“I know, Your Honor. I am sorry to have my troubles in public.”
“Um,” the judge said. He had asked where Mama was, and Daddy had told him she was at work and couldn’t get free. The truth was, she was home sleeping off a hangover. The judge peered at him when he explained that, and Daddy shifted his eyes quickly. It was like he had a glass skull and you could see any attempted lies tangle up and crumble. He kept rubbing his hands together nervously.
I felt more embarrassed for him than I did for myself, even though Daddy always looks respectable and is always nicely dressed. He says it’s part of his work as a tool salesman. He sells very expensive equipment and says he has to look like someone who would. He’s always telling me a good presentation, a good image, is half the battle in this world. He does his best to get me to dress more conservatively. I tell him he’s just too old-fashioned, but he says it doesn’t have anything to do with fashion. It has to do with being decent.
I told him being decent is no fun.
“It’s like eating sugar-free candy,” I said. He didn’t laugh. He was laughing less and less these days, and now I wondered if he would ever laugh again.
Anyway, without Daddy around and with Mama out and about, working and such, I often violated the curfew, and the evening before was just such an occasion. Daddy told me I was skidding on thin ice. I almost fell through the day Daddy told me Mama was gone. Now that I knew he wasn’t going to be home for dinner, I went off with Sylvia and stayed too long at her house partying with her, Packy Morris, and Newton James, two boys whom the principal herself had encouraged to drop out of school. We made a little too much noise, and Mrs. Gilroy, who lives in the apartment below, went and called the police. They took our names, and I thought they would know I was violating curfew, or they would come arrest me the day after, but no one came.
Daddy found out about it and looked very glum when I came home from school the next day. Mama still hadn’t come home, and the reality of her never coming home was beginning to settle in me like a glob of fresh cement. He was sitting at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee between his hands and coming up out of an ocean of thought like someone who had been deep-sea diving for ideas all day.
“I realize I can’t do this, Phoebe. I can’t look after you, and this can’t continue. You’re just going to go from bad to worse,” he said. He shook his head and drummed his fingertips on the tablecloth, looking like he had spent his last dollar.
His conclusion was that since there was no doubt now that Mama had left us for good, he had decided to deposit me with my aunt Mae Louise, Mama’s older sister. He told me he had already had a preliminary conversation with her and my uncle Buster about it.
“What are you talking about, Daddy? I ain’t gonna live with no Aunt Mae Louise,” I said after he told me. I wagged my head and put my hand on my hip. Usually, I could get him to ease up on any of his restrictions and punishments, but he looked very determined this time.
“This is no life for you here, Phoebe. Not the way things are now. It won’t be forever, but it’s a way to save you. Maybe the only way.”
“I don’t need to be saved.”
“People who need to be saved usually don’t know it,” he replied. “Put on something n
ice. We’re going to talk to Aunt Mae Louise and Uncle Buster tonight.”
“No,” I said.
“You do what I tell you, Phoebe,” he said firmly. “If you don’t, the law is going to come around and take you off one of these days anyway. They’ll go and put you in some foster home with strangers, like the judge said, and I know you wouldn’t like that.”
“Uncle Buster and Aunt Mae Louise are no better than strangers,” I whined.
“Stop it,” he snapped, and pounded the table with uncharacteristically intense anger. I actually jumped back. “Now go get dressed, and don’t put on any of those blouses so short your belly button peeps out. Go!” he ordered, his finger stiffly pointing toward my room.
I sauntered off reluctantly and changed into something that I knew would make him happy, but I wasn’t smiling. All the way out to Aunt Mae Louise’s house, I sat sulking in the car. Daddy went on and on about how this was my biggest and best opportunity to escape trouble and grow into a decent young woman, maybe even go off to a college and become something. He said he couldn’t be expected to make a living and raise a teenage girl who had already been in enough trouble to bring a grown man to tears. He said bringing a girl like me up in the heart of Atlanta’s toughest neighborhood was like planting a rose in a pigsty.
“Not that I’m saying you’re any rose, Phoebe, not by a long shot,” Daddy added. “I’m not one to be blind to my child’s problems and my own. People who do that end up wishing they was born a few minutes earlier or later.”
“Maybe Mama will come back,” I offered as a last resort when we drew closer to Stone Mountain. “At least we should wait a week or so to see.”
Daddy looked at me with those coldly realistic eyes of his, the sort of eyes that would clear fantasies off your own like windshield wipers cleared off rain.
“I don’t fool myself about your mama, Phoebe. She was never satisfied with our life, and you know it. She’s into bad stuff now. And anyway, I don’t want her coming back,” he added with more rage in his voice toward her than I had ever heard. “Not after what she’s done this time.”
I used to think nothing could make him really mad. He seemed to take every insult Mama threw his way. She complained he didn’t put up enough of a fuss when his boss made him work harder and cover more territory.
“You sure you got a spine in there, Horace?” she would taunt him.
The most he would do is shake his head and saunter off, but I could see there was no way I was going to talk him out of this. My only hope was that after all was said and done, my aunt and uncle wouldn’t want me. If I were them, I wouldn’t want me, I thought. I don’t even want me now, and probably Daddy didn’t, either, and was just using everything as an excuse to pawn me off. Part of me was sick over it, and part of me was understanding.
Aunt Mae Louise and Uncle Buster Howard, who was a civil engineer, whatever that meant, had recently bought a nice home in Stone Mountain, a suburb community of Atlanta. It had two stories, a front yard and a backyard, an attached garage, and enough land between it and the houses beside it so that you couldn’t reach out the window and steal bread off someone else’s dinner table like you could in the rundown tenement we occupied in downtown Atlanta.
In other words, they had a home that would nourish a rose, even a weed. It was in a safe neighborhood. There were no gangs, and drugs if they came had to come subtly, through back doors, and not be sold in kiosks in the street outside your front door like they did where we lived. I could attend a better school, and, most importantly, Daddy emphasized, help my aunt and uncle with their two children, Jake, age five, and Barbara Ann, age eight.
Daddy, who had been a salesman of some sort or another most of his adult life, put all his skill and logic into his selling of me. There was just no other way to view it. He was there to convince my aunt and my uncle they should take me in, just like they would take in a new vacuum cleaner.
I really hated the idea of living in Stone Mountain, away from my friends and stuck with my snobby relatives, especially my mother’s older sister, who was fond of lecturing her about how an African-American woman and man today could make themselves successful if they just had a mind to and had real ambition. Everything they had was real; everything we had was just a temporary fix.