Somebody's Someone (2 page)

I ’magined that living with Big Mama wouldn’t have been so bad if it wasn’t for ole Lula Mae—she was Big Mama’s oldest ex–foster child, who’d moved out and back in. And on account of her Christian ways, Johnnie Jean couldn’t turn nobody away who was in need. That means Lula Mae was part of the family again—right along with her two kids, Ella and Sherry, who didn’t have no daddy to speak of. You should’ve seen how spiteful that ole Lula was to folks. Talking ’bout people behind they backs and in front of they faces for that matter. She acted like everybody in the whole world had jumped her from behind and left her for dead, and she’d be damned if they was gonna get away with it. Many times the things I overheard her saying ’bout me, my mama, and a lot of other folks wasn’t fit for the ears of a junkyard dog on its last leg. I even heard the grown folks say Lula was more ornery than a tick full of turpentine. Big Mama said that Lula Mae was meaner than she could ever be, and that was a good thing. That way Lula could do all of Big Mama’s dirty work and not get in the way with Big Mama making it into heaven.

If you didn’t do what Lula Mae asked faster than she could get the words out her mouth, she’d be on you like flies to a pile of shit. All I could say was that, even though her kids might’ve had they mama living right with ’em, she was no real mama to them—that’s why right now, I had her baby strewn ’cross my side. She’d been with me since I finished up my chores this morning. If anybody’d bothered to ask, I would’ve much rather been rolling down the river with Huckleberry Finn and Jim the slave. But instead I had to be the child’s keeper. Secretly I didn’t mind being with the baby that much—I just sometimes rather be round Huckleberry.

Ever since my teacher Miss Schenkel loaned me
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
I would ’scape to his world every chance I got. I read that book so many times I lost count somewhere round ten. Over and over Miss Schenkel would ask me to return the book back to her, and each time I’d tell her I’d misplaced it. I got to telling her that so much, she just told me to keep it. And I did. The truth was I always kept the book hiding in the underside of my pillowcase. I put it there every night after reading it, just in case Huckleberry and Jim would think to come and get me so we could ride down the Mississippi on they raft.

My mind returned to me as I pushed Huckleberry to the side. The sweat had slid down the back of my legs and pooled its way to the bottom of my feet. We needed some shade. Holdin’ baby Ella on my hipbone, I decided that we should go outside to the front yard and wait for the rain to break through. There was so much heat hanging in the air I thought I’d lose my mind. As I stepped outside onto the dirt in my flip-flops and tried to breathe in the muggy air, I felt like I was being smothered with a wet blanket. But I didn’t let the stickiness bother me too much, on account that Big Mama’d said it’s what makes the women of the South stay younger-lookin’ longer.

Outside we sat down under a big oak tree, on a pallet somebody’d left out, so its branches could shade our skin from the heat of the too-hot sun. I placed the baby b’tween my legs and licked the dust from the pacifier that was pinned to her bib— then I put it in her mouth. Within no time Ella’s dark Karo syrup–colored eyes was rollin’ into the back of her head—till she fell off to sleep.

Since right after she was born, Ella was like my own child. She was with me almost all the time. Ofttimes, seemed like I was the only one who wanted to get next to the baby other than her mama. You see, Ella was born clubfooted, which mean that her feet was turned backwards from the ankle. She had to wear special shoes that was screwed on to a curved metal bar— they was meant to force her feet forward. As long as the brace was on, her little ankles looked fine, but when them shoes was off, you didn’t know which direction her toes was heading. Since the braces made her twice as heavy, nobody wanted to tote her round when she wore ’em. Everybody else complained ’bout how they back hurt and how uncomfortable holding Ella was. Not me—no siree. I never whined. I’d pick that child up and sling her ’bout my side, and we’d be on our way.

Instead of being with her child, most of the time, Lula Mae could be found watching her soaps and yelling at me to take her baby and git.

