to work today?” I asked with my mouth full.
“Finish your biscuit, girl,” Mama said tiredly. Then she went to the kitchen and started sweeping and crying. We spent most of the day cleaning up the mess the tornado had left behind. She kept sweeping, wiping, and cleaning the same spots over and over, and yelling at me every time I tried to get her to tell me why she was crying. “You ain’t nothin’ but a child! You don’t know nothin’ about nothin’!” she insisted. “Get that broom yonder and get busy.”
I did so much sweeping that day my arms got sore. Later, Mama started sewing on a quilt she was making for a lady at church. When she ran out of things to do, she went to the mattress and fell facedown and cried some more.
The days seemed so long when Mama and I didn’t go to her work. With no friends and hardly any toys, there was not much for me to do but eat. I left the bedroom and went to the kitchen to finish off a blackberry pie. After I felt good and stuffed, I went back to the bedroom.
“Mama, what’s the matter?” I asked again. I sat on the edge of the mattress and patted Mama’s trembling leg. The only other times I had seen her cry was when we were running from the Klan. “The Kluxes coming again?”
“Go to the yard and see if the storm messed up my garden,” she ordered. Her eyes were red and so swollen she looked like she had been beaten. “Lickety-split!” She dismissed me with a wave toward the door. I ran to check on the garden and returned to the bedroom within minutes.
“It’s got a bunch of nasty old water in it, and the onions popped up out the ground. The greens and everything else look all right though,” I reported.
“Good. We’ll still have somethin’ to nibble. Least ’til I can figure out what to do,” she sniffed, smoothing her hair back with her hand. She had cried so much there was a spot on the bed that was soaked with her tears.
“Mama, what’s the matter? We moving again?” I attempted to rejoin her on the mattress, but she pushed me away with her ashy bare foot.
“Go in the room yonder and find somethin’ to do, girl.”
“Ma’am?”
“Read the Bible,” Mama growled.
I didn’t know how to read yet, but I still fished out our old Bible with no covers from one of the shopping bags in a corner in our living room. The pictures were interesting enough to keep me occupied for a while. When I went back to the bedroom Mama had closed the door. I put my ear to it and could hear her crying again.
At my usual time of the day, when the sun began to disappear, I went to sit on the front-porch steps to wait for Daddy to come dragging down the hill. To pass time, I got up every few minutes to stir a stick around in some of the puddles still in our front yard.
When he didn’t come home at the time he should have, I went in to eat with Mama. It was the first time we’d eaten dinner without Daddy. I didn’t even bother trying to pry any information out of Mama anymore. Her eyes were even redder by then. She was not eating. She just kept staring at the wall and pushing beans and neckbones around on her plate.
I took my plate with what was left on it and went back to the porch steps to finish eating. When it got dark enough for the lamp, Mama came to the door and poked her head out. “Annette, carry that plate in the kitchen and get ready for bed,” she told me.
“But I have to wait for Daddy—”
“Your daddy gone!” she snapped, waving both arms. She already had on her nightgown. “Now, go get in your sleepers and get to bed like I told you. And wash that nasty plate.”
“Daddy gone where?” I whimpered. My voice trembled as I stumbled into the house. I didn’t believe what I was hearing. My daddy would not just run off and leave us! “Where he go and didn’t take us? When he gonna come back to get us?” I choked.
“Your daddy’s a good man in a whole lot of ways. But like all of us, he ain’t perfect. He had weaknesses of the flesh. One was white women. Before you was born