Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 34

Manny Evans, raven colored, bald-headed, broad smiling, pockets heavy with nickels Manny.

Manny Evans who had bounced Rita on his knee, patted the top of her head, dropped nickels into her saving jar, the old mayonnaise jar Bertha had cleaned and put aside for just that purpose.

Manny Evans who had women on corners and a twenty-two in his sock. He wore taps on the heels of his shoes and the nickel-jingle-clickety-click sounds he made when he walked down the streets told everybody he was coming, but no one messed with him because they were sure about the twenty-two in his sock, and suspicious about the breast pocket of his jacket and the nickel-free pocket of his pants.

Rita had always liked the way his head shone and as she got older she began to appreciate his color, so black and smooth. She found herself thinking about his shoulders and the gold pinky ring he wore, the one with the black onyx stone. "Black like me," he said, "strong like me."

Rita filling out in places, eyes greener now, hair loose instead of pulled back, stockings replacing knee socks, ears pierced and Rita all of the time licking her lips keeping them moist, keeping them shiny.

Manny Evans dropping paper money in her saving jar instead of nickels, wanting to pat her a.s.s instead of the top of her head, wanting to bounce her on his knee again and maybe on something else.

He visits on Sat.u.r.day nights. Comes by with a bottle of whiskey after checking on his women, collecting money, and laying his hands on people who've allowed their eyes to slide over and past him when he called out to them, "You got my money n.i.g.g.a?"

Erasmus and Manny drink, smoke Pall Malls, and play dominoes while Bertha talks to Adele from next door. Adele, tall like a man with hands that wrinkled early and callused two years ago on the palms.

Before she was Luscious on parole and scrubbing floors for white folk in Indian Village, she was Rita and that's what was written on her bedroom door in big black letters so Manny couldn't have mistaken it for the bathroom. But he did.

His fly is down and his d.i.c.k is already in his hands when he stumbles in stinking of liquor and bleary-eyed. He apologizes when he walks in on her in the middle of drying her just-bathed body, but he don't jump back and close the door or drop his eyes in shame. He just stares at her and his hand, the one not holding on to his d.i.c.k, reaches behind him and pushes the door shut.

His eyes enjoy her face and then her naked b.r.e.a.s.t.s and finally the thin line of black hair that begins two inches below her navel.

Before she was Luscious, she was Rita, confused and held down in her own bed by strong hands. Those same hands covering her mouth, roughly touching and rubbing. Those hands are rough like the steel wool Bertha scrubs the pots with and Rita believes her skin will shred beneath them. She can't imagine a more painful feeling and then she doesn't have to because he's inside of her, pushing into the place where only her index finger had ever been.

Rita, before she was Luscious, her mind bending and her body coming apart on the inside and Manny not allowing her to scream or breathe and when he's done he don't even look at her he just looks down at the bloodstains on his pants and tucks back in the paper money sticking out of his pockets, but he leaves the nickels that have fallen out and onto the bed.

Manny Evans finds the bathroom just fine now and returns to Erasmus, his Pall Malls and liquor and proceeds to win three more domino games.

Rita buds in the spring along with the gnarly limbs of elms and oaks. Her belly pushes out in mid-April, coinciding with the tulip and daffodil blooms and all of the beauty of the season rests in the glow of her skin, but her eyes are as cold as the long-gone winter.

"Who?" her parents ask even though their minds have wandered over the young men that have spent time with Rita on the porch, the ones that have called out to her from open car windows, music blasting, Rita's name lost in the lyrics and strain. Jake's son, Marshall, they a.s.sume, or the Tompkins boy, Pierce.

"Coca-Cola man," Rita says rubbing her stomach and looking off at nothing.

Erasmus doesn't stop smoking and Bertha keeps moving her hands up and down her arms.

"The Coca-Cola man?" they say together and exchange glances before looking back at Rita.

"Hmmm," Rita sounds and looks down at her swollen bare feet. "Mama, where the pail at?" she asks as if the conversation is over.

Bertha remembers her own pregnancy and her feet, swelled up and burning at the bottoms, but she can't go for the pail because Erasmus is reaching for another cigarette even though the one he lit a moment ago is still burning in the ashtray.

"White man, then?" Erasmus asks and then holds his breath.

Rita's eyes roam around the kitchen and then look up at her father. "No. Colored man," she says and her eyes move to the ceiling and then down to the floor and then to the window that looks out into the yard.

"Girl, have you taken leave of your senses?" Erasmus laughs before lighting his cigarette and inhaling. His laughter makes the hair on Bertha's neck stand up.

