by Mary Monroe
I gave Odell the biggest smile I could turn up my lips to form. I was thankful to pieces that he had alerted us about his plan to hire a “watchdog” security man to crack down on the shoplifting. That didn’t scare me, and I knew it didn’t scare Milton. He’d busted into houses and businesses that had security guards and real dogs and never got caught. The bottom line was, nothing could keep competent crooks like us from taking care of business. All we had to do was keep being careful.
We decided to drop in on Joyce and Odell again the very next evening. The door was cracked, so we walked in without knocking. We didn’t expect them to be entertaining company two days in a row, so we was surprised to see a mule-faced cracker and his frizzy-haired, pointy-nosed wife sitting on the couch. It was the same pair Joyce had been entertaining when I’d paid her a unexpected visit a few weeks ago: the café woman and her sheriff’s deputy husband. I didn’t like them the first time, but this time they really spooked me, because the husband had on his uniform, his badge, and a holster with a gun in it. Milton must have felt the same way, because he suddenly “remembered” that we had company coming in a little while, so we stayed only five minutes. We decided that day that we wouldn’t visit Joyce and Odell again for a few weeks, unless they invited us over.
* * *
Friday night, when Joyce and Odell was about to leave our house after gulping down three drinks apiece, I walked them to the door. They was the last to leave.
“Joyce, I might come over tomorrow so you can show me how to make hush puppies.” A few hours earlier, Odell had mentioned that he would be spending most of the weekend with his daddy. Milton had plans to meet up with Willie Frank in the morning and maybe go fishing and drop off some deliveries. And I didn’t want to spend all that time by myself.
“That’ll be just fine. I like to lie in bed after I wake up on weekends, and read for a while. If you decide to come, don’t come before eight,” she told me. I was stunned when she hugged me. “Good night, y’all.”
After I shut the door behind them, I stood in front of it as silent as a mute, gazing at Milton sprawled on the couch.
“Why you so quiet now? What’s going on in that busy brain of yours?” he asked.
“I was just wondering if she’ll feel like hugging me when I get over there tomorrow morning.”
Milton shrugged and then yawned. “I hope she will. It’s a blessing to see you and Joyce making progress.”
“The only thing is, I don’t know what we progressing to.”
CHAPTER 17
YVONNE
I ARRIVED NEXT DOOR AT FIVE MINUTES PAST EIGHT ON SATURDAY morning. By nine, Joyce had finished showing me how to make hush puppies. After we ate a few, we cleaned up the kitchen and sat down at the table to chat. She hadn’t said nothing to offend me yet. All we’d talked about so far was her great life, recipes, shoe sales, what the news was reporting, and a few other mundane subjects. I was getting bored, so I was happy when she said something that sounded interesting.
“I don’t care for Saturdays the way I used to.” She let out such a long, deep sigh, you would have thought she was in pain. On top of that, she gave me a weary look.
“Why come? At least you don’t have to go to work. You can spend the day doing all kinds of other things.”
“Yeah, but when Odell is gone, the day seems so much longer. I don’t expect him, or want him, to stop spending so much time with his daddy. These could be Lonnie’s last days. I’m just thankful Odell and me still got our daddies.” She paused and patted my arm. “I know you miss your parents, and I pray they are at peace.”
“I appreciate you saying that.” Like always, when that subject came up, I had to blink hard to hold back my tears.
“I can see that that’s an uncomfortable subject for you. Let’s talk about something that’s not so gloomy.” Before I could say anything, she popped her fingers and abruptly stood up. “Come in the bedroom so I can show you a couple of new dresses I ordered from Sears and Roebuck.”
