Читать книгу God Still Don't Like Ugly - Mary Monroe - Страница 8

I was devastated that long-ago morning when Daddy deserted my mother and me, leaving us in a run-down shack with just ten dollars and some change to our names. A tornado had swept through Miami the night before, destroying most of our few possessions. That had been enough of a trauma. For many years I had blamed that storm for helping destroy my family, but Daddy had put his plan in place even before that.

His cruel departure was unexpected and thorough. I knew he wasn’t coming back, because he took everything he cared about with him.

Everything but my mother and me.

I never got over losing my daddy. He had been the most honorable, gentle, dependable man I knew back then. He’d loved us with a passion and I had adored him. Like a slave, he had worked in the fields from sunup to sundown almost every day to support us and we had depended on him. He’d kept my mother and me happy by spending most of his meager wages on us. He would wear his shoes until the soles flapped, his clothes until they fell off his body, and sometimes he’d go without eating a meal so we could have seconds. But like it was a rug, he had snatched that security from under us and left us struggling around like we didn’t know which way to turn. And we didn’t. It was almost like being blind. I always knew that someday I would track Daddy down and make him sorry.

My mother had shed so many tears and spent so much time in the bed those first few days, I felt like the parent. I had to help her bathe, comb her hair, and cook. And all that had frightened me. It had been a heavy burden for a three-and-a-half-year-old child.

I had grieved, too, but behind my mother’s back. I could not count the number of times I’d wallowed on the ground behind an old orange tree in our backyard crying until I’d made myself sick. I didn’t want my mother to know that I was in just as much pain as she was.

“Don’t worry. We’ll be all right,” I assured her. My mother must have believed me because right after I said that, she stopped crying and leaped out of that bed.

It didn’t take long for us to spend that last ten dollars and change. After we ate all the food in the house, we ate berries from a nearby bush and oranges from the tree that I’d cried behind. My mother didn’t believe in going to the welfare department for assistance. Other than a distant aunt we rarely saw, there were no other relatives that I knew of for us to turn to. Both of my parents had taught me that it was wrong to steal, but that didn’t stop my mother and me from sneaking into other people’s yards in the middle of the night to steal fruit, vegetables, and anything else edible. One night we got caught snatching a chicken out of a man’s backyard. The man turned a dog loose on us that chased us all the way back home with that doomed chicken in a pillowcase squawking all the way. We got our best meals at church each Sunday and from food we stole out of the kitchens of some of the white people my mother did domestic work for.

Like an answer to a prayer, one of my mother’s female friends moved to Richland, Ohio, and shortly afterward encouraged us to join her. She even sent us the money to cover our fare. In the middle of the night, my mother and I tiptoed out of our house owing back rent and loans, taking only what we could carry. Just like thieves. A segregated train took us from one pit of despair to another.

That year was 1954.

It was hard to believe that I’d made it to 1985.

As weak and sad as Daddy now looked, I would make sure that he knew just how much he had hurt us by sacrificing us for that white woman. And I would never let him forget that because I couldn’t. Anger consumed me as I looked at him. The knife that had been in my back for so long only shifted its position.

I managed to postpone my wrath and wrapped my arms around my daddy. His body was as rigid as a tree trunk. He had the strong, musky smell of a man who didn’t waste money on man-made fragrances. He leaned back and stared through me as if I were not there, bug-eyed and unblinking, like a dead man.

Finally, Daddy hugged me back with limp arms that trembled. He hesitated for a moment before he rested his knotty head on my shoulder. “Annette, I am so, so sorry for what I done to you and your mama. I can’t change the past, but I swear to God I’ll be there for you from now on.” Then, my daddy cried like a baby.

And so did I.