Somebody's Someone (10 page)

As I flipped through the pages of the picture book, I saw a photograph of Carlene standing with a man who looked somewhat like her. They had the same big light-skinned foreheads. And just like the first picture I seen of him, the man who I figured to be Glenn had an Afro that was sitting on his shoulders. There was another woman in the picture as well. She was way darker than them two, but the forehead was the same. The more I stared at the picture, the more I put two and two together. The dark-skinned woman was the lady that lived ’cross the way from Ruby. I’d seen her a few times, had even talked with her ’bout the weather, but I never knowed her to be any kin to me. And there she was, my Ainty, right there under my own nose. Right then I also r’membered the dark-skinned woman sayin’ to a friend of hers while they was sitting on her porch—“She sho’ do look just like she could be kin.” I never paid no mind to it a’tall.

I kept looking through the pages and seen lots of pictures with folks looking like they was having a good ole time. And I wondered why come if they knowed ’bout me they didn’t come and get me so that I could be in their pictures too. I closed the book and tried to let my mind wander on what it would’ve been like if I’d lived with my so-called daddy’s people instead of the Thornhills. Within no time a’tall I was ’sleep.

As the smoke made its way into my dreams, I caught the whiff of something burning and heard a ringing sound all round me.

It must’ve been going on for some time without me knowing it. Uh-oh. I threw that book on the floor and ran to the kitchen, right smack into a cloud of smoke and stink.

I opened doors and windows as fast as I could. Then I took the pot and removed the beans that was on top of the scorched part. I put them in a bowl. The burnt stuff, I scraped into the outside trash can. After scrubbing the black spots outta the pan with a S.O.S. pad, I put the beans I saved back in the pot, hoping Carlene wouldn’t know any different. Lordy knows that I didn’t want her to cut me up with no switchblade. Thinking it might help, I found a towel and started waving it through the air so I could get the burnt-smoke smell gone. I waited as long as I could to close the windows, and finally, when it seemed the smells’d gone away, I shut everything up to make it like b’fore. Considerin’ the situation, I even put the empty Fig Newton carton back into the cupboard I found it in. I figured that if Carlene found I had burnt up her dinner and eaten all her cookies she would probably try and kill me off. When she came home, sounded like I wasn’t wrong.

“What the fuck happened up in here! Regina? Where my beans at? I know damned well you didn’t go and burn ’em up.” Carlene barged in with two li’l girls. They must’ve been sisters, ’cause they looked just alike.

“I know you hear me talkin’ to ya. What happened to my beans? Did you burn the shit or what?”

“Uh, nah, I didn’t. See, look here; they still in the pot.” My body was nowhere to be found. I didn’t feel like me. I felt like the burnt beans that was laying dead at the bottom of the trash can—the truth lay burning at the bottom of my belly. I couldn’t say what was so.

“You take me for a fuckin’ fool? I can smell that ya done burnt the shit up. Just tell the damned truth. I ain’t got money to just burn, and now I gotta go and find my babies somethin’ to eat. I really had a taste for them pintos, Regina.”

I kept trying to convince her that the beans was fine, and that nothing wrong had happened. Her girls just sucked on they fingers, each one holding on to the side of her pants as if they couldn’t stand unless they was touching her. Carlene stood in front of me, her eyes burning the meanness she felt for me right onto my skin, like a birthmark I forgot to get. I watched in quiet as she took her tongue and stuck it into the side of her cheek. It looked like she was saving a jawbreaker for later pleasures. I couldn’t tell the truth. I would be beat or cut first.

“No wonder you got yo’ ass whipped over yonder. It’s ’cause you a damned liar, and a ugly liar at that. And God sho’ don’t like ugly, especially when it’s a lie. I know one thing that’s right, even if my beans ain’t—you sho’ is troublesome.”

That was all she had to say to me. I wasn’t gonna let no bigforehead, looking-cut-to-the-bone woman call me names. I was sick of all these folks and they evil selves. It was time to move on any damned way. One thing was for sho’; I had worn out my welcome here! It would just be a matter of time b’fore she would want to wear me out! And, I was missin’ Big Mama any ole way. I wanted to go home, and I didn’t need nobody to show me the way.

