God Don’t Like Ugly Page 3

  The boardinghouse had just one bathroom for the two floors of tenants. It was always either occupied, too filthy and smelly (people would use the toilet and not flush it), or out of order. We used an empty lard bucket that I had to empty every morning for a toilet. We heated water in the pan on the hot plate and bathed in the sink in the corner.

  “Mama, we poor?” I asked, several weeks after we’d left the house we shared with Daddy.

  “Not in the eyes of the Lord,” Mama replied.

  We were walking home after cleaning and cooking for Mrs. Jacobs, an unpredictable old woman with hair on her chin and breath as foul as cow dung. Of all the white women Mama worked for, the Jacobs woman was the only one I disliked because we never knew what to expect from her. Some days she was nice and would send us home early with extra pay and leftover food. When she was in a real good mood, she’d have her chauffeur ride us home. When she was not in a good mood, usually when she was mad at her husband or one of her children, she treated us like trash. She would throw away good food rather than give it to us, but we’d always fish it out when she wasn’t looking. She suffered with severe flatulence and would pass gas right in front of us and not say excuse me. As soon as she entered a room, Mama stopped whatever she was doing and opened a window. One particular day, right after her husband had slapped her, she marched into the kitchen where Mama was sitting at the table shelling some crowder peas. I was glad all the windows in the kitchen were already open because the old woman started farting right away. I was standing next to Mama with both my hands full of peas. Mrs. Jacobs raised her cane and shook it at Mama, and roared, “Gussie Mae, you get back in that bathroom and shine that commode like I told you! Put some elbow grease on it!” Mama looked up at her, and said, “I just finished shinin’ the commode, Mrs. Jacobs.” Still farting, the old woman whacked my mama across her back so hard Mama fell out of her chair. I was horrified. “You leave my mama alone—you old heifer!” I screamed. I ran around the table and bit Mrs. Jacobs on the leg so hard she bled. That was the only job Mama ever got fired from. I expected Mama to yell and scream at me all the way back to the boardinghouse, then whup me once we got there. “I was sick of slavin’ for that fartin’ old witch anyway,” was all she said on the subject. “God’ll take care of us.”

  Mama bought a newspaper on the way home that day. There was a whole column of domestic jobs advertised. She started working for another white woman two days later, a sweet-smelling woman who hugged me and encouraged me to play with her kids on a swing set in her huge backyard. Mrs. Myers, a woman with eyes like blue marbles and hair the color of carrots, was always nice to us. “Annette, you lookin’ mighty spiffy in those blue pedal pushers,” she told me one day, handing me a glass of ice-cold orange NeHi pop. “You should have seen me yesterday! I got some green ones just like these!” I exclaimed, grinning so hard my mouth hurt.

  Every day after work Mama and I went through trash cans behind restaurants and stores on our way back to the boardinghouse. We often found food that looked like it had not been touched and a few items for our room. I’d even found a pair of shoes, clodhoppers with cleats. They were boys’ shoes that were too big and so heavy I dragged my feet. People started looking at me the same way they looked at Mr. James, a man at our church they hauled around in a child’s red wagon because he had been born without arms or legs. I hated those damn shoes, but they were better than the ones I’d been wearing, brown moccasins with pins holding them together. With what help we could get from church and God, we survived.

  One day I asked my mama, “We happy?”

  Mama smiled for the first time in weeks and squeezed my cheek. She wasn’t even mad about me eating up some lamb chops Mrs. Myers had given to us. “We got more than the Lord ever had him, and He was happy,” she answered.

  CHAPTER 3

  About a month after we had moved to the Miami boardinghouse, Mama took me to a prayer meeting at a church across town on a dead-end street. A well-known visiting preacher from Jacksonville who promised miracles was the guest speaker. “It’s goin’ to take a miracle to get us on our feet,” Mama muttered to me, as we squeezed onto a bench near the back of the room.

  “Could a miracle bring Daddy back to us?” I asked excitedly.

