Red Light Wives (4 page)

A
s mad as I was with Larry, I
still
had feelings for him. One of my problems was that I loved too hard and I suffered because of that. Because everybody I loved eventually deserted me.

Mama was the first.

I don't remember much about Mama's family. I hadn't seen them since I was six. My grandfather was a huge, red-faced, wild-haired, fire-breathing preacher of whom everybody was afraid. When he preached his sermons, the older sisters danced out of their shoes and fainted. The church even shook. Other kids were afraid of him, but I just laughed and hid when he yelled at me for misbehaving. Because as fierce as he was, he was also a gentle and loving man. I would end up being sorry that I had not appreciated him when I had a chance.

My grandmother was a petite, attractive, but overbearing woman who was always telling Mama how she was going to go to the devil and take me with her if she didn't “get right.” There were other relatives on my mother's side, just as judgmental and sanctified as my grandparents, but they all stopped coming around because Mama embarrassed her family by fooling around with married men.

Mama was only sixteen when she had me, but she had been fooling around with my daddy since she was fifteen, and that's something her folks reminded me of every day. We lived with her parents and half a dozen other relatives in an old house in Barberton, Mississippi. Barberton was a sleepy little farm town known for its cotton fields, fishing creeks, churches, juke joints, and peanut patches. People had to drive all the way to Biloxi, fifty miles away, when they wanted to experience the “big city” life.

My grandparents' house on Pipe Street looked like a wide, sad face at the front from the outside. The windows had shades that were always half drawn, looking like half-closed eyes, and the front door looked like a grim mouth. There was a big peach tree with a crooked trunk in the front yard shading two lawn chairs. That's where Mama and I could be found most of the time, sipping from glasses of lemonade (half of hers was vodka) as we basked in the sun.

I could play with the other kids in the neighborhood, but I didn't do that much because I got tired of defending my mama's name. Which was Maxine and not “that slut” or “that tramp” like the other kids called her. The thing about all that was my mother was not the only “shameless hussy” (another name the people called her behind her back) in our neighborhood. But most of the other loose women tried to hide what they did. My mother didn't.

For Mama, life was all about having a good time, and she did that in three shifts. She would leave me alone with my grandparents for days at a time. Then she'd stagger into the house looking like she'd been mauled by a grizzly bear.

“Lula Mae, don't you be lookin' at me like you crazy, girl. I'm young. I'm goin' to enjoy myself while I can. Help Mama to bed, baby.”

When Mama was home, she spent most of her time in the bedroom she shared with me, lounging up under one of Grandma's goose-down quilts or getting dressed to go back out again. I got used to her shenanigans fast. Some nights I'd even help her put on her makeup then I'd lie awake most of the night waiting for her to come home.

When my mother's behavior got to be too much for her family and their constant put-downs got to be too much for her, Mama found us an apartment across town on St. James Street next door to a convenience store.

“Now we can worry about your whorin' behind day and night,” my grandmother said, crying hard as Mama ran around our bedroom, snatching our clothes out of drawers. As much as Mama and I irritated my grandparents, they didn't want us to leave.

“Y'all ain't got to worry about me and Lula Mae. I'll be takin' care of myself and my child by myself from now,” my mother shot back, adjusting one of the many headbands she wore to hold her unruly dyed brown hair in place. Like my grandmother, my mother was a petite and pretty woman. With her big brown eyes and dazzling smile, she didn't have to do much to make herself attractive. But that didn't stop her from wearing the tightest, shortest dresses she could squeeze her sexy body into. It was no wonder men couldn't keep their eyes and hands off her.

“Ha!” my mama's daddy screamed, stumbling into the room on his thick, crippled legs. “You mean that other woman's husband'll take care of y'all. This girl,” he pointed at me with the cane that he needed to get around with, “she'll end up just like you, if you was to take her away from here where we tryin' to set her a good example.”

