young, she’d supervised a chain gang. After that, she got a job in some kind of underground factory making bombs. Age and a cruel scar that ran from beneath her left eye to beneath her chin had slowed her down.
One day the police raided Scary Mary’s house. They charged her with running a whorehouse and selling alcohol without a liquor license and took her off to jail. Mama and I ended up back at the boardinghouse in the same room we had rented before! Scary Mary had to pay a big fine, and they put her on probation. A week later, she moved to Richland, Ohio.
A few days after she got there, she wrote Mama this long convoluted letter in her spidery handwriting telling her how blessed she was because the Lord had led her to such a wonderful place and that we would be better off up there.
“How would you like to move up North?” Mama asked me after reading the letter to me three times.
“Why?” I wanted to know. I didn’t know a thing about the state of Ohio, but I loved Florida and didn’t want to leave. I had gotten used to the boardinghouse and a girl my age next door named Poochie.
“So we can have a better life. The South is such a savage place for colored folks,” Mama explained.
I was tired of relocating, tired of having to get used to new surroundings and new friends. “I’m sick of packing up and moving all over the place, Mama,” I protested.
When Mama saw how unhappy the thought of moving again made me, she stopped talking about it for a while even though Scary Mary kept writing letters to Mama bragging about her good life in Ohio. When she started sending us money and pictures of her posing with prosperous-looking men, Mama gave in.
One night she left me alone at the boardinghouse to go use a pay phone across the street. I was in bed when she returned. “Get up and start packin’, girl. There’s a train at midnight,” she informed me.
“Where are we going?” I yawned.
“Scary Mary’s goin’ to put us up ’til we find a place.” Her eyes were wide, and there was such a big smile on her face I knew it would do no good for me to put up a fight.
Three months after Daddy had left us, we slipped off during the night, tiptoeing and whispering because we owed the boardinghouse woman a month’s back rent. I cried all the way to the train station.
“What’s wrong with you, girl?” Mama snapped, bumping me with her knee.
“I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye to Poochie,” I sobbed.
“We’ll write her a letter soon as we get to Ohio. I ain’t goin’ to stay in Florida like Mama and Pa and the rest of ’em done and rot workin’ for no white folks. I’d rather be buried alive. Colored folks is so unambitious,” Mama told me, as we approached the train station.
During the fifties, just moving north meant having ambition to a lot of Black people, even though most of them left the fields in Florida to work in the ones in Ohio. Mama considered herself a step above the field workers. She cleaned white folks’ houses and cooked and took care of their kids in Florida, and that’s what she would end up doing in Ohio. “I praise the Lord every day. Look what he done for me.” Mama said things like that a lot. She was so proud of her work.
But I hated the fact that she had to work so much. As soon as she finished cleaning one woman’s house, she ran off to clean for another or to tend to somebody’s spoiled kids.
I used to wonder what white women were good for. Most of the women Mama worked for told her a lot of their business. They all seemed to be having an affair or seeing a therapist. They couldn’t clean their own houses or take care of their own kids or even cook. They sounded pretty useless to me. But I had to admit, white women had it made. They had the world at their feet. Oddly enough, I never wanted to be white. Besides, Mama told me white women didn’t age as well as Black women.
I slept during most of the long ride north on the segregated train, dreaming about the “white only” water fountains and restaurants we had never been able to enjoy in Florida. Mama had promised