  “Only miracle he care about these days got yella hair and blue eyes!” Mama snapped, rolling her eyes at me.

  “You mean that white lady? Can’t we just go to her house and tell him to come home?”

  “Girl…you so young.” Mama sighed.

  The small church, lighted by coal-oil lamps, was packed with people needing the Lord’s special attention. There were people in wheelchairs, people walking with canes, a blind man, and people slobbering and babbling. I got restless and ran to the bathroom every few minutes. I ignored the spry little Reverend Mason skipping all over the stage with his eyes closed, his head and hands shaking, ordering people to “Lay down that cane! Get your rump out that wheelchair!” Two hours into the revival, the only miracle performed so far was a man spitting out a cancer (it looked like a piece of raw liver) after Reverend Mason massaged his shoulders, and hollered, “Heal yourself, brother!”

  As far as Mama was concerned we received our miracle that night, too. The preacher had massaged our shoulders so hard mine were throbbing. Our miracle came in the guise of a woman. I had seen her staring at me, shaking her head as I dragged myself up and down the aisle. When the meeting ended, this curious woman, several years older than Mama, who at the time was thirty-eight, came up to us and placed her hand on Mama’s shoulder, and said, “Sister, I’m gwine to pray for your girl. How long she been had polio?”

  Mama draped her arms around my shoulder, and told the woman, “Oh she ain’t got no polio. She just clumsy. It’s them brogans on her feet. And you can see she eat like a workin’ man,” Mama said apologetically.

  The woman looked at the dusty clodhoppers on my feet, then made a sucking noise with her teeth. “Oh. Well I’m gwine to pray for her anyway. I came to the meetin’ this evenin’ to pray for my girl Mott. She mentally limited, and I got her in a home for now.”

  Mama touched the woman’s arm, and told her, “I’ll pray for your girl, too.”

  The woman started visiting us at the boardinghouse, bringing us food and clothes. I kissed her on the neck when she brought me a pair of black patent leather shoes to wear to church and a pair of red tennis shoes to play in. This mysterious woman quickly became Mama’s best friend. Her name was Mary. Everybody called her Scary Mary, a nickname a frightened boyfriend she had battered had given to her.

  Within a week we moved in with her and the two nice ladies who lived with her. She lived in a big redbrick house behind the church that had sponsored the prayer meeting.

  Her house was as grand as any of the white women’s houses we’d cleaned. Upstairs and down, the rooms had wallpaper with swans, some floating on a pond, some flying. Her furry brown-and-white furniture not only matched, it was so clean it looked new. She had a fireplace in her living room and great big beige lamps on her cream-colored coffee tables.

  Tears appeared in her eyes when Mama showed her the coal-oil lamp we had been using. Mama and I shared Scary Mary’s spare bedroom off to the side of the kitchen.

  “Is Scary Mary rich?” I asked Mama when she was putting me to bed that first night. She had bathed me in a bathtub for the first time in my life with store-bought soap. I put on some brand-new pink-flannel pajamas with ducks on them that Scary Mary had run out to buy earlier that day. The goose-down pillows on the bed were as big as I was.

  “Yep. She rich. She blessed. The good Lord sent her a rich husband with a bad heart,” Mama said proudly, with a longing look in her eye, punching the pillows. She rebraided two of my braids that had come undone and kissed me long and hard on the cheek.

  “There is rich colored men?” I gasped.

  Mama laughed and tapped my head. “There ain’t no such a thing. One of her husbands was a rich white man from Ohio, a old banker she met when h
e was on vacation in Miami.”

  Scary Mary made me wash dishes and sweep and dust a lot, but there were trees in her backyard that I could climb and hide behind and eat the food that I removed from the refrigerator behind her and Mama’s backs.

  Scary Mary had gone through all the husbands she would ever have by the time we met her. “After my third husband I got so sick of changing my last name, I got me a lawyer to change it to ‘X’ nice and legal,” she told us, adding, “I kept it that way even after a few more.” She told us that the day before we met her she had just run off her last husband, a man she had described as a rogue, who was stingy and dull and who only bathed when she made him. She bragged about how easy it was to control a man just by bouncing a rolling pin off his head whenever it was necessary.

