“My mama used to cook this late at night,” she announced, blinking in the too-bright light. Daddy Glen was sitting in the living room in front of the television set with the sound turned down low, not looking at us and not speaking. I watched Reese’s eyes flicker toward him and then back to Mama and over to me. Daddy Glen’s hands kept moving on his thighs, the fingers working into knots, tightening on his trousers and then shaking against the dark fabric like the legs of dying june bugs turned belly up in the night. Mama pulled a tray of biscuits out of the oven and grinned at us.
“You got to get the tomatoes almost done before you put the eggs in, ‘cause you don’t cook the eggs much at all. Want them soft. Want them to melt like butter between your teeth and your tongue.” She spooned me out a scoop of eggs and put two biscuits on the plate next to the soft browned tomatoes. Reese spread butter on her biscuits and poured a big dollop of jelly next to her eggs. My stomach was so tight I didn’t see how I could eat, but Mama sat right across from me and smiled so wide I knew I had to eat it all. I did, slowly, while Daddy Glen sat silent in the next room and Mama went on talking like he wasn’t there at all. My eyes kept sliding over to where his hands gripped his thighs. I curled mine under the table, rubbed my leg muscles.
The biscuits stuffed me but didn’t satisfy. Once I started eating I could not get full. Reese seemed to feel the same way. She ate until her eyes looked swollen shut from too much food. Then she lay her face down on the table as if she were going to nap right there. Mama smiled at her and reached over to tuck her lank blond hair behind her ears where it couldn’t fall in her eyes. She buttered all the biscuits that were left and wrapped them in a towel to keep for morning. All the time she went on talking about nothing in particular, about her mama and meals she had watched her aunts cook up late at night, about a noise the Pontiac had started to make, and how she really needed to clean out the trap on the washing machine.
I listened to Mama with my mouth open. It felt like there was a wind blowing from my neck down to my belly, hot and chill at the same time, dropping little sparks into my nervous system. Finally Mama put Reese and me to bed together, sitting up beside us as if she were going to spend all night there. I could hear the television set still playing softly in the front room, and I tried to stay awake, but the food was like a drug in my system. I slid off into the dark and a dream of great soft strangling clouds lying like fogbanks on a field of blackberries. I woke up to Reese’s swollen frightened face and the low angry sound of Daddy Glen’s voice down the hall. I linked my fingers with Reese’s and prayed for silence, closing my eyes so tight my ears buzzed.
We had to move again that next week, but Mama said the new place would be better now that Daddy Glen was going to be working out at the Pepsi plant. But the new house wasn’t new. It looked just like the last three—small and close and damp-smelling no matter how many times Mama aired it out. It was just like all the houses Daddy Glen had found for us—tract houses with white slatted walls and tin-roofed carports. The lawns were dry, with coarse straggly grass and scattered patches of rocky ground. There were never any trees or bushes. Mama would sometimes put in flowers or spade up a patch in the back for vegetables that somehow never got planted before we would move again, but the houses always looked naked and abandoned.
“Unloved,” Temple, Aunt Alma’s oldest girl, told me while helping us unpack in the new bedroom. “Your daddy’s always finding you houses where it looks like nobody ever really wanted to live. This place looks like people just stopped in and left as fast as they could.” I didn’t argue. She was right.
My aunts were always moving too—all of them but Aunt Raylene, who had rented the same house for most of her adult life. No one else seemed to stay any one place very long, but the houses they chose were older ones that tended to resemble each other, not like the ones Daddy Glen wanted, with the jalousie windows, carports, and garbage disposals that never worked. Alma always lived in big old rickety houses with wide porches and dogs lying out flat in the sun. Aunt Ruth liked the ones that had black walnut trees to spread shade over my uncles’ pickup trucks.
Daddy Glen sneered at my aunts’ houses with their coal-grate fireplaces and chicken coops in the backyard. “I wouldn’t live in your place if you paid me,” he swore to Travis one Sunday. But Travis just grinned and gave him a shove. “The problem is, Glen boy, you got to pay them landlords, and hell, they don’t care what we think about nothing, what kind of place we think we want to rent. Shit! We all do what we can, you know?”