Mama snapped one of our suitcases shut and then folded her arms, looking from her mama to her daddy. “Well, it didn't do me no good livin' all these years with y'all. All them preachin' sessions and Scripture readin' about somebody in the Bible begattin' this or that, and chattin' with a God they couldn't see just made me want to do the opposite. Lula Mae, go empty your bladder and your bowels, so we can get up out of here. I'll go crazy if I stay in this house another minute.”

As I ran to the bathroom down the hall, I heard my grandmother say to Mama, “Lula Mae is gwine to end up just like you. Layin' up with men for money. Mark my word.”

It would be more than twenty-five years before my grandmother's prediction came true. But a lot of other things happened along the way that drove me to that point. Things that I had tried to do to make sure that I didn't end up laying with men for money like my mother.

 

My daddy, George Maddox, was married to a woman named Etta. Etta was not a bad-looking woman. She had a nice body for a woman her age, smooth high-brown skin, bright hazel eyes, and thick black hair she always wore in a braid wrapped around her head. She read her Bible every day and had a few good qualities, but people overlooked all that because most of the time, she was mean and hostile to people she didn't care for. Like me.

Etta Maddox knew all about my mama and me. But she left us alone as long as we stayed out of her way. I don't know what she would have done if she had known that every time she went to visit her relatives in Philadelphia, Daddy brought me and Mama to the big white house she guarded like a palace.

I knew about some of the nasty things Etta said about me and Mama. One day I passed her and one of her friends on the street. I overheard Etta talking about me like a dog. “Look at George's little jungle bunny…only thing missin' is a spear.”

I liked going to my daddy's house when Etta was gone. I rooted through her things like a thief. That's how I got back at her for talking trash about me and Mama. My revenge included me snapping her necklaces in two, tying her belts and scarves into knots, ripping holes in her gaudy underwear, and peeing in her cold-crème containers.

The apartment that Daddy moved Mama and me into was furnished and in one of the best parts of town. For the first time, I had a room to myself. Daddy bought me my own television set and more toys than I knew what to do with. He also bought us new clothes, a stereo, and a nice little car for us to get around in. Mama had him wrapped around her little finger, but she didn't let that stop her from adding more men to her collection. The old man who owned the store next door to our apartment was always giving us something free. And, as far as I knew, all Mama had to do for him was smile and flirt.

Our landlord, a blind albino man named Mr. Green, couldn't even see how pretty Mama was. But that didn't stop him from coming around grinning like a Cheshire cat, scaring me like a ghost with his white hair, white skin, and haunting eyes. Some months when Daddy gave Mama the money to pay our rent, Mama would spend most of it and give Mr. Green the change, and it didn't even bother Mr. Green. He would still grin every time he heard her voice. I never could figure out why Mama's mercenary habits didn't rub off on me until after that fiasco with Larry Holmes.

That first year away from my grandparents' house was all good. But one day I came home from school and there was an ambulance in front of our house. I found out later that Mama was already dead when I'd left for school that morning. During the night, she had had a brain aneurysm. My grandparents, my daddy, and our landlord's wife, the woman who had found my mama dead, were all in the apartment weeping and wailing when I got home. Before that day, the worst thing that had happened to me was the car wreck that had damaged my grandfather's legs. Mama's death was ten times worse.

I don't know how I got through Mama's funeral. There must have been a thousand things going through my head. I sat there on that hard pew, my body as stiff as a tree, listening to Reverend Newton go on and on about what a “wonderful daughter and mother” my mother had been. As much as I had loved and was going to miss my mama, the main thing on my mind was: what was going to happen to me? I didn't have to worry about that too long, because right after the funeral, my daddy packed up all my stuff and took me to his house.

It was a big house with four bedrooms and a lot of corners and closets for me to hide in when I wanted to get away from my stepmother. I had a bedroom to myself, but it was more like a well-furnished prison. Every time I misbehaved, I got locked in my room.

While Daddy was at work, his wife treated me the way I'd always heard that stepmothers treated their stepchildren. She gave me all kinds of chores to do, and when I didn't do them the way she thought I should have, she slapped, pinched, bit, and even kicked me. The one time that I did tell Daddy, she attacked me for doing that as soon as he left the house.

