Читать книгу Gonna Lay Down My Burdens - Mary Monroe - Страница 13

Belle Helene, Alabama, an hour’s drive north of Mobile, had about forty thousand residents when I was growing up. Meridian, Mississippi, was closer, which was where a lot of Belle Helene’s six thousand Blacks worked. Most of the Black men in Belle Helene worked for the turpentine or logging companies. There was a garment factory near Lake Mead, between Mobile and us, and several downtown department stores and a mall where a lot of the Black women I knew worked.

Our house was in Belle Helene on Heggy Street in what we all considered a middle-class Black neighborhood. Our houses looked a lot alike, just different colors. We all had nice, neat front and back yards complete with barbecue pits and surrounded by fruit and pecan trees. Every house had a two-car garage and at least two vehicles. A lawyer and his wife lived on one side of us. A retired airline pilot lived on the other side.

My daddy, Charles, was a mechanic and owned a garage in Mobile. My uncle Redmond and four other men worked for my daddy, so Daddy didn’t have to go to Mobile that often. But he loved fiddling around with cars so much that the garage and driveway of our three-bedroom house always contained two or three cars to be worked on at all times.

Though we lived in the deep South and there was an occasional incident involving the Ku Klux Klan and other run-of-the-mill racists, we all got along well with the white folks we had to deal with. But Mama and Daddy, who had both served in Vietnam and marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the sixties, never let us forget how far Black folks had come. I couldn’t count the number of times I heard from Daddy, “When me and your mama was young, we couldn’t even eat or go shoppin’ where we wanted to down here. We even had to ride on the back of the bus. Y’all kids nowadays got a lot to be thankful for.” I usually heard comments like that when I got lazy about going to school.

Daddy made good money, but Mama worked, too. She was a hairdresser and, like a lot of the older Black women who dressed hair, she worked out of the kitchen in our house. After she had tended to wounded soldiers in Vietnam, where she had met Daddy, Mama had given up nursing to do hair and stay at home to raise my older sister Babette and me. Mama didn’t have a beautician’s license and had not been formally trained, but she had a long list of regular clients. She even had a few white women on her list that thought cornrows were so “awesome.”

Behind the large, marble-topped table facing the stove in our kitchen was a large wooden chair with a high back. Mama had strapped a pillow to the seat to make her customers more comfortable while she pressed, curled, permed, and braided their hair. In a drawer in the same cabinet with the silverware were several straightening combs, a pair of curling irons, and other assorted hairdressing tools. The smell of exotic pomades that Mama used on her clients’ hair overpowered the smell of her fried chicken and collard greens, but that never bothered her or us enough to move the chair and her hairdressing items to the den behind our living room. Besides, by working in the kitchen, Mama could look out of the window over the sink and enjoy nature. She was particularly proud of her flowerbed in our front yard and the oak tree where my Uncle Redmond had tied a hammock.

Mama was a busy woman. She was active in the church and she never missed a PTA meeting. She dragged Daddy to movies, plays, and a few other things he hated. On any given day, she had up to four customers, all of them wanting her to perform magic on their hair. Somehow she found time to keep our house clean and Babette and me out of trouble. I spent a lot of my time in front of the TV in the living room next to the kitchen, listening to conversations between Mama and her customers.

One of Mama’s best customers and her best friend was a cook named Mozelle Tupper. Miss Mozelle was almost baldheaded, but Mama dressed what little hair she had once a week. One thing I liked about Miss Mozelle was the fact that she lived in a big beige house right next door to the house where Chester Sheffield lived. In addition to the house he lived in then, Chester’s parents owned Miss Mozelle’s house and the one a few blocks away that Chester would eventually share with Desiree. Miss Mozelle’s son Burl was a grade ahead of me at Belle Helene Junior High. He and I were not really friends, but I used him as an excuse to go to Miss Mozelle’s house, just so I could be closer to Chester. This was especially important after I had hit Chester with the canned goods. Part of my punishment was, I couldn’t visit Chester’s house to hang out with his sister Kitty.

Chester stayed mad at me for over a year after the incident with the canned corn. When I saw him at church or on the street, he just rolled his eyes at me or ignored me completely. When he worked in his daddy’s store, he waited on me, but he wouldn’t talk to me and practically hurled my change at me. And when I called his house to chat with Kitty, he’d hang up on me without calling her to the telephone. By that time, Kitty was already into boys big time and didn’t have a lot of time to spend with me anyway.

“Girl, Chester ain’t never gonna get over what you done. That spot on his head where you hit him gonna be soft from now on,” my second best friend, Regina Witherspoon, told me. Regina lived with her widowed mama in a two-bedroom apartment in the Pike Street projects. We’d been friends since third grade. One night at the age of eleven, Regina slipped out of her house to visit me. While her mother was out looking for her, their apartment caught fire and all six of her younger siblings burned to death. I never told her or anybody else, but I felt responsible for that tragedy. I had nightmares for months after the mass funeral. If I had not coaxed Regina into hanging out with me, her mother would have never left the other kids in the house alone. For months, every time I closed my eyes I could still see those six small cream-colored coffins lined up in a flower-lined row at the Second Baptist Church.