CHAPTER FOUR

NO TIME FOR
GOOD-BYES

WE WAS DONE
b’fore we could get started. I waited right good till Carlene headed out the room we was in to plan my quick getaway. Carlene told me she was gonna get her girls ready to go out, since the food she’d planned to have wasn’t fit for a dog to eat. She also said she had a good mind to make me eat the burnt mess that I’d cooked, since I was tryin’ so hard to convince her dinner wasn’t ruin’t.

The second Carlene left the kitchen I went into the bathroom and locked the door. My first mind was to worry on Odetta and how she’d hid me out from the bad guys and took pretty darn good care of me, but then I thought on it and figured if she really was sweet on me she wouldn’t’ve left me in the hands of her nasty-mouth, bottom-of-the-feet-cut-up daughter. Plus, Odetta was on her stupid son’s side anyway. That damn Glenn, what did he ever do to get me outta the mess he made in the first place? I was sick and tired of folks leaving me places and not really wanting to be bothered. Well, the way I seen it is, the time had come for me to take my troublesome self right back to where I came from.

I used the metal handle on the bathroom window to crank it open. Then I kicked out the screen, jumped to the ground, and ran from Carlene’s house. I wasn’t scared no more. Plus, I’d seen folks on TV plan harder getaways than me. I figured if they could jump outta skyscrapers wit’out killing theyselves, then so could I.

I’d picked a good time to head home. The sun was on its way to the other side of the world, so it wasn’t as hot outside. East Austin to south seemed to be connected by one main road, Congress Avenue, but to get to it, I had to cross through the graveyard on Martin Luther King—Lord knows I must’ve hightailed it through that cemetery all in a single breath.

I knowed there was only one bus that rode both the east and the south sides of town. I know this ’cause I would always go with Big Mama down to Congress Avenue, so she could do her errands. My favorite was when we would go turn in our S&H Green Stamps. Me and whoever else was inna’rested would collect the stamps and stick ’em into little green books, and when the books was full we’d turn them in for all kinds of food and supplies. Every now and again I was allowed to get somethin’ sweet. But mostly we bought stuff like Ajax and Mr. Clean, to be used for Saturday housecleanings.

Running down the road, I heard somthing jangle in my pants pocket—the seventy-five cents that Odetta had gave me for lunch that morning! I was real lucky, ’cause I hadn’t even thought ’bout the part of how I was gonna pay my fare, and now I didn’t have to worry on it. I started to slow down when I seen a bus stop.

As I waited for the bus to come, I let my breath catch up to me and my mind wander on what was gonna happen when Big Mama caught her first look at me, after my being gone a spell. I let myself believe that she would see me coming from a ways and start cryin’ ’bout how she’d missed me so. Then she’d run down the dirt road, and we’d meet halfway. After she’d hug me for a long while, like the white folks did on TV, she would tell me Lula Mae had either found a new man and run off, or had met with a bad accident and was no longer with us. Either way, I’d be relieved, and could stay with Big Mama happily ever after, like all the li’l white girls in the stories I read. In them stories, the li’l girls was loved by they mas and pas like no other. Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins knowed what it was like to have they own families. They also got to be detectives and uncover the bad guys and they wrongdoings and then turn round and write a book ’bout it. Or, if they wanted to, they’d help folks out in the towns they lived in, so that it was safe for everybody to live and get along. And most of all, them li’l white girls even got to go on real TV vacations where there was snow and they could ride li’l sleds, and make snowmen, all the while never having to leave they mamas and daddies. I loved them li’l white girls, and I thought to myself that maybe one day if things didn’t work out so well with Big Mama, then maybe I could find me a nice white family of my very own.

While I was letting my mind take me to places I’d never dreamed b’fore, the bus came. I got on and put a twenty-fivecent piece in. The fare was only a nickel for me, but I didn’t have change. After takin’ a seat on the door side of the bus, so’s I wouldn’t miss seeing my stop, I sat back in my seat and let my thoughts settle on Big Mama. I was happy to be seeing her soon. I always believed Big Mama when she said that she tried her damnedest to be a good Christian woman, even though I ain’t never seen her go to church. She claimed that it was the things you did for other people that let you know which direction you’d be heading in the end. She said, “You should never let a dog or a child go hungry,” and since she didn’t care too much for animals, it made sense to her to take in and feed children and the elders. Her saying was, “There’s ’nough to go round, even if it is leftovers.” And believe you me there was enough of that. The only person who didn’t eat leftovers was Daddy Lent. I heard him say one day, “Johnnie, I works too darn hard to eat the same cooked food twice in one week.” So for him there was always new cooked food.