Back then, Daddy and his wife didn't have any kids together, but Etta had a daughter from her first marriage. Verna was ten years older than me, and in some ways she treated me more like a daughter than Etta.

Even though Verna was her real daughter, Etta was often mean to her, too. It took me a while to figure out why. Verna was a lesbian, but that was not the word I heard. Both Daddy and Etta always referred to Verna as being “confused.”

“Confused hell! I ain't confused. I know what I am. I just like to eat me some pussy,” Verna said to her mother, with me standing right there in the living room listening. It was my ninth birthday. The way Etta's eyes bulged out, with her mouth open, I thought she was having a stroke. But all she did was shake her head and stomp out of the room, dropping pieces of my birthday cake all over the floor. “Lula Mae, the sooner you learn about life, the better off you'll be. I ain't never goin' to hide nothin' from you, girl. You done already seen more than a child your age should anyway,” Verna told me, a serious look on her face. Even though I was still a child, sassy and disruptive most of the time, Verna treated me with respect and affection.

She was a gentle person. But with her big moon face, beady black eyes, shaved head and barrel-shaped body, she looked like a truck driver. As a matter of fact, Verna
was
a truck driver. Daddy co-owned a trucking company with another man and Verna worked for them. Most of her jobs only took her across town to help somebody haul something to the junkyard, every now and then, she had to drive out of the state or to some other city in Mississippi to haul fruit or live chickens. I hated the days when Verna had to go out of town overnight.

Daddy was old, almost as old as my mama's daddy. So, like most other older people, he slept a lot and was out of touch with a lot of things. Verna was the only person in my life at the time with whom I felt comfortable. When she was gone, I felt like I was all alone in a world that was so big and unfair, I never knew if I was coming or going. Attention seemed to be the one thing of which I could never get enough.

As old as Daddy was, he still had enough juice in him to get my stepmother pregnant with twin boys.

I was fourteen when Etta gave birth to Logan and Ernest. She wasn't so young herself, so when her health started to fail, she took me out of school so that I could stay home and help her with the twins.

“Lula Mae needs a education,” my daddy said weakly. “I want her to be able to fend for herself.”

“Like her mama did? Either Lula stay home and help me with them babies, or you hire me a full-time nurse,” Etta told Daddy, from the bed she rarely left anymore.

“I can always go back to school, Daddy,” I said, peeping around the door to the bedroom he shared with Etta.

With a surprised look on her long, evil face, Etta lifted her head off her pillow and glared at me. “You so triflin' you don't care nothin' about no school nohow,” she insisted with a smirk. “I got a lot of things for you to do around this house,” she declared, laying her head back down on her pillows so hard the bed's headboard shook.

I hated school, and as far as I was concerned, I'd learned as much as I could anyway. As bad as it was being in the house with Etta and her two squawking brats, it was better than being in the school I attended. Barberton had a lot of small-minded people with big ugly attitudes, and I suffered because of that. Etta was on the school board so she knew every one of my teachers and had managed to poison most of them against me. I was glad to be away from mean old Miss Windland. That heifer used to make me stand in a corner just for having a “stupid look” on my face or for being disruptive. I got violent when kids said something nasty about my mother, so I had to get “disruptive” a lot. And Miss Windland never failed to remind me that when she'd taught my mother, my mother had been just like me.

Every time a teacher punished me and sent me home with a note, Etta made me snap a switch off a tree for her to whup me. But there was more to it than that. When she whupped me, it was for a lot of reasons. The worst one was, I was a constant reminder of my daddy's infidelity and weakness for younger women. She couldn't take it out on him, so she took it out on me. Even though I knew I would suffer, I was glad when the rumors started flying around the neighborhood about Daddy's relationship with yet another sweet young thing over in Meridian. I was even happier when Verna told me that it was more than a rumor. She'd seen Daddy with his new piece.