Mama (5 page)

A lot of people had drowned from undertows in the St. Clair River, where they often fished. Folks swore the currents came from Canada, which they could see when standing at the shore. Even when the sanctified preacher put on his white robe and walked through waves and over stones to baptize people, he wouldn't go out too far. Once he dropped his Bible in the water after dipping Melinda Pinkerton backward into salvation and a wave clipped his sleeve, sweeping his Bible away. He didn't try to go after it, either.

There were three residential sections in Point Haven. Half of the black population lived in South Park by the railroad tracks or near the small factories on the outskirts of town. In South Park there were five churches, one bank, two grocery stores, one Laundromat, one bar, and four liquor stores. Coming from Detroit, you reached South Park first, and the first impression people got was that this place looked like a ghost town. It was. Full of black ghosts who crept quietly up and down the mostly unpaved streets, with no place to go besides the Shingle. If you were under twenty-one, there was roller-skating twice a week, uptown at the McKinley Auditorium, but this was only in the summer. Uptown consisted of only three main streets, which housed stores that sold all the same items, only at different prices. There was no building in the entire town more than four stories, except the YMCA and the telephone company. They were six stories. There was one movie house, three drive-ins, three beaches, a Softball field, and, in the fall, football games at the high school. In the winter there was outdoor ice skating but everybody's main source of entertainment was TV.

Word was that all the rickety houses along Twenty-fourth Street were going to be torn down to make room for an industrial park. Supposedly it was already in the planning stages, but the colored people didn't believe this for a minute. They had lived here too long, some for as many as three generations. Surely the city wasn't going to tear down the houses that most of them had scrimped and scraped to buy. Where would they go, anyway? There was also supposed to be a plan to build a housing project smack dab in the middle of South Park, but this too they thought was all talk. After all, nothing had been built in this town since the library and state office building uptown, and that was where white people lived.

Mid Town was where the so-called in-between black folks lived. These people weren't altogether poor because most of them had never received a welfare check, or if they had, they'd been working steadily enough to consider themselves middle class. Many of them were now buying instead of renting, and there were some white folks scattered in their neighborhood, but everybody called them white trash.

As you continued north on Twenty-fourth Street, past Mid Town, you began to see aluminum siding and the houses were set back farther from the street. The front yards became longer and wider and this was a sure sign you were entering the all-white neighborhoods. There was no name for this area. Directly behind it was the highway, which veered off to the left and led to Strawberry Lane, where middle-class white folks who thought they were upper class lived. The only black folks you ever saw up there were the ones who cleaned house, raked leaves, or picked up trash. Black people called this redneck country. These white folks didn't actually hate colored people, they just didn't like being too close to them. People like the Leonards, who ran the NAACP chapter, the Colemans, whose family was full of schoolteachers, or the Halls, who both had Ph.D's in psychology, couldn't buy a house in this neighborhood without fearing for their lives.

Even farther north was the North End. It was only ten minutes from Sarnia, Ontario. Here was a mixture of everybody: poor, not-so-poor, middle- and upper-middle-class black and white folks, all of whom considered themselves better than everybody else in town.

Half the reading and writing population of the Point—black and white—worked in factories. One, Prest-o-Lite, was in South Park. They manufactured spark plugs, shocks, and points for diesel trucks, and some car parts that were shipped to major car manufacturers near Detroit, like Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler. The women usually did day work, like Mildred, and the men worked for the Department of Sanitation, like Crook had. Or they were on welfare. Those on welfare looked for opportunities in all employable cracks and crevices but once they found jobs, many of them realized that their welfare checks were steadier and went a lot further. So a lot of them stopped looking altogether and spent their afternoons watching soap operas and gossiping.

Four

R
IGHT AFTER THANKSGIVING,
it was snowing so bad that warnings were up. No one was supposed to leave the house, let alone try to get out of the driveway. Snow was piling up past Mildred's fifth step and there was no way she could go to work in this weather. She was supposed to get paid today and she only had one dollar and sixty-three cents to her name. Her left eye was twitching and jumping. Didn't that mean you were supposed to come into some money—or was it your left palm? Anyway, Mildred knew nobody was coming by to drop off a bundle of dollar bills unless it was God. And so far, she didn't think he was such a reliable source.