I loved it when Alma and Wade moved out to the country next to wide flat fields of peanuts and strawberries. It was just past the edge of town, near the West Greenville truck routes, where everything was run-down and cheap and nobody minded if you parked your car on the grass. There were always kids on the porch, cousins going in and out of screen doors, laundry hanging out back, and chickens running around, and no matter which aunt we visited there was always something to do.
“Catch me that hen,” Aunt Alma would tell me. “Then pick over these beans and wash those tomatoes.” Reese would help, we would sit out on the porch together, blending in with the cousins and their friends so completely that sometimes Aunt Alma or Aunt Ruth would forget we were there until Mama called looking for us. It didn’t matter where we were living so long as we could go stay with one of our aunts.
Over at Aunt Alma’s we could listen to Garvey and Grey fight, to Little Earle giggle and squeak, to Uncle Wade drink and cuss, to the radio playing and the chickens clucking outside the windows. Over there we got to slide around on a big tarp with the sprinkler shooting cold water up in a shower. At Aunt Ruth’s we could watch Uncle Travis cut up potatoes for her, a beer at his side and a cigarette dangling from one side of his mouth, ashes occasionally dropping into the peels. Aunt Ruth even let us play in just our panties, though after Reese got ringworm Mama insisted we keep our clothes on, and after we got chiggers she made us scrub down as soon as we came home. Reese and I didn’t mind. We still wanted to go visiting at every chance. It was alive over at the aunts’ houses, warm, always humming with voices and laughter and children running around. The quiet in our own house was cold, no matter that we had a better furnace and didn’t leave our doors open for the wind to blow through. There was something icy in Daddy Glen’s houses that melted out of us when we were over at our aunts’.
Daddy Glen’s brothers lived in big houses they owned, with fenced-in yards and flowering bushes. “This is how people ought to live,” he told us when he drove us over to visit his brothers. More than anything Daddy Glen wanted a house like Daryl and James had—a new house with a nice lawn and picture windows framed in lined curtains. The houses he chose for us were always shabby imitations. Mama sewed curtains, washed windows, and polished floors. Daddy Glen mowed the grass and sent us out with scissors to dig up the weeds along the driveway. He yelled at Earle and Beau if they drove up on the grass, and he chased the dogs that came and knocked over our garbage cans in the night.
“Nobody wants me to have nothing nice,” he’d complain, and then get in one of his dangerously quiet moods and refuse to talk to anybody. He brooded so much Reese and I patrolled the yard, picking up windblown trash and dog turds—anything that would make him mad. Every new house made him happy for a little while, and we tried to extend that period of relative calm as much as possible, keeping everything sparkling clean and neat.
“Things are gonna be different here,” he’d tell Mama. Reese and I would keep our faces expressionless and stay out of his way. Neither of us believed things would ever change, but we knew better than to say so. Sometimes it seemed Daddy Glen could almost read the thoughts we were trying to hide, catch us with his eyes thinking that nothing he did was going to make any difference.
“It eats a man’s heart out,” he told Mama one time, “knowing no one trusts him.” It seemed our unbelief was what made him fail. Our lack of faith made him the man he was, made him go out to work unable to avoid getting in a fight, ma
de him sarcastic to his bosses and nasty to the shop owners he was supposed to be persuading to take his accounts. Money would get tighter and Daddy Glen would stare at us like we cost him cash with every breath we took.
The rent would be late one month, impossible the next, and late again after that. Daddy Glen started going for long drives in the evening, and people started coming to the door during the day. They’d bang on the jamb after ringing the bell. If Mama was home, she would sit at the kitchen table with a cigarette between her fingers, staring off into space and saying nothing.
Reese or I would go to the door and yell out, “Mama’s not to home. I can’t let you in, my mama’s not to home.”
The men and women who came to our door would wheedle and threaten, cajole and rage. They’d call Mama’s name so loud all the neighbors could hear. Mama would push her hair straight back from her face, light another cigarette, and hug us. Reese and I would grin and look carefully out from under the curtains to be sure the landlord or the bill collector had gone, and then run back to tell her.
