Leaving Atlanta (17 page)

And she’s a hypocrite. Tells me all the time to tell her the “whole truth.” If she asks me if I did my homework and I say
“yes” when I only did half of it, she has a fit and won’t let me watch TV for a whole week.

“You didn’t ask me if I did
all
of it,” I said. “You said did I
do
it.” She looked at me and said, “Octavia, you ain’t crazy. You knew that was a lie as soon as you told it.”

But when I came home from school today, what was she doing? Stomping on the electric bill to make it look like it got lost
in the mail. I bet they go and cut our lights off anyway.

I opened the fridge to see what she had left out for my snack. On a little saucer was a plate of cheese squares and crackers.
It’s a good thing that I like cheese because we always have a lot of it.

I ate three or four crackers and went into the fridge again for juice.

“Stop opening the fridge. Decide what you want and get it.” Evidently, she had put too many footprints on the bill because
now she was trying to smooth it out.

“We don’t have no juice?” I had already had a bad day at school and I didn’t need to add thirst to the list of things on my
mind.

“Drink water. It’s good for you.”

Now, did I ask her what was good for me? All she had to say was that we were all out. “You’ll go to the store tomorrow?”

“Friday.” That’s when she gets her check.

The phone rang and she picked it up on the first ring. “Hi, Mama,” she said. It was Granny calling from Macon. Mama can be
psychic like that. It’s like she know the way Granny rings.

“Mama, I know what you saw on the news. How many times do I have to tell you that is not happening around here.”

She was talking about the Missing and Murdered Children. That’s all anybody want to talk about when they call long distance.
But that right there that Mama said was a straight lie. It was happening all around here. Jashante Hamilton, who stay right
next door, went to play basketball last October and never came back. His mama went and put extra locks on her doors but that’s
closing the barn after the cow done got out. The boy dead now. They ain’t found a body yet but everybody know that’s what
happened to him. Last time anybody saw him, he was selling car air fresheners at the West End Mall.

I started chewing the crackers with my mouth open because I didn’t want to hear her conversation. I don’t like to think about
nobody being dead. But she was getting mad at Granny and I could hear her over my crunching.

“I don’t care what Kenny told you. We do not live in the projects.”

Uncle Kenny is something else I didn’t want to go into. I started to leave the room, but Mama motioned for me to stay. I don’t
know why she needs a witness for everything.

“Listen, Mama,” she said. “Sweet Pea is
safe.
Atlanta is a very big city you know. Those kids getting killed are way on the other side of town.”

Mama rolled her eyes and reached into her pocket for her cigarettes. She snapped her fingers at me and I handed her the lighter.
She took a deep pull of her cig and then she blew it out hard so Granny could hear she was smoking. “Mama, you act like no
black boy ever got killed in Macon, Georgia. At least here it’s considered a crime.”

I could hear Granny voice squawking out the phone like a hit dog. I don’t know why Granny call so much if all the two of them
do is fight. They get to talking about Atlanta and Macon like two kids saying who can run the fastest. If Granny saw on the
news that we getting rain in the city, Mama will look out the window at the water dripping off the glass and say it’s sunny.
And then she’ll turn around and tell Granny that a tornado is headed right for Macon City Hall.

All of a sudden Mama changed the subject. “Sweet Pea just got in from school. She brought her report card yesterday. All As
again.
”

Now that there was a ball-face lie. I brought home my six-week assessment two days ago. I didn’t make all As. I made some
As but some Bs and Cs too. Now she made it seem like me and her was a lying tag team. Then she shoved the phone in my hand
so I could talk to Granny. My mama is a trip.

“What’s wrong with you?” Mama said, as soon as I had put the phone on the hook.

“Why you say that to Granny? About my grades?” I said.

She waved her hand at me like she was fanning my mad away with the smoke. “You know how Mama is.” She smiled like we were
sharing a secret joke. But I refused to show her tooth the first.

I didn’t say nothing else about it. My mama don’t believe in beating kids, but she got other ways of showing that she don’t
appreciate back talk. She don’t tolerate eye-rolling either, so I squeezed them almost shut and gave her my evil eye.