The kids were in the basement playing, and she could hear their screaming and rumbling through the vents that led upstairs. Mildred wasn't thinking about the noise, for once. She was trying to concentrate on dinner. Lately, she had so much on her mind, so much to consider at once, that one decision, or the wrong decision, could change all the others. So sometimes she made none at all.

When she opened the cupboards, an ache slid down her forehead into her nasal passage and throbbed on the roof of each nostril. It continued like an arrow into her skull, and skated up and down her neck until it had no place else to go. Mildred gave her head a good shake. Bags of black-eyed peas, pinto beans, butter beans, lima beans, navy beans, and a big bag of rice stared her in the face. She opened another cabinet and there sat half a jar of peanut butter, a can of sweet peas and carrots, one can of creamed corn, and two cans of pork-n-beans. There was nothing in the refrigerator except a few crinkly apples she'd gotten from the apple man two weeks ago, a stick of margarine, four eggs, a quart of milk, a box of lard, a can of Pet milk, and a two-inch piece of salt pork.

She put on a pot of pinto beans. Mildred knew the kids were tired of them, and so was she, but at least they would last a few days. Something good was going to happen, she thought. She didn't know what, but she always knew that when things got this bad they had to get better, just had to. She chopped up a yellow onion and sat it on the table, then took the lonely piece of salt pork from the refrigerator. She threw them both into the pot, sneezed, then wiped her tearing eyes. The only time Mildred cried on her own accord was when she peeled onions.

She wiped her eyes with a dishtowel and stood locked in place, as if hypnotized, watching the rainbow of spices, brown beans, and onions float to the top of the water. Something smelled funny. Like smoke and fumes. When Mildred looked toward the living room, she saw smoke coming out of the vents, leaving a sooty film on the beige walls. She dropped the spoon on the table and ran downstairs. She didn't see any of the kids.

"What the hell is going on down here? Y'all better not be near that furnace." Before she could get all the words out of her mouth, five charcoal-covered children walked sluggishly from the furnace room. Mildred stomped her foot and stormed past them. The handle on the stoker was dangling.

"Who did this?" she demanded, her hands on her hips.

They all stood like prisoners and hunched their shoulders up then down.

"I'ma ask you one more time before I tear up each and every one of your black behinds. Now who did it?"

"Not us, Mama," said Angel, holding Doll's hand. One of them always answered for both, as if they were Siamese twins, and they always agreed with each other. At six and seven years old, and only ten months apart, neither of them had opinions that weren't interchangeable.

Money just stood there, knowing full well he was guilty.

"Mama, we was just playing," he said. "I didn't mean to touch it, but Bootsey and Doll were chasing me and I bumped into it. I can fix it. Remember last time, Mama, when it broke, and I fixed it?"

"All right. I want all of you to go into that bathroom over there. Get that soot off of you. Then I want you to march back up those steps, sit doWn on that sun porch, turn on that TV or get a book, and don't say two words to me or else I'ma be two minutes away from your asses. You understand me?"

The girls ran into the bathroom. Money was used to this kind of thing: his sisters undressing and slamming the door in his face. He tried to fix the furnace while they were bathing, but it was really broken this time. When he heard them run upstairs, he made sure the bathroom door was locked and then he took his own shower. He loved his sisters, but sometimes he could strangle them for being girls. He had always hoped that the next one would be a boy, but no luck. While he took his shower, Money wished he could tell somebody how much he missed his daddy.

By six o'clock, the beans were thick and simmered but the house had grown colder and colder. Mildred knew then that the furnace was in fact broken. She called to find out when the repairmen could come out to fix it but they told her not until the roads cleared up. When would that be?

By eight o'clock the house was so cold the kids could see their own breath. They didn't want to leave the sun porch because they were watching "Get Smart," one of their favorite shows, but Mildred made them huddle in front of the warm open oven while they ate their beans and rice and corn bread. She wasn't hungry and just sipped on her last beer.

