The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat

by Edward Kelsey Moore

  When we got to the end of the line, the men headed back to our table. The three of us women stopped to say hello to Little Earl and Erma Mae, who had come in from the kitchen and were sitting side by side on stools at the far end of the last steam table.

  I said, “Hey, Little Earl. Hey, Erma Mae.”

  They answered together, “Hey, Supremes.”

  I inquired about their health, their children, and Erma Mae’s elderly mother. I asked Little Earl for the latest on his sister Lydia and her husband, who ran a diner in Chicago that was almost identical to the All-You-Can-Eat. After being assured that all of those people were fine, I got around to the question I really wanted an answer to.

  I asked, “How’s your daddy doing, Little Earl?” trying to sound casual about it.

  “Oh, he’s great. Eighty-eight next month and gonna outlive us all, I ’spect. He should be comin’ by sometime soon. Here lately he’ll sometimes sleep in, but he won’t miss an entire day’s work, that’s for certain.”

  “ ’Specially not on a Sunday,” Erma Mae added, nodding her head toward Minnie’s empty fortune-telling table. She said that for Clarice’s benefit since the two of them were kindred spirits on the subject of Minnie.

  At that moment the front door opened with a loud scrape. Little Earl looked toward the door with an expression of boyish expectation, like he really believed that just speaking of his father would conjure him up. But Big Earl didn’t step into the restaurant. Instead, Minnie McIntyre stood in the threshold, holding the door open and letting a hot, moist draft into the room that made the nearby patrons groan in discomfort and give her the evil eye.

  Minnie’s costume of the day was a deep purple robe decorated with the same astrological signs that adorned her corner table. She wore gold Arabian-style slippers with curled-up toes, a necklace made of twelve large chunks of colored glass, each representing a birthstone, and a white turban with a silver bell jutting out from its top. The bell, she claimed, was for Charlemagne the Magnificent to ring whenever he had a message for her. He was very consistent. Charlemagne rang every time Minnie lowered her head to count a client’s money.

  Minnie walked into the restaurant, taking long, slow strides and holding her arms outstretched, palms toward the ceiling.

  Little Earl left his stool and met her at the cash register. He sighed and said, “Miss Minnie, please, we talked about this. I just can’t have you doing your readings on Sundays. The Pentecostals’ll have my ass.”

  Minnie said, “You and your precious Pentecostals will be happy to know that you won’t have to worry about me or my gift much longer.” She wiggled her head from side to side as she spoke, making her bell ring repeatedly. She lowered the range of her normally high-pitched voice to a deep rumble and said, loud enough for nearly everyone in the place to hear, “Charlemagne says I’ll be dead within a year.”

  Most people in the restaurant, having heard Minnie announce grave prophecies that failed to come to pass many times, paid her no mind. Clarice, Barbara Jean, and I stuck around and waited to hear what else she had to say.

  Little Earl said, “Why don’t I make you some tea, get you calmed down?”

  “There’s no calmin’ me down; I’m facin’ the end. And don’t pretend you’re sad to see it. You’ve wanted me out of the way ever since I married Earl.” She pointed at Erma Mae and added, “You, too. I dare you to deny it.”

  Erma Mae was never one for lying. Instead of responding to Minnie, she yelled toward the kitchen, “Belinda, bring some hot tea for Grandma Minnie!”

  Little Earl led Minnie behind the register and guided her onto his stool. In a soft, soothing tone of voice he said, “Yeah, that’s right. Have a cup of tea, and then I’ll walk you back across the street. You, me, and Daddy can talk this whole thing out.”

  She made a kind of a squawking noise and dismissed him with a wave of her hand. “There’s nothin’ to talk out. A year from now, I’ll be dead.”

  Clarice was tired of listening to Minnie’s ramblings. She whispered in my ear, “My food is getting cold. Are we about done listening to this old fake?”

  Minnie screamed, “I heard that!” She was old; but you had to hand it to her, the woman still had excellent hearing. She leapt from the stool and lunged at Clarice, ready to dig her purple polished nails into Clarice’s face.