Her bedroom was just what I’d expected. There was a four-poster bed with matching nightstands and a huge chifforobe. The bedspread matched the frilly yellow and green curtains. But when it came to fashion, all of Joyce’s taste was in her mouth. So I was not surprised by what she had in her closet. There wasn’t a piece in it that I would wear even to a Halloween party. One of her newest dresses was plaid and had sleeves that looked like bat wings. Another one could have been mistook for a tent with a green bow tie that looked like a two-leafed clover. I couldn’t believe how organized everything was. Odell’s clothes was at one end of the closet; hers was at the other. The dresses was first, the blouses was next, and her shawls and sweaters was at the tail end. Shoes so long they looked like little boats was lined up in a row on the floor. If some hadn’t had high heels, I wouldn’t have been able to tell hers from Odell’s. The whole room was so neat, it didn’t look lived in. On top of the dresser, there was a large picture of Joyce and Odell on their wedding day, cheesing it up with the preacher and some of their guests.
“Y’all looked so nice,” I commented.
“I know. To this day, some folks are still telling us that. Girl, it was such an amazing ceremony.” Joyce’s eyes got glassy, and tears pooled in them. She pulled a handkerchief out of her brassiere and blew her nose. “Speaking of wedding pictures, do you have any?” She laid her handkerchief on the dresser, so I figured she’d probably do some more swooning and have to blow her nose some more.
“Uh, no. There was a date mix-up with the man that was supposed to come with his Kodak. He didn’t show up until the next day.”
Joyce gave me a puzzled look. “Where did y’all get married?”
“At Delroy Crutchfield’s place. Since that was where me and Milton met for the first time, he wanted to marry me there.”
Joyce stared at me for a few seconds with her mouth hanging open. “My Lord. Y’all got married in a bootlegger’s house?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Delroy’s place is one step above a shanty! I’m so sorry to hear that that’s where you spent your special day. Odell would never have asked me to do such a lowly thing.”
“It’s a blessing to hear that. I guess them few years he spent living and working in Aunt Mattie’s whorehouse before he met you was lowly enough for him . . .” To keep her from going on again about Odell, I rushed into another subject. “You read all them books?” I pointed at a stack on the dresser, next to the wedding picture.
“Yup. I’ve read my favorites more than once. Reading is a good way to ingrain better grammar than that ignorant gibberish most colored folks speak.” I couldn’t believe how proud Joyce was of herself. She puffed her chest out so far, it almost looked like she had strapped on a pillow. “If you ever want to borrow a few, just let me know. And you better borrow my dictionary, too. Otherwise, you’d have to skip over a lot of the words, and you might not enjoy the books as much as I do.”
“No thanks. Even when I was in school, I didn’t like to crack open a book. And when I had to read one, I didn’t learn much.”
“I can tell.”
That comment wouldn’t have stung so sharp if she hadn’t shook her head and gave me such a pitiful look to go with it. She was so happy being Joyce Watson.
“Joyce, thanks for showing me your new dresses. Someday I hope to have some stuff that sharp and a bedroom as nice as yours.”
“I hope you do, too. By the way, how can you stand to sleep in your bedroom the way it is now? Nothing matches, and it’s so bleak.” Joyce twisted her mouth into a grimace and shuddered.
“Because Milton is in there with me.”
I guessed she didn’t know how to respond to my answer, because all she did was gaze at me for about five seconds. “Come on, Yvonne. Let’s go to the living room.”
When we sat down on the couch, she gave me one of the strangest squinty-eyed looks I ever seen. It seemed like she was trying to look inside my head. Her silence was making me nervous, so I said the n
ext thing that came to my mind.
“Maybe I will borrow some of your books. It might help me sharpen my mind, like I should have done in school. But I didn’t like school, and money was so tight, it didn’t take long for me to make up my mind to drop out and go to work full-time. I doubt if them teachers at Grove High missed me.”
Joyce’s jaw dropped so low, I was surprised it didn’t reach her neck. “You went to Grove High? So did I!”
“Yeah . . . Wait a minute. Sweet Jesus!” I raised my finger in the air and waved it at her. “Girl, the first time I seen you, I told myself I’d seen you before. I was three grades behind you when I was at Grove High, but we had a study hall together. I missed a lot of days before I dropped out, but I remember you now. You and two other girls used to hang out together. Their folks was well off, too, so y’all wore pretty clothes every day. Me and the other girls that lived on the lower south side wore the same drab things, sometimes two or three days in a row.”
