Midnight Without a Moon(20)

Queen, snickering, relaxed in her chair and turned up the volume on the radio.

“Aren’t you glad you use Dial?” the radio announcer said. “Don’t you wish everybody did?”

As I ambled toward the kitchen, my heart stinging from the letter, my hands stinging from the lye soap, I hated Mama even more for marrying Mr. Pete.





Chapter Ten


FRIDAY, AUGUST 19


THE ONLY BRIGHT SPOT IN MAMA’S LETTER WAS THE announcement that Aunt Belle, the youngest of Ma Pearl’s children, was coming from Saint Louis that Sunday, the twenty-first. Only two days away. Of course that meant extra work for me. But I didn’t care. Having relatives visit from up north was worth the extra labor of scrubbing down everything in the house. Everything had to be bone clean, including the front yard, which would be swept until it was nearly as clean as the kitchen floor.

Special care had to be taken with Grandma Mandy’s old mothball-scented room, between the front room and the kitchen. Ma Pearl kept it as a guest room and worshiped it as a shrine, seeing as it had been the room where Papa’s mama slept for the ten years she’d lived with them. From what I’d heard, Grandma Mandy could barely stand the sight of Ma Pearl, yet Ma Pearl did all she could to win her favor. So even with Grandma Mandy seven years dead, her ancient bones cold in the ground, Ma Pearl kept her room unoccupied and as pristine as Mrs. Robinson’s parlor, while I had to share a room with wanna-be-swanky Queen.

Unlike Queen, I didn’t care nearly as much about the clothes Aunt Belle would bring as I did about seeing how rich colored folks were after they had been living up north for a while. I thought about some of the other things Mama said in that letter, things about light switches and closets. Things Mrs. Robinson had in her house. I thought it was almost magical that whenever I walked into a room in her house, all I had to do was hit a switch on a wall and the light would come on. I couldn’t wait to grow up and get me a real house, with a toilet that flushed my doo-doo down to God knows where, instead of an outdoor toilet where everybody’s mess sat stagnant and maggot-covered in a hole until a new toilet was built.

And closets? What a dream it would be to put my clothes in their own special little room instead of folded in a cardboard box in a corner. Of course, if I had a closet, I reckon I’d need some decent clothes to hang in it too. But one day—?one day it would happen, because I was determined to get myself a good education and make it happen.

When I went out to sweep the back porch, I found Fred Lee sitting on the steps. He was tossing corn at Slick Charlie and his female admirers—?the twenty or so hens that supplied us with eggs and the occasional chicken dinner.

“Got a letter from Mama today,” I told him.

Fred Lee shrugged, kept tossing corn to the chickens, and didn’t utter a word.

I took the letter from my pocket and extended it toward him. “Wanna read it?”

He spat on the ground, then shook his head. Even with his near-charcoal complexion, he still looked like Mama, in my opinion, despite what Ma Pearl said. He had her sleepy eyes and her thin nose and thin lips, unlike me, with my wide nose and full lips.

I placed the letter back in my pocket and began sweeping the porch. But I wasn’t nearly as concerned about the dirt as I was about my brother. At only twelve, his thin shoulders were already hunched over, almost as bad as Papa’s at fifty-nine.

My aunt Ruthie Mae, the knee baby of the family, was married to a mean man everybody called Slow John. Slow John drank all the time and was always getting into fights. He even stabbed an old man six times in the chest for cheating him at dice. Papa said Slow John was hard like that because he grew up without his mama. Folks said she was shot to death by Slow John’s daddy in a juke joint up in Clarksdale.

As I swept the porch and stared at my brother, I wondered if he would become hard like Slow John. When Fred Lee was little, Ma Pearl was always calling him stupid because he wouldn’t talk. Until around age four, the most he would do was mumble. Even though I was only five, I tried my hardest to teach him how to talk. By the time he was four and a half, he still knew only a few words. He didn’t speak in sentences until he was almost six.

Then Mama left us. Fred Lee shut down again. After that, it took him two years to say more than “umm.” Standing there on the back porch that hot August afternoon, nearly a month after Mama had left for Chicago, I couldn’t recall two words having come out of Fred Lee’s mouth since.

I took a chance on getting caught by Ma Pearl and leaned the broom against the house. I went to the edge of the porch and sat with my brother. Fred Lee had never cared much for touching, so there would be no pat on the knee or arm draped around his shoulders. I folded my hands in my lap instead.

“Wanna talk?” I asked.

Fred Lee shook his head.

“You should,” I said.

Fred Lee shrugged.

“Baby Sister’s coming Sunday.”

Nothing.

“She’ll probably bring us something.”

Silence.

I should have expected that response from Fred Lee. He didn’t give a hoot or holler about stuff like that. Like Papa, he seemed to be content in whatever state he was in, even if that state was the State of Poverty.

Ma Pearl said that Fred Lee was slow in the head like our daddy. She said, “All them Banks is a tad bit touched.” Interestingly, according to Ma Pearl, all of mine and Fred Lee’s bad traits came from the Banks blood. None of them came from hers.