32 Candles by Ernessa T. Carter
Dedication
To my dearest mother. Wish you were here.
PART I
Then
ONE
So you’ve probably heard of this thing by now. It’s called life. And it’s hard. Even when it looks easy, it’s hard. That’s pretty much everybody’s situation, and it was mine, too.
And on top of the usual business of life, I was ugly. I knew this because I lived in Glass, a little town in western Mississippi, where people aren’t ever afraid to tell you how they feel—especially if they’re women. In fact, it’s impossible for a Southern black woman not to state a thing as she sees it. So they would often come up and say what they were thinking on the subject of my looks, while I was out with Cora, whose beauty offended them.
Cora had caramel-tinted skin—not light enough to be called yellow, not dark enough to be called plain. She was just right, with a heart-shaped face and large brown eyes that kept the title of ugly far from her door.
And there was another thing about Cora that offended the women in our town. She had a lot of friends. A lot of male friends, but not one female friend. That’s really why folks hated her.
She was the kind of woman that men met at Westons, the one bar in Glass. She went there near about every night, and some of the time she didn’t come home. But a lot of the time she came stumbling in the door, reeking of alcohol, with a guy right behind her.
These were the guys she called her friends if she called them anything at all. And she didn’t care if they had a wife or a girlfriend, she’d still bring them home to the one-bedroom shack that she inherited from her mother. She wouldn’t even shush them as they walked past her daughter (me), sleeping on the couch in the front room. And she’d show them a good time. From what I could hear, sex with Cora was fun and exciting and real loud.
Cora’s men were often appreciative of her friendship. I always waited till they had left to get up and use the toilet. And when I walked past her bedroom, sometimes the lights would still be on and I’d see wrinkled money on the nightstand. Or sometimes there’d be a bill that needed paying and Cora would ask one of her friends real pretty if he could take care of it. And I’d watch as he stuck it in his pocket.
I’d guess about seventy percent of the friends that Cora brought home came back for more. I’d also guess that by the time this story begins in the spring of 1984, she had slept with at least half of the husbands and boyfriends in town.
And that’s why black Southern ladies, who wouldn’t deign to walk on the same side of the street as her most days, would go out of their way to come over to us in Greeley’s Mini-Mart and say things like, “Oh dear, when you planning on putting a comb through this child’s head?”
Or, “She sure is dark, ain’t she? You’d lose that child in too much night.”
Or, “Why, she didn’t inherit none of your looks, did she? Maybe she got that face from her daddy.” A beat. “Whoever that is.”
And Cora would smile, mean as a snake, and say, “She named after him.”
Which of course didn’t tell them nothing, since my name was Davidia, and there were at least a dozen Davids in town. Cora never said, but I always suspected she’d done that on purpose.
I had serious doubts that she actually knew who my daddy was. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had just decided on the name that would hurt the most people. I think she liked the idea of wives and girlfriends, lying awake at night, wondering, Is that his child? Is that dark, nappy-haired thing his child?
And in their eyes, this made me even uglier. It made me so hideous that they could justify going up to Cora and calling me ugly straight to her face, as if I wasn’t standing right there.