  Little Earl held her back and got her onto the stool again. She immediately burst into tears, sending black trails of mascara down her copper cheeks. Maybe she’d been faking it for so long that she’d started to believe herself. Or maybe she really had talked to Charlemagne. Fake or not, we all could clearly see that this was a woman who believed what she was saying. Even Clarice felt bad watching Minnie break down like that. She said, “Minnie, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  But Minnie wasn’t ready to hear apologies or be consoled.

  “I knew this was gonna happen. Nobody cares what happens to me. As soon as Charlemagne told me that I’d be dead within a year of Earl, I knew I’d get no sympathy.”

  Little Earl, who had been patting his stepmother on the back while she wailed, took a step away from her and said, “What?”

  “Charlemagne came to me early this morning and said that I would follow Earl to the grave within a year. Those were his exact words.”

  Now the restaurant grew quiet as people began to catch the drift of what she was saying.

  “Are you saying that Daddy is dead?”

  “Yeah, he died last night while he was sayin’ his prayers. Between that and my bad news from Charlemagne this morning, I’ve had a terrible, terrible Sunday, let me tell you.”

  Little Earl grabbed Minnie’s shoulders and spun her on the stool so she faced him directly. “Daddy died last night … and you didn’t call me?”

  “I was gonna call you, but then I thought, If I call ’em, they’ll feel like they’ve got to come over. Then there’ll be the preacher and the undertaker and maybe the grandkids. With everybody makin’ such a fuss, I’ll never get a lick of sleep. So I thought it out and figured your daddy would be just as dead if I got a good night’s rest as he’d be if I called you and didn’t get my sleep. So I just let it be.”

  James, Richmond, and Lester came over from the window table then and joined us. No one said anything, and Minnie sensed that it wasn’t an approving silence. She looked at Little Earl and Erma Mae and said, “I was just tryin’ to be considerate. Y’all need your sleep, too.”

  When the crowd around her remained quiet, she let loose with another wail and a new round of tears. She said, “This is no way to treat a dyin’ woman.”

  Little Earl began to untie his apron. He said, “Is he at Stewart’s?” Stewart’s is the largest black mortuary in town and it’s where most of us are taken when our time comes.

  “No,” Minnie said, “I told you I let it be. He’s upstairs beside the bed. And that wasn’t easy on me, neither. I hardly got seven hours of sleep, him kneelin’ there and starin’ at me all night.”

  Little Earl threw his apron to the floor and ran out of the door toward his father’s house across the road. James was right on his heels.

  Erma Mae began to sob. She came around the buffet line and launched herself straight into Barbara Jean’s arms, passing by Clarice and me even though we were both closer friends of hers than Barbara Jean. I wasn’t surprised or offended, though. And I was sure Clarice wasn’t either. Everyone knew Barbara Jean was the expert on grief.

  As Barbara Jean held Erma Mae and patted her trembling back, I looked through the window and across the street. James and Little Earl were just arriving at Big Earl’s home. They rushed up the front stairs and right past Mama, who stood near the porch swing. Big Earl and Thelma McIntyre sat on the swing holding hands, Miss Thelma’s head on her husband’s shoulder. I could tell from Mama’s familiar gestures that she was telling one of her jokes. I had seen those particular movements a hundred times. I knew which joke she was telling and that she was now at the punch line. Right on cue,
Big Earl and Miss Thelma doubled over laughing, stomping their feet on the painted boards of the porch floor and falling against each other on the swing. Even from dozens of yards away, I could see the sun reflecting off the tears that ran down the cheeks of Big Earl’s grinning face.

  Chapter 6

  Erma Mae cried on Barbara Jean’s shoulder as a crowd of friends surrounded them murmuring words of sympathy and support. Barbara Jean felt a hand stroke her back and she turned her head to see Carmel Handy standing behind her, shrunken and bony in her best Sunday dress. Barbara Jean knew what the first words out of Miss Carmel’s mouth would be and she held her breath, bracing herself to hear them. Miss Carmel didn’t disappoint. In her high-pitched, feathery voice she said, “Sweetheart, did you know you were born on my davenport?”

