He pushed his plate away, then got up from the table and went to sit on a footstool in the living room and started looking out the window.
“What’s the matter with him?” I wanted to know.
Daddy was a strong man. Not just physically, but he had a strong personality. Unlike some of the Black men I knew, Daddy didn’t back down from white folks. I used to see men bigger than he was cowering nervously and keeping their eyes on the ground when talking to white folks. Daddy looked white folks straight in the eye when he talked to them, and when white folks called him “uncle” or “boy” he corrected them, and said firmly, “My name is Mr. Goode.”
“Hush up,” Mama said to me. Like an afterthought, she grabbed another pig foot and aimed it at my mouth. When she saw I was still gnawing on the first one, she pressed her lips together, shrugged, and put the pig foot back in the bowl in the middle of the table.
The rain was really coming down by then, and it was dark enough for Mama to light the lamp so she could sit in the living room and sew. She occupied the couch, and I sat on the floor next to Daddy on his footstool. Just a few minutes later, the tornado came roaring at us like a runaway train.
Nobody said anything, but we all knew what to do. Mama blew out the lamp, grabbed me by the arm, and we followed Daddy into the bedroom, where we all crawled under the blanket on the mattress and waited. The hardest part was not knowing if we were waiting to live or waiting to die. Tornadoes were tricky. One could destroy everything in its path including people’s lives and dreams, it could tease then move on to another area or it could suddenly cease. This storm was a teaser. Our house shook violently one moment, then was still the next. The window on the side of the bed exploded, and most of the glass ended up on the mattress with us. Mama prayed, Daddy cussed. I didn’t do anything but lie there and cling to my daddy. He had one arm around me and one around Mama. The storm gave the house a real hard jolt, so hard Daddy stopped cussing and started praying along with Mama. God must have been listening because not long after that the storm ceased. By then it was morning.
The next morning we cleaned up the glass, then checked to see how much damage we had to deal with. Miraculously, our house was still intact. But our backyard outhouse was gone. We found out later that a shack occupied by an old Seminole Indian man had been relocated to a field in the next county with the old man still in it, dead.
Somebody’s frantic and confused hog ended up in our backyard, but ran into the woods as soon as it saw our faces.
Daddy put on his work clothes, and Mama fixed breakfast like it was just another day. But it was not just another day. He said he didn’t have time to eat. Instead he started walking around the living room like he was nervous and glancing out the window every few minutes. He looked at me a long time standing in the middle of the floor watching him. Suddenly Daddy left the room and returned a few minutes later holding one of our shopping bags in one hand and a lunch bag bulging with baloney sandwiches in the other. “Annette, you better be good,” he said in a low voice. He started walking toward the door but turned around and ran over and kissed me on the forehead.
“Daddy, what’s the matter?” I wanted to know. I was puzzled and afraid when Daddy didn’t answer me. Mama followed him out the door, and I heard them arguing on the front porch. I couldn’t tell what they were talking about, but both of them were cussing.
I ducked back into the kitchen, grabbed a biscuit, then ran to the living-room door in time to see a white woman in a dusty green car drive down the hill toward our house. Daddy jumped in the car while it was still moving. I stood on the front porch next to Mama, watching the car turn around and shoot back up the hill.
“Mama, who was that white woman? Is she giving Daddy a ride