I tried not to argue with Lula. Instead, every chance I got I aimed to get her to like me, but the harder I worked, it just seemed to make her more and more ill-tempered, which meant that she was either apt to cuss me out or find a reason to go up side my head with whatever she could get her hands on. Sometimes it was a rosebush switch with the stickers left on it, and other times it might be an extension cord pulled from a old iron or maybe even one of those orange Hot Wheel track pieces. But the worst of all of ’em was the Green Monster: the cut-off green water hose. And when the beatin’s wasn’t ’nough, she’d haul off and start cussing—saying things like, “Yo’ mama ain’t shit, and if you don’t watch out you gonna be just like her. And all I know is I betta’ not ketch you even looking at a boy with yo’ fast-ass self.”

I hated how Lula always had something to say ’bout me being “hot” or “fast.” I never understood why I always had to hear that kind of mess, when I hardly had nothin’ to do with boys, except for maybe Huck—and since he lived somewhere in Mississippi he didn’t count. So other than him, I wasn’t studying boys in no kinda way. Deep inside, I kinda figured out the reason I was called those names was ’cause of my mama and the reputation she’d made for herself by chasing after married men and leaving us for other folks to look after. I finally came to figure that where I come from, it wasn’t a matter of whether or not you yourself was guilty of what you was being accused of, but that what your mama did could hang over your head like heavy, dark clouds on a sunshiny day. I guessed when she left us my mama didn’t figure that Lula Mae was gonna be the one to look out for me and Sister, on account that Big Mama was getting old and was more concerned with having a spot in heaven than takin’ care of young girls.

Seeing how low-down my mama maybe was, I tried real hard to make it easier for Lula by helping her with Ella. Most times, unless I was doing my schoolwork, or reading, Lula didn’t even have to ask me, ’cause I kinda figured that the less Lula had to take care of kids, the less right she’d have to be hateful. I started out by going to the baby if she cried out at night. The walls of the house were so thin you could almost hear everything throughout the entire property. I’d even change her diaper and warm a bottle for her if she was hungry. Since combing hair was one of my favorite things to do, I had no qualms ’bout caring for Ella’s. It was easy to comb her hair ’cause Ella and her sister Sherry had what black folks called “real good” hair, not like mine. Theirs was soft to the touch, and each curl would wrap itself round your finger like a Slinky round your wrist. I would just section her jet-black tiny curls into plaits rubbed with Alberto VO5, so she wouldn’t get tangles. I wanted baby Ella to be hardly any trouble a’tall to her mama. I guess I was hoping that somehow I could make what my mama did go away from Lula’s mind. But it made no difference to Lula if I was good or bad. She must’ve just looked at me and seen Ruby, and I figured it was reason ’nough to keep her plain old ornery and plumb full of hate. There was very few things that scared me, but Lula Mae’s nasty temper’mint and God was at the top of the list. The only thing that could top them was being beat with that Green Monster hose, and told not to cry when the whoopin’ was done.

’Cross the yard from where me and the baby was sitting, I seen Donna Janine, the nobodies’ child, standing on the curb talking to some high-yellow-skinned boy. I don’t know what she thought she was doing, ’cause she knowed that talking to boys was off-limits on account we already had ’nough mouths to feed. From far away, the boy looked like he could’ve been kin to her, but I knowed better: she had no peoples in these parts. According to the whispers, Donna Janine was a product of a inna’racial thing, and her white mama couldn’t take her home for fear that her own peoples would kill her for sleeping with a Negro and then bringing some half-breed baby round ’em. So, Donna Janine was left with the rest of us. For years, folks in Austin who didn’t want they kids could drop ’em off at Johnnie Jean Thornhill’s. And for a small price, she would take anybody in. I heard she even had insurance policies on ever’body she took care of just in case they was to drop dead. Again, it was ’cause of her Christian background that she couldn’t let folks go hungry or without. I know this to be true firsthand since she’d taken in my mama Ruby b’fore me. That’s right, I was living in the same foster home my mama’d lived in, which maybe shoulda made it feel more like home to me, but since my mama wasn’t with me, it didn’t feel much like a home a’tall.

Big Mama’s motto was, “If you play, you should pay,” and that was that. A lot of folks must’ve agreed with her, ’cause over the years there sho’ was a lot of kids that came and went.

