Red Light Wives (9 page)

I
didn't feel comfortable with a strange woman in my place. In this day and age, who would? There seemed to be just as many maniacs outside of the nuthouses as there were inside. It was times like these that I wished I had not watched so many stupid movies with people running around chopping up people for no good reason.

With Lula on my couch, with God only knew what she had in her purse and on her mind, I reminded myself that there was also a lot of mayhem happening every day in real life. I was having some grim thoughts for a woman in my line of work, but that was a whole 'nother story. I didn't want to spend too much time thinking about that, too.

I locked my bedroom door before I crawled into my bed. And I made sure that the baseball bat I kept for protection was close enough for me to grab if I had to.

But something told me I didn't have to worry about Lula. She seemed like a nice enough person. I liked her because I felt sorry for her and I could relate to her. What she'd been through sounded almost as bad as my situation. I was surprised that she was holding up as well as she was. If some thug had shot and killed my husband, I don't think I would have been doing as well as Lula seemed to be.

I don't know what kind of impression I made on her. But I didn't just drop out of the sky and land in San Francisco on my back, although sometimes it seemed like it had happened that way. If things had been different, I would never have left Georgia in the first place. Because at one time, I had a real good life.

 

I grew up in Homeworth, Georgia, a sleepy little farm town that wasn't even on the map. Everybody knew everybody, and all their business, and we didn't even have to lock our doors. When I was around thirteen, my daddy started managing a popular grocery store in town. We lived about a mile away from the store, down a dirt road with cornfields on both sides. Even before the grocery store, Daddy was already a tired old man. He had worked hard, doing whatever jobs he could find to take care of a wife and five kids. He'd worked on the railroad and cooked in a prison. Before all of that, he'd dug graves. That was the only job he'd ever complained about. He'd done it so long and hard, he had developed a hump on his back.

Daddy didn't own the store he ran, but you would have thought he did. The real owners, a childless old White couple, liked Daddy so much, they let him run the place like it was his. He made all the rules, and he did all the hiring and firing. After a while, everybody who worked in that place was related to me. My oldest brother, Marvin, was the bookkeeper. My other brother, Tyrone, and my older sister, Maybelline, worked behind the counter. My only other sister, Dorothy—Dot we called her—ordered everything. Daddy's main job was to keep his eye on us and make sure we didn't fuck up.

I was the baby of the family, spoiled as hell, so I spent most of my time driving my siblings and Mama and Daddy up the wall. I only hung around the store when I wanted something, and I ran every time they tried to put me to work.

I'd been to Mississippi where Lula came from. I still had a few distant relatives there. My deceased uncle Doobie had lived in Mississippi with a mysterious woman named Pearl Carl during the early nineties. Miss Pearl was this itty-bitty, light-skinned woman with reddish hair and moles on top of moles on her face. Nobody ever told us where she came from, but she had an accent. Somebody said she came from Haiti, another somebody said it was New Orleans. Wherever she came from, she was heavy into voodoo.

By the time Miss Pearl entered our lives, Black folks had already come a long way as far as voodoo was concerned. But there were a lot of Black folks in the south still living in the Dark Ages. They believed in things that science couldn't explain. Spooky things like spells and ghosts. Back then and, I am sorry to say, to this day.

I had never talked about this subject with anybody else in California but Clyde. I would share this information with the other girls eventually. I had already told Clyde, mainly because he'd come from one of the same types of little southern towns with some of the same kind of people I grew up around. He knew all about this stuff. “I ain't scared of nothin',” he told me one time, waving the nine millimeter Glock he carried all the time and slept with under his pillow. “'Less it's somethin' I can't see…”

I never believed in anything I couldn't see, either. But I experienced something strange after a girl I used to hang with fell off a roof and died when we were fourteen. Her name was Annie Mae Proctor and she had been my best friend. One of the things that Annie Mae had always liked about me was my long braids. Since she'd been practically bald, I could understand why. Every bald-headed Black girl I ever knew had major issues when it came to hair. I felt sorry for Annie Mae, when people would mistake her for a boy because of her smooth head. However, I hated the way she used to sneak up behind me and tug on my hair.

