I learned to listen, observe, and wait for the rare times when my mother could be there for me—when she was rested enough to spend time with me, when she got hungry enough to cook, when she felt good enough about herself to look at me in a positive way, to see my good qualities instead of focusing only on my faults. I learned to wait until she was holding court with her friends, drinking and laughing and telling stories—when her reminiscing transported her from her mundane, difficult life back to more light-hearted, joyous times. Then, partly because she was in a good mood and partly because she was aware of being observed, my mother would look at me kindly and say something nice about me—or to me.
One day, while she was sitting on our little lawn with Zelda and Kinney and I was playing nearby I heard my mother say, “Beverly’s such an imaginative child; she can play all by herself for hours, making up little scenarios in her head.” I knew she meant this as a compliment, that she liked this about me, and realizing this, I felt warmed from my head to my feet. I relished moments like this, devoured them like the starving child I was.
I loved to see my mother with her friends; in those moments, she became a different person from the one I knew. I wondered what the trick was—how her friends got her to open up like that. What did they do to make her laugh?
I soon learned that my mother liked to be entertained by people, so I started entertaining her. I became a real song and dance kid. If she’d had just enough beer but not too much, and if she wasn’t too tired, I’d let my outgoing personality shine with her. And when I was really young and cute, she seemed to like that.
That summer we took a trip to Modesto to see my uncle Forrest. The entire Greyhound bus was full of sailors. Up until that time, I had always been surrounded by women—my mother, Ruby, my babysitters, and Zelda and Kinney—so I was fascinated and excited to see all these young men. And I’d never seen men dressed in funny white uniforms with scarves around their necks. I was delighted. I ran up and down the aisles, talking to one young man after another.
“Hi, my name is Beverly, what’s yours?”
“Why are you all dressed the same?”
“What’s that funny scarf around your neck?”
The sailors seemed to be delighted with me. They answered all my questions and laughed at all my jokes. Before the trip was over, I had the entire busload singing “You Are My Sunshine,” my favorite song.
Momma preferred to blend into the crowd, not bring attention to herself. But she was so charismatic and beautiful that people flocked to her. I was the opposite. I was hungry for attention and was seldom quiet. I said what I thought and what I felt, no matter how inappropriate or ill advised. Like most children, I didn’t have a filter, so I told people all about myself, all about my mother, and all about our business—something my mother cringed at. “People don’t need to know that,” she’d chastise me in loud whispers.
To my mother’s horror, I never met a person I didn’t immediately begin talking to—whether it was the people who passed by our house or people on the bus. Like the time I walked over and got in the lap of an old black man on a trip downtown on the bus. My mother had a Southern upbringing, which meant she was prejudiced—plain and simple. She thought that black people, and brown people for that matter, were beneath her.
So it was bad enough that I talked to a black man—a “Negro,” as my mother said—but when I got in his lap, she was mortified. She got up, jerked me off his lap, and pushed me as far away from him as she could get.
“What’s wrong with you?” she whispered harshly. She was so angry I could see the veins on her forehead pulsating. “Don’t you ever, ever do that again!”
When I got home, she explained to me that I shouldn’t talk to Negroes. And I should certainly not ever get in a Negro’s lap.
“Why would you do such a thing?” she implored, shaking her head in exasperation.
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell her I didn’t understand what was wrong with Negroes. I couldn’t explain that the man had smiled at me and that’s why I had gone over to him in the first place, or that I’d had especially fond feelings for black men ever since I’d watched Walt Disney’s Song of the South.
Although my mother scolded me for getting in the black man’s lap, she told this story over and over to other people with an air of pride in her voice, just like when she told the story of me riding my tricycle all the way home from the babysitter’s house. Even though she had spanked me for doing that, she also laughed about it, almost boasted. It was like she was giving me one message—“Don’t be so bold”—but there was another message underneath that one: she secretly enjoyed my bravado and boldness.
chapter 4
My relationship with my mother was always a strange one—an odd mixture of love and hate, hero worship and disdain. She was all I had and so she got it all—all my love, all my hatred, all my neediness, all my rebellion.
Thank God for Ruby. I went back and forth between my mother and Ruby like some kids go between divorced parents. Ruby was fire—all warmth and passion and smoldering coals. Momma was ice, so cold you could get burned if you got too close.
There was a lushness about Ruby, from her thick mane of
