Читать книгу God Still Don't Like Ugly - Mary Monroe - Страница 11

It was another twenty minutes before Daddy returned from the bathroom, mopping his face with a wet towel and straightening his bathrobe.

“Lord, I wish I hadn’t et them peppers. Lillimae, can you run out to the drugstore and get me some more Maalox?” he grunted, a severe grimace on his face. “Carry Annette with you so she can sight-see.”

I waited with Daddy in the living room while Lillimae went to put on some clothes and shoes.

Sitting next to me on the couch, Daddy placed his hand over mine and squeezed, smiling so hard his eyes watered. “Annette, I can’t get over how fine you turned out. But then, good-lookin’ females run in my family.”

I listened with interest.

“Daddy, do you have other family? Aunt Berniece said something about you having a brother somewhere. I’d like to get in touch with your other relatives, if you don’t mind.” I thought that at this stage of my life, it was important for me to know as much as I could about my background. I wanted to have some answers for the questions I expected from the children I planned to have with Jerome.

Daddy sighed and shook his head and then an unbearably sad smile crossed his face. “St. Louis was my only brother. He passed last year. He would have been eighty last week. He had a bunch of kids but I don’t know where none of ’em at. Both of my sisters, twins named Collette and Corinna, passed before you was born.” Daddy paused and giggled. “Big-foot gals, both of ’em.” He sniffed and got serious again, massaging his chest. “A car wreck is how they died. They come into this mean old world together and they left it together. Comin’ home from a revival one night, a possum jumped in front of the car and they ran off the Yammagoochee Bridge over in Alabama. Both of ’em died in my arms after me and some boys from the church pulled ’em out of that car. There was a hospital less than five minutes away, but we couldn’t carry them there on account of it was still segregated at the time. Right after Kennedy got in the White House and him and the rest of the decent white folks made new laws, they closed that hospital down to keep from havin’ to doctor on Black folks.” Daddy’s lips quivered and his jaw twitched, almost as much as mine. He sniffed and continued. “Corinna left a little girl behind that her man took off somewhere right after the funeral. He was one of them Geechees so I suspect he took that child off somewhere to one of them islands where I think he came from.” His jaw still twitching, Daddy paused and blinked fast and hard. But a single tear still managed to slide out of his eye. “I declare, I loved that little gal as much as I love my own.” He paused again and grinned, wiping the tear off his cheek with the back of his hand. “You ever gwine to be my girl again?” He sniffed hard and downgraded his grin to a weak smile.

“I’ve always been your girl, Daddy. And I always will be.” I patted Daddy’s shoulder and looked away, sucking in air so hard a sharp pain rolled through my chest. “How come you didn’t tell me Lillimae looked like that?” I asked in a whisper, leaning my head close Daddy’s.

He looked at me with genuine surprise. “Look like what?” He glanced toward the back room, where Lillimae was slamming closet doors and banging dresser drawers shut.

My face was flaming as I caressed my cheek and cocked my head to the side. Talking out of the side of my mouth, I said in a controlled voice, “She can pass for white.”

Daddy shrugged. “I can sure enough understand you havin’ a beef with white women…”

I gave Daddy a thoughtful look and a smile. “My closest female friend back in Ohio is white. I don’t have a problem with white women. But it was a real shock to find out that my own sister looks like one.”

“Well, Lillimae ain’t white. At least not by these rules the white folks done laid down. And while we on the subject, every nigger I know claim to be part Indian. Even me! Only ones ain’t braggin’ about havin’ Indian blood is the Indians. Shoot. White blood, Indian blood, don’t matter how much of it you got. If you got any Black blood at all, you Black in this white man’s country. Case closed. Lillimae is a Black woman and she proud of it.” Daddy paused and gave me a thoughtful look. “And I hope you proud of your color, too.”

“I am, Daddy. I wouldn’t want to be anything else.”

