she ain’t got no polio. She just clumsy. It’s them brogans on her feet. And you can see she eat like a workin’ man,” Mama said apologetically.
The woman looked at the dusty clodhoppers on my feet, then made a sucking noise with her teeth. “Oh. Well I’m gwine to pray for her anyway. I came to the meetin’ this evenin’ to pray for my girl Mott. She mentally limited, and I got her in a home for now.”
Mama touched the woman’s arm, and told her, “I’ll pray for your girl, too.”
The woman started visiting us at the boardinghouse, bringing us food and clothes. I kissed her on the neck when she brought me a pair of black patent leather shoes to wear to church and a pair of red tennis shoes to play in. This mysterious woman quickly became Mama’s best friend. Her name was Mary. Everybody called her Scary Mary, a nickname a frightened boyfriend she had battered had given to her.
Within a week we moved in with her and the two nice ladies who lived with her. She lived in a big redbrick house behind the church that had sponsored the prayer meeting.
Her house was as grand as any of the white women’s houses we’d cleaned. Upstairs and down, the rooms had wallpaper with swans, some floating on a pond, some flying. Her furry brown-and-white furniture not only matched, it was so clean it looked new. She had a fireplace in her living room and great big beige lamps on her cream-colored coffee tables.
Tears appeared in her eyes when Mama showed her the coal-oil lamp we had been using. Mama and I shared Scary Mary’s spare bedroom off to the side of the kitchen.
“Is Scary Mary rich?” I asked Mama when she was putting me to bed that first night. She had bathed me in a bathtub for the first time in my life with store-bought soap. I put on some brand-new pink-flannel pajamas with ducks on them that Scary Mary had run out to buy earlier that day. The goose-down pillows on the bed were as big as I was.
“Yep. She rich. She blessed. The good Lord sent her a rich husband with a bad heart,” Mama said proudly, with a longing look in her eye, punching the pillows. She rebraided two of my braids that had come undone and kissed me long and hard on the cheek.
“There is rich colored men?” I gasped.
Mama laughed and tapped my head. “There ain’t no such a thing. One of her husbands was a rich white man from Ohio, a old banker she met when he was on vacation in Miami.”
Scary Mary made me wash dishes and sweep and dust a lot, but there were trees in her backyard that I could climb and hide behind and eat the food that I removed from the refrigerator behind her and Mama’s backs.
Scary Mary had gone through all the husbands she would ever have by the time we met her. “After my third husband I got so sick of changing my last name, I got me a lawyer to change it to ‘X’ nice and legal,” she told us, adding, “I kept it that way even after a few more.” She told us that the day before we met her she had just run off her last husband, a man she had described as a rogue, who was stingy and dull and who only bathed when she made him. She bragged about how easy it was to control a man just by bouncing a rolling pin off his head whenever it was necessary.
The only one she spoke fondly of was the rich white one from Ohio. “My poor beloved old Mr. Blake. It was a cryin’ shame he had such a bad heart and dropped dead on me within a year. But, I don’t question God,” she told us, shaking and staring hungrily at a shot glass full of bourbon.
Scary Mary called herself a Christian. But during those days, with the exception of the Jewish women Mama worked for, I didn’t know anybody, Black or white, who was not Christian. Even the Klansmen who had come after us did it in the name of the Lord. Even though Scary Mary was involved in all kinds of shady activities, like any good Southern woman, she knew her Bible. She only missed church when she was in jail. From one of her jealous, busybody female neighbors, we had heard that when Scary Mary was