"Why you say that, Erasmus?" Bertha asks, moving closer to Rita.

Erasmus' laughter rocks him and his cigarette falls from his mouth.

"What's so funny? Why you laughing so?" Bertha's head swings between her husband and her child. "Man, you crazy or something?" She asks rubbing at the hairs on her neck and taking another step that puts her right next to Rita.

Erasmus composes himself and bends down to retrieve his cigarette from the floor. Both women see the thin sheath of hair on the top of his head and Rita thinks that in a few years he will be bald like Manny. She shivers.

"This here is 1942," Erasmus says, wiping the tears from the corners of his eyes and sticking the cigarette back between his lips. "And I ain't never seen no colored man driving no G.o.dd.a.m.n Coca-Cola truck!" Laughter consumes him again and the house seems to shake with it.

They send her down to Fenton, down to Mamie Ray's house.

Mamie Ray is an old woman Bertha had heard about months earlier when Valerie Hope, one of the women she worked with at the hotel got herself "messed up" by some married man who had showered her with "I love yous" until she was so slick from his sweet words that she found it hard to keep her legs together.

Having had her, his affirmations became few and far between and stopped all together when she announced that she was pregnant.

He didn't love her anymore and maybe when the love left so did his vision because he would pa.s.s her on the street like a blind man walking past a box full of money.

Aurora had pulled her aside and told her to stop her whining and crying. Told her it was her own fault she was in the situation she was in but it wasn't no use crying over spilled milk and shoved a piece of paper in Valerie's hand.

"You call Mamie Ray and she'll take care of it." Bertha heard her whisper. Gladys, who wasn't even involved in the conversation, sounded, "Umph!" and nodded her head in agreement before swinging her mop from one side of the hall to the other.

Bertha, who was only on nodding basis with Valerie and Aurora, approached Gladys about it later. They whispered about Valerie's situation over their bologna sandwiches and thermoses filled with warm coffee and, in the end, Gladys scrawled Mamie Ray's name and number on the crumpled paper bag that still held Bertha's apple.

"Always good to have," Gladys offered. "Like a pistol or a straight razor," she added and popped the last bit of sandwich into her mouth.

Mamie Ray, black, short, and stout with a tangled ma.s.s of orange hair that spread out around her head like a feathered hat imparting her with a buffoon-type peculiarity. She had a dead right foot that was larger than her left and hands too small for her body or even a five-year-old.

When Rita stepped off the bus Mamie Ray, body lopsided from years of dragging around her dead foot, was standing on the curb waiting.

"You Rita?" Mamie asked as she grabbed Rita's elbow with her tiny hands.

She hadn't really had to ask that question, Bertha had described her child to a tee, all Mamie needed to look for were the eyes. "Ain't seen another pair like 'em, ever," Bertha had said to Mamie on the phone.

"Yessum," Rita said, her eyes struggling with the woman's orange hair and twisted body.

"How far along you think you is?" Mamie asked, looking down at Rita's stomach.

"Don't know," Rita replied and took a step backward.

"Well, you know when you 'lowed him on top of you. What month it was?"

"I ain't allowed nothing," Rita mumbled. "Cold month, I suppose," she added and chanced a glance at the oversized foot.

Mamie bit her lip and scratched at her head. "After Thanksgiving but before Christmas and New Year's?"

"I dunno," Rita said and her eyes moved to the tiny hands.

"Uh-huh," Mamie sounded and then, "You look strong, you can carry that suitcase," she said and wobbled away.

Bertha is already preparing. She eats late and heavy, drowning her biscuits in b.u.t.ter and then dabbing them in honey. She bakes pies and cakes and consumes them like air. She excuses herself from the conversations that takes place around the bus stop in the mornings and evenings, when she's traveling to and from work. She excuses herself to spit or to move herself beneath the shade of a nearby tree and dab at the imaginary sweat forming on her brow and below her nose.

She calls in sick, falls out in front of the church after service is over and the congregation and choir are gathered there.

She does all of this so they can a.s.sume before she has to tell them.

Her hips have already spread and people remember that she carried Rita the same way. "That baby is all in your behind girl!" they say, just as she had planned.

"When you due?"

The questions come like rain.

"Lawd, you want another one after Rita practically grown!"

"My friend Ann had a baby late, too. Change-of-life baby. You probably won't even get your menstrual after this one come."

Erasmus didn't like what Bertha was doing, didn't like it one little bit.

"Bertha, why we gotta hide the fact that Rita done gone and got herself knocked up?"

"'Cause."

"'Cause what?"

"Just 'cause." Bertha was done talking about it and went to check on the cornbread and chicken and dumplings she was preparing.