“Why you sitting looking at me with your face all balled up?” Mama scooped up her cigarettes on her way to the table where
I was sitting picking at my snack. “Something must have happened at school today.”

Something did happen at school but I really didn’t feel like telling her about it so I said, “Didn’t nothing happen.” I got
up and opened the fridge like I thought some juice grew in there while I was on the phone.

“Sweet Pea, shut that fridge. Electric bill is high enough without you trying to cool the whole kitchen.”

I closed it and sat down at the kitchen table. Mama had put a wad of paper under one leg to make it more steady, but it wobbled
anyway. I rocked it back and forth like a loose tooth.

Mama took a couple of puffs. She had her eyes clamped on me like two clothespins. She hates it when I have something on my
mind and don’t tell her about it. I think if we had the money she would go buy a X-ray machine so she could look inside my
head a couple times a day and make sure I’m not thinking anything that she don’t like.

“Did you get in trouble?” she asked. “Tell me the truth. I don’t want no surprise phone calls.”

She’s always bringing that up. And it’s not fair. Only one time did a teacher call over here to report me. And that wasn’t
really my fault. Somebody stole my spelling book.

“No, Mama,” I said. “It wasn’t me that was in trouble.” She looked relaxed now. “It was my friend, Rodney.” She tightened
up again. I should have told her my friend was a girl. Now she was going to try to squeeze the whole story out of me.

“Who?” she said, with her eyebrows all up in the air.

“Rodney,” I said. “This boy I know. Sit behind me. Remember I told you about him? Quiet and everything?”

She nodded her head like she knew what I was talking about, but I knew I had never said one word to her about him.

“What kind of trouble?”

“His daddy came up to the school and beat him in front of the class,” I told her.

Mama got up and went to the cabinet and took down a blue glass. She rinsed it out before filling it with ice water. “His
daddy?
”

“That what I said. Whoever heard of a
man
coming up to the school in the middle of the day to whip somebody?” I had heard about people’s fathers getting rough. And
stepfathers supposed to be the worsest one out of all of them. My own daddy never got rough with me because I don’t hardly
know the man. He stay in South Carolina with his wife and they baby girl. And I had never seen a man raise his hand to a child
out in the public. “Ain’t a man supposed to be at work during the day?”

Mama said, “Well, the mothers that come up to the school have a job.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But daddies supposed to have the kind of job you can’t just up and leave.”

Mama drank some more of her water and shrugged her shoulders. “At least he was there.” She got up from the table and poked
around with frozen chicken soaking in a sink full of water.

Least he was there? She make it seem like any old daddy is better than none at all. Don’t get me wrong. I sometimes wish that
maybe my daddy, Ray, would be around here with us. And not just for TV-reasons like taking me to the park or letting me step
on his shoes to learn how to dance. But also because when your daddy is not around, it look like you and your mama ran him
off. Like he just couldn’t stand to be around you no more.

But if I had a daddy like Rodney got, he would have been the one ran
me
off. For real. He took that strap to Rodney like he was enjoying it. And Rodney is so quiet that he couldn’t even cry. When
it was all over, I thought the man was going to take a bow while my stupid teacher, Mr. Harrell, clapped. Rodney walked back
to his chair, but it seemed like he was crawling. Then he just stayed there, all crumpled up like a dirty napkin.

But Mama wouldn’t understand so I didn’t say nothing else about it. It was easy keeping it to myself after dinner because
Mama don’t talk much after the sun go down. This is because she is too busy being worried about me being home by myself at
night while she’s off at work.

She try to act like it’s not a big deal, but I know different because I heard her lying to Granny saying there wasn’t nothing
to worry about. “Eleven-to-seven shift ain’t that bad,” she said. “It’s better for me to be at work when she sleep than for
me to be gone when she get home from school. The afternoon is when kids get into mess.” She put the phone back on the hook
and blew smoke out her mouth and sucked it back up through her nose. “Mama act like that white man
ask
me when I want to work.” Then she mashed the cigarette out.