Joyce looked like she was about to laugh. I was glad she didn’t. “I’ll never forget the girls from your neighborhood. Especially the ones that came to school stinking up a storm, like they didn’t know what soap and water was. But I don’t remember you at all. That’s a mystery, because there’s only one high school for colored kids in this town, and everybody knew everybody.”
“That is a mystery.” I’d been expelled for cussing at my teachers, fighting, and causing other ruckuses. With all of that, how could Joyce not remember me? I wondered. Especially if everybody knew everybody. And another thing, I had never come to school “stinking up a storm.” Her comments sliced through my feelings like a knife. She was making me feel smaller than I really was. I felt like I was shrinking with each word that spewed out of her mouth.
“Most of the kids from the lower south side came to class only a few days each month. There was this one girl named Bonnette Pittman. I could never forget a piece of work like her! She only came to school on the first day of each new semester and when we had holiday parties. She didn’t show up again until the last day of school, to attend the end-of-the-semester party and get her report card.” Joyce threw her head back and laughed like a hyena. “The teachers always passed Bonnette on to the next grade, even though she could barely read and write. I guess it didn’t matter one way or the other. Even with a high school diploma, some colored people still don’t do a damn thing with their lives. She was from a family of fools, so it was no wonder she was so trifling. The last time I saw her was on the first day of our senior year. I wonder what happened to her.”
“The reason she didn’t return was that she got in some trouble.”
“Oh? What did she do?”
“The weekend after school had started, Bonnette went to Florida with her bootlegger boyfriend to visit his folks. She got in some trouble in a jook joint one night, when she bumped against a white woman and made her spill her drink. The woman called her a clumsy nigger and punched her. Bonnette stabbed her to death. She been in prison ever since and still got thirteen more years to go.”
“Prison!” Joyce screamed. “Oomph, oomph, oomph! That Bonnette. She was such a jook-joint jezebel, I’m not the least bit surprised. If she had the nerve to kill a white woman, she had to be crazy, and they should have put her in a nuthouse, not a prison. Oh well. I’m sure one place is as bad as the other, so in the long run, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they got her off the street.” Joyce sniffed and leaned closer to me. “I don’t know why some colored people won’t behave. Me and Odell have never had any trouble with the law or white folks. And that’s only because we know our place and stay in it.” Joyce sighed and gave me a weary look. “As much as I hate to admit it, this is a white man’s world.”
On top of everything else, she was a Uncle Tom, too. Just like I’d suspected when I seen how meek she was with that white feedstore couple that day me and Milton paid her a visit. She’d just confirmed it.
“Grove High had so many busybodies. Which blabbermouth told you what happened to that sleazy Bonnette? I still feel so sorry for her,” she said.
Joyce had really struck a nerve with the comments about Bonnette. “Her mama was my mama’s baby sister. Bonnette was the only true friend I had the whole time I was in school.”
“Oh. I guess I don’t feel as sorry for her now that I know she had at least one friend.” Joyce squinted and gazed at me so hard, I squirmed. “Now that I look at you closer, I can see the resemblance between you and her. I guess good hair and high cheekbones run in your family, huh?”
“Yeah. We got Indian blood.”
“Pffft! You and everybody else—or so they say. There ain’t enough Indians in America for all the colored people that claim to have Indian blood to be telling the truth.”
“I ain’t got no reason to lie. My mama’s mama was a full-blooded Apache. Before Mama died, she used to take me and my sisters to visit her kinfolks on the reservation in Oklahoma where she grew up.”
“Well, at least you look it. I guess every colored person in this country got some mixed blood, including me. My grandmothers on both sides had babies by the white slave masters they belonged to. But with my complexion and nappy hair, folks can’t see my mixed blood as easy as they can yours.”
“I know what you mean,” I agreed, with the smuggest look I could come up with.
Joyce was like a lot of other colored women when it came to skin tone and hair texture. Skin darker than tobacco was a real sensitive subject, with nappy hair close behind. But she was not that dark. And even though her hair looked like barbed wire when she didn’t use her hot comb, it was fairly long and thick, so she had something to work with. She still couldn’t hold a nub of a candle to me. The biggest thing wrong with her was her height. She was almost as tall as Odell, and he was six feet four. She was probably self-conscious about it, and I was about to find out.
