Red Light Wives

by Mary Monroe

  A lot of people we knew took to Miss Pearl right away. She didn’t work and she didn’t have a check coming in the mail like a lot of the older Black folks I knew back then. But Miss Pearl didn’t need a measly check from Uncle Sam or anybody else. She made good money “helping” folks, the same way she had helped me. It seemed like every time I eavesdropped on a conversation between my mama and one of her friends, they were talking about some divine thing that Miss Pearl had done for somebody. She had located a beloved dog that had been missing for a month, and she even helped a childless woman get pregnant. I don’t know if Miss Pearl really had any divine powers, but she solved a lot of people’s problems. That had put her in a very high position in our little town.

  Eventually, things took a sinister turn as far as Miss Pearl was concerned. It didn’t take me long to figure out that supernatural power was a double-edge sword and could cut both ways.

  I started hearing rumors about people going to Miss Pearl to put spells on somebody. Now, as ridiculous as it sounded, I was real skeptical about all that shit (even though I’d had my own experience with something that couldn’t be explained), and it scared the hell out of me. Especially when healthy people suddenly got sick, or somebody lost a job they’d had for umpteen years.

  Mama and Miss Pearl were good friends so Miss Pearl “helped” us a lot. She even took credit for getting Mama through menopause in one piece. Then things went in an ugly and frightening direction. People started calling our house leaving messages for Mama saying Miss Pearl was fooling around with Daddy. When Mama confronted Daddy and Miss Pearl, they both denied that they were having an affair. But a few nights later, my brother Tyrone caught Daddy fucking the hell out of Miss Pearl on a desk in a back room in the store. Daddy was supposed to be at choir practice and Miss Pearl was supposed to be at home in bed with a severe case of grippe.

  All hell broke loose. That same night, with me and all the rest of my siblings riding shotgun, Mama drove Daddy’s truck to Miss Pearl’s fancy red-brick house. Mama had come from a long line of feisty country women. When she got angry, even voodoo didn’t scare her. Her own mother had spent the rest of her life in prison for burning down some racist man’s house after he’d raped her.

  Anyway, Mama cussed Miss Pearl out and batted her head a few times with a two-by-four plank. She told Miss Pearl, “Heifer, I ain’t scared of nothin’ you think you can do. I got Jesus on my side! He got a whole lot more power than you got!”

  Before we left Miss Pearl’s place, my brother Tyrone punched Miss Pearl in the chest so hard, her wig and glasses flew off. My sister Dot crushed Miss Pearl’s glasses with her foot. Then she kicked Miss Pearl in the side while she was already on the floor of her kitchen squawking like a chicken. “Bitch, you don’t fuck with my family,” Dot hollered. “I don’t care what kind of power you think you got, you can die like anybody else.”

  Mama didn’t waste any time turning a lot of people against Miss Pearl. The people who were too scared to piss off Miss Pearl stayed out of the mess. But Mama had a lot of friends, and when they stopped going to Miss Pearl to locate a lost ring or to get a child’s ringworm cured, Miss Pearl’s generous income went way down. She had to get a job cleaning houses. She also lost her brick house and had to move into a trailer.

  I’ll never forget the day Miss Pearl called our house while we were having dinner. She left an ominous message on our answering machine. And it was a warning that chilled me to the bone: “You block-ass neegers’ll weel be sorry you evere fucked weed me.”

  “That crazy bitch don’t scare me,” Mama snapped, spooning more greens onto my plate. She gave Daddy one of the meanest looks she could come up with. “Alex, I hope you happy with the mess you done stirred up.”

  All Daddy did was bow his head and keep chewing.

  I was eighteen. I had a lot of other things on my mind, like finishing school and marrying Sammy Pittman. He was the cutest boy I’d ever seen. I was so damn crazy about that boy, with his big brown eyes and neat little Afro, I didn’t have time to be worrying about some old witch’s threat.

  A month after our attack on Miss Pearl, Daddy had a heart attack and died while he was taking a bath. We found him floating in our claw-foot bathtub. There was nothing strange about Daddy having a heart attack because he’d smoked five packs of cigarettes a day most of his life and had always had trouble with his heart.

