Mama
Table of Contents
Copyright
© 1987
by Terry McMillan
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recoding, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
McMillan, Terry.
Mama.
I. Title.
PS
3563.
C
3868
M
3 1987 813'.54 86-15367
ISBN
0-395-39974-2
e
ISBN
978-0-547-52404-7
v1.1112
I want to thank my editors at Houghton Mifflin: Janet Silver, whose insight and faith helped me to transform this book through many revisions, and Larry Kessenich, who said yes in the first place and gave me constant pep talks and reassurance. Thanks to them, I have developed something I didn't have before: patience.
I would also like to thank both the Yaddo and MacDowell artist colonies, where the first draft of
Mama
was written, and the PEN American Center, the Authors League, the Carnegie Fund, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts for their much appreciated financial support. I am also grateful to the many people who helped me get through the long revision process: Doris Austin, my family, the members of the New Renaissance Writers' Guild, the word processing department of PBW&T, Jackie Berke, Virginia Dunwell, Betty Hopkins and her entire family, and Leonard Welch.
Finally, I have to thank my son, Solomon, who, at two years old, discovered
he
could write, too.
For my own Mama,
M
ADELINE
T
ILLMAN,
whose love and support
made everything possible
One
M
ILDRED HID THE AX
beneath the mattress of the cot in the dining room. She poured lye in a brown paper bag and pushed it behind the pots and pans under the kitchen sink. Then she checked all three butcher knives to make sure they were razor sharp. She knew where she could get her hands on a gun in fifteen minutes, but ever since she'd seen her brother shot for stealing a beer from the pool hall, she'd been afraid of guns. Besides, Mildred didn't want to kill Crook, she just wanted to hurt him.
She hated this raggedy house. Hated this deadbeat town. Hated never having enough of anything. Most of all, she hated Crook. And if it weren't for their five kids, she'd have left him a long time ago.
She sat down at the kitchen table, crossed her thick brown thighs, and rested her chin in her palms. An L&M burned slowly in the plastic ashtray next to her now cold cup of coffee. At twenty-seven, Mildred was as tired as an old workhorse and felt like she'd been through a war. Her face hurt. Her bottom lip was swollen and it would stay that way the rest of her life, so that she'd have to tuck the left corner in whenever she wore lipstick, which was almost always. It would serve as her trademark, a constant reminder that she had quick-firing lips.
Her left foot was swollen, too, from the tire Crook had backed over it last night when she wouldn't move. She had gotten up at five o'clock this morning and soaked it in Epsom salts for a whole hour but that hadn't done much good. Now the combination of this pain and the crisscrossing of her thoughts irritated her like an unreachable itch, so she went ahead and took the yellow nerve pill Curly Mae had given her last week. Then she wrapped her foot in an Ace bandage, covered it with a fake-fur house shoe, and pulled another chair in front of her to prop it up. She took a sip of her coffee.
As Mildred waited for the pill to work, she stared out the kitchen window at the leafless trees and drew deeply on her cigarette, one strong puff after another. She twirled her fingers around her dyed red braids, which hung from the diaper she had tied on her head. She patted her good foot against the torn linoleum, something she always did when she was thinking.
The way she figured it, there'd been no sense trying to be too cute last night and get herself killed thoroughly. Crook had smacked her so hard outside the Red Shingle that she had forgotten her name for a minute or two.
He was the jealous type.
Everybody knew it, but Mildred had made the mistake of carrying on a friendly two-minute conversation with Percy Russell. Crook had always despised Percy because, as rumor had it, their oldest daughter, Freda, wasn't his, and could've easily been Percy's. Both men had skin the color of ripe bananas and soft wavy hair, which Freda had inherited. And both men had high chiseled cheeks, which, as time passed, emerged on Freda's face too.
Mildred ignored the rumors and knew that in a town as small as Point Haven people ran their mouths because they didn't have anything better to do. Crook never did come right out and accuse her of cheating because he'd been having an affair with Ernestine Jackson off and on for the past twelve years, before Mildred was even showing with Freda. And before they got settled good into their marriage. He wasn't whorish, except when he had more than eight ounces of liquor in him, which was just about every day.
And while Crook ran the streets, it was Percy who nailed plastic to the windows in the winter, bought Mildred maternity clothes, fixed the drip in the bathtub, and paid the plumber to fix the frozen pipes. It was Percy who had shoveled the heavy blocks of coal from the shack in the back yard and carried them to the house when Crook was too drunk to stand up, and then waited for the fire to pop and crackle in the stove. It was Percy who made sure Mildred was warm, who bought her cigarettes, aspirin and vitamins, lard and potatoes, and even paid her light and gas bills when Crook had done something else with the money, but pleaded amnesia.
The three of them had grown up together, though both men were six years older than Mildred. Percy had always had a crush on her, but he was so shy and stuttered so badly that she didn't have the patience to hear him out when he tried to express his true feelings for her. So Percy was forced to demonstrate his feelings rather than making them audible, which was a lot easier on both of them. And although Mildred always thought of him as kind and mannerly, his slowness and docility annoyed her so much that she never took his intentions seriously, except once.