“If you don’t mind me asking, where do you get your clothes from?”
Joyce puffed out her chest again, crossed her legs, and brushed off her sleeve. From the self-satisfied expression on her face, she must have thought I was complimenting her good taste. That wasn’t the case, because the floor-length brown dress she had on looked like a horse blanket with sleeves.
“Like I already told you, I get a lot of my clothes from the Sears and Roebuck catalog.” She grinned. “That’s how I keep up with what’s in style.”
“You lucky you got catalogs to turn to. Because most of the stores I shop in don’t carry nothing that would fit a stout, strapping woman like you. And that’s a damn shame.”
Her confidence disappeared. “Yeah . . . it is a damn shame.” As big as Joyce was, her voice suddenly sounded small enough for a woman my size. “My mama makes a few outfits for me, too.” She gave me a sorry look and bit her bottom lip. “Um . . . I guess I should get up and start doing some of my chores. I have a basket of laundry to wash, and I need to scrub my kitchen floor today. When I finish, I might go visit my parents.” We stood up at the same time.
“I have a heap of stuff to do at home myself. The men that work at the sawmill get paid today, so we expect some of them to drop in on us later. You coming back to the house tonight?”
“If I get everything done and don’t stay at my parents’ house too long, I might.” Joyce glanced at the wall clock above the stove. “Goodness gracious. I didn’t realize how late it was.” Next thing I knew, she pranced to the door and opened it for me. She was that anxious to get rid of me. And I was just as anxious to get away from her.
“Thanks for showing me how to make hush puppies. And I really enjoyed conversating with you.”
She scrunched up her face like I had just cussed at her. “Yvonne, ‘conversating’ is not a real word.”
“It ain’t? I been using it all my life.”
“I don’t think it is, but it doesn’t matter. I know what you meant. My daddy and Odell use that word all the time.”
“Anyway, I enjoyed your company. We should get together more often.
Just me and you.”
She took her time responding. When she did, she sounded like I’d just offered her a dose of castor oil. “Yeah. We’ll do that.” Joyce suddenly looked uneasy. She cleared her throat and scratched the back of her neck. “Um, before you go, I’d like to apologize for what I said about your cousin and the rest of your family being fools. I didn’t mean it. I’m not a mean person. It’s just that I’ve never been able to control my tongue. I got that from my daddy.”
Her apology and excuse for her behavior surprised me, and it made me feel a little better. “Joyce, don’t worry about it. It didn’t bother me.” What surprised me even more was when she hauled off and hugged me before I left.
Maybe there was still a chance that she and I could become real good friends, after all. But I was not about to get my hopes up too high.
CHAPTER 18
MILTON
ONE OF THE MANY THINGS I LOVED ABOUT YVONNE WAS THAT SHE wasn’t no wimp. She wasn’t even scared of bugs and rats, like every other woman I knew. But she hated being alone, because it reminded her how sad and lonely her childhood had been. Her aunt and uncle would leave her in the house by herself for hours at a time while they went shopping or fishing or to visit folks. Every Sunday she had to sit in church for hours on end, and she had to read the Bible every night—after she had done whatever housework needed to be done at the time. I didn’t like to leave her by herself too often. But I had things to attend to today that I couldn’t do with her breathing down my neck. Me and Willie Frank wanted to go fishing and then drop off some liquor orders to a few of his customers.
The fish wasn’t biting, so we gave up on that after only half a hour and headed out to do our deliveries. The first customer was a fifty-year-old widowed farmer named Oscar Lewis. He lived by hisself on the outskirts of town, not far from Cunningham’s Grill. He gave poker parties several times a month, so he led a busy life. He was fat and slouchy, but he had a decent-looking face, so he didn’t have no trouble getting women. When he was between girlfriends, he called up Aunt Mattie and had her send one of her girls on a house call.
