Midnight Without a Moon(21)
Seeing that my brother wasn’t going to talk, I got up and began sweeping the porch again. Then he decided to talk.
“How come she don’t want us?” he asked, his voice coming out choked.
I didn’t stop sweeping. But the broom stopped moving, as if it had a mind of its own. I took that as a sign from above and placed the broom against the wall. I sat and had a long-overdue talk with my brother.
At first neither of us said a word. We simply sat there in the sun, listening to the sounds of the chickens clucking in the yard. Occasionally a grunt came from the hog pen as our sow and her three plump pigs cooled themselves in the mud. The pigs would soon become our meat. Then Papa would mate our sow with Uncle Ollie’s boar to produce new pigs. They, too, would be fattened up with slop, and the circle of life would continue.
I took a handful of corn and tossed it into the yard. The chickens left the corn they were already pecking at and raced toward the fresh drop. “Sugar and Li’ Man are still babies,” I told Fred Lee. “They need Mama more than we do.”
I cringed at my own lie.
“Ain’t Sugar seven?” Fred Lee asked.
I didn’t answer. He already knew Sugar was seven—?the age I was when Mama left us, saying we were big enough to take care of ourselves.
“I’m leaving as soon as I can get my hands on some money,” Fred Lee said.
I jumped. That was the most I’d ever heard my brother say in his entire life.
“How you suppose you gonna do that?” I asked him. “Every dime we manage to get goes in Ma Pearl’s hatbox.”
Fred Lee shrugged. “I’ll figure out a way. Pick pecans, maybe.”
“Gotta have somebody to pick for,” I said. “Mr. Robinson already got his pickers. Little children. Nine and under. So he only has to pay them three cents a pound. Then he can go to Greenwood and sell them for twenty cents a pound.”
Fred Lee said nothing.
“Picking pecans won’t get you enough money to buy a bus ticket nohow,” I said.
Fred Lee shrugged, grabbed a handful of corn, and tossed it into the windless space above the yard. He gazed out at the fields, which were bursting forth with bolls, just begging to be picked, weighed, and sold. “We too black for her,” he said.
“The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” I said, mimicking Hallelujah.
“That’s stupid,” Fred Lee muttered.
Of course it was. Hallelujah could comfortably make fun like that. His complexion was an acceptable caramel color. He knew he could stand in the sun all day long and never get as black as me and Fred Lee. Besides, only a fool would want to.
The blacker the berry, the quicker it gets thrown out is what he should’ve said, because that’s exactly what I felt like, something thrown out, like the corn Fred Lee and I tossed to those chickens.
Chapter Eleven
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21
AFTER MAMA LEFT US AND MARRIED MR. PETE, Aunt Belle would sit with me nearly every day on the old broken-spring sofa in the front room and fill my heart with dreams. We’d sit there with a Sears and Roebuck catalog spread in our laps and dream over dresses. Pretty, frilly dresses. The prettiest, frilliest dresses a little girl could ever wish for.
I remember pointing at a blue one with a stitched white bodice and a big bow tied in the back. I smiled and asked, “Will you buy me this one?”
“Um-hmm,” Aunt Belle said with a nod.
I beamed and pointed at another. “And this one?” It was red with white polka dots. The white collar was round and wide.
“Sho’ will,” Aunt Belle promised.
I vividly remember a black velvet one with a white lace collar. Aunt Belle promised me that one day it, too, would be mine.
Other than in those catalogs, I never laid eyes on any of those pretty dresses. At only seven years old, I was too young to realize my aunt didn’t have the means to purchase them. Less than a year after Mama left, Aunt Belle, at nineteen, left too. She moved to Saint Louis with Papa’s youngest sister, Isabelle, after whom she was named. There she attended beauty school. And although she had only finished eighth grade, like Aunt Clara Jean, three years after moving to Saint Louis, she opened her own beauty shop.
Papa said she had grit. As a little child, I thought he meant grits, like what we ate for breakfast. So whenever Ma Pearl cooked them, I ate a big helping because I wanted grit too, like Aunt Belle.
In my eyes, Aunt Belle was rich. Not as rich as Mr. Pete, but richer than most folks I knew. She never bought me those promised dresses, but she brought both Queen and me clothes every August before school started back in September. We weren’t allowed to keep these clothes folded in boxes in the corner in our room like the homemade croker-sack dresses. Ma Pearl kept our good clothes in her room, hanging in that old scratched-up chifforobe Mrs. Robinson gave her. And sometimes Queen would be the only one allowed to wear hers. Ma Pearl would find a reason to deny me mine, such as claiming they didn’t fit me right. So they remained a collection, untouched, in the chifforobe.
When Sunday finally came, I thought I would burst from excitement. Plus, we didn’t have to go to church, as Ma Pearl wanted to have the house ready and the food cooked by the time Aunt Belle arrived.
I sat on the front porch, my legs dangling over the edge. I didn’t worry about sweat, splinters, or even snakes as my legs swung anxiously back and forth under the raised porch. I simply enjoyed the scent of collard greens and candied yams floating from the kitchen. I could even smell the buttermilk in the cornbread. Ma Pearl usually cooked on Saturday night, with Papa believing that Sunday was the Sabbath. But this time he made an exception and let her cook on Sunday. So, long before the sun ever left China that morning, she was up fixing chicken and dressing and whipping up cakes—?coconut and caramel.