By the time Manny shows up to the house again, Bertha is a good twenty pounds heavier.

"We expectin' you know. Erasmus ain't tell you?" Bertha spouts when Manny's eyes go wide with surprise.

"Really?" Manny says and his eyes stretch wider. "Go 'head man!" He laughs and slaps Erasmus hard on his back. "You still gotta a little left in you!"

Erasmus just grimaces.

"So when you due?"

Bertha drops her eyes and mumbles something Manny can't quite catch.

"What's that?" he asks and leans in closer to Bertha.

"Summer. July. Maybe August." Bertha speaks in a low, unsure voice.

"Is that right? Is that right?" he says again.

"Uh-huh," Bertha mumbles and then looks over at Erasmus.

There's a s.p.a.ce of silence. A deep ebbing quiet that makes both Erasmus and Bertha twist their necks and examine their hands.

Manny considers them for a while and then asks, "Where Rita at?"

"Oh she down in Gainesville, visiting with my mama. She's ailing you know, so I sent Rita on down there to help out." The lies fall from Bertha's mouth like stones and Erasmus' body jerks with each syllable.

"She'll be back by the time the baby come. She'll be back by then." Bertha's voice falters and the smile that had been holding fast to her lips slips.

"That's good," Manny says and twists his ring around his pinky. "She a good girl that Rita."

Rita, before she was Luscious, was not called upon to change a diaper or heat a bottle, was a.s.sured that she would never be referred to as Mama or have to attend a PTA meeting. Bertha is Mama and Rita, before she was Luscious, is just older sister, eldest sibling, first child of Erasmus and Bertha, mother of none.

Friends visit; family, too. They bring pink receiving blankets, matching booties, and bonnets that smell of talc.u.m powder and everything precious and new.

They stroke the baby's tiny hand and coo at her pursed lips and Bertha grins and smiles and serves cookies and tea while Erasmus grunts and excuses himself from the sounds of women and the baby smells that swirl around him and s.n.a.t.c.h away his air.

Rita, fuller in the hips and heavy-breasted, stays put in her room and listens as the lies her mother tells about pregnancy and childbirth slip through the crack beneath the door.

They notice her b.r.e.a.s.t.s before anything else. Their eyes light on them like flies on sugar s.h.i.t and they lick their tobacco-black lips and drag their hands through their woolen hair and some touch themselves, running their fingers across their chins or pinching the skin of their necks.

The women turn cold eyes on her and one even spits in her path, another fixes her mouth to sling an insult but catches the cold glint in her eyes and the sun fastening onto something long, sharp, and silver sticking out from her coat pocket and she thinks better of her comment, bites her tongue and turns her head away instead.

It's just before dusk and the sun is looming and orange in the sky, people are huddled in bunches on the corners, and someone is already cussing up a storm in one of the apartments overhead.

Music is streaming out of Lou's place, and Jake's Spot has set the first batch of porgies in the pan to fry.

Friday night in the Black Bottom, Paradise Valley.

Rita reaches the corner and turns left on Hastings Street. Broken gla.s.s litters the sidewalk; there are bloodstains close by and further away a chalk outline of where the body fell dead.

But that was last night and not one person is talking about it because someone else was shot dead outside of Sonnie Wilson's place and another stabbed behind The Flame.

Too many dead people to talk about, living people got other things on their minds; they move up and down the walkways and don't even seem to notice the silhouette on the ground. They trample across its hands, legs and face while they talk about fifths, f.u.c.king, no-good men, and bad-a.s.s kids.

Rita turns into the O Bar.

The door sits open but the orange sun can't even work its way past the threshold; it's already midnight inside those walls, just the flicker of cigarettes and the dim light coming off the jukebox exist there.

Rita peers in before stepping into the gloom. The two men seated at the bar turn their heads to consider her but decide after a moment that the drinks sitting in front of them are more interesting.

A woman, satin-colored, long and leggy, moves from the shadows and positions herself near the jukebox. Rita sees that the skin around her eyes is puffy and the lipstick she wears is the color of purple-black grapes.

The woman drapes herself over the jukebox, pressing the side of her face against the curved metal. Slowly, gently, she places loving kisses onto the gla.s.s, leaving plum-colored lip marks smeared across its clear face.

Rita watches her for a while before moving to the bar and taking a seat.

"Yeah," the bartender calls from a dark s.p.a.ce at the end of the bar.

Rita squints her eyes. "Manny here?" she asks.

"Maybe," the voice calls back.

The two men turn their attention to Rita once more.

"He here or not?"