She giggled and said, “Nah, that ain’t it.”
Before I could guess again, Li’ Man blurted out, “We finn’a go to Chi-caaaa-go.”
Sugar’s bright smile dimmed quicker than a candle with a short wick. She slammed the egg crate to the ground and stalked off, yelling, “Li’ Man, you jest spoiled the surprise!” She stomped back up the steps and stormed across the porch. When she snatched open the screen door and yelled, “Papaaa! Li’ Man jest spoiled my surprise to Aunt Rose,” Li’ Man’s eyes bucked bigger than the moon. When the screen door slammed shut, he charged up the steps and raced into the house, ready to defend himself. He knew better than anyone that Sugar was as rotten as a bushel of bad apples, and it wouldn’t take much of her whining for Mr. Pete, or even Mama, to take a switch to him.
But I stood at the front steps, too stunned to move.
Chicago.
Colored folks didn’t go to Chicago to visit. Colored folks went to Chicago to live. In the last few years it seemed everybody had been leaving. Folks were fleeing Mississippi so fast it was like birds flying south for the winter, except they were going north, or out west to California. “Migrating” is what my seventh-grade teacher, Miss Johnson, called it. “A great colored migration,” she’d said. “Like a flock of black birds.” Except, unlike birds who returned in the spring, these folks rarely came back.
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.