from Duck Summer
That night, we all went to dinner at one of Delaware’s most popular seafood restaurants. Instead of eating more seafood than I should, the way I usually do, I stood before the raw bar gazing at the oysters and watching the lemon slices blur against the leaf lettuce. Back at the table, I picked over the food as if it were rancid. It was only the memory of the taste of crab cakes and lobster tails that encouraged me to attempt to eat. I simply had no appetite. I nibbled on small pieces of lettuce, pushed cubes of tomato and carrot strips from one place to another on my plate, and finally waved for the waitress to come and take it away. Watching the rest of the family enjoy their food, I decided to try some pasta salad, since I thought pasta might be easier on the stomach. Shortly after the first bite, I felt a small pocket of immovable gas in the right side of my stomach. Without drawing attention to myself, I massaged my stomach and wondered if this were the beginning of one of those two to three day bouts with gas that had so often sent me to the emergency room. For the remainder of the time we spent at the restaurant, the gas didn’t dissipate; it just knotted in my side, moved to my upper intestines, and finally took on the feel of a big jagged-edged rock. When we reached home, I gulped two Rolaids and lay on the bed. The two white pasty pills had no effect on the gas; in fact, what was gas had now become an annoying stomachache, characterized by both bloating and pain. As the night progressed, I thrashed about with stomach cramps that became almost unbearable. I tried to find a comfortable position from which I could rest and eventually fall asleep, but both rest and sleep eluded me. The only way I could bear the pain was to lie on the area of my body between my left side and my stomach, a position that had my face practically buried in the mattress. By morning, I was not only suffering from the gas pains that exploded throughout my stomach and back during the night, I was sore from my rib cage to my lower stomach from wrestling with the gas. There was no way I would be able to go down stairs, and therefore, with the exception of trips to the bathroom, I spent the entire day in bed. My aunts came to my sick bed bringing toast, tea and prayers. I took a few sips of tea, and since I knew they would not leave me alone until I ate the toast, I forced down a couple of bites. Knowing we were supposed to fly back to Cincinnati Monday morning, I tried to sit up long enough to prove I could make the trip. Both my husband and my mother-in-law insisted they take me to the emergency...
Read MoreExcerpt from Chapter 4
From LENA & MARY GLADYS It was the summer of 1937 when Aggie’s first cousin, Elnora, and Elnora’s latest boyfriend, Calvin, drove all the way from Newark, New Jersey to Pelham’s Creek for the Fourth of July with Elnora’s mother. Five years earlier, Elnora had left her two children, a nine-year old girl and a boy, two years older, with her mother and headed North in search of a decent job and a good man. After she had been in New Jersey two years, she sent for her children at the end of the school year with the intentions of keeping them for the summer. After all, she told her friends, “I am the chilren’s mama and I got to see ‘em sometime.” On some weekdays when she had time off from work, she took them to Palisades Park (on the colored side), and let them romp about until they grew tired and contrary. Occasionally on the weekends, they visited Buck Row at Coney Island where they rode the Ferris wheel, ate hot dogs and cotton candy, and frolicked in the water. When playing mama began to wear on Elnora’s nerves, long before the end of the summer, she bought them a huge box of Goodwill clothes, some discount toys, and a bus ticket back to Pelham’s Creek. All over the colored section of town, people talked about Aggie Scott’s Cousin Elnora from “New Jursie.” Every time Lena saw Elnora, it was like watching one of the women on the billboards along the main road into town. With shiny black curls twinkling against her rosy brown skin, she was good-looking, glamorous. Only she never saw Elnora on any billboards with a Lucky Strike clamped between her fingers, and Elnora was a colored woman. Since the women on the billboards were always white with yellow hair and fiery-red lipstick, Lena sometimes squeezed her eyes shut, mentally painted one of the women dark, and pretended it was Elnora staring out at her from the signs. Elnora should have been on the billboard anyway, Lena thought. With her painted face and shiny hair, she was pretty enough, especially with the way she strutted around in flowered sun dresses and biscuit-polished patent high-heeled shoes. She gave herself a press and curl every time she started to sweat, so she kept the kitchen smelling like burnt hair and Dixie Peach. Twisting and turning in front of the hand mirror, caressing her hair and picking the dried lipstick from the corners of her mouth, she primped constantly, and would ask whoever was around, “Do I look all right?” Ever since Elnora had gone to New Jersey, she had courted one man after another and nobody could remember a time since she had gone north that she had come home without a man. Alongside the farmers in their bib overalls, washed out shirts, and mud-soaked brogans, Elnora’s boyfriends were the women’s dream and the men’s envy. With the look and smell of money, they dressed in...
