Midnight Without a Moon(3)
I picked up my egg crate and tossed it across the porch. Plunking myself down on the top step, I glowered at Mr. Pete’s big black car—?the car that would take my mama to Chicago. Li’ Man had said “we,” and of course that had to include Mama. She was Mr. Pete’s wife. But I already knew it didn’t include me and Fred Lee, because it never did. We were Mama’s children, but we had never been invited to be a part of her new family. Nor had we ever set foot in their house. It was bad enough we never saw our daddy, Johnny Lee Banks, even though he lived right there in Stillwater. Now we would never know when we’d see our mama’s face, either. Some folks who’d migrated up north made the South an annual visit. Others, it seemed, never came back. Seeing how they rarely came to see us anyhow, I wasn’t so sure in which category Mama and Mr. Pete would fit.
I was seven when Mama left us the first time. Six years had passed, but they felt as fresh as six months. At the time, Sugar was a year old and Li’ Man was still a lap baby. Their mama’s heart simply gave out, folks said, and Mr. Pete found a replacement so quickly that it seemed as if he held the funeral for his first wife and the courthouse wedding to his second wife on the same day. And it didn’t seem to bother him one bit that Mama already had me and Fred Lee but had never married our daddy.
Folks said that Mr. Pete was interested in only one thing—?a pretty face. And that, Mama certainly had. I remember how she stood before Ma Pearl’s dresser mirror that chilly March morning and smeared red lipstick on her pouting lips. Among the dullness of Ma Pearl’s bedroom, she looked out of place wearing a silky beige dress trimmed in lace. So I asked her, “Where you goin’, Mama?”
She grinned and said, “Rose Lee, honey, yo’ mama ’bout to marry a fine man. And I’m go’n take care o’ his babies for him.”
“What about me and Fred Lee? Ain’t we yo’ babies?”
Mama giggled like a silly schoolgirl. “You and Fret’Lee big now,” she said, waving her hand at me. “Callie and Christopher is the babies. Besides, y’all got Papa and Ma Pearl. Callie and Christopher don’t have a soul but Pete. And Pete ain’t got time to raise no babies,” she said, smiling. “He got all that land to farm.”
“Can me and Fred Lee come too?”
“Nuh-uh,” Mama said, frowning, as she leaned toward her reflection. “Two babies is more’n enough for me to care for.”
After making sure that she was as lovely as a spring morning, she bent down and placed her soft hands on my shoulders. Kissing my forehead, she said, “You be a good girl for Ma Pearl and Papa. Don’t make Ma Pearl have to whup you.”
That was the last thing she said to me before she became a mama to Sugar and Li’ Man and a memory to me and Fred Lee.
When the screen door to the parlor creaked open that Saturday, I jumped. But I didn’t turn around.
“Sister?” Mama called softly.
Reluctantly, I turned and faced her.
Mama was tall, shapely, caramel complexioned, and movie-star beautiful. Except for the height, I looked nothing like her. I was string-bean skinny and as black as the ace of spades, as Ma Pearl liked to say. In her crisp green dress, Mama looked fancier than some of the ladies in Mrs. Robinson’s fashion magazines. As pretty as an angel, some folks said. Even the afternoon sun seemed to form a halo around her freshly pressed and curled hair.
But according to Ma Pearl, her daughter was definitely no angel. Having had me at fifteen and Fred Lee at sixteen, Mama was what the old folks labeled “ruint”. And Ma Pearl never let me forget it. She was so strict on me that I was allowed around only two boys—?Fred Lee and Hallelujah Jenkins, the preacher’s boy.
Mama smoothed a curl from her pretty face and said, “Sister, why you ack’n shameface?”
She’d begun calling me Sister when I was ten, and calling Fred Lee Brother when he was nine. We hated those pet names more than we hated the old-folksy names, Aunt Rose and Uncle Fred.
I shielded my face from the sun with my hand. “I ain’t acting shameface,” I said, squinting at Mama. “I just don’t wanna come in right now.”
With a wide grin plastered on her face, Mama gestured toward the door. “Well, you better git on in here and say bye to us ’fore we leave.”
I cringed. Those were the exact words she’d used the day she pranced off to the courthouse in Greenwood and married Mr. Pete. I had stayed awake all that night, lying in the bed we shared, worried. Waiting for her to come home. Of course, she never did. Now she was heading to Chicago, and she’d probably never come back from there, either.
Instead of following her through that squeaking screen door, I wanted badly to make a run out back to the toilet to settle my gurgling stomach. Plus, with Ma Pearl’s cheerful chatter flowing from the parlor, I knew I didn’t want to go in there and watch her awe over Mama’s new family as if they were a collection of Mrs. Robinson’s fine china.
Yet somehow I managed to stand and stumble toward the screen door. Then I stopped, my stomach flipping, my heart pounding, as I hesitated before Mama.
She smiled. Her brown eyes, warm, glowing like a welcome fire on a cold night, beckoned me, as always, to do what I didn’t want to do. But before I took two steps inside the parlor, Ma Pearl, with her ample frame crammed in the chair right next to the door, took one look at me and frowned. “Gal, what the heck jest happened to you?”