  Barbara Jean’s mother, Loretta Perdue, was drunk when she gave birth on the living room sofa of Miss Carmel, a woman she had never met. Her friends had thrown her a baby shower that day at Forrest Payne’s Pink Slipper Gentlemen’s Club, where she worked as a dancer. She often told Barbara Jean how she only drank whiskey sours when she was expecting because everyone knew that drinking beer during pregnancy would make your baby nappy-headed. “See, honey,” she would say, “your mama was always lookin’ out for you.”

  Loretta had plans to give her daughter, and herself, a leg up in life. After reading the news of Clarice’s birth in the newspaper, and seeing how people went on about it, she decided that her child would be the second black baby born at University Hospital. Clarice’s mother was just the wife of a shady lawyer and no better than she was, Loretta figured. Now that the color barrier had been broken, she would just show up at the hospital when the first pain hit and take her rightful place among a higher class of folk. Like most of Loretta’s schemes, it didn’t work out that way.

  Things went wrong for Barbara Jean’s mother when the man she had arranged to see that evening sprung a surprise on her. She’d told him five months earlier that he was going to be a father, and he had seemed to be pleased about it. Or rather, he was pleased Loretta was not going to tell his wife. She was content merely to accept a small monthly payment in exchange for her discretion. This same arrangement also suited each of the three other men Loretta had informed that they were the father of her unborn child.

  Loretta had set up a meeting with Daddy no. 4 (going by the order in which she had told them about her pregnancy) at a quiet roadside diner in Leaning Tree after the baby shower. At the diner, she was going to remind him of just how fair she was being and then, when she had him feeling appropriately grateful to her for being such a good sport, she would casually mention just how much easier a new Chevrolet would make life for her and his child. If she worked it right, by sunset she would have a new car and he would travel back to his wife and family in Louisville thanking God that he had knocked up such a reasonable woman.

  She seated herself at a booth and drank coffee to come down from her whiskey sour buzz and waited for Daddy no. 4 to join her. When he stepped through the door with Daddy no. 2 right behind him, she knew that the jig was up.

  As the men approached, Loretta, always quick on her feet when cornered, made one last desperate move to hold her plan together by playing one daddy against the other. She said, “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’ve tried so many times to tell him that I love you and it’s all over with him, but I was just too scared. He’s so mean; I didn’t know what he might do to me and our baby.” She said it to both of them, hoping each would assume she was talking to him alone and that she could slip out of the diner while they fought over her. Later, she could separately thank both the conquering hero and the valiant loser for defending her honor, assuring each that she loved only him. With luck, after the dust settled, her plans could go forward unchanged.

  Loretta was a stunning beauty, and she knew it. She thought it was only logical that men should fight over her, and they often did. When she got sick with the cirrhosis that killed her at thirty-five, the hardest thing for her—harder than dying, Barbara Jean thought—was saying goodbye to her beauty. Loretta died hard and she died ugly. Liver disease whittled away her cute, round face and bountiful figure to nothing—a mean turn of fate for a woman who, as one of her men described her, “looked like she was made out of basketballs and chocolate pudding.”

  Daddies no. 2 and no. 4 presented a united front in the diner, with Daddy no. 4 doing most of the talking. He told her she’d never get another dime from either of them, and he carried on as if he were some sort of genius detective for single-handedly figuring out her plot. The truth, blurted out by Daddy no. 2, was that Loretta had been the victim of her customary bad luck. The fathers had ended up seated next to each other at Forrest Payne’s joint, and after they had sucked down enough of Forrest’s watered-down liquor to loosen their tongues, they started bragging about their women. It didn’t take them long to realize that they were each bragging about the same one.