  The only one she spoke fondly of was the rich white one from Ohio. “My poor beloved old Mr. Blake. It was a cryin’ shame he had such a bad heart and dropped dead on me within a year. But, I don’t question God,” she told us, shaking and staring hungrily at a shot glass full of bourbon.

  Scary Mary called herself a Christian. But during those days, with the exception of the Jewish women Mama worked for, I didn’t know anybody, Black or white, who was not Christian. Even the Klansmen who had come after us did it in the name of the Lord. Even though Scary Mary was involved in all kinds of shady activities, like any good Southern woman, she knew her Bible. She only missed church when she was in jail. From one of her jealous, busybody female neighbors, we had heard that when Scary Mary was young, she’d supervised a chain gang. After that, she got a job in some kind of underground factory making bombs. Age and a cruel scar that ran from beneath her left eye to beneath her chin had slowed her down.

  One day the police raided Scary Mary’s house. They charged her with running a whorehouse and selling alcohol without a liquor license and took her off to jail. Mama and I ended up back at the boardinghouse in the same room we had rented before! Scary Mary had to pay a big fine, and they put her on probation. A week later, she moved to Richland, Ohio.

  A few days after she got there, she wrote Mama this long convoluted letter in her spidery handwriting telling her how blessed she was because the Lord had led her to such a wonderful place and that we would be better off up there.

  “How would you like to move up North?” Mama asked me after reading the letter to me three times.

  “Why?” I wanted to know. I didn’t know a thing about the state of Ohio, but I loved Florida and didn’t want to leave. I had gotten used to the boardinghouse and a girl my age next door named Poochie.

  “So we can have a better life. The South is such a savage place for colored folks,” Mama explained.

  I was tired of relocating, tired of having to get used to new surroundings and new friends. “I’m sick of packing up and moving all over the place, Mama,” I protested.

  When Mama saw how unhappy the thought of moving again made me, she stopped talking about it for a while even though Scary Mary kept writing letters to Mama bragging about her good life in Ohio. When she started sending us money and pictures of her posing with prosperous-looking men, Mama gave in.

  One night she left me alone at the boardinghouse to go use a pay phone across the street. I was in bed when she returned. “Get up and start packin’, girl. There’s a train at midnight,” she informed me.

  “Where are we going?” I yawned.

  “Scary Mary’s goin’ to put us up ’til we find a place.” Her eyes were wide, and there was such a big smile on her face I knew it would do no good for me to put up a fight.

  Three months after Daddy had left us, we slipped off during the night, tiptoeing and whispering because we owed the boardinghouse woman a month’s back rent. I cried all the way to the train station.

  “What’s wrong with you, girl?” Mama snapped, bumping me with her knee.

  “I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye to Poochie,” I sobbed.

  “We’ll write her a letter soon as we get to Ohio. I ain’t goin’ to stay in Florida like Mama and Pa and the rest of ’em done and rot workin’ for no white folks. I’d rather be buried alive. Colored folks is so unambitious,” Mama told me, as we approached the train station.

  During the fifties, just moving north meant having ambition to a lot of Black people, even though most of them left the fields in Florida to work in the ones in Ohio. Mama considered herself a step above the field workers. She cleaned white folks’ houses and cooked and took care of their kids in Florida, and that’s what she would end up doing in Ohio. “I praise the Lord every day. Look what he done for me.” Mama said things like that a lot. She was so proud of her work.

  But I hated the fact that she had to work so much. As soon as she finished cleaning one woman’s house, she ran off to clean for another or to tend to somebody’s spoiled kids.