Last night at the Shingle, Crook had barged in and broken up their conversation, grabbed Mildred by the arm, and pushed her outside through the silver doors. He'd ordered her to get in the car—a pink and gold '59 Mercury—and he jumped in and started gunning the motor. When she didn't budge, he backed the car up so fast that it stalled and ran over her left foot. Drunk and aggravated because his anger was being diverted, Crook leaped from the car and hauled off and slapped Mildred's face until she thought it was in her best interest to go ahead and get in.
She had pushed her platinum wig back in place, pulling on the elastic bands and pushing bobby pins against her skull to make sure it was on tight again. Mildred always wore this wig when she went out. It made her feel like she was going someplace, like she was an elegant, sophisticated woman being taken out on the town by the man of her dreams. She got into the back seat of the car and pushed herself as far as she could into the corner of the soft pink seat because she didn't want to be within smelling distance of Crook. He climbed behind the wheel without saying a word and slammed the door.
"Just take me home, Crook," she'd said, trying hard not to scream or cry, but tears were already streaking her cocoa-colored foundation so that her own lighter skin tone showed through. She rolled her eyes at Crook until the pupils stuck in the corner sockets hard, but Crook couldn't see her or else he'd have hauled off and smacked her again. All she could think of now was how she was going to get him when she got home.
It only took five minutes to drive home from the Shingle, straight down Twenty-fourth and a left on Manual to Twenty-fifth. Mildred's mind was clicking like a stopwatch, trying to remember exactly where she'd situated the cast-iron skillet among the other pots and pans. Was it underneath the boilers? Or in the oven with chicken grease still in it? Didn't matter. She'd find it. She pressed her forehead against the cold wet glass and stared at the clapboard houses, most of which belonged to people she knew, some even family. Crook was barely staying in his lane. Mildred knew he was drunk on Orange Rock, but she didn't dare say anything to him. She'd been on the verge of being tipsy herself, but the lingering sting of Crook's hand on her face had slowly begun to break down her high. Anyway, there were no oncoming cars. Not at this time of night. Not in this hick town.
"I'm taking you home all right, don't worry about that," Crook said, trying to keep his eyes focused on the wiggling white line cutting through the two-lane street. "You think you're grown, don't you? Think you're just so damn grown." He wasn't expecting an answer and Mildred didn't give him one.
"You know you're gon' get your ass tore up, don't you? Gon' get enough of flirting with that simple-ass Percy and all the rest of 'em. You my wife, you understand me? My woman, and I don't want nobody talking to you like you ain't got no man. Especially in front of my face 'cause the next thang you know, I'll be hearing all kinds of mess up and down the streets. You understand me, girl? You listening to me?" He looked at Mildred through the rearview mirror, his eyes dilated so big that it looked like someone had just taken his picture with a flash cube. Mildred simply stared back at him, her tears all dried up now, and kept fumbling with her wig. Her fingers smelled like Evening in Paris, probably because she had sprayed it everywhere—between her legs, under her arms, on the balls of her feet, and beneath the fake skull of her wig. She didn't utter a word, just tried to ignore the pain in her foot and hissed and sucked saliva through her teeth.
Crook pulled into the cement driveway, and the right headlight barely missed the bark on the big oak tree as he cut the wheel and brought the car to an abrupt halt.
Mildred opened the door before they'd come to a complete stop, jumped out, slammed the door, and screamed, "Kiss my black ass!" She limped up the side steps toward the porch, turned, and yelled, "I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!" like a cheerleader.
All the lights were out in the house, but Mildred knew the kids weren't really asleep. She knew that as soon as they'd heard the car pull up the driveway, Freda had sprinted to the TV and flicked it off and ordered the rest of the kids to "hit it." Money, Bootsey, Angel, and Doll would have scattered like mice to their two bedrooms, closed their doors, and dived into bed to hide under the covers and wait to hear the boxing match they knew was sure to come. It was something they always dreaded when their parents came home from the bar. They'd squeeze their eyes tight pretending to be asleep, just in case Mildred or Crook decided to check on them, but they rarely did on nights like this, when Crook forgot he had kids and Mildred was too preoccupied with her own defense.
Mildred flicked on the dining room light and walked toward the bathroom. Her foot was killing her. When she looked in the mirror she saw that the blood from her lip had smudged all over the white mink collar of her blue suede coat. The blood had made the mink come to slick points, like the fur of a wet dog. Mildred felt herself getting mad all over again. She had cleaned a lot of white folks' houses to buy this coat, had kept it on layaway at Winkleman's for almost a year, and she knew that blood never came out, never.
When Mildred looked down, she saw more blood was soaking through the seams of the pockets and staining the white stitching around the buttonholes. The scent of her Evening in Paris permeated the bathroom and started to stink. She wanted to throw up. Instead, she went into the kitchen, grabbed the dishrack, and threw it high into the air so that it crashed and hit the edge of the sink. Everything breakable broke and smashed in the basin. Plates, glasses, cups and saucers, cereal bowls. Some things fell to the floor and shattered into jagged chips. Mildred gritted her teeth, balled up her right fist, and pounded it on the pile of broken dishes. Her fist bled but she was too mad to notice.