  Forrest Payne had pretensions of running a gentlemen’s club instead of a country strip joint and whorehouse, so he greeted every customer at the door dressed up in his signature canary-yellow tuxedo. Then he escorted them to their seats with all the flourish of a French maitre d’. Since he didn’t trust anyone else to handle the door and the cover charge money, Loretta knew it had to have been Forrest himself who had seated the daddies next to each other. This, in spite of the fact that she had left explicit instructions that none of her baby’s fathers should be placed within ten feet of each other. For the rest of her short life, Loretta blamed Forrest Payne for ruining her.

  Daddy no. 4 leaned across the table and wagged his finger at Loretta’s nose. He said, “I was too smart for you, li’l girl. You been outplayed at your own game.”

  Loretta stared at Daddy no. 4, who had once been her favorite, and wondered what it was she had ever seen in him, with his wide, lopsided mouth and his strange, Egyptian-looking eyes. Then she thought about the ring he had bought for her, a decent-sized ruby with tiny azure sapphires arranged around it in a daisy pattern, and she recalled why she had put up with him. She slid her hands from the table so he wouldn’t see the ring and get it in his head to demand its return. When she tried to pawn it a year later, she would find out the stones were glass.

  Daddy no. 2 surprised Loretta by bursting into tears. He buried his face in his hands and wailed as if he’d been stuck with a sharp stick, blubbering on about his lost son. Daddy no. 4 put his arm around his new friend and then put both of their feelings about Loretta into words. He leaned toward her and launched into some very loud and creative name-calling. The other customers in the diner looked their way, wondering what the commotion was about.

  Loretta was a firm believer that, if a woman was smart, she acted like a lady by the light of day no matter what she did after sunset. This situation, one daddy crying his eyes out and the other loudly exploring the limits of his vocabulary, was just the kind of thing that got you ostracized by decent folks—the kind of people she planned to be spending her time with as soon as she’d had her baby in University Hospital and elevated her status. Loretta hurried away from the booth and, for the benefit of anyone who might have been listening, said, “I can see that you two do not intend to behave like gentlemen. I shall not stay and risk losing my poise due to your crass behavior.” What she said to herself was “Fuck this. I still got Daddy no. 1 and Daddy no. 3.”

  She headed back toward Forrest Payne’s place to cuss him out, and was halfway there when her water broke. She made her way to the best-kept house on the block, thinking that its owners would be likely to have a telephone—not everyone did in 1950. Mrs. Carmel Handy, a schoolteacher Loretta would have known if she hadn’t left school in the sixth grade, owned the well-landscaped brick bungalow she chose to stop at. Miss Carmel answered the insistent knocking at her door and found herself confronted with a very attractive, massively pregnant young woman supporting herself against the doorjamb.

  Between groans of discomfort, the girl said, “Hi, I’m Mrs. L
oretta Perdue, and I was admiring your front yard and thinking that whoever lived here must be a person of class and would surely have a telephone. I myself have a telephone, but I’m a ways from home and I’m not feeling well. So, if you don’t mind, I need you to call my friend, Mr. Forrest Payne, at his place of business and tell him to come get me and drive me to University Hospital where I plan to have my baby like folks of substance. It’s the least Forrest could do since my situation is entirely his fault.”

  Because she had been in the middle of pressing her hair and she didn’t want to stand there with her door open for any passersby to see her with her head half done, Carmel Handy permitted Loretta to enter her home. Careful not to burn Loretta with the still-smoking straightening comb, she helped her into the house. In her foyer, Miss Carmel listened politely as Loretta recited Forrest Payne’s telephone number, all the while thinking how funny it was that this girl was trying so hard to make Forrest sound like anything but the pimp everyone in Plainview knew he was.

  Miss Carmel led Loretta to her living room sofa to rest while she made the phone call. But instead of calling Forrest Payne—she wasn’t about to have her neighbors see that man coming and going from her house, thank you very much—she called a nurse who lived down the block.

  The nurse brought Barbara Jean into the world right there on the sofa while Carmel Handy made the first of a dozen phone calls she would make that day to tell her friends what had happened in her home and to extol the benefits of plasticizing your furniture. That first call began “Some girl just popped out another of Forrest Payne’s bastards right in my front room,” starting a rumor that would follow Barbara Jean for the rest of her life.