So what ends up happening is that I have two bedtimes. Nine o’clock is the first one. Mama makes me go to bed then so I can
be good and sleep by the time she leave for the SunBeam Factory around ten-thirty. It mighta worked if I didn’t know that
she was leaving at eleven P.M. Then I could sleep as sound as I do on her off days. But I can’t get locked good into a dream
because I keep waking up looking at the clock to see how much longer before I’m by myself. It’s like the men that’s about
to be put in the electric chair. They always ask them what they want to eat. But I bet they bring them the fried shrimp or
whatever and the men can’t even eat it because they so worked-up about what’s going to happen next. That’s how I am at night.
My stomach get balled up in a gooey mess like chewing gum stuck in somebody’s hair.

Before she leaves, Mama comes in my room to put an extra quilt on. She do that no matter what time of year it is. I always
make little sleepy sounds when she kiss my fore-head, but soon as the lock clicks, my eyes pop back open. I stay in the bed
awhile longer to make sure she good and gone. I used to have my feet on the floor as soon as the door shut but one time she
came back to get her sweater. It took some fancy dancing to get out of that one.

The first thing I do when I get out of bed is put on my shoes. I get nervous and I like to be ready to run if I have to. I
ain’t never had to, but it’s good to be ready. The next thing I do is get my door key from my nightstand. I threaded a shoestring
through the hole so I can put it around my neck. I’ve only had the key for about two years. Mama used to just lock me in the
house and the door would stay closed until she came back. But three little kids who stay in the projects across the street
got burned to death while they mama was at work. After that, we rode the bus to Kmart and got a key made just for me.

Once I got everything I need, I head to the living room to watch TV.

It was a regular night. I was wrapped up like a mummy in my quilt, with the TV turned to the eleven-o’clock news. I had watched
at the six-o’clock show with Mama, but I like to watch it again at eleven to make sure that everything is still okay. Channel
Two is the best channel because they got Monica Kaufman, a black lady, giving the report.

As soon as the theme music went off, and the camera zoomed in on Monica, I knew that somebody else was dead. Whenever there
was bad news, she took a breath before she talked, like she was fixing to dive under water. I held my breath too and waited
for her to tell us who it was.
Please, God, let it be far from here,
I prayed right quick. But I should have known that praying only makes thing worse. It gets God’s attention like with Job.
Right there in the middle of the screen was my friend Rodney.

Monica has this way of talking about everything like it was just a ribbon cutting downtown or something like that. “A twelfth
child has been reported missing in Southwest Atlanta tonight. Police are looking for information regarding the disappearance
of Rodney Green.” On and on like that. She said almost the same thing when Jashante next door came up missing. It would seem
like there should be some different words to talk about two people that were nothing alike. But all Monica had to say about
both of them was that they were gone. Then they showed Rodney’s mother and father. They both just said how much they wanted
him back just like Miss Viola had said back in October.

And even I was almost the same. I was on the same couch in my same pajamas staring at this same TV like I had never seen one
before. But last time, my mama was with me. We knew Jashante was missing because his mama had been all over the neighborhood
looking for him. She knocked on our door twice. “You seen Shante?” she said. I had the door locked because my mama wasn’t
home. “No ma’am,” I hollered. She came again and I said no. Mama came home before Miss Viola came back again.

Miss Viola had on a black skirt and a yellow-and-green top. Thick stockings the color of white ladies stretched up her legs
and tied off at the knee. She sat down at our rickety table while Mama fixed her a cup of black coffee.

“When the last time you seen him?” Mama asked her.

“When he went off for school this morning.”

Mama looked at the clock. It was nine o’clock at night. She had only been looking for him since eight. I sat as quiet as I
could so I wouldn’t get sent to my room.

“You going to call the police now?”

“You think I should?”

“Yeah,” Mama said. “They can help you look.”

“But I got some hot checks at Big Star, some other places around town.” Her voice faded out. “Sometimes the police pick people
up for stuff like that.”