Accordin’ to the grown folks, there was only one thing that Donna Janine’s mama forgot to tell Big Mama when she dropped her child off: the fact that she was crazier than a bedbug. Donna Janine had that look in her eyes like them folks who you ain’t s’posed to point and stare at ’cause they different than you—the kind that came to school early on them yellow buses. The only difference was, she could talk and walk like most other folks round her, and she didn’t have stringy spit runnin’ from her mouth. I’d heard that the way she became mentally off was ’cause she got jumped in the girls’ locker room at her school by a gang of heathen girls on account of her talkin’ trash. I heard tell that they cracked her skull open with a combination lock and watched some of her brain slip out. My sister told me that some folks had found Donna Janine in the back of a Laundromat, curled up in one of them baskets and returned her to her mama, then they told her ’bout Big Mama. However she got that way, Donna Janine turned out to be somebody not to mess with. There was something way off in her.

Every now and again when she got overly upset or caught off guard, she would fall out wide on the floor and go wet on herself, while her eyes would turn so all you could see was the whites of ’em. A coupla times Big Mama’d yell at me to try and hold her tongue still with a Popsicle stick, to keep her from biting her ole tongue off. All you had to do is see that mess one time, and you knowed better than to bother Donna Janine.

But that girl hurt more’n herself. Not only could she tell bald-faced lies longer than Lake Travis, but she could steal you blind faster than you could smell a roadrunner’s fart. All us kids learned quick not to say anything round her, ’cause if we did, she’d take what you’d say and turn it into the most outlandish concoction anybody’d ever heard. And since the grown folks was ’fraid she’d snap into one of them fits where somebody was gonna have to clean up her piss, they just believed whatever she told ’em.

I’d found out the hard way ’bout Donna Janine’s thieving ways. One day, after spending the better part of my morning digging round the neighborhood for empty soda-water bottles, I decided to go and turn my findin’s in at the 7-Eleven corner store. I wanted some Little Debbie nickel cakes more than anything, and it was for certain that I’d make ’nough money for two cakes, being that they only cost a nickel. I wanted one oatmeal cake with white icing and the other would be vanilla with pink filling. I could already see myself nibbling round the thin smooth edges of the cookie first, then making my way to the thick center. I’d also figured there may be change left for a coupla pieces of banana taffy candy. After getting my bottles all bagged up in two old pillowcases, I headed for the dirt trail that led from our house directly to the front of the store. I don’t think I got four good steps down the driveway b’fore Donna Janine shows up out of nowhere and invited herself along. I guessed I didn’t mind, seeing how she was willing to help me carry the Coke and Pepsi bottles, as long as she didn’t think she was getting some of my money.

Once we was in the store, I got my thirty cents and bought the nickel cakes and the other candy I wanted and still had change left over. I was ’bout to go outside and wait for Donna Janine until her whistle made me look up and see her. She was motioning with her hand for me to come on over to where she was standing—the too-expensive candy aisle.

“Come here, Gina. Let me show you how to get any kind of candy you want wit’out having to spend your hard-found money,” Donna Janine whispered to me, while at the same time shoving a big ole candy bar down the front of my panties.

“Ain’t what we doing s’posed to be against the Bible?” I asked.

“Looka here girl, that’s why God created thieves. He made it so that all the li’l folks who was meant to have they share could get it. God wouldn’t want for some to have and others to not, so take this and walk out the door. I’ll meet cha on the other side.”

“Wait a minute now.” I asked, real confused, “Won’t God punish me for stealing?”

“Hell nah! My mama told me that as long as I was under twelve years old, then God didn’t bother keeping track of all the things I did. But, she said that after twelve that was a different story, ’cause then you was a grown-up. And since you is still eleven, and I’m sixteen, you have some time left to do good by those who don’t have.”

Well by the way she put it, it did seem like I had heard something ’bout that “being twelve” thing b’fore. And since her mama had told her it was okay, I let her talk me into taking that Milky Way candy bar.

I pushed the king-size thing deeper b’tween my legs and headed straight for the front door. As my feet turned in and almost tripped me up every step I took, you could hear the paper crackle. But I kept going. I could feel the candy seesaw against my thighs as it poked out, making me look like a boy with wet swim trunks on. When the store clerk looked up at me, I knowed I was caught, and I got scared, and as I waited for him to move round to my side of the counter, I peed all over the candy bar. He made me pay for it by turning in my other goodies and my spare change.

“Don’t ever let me see you face round here no more,” he said. “If I do, I’ll tell you peoples.”