It was no surprise to anyone that Johnnie Jean Thornhill always had a house full of kids. And it didn’t matter where they came from or who they belonged to. Accordin’ to Big Mama, when my mama’s mama died, from swallowing lye, the neighbors found her in the house with the body. It was Big Mama’s reputation that landed Ruby in her charge. I heard tell people thought Ruby wouldn’t know the difference—everybody said she was too young to r’member her mama dying and leaving her. Funny thing ’bout it, Ruby sho’ wasn’t dead when she s’posedly left me in that motel room.

Course, I only knew ’bout that room from what Lula Mae said—same way I learnt just ’bout everything I knew about Ruby. Seemed like folks only had bad things to say ’bout her, so I tried to play like her being kin to me wasn’t such a big thing, even though secretly, I really liked her. I used to not only hear people say things like Ruby my mama was a whore, but that she couldn’t stand that us girls had ruined her shape early on in her life. They said that was another reason why she didn’t want me and Sister. No matter what was said, it only made me want her more. I figured anybody who got talked ’bout that bad must be somebody everybody wants.

I r’member when that song “Have You Seen Her?” came out on the radio. I would sit for days with my ear stuck to the li’l speaker on the music box, waiting on that song. It was as if the Chi-Lites knowed the questions I was wantin’ to ask anybody who’d listen.

I learned all the words to that song, and I sang it everywhere I went, hoping that somebody might ask me if I was sanging ’bout somebody I knew by the way I sang it. I ’magined that if somehow it was known that I was on the lookout for Ruby and I was heard, then maybe someone would tell her.

My sangin’ that song got so bad Sister threatened to cut the electric cord right off the back of the radio. She told me I sounded like I had no sense. I told her she was a ugly monkey’s uncle and to mind her own business. I also told her that as far as sense went, she should use hers and help me sing the song. Then for sho’ our mama might get wind of it and maybe would come back. After sucking her teeth and turning her backside to me, she’d walk off shaking her head.

The bus rolled past the Goodyear Tire Company, and then I knowed I was real close to home. I wasn’t too upset ’bout it— livin’ with Big Mama had been mostly all right, I guess. I got to go to Sunday school as much as I liked. Every Sunday, the church folks would come round in they van, with the Church of the Nazarene sign on it, and take me and anyone else who wanted to go. Normally it was only me. I loved to go to that church. We not only got to have Easter egg hunts on Easter and get our names picked for Christmas in order to get free presents, but we got to read the books of the New Testament. I would always compete with the other kids to see who could mem’rize the most books of the Bible. Due to my knack for r’membering words, I’d almost always win. My most favorite saying was, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” John 3:16. I loved that saying more than anything. It was the first Bible verse I’d ever learned by heart and the only one I could say even if I was tongue-tied.

The day I decided to believe the verse, I was sitting in the church on one of the front pews, with my hands tucked underneath my bottom as my feet swung quietly back and forth ’cross the floor. I looked up and seen the white preacher man in his long red gown that was trimmed in white ribbon. He told us to turn our Bibles to the Book of John. After everybody’d found the page, the preacher man asked us to repeat after him. We started that way, simple enough, but by the end of the verse, something in me got all warm feeling and almost made me wanna cry. After turning the verse over and over in my mind, I simply got stuck on the believeth part. I had never heard such a thing of a word b’fore. It was like the
th
sound put a spell on me. I said the
th
over and over in my mind until it worked its way to my mouth. After a while, which was the end of the service for that particular Sunday, the whole saying made sense. The way I seen it was this: if God took the time to kindly put them extra letters on a already-made word, then he must’ve had more’n he needed of everything, and didn’t mind giving away his extra son. God was a real nice man. And since I knowed the Holy Book was no joking matter, I made it my business to take it seriously.