“My smart girls,” Mama would praise us. “My strong, smart girls.” Her face would relax then, the sharp lines of her eyebrows would soften, and she would pull us up close to her one more time, every time.
“We’re not bad people,” Mama told us. “We’re not even really poor. Anybody says something to you, you keep that in mind. We’re not bad people. And we pay our way. We just can’t always pay when people want.”
Reese and I nodded earnestly, agreeing wordlessly, but we didn’t believe her. We knew what the neighbors called us, what Mama wanted to protect us from. We knew who we were.
Uncle Nevil and Aunt Fay got a place on such a steep hill that we could play in the dirt under the front porch with the dogs. When we stood on tiptoe, we could barely reach the floorboards above us. The house was set so deep in the hill that the dogs could not dig out from under it, and the back rooms were always cool and shadowy. I loved that house, the cool dimness under the porch ripe with the smell of dogs and red dirt, but Daddy Glen hated it.
“It’s a goddam nigger shanty! Don’t they care how they’re living?” He wouldn’t put us in such a house, he insisted. He moved us instead to a cinder-block house where the tile floors were always peeling up in the damp and where we didn’t stay very long anyway. “But a decent neighborhood,” he told Mama, who said nothing, just unpacked the dishes one more time.
My aunt Alma earned Daddy Glen’s undying contempt the year I was nine and she moved out on my uncle Wade. Uncle Earle joked that Alma had finally caught Wade doing just what he’d been doing for years.
“Messing around,” Cousin Deedee said. “If he was my husband, I’d shoot his dick off.”
“Might be a factor in why you don’t have one—a husband, that is,” Aunt Alma told her, and then laughed at the idea of shooting Uncle Wade in his private parts. “It’d get his attention anyway,” she told Mama. “But hell, the man’s a dog. Don’t care where he sticks it. Don’t know the value of what he had. Might as well take myself out of reach of his dirty ways.”
She moved her brood of kids into an apartment building downtown, a second-floor frame walk-up with a shaky wide porch hanging off one side. No matter where she lived, Alma always had a porch.
Nobody else we knew had ever lived in an apartment. Mama took us over to visit with a paper sack of towels and cotton diapers for the new baby from the Salvation Army thrift store. Aunt Alma smiled to see her, pulled a pitcher of cold tea out of the icebox, and shooed us out on the porch.
A long flight of steps ran off the porch and looped back past the lower apartment extending down to the yard. Grey and Little Earle were sitting on the top steps, leaning over to watch the kids from downstairs, who were looking out their windows up to where we all stood. Shiny brown faces kept pressing against the glass and then withdrawing, stern blank faces that we could barely tell one from the other.
“Niggers,” Grey whispered proudly. “Scared of us.”
I wrapped my fingers around the banister rail, working splinters loose from the dry wood, and leaned over to look for myself. I had never seen colored people up close, and I was curious about these. They did look scared.
“Their mama won’t let them come out.” Little Earle was chewing a splinter off the railing and picking at another. “We heard her this morning, telling ’em she’d beat their asses if they even opened that door. She sure an’t happy we moved in here.”
“Well, neither is Daddy,” Grey laughed.
“Must be hot cooped up in there,” Patsy Ruth whispered.
I nodded, still watching the window. It looked like there were three of them down there, taking turns looking out, fully fascinated with us as we were with them. Reese came up behind me and pulled at my arm. I didn’t turn; it seemed as if the face in the window was looking at me.
“Can’t we go down in the yard?”
“It’s hotter down there, no breeze at all, and dusty. Better up here.” Grey spat over the rail to the parched bare ground far below. “Besides, we’d have to go past them.” He nodded at the window.
I slit my eyes against the bright light. The face in the window narrowed its eyes. I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl—a very pretty boy or a very fierce girl for sure. The cheekbones were as high as mine, the eyes large and delicate with long lashes, while the mouth was small, the lips puffy as if bee-stung, but not wide. The chocolate skin was so smooth, so polished, the pores invisible. I put my fingers up to my cheeks, looked over at Grey and then back down. Grey’s cheeks were pitted with blackheads and flushed with sunburn. I’d never thought about it before, but he was almost ugly.
