Mama Black Widow (20 page)

I lay down on the sofa, but my whirling brain wouldn't let me nap. At eight
P.M.
Mama got up and went to the kitchen. I heard her washing dishes.

I went to the kitchen and started drying them. I was drying a steak knife when I got the terrible urge for the first time to kill Mama. I stood there staring at the pulse in her throat and feeling a strange kind of scary ecstasy thinking about plunging the knife to its hilt to start the scarlet spurting.

I stood there ecstatic and terrified. My hands trembled so violently I locked them together and hid them behind me. I could see clear as real Mama thrashing to death on the kitchen floor like a chicken with its head hatcheted off.

I dropped the knife and ran to the bathroom. I locked myself in.

I was leaning against the face bowl sweating and panting when Mama knocked and said, “Sweet Pea, yu awright?”

I fought for breath and managed to mumble, “Yes, Mama, dear, I'm awright.”

T
wo days after Carol's funeral I made my bed on the sofa. Sleeping in the bed where Carol had died gave my mind wrenching nightmares. Bessie and Junior were in the streets, and Mama was asleep. I was falling asleep when I heard knocking on the door.

I looked out the window to see if a police car or Lockjaw's limousine was out front. I went and put an eye to a thin crack in the doorjamb.

It was Frederick. I held my breath and heard Mama snoring. I eased the door open and stepped outside into the hall. Frederick's round face was drawn. His merry blue eyes were sad, and his pug nose was red like he had been weeping.

He said in a breaking voice, “I got in an hour ago. The chef at the cafe told me. Where is she?”

I said, “Oh, Frederick! She was buried with the baby two days ago in Rosehill Cemetery.”

He stood silently with a piteous look on his face. I didn't tell him about Mama's bestial part in the miscarriage. I did try, in a kid's clumsy way to comfort him.

Just before he left he said bitterly, “Why did God take her? She was the loveliest, sweetest girl I ever met and will ever know.”

Then his cherub face softened, and he had a dreamy look in his eyes.

He almost whispered, “Sweet Pea, it was magical with Carol. I never felt dwarfish and pudgy and comical looking like I know I am. Girls of my own race in subtle ways never let me forget it. But Carol, bless her angel heart in heaven, made me feel six feet tall, handsome and loved.”

He turned and walked dejectedly away. I went to the window and watched his old Model A careen madly and disappear into the lonely April midnight.

With Carol gone, 1939 was a lonely year for me. Junior was seldom home. Bessie was openly hostile toward Mama and in defiance, ran the streets with Sally, and with Railhead when he could catch up with her.

I had no close buddies at school because I didn't take to sports. But otherwise, I wasn't doing badly in school. I had been advanced to the fifth grade, which was only one grade behind for an eleven year old.

Connie, the landlady, had a stroke that paralyzed the whole right side of her body. She was a no-good woman, but she looked so pitiful with a crutch and dragging her leg that I couldn't help feeling sorry for her. And her only relative, her son, never came to visit her any more, not even to get money.

I couldn't visit Papa and Soldier as often as I wanted to because Papa would quiz me dizzy about Carol and where she was and why she didn't write him. I'd get nervous and have a helluva headache after all the fast lies I'd have to tell him.

Lockjaw and Red dropped in several times for short visits. I didn't hear Lockjaw mention the money Mama owed him. In fact, he almost always brought a slab of corned beef or some other delicacy. I guess he had one soft spot in his ruthless heart, and that for Carol's Mama.

Mr. Cox, Railhead's papa, dropped dead while shining a
customer's shoes in the Loop barbershop where he had worked for twenty years. A pal of Mr. Cox told Railhead that his papa's boss had to canvas the black shoe shiners and porters in the neighborhood of the barbershop to find out “what the hell is Bill's last name so I can send some funeral flowers?”

It was strange and awfully cold-blooded that after twenty long years, Mr. Cox, like multitudes of other black men and women, wasn't really a human being to his white boss, but only a shadowy flunkey with a mop and toilet brush and shine rag who answered to the name of Bill.

