Mama stopped talking and, with a soft gesture of her hand, she sent Brenda out to get us ready for bed. The old smelly washcloth came out, but I was too tired to put up a good fight. Brenda got us all into the bed we shared, and she went back to the front room. Instead of sleeping, though, I quietly got up. I wanted to play jacks. So I pulled out my little rubber ball, one of my few prized possessions, and ten small round rocks I kept in my dress pocket. I had no jacks, but the rocks worked fine.
I was sitting on the floor in the back room, half playing my game and half listening to the hushed words coming from the front room. Light flickered in from the kerosene lamp there, and the acrid smell of the other lamp Brenda had blown out still filled the air. She and Mama were talking softly.
As I played, I inched closer to the doorway. Soon I was able to make out their words. What I heard made me more frightened than I had ever been before.
“I can't take it any longer,” Brenda said. Her voice sounded strange, as if she were choking on her own words.
Mama made a soft noise as if in agreement. I could tell she was trying to comfort her.
“We'll find a way out, Brenda. I've tried. You know I've tried. But last time, he almost killed us. I'm still carrying the scars.”
“What about the others? You know who's next. I can't let that happen. I won't!” Brenda hissed.
Mama's voice was barely more than just air. “What can we do? What can
I
do? There's no way to stop him. I've put rat poison in his food. I've left, and he found me and nearly killed me the last time. How long was it before I could open my eye?”
The room was silent for a moment.
“I stole his claw hammer,” Brenda whispered. “I hid it behind the back of the cabin.”
I stopped playing jacks and held the ball tightly in my hand.
“Keep your voice down, please, Honey,” Mama said.
“I'm never gonna let him touch me again. I'd rather be dead,” Brenda said.
“Lord, help us,” Mama whispered. “May God forgive me.”
“I'm gonna do it, Mama,” Brenda said.
“I know,” Mama said. “We should have done it long ago.”
“I'm going to pull that hammer out tonight. I'm gonna put the hammer under the bed.”
Mama's foot scuffed against the floor. Brenda paused for a second, then continued.
“Once he starts snoring, I'm gonna hit him in the head with that claw hammer. I'm gonna bash in his skull. I'm gonna hit him and hit him. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to kill him!”
I jumped up
as the little ball dropped from my hand and rolled across the plank floor. My bare feet scattered the pebbles I used for jacks.
“Oh no! Mama, no! No!”
The words came pouring out of my mouth before I realized I had spoken. I had to keep Mama and Brenda safe, and I felt in my soul that this could only end badly. At the same time, my young mind could not wrap around what I had heard Brenda say.
I burst into the front room, seeing Mama sitting on the only chair and Brenda huddled close by her on the floor. Their faces looked pale in the lamplight. I saw fear and desperation in their eyes.
“Please don't kill Daddy! Please don't do it,” I cried.
Tears streamed down my cheeks as I ran up to Mama. They both stood up quickly, and Brenda reached out for me. I jumped back before she could touch me. Mama shot her a nervous glance and then tried to put a smile on her face when she looked down at me.
“Calm down, Frances,” she whispered. “You're gonna wake everybody up.”
“You can't! You can't do murder!” I wailed.
Brenda hung her head and stared at the floor. Mama tried to reason with me.
“It's okay . . . it's okay,” Mama said.
“I'll tell him. If you kill him, I'll tell him. I will!”
Mama saw how scared I was. Brenda did not seem to want to say anything. Mama sighed deeply and pulled me to her side. She looked very serious as she spoke to me.
“We were just playing, Frances. Just talking. That's all. Go back to bed and I promise you nothing is gonna happen to anybody.”
I wanted to believe her, so it did not take much more convincing than that. I inched closer to Mama and she held me in her arms. She pulled me down and I snuggled into her lap, my fingers finding a rough fold of her cotton dress. I patted it as my heartbeat gradually slowed back to normal. All the while, Brenda did not say a word. After a while Mama carried me back to the room we slept in and laid me on the bed, tucking me under the blanket next to my sisters and Robbie.