“What you staring at, Bone?” Grey poked me.
I couldn’t say what I was thinking, couldn’t say, “That child is prettier than you.” I pulled myself back from the railing and tore off a splinter of my own before turning to look into Grey’s face.
“I like it here. Like it a lot better than that rickety old place where you were living before,” I lied. “How many bedrooms you got?”
Grey’s face relaxed, and I realized he had been afraid I was going to say something nasty. “More room here than it looks like. Got a room just for Little Earle and Tadpole and me. Patsy Ruth and Temple got their own, and Mama even said I could keep a tank on the dresser and get my turtles back from Garvey.” Little Earle nodded enthusiastically. It was the first time anyone had mentioned Garvey, who had stayed with Uncle Wade, but I said nothing. Mama had told me it caused a terrible fight when Wade kept Garvey and let his twin go on with Aunt Alma.
“Don’t call the baby Tadpole,” Patsy Ruth interrupted. “Call her Annie. You know Mama hates it when you call her Tadpole. ”
The door opened and Aunt Alma looked out. “You kids playing good?” She squinted against the sun.
“No problem, Mama,” Grey told her. I looked down to the window below us again. It was a girl, I was almost sure, a fierce girl watching us distrustfully. Grey pulled himself up from the steps with one big hand. The girl’s eyes followed his fist and then looked back to me. I tried to smile but my face felt stiff, nervous. The girl’s face remained expressionless and pulled back into the darkness of the apartment.
“Don’t you be mean to those kids downstairs,” Aunt Alma told Grey. “I don’t want no trouble with these people.”
“Yes, Mama,” Grey and Little Earle echoed. The window below stayed dark.
The next time we went over to visit, Grey told me there were five of them downstairs, same as upstairs, with the daddy off working up north and none of the kids as old as he was. The woman kept to herself, wouldn’t do more than nod to Aunt Alma, but the kids started hanging our on the steps again after the first week, running inside whenever one of the uncles’ trucks pulled up but otherwise ignoring the white children.
Sometime in the second week they held a spitting contest, upstairs against down, and Grey won. After that things got a little easier. Grey showed his pocketknife to the boys downstairs an
d in turn admired a set of tools the oldest boy had from his father. It was only the girl who kept herself aloof, staying with her mama while the boys played out in the yard.
“She’s pretty, if niggers can be pretty,” Grey told me, “but not friendly. Looks like she expects me to bite her neck or something.”
“You call her that and she might bite you. I would.” I was remembering the girl’s intent, determined face. I had heard all the hateful jokes and nasty things people said about “niggers,” but on my own, I had never before spoken to a colored person in anything more than the brief, careful “sir” and “ma’am” that Mama had taught us. I was as shy with those kids as they seemed to be with us. As nervous as the idea made me, I wished that girl would come out so I could try to talk to her, but she never did more than look out the windows at us. Her mama had probably told her all about what to expect from trash like us.
“Boy howdy, you should have heard what Daddy and Uncle Beau said when they came over, the things they called them.” Grey frowned and kicked one foot against the other. “Daddy’s awful mad we moved in here.”
I knew what he meant. Uncle Wade and Aunt Alma had been over at our place the week before, Wade looking worn-down and shabby and cursing Alma to her face.
“Running off with a man’s children, living in that dirty place with niggers all around. My little girls having to go up those stairs past those nigger boys. My wife walking the street past those peckerwoods!” Uncle Wade’s sunburned face was thinner than usual and dark with outrage.
Aunt Alma just laughed at him. She looked better than ever. She was a little thinner too, but that was good on her. Her face was smooth and relaxed, her skirt loose on her soft hips. She didn’t look like she was missing Uncle Wade too much. “That man’s worse than a boy,” she’d told Mama, “wears you out wanting stuff done for him all the time, running after his meals, washing his clothes, hell, washing him and his greasy hair!” Now she just laughed and pushed her bangs back casually with one small hand.