Well, a week after Annie Mae died, I was in the kitchen standing over the sink washing dishes. The kitchen door slammed, but I didn't look up right away to see who it was. Then somebody yanked on my freshly braided hair. When I turned around, nobody was there! I forgot about it until it happened again, while I was in the bathroom standing in front of the mirror washing my face. And there was Annie Mae in a white gown, standing behind me, grinning with her gapped teeth sparkling like diamonds. But the girl was dead! I'd attended her funeral and watched them plant her in the ground.

Annie Mae came to visit me two and three times a week. She never said anything, and I wasn't scared the first few times. But after a while I did get scared. I wanted Annie Mae to go back to wherever it was she was supposed to be. So I finally told Mama.

Mama didn't even look surprised or scared. She just let out a deep breath and shook her head. “Sister Pearl over in Mississippi knows how to deal with these things,” Mama told me, whispering so the rest of the family wouldn't hear us talking on our back porch. “We better pay her a visit.” Even though almost everybody I knew had some kind of fear or interest in the supernatural and it was no secret, it was something talked about behind closed doors. Even then, it was usually discussed in low voices or whispers.

The very next day, Mama drove me to Mississippi to “shoo off the spook” that was harassing me. In Miss Pearl's kitchen, a congested little room that always smelled like a just-baked cake, Miss Pearl sprinkled some green stuff on my head that looked like green meal. When my head looked like I had on a green cap, Miss Pearl closed her eyes and mumbled some gibberish. After that, she prayed for about five minutes, massaging my head the whole time. Then she had me drink something from a cracked cup. It was a foul-smelling concoction that looked like something you might expect to see in a toilet. When I gagged and threw up on the kitchen floor, Miss Pearl filled the cup again. She poured that slimy mess down my throat like it was a funnel and held my mouth shut until I swallowed every drop. I felt totally ridiculous the whole time.

After Miss Pearl made me mop my puke up off her floor, Mama slapped a few dollars in her hand and we left. That was the one and only time I had to seek Miss Pearl's “professional” services, because Annie Mae never came back from the dead to bother me again.

When my uncle died, and since Miss Pearl didn't have anybody else in Mississippi, Daddy encouraged her to move to Georgia so she could be near us. “Pearl ain't got no family and she gettin' on in years,” Daddy said in his gruff voice. He'd made a few visits to Miss Pearl himself, and she had literally straightened him out. The hump on his back had been reduced to a slight curve. Another thing that I'd noticed about my father after his visits to Miss Pearl was that he looked so much better. When he was cleaned up, he was one of the most attractive older Black men in town. He was dark and well-built from working so hard for so long. He had gray eyes like a cat, that more than one woman had admired. And now that he could stand up straight, everywhere I went with him, women with roving eyes gave him looks that made me uncomfortable.

A lot of people we knew took to Miss Pearl right away. She didn't work and she didn't have a check coming in the mail like a lot of the older Black folks I knew back then. But Miss Pearl didn't need a measly check from Uncle Sam or anybody else. She made good money “helping” folks, the same way she had helped me. It seemed like every time I eavesdropped on a conversation between my mama and one of her friends, they were talking about some divine thing that Miss Pearl had done for somebody. She had located a beloved dog that had been missing for a month, and she even helped a childless woman get pregnant. I don't know if Miss Pearl really had any divine powers, but she solved a lot of people's problems. That had put her in a very high position in our little town.

Eventually, things took a sinister turn as far as Miss Pearl was concerned. It didn't take me long to figure out that supernatural power was a double-edge sword and could cut both ways.

I started hearing rumors about people going to Miss Pearl to put spells on somebody. Now, as ridiculous as it sounded, I was real skeptical about all that shit (even though I'd had my own experience with something that couldn't be explained), and it scared the hell out of me. Especially when healthy people suddenly got sick, or somebody lost a job they'd had for umpteen years.

