But it wasn’t just the storm clouds that darkened my morning. It was Aunt Belle; she had left without bothering to say goodbye. The minute she found out about the Chicago boy’s funeral, she sent word by Reverend Jenkins that she and her northern comrades were leaving—?heading to Chicago. I figured that’s probably where she was at that very moment—?in Chicago—?preparing to attend a funeral for someone she’d never met while the folks who loved her sat under the heavy weight of a thunderous Mississippi sky.
As Papa and I waited for Uncle Ollie, we didn’t dare sit in the house. Ma Pearl was in a huff—?slinging pots and pans around as if they had scorned her. She had planned to go fishing that morning, but both the thunder and the news that a dead body had been floating in the river for three days kept her at home.
Papa and I sat in silence as we watched the black clouds roll across the sky, looking as if there was no end to them. Thunder rumbled in the distance, yet it was still so hot that it felt as if the heat could burn a person’s skin off. No one thought the weather would turn so suddenly, as the day before had been sunny. Now it felt as if those thick clouds had trapped the heat over Stillwater the way heat got trapped inside the belly of our black woodstove.
At a quarter of ten, Uncle Ollie’s old Ford came rumbling up the road. The car was black with lots of dents, but it got Uncle Ollie, along with all the family members he often chauffeured, where they needed to go. And that Saturday, Papa and I were going to visit his little black bird in the woods—?my aunt Ruthie.
Aunt Ruthie and her husband, Slow John, didn’t live on anybody’s place. They simply lived in a shack hidden so deep in the woods that even a bear couldn’t find it. And since they didn’t live on anybody’s place, Slow John, an uneducated, rowdy drunk, had no one to work for—?no sharecropping or tenant farming. And because of his bad spirits (and the many other spirits he consumed on a daily basis), he rarely held a job more than a week at a time.
Slow John and Aunt Ruthie were so poor they didn’t even have a problem with rats. Those rats took one look at that empty kitchen, shook their heads, and walked away.
Uncle Ollie’s car shook and rattled as he drove over tree roots that snaked throughout Aunt Ruthie’s grassless front yard. As soon as the car stopped, just short of the splintered front steps, three of Aunt Ruthie’s children—?Li’ John, Virgil, and Mary Lee—?rushed off the sagging porch and raced to the car.
“Papa!” they cried. They had just seen him the month before, but they acted as if they hadn’t seen him in a year.
The screen door creaked open, and Aunt Ruthie stepped out on the porch. She might have had a complexion like cocoa, but she was one of the most beautiful women I knew. She kept her long hair pressed and curled. And when she smiled, her face lit up so bright it could soften even the hardest heart, except that evil Slow John’s.
Her slender body was draped in the same dress she seemed to wear every time I saw her, a lime green one with faded red flowers. With one hand on her hip and the other over her heart, she called out to the car, “Y’all come on in, Papa.”
Aunt Ruthie’s house always smelled like lemons. Every door and window in the house was kept open during the summer. And with so many trees surrounding it, it was always cool, even if the air everywhere else in Stillwater sat stiff at a hundred degrees. But wintertime was a different story. Aunt Ruthie’s house had so many cracks in the walls and floors that it was as cold as the outdoors.
Visiting Aunt Ruthie made me appreciate why Ma Pearl didn’t want to get thrown off Mr. Robinson’s place. There was a time when Aunt Ruthie and Slow John, like the rest of the family, had resided there as well. From what I heard, Slow John stole money from Mr. Robinson and blamed another worker. But the truth came out when Slow John was foolish enough to go in to town the next week and buy a bunch of new clothes from Mr. Jamison’s store. Mr. Jamison immediately notified Mr. Robinson that one of his “nigras” had come into the store flashing a heap of money. After that, Slow John was never again able to secure a spot on a white man’s place, except for that shack, which was owned by an out-of-town landlord who couldn’t care less about his property.
“Papa, you didn’t have to do that,” Aunt Ruthie said when she saw us hauling sacks of food from the car. She said that every time. And every time, Papa replied, “Ah, this ain’t nothing, Ruthie. We got plenty at the house. No sense in us having all this extra.”
“Li’ John, y’all take them sacks to the kitchen,” Aunt Ruthie said.
Uncle Ollie handed his sack to Li’ John, but Papa and I held on to ours like we always did. “Me and Rose got this, Ruthie,” he said.
We followed Li’ John through the bedroom to the right of the front room, then on to the kitchen from there. Aunt Ruthie had only one bedroom in her house: it was for her and Slow John. The children slept on pallets in the front room and the kitchen. Girls in the front room, boys in the kitchen.