I could not believe that I had only been in Florida for a few hours. It seemed more like a few days. Daylight was coming to a dramatic close. Lightning bugs and dim streetlights lit up the night as Lillimae and I made our way from the living room to her old Chrysler. She kept it parked in a narrow driveway by the side of her house. The full moon, shining like a huge silver ball, looked like it was about to drop right out of the darkening sky. It gave me an eerie feeling.

It was still just as hot as it had been when I’d arrived that afternoon. All of the doors to the neighboring houses were standing open. People in their nightclothes had gathered on their front porches. They were fanning, drinking, and listening to radios playing everything from Gospel to the Blues.

After the visit to the drugstore, Lillimae and I stopped at a vegetable stand. She wanted to pick up more turnip greens and a bag of red-skinned potatoes. The place was crawling with sweaty people pushing shopping carts, loaded with everything from watermelons to ten-pound plastic bags of raw peanuts.

There was a long line of customers at three of the four checkout aisles. Since Lillimae had only two items, she rushed to the express lane. I stumbled along behind her, chewing on a handful of grapes that I had snatched off a counter next to the greens.

The cashier, a middle-aged blonde who would have been pretty without the dark circles and heavy bags under her large blue eyes, smiled as we approached her counter. She had chatted with the white man ahead of us, telling him how sorry she was about his sick wife and telling him she was going to pray for him and his whole family. Naturally, I assumed she’d show us some level of courtesy, too.

Just as Lillimae placed her greens and the sack of potatoes on the counter, a sharp-featured white man wearing a manager’s identification tag appeared out of nowhere. He stood rooted in a spot near our cashier, with his hairy, sunburned arms folded and a grim expression on his face. The cashier’s face immediately went from a smile to a scowl. She roughly stuffed Lillimae’s greens into the same bag with the potatoes, even though the bag was clearly too small. Then, she practically threw Lillimae’s change at her, ignoring her request to have the greens put in a separate bag. Instead, the rude cashier waved us through her line and snapped her fingers at the customer behind us and yelled, “Next!”

I had to remember where I was, because I was tempted to say something. By the grace of God, I was able to restrain myself. But I still glared at the cashier. Somehow, Lillimae managed to remain pleasant, even telling the woman, “Have a nice day.”

I was further annoyed when the manager put his hands on his hips and watched us until we went out the door.

“I guess some things never change.” I sighed as Lillimae and I approached her car parked on the street directly in front of the vegetable stand. “I’ll never forget the way some white folks used to treat Muh’Dear and me when we lived down here.” I snorted so hard I had to rub my nose. I was surprised to see specks of blood on my fingers. Lillimae didn’t respond until she had tossed the bag with her vegetables onto the backseat.

“I would have gone to another stand if I had known that woman worked here,” Lillimae hissed, gripping the sides of the steering wheel. The weather had cooled off considerably by now, but beads of sweat covered most of Lillimae’s face. She was red with rage. “I work my fingers to the bone at that damn post office so me and Daddy can eat good. This is one of the best stands in town and one of the closest. But them motherfuckers’ll never get another one of my hard-earned dollars. I don’t have to put up with that shit.”

“I would not have been as nice to that old peckerwood witch as you were,” I snarled, looking back toward the vegetable stand.

The same cashier who had behaved so rudely was now standing outside on the sidewalk in front of the vegetable stand under a streetlight, looking at us. For a moment, her eyes locked with mine. I blinked because I couldn’t believe the unbearably sad look on the woman’s face now. I gasped when she offered a faint smile before we drove off. I let out a deep sigh and turned back around.

I saw no reason to share what I had just seen with Lillimae. As far as I was concerned, the woman was nobody. But what Lillimae said next made my eyes burn with tears.

“Her name is Edith,” Lillimae told me, her voice cracking.

“Who?” I asked, my eyes staring at the side of Lillimae’s head.

“That old peckerwood witch that just waited on us.”

I gasped. “You know her?”

Lillimae nodded. “She’s my mama.”