Mama (3 page)

Motherhood meant everything to Mildred. When she was first carrying Freda, she didn't believe her stomach would actually grow, but when she felt it stretch like the skin of a drum and it swelled up like a small brown moon, she'd never been so happy. She felt there was more than just a cord connecting her to this boy or girl that was moving inside her belly. There was some special juice and only she could supply it. And sometimes when she turned over at night she could feel the baby turn inside her too, and she knew this was magic.

The morning Freda came, Crook was in a motel room on the North End with Ernestine. Curly Mae drove her to the hospital. From that point on, Mildred watched her first baby grow like a long sunrise. She was so proud of Freda that she let her body blow up and flatten for the next fifty-five months. It made her feel like she had actually done something meaningful with her life, having these babies did. And when she pulled the brush back and up through their thick clods of nappy hair, she smiled because it was her own hair she was brushing. These kids were her future. They made her feel important and gave her a feeling of place, of movement, a sense of having come from somewhere. Having babies was routine to a lot of women, but for Mildred it was unique every time; she didn't have a single regret about having had five kids—except one, and that was who had fathered them.

Mildred lay down when she felt the heaviness of the pill beginning to work. Bells were ringing in her ears, and it made her think of Christmas, which was only two months away. For the past nine Christmases Mildred had had to hustle to buy Chatty Cathy dolls, Roll-a-Strollers, ice skates, racing car sets, sleds, and bicycles. Crook had helped her sneak them through the side door at midnight. She didn't know how she would manage this year.

She shook her head. Should've never let you come back after you got out the sanitarium, she thought. Should've let you have old sorry, ancient Ernestine, 'cause y'all deserved each other. But I felt bad for you 'cause I thought tuberculosis was gon' kill you. Guess alcohol must be the cure for what you got. You promised me, promised me, that when you got back on your feet you would take care of me and the kids like a husband is supposed to do. Told me I wouldn't have to worry no more about everything or work so damn hard. Well,
look
at me. My nerves is about to pop. Red veins in my eyes like freeways. My head always throbbing and my skin look like it been embalmed. I'm twenty-seven years old, and I'm sick and tired of this shit. And I don't care if I gotta turn tricks or work ten jobs—you getting out of here this time for good.

Mildred tried to grit her teeth, but the pill wouldn't let her. She wanted to scream, but the pill wouldn't let her. She felt like crying too, but the pill wouldn't let her. All it would let her do was sleep.

Two

"K
ILL HIM
," slurred Curly Mae, as she fell back in the recliner on Mildred's sunporch. The sun was piercing through the Venetian blinds, leaving yellow stripes across Curly's light brown legs. "As the World Turns" was on television, but neither of them was paying much attention to it. Liquor always made Curly talk crazy.

"And if he put his hands on you again, the sucker deserve it. I don't care if he is my brother, what give him the right to disfigure you?" She gulped down the rest of her drink and carefully set the plastic glass on the floor. It tipped over. "A skunk is a skunk," Curly said. She lifted her arm up as if it weighed a hundred pounds and plopped it in her lap.

Mildred was snapping string beans a few feet away from her. They were landing all over the floor instead of in the bowl. She was drunk too.

"I don't want to kill him, Curly, damn. I just don't want him jumping on me when he get back. It's been two days and I ain't heard nothing from him. I know where he is."

"He down there with that heffa, ain't he?"

"Yeah, I guess so. More power to him," said Mildred.

"Yeah, well, let me put it to you this way. You need something to protect yourself with. A gun'11 scare a niggah."

"They scare me, too. You know that, girl."

"Now you tell me, what make more sense? To be waiting in here scared with these kids, or be holding something to get his ass on out of here? Remember the last time you called the police? How long it take 'em to get here? Forty-five minutes, and you know it take ten minutes from uptown. You could'a been dead. As long as one niggah is trying to kill another, white folks could care less."

"You right, chile, you right."

Mildred pushed the plastic bowl aside with her foot and went to get the rest of the Old Crow. When she came back, Curly was struggling to get out of the chair.

"Milly," she said, "I'll tell you what. I let you hold my gun till you get him out of here. Can you lend me twenty dollars?"

"Twenty dollars? That's my gas bill money. Till when, Curly?"