  Then my sister Maybelline died a week later. That morning she had complained about a severe pain in her stomach and by noon she was in the hospital. She died that night. The doctor couldn’t figure out what had killed her, so all we ever heard was “unknown causes.” Tyrone was next. A month later he got into a fight with somebody in a card game over ten dollars. He got stabbed in the neck and died on the spot.

  A week after my graduation, which Mama was too nervous to attend, Sammy and I got married. We moved Mama in with us in a little house on a hill behind the church we went to. My sister Dot moved in with her boyfriend and a year later, they got into a fight. He beat her to death with a brick.

  Mama didn’t mention Miss Pearl’s curse until after Dot’s funeral.

  “We got to get out of this town away from that crazy woman,” Mama told me. The fear in her voice was so thick, I could have sliced it with a knife.

  “Mama, you are the one actin’ crazy. Miss Pearl didn’t kill Daddy, Maybelline, Dot, or Tyrone.”

  Mama gasped and shot me a look full of contempt and disappointment. “How many other folks lose so much family in so little time, girl?”

  “What about the Hardy family? Nine of them died in that church bus crash last year. Miss Pearl responsible for that, too?”

  “I ain’t worried about no other family but my own. I know more about these things than you do. I seen all kinds of shit when I was growin’ up. Them roots women can do just about anything they set out to do.”

  “If you think Miss Pearl did somethin’ evil, you need to go see her and set things straight,” I insisted.

  Mama did try to talk to Miss Pearl, but it was too late. Miss Pearl had put the word out that she would never forgive Mama for ruining her life and that Mama would pay for it. A year later my brother Marvin caught pneumonia and died. Mama seemed to turn into a dried-up old hag overnight. Her soft light brown skin looked like leather. Her delicate features looked like they had melted and slid halfway down her face. And she rarely smiled anymore. A slight noise would make her jump up like a rabbit and she lost so much weight, none of her clothes fit.

  I didn’t get really nervous until I ran into Miss Pearl at the Laundromat one night. She gave me a look that was so cold, I shivered. Then, as she was walking out, she told me with a smirk, “You and your mommee, y’all ain’t nevere goin’ to have no peace. I weel see to eet.”

  I didn’t tell Mama about my run-in with Miss Pearl until a month after we’d buried my last brother. The fact that I’d waited so long to tell her, upset Mama almost as much as Miss Pearl’s threat. By now my mother already looked so grief-stricken and old, what I told her didn’t make her look any worse. But I knew she was scared and she couldn’t hide it. She started going to church more, she burned candles, and, she even went to see another woman in Fayette, who also practiced voodoo.

  Every time Mama heard me cough or complain about cramps or any other ailment, she started watching me like a hawk. Then she rubbed me with some greasy red oil that the other voodoo woman had given her. She made me promise that I wouldn’t eat anywhere but at home. And she insisted that I sleep with a Bible under my pillow and wear a cross around my neck at all times. I wasn’t surprised when Mama started talking about us moving away.

  Mama had a friend in San Francisco, a retired schoolteacher who used to go to our church. Sister Curry had tried to get Mama to move to California to live with her right after Daddy died but Mama had refused. Now Mama was begging that old lady to extend the invitation again. But by that time Sister Curry was sick herself and hinting that she would eventually move to Arizona for her h
ealth.

  Mama decided to try Detroit where she had a distant cousin. Sammy had relatives in Detroit, too, so we went with her. Sammy didn’t want to quit his job supervising workers at a peach orchard, and he wasn’t that wild about moving to another state. But after I begged and pleaded with him, threatening to go whether he went or not, he gave in. One of the things I loved about Sammy was the fact that he had always let me have my way. I had told him before we got married that my mama would always come before him in my life. He’d accepted that and married me anyway.

  Detroit didn’t work out for any of us. Sammy couldn’t find a decent job, and it made him cranky. He had dropped out of school in the tenth grade and worked on farms most of his life. There was not much farm work in Detroit. I took whatever jobs I could, but we were still having a hard time making ends meet. We couldn’t even afford our own place and had to live in Mama’s cousin’s basement.