Read Morefrom Lena and Mary Gladys
“Let’s play school,” Lena proposed, determined to change the subject. Waving her hand impatiently, she shouted, “I want to be the teacher.” “Don’t nobody want to play no school,” Michelle grumbled and kicked in the dirt. “Ah come on,” Lena said. “We can play spelling on the chalkboard.” She looked around, waiting to see if Mary Gladys and Michelle agreed. “Yall can call me words and see if I can spell them.” She began writing on the chalkboard. Michelle stretched her legs and cleared her throat. Then she stood up, grabbed the narrow trunk of the tree, and swung herself back and forth. “I know. We can play ministration.” “What’s that?” Mary Gladys frowned. “Ah, you know.” Michelle snapped at Mary Gladys and turned her head towards Lena. “You know, don’t you?” “Naw,” Lena said without looking up. She continued to mark on the chalkboard, this time writing in cursive the word, ‘encyclopedia.’ “Look, this word got twelve letters in it!” “Yall wanna play or not?” Michelle grew impatient. “Play what?” Mary Gladys shouted. “I told you, ministration!” Michelle talked through her teeth. “How you play it?” Mary Gladys stood with her hands on her hips. “You got to have some cotton.” Michelle looked around, her eyes wandering from Lena to Mary Gladys. “What we need cotton for?” Mary Gladys turned to Lena, who had not taken her eyes from the chalkboard. “You have to put it in your bloomers.” Michelle giggled. Mary Gladys shook her head. “Aw naw, I ain’t doing that,” she said and cut her eyes at Lena. “I ain’t doing that.” “Me neither. Sounds like something bad.” “Yall just dumb and countrified, and besides, you chicken.” “I ain’t chicken,” Mary Gladys yelled. Lena hugged the chalkboard and stared at Michelle. Maybe it was okay. After all, Michelle was the oldest and she had been to the city, so maybe she could teach them something new. But she didn’t know about this cotton thing. Putting something in your bloomers just didn’t seem right. Like something nasty. “I don’t want to play,” she eventually admitted. “I want to write on the chalkboard.” Michelle’s eyes lit up. “Give you my chalkboard if you play.” Lena looked at Mary Gladys and then at the chalkboard. For a second, the sun went behind the cloud and cast a shadow over the ground where they played. “Okay,” Lena agreed. “I’ll use this.” She snatched a dingy ribbon from her hair and held it out toward her friends. “You can’t use that, dummy. It’s got to be cotton or a rag or something. Let’s go up to the house and see if we can find something.” With Michelle in front and Lena and Mary Gladys marching side by side behind her, they sneaked past the grownups, sitting under a shade tree in the yard, and went into the house. Michelle untied the string around her mother’s brown suitcase and searched through her clothes and cosmetics. When nothing appropriate turned up, she rambled through...
Read MoreMotel on Highway 29
Chapter from LENA AND MARY GLADYS The restaurant looked like a white boxcar. Crammed between two horizontal rows of small dingy white red-shuttered motel rooms with paint curling and cracking like a late autumn leaf, the restaurant claimed to be the best eating-place in the county. Jones Motel was the only lodging within a twenty-mile radius and people were always talking about how neat and clean the colored women kept the rooms. Of course, they couldn’t eat or sleep there since the motel was white only, but it was one of the few places in the county where they could get a job “working for the public,” which is what they called any job outside sharecropping. Lena heard from her mother and her aunt, who were the cleaning women, that Mr. Jones, the owner, had fired his last cook for what he termed, “a minor indiscretion,” and her mother thought that since she was a good cook, she might as well apply for the job. When Lena went to restaurant to fill out the application, the motel owner’s wife interviewed her. “My husband he a busy man and he want me to do this,” the woman said. Marge Jones, a tall stout ruddy-faced woman with graying yellow hair and liquor on her breath, said she was in charge of the restaurant and she was the one to do the hiring. Her husband had too much to handle with trying to keep his lodging business going and making sure the rooms were always “up to code.” Lena knew what “up to code” meant because she had heard her mother and aunt talking about how G. Carter (which is what they called him behind his back), spent most of his time following them, checking to see if they stole anything. “Up to code” was just another way of saying his cleaning women weren’t stealing any of the motel’s old raggedy sheets and towels. The women liked calling him G. Carter because when his daddy was living, the Jones family lived in G. Carter trailer park. Lena’s mother and aunt teased that G. Carter and Marge probably still lived there when they weren’t shacked up in one of those old shitty motel rooms. “How come you ain’t up north somewhere doing something to make some real money? This 1959, girl. Tell me a women can git good jobs up north, specially colored girls.” Marge Jones eyed Lena curiously. “Where you been?” “Well, me and my husband live up the road there on Saddler’s Place.” Lena wondered what the woman was talking about. What did she mean, where had she had been? “You married?” “Yes, Ma’am.” “He working?” “Yes, Ma’am. “Doing what?” With a devilish smile, Marge Jones tilted her head and raised her brow. “We farm. Or at least we did before that storm came through. Now he trying to find work just like me.” “Yeah,” the woman said, changing her expression and pulling out a cigarette. “That goddam storm took the...
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