Midnight Without a Moon(36)
“I heard of Bryant. And the bald-head one sound like his brother. Milam,” Ma Pearl said brusquely. “Lawd, I hope it ain’t J. W. I believe he the man Doll say her nephew work for in Glendora. She say he one o’ the meanest white mens in Mississippi. Meaner than a bear caught in a beehive. Fought in the war. Learnt how to beat mens to death with his pistol.”
The room was quiet again. My legs grew weak from standing on my toes to peer into the parlor through the cracked mirror. I needed to go get water so I could wash up. But I couldn’t move. My curiosity kept my ears glued to the parlor and my eyes on that mirror.
Finally Ma Pearl spoke. “Y’all know that boy dead.”
“Mama!” Aunt Belle snapped.
“They might as well be looking for a body ’stead o’ waiting for the boy to show up at the front do’,” Ma Pearl said. “If Big Milam is the one that got a holt of him, he dead.”
What if Ma Pearl was right? What if the boy was dead while everybody was waiting for him to show up at the house? What if Miss Addie was right about something bad about to happen in Mississippi? What if colored folks were about to start getting killed for any old reason and regardless of their age?
Reverend George Lee in May.
Levi Jackson in July.
That old man Lamar Smith in the middle of August.
And now a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago might be dead too? And August hadn’t even ended.
My head spun, and I no longer felt like going to the kitchen to warm up water for washing. I no longer felt like doing anything but crawling back into bed and hiding my head under the pillow. I had to do something to block out the horrible thoughts swirling through my head.
September
Chapter Nineteen
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1
WHEN I WAS ALMOST TEN AND REALIZED THAT GOD wasn’t going to lighten my skin any more than he was going to let the moon rule the day, I began to wonder what it was like to be white. More specifically, I used to wonder what I would be like if I were white. Would I be nice like old Mrs. Jamison, whose husband owned a clothing store uptown? It was rumored that she allowed her colored maid to enter her house through the front door as well as eat with her at the dining room table. The only time Ma Pearl got to see Mrs. Robinson’s front door was when she had to answer it. Or would I be spiteful like Ricky Turner and chase Negroes off the road with my pickup just for the fun of it? I always figured I would be a nice white person, that I wouldn’t hate Negroes or mistreat them. But maybe that was because I was a Negro and knew what it felt like to be mistreated simply because my skin was brown. And among my own people, I also knew what it felt like to be shunned simply because my skin was too brown.
Hallelujah once showed me a copy of Jet magazine that had an article called “The Most Beautiful Women in Negro Society.” On the cover was a woman labeled “Pretty Detroit Socialite.” She looked as white as Mrs. Robinson.
Hallelujah, twelve years old at the time, cooed and clucked over her, claiming that he’d marry a pretty woman just like that one day. I didn’t see one picture of a woman with dark skin among those listed as “the most beautiful women in Negro society.”
Also in Jet I saw an advertisement for a product that could make my skin light. After that, I started bleaching my skin with the stuff Aunt Clara Jean used to keep her complexion “even.” Every time I went to her house, I’d sneak into her bedroom, grab the jar of Nadinola Bleaching Cream from her dresser, then smear the cream all over my face. The label read “Lightens skin fast!” and “Results guaranteed!” I’d return home thinking that in no time at all, my skin would be pretty and caramel like the rest of the women in my family, with the exception of Aunt Ruthie. Of course, just like the prayer, the cream didn’t work, as it had to be used daily in order to see results.
A lot of good the cream would have done anyway, seeing how much time I spent in the sun, chopping and picking cotton. That’s where I was supposed to be that morning. Instead, I was somewhere I wasn’t even allowed: Ma Pearl and Papa’s bedroom. I should have been in the field picking cotton, but I just couldn’t go. I couldn’t take it a third day in a row, especially knowing I wouldn’t get to go to school the next week when everyone else went.
Heavy-hearted doesn’t begin to describe what I was feeling that morning. Since the Chicago boy was still missing, so was Aunt Belle. She and Monty were riding all over the Delta in search of any signs of the boy and in search of answers as to how something like that could have happened. I couldn’t believe she cared more about someone she had never met than she did about her own family. She had only a few days left before she returned to Saint Louis, and she couldn’t bother spending them with us.
That morning, I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. So, like my wanna-be-a-movie-star cousin Queen, I faked an illness. Not cramps, but a summer cold. The dry, hacking cough and sneezing were easy to conjure with a little help from a black?pepper?filled handkerchief, but the fever was a bit harder to fake. Sitting close to the woodstove helped, though.
As I stood before Ma Pearl’s dresser and studied my reflection in the clouded mirror, I felt as black as a crow and uglier than a mule. The room was dark because of the thick curtains Ma Pearl had made to block out the sunlight, but that didn’t prevent me from seeing the frightening figure before me. My bony shoulders jutted out from the sleeveless croker-sack dress. And my shapeless arms were so skinny it’s a wonder I was able to even work the pump long enough to fill a bucket with water.