Mama and Miss Pearl were good friends so Miss Pearl “helped” us a lot. She even took credit for getting Mama through menopause in one piece. Then things went in an ugly and frightening direction. People started calling our house leaving messages for Mama saying Miss Pearl was fooling around with Daddy. When Mama confronted Daddy and Miss Pearl, they both denied that they were having an affair. But a few nights later, my brother Tyrone caught Daddy fucking the hell out of Miss Pearl on a desk in a back room in the store. Daddy was supposed to be at choir practice and Miss Pearl was supposed to be at home in bed with a severe case of grippe.

All hell broke loose. That same night, with me and all the rest of my siblings riding shotgun, Mama drove Daddy's truck to Miss Pearl's fancy red-brick house. Mama had come from a long line of feisty country women. When she got angry, even voodoo didn't scare her. Her own mother had spent the rest of her life in prison for burning down some racist man's house after he'd raped her.

Anyway, Mama cussed Miss Pearl out and batted her head a few times with a two-by-four plank. She told Miss Pearl, “Heifer, I ain't scared of nothin' you
think
you can do. I got Jesus on my side! He got a whole lot more power than you got!”

Before we left Miss Pearl's place, my brother Tyrone punched Miss Pearl in the chest so hard, her wig and glasses flew off. My sister Dot crushed Miss Pearl's glasses with her foot. Then she kicked Miss Pearl in the side while she was already on the floor of her kitchen squawking like a chicken. “Bitch, you don't fuck with my family,” Dot hollered. “I don't care what kind of power you think you got, you can die like anybody else.”

Mama didn't waste any time turning a lot of people against Miss Pearl. The people who were too scared to piss off Miss Pearl stayed out of the mess. But Mama had a lot of friends, and when they stopped going to Miss Pearl to locate a lost ring or to get a child's ringworm cured, Miss Pearl's generous income went way down. She had to get a job cleaning houses. She also lost her brick house and had to move into a trailer.

I'll never forget the day Miss Pearl called our house while we were having dinner. She left an ominous message on our answering machine. And it was a warning that chilled me to the bone: “You block-ass neegers'll weel be sorry you evere fucked weed me.”

“That crazy bitch don't scare me,” Mama snapped, spooning more greens onto my plate. She gave Daddy one of the meanest looks she could come up with. “Alex, I hope you happy with the mess you done stirred up.”

All Daddy did was bow his head and keep chewing.

I was eighteen. I had a lot of other things on my mind, like finishing school and marrying Sammy Pittman. He was the cutest boy I'd ever seen. I was so damn crazy about that boy, with his big brown eyes and neat little Afro, I didn't have time to be worrying about some old witch's threat.

A month after our attack on Miss Pearl, Daddy had a heart attack and died while he was taking a bath. We found him floating in our claw-foot bathtub. There was nothing strange about Daddy having a heart attack because he'd smoked five packs of cigarettes a day most of his life and had always had trouble with his heart.

Then my sister Maybelline died a week later. That morning she had complained about a severe pain in her stomach and by noon she was in the hospital. She died that night. The doctor couldn't figure out what had killed her, so all we ever heard was “unknown causes.” Tyrone was next. A month later he got into a fight with somebody in a card game over ten dollars. He got stabbed in the neck and died on the spot.

A week after my graduation, which Mama was too nervous to attend, Sammy and I got married. We moved Mama in with us in a little house on a hill behind the church we went to. My sister Dot moved in with her boyfriend and a year later, they got into a fight. He beat her to death with a brick.

Mama didn't mention Miss Pearl's curse until after Dot's funeral.

“We got to get out of this town away from that crazy woman,” Mama told me. The fear in her voice was so thick, I could have sliced it with a knife.

“Mama, you are the one actin' crazy. Miss Pearl didn't kill Daddy, Maybelline, Dot, or Tyrone.”

Mama gasped and shot me a look full of contempt and disappointment. “How many other folks lose so much family in so little time, girl?”

“What about the Hardy family? Nine of them died in that church bus crash last year. Miss Pearl responsible for that, too?”

“I ain't worried about no other family but my own. I know more about these things than you do. I seen all kinds of shit when I was growin' up. Them roots women can do just about anything they set out to do.”