My mama patted my head and softly started to tell me a story. It was the Indian princess and the frog, and it brought back the night we had danced around the shack. I fell asleep feeling a little better. I do not know how long I slept, but my eyes shot open when the front door opened and Daddy's curses filled the cabin. As I often did, I reached out for Brenda where she usually slept beside me. She was not there.
As my hand darted about looking for my sister, Mama screamed. I heard the thud and groan of Daddy striking her. Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried my hardest to pretend it was all a bad dream. The cursing and the pounding continued, and Susie's hand found mine under the covers. Robbie crawled up quickly from the foot of the quilt and wrapped both of his little arms around my waist. He nearly squeezed the breath out of me but I hardly noticed in my fear. We were all afraid to move or speak.
The beating was worse than ever before. It went on and on until I thought I'd get physically sick. I tried to blot out Mama's screams and his maniacal curses and accusations.
“Please Broadus, stop, please,” she pleaded, but soon her words were silenced, and I heard her body fall to the floor. I shook and cried until my tears dried up, but my body was racked with sobs.
I prayed. I screamed inside my head. I poured out my grief and fear until the cabin fell silent. The final prayer on my lips before I fell into a fitful sleep was, “Please let me escape the ugliness and horror and see something pretty in this life. Please take care of my mama.”
The next morning
I awoke to find Daddy and Brenda packing up our meager belongings and placing them in the old car he'd swindled away from someone. We were moving again, going to another camp. Mama was too weak to even get up out of her bed. To my surprise, Daddy let her be. He must have known that he'd broken her ribs and her nose, which was swollen and slanted to one side. I could not stop staring at her as she drifted in and out of consciousness.
As was often the case, she needed medical attention but would not receive it. He would make her prove her loyalty before taking her to the hospital; he waited until he was satisfied that she would not turn him in to the authorities. So she traveled in pain. The cotton had been picked, and Daddy was on the hunt for more work. After several weeks Mama had recovered enough to be alert, I overheard her mention our Uncle Mose.
We were headed toward Greenville, South Carolina. When I found out we were actually going to Uncle Mose's house, I was elated. Uncle Mose was Daddy's brother. He was the complete opposite of Daddy. None of his brothers were mean like he was. My Uncle Mose was a kind man, large and quiet with the air of someone who understood the land and farming in a way that had been lost a century before. As we parked the car and walked nearer to his house, we could not hide our excitement. I skipped down the sidewalk, and even Brenda's gaze lifted from the ground. She did not smile, though.
Daddy swung at me, landing a blow to my shoulder. I stumbled but kept my feet. He looked around to see if anyone was in their yard, watching us. He saw no one.
“Stop running and wait for me, Frances. And understand this.” Daddy gripped Mama by the arm. His blue eyes burned like fire. “If any one of you says anything while we are there, I will kill you.”
I could see his knuckles turning white as he squeezed her. She whimpered but then went silent. I looked up at her face. Her pretty features were drawn thin. I wanted to reach out to her, to comfort her, but I could feel Daddy's eyes on me and cowered away.
We walked the last hundred yards in silence. Uncle Mose came outside. When Daddy saw him, he strode forward, a charming smile splitting his face.
“How are you, brother?” he said, extending a hand in greeting.
Uncle Mose nodded. “Good. You?”
Even at five I could sense the suspicion behind my uncle's tone. He glanced at Mama, who just stared at the ground. Uncle Mose knew something about my daddy that I did not. The two had been in Civilian Conservation Corps camp together when they were young men. The program, called CCC for short, began in 1933 as part of the New Deal, set up by President Roosevelt to create jobs. Young men could join and the government would put them to work planting trees and creating parks and wildlife refuges.