  In addition to all of that, the cold weather was bad for Mama’s health. Mama and I insisted on staying in Detroit anyway, but Sammy wanted to move back to Georgia. His former boss was still holding his old job open, hoping Sammy would return. Because Sammy had accepted me under my conditions, he wouldn’t argue too much with me when it came to my mama. He shut up about moving back to Georgia real quick.

  Less than six months after the move to Detroit, Mama decided it was time for us to move on again! After begging and pleading with her friend in California, her friend said that we could stay with her. My mama was old and so scared, I thought she’d keel over from a heart attack or a stroke if she got any more upset. She was the only close relative I had left. I knew I would never forgive myself if she went off to some strange state and died alone. I had to do what I had to do. I told Sammy we were going with Mama. His reaction shocked the hell out of me.

  “Rosalee, I done had enough of this foolishness. If you leave Detroit, you’ll be leavin’ here without me. I finally got a job, and I ain’t about to leave it,” Sammy told me, whispering in bed that night because Mama was on the other side of the room on a rollaway bed. With Mama so close by every night, we couldn’t even make love. We had to sneak and do it in the bathroom or on the garage floor. Every now and then we went to a cheap motel. It was a young married couple’s worst nightmare. Especially a couple who liked to make love as loud and often as Sammy and I did. And, I could no longer admire my man walking around naked in front of me. “I ain’t goin’ to spend the rest of my life runnin’ from a goddamn witch’s curse,” Sammy said, not even trying to hide his anger. I was horrified. He had never talked in such a bold way to me before.

  Like me, Sammy didn’t really believe in that voodoo shit. But he’d grown up with family members who did, too. He just went along with it because he knew how serious it was with some people.

  I sat up in the weak bed and glared at my husband. The glow from the lamp on the crate we used for a nightstand was dim, but I could still see the pain in my husband’s eyes. I decided that I was in more pain than he was. Sammy still had all of his siblings and a healthy mother who didn’t need anybody to look after her. Besides, I was spoiled and used to getting my way with everybody except Mama.

  “Now you see here, I’m your wife,” I hissed. “You came to Detroit with me so we could both look after my mama.”

  Sammy sat up, his face so close to mine I could feel his breath. “I married you, Rosalee. I didn’t marry your mama. It’s supposed to be me and you, not me, you, and Mama.”

  I heard the springs on Mama’s bed squeak. “Shhhh!” I covered Sammy’s mouth with my hand. In a dry whisper, I continued. “If that’s the way it’s goin’ to be, that’s the way it’s goin’ to be. I’m all my mama’s got now and she needs me more than you do,” I insisted, hoping that Sammy would see things my way. He used to!

  “Rosalee, I have been more than patient with you. I have tried to make you happy. As long as you feel that you should put your mama ahead of me, we ain’t never goin’ to be happy. If you don’t grow up, you goin’ to be a miserable woman for a long time. And, you’ll be miserable by yourself, because ain’t no other man in his right mind goin’ to put up with what I done already put up with.”

  For the first time in our relationship, Sammy Pittman had stood up to me. He refused to quit another job and run away with me and Mama. The strange thing about that was, I was glad he did. It gave me hope that someday I would be strong enough to refuse my mother’s unreasonable demands, too. As much as I loved my husband, and as proud as I was of him, I couldn’t choose him over my mother. It would have killed her, and I knew I’d never be able to live with that. And, I would probably hold Sammy responsible for it until the day he died. I didn’t feel good about the way I treated my husband. But it made me feel a little better when I reminded myself that a woman could only have one mother; a husband could be replaced like a pair of shoes.

  When Mama packed up and climbed on a train to California, I was right behind her. We stayed with the retired schoolteacher, Sister Curry, until she moved on to Arizona to live with her son.

  “Mama, I’m tired of runnin’. If you want to go off somewhere else, you’ll be goin’ without me. I’m stayin’ in California,” I told her when she started dropping hints about following Sister Curry to Arizona.

