The next Sunday we got up, got dressed, and walked back across the street to church, where we all got dunked in icy cold water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. After we got baptized is when Mama got invited to the pantry. It was everything Miss Cynthia had said it would be.
Sister Ernestine took out a cardboard box and started loading it up with rice, flour, powdered milk, a bag of sugar, Tang drink mix, three cans of sardines, and a jar of Jiffy peanut butter. “Thank you, ma’am,” Mama kept saying. “I’m just trying to feed my babies. That’s all I’m tryna do . . . Praise Jesus.”
“God is good all the time, all the time God is good,” Sister Ernestine answered. “Through Him all things is possible.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“God’s work done God’s way will never lack supplies,” she added. “Chile, I heard that on the TV.”
Greater Springfield Baptist Church was the first congregation we joined. But Mama didn’t discriminate. She thought we should go see what kinds of charity other churches had to give. Her baptism hustle took us all over town. We became members of Mount Zion Baptist, New Jerusalem Baptist, Bethel Baptist, Shiloh Missionary, Free for All Baptist.
One Sunday Mama even doubled up, taking us to two services in a day. I don’t know what the pastor thought when we all showed up to get baptized with our hair already wet.
Chapter 4
Angel in Leather Boots
Miss Thompson was my regular third grade teacher, but she didn’t teach me much of anything, unless you consider giving the side eye a skill. All my most important learning happened Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons from one o’clock to 2:05. That’s when I went downstairs to a small classroom across the hall from the cafeteria to see Miss Troup for Title I remedial reading. Kids called it the slow class, but I didn’t care. I loved hanging out with Miss Troup. She was the exact opposite of my mother, quiet, calm, and patient. Plus she was the number one sharpest dressed teacher in the whole school. Miss Troup must have had a closetful of pastel-colored skirt suits and matching floral blouses, because it seemed like she wore a different outfit each day. She styled her hair in a big, bouncy press ’n’ curl and wore long fake eyelashes. But best of all were her boots: bad-to-the-bone, knee-length, brown leather with stacked heels, and always polished to a shine. She looked like she just stepped out of the pages of Jet magazine. Miss Troup—the baddest bitch at English Avenue Elementary—is the teacher who finally taught me how to read.
“Patricia, honey, just try to sound it out,” she said one afternoon, tapping the page with a bright red fingernail painted the color of a cinnamon Red Hot. We were sitting in her classroom with a book cracked open on the desk in front of us. It was hot and I was tired. “Just give it a try,” she said again. I looked hard at the letters. I knew they were strung together in words I should recognize, but none of it made sense.
Not everybody in my life knew I couldn’t read. Mama, for one, thought I could read my ass off. Every afternoon, she would pick up a copy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the corner store. First she’d flip to the comic strips and put her face close to the paper, looking for numbers she was convinced were hidden in the hair or clothes or scenery of the cartoons. Like maybe she’d see a 4 in the background behind Charlie Brown, or a 7 in Hagar the Horrible’s beard. Those were the numbers she’d use for the fifty-cent bets she placed with the Numbers Man. The only other thing she got the newspaper for was to check her daily horoscope. But Mama had never finished elementary school and didn’t know how to read. Instead, she’d hand me the paper and ask me to tell her what it said.
“Sagittarius,” I’d say, looking down with my forehead wrinkled in fake concentration. Then I’d make some shit up: “This is NOT a good day for beating on your children. TODAY IS NOT A GOOD DAY FOR ANY TYPE OF WHOOPING AT ALL!”
Reading Mama’s fake horoscope was easy, but with Miss Troup reading took all my brainpower. Sitting beside her, I could feel the frustration rising up inside me. “Sound it out,” she said again. “Just take your time.” On the page in front of me was a drawing of a cat wearing a big-ass striped hat and red bow tie, holding an umbrella. What the hell? I thought. If the damn picture made no kind of sense, how was I supposed to figure out the words?
“I don’t know what it says,” I mumbled.
“Just give it a try,” she urged.
“I can’t do it.”
I put my face down on the desk, closed my eyes, and swung my legs hard, kicking the metal frame of my chair with the back of my heel.
Bang
Bang
Bang
Bang
I could feel the tears coming. I didn’t even know why I was crying. “It’s okay,” Miss Troup said softly, rubbing my back. “You’re doing fine.” I thought she was going to let me sit out the whole lesson with my face on the desk, the way Miss Thompson did in my regular class. But instead she told me to sit up. Then she turned her chair to face me, looked me in the eye, and said, “Patricia, I’d like you to come by my room tomorrow morning before the first bell. Do you think you can do that?”
“Why?” I asked, worried. “Am I in trouble?”
“No, not at all,” she answered, gently. “I want you to come in early because I have a little something for you.”
Then she smiled at me, big and wide, with her cherry-red lipstick and Chiclet teeth, and I got the feeling that whatever she had for me had to be something good.
The next morning I splashed some cold water on my face, pulled on the musty jeans I’d been wearing all week, and took off running—past Mama asleep on the living room sofa with a Bumpy Face bottle on the floor beside her—and out the front door. I flew past Drunk Tony hanging out on the corner. “Girl, you gettin’ some ass!” he yelled at me, like always.
“Fuck you, Tony!” I shouted back, and kept on running. When I got to the school, I flung open the side door, ran up the ramp, and busted into Miss Troup’s room, sweaty and out of breath.
“Good morning, Patricia!” she said, looking up from her desk. She was wearing a peach-colored dress with a giant bow at the collar and her bad-bitch leather boots. “I’m so happy to see you.” Miss Troup reached under her desk, pulled out a blue nylon gym bag, and told me to follow her down the hall to the girls’ bathroom. We stepped inside and she started taking things out of her bag and setting them down on the side of the sink: a brand-new bar of Ivory soap, a pink container to put the soap in, a Tussy cream deodorant, a tube of Aquafresh toothpaste, a white washrag folded into a little square, and a brand-new toothbrush with a red handle, still in the wrapper.
“Patricia,” she said, turning to me, “these are your things.”