"Till Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon at the latest."

"Okay. But who's gon' show me how to use the gun?"

"I would, but I got so much to do over in that house today, and Lord knows some of this liquor gotta wear off first."

There was a knock at the door. It was Deadman. He often helped Mildred around the house. Of all Lucretia Bennett's dumb and ugly sons, Deadman was the ugliest and dumbest. He was in his early twenties and had the reading level of a fifth grader. But he was reliable and he was as nice as nice could be, so whenever he stopped by Mildred felt obligated to keep him busy, even if she didn't have anything for him to do. Trying to find things that needed to be fixed wasn't hard, because Crook had never fixed much of anything. After Deadman did whatever Mildred had asked him to, the next problem was getting him to go home.

Mildred opened the door.

"Hey, good-lookin'," she said. Deadman smiled, showing off his tiny yellow teeth. His head was shaped like a big almond from one angle and a small watermelon from another. Deadman knew he was ugly, and for that he was sort of cute. He kind of grew on Mildred and the kids. He had a contagious sense of humor. He'd have her and the kids on the floor in stitches when he'd tell them all the goings on in the neighborhood. He knew who was screwing who, who'd just been put out, who'd gotten her behind kicked, whose lights and gas were turned off, and whose car had been repossessed. He was more like a reporter than a gossiper, because he wasn't malicious. He also knew how to hustle and always had a few dollars in his pockets. Lots of times he lent Mildred money when she was short.

"I was going out to the butcher's and wanted to know if you needed something. Mama say they got a sale on neck bones and pork chops today."

"Why, thank you, Deadman, but I just lent Curly my last. We got enough meat around here to last us for a while, though. Tell me something, you know how to shoot a gun?"

"Yeah, everybody know how to shoot a gun. Pull the damn trigger." He started laughing, and his eyes darted past Mildred. He was looking for Freda. He had a silent crush on her, but he'd never let Mildred know it or else she would've probably changed her mind about him. He always bought Freda potato chips, fruit punch, chewing gum—small things he could give her without seeming obvious. As a matter of fact, that's what brought him over to their house so often. He would rake leaves when there were only a few on the ground. He'd clean out the stoker when it didn't need it; clean Mildred's storm windows, paint the bricks around the base of the house and along the driveway, and do anything else he could find.

"Can you show me how?" Mildred asked.

"Yeah, you got it here?"

"I'll send it over by one of the kids," Curly said, brushing past him. "I'll stick it in my old blue purse."

Mildred slipped her the twenty and Curly inched down the steps and pranced across the street to her house. A few minutes later, her oldest son returned with the purse. After Deadman showed Mildred how to use it, she hid it between her box spring and mattress.

Mildred knew how to pretend, and that's exactly what she'd been doing since Crook had come home from the hospital. Pretended she didn't know he was still messing around with Ernestine. Pretended not to know that Ernestine's oldest daughter looked just like Crook. She didn't know what he saw in that evil, bug-eyed drunk. Ernestine had never liked Mildred either, from the time they were kids. Mildred was not only better-looking, to put it mildly, but was much smarter and never had trouble attracting boys. Mildred always thought that just because she was poor didn't mean she had to look it.

Ernestine never smiled at anyone because her two front teeth had been knocked out by some man years ago. People said it was Crook who did it, but no one really knew. One thing Mildred did know was that even though Ernestine had had Crook's baby, he had married her, not Ernestine. At the time, she felt like the best woman had won. Hell, any woman can have a baby, Mildred thought, but can't every woman get the man.

When Crook still hadn't come home by evening, Mildred decided she couldn't wait another minute. She put her clothes on, left the kids watching "Million Dollar Movie," and walked down to Ernestine's house. She saw the Mercury parked in the alley. Mildred was furious, not because he had run to Ernestine, but because he wasn't man enough to face her. She contemplated picking up the brick she saw lying next to the car and breaking all the windows. Then she remembered that she was the one who had bought this car. She thought she might throw it through Ernestine's window but finally decided against that, too. Instead, she walked back home in the snow and packed everything Crook owned in cardboard boxes and trash bags. Then she called a cab and rode back to Ernestine's house and plopped them into a huge snowbank.