One day, my uncle saw my daddy get in a fight with a man at the camp. It was a vicious battle, and the other man got Daddy to the ground. Grabbing him by the hair, he slammed Daddy's head into the concrete over and over again. When the other man walked away, my daddy's head was busted open. My uncle swore he saw pieces of Daddy's brain on the sidewalk.
I don't tell this story as an excuse for my daddy's behavior and temperament. My uncle, though, thought his brother was a different man before that day. Maybe something happened to his head that caused him to change. Maybe the evil inside Daddy had been there all along. I'll never know.
“We won't be a bother, Mose,” my daddy said as my uncle looked him over. “Just looking for a better car, and then we'll be off. I have a job lined up in Oklahoma. Good one too.”
“Mmm hmm,” my uncle said.
At that point my cousin Jimmy appeared; at least I thought he was my cousin. I would learn much later that he was actually my brother, and he would go on to play a large part in my search to reunite my family later in life. In truth, my daddy had sold him to my aunt and uncle for five dollars, recorded in the courthouse in Greenville, South Carolina, with a bill of sale. He forced Mama to sell baby Jimmy because he believed she had been unfaithful and Jimmy was not his child. Daddy's belief was totally unfounded. Mama was never allowed to go anyplace alone, much less consort with other men, but when Daddy got something in his head, there was no changing his mind. I remember noticing how Mama almost touched Jimmy on occasion, but only now can I begin to understand her loss. It reminded me of a story in the Bible when Moses' mother was forced to give her son away to save his life. I realize now that my mama went along with daddy to save Jimmy. With my uncle, he would be safe and have a life apart from her sad one.
At Uncle Mose's
house, the adults faded into the background for me. I became a kid again, playing and laughing in the yard with the boy I didn't realize was my older brother. This was a rare taste of freedom, to run and play without fear. On top of that, my uncle's wife, Gracie, cooked us all dinner. In the largest cast-iron skillet I'd ever seen, she would fry Irish potatoes and serve us pinto beans with ham hocks boiled in a two-gallon pot. I can still taste her cornbread, baked in another cast-iron skillet until it was golden brown. And I can remember Mama watching us eat and play with a smile on her face when Daddy was out of the house for a while. Life at my uncle's house must have been what a normal life was like for a child my age. But I didn't know what normal meant.
We slept in a bed with sheets and took warm baths in a big claw-footed tub when we visited my uncle's house. We had hot meals and ate twice a day. Playtime was all day, and my daddy never dared touch Mama in anger. I wished it could last forever.
Then daddy bought another car. It was a jalopy that seemed to be held together by chicken wire and clothespins. Daddy was good with his hands, and all throughout my childhood, he kept sputtering old wrecks running by what seemed like sheer force of willâuntil he could sell it to some poor unsuspecting soul and buy another one.
In the late 1950s, you could shake a man's hand and it was like signing a contract. Most people were honest; nobody locked their doors back then. Daddy gave a local used car dealer the money we had earned from working on the farm for several weeks as a down payment, but when the next payment came due, we were hundreds of miles away. He did this often. Making out his own bill of sale, he would then trade the car he had for a less expensive one, a deal the owner of the car lot was eager to seal. Once he got the title to the older car, he'd promise to send his title the following week to the dealer for the one he “owned.” Of course he never did.
My dad felt he needed a different car. The car we arrived in had blown a head gasket the day we reached South Carolina, and traveling by train was getting harder to do without someone seeing us. He could not let us get caught. He knew if the train conductors saw us riding in a boxcar, they might merely throw us off, but they could also call the sheriff. Daddy could not allow that. Even then before his arrest, I could sense his fear of the police. It seemed strange to me that a man who could be so mean, a man who would not hesitate to fight another man twice his size, would show any fear. But he did, and it was a fear that followed him throughout his life. His terrifying demeanor changed at even the mention of the police. I found out later that he had been locked up and the arresting officer had beaten him severely with a billy club to the point he had to be hospitalized. That may have been why he feared the police the way he did.