On a blustery Saturday night at the end of the first week in December Mama had unexpected visitors drop in. They were Marva Pike, the curvy coffee-cream-shaded secretary-treasurer of Mama's church, and the secretary's mother, Sister Pike and stentorian-voiced Reverend Owens who was the assistant pastor and heir apparent to the pulpit of the slick extortionist with the debauched yellow pimp face.

Sister Pike cleared her throat noisily and said, “Sister Tilson, the Lord has sent us on a sad but necessary mission.”

Then Sister Pike rolled and lowered her cow eyes apologetically and said, “Sister Tilson, all the members of our church know of your high regard and . . . uh . . . affection for our beloved pastor. My heart is heavily burdened to have to tell you that Reverend Owens and myself are starting a movement to drive Reverend Rexford from the pulpit of The Church Of Divine Holiness.

“And we know you will help us after you find out that Reverend Rexford is nothing but a thieving no-good nigger that has been using church money for diamonds and furs and a Northside love nest to fornicate with his white slut sweetheart.”

Sister Pike heaved her monumental chest to catch her breath and nodded to Reverend Owens who shook his head sadly and said, “Sister Tilson, Sister Pike has spoken the gospel truth.

“When I found out the truth about our pastor, I went out into
the open country and threw myself on my knees. There, under God's heaven, I wept and prayed for righteous guidance because I love Reverend Rexford like a brother of blood, and I had a confused and troubled mind.

“Sister Tilson, the earth shook beneath me when I heard the Lord denounce the pastor. We must drive him from the pulpit of our precious church.”

Mama sat motionless through the whole thing. Reverend Owen's rundown on how he had unearthed the scandalous truth about Reverend Rexford lasted for half an hour.

The fateful details of the good reverend's detective work were that a black city garbage man who was a tenant in a house the reverend owned was transferred to the plush near Northside of Chicago to pick up garbage.

His first Monday on the new route he spotted a gleaming black Cadillac limousine that seemed familiar. It was parked in the driveway of an attractive bungalow.

It worried him, and since he was a devout elder of The Church of Devine Holiness, his eyes were drawn to the license plate number of his pastor's black limousine parked in front of church the next Sunday.

The next morning as his truck approached the suspect bungalow, his weathered eye saw Reverend Rexford in the doorway. He was kissing good-bye a pulchritudinous young platinum blond white woman who probably seemed to coruscate like an unattainable jewel in the morning sun.

His garbage man's brain maybe turned moss green with envy as he watched the wizard of woo get into the limousine and gun away.

While dumping the bungalow's garbage into his truck, Elder Elijah watched as a shabby black woman with a work-hacked face and fluid-puffed ankles hobbled down the street and went in the back door of the bungalow.

He glanced at the name plate on the pole mailbox near the
sidewalk and saw that the silky haired wizard was shacking for real under a Mr. and Mrs. moniker of Filipino derivation. Elijah feverishly picked up his route in half the time and sped to Reverend Owens with the electrifying news.

Late that afternoon Reverend Owens was waiting in his car down the block when the bone-tired cleaning woman finished her labors at the bungalow. He gallantly gave her a lift all the way to the Southside and picked her clean of information. And got her another job paying more.

The wizard had indeed set up the blonde in the bungalow, and her closet was crammed with expensive finery the dazzled pastor had suckered for. And he was being cuckolded at least twice a week by a penniless young white guy who sang in the dives along North Clark Street, when he got a chance.

After Reverend Owens had given his outraged account of the pastor's costly dalliance with taboo white pussy he passed the ball of condemnation to sloe-eyed Marva Pike with an elaborate bow and jerk of shoulder that looked suspiciously choreographed.

With tortured eyes and in a voice that staggered the piercing rim of hysteria she told how she had aided and abetted the pastor in his embezzlement of fifteen thousand dollars of church money.

She had done it, she said in lofty language, because, “The pastor made me his abject slave and avid fellatrix through his marvelous mastery of the art of cunnilingus and his peerless skill with his confection penis. But now I want him to suffer for cheating on me.”

Mama decoded it slowly because her face turned charcoal gray. Marva's mama frowned disapproval of her candor. Reverend Owen's face had a look of painful disgust, like perhaps he had found a used menstrual pad in his plate of hog balls.