  I used to wonder what white women were good for. Most of the women Mama worked for told her a lot of their business. They all seemed to be having an affair or seeing a therapist. They couldn’t clean their own houses or take care of their own kids or even cook. They sounded pretty useless to me. But I had to admit, white women had it made. They had the world at their feet. Oddly enough, I never wanted to be white. Besides, Mama told me white women didn’t age as well as Black women.

  I slept during most of the long ride north on the segregated train, dreaming about the “white only” water fountains and restaurants we had never been able to enjoy in Florida. Mama had promised me we’d be able to drink and eat wherever we wanted to in Ohio. I woke up off and on just long enough to eat and stare through tear-filled eyes out the train window at the world going by me.

  After we had arrived in Richland, Ohio, which was about a hundred miles south of Cleveland, we had to walk from the train station to Scary Mary’s house because we couldn’t get a cab driver who was brave enough to go into that part of town. It took us more than an hour to get there. By then I was so tired and weak I was dizzy. It was the middle of November and so cold I shivered for the first time in my life. When the urge to pee came over me, I had no choice but to run behind a building and do it there. I got hungry again, and Mama stuffed a baloney sandwich in my mouth.

  An ominous feeling came over me as soon as me and Mama, hugging our tattered suitcases, walked up onto the porch of Scary Mary’s shabby old house, a house very much unlike her nice redbrick house in Florida. There was a bullet hole in one of her front-room windows! On the front door next to a wallet-sized, black-and-white picture of Jesus was a crude sign that said: NO CREDIT, NO PERSONAL CHECKS, NO WEAPONS ALLOWED. Stray dogs, cats, and people were roaming all over the run-down neighborhood. A policeman was sitting in his patrol car on the street sound asleep. We knocked on Scary Mary’s door for five minutes before a man leading a drunk woman down the street told us that Scary Mary was in jail.

  “But we ain’t got nowhere to stay,” Mama told the man, dabbing at her eyes with a dingy handkerchief.

  I could see that the man was sympathetic. He looked at us and shook his head. Old and shabbily dressed, he didn’t look like somebody in a position to help two homeless strangers; he could barely hold up the woman who was falling-down drunk. All he could do was give us the address to the welfare department, but since Mama refused to accept handouts from Uncle Sam, we didn’t go there. Instead, we returned to the train station, where I sat alone on a bench in the waiting area for four hours while Mama went to look for work.

  “Don’t you say nothin’ to no strangers,” was all she said before she hurried away.

  I ran to the window and watched her drag her weary feet down that cold, mean street. A large tear rolled down the side of my face. The tail of her tattered old coat had started to unravel, and her shoes were so old, the heels were completely gone.

  Not long after I returned to my seat, a heavily made-up white woman wearing a floppy hat came up to me. First she let out this long low whistle, and then she said, “I just got to touch those pigtails. Can I?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I r
eplied. The woman laughed, patted my rough braids, and slapped a penny in my hand.

  “What a little nigger frog you are,” she said as she turned to leave.

  I didn’t know if she had complimented or insulted me. I couldn’t think of anything uglier than a frog. But on the other hand, some people thought frogs were cute. The woman’s comment troubled me. Even at my young age, I knew that there was nothing complimentary about being called a nigger. So there I was, homeless, helpless, and a nigger frog.

  Finally, Mama returned to the train station. I was shocked when I saw her crawl out of a big black car with a middle-aged, moon-faced white man behind the wheel. This was her new employer and we had a new home: his basement. I was glad when we moved into our own house a month later.

  CHAPTER 4

  We didn’t spend much time in our first house in Ohio, just four months. It was this lopsided pile of bricks on a dark rural road. Behind it were some train tracks and in front across the road was a cemetery. Every time a train roared by, the house shook. On both sides were deserted, boarded-up houses with CONDEMNED signs all over the place. Tramps that traveled on the passing freight trains hopped off now and then to sleep in one of the deserted houses and peep in our windows and go through our garbage cans. We had these great big rats that were so brazen they marched across the room right in front of us. They would even climb all over our bed with us in it. We never went into the kitchen without a baseball bat. That was the rats’ favorite room.