“It ain’t about how much I weigh,” I said defensively. “Last year I weighed twenty pounds more than I do now, and it didn’t make a difference. But . . . I wish I could shrink down to a normal height.” I laughed, but I was serious. For a colored woman, being too tall was almost as bad as being too dark and homely. I wasn’t as dark or homely as some of the women I knew, but I was the tallest and the only one my age still single.
“Well, look at it this way, baby girl. You ain’t no Kewpie doll and you may be too lanky for anybody to want to marry you, but at least you got your health. A lot of women don’t even have that.” Daddy squeezed my hand and smiled. “And you real smart.”
I was thankful that I was healthy and smart, but those things didn’t do a damn thing for my overactive sex drive. If a man didn’t make love to me soon, I was going to go crazy. And the way I’d been fantasizing about going up to a stranger in a beer garden or on the street and asking him to go to bed with me, maybe I had already lost my mind. “Can I be excused? I have a headache,” I muttered, rubbing the back of my head.
“You said the same thing when we was having supper yesterday,” Mama reminded.
“I had a headache then, too,” I moaned. I rose up out of my chair so fast, