eyes.
“What’s the matter, my little queen? I missed you. I missed the prettiest girl in the whole world. Are you just gonna cry all the way home? I hope not, cause I was gonna tell you a story about your real momma.” Jimmie looked away, then glanced back just long enough to see that she got Pat’s attention. “And I know lots a things about her.”
Through her tears Pat could see that Momma was very nervous. Jimmie sipped from the flask she brought with her, then turned to Pat and said, “Patta, I know you miss Big Momma. You were very happy there . . . wasn’t you?” Pat looked up at her bloodshot eyes, sniffled, and nodded yes. “There’s lot’s of things you just don’t understand. It’s not that I want to be mean to Big Momma, after all, she’s my momma, too! Just like your real momma loves you. Even though she’s not with you, she still wants you to be taken care of—by me. And it’s important that you know that.”
“Where’s my real momma?” The child asked.
“Don’t you worry, your momma is fine. She’s just real young . . . too young to take care of you. And she’s beautiful, too. Got big blue eyes and long blond hair, just like you.”
“Am I ever gonna see her?”
“Oh yeah! Someday you’ll meet her. In fact, I can get a hold of your granddaddy anytime I want,” she said smugly. “All I got to do is pick up the phone and call. He’s a very powerful man . . . your granddaddy is. One day, when you’s older, I’ll tell you all about your real momma and your whole family, too.”
As she spoke, the child only imagined what her real mother looked like and how her granddaddy acted.
Jimmie continued, “Your real momma wanted me to raise you . . . raise you to be black. But you already knew that. I told you that before. So I couldn’t let Big Momma give you away to some white folks. That would ruin everything. What would your real momma say if she knew I let somebody take you away from me? She be spittin’ chickens.” Pat began to giggle. “You’re a very special child and someday you’re gonna be very rich and live in a big house with servants and fancy cars and lots of clothes. You’ll be just like a queen.”