“Humph,” said Ma Pearl. “You shoulda see’d what I caught her doing in my bedroom last week.”
Aunt Clara Jean’s head snapped toward me. “What?” she asked, wide-eyed, eager for gossip.
My blood felt like it drained as Ma Pearl proceeded not only to give a play-by-play of the fiasco of my dancing scene in her bedroom, but also to embellish the story with details that were way beyond my thirteen-year-old imagination. “All moanin’ and groanin’,” she said, frowning with disgust.
Aunt Clara Jean looked down her nose at me and said, “Umph, umph, umph. She fast, jest like her mama.”
I felt tears begin to bulge. “Ma Pearl, you know that ain’t true,” I said, my lips trembling.
Ma Pearl narrowed her eyes at me. “You wadn’t in front of my mirror dancing like a tramp off the street?”
Before I could stop them, tears fell in clumps into my food. I took my chance on a skillet flying to the back of my head and got up from the table and ran out the back door.
My whole body shook as I raced down the steps, across the backyard, and straight to the cotton field, the sound of Ma Pearl’s and Aunt Clara Jean’s cackling following me all the way.
I ran all the way to the far end of the field before I stopped and collapsed in the dust. The tall green leaves and white cotton bolls hid me as I lay there and sobbed—?promising myself that I would one day kill Ma Pearl and Aunt Clara Jean.
Chapter Twenty-Three
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 8
PAPA WAS WRONG WHEN HE SAID I NEVER FORGET. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t remember what my daddy’s face looked like. I had seen him only once, from a distance, when he came to see Fred Lee shortly after he was born. Every year when the cotton was full and ready for harvesting, I thought about that day.
Fred Lee and I were both nursing at Mama’s breast, but she still had to go to the field to pick cotton just the same. She would come back to the house every few hours to nurse Fred Lee, then allow me—?at nearly two years old—?to have the rest of whatever was left of her milk when he was done.
On one of those days, there was a knock at the door. It was our daddy, Johnny Lee Banks. Mama stood at the slightly open door, her back to me, and told him, “I can’t see you no mo’.”
“I didn’t come to see you,” he replied. “I jest wanna see the baby.”
I thought he was talking about me until Mama said, “You can’t see him neither.”
“They say he don’t look nothing like me,” my daddy replied. “I wanna see for myself.”
“You need to leave ’fo my mama catch you here,” Mama said, pushing on the door.
Instead, the door opened wider, and Johnny Lee tried to push past Mama. She pushed him back out the door, but not before I saw his face. I guess I didn’t see it long enough to hold it in my memory. But his voice is still there. It dragged, just like Fred Lee’s.
I couldn’t remember my daddy’s face, but poor Queen had never even seen her daddy’s face. Nor did she know his name. Fred Lee had seen our daddy once, when he had gone to town with Uncle Ollie. Neither said anything to the other, but Uncle Ollie had pointed him out from a distance and said, “There go yo’ pappy, boy.”
Queen was following in the same footsteps as our mamas. Maybe she’d get lucky like Aunt Clara Jean and find a kind man like Uncle Ollie who would marry her and start a new family. Or perhaps she’d end up like Mama and find a rich man who desired a pretty woman to raise his children.
Well, I didn’t want to end up like any of them, not Mama, not Aunt Clara Jean, and certainly not Aunt Ruthie, who, to escape Ma Pearl’s house, married Slow John. From what I’d heard, she had been offered the same opportunity as Aunt Belle. Papa’s sister Isabelle had come from Saint Louis and offered to take her back when she was sixteen, said she could attend a cooking school and become a chef. But Ma Pearl refused to let her go. Two years later Aunt Ruthie slipped off in the night and married Slow John.
Angry with her or not, I knew I’d pattern my life after Aunt Belle. Like Aunt Belle, I knew I’d have to escape through someone taking me up north. And I knew I had to learn a trade. I would’ve preferred finishing high school and going to college, but at the time, anything would have been better than chopping and picking cotton. Or squeezing milk from an ornery heifer before the sun came up in the morning.