Two days later when the furnace people finally came, they told her it would cost $175 to fix, and since it had taken her so long to pay last time, they said they couldn't even start the job without at least a $50 deposit. "Just have a seat, and don't go nowhere," she told them. Mildred closed her bedroom door and called Buster, her daddy. She knew she was his favorite, and if she could just get around Miss Acquilla, she wouldn't have a problem. Mildred's mama, Sadie, had died in 1958 at forty-eight from a heart attack. Out of all Mildred's sisters and brothers, she took her mama's death the hardest. For the longest time, Mildred thought God had betrayed her by snatching Sadie away from her the way he did. Two years later Buster had married Miss Acquilla. He had told Mildred he was lonely in that big old house with no woman. And during those two years before Miss Acquilla had moved in, Mildred had made Crook watch the kids while she took her daddy home-cooked meals, washed his work clothes, and cleaned up his raggedy house.

Mildred and Miss Acquilla couldn't stand each other. Miss Acquilla didn't like the way Mildred could get anything she wanted from Buster, and Mildred didn't like Miss Acquilla because she was a selfish bitch, and reminded her of Ernestine: big, black, and evil. Ever since Mildred could remember, Miss Acquilla seemed to have had a head full of gray hair. She dipped snuff, too. But the main reason Mildred didn't like her was because she had married her daddy and ran him like a race horse.

Buster didn't tell Miss Acquilla he was lending Mildred more money. He knew he'd never hear the end of it. He took his white handkerchief from the old trunk at the foot of his bed, counted out three twenties and a ten, hopped in his Buick, and drove directly to Mildred's. She had asked for seventy because the kids had caught colds and couldn't go to school. She had to buy at least two bottles of cough syrup, a jar of Vicks, and extra toilet paper so they could blow their noses.

The kids stayed home from school the entire week, and Mildred didn't go to work. She was sick, too. Christmas was three weeks away and two of the families she cleaned for called to tell her they were letting her go. They were mailing her checks, along with a small Christmas bonus. There wasn't much she could do about it except walk down to the Social Services Department like everybody else and ask for help. This humiliated and embarrassed the hell out of her—Mildred hated the idea of begging, which is what she thought it boiled down to—and she also didn't like the nosy people in town knowing all her damn business. They talked enough as it was, which was one reason she didn't go to church, and she didn't want them to know just how bad off things really were in her house. She had always prided herself on being self-sufficient and self-reliant. But Christmas was right around the corner, so for once Mildred ignored her pride.

"Mama, here's my list," Freda said, handing Mildred a piece of notebook paper itemizing everything she wanted. The other kids handed Mildred pieces of paper with equally long lists.

"I want a Baby Sleepy," said Bootsey. "She pees and cries and then falls asleep. She comes with clothes too."

Money said, "All I want is a racing car set, a Mighty Moe, and, oh, I almost forgot, a pair of ice skates. My other ones are too small."

"We want skates too, Mama, with tassles on them," said Angel, "and a cooking set." Doll nodded in concurrence.

"Hold it! Just wait one damn minute here. Let me tell y'all something. First of all, now, you know your daddy ain't gave me a dime since he left. And you know I just got the first check and I still gotta pay off that furnace bill, and y'all be lucky if you get something to eat for the rest of the month, so all these elaborate lists y'all making can be cut right on down to three thangs. First I'ma get you what I know you need, then what I can afford. But ain't nobody in this house got no money to be going out spending hundreds of dollars on no damn toys that'll be torn up before the weather breaks good. You understand me?"

"Yes, Mama," they said, holding their heads down and returning to the sun porch.

"Chunky and BooBoo are getting bikes," Money whispered to the girls.

"Yeah, and Rita Morgan and those guys are getting new sleds and a toboggan and
real
skis," said Bootsey. "I don't want them cracking on me when we get back to school if I ain't got no new skis." Bootsey was the most competitive of the kids, and many times she and Freda would argue because Bootsey swore she was smarter. On one occasion, she decided she was stronger and asked for a fight. Freda slapped her so hard she made Bootsey's lip bleed. That was the end of that.