  “I’m tired, too,” Mama told me. “And you ain’t got to stay out here with me. You can go on back to that husband of yours. I’ll be fine.” Mama knew which buttons to push on me. “I got enough money to last me for a while and enough to bury me…”

  After Sister Curry moved away, we stayed on in her apartment. But she had been living there on some kind of agreement where she didn’t have to pay but a hundred dollars a month. The apartment owner wouldn’t let us take over that same agreement, so the rent went up to a thousand dollars a month! I took whatever temp jobs I could get, but even with Mama’s pension, we couldn’t make it. Bill collectors started calling, we couldn’t keep our utilities paid, and we ate a lot of Spam and peanut butter.

  Then I answered a newspaper ad. Within two months after moving to California, I landed a job answering telephones for an escort service. The cramped little office was on the first floor in a big brick building on Howard Street, in downtown San Francisco. That’s where I met Carlene Thompson. As a go-between for the man who owned the service, she was the one who’d interviewed me for the job. I didn’t need any experience, but I was told to my face in no uncertain terms that I had to be discrete and dependable. My job was to take names and numbers, not to set up dates and certainly not to quote prices. If a caller brought up sex, I was supposed to play dumb, tell him it was an escort service, not a brothel. A lot of teenage boys called up acting the fool. If the caller sounded too young, I was to hang up. If the man was not a regular, Carlene had to check him out by calling his place of business and in some cases, going to visit him there.

  There were two other women, alcoholic hags who couldn’t get work anywhere else, who helped me take the calls. But when they were too wasted or hungover to work, Carlene helped when she wasn’t going on dates herself.

  “Rosalee, you can expect just about anything to happen in this line of work. One customer who’s into watchin’ a woman do crazy shit called up and asked me to come to his mansion, get out of my car, go into his backyard and masturbate for ten minutes. Then I was supposed to knock on his back door so he could pay me. I did everything I was supposed to do—but at the wrong house!” Carlene laughed until she cried.

  There was never a dull moment. Between calls, Carlene entertained me with one off-the-wall story after another. Some were funny, but then there were a few that were downright scary. Like the story about the man who’d hog-tied her, then passed out for three hours before he turned her loose.

  I didn’t like what I was doing, but it was the first job I had been able to get that had flexible hours and paid good money. And, I got paid under the table so Uncle Sam couldn’t get his pound of flesh from me. I was able to afford to do nice things for Mama, and that kept her happy. />
  Carlene seemed to enjoy telling me about all the years she had slept with men for money. “Girl, back in Ohio, I lived with this old madam we all called Scary Mary. That sister taught me most of everything I know about men and their money and how to get it. It ain’t that hard. Especially for a pretty woman like me,” Carlene bragged. She was in her late thirties, and looked it, even with her long dyed black hair and petite body. Being light-skinned, and always boasting about it, she thought mighty highly of herself. “Me, even at my age, I can still make as much money as a girl your age.”

  I rolled my eyes and yawned, knowing it would irritate Carlene. “I know I need money real bad, but I don’t think I want to start walkin’ the streets yet,” I told her. “I think more of myself than that,” I added with a sneer. I’d enjoyed such good sex with my husband, every time I saw a man now who looked like him, my crotch itched. I couldn’t imagine getting that close to any other man. Even for money.

  Carlene’s eyes flashed and she shot me a hot look. “Who said anything about walkin’ a damn street?” she said, huffing. Carlene swatted the top of my head with a folded newspaper. “The women we set up on dates, don’t do none of that, if they don’t want to. Ain’t you learned nothin’ by workin’ here? These women we send out get three hundred dollars just to go have dinner with some lonely man from out of town.” The telephone rang and Carlene’s voice suddenly seemed like it was coming from another woman. She sounded sweet and soft, purring and giggling as she processed the call. “No problem, sweetie. How’s your back? Uh-huh. Well, I’m sure Ester will be glad to hear she didn’t hurt you too much last week. You better start takin’ better care of yourself before you get hurt even more. Yes, baby. I’ll pay you a visit myself next week.” As soon as Carlene completed the call, she turned to me again and said harshly, “You better get the spirit, sister. That call just now,” she tapped the telephone, “that old goat is good for five hundred dollars. He’s fat as fuck and comes like that,” she giggled, snapping her fingers.