Mama Black Widow (12 page)

Bessie had unbelievable nerve. She really did.

She got right in Mama's face and said peevishly, “Papa wuz worried an' Ah thot yu wuz gonna' stay out all night. Whut yu been doin', Mama? Huh?”

Mama shoved hard against Bessie's chest and said angrily, “Heifer, don' ast 'bout mah bizness. Ah'm th' onlyess wuk hoss 'roun heah, an' Ah'm gonna pleshu mahsef lak Ah don at uh bankit afta chuch. Is Junior home?”

Carol said, “Junior's up at Railhead's. I'll bring him home.”

Carol went out.

Mama said, “Sweet Pea, yu an' Bessie hol' them feet up so Ah ken see them shoes.”

Mama took a quick look and clapped her palms against her temples in playful condemnation. She shot a swift glance at the street and pulled a twenty dollar bill from her stocking top just as Junior and Carol came in.

Junior's eyes popped wide.

He said, “A Jackson frogskin! Whr'd yu git it, Mama?”

Mama stuck the bill in his shirt pocket and said, “Shet yo mouf, fool, and don' worry 'bout th' mule goin' blin'. An' lissen, yu take the twins an' Sweet Pea an' git bran'-new shoes tuhmorra. An' don' none uv yu blab mah bizness 'roun th' hous.”

We went to bed around 10
P.M.
I couldn't sleep. It wasn't that I was that excited about new shoes. I was worried about that look in Papa's eyes.

I was confused. I couldn't understand what Mama was up to sneaking around in the preacher's Cadillac and hurting Papa the way she was.

Mama wasn't worried. I heard her snoring blissfully. I lay there for a long time thinking angry thoughts about Mama, and then I heard Papa's key fumbling in the lock. I almost cried out in relief. I heard him stumble down the hall to the bedroom and soon his shoes hit the floor, kerplop. I fell asleep right away.

Next morning Carol didn't fix breakfast because nobody was hungry. I took a cup of coffee to Papa's bedroom, but he was gone. I had forgotten he swept out a pawnshop on Madison Street every Monday morning for a buck and a half fee.

It was a warm and brilliant July day. We took a streetcar to the Loop. The boom and the bustle of traffic, and the grim-faced white people made me clutch Junior's arm like I was going to drown in the sea of sound.

We stood entranced gazing at the opulent merchandise that seemed touchable behind the almost invisible plate glass.

We found a shoe store near State and Madison streets. Brand-new shoes were displayed in the luxurious window like burnished treasure.

We went and sat down gingerly for fittings on purple velvet chairs. A young blond white guy with a movie star face and gleaming teeth and clothes came to serve us.

Bessie giggled and looked down at the fuchsia carpet. Carol called out the numbers for the shoes we'd liked in the window. The clerk took our measurements, all except Junior's. He hadn't seen what he wanted in the window.

I got a pair of black Buster Brown oxfords. Carol got a pair of black sandals. Bessie got a pair of gaudy red sports shoes.

The clerk turned to Junior and said, “Now sir, may I help you?”

Junior gave him a hip sneer and said, “Yu ain't got nuthin' but square junk, Jack. Ah'm goin' to th' Southside and score fer some tan knob-toed kicks.”

We decided to wear our new shoes.

When the clerk said he'd wrap our old shoes, Bessie drew herself up and flung her hand through the air like a shabby countess and commanded, “Throw 'em away, sweety. Burn them raggity ole shoes.”

Carol frowned and led us from the store. We caught a southbound streetcar on State Street. A pleasant freedom from tension happened as the streetcar rattled away from the Loop's dizzying human whirlpool.

It really felt wonderful to cross the border of solid black town at 188th Street. I had felt so unclean and ragged down there in the Loop among the crisply dressed white people.

I knew I wasn't really dirty and my secondhand clothes weren't torn or tattered or anything. But still I had felt so alien and uncomfortable.

We left the streetcar at Thirty-fifth and walked toward Indiana Avenue. Shop doors gaped open in the sticky heat. The ecstatic
voice of Pat Flanagan, the Cub's baseball team announcer, blared from the dingy bars, pawnshops, beauty and barbershops.

Gaudy secondhand suits hung limply under the furnace sun like faded swatches of rainbow. Black guys in silk shirts and sailor straws strutted in and out of the womblike bars with high yellow strumpets tossing awesome rear ends inside loud tight dresses.

White pitchmen in front of jewelry and furniture stores cajoled and clutched at passing black mothers. Their skeletal children had horribly old faces and puslike yellow matter in the corners of their sunken eyes.

A white-haired black guy with insane eyes sprawled drunkenly in front of a vacant store in a puddle of piss. He was slobbering and shouting, “I'm a man, motherfuckers. Come on, fuck with me and go to the cemetery, motherfuckers.”

Ben Hur perfume, the cloying odor of hair pomade, stale beer and whiskey odors, and the greasy smell of cooking chitterlings coasted heavily on the humid air.

A sweaty black guy in a bloody white jacket snatched a squawking chicken from a crate on the sidewalk. He stood talking with a trio while the chicken shrieked in terror.

I heard the butcher say as we passed him, “Cocksucker, don't say that no more. Is you crazy? Ain't a peckerwood on the planet can whip Joe Louis. He's gonna' knock the shit outta' every white pussy that's fool enough to get in the ring with him.”

At Wabash Avenue a frowzy housewife type slashing the air with a butcher knife held a thickly rouged whore-type woman at bay in a doorway. Her mascaraed eyes were glittery with fear, and she flinched with each pass of the knife.

The protector of her husband's sexual boredom screamed again and again, “You nasty dick-sucking bitch, stay away from my husband. You hear me, bitch?”

I can remember distinctly the peculiar laughter (almost all of it identical) that I heard that first day spent in the ghetto streets.

The wild laugher was on all sides as we walked to the corner of Indiana Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street. It was strident laughter, unemotional and without mirth, like perhaps the treacherous laughter of a madman before he goes berserk.

We stopped at a sidewalk stand and got pig ear sandwiches and bottles of Nehi soda. We had almost finished when we missed Bessie. We found her in a bar down the street chatting gaily with a slick-haired black guy draped out in a sharp white suit.

Junior strode in and jerked her out. The dapper buy grinned like a Cheshire all the while and flicked open a switchblade and held it casually at his side.

Junior kept looking back over his shoulder until we went into a shoe store near Calumet Avenue. Junior let the store dispose of his old shoes and pranced to the sidewalk in his new tan knob-toes. I suddenly remembered that Railhead Cox wore nothing but tan knob-toed “kicks.”

We walked back down Thirty-fifth Street toward the car line at State Street. Near Michigan Avenue we paused at a vacant lot. A wiry black guy with a savage face stood in the bed of a battered pickup truck and hoarsely exhorted thirty to forty poorly dressed black people.

His strange grey eyes glowed as he pointed his index finger like a pistol. He was hypnotic crouching there and baring his teeth like a snarling black leopard.

He was saying, “Mr. and Mrs. Niggers, I ain't speaking nothing but the truth when I tell you the flag and national anthem shouldn't mean and ain't worth a pint of dog shit to black people.

“Now lemme tell you about the Constitution. It was created for white people by the slave-holding criminal Founding Fathers of this country. I wanta tell you about the corrupt bastards that call the rotten shots behind the scenes and mold the laws and the government to keep themselves rich and powerful and us poor and suppressed.

“They're the cynical clique of conning sonsuvbitches who have a death grip on the important money in this country and use it to buy the elections and the candidates.”

He paused and mopped sweat from his face and bald head. There was recognition on his face as he glared at an impressive-looking brown skin guy who got out of a shiny Lincoln sedan and came to stand on the fringe of the crowd.

The exhorter gave the rich-looking guy a venomous look and shouted, “I'm gonna get back to the big shot white crooks controlling the government and strangling free enterprise with their monopolies.

“But lemme tell you about the sick sadiddy niggers with pus on the brain who strive to be white. Don't worry, the police will always bust their nappy heads wide open just like they do mine and yours,

“Lemme say this. You remember the race war we had here in 1918. Well, Mr. and Mrs. Niggers, there's gonna be a big countrywide race war one of these days. Lemme tell you what's gonna happen to the pus head middle-class niggers who have forgotten their blackness. They are gonna be marooned out there, grinning and suck assing in white neighborhoods. The treacherous paddies are gonna cut off their peckers and ram them up their . . .”

Carol took my hand and led me down the sidewalk. We had walked almost to State Street before Junior and Bessie tore themselves away from the fanatical exhorter and caught up with us.

Junior and I sat across the aisle from the twins on the westbound streetcar. Bessie was rolling her eyes up at a sleek-looking Mexican in a dusty purple suit standing beside her in the crowded car.

I noticed how much the twins looked alike and yet how unalike they were under close scrutiny. Carol's mouth was tiny and seductive like mine. Her face was round and her tip-tilted nose was delicate, and her light hazel eyes were large and curly lashed like mine and Papa's.

Bessie's face was angular like Mama's and Junior's. Her mouth
was large, and her eyes were small like Mama's. Bessie's teeth had a slight overbite, and her feet were a size larger than Carol's. Bessie had long auburn hair like Carol's, but she put oil on it that gave it a greasy shine. Bessie was bold and flighty. Carol was soft and sensitive and demure. Bessie was simply a coarse version of Carol.

When we got home Papa was too tipsy to notice our new shoes. Mama came home around seven. She was silent and edgy during supper. Later while massaging her feet in the living room I asked her if she was sick.

She sighed and said, “Not en mah body, Sweet Pea. Ah let thet devlish white heifer whup mah spirit tuday. Ah started tu knock her head off follin' me 'roun lak Ah wuz uh chile an' finin' mah wuk wrong, an' she wuz low nuff tu plant uh fity-cent piece on the cahpet tu tess mah honessness.”

Carol said excitedly, “Mama, did yu give it tu her an' tell her yu don' steal?”

Mama smiled and said, “Shoot, Ah didn't say nuthin' tu her 'bout thet foolishment. Ah jes' put down uh quatah, two dimes an' uh nickul en place uv thet fity-cent piece. Wen fo-thurty come, Ah tol' her Ah wuzn't comin' back no mo.”

We all rolled on the floor laughing because Mama had been so clever. All but Papa. He grunted and went out the front door muttering.

That first summer in Chicago passed quickly. During the first part of August, radio and newspapers covered an electrifying event for black people. Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the Olympics in Berlin, and Hitler almost wet his pants.

Papa was a doddering shadow of himself. Slop wine and frustration had killed his ambition and energy. Mama's big pride, high temper and dislike for the white women she worked for caused her to often walk off jobs. This meant scraps of food on our table.

Mama had to scratch desperately to pay the rent. Many days hunger growled our stomachs, but Mama didn't give up or complain about being hungry. None of us could know that she was full, glutted with cunning schemes.

Toward the end of that first summer, I remember sticking my head out the front window watching her crawl home from the humiliation of cleaning for the despised white folks. I'd see her start way down the block to set her shoulders proud as the devil and quicken away the lag in her walk.

She'd come down the walk and into our ratty flat with an air that all was well and tomorrow would be marvelous. Her pitiful act was so sad because her eyes always mirrored the stark naked hate, hurt and horror of her blackness that rotted her soul.

In September, Mama took me to Hayes Grammar School, and I was enrolled in the first grade. I was small for my age so I fit right in with the kids in my class.

The twins and Junior didn't start school. The country school down South had prepared them for nothing higher than grade school up North. They simply couldn't face the embarrassment. And Mama didn't force them to.

Carol got a waitress job at a cafe on Madison Street. The twins had turned sixteen on June 25.

I liked school except for a bunch of teenage rowdies who called me Bustle Butt because I had an unusually fat behind for a small kid. I'd burst out crying and run home fast as I could with my palms clapped over my ears. I hated those loud-mouthed bums. I really did.

Soldier was evicted from the Vet's Hospital the last of September. Papa would get up enough energy on weekends to go to the Southside and help Soldier wash and wax cars under the El at Forty-seventh Street.

Papa bought a few groceries, but most of the little that he made with Soldier was spent on wine. Carol gave Mama most of her salary to apply on rent and utilities. As a result, Mama was able to start paying back the money she'd borrowed from Lockjaw Hudson's sister, Jonnie Mae.

Bessie spent her time with Sally Greene who had dropped out of school. Junior and Railhead were real tight, and Junior stuck to him like his shadow.

I remember how awfully lonesome I'd get with Mama and Carol working all day. Papa was home a lot, but he wanted to be left alone.

One sleety October afternoon I strayed to the third floor of our building. I saw Deacon Davis dumping his wastebasket into the big barrel on the rear landing. He was wearing yellow pajamas and a skullcap made from a woman's black silk stocking.