About a month after the fire, Regina’s mother, Miss Maggie, developed a weird phobia that a lot of us didn’t know much about then. Agoraphobia caused Miss Maggie to be too afraid to leave the house. Her fear was so deep, she wouldn’t even stand too close to a window. Regina felt obligated to spend as much time with her mother as possible. I visited Regina and Miss Maggie a lot, helping them take care of their apartment and doing chores for them that I’d rather get a whupping for than do at my own house. I felt it was my job to help them ease the pain that I had helped cause.

My plan to help Regina deal with her depression helped her but it depressed me. When I couldn’t deal with that, I turned my attention to Mimi Hollis, another girl with a disturbing background. Mimi was two years older than me and lived five blocks away from us. Everybody I knew was familiar with Mimi’s painful history, but I had heard it firsthand from her mother while she was sitting in our kitchen getting her hair done. In her fifth month of pregnancy, Mimi’s mother, Miss Odessa, had tried to abort Mimi. But Mimi had survived, and for the first five years of her life she seemed as normal as Miss Odessa’s other five children. Right after Mimi started school, she started behaving strangely. She would go for days at a time not talking, and she ate rocks and mud pies. One Sunday during church, she stood up in front of the whole congregation and exposed her private parts while Reverend Poe was preaching. Miss Odessa took Mimi from one county doctor to another, and not a one of them could put a name on Mimi’s condition. Odd, slow, and confused were just a few of the adjectives used to describe the girl’s behavior. It was no wonder we all called her Crazy Mimi. When she was nine, Miss Odessa took Mimi out of school and started teaching her herself at home.

When I was eleven and still in my tomboy mode, I had stumbled across Crazy Mimi one September evening in an alley giving blowjobs to some of Chester’s friends. I chased the boys away with a plank and escorted Crazy Mimi to my house. Even though I had taken her under my wing, she still ended up pregnant three years in a row by males she couldn’t or wouldn’t identify.

I spent a lot of time baby-sitting Crazy Mimi’s kids or helping her haul them around in a red wagon loaded down with Pampers and toys that we had purchased from either Sheffield’s Market or the nearby Piggly Wiggly.

It seemed odd that a mentally challenged girl like Crazy Mimi would take it upon herself to give me advice. “Carmen, there’s a lot of other cute boys around here. You need to quit mopin’ around about that Chester Sheffield. I used to be crazy about him myself, but I got over him real quick when other boys started payin’ me attention. Look at me now! I got three babies!”

I stared at Crazy Mimi’s narrow peach-colored face, big, glazed black eyes, and keen nose. I wondered how so many boys could overlook her long, flat breasts; her bell-shaped body, and thin, greasy hair that was always worn in a single lopsided braid. In the long, shapeless black duster she had on and with her sharp features, she looked like a black crow lounging on my bed. The thick makeup and sensible shoes she wore most of the time made her look ten years older. Which is what she told me when I asked her why she never wore jeans, T-shirts, and running shoes like the rest of us. Sadly, looking older often got her in trouble with men old enough to be her daddy.

Crossing her thick, knotty ankles, she added with a sneer, “I know for a fact that Burl Tupper likes you. I asked him myself.” Crazy Mimi cackled and lifted her voluminous outfit, revealing a stiff-looking white girdle but no panties.

Getting over Chester was not something I wanted to do. Even though he had me at the top of his shit list, I still had my crush on him. I planned to do whatever it took to turn his feelings toward me around.

“I don’t want no potbellied pig like Burl,” I said emphatically.

Crazy Mimi and I were in my bedroom that sultry Saturday afternoon in late October, trying to decide what to wear to Kitty Sheffield’s Halloween party a week away. A mask of a scowling red demon left over from the Mobile Mardi Gras we’d attended in February lay upside down on the bed next to me. Crazy Mimi and I had both decided that we were too old and cute to be wearing masks that ghoulish. And the last thing I wanted was for Chester to see me as something evil. I had decided to go to the party dressed as a queen wearing a crown.

Crazy Mimi was sitting on the side of my bed next to her drooling, moon-faced two-year-old son, Boogie. I was peeping out of my bedroom window, parting the curtains with my head, hoping to get a glimpse of Chester. I had seen him earlier outside talking to Daddy. Mama and my sister Babette were in the kitchen cooking up a storm. So was every other woman on our block. With the window and my door slightly open, I could smell macaroni and cheese, collard greens, buttered cornbread, pork chops, peach cobbler, and smothered chicken coming from every direction.

“Well, Chester don’t want you,” Crazy Mimi reminded me. She then delivered a well-orchestrated snap of her thick fingers, swatting Boogie’s hand with her other hand as he unraveled a thread on my new chenille bedspread. “Behave, Boogie, or Carmen won’t ask us to stay for dinner so we can help eat them screamin’ pork chops. Girl, your mama cooks a mean pot of greens, too.” Crazy Mimi looked at me and nodded; I nodded back. She sucked in her breath before continuing. “One other thing you need to know, girl.” She paused and waved her finger in my face. “The best way to get a boy to want you is to make him think another boy wants you. And didn’t I just tell you that Burl wants you?”

I carefully considered Crazy Mimi’s words. For someone so crazy, she sometimes made a lot of sense.