A week went by and Mildred still hadn't heard anything from Crook. It was snowing again on Sunday night, and she was watching a new group called The Beatles on "The Ed Sullivan Show." Funny-looking little white boys with suits that looked too small, with stingy little collars. There was a noise at the side door, and Mildred thought it was Prince, but she had put him on the back porch. She went to the door and there was Crook; sitting on the steps, snow soaking through the seat of his pants, his teeth hanging out of his mouth, looking like some orphan. She let him in, pushed him toward one of the kids' rooms and cracked open a window because he smelled like he'd been living in a flophouse. Crook passed out.

Mildred put on her snow boots and car coat, went to her bedroom, slid the gun from under the mattress, and put it in her purse. Then she eased the keys from Crook's pocket and drove down to the Red Shingle, where she knew she would find Ernestine.

There was nothing red about the Red Shingle, except for the trim painted around the white windows. And they weren't really windows either, because you couldn't see through them. They were squares cut into the brick wall. The parking lot could only hold twenty or thirty cars—big cars, which is what everybody drove in Point Haven. The bigger the car, the more stature you had, though a lot of the men who drove these cars lived in them, too. Kept their clothes in the trunk, their shaving equipment in the glove compartment, and a quilt in the back seat in case one of their lady friends wouldn't put them up for the night. Most black folks considered their cars evidence of their true worth. That and the gold capped over their teeth. And Lord, they flashed those. Some of them, mainly folks who had migrated from the South to work in the factories near Detroit, tried to out-tooth each other. They started out simple: a gold cap. Then they moved into gold and diamonds, then stars, and last, their initials.

Folks hung out at the Red Shingle because it was the only place blacks were welcome.

Drinking was the single most reliable source of entertainment for a lot of people in Point Haven. Alcohol was a genuine elixir, granting instant relief from the mundane existence that each and every one of them led. It was as though the town had some hold over them, always hinting that one day it would magically provide everything they would ever need, could ever need, and satisfy all their desires. No one was the least bit curious about anything that went on outside Point Haven. Here it was 1964, and most folks had never heard of Malcolm X and only a few had some idea who Martin Luther King was. They lived as if they were sleepwalking or waiting around for something else to happen.

Most of the black men couldn't find jobs, and as a result, they had so much spare time on their hands that when they were stone cold broke, bored with themselves, or pissed off about everything because life turned out to be such a disappointment, their dissatisfaction would burst open and their rage would explode. This was what usually passed for masculinity, and it was often their wives or girlfriends or whores who felt the fallout.

Since the Shingle was in the middle of South Park and everybody lived within walking distance, the majority of these men hung out here. And people came from as far as New Winton and St. Clemens, thirty miles away, to hear an occasional live band.

The Shingle was right across the street from Miss Moore's whorehouse, three doors down from Stinky's Liquor Store. Dove Road, at the mouth of Stinky's driveway, was considered a busy street because it was the artery that led to the intersection at Twenty-fourth. It was also the first side street in the black neighborhood to be paved and get streetlights.

The only time the Red Shingle ever saw a white face swing through its silver doors was when a Canadian came looking for brown thighs and breasts. This had been going on for so long that no one paid much attention to them when they showed up, except for the few women who sat at the bar and called themselves prostitutes. Most of them were just welfare mothers trying to pick up some extra change, or wives whose husbands were out of work or had left them.

Fletcher Armstrong owned the Shingle. He was one of the only black men fortunate enough to have some money in his family. His father, who lived fifty-four miles away in Detroit, was in the numbers business. It was supposed to be a well-kept secret, but everybody knew it and always had. Fletcher lived out on Ross Road in a house he had had built. It was a split—three levels—like the white folks' houses up on Strawberry Lane. Sometimes on their way out to the country, black folks from South Park would drive by Fletcher's house just to ooh and aah. Some were quite jealous, and the most considerate thing they could find to say was nasty. "Niggahs thank, they something when they get a little money, don't they? Gotta throw it all up in your face. Look at them pink shingles. Wouldn't you say they was too damn loud to be on your house? Can't take the country out of a niggah, can you?" But some people were quite proud. "It sure is nice to see colored people moving up in the world, ain't it? Ten years ago, weren't no colored people even living out here. Now look. And look at them pink shingles—they beautiful, ain't they?"