Mama seemed more than eager to see the pastor destroyed. She agreed to boycott church services the next day. The plan was to zing the pastor at a special meeting in midweek to be arranged by Reverend Owens who would convince the pastor to face and strangle the
vague and wild rumors that he had been keeping a white harlot with church funds.

Reverend Owens was naturally going to conceal from the pastor the fact that hanging witnesses and evidence had been gathered until the terrible session of truth. Marva, the main witness, was to continue with the pastor in a manner not to alert him to the solid threat to his ministry.

Just before the trio left to recruit other church members to the cause, Reverend Owens's face became solemn and he boomed, “Sisters, don't this mess make you sick? When I was a boy, the majority of black preachers were dedicated good men that everybody, especially young men, looked up to and respected.

“A mule kicked my papa's brains out when I was twelve years old. Sure, I missed him because I loved and honored him. But my hurt was healed and my need for a strong man in my life was filled by the pastor of our church.

“Prisons and gutters across America are crawling with black men. Many of them could have been saved for a better way back in their boyhood. But too many pulpits in our black churches are filled with flamboyant crooks and racketeers, many, of whom, are also drunks and sex maniacs that corrupt and prey on attractive young women of their congregations. They betray religion, our race, and our young people. Reverend Rexford must go!”

Late Sunday night one of the pastor's flunkeys brought a sealed letter to the door. Mama slammed the door in his face. Sister Pike came by Monday night to tell Mama that the special meeting was to be held on Thursday evening at eight
P.M.

Junior had promised Mama that he would go with her. But at eight
P.M
. she was still waiting for him to come home. She took me with her, and the pastor hadn't arrived when we got to the church at eight thirty.

The front rows of pews were crowded with about sixty grim-faced sisters and brothers who had begun to shift about
impatiently. We squeezed into a center front pew that was in a direct line with the pulpit.

In about fifteen minutes the pastor and a dozen lackeys and deacons came through a rear doorway behind the pulpit. The pastor had a beatific smile lighting his corrupt face, and he oozed oily charm as he approached the pulpit. And then the light went out in his face as he saw that no one was standing except his henchmen to honor his entrance.

He gazed blandly at the hostile faces before him and leaned forward with insolent grace. His long fingers were tented innocently beneath his chin like a pickpocket lulling a sucker. His brooding black eyes were devious pools of cunning.

Then suddenly he threw back his head and snapped it forward close to the microphone and screeched, “Satan!”

The sound tortured the nerve ends unbearably like the prongs of a fork scraping the bottom of a tin pan.

And then he screeched it three times in rapid succession before he shouted, “He's here tonight. Children, my heart is aching with sorrow and love for you because I am looking at the mean expressions on your faces. But I am going to forgive you because I know that Satan sent you here tonight to do his work.”

Then the crafty little charlatan vibrated the church with fake evangelical fury when he shouted, “God! God the Father is here tonight standing beside his humble servant knowing that I'm pure in heart and deed.

“What was that you said, God? Hallelujah! Amen! Bless your precious name. But please, God, don't punish the sheep for the poisonous lies of the wolf that brought them here tonight with evil minds.

“God, you are reading my secret heart, and you see that I lead a life of strictest celibacy, and I, as a black man, aware of the white man's crimes against my poor people, would rather be dead than have sexual interest in his women.

“But, God, you taught me to love and to help everybody
regardless of race and color. And it was you, Lord, who directed me to go everywhere I was needed. You sent me to the Northside to lay my healing hands on a poor white spinster sick in mind and body. And some black lying snake in this church is trying to show my good works as evil. And about the church's money, you know how I sacrifice many of my comforts to save church money. I would never steal the church's money for—”

The pastor cut off his defensive ranting with a gasp, and his jaw hung loosely as he stared toward the rear of the church like a condemned man seeing the electric chair of his first and last name.

Everyone turned to follow his stricken stare and saw Sister Pike enter with the church bookkeeper and treasurer, Marva in tow and a tired-faced black woman who had been the maid in the pastor's love nest, hobble ahead of them down an aisle toward the front of the church.