“I just finished shinin’ the commode, Mrs. Jacobs.” Still farting, the old woman whacked my mama across her back so hard Mama fell out of her chair. I was horrified. “You leave my mama alone—you old heifer!” I screamed. I ran around the table and bit Mrs. Jacobs on the leg so hard she bled. That was the only job Mama ever got fired from. I expected Mama to yell and scream at me all the way back to the boardinghouse, then whup me once we got there. “I was sick of slavin’ for that fartin’ old witch anyway,” was all she said on the subject. “God’ll take care of us.”
Mama bought a newspaper on the way home that day. There was a whole column of domestic jobs advertised. She started working for another white woman two days later, a sweet-smelling woman who hugged me and encouraged me to play with her kids on a swing set in her huge backyard. Mrs. Myers, a woman with eyes like blue marbles and hair the color of carrots, was always nice to us. “Annette, you lookin’ mighty spiffy in those blue pedal pushers,” she told me one day, handing me a glass of ice-cold orange NeHi pop. “You should have seen me yesterday! I got some green ones just like these!” I exclaimed, grinning so hard my mouth hurt.
Every day after work Mama and I went through trash cans behind restaurants and stores on our way back to the boardinghouse. We often found food that looked like it had not been touched and a few items for our room. I’d even found a pair of shoes, clodhoppers with cleats. They were boys’ shoes that were too big and so heavy I dragged my feet. People started looking at me the same way they looked at Mr. James, a man at our church they hauled around in a child’s red wagon because he had been born without arms or legs. I hated those damn shoes, but they were better than the ones I’d been wearing, brown moccasins with pins holding them together. With what help we could get from church and God, we survived.
One day I asked my mama, “We happy?”
Mama smiled for the first time in weeks and squeezed my cheek. She wasn’t even mad about me eating up some lamb chops Mrs. Myers had given to us. “We got more than the Lord ever had him, and He was happy,” she answered.
CHAPTER 3
About a month after we had moved to the Miami boardinghouse, Mama took me to a prayer meeting at a church across town on a dead-end street. A well-known visiting preacher from Jacksonville who promised miracles was the guest speaker. “It’s goin’ to take a miracle to get us on our feet,” Mama muttered to me, as we squeezed onto a bench near the back of the room.
“Could a miracle bring Daddy back to us?” I asked excitedly.
“Only miracle he care about these days got yella hair and blue eyes!” Mama snapped, rolling her eyes at me.
“You mean that white lady? Can’t we just go to her house and tell him to come home?”
“Girl…you so young.” Mama sighed.
The small church, lighted by coal-oil lamps, was packed with people needing the Lord’s special attention. There were people in wheelchairs, people walking with canes, a blind man, and people slobbering and babbling. I got restless and ran to the bathroom every few minutes. I ignored the spry little Reverend Mason skipping all over the stage with his eyes closed, his head and hands shaking, ordering people to “Lay down that cane! Get your rump out that wheelchair!” Two hours into the revival, the only miracle performed so far was a man spitting out a cancer (it looked like a piece of raw liver) after Reverend Mason massaged his shoulders, and hollered, “Heal yourself, brother!”
As far as Mama was concerned we received our miracle that night, too. The preacher had massaged our shoulders so hard mine were throbbing. Our miracle came in the guise of a woman. I had seen her staring at me, shaking her head as I dragged myself up and down the aisle. When the meeting ended, this curious woman, several years older than Mama, who at the time was thirty-eight, came up to us and placed her hand on Mama’s shoulder, and said, “Sister, I’m gwine to pray for your girl. How long she been had polio?”
Mama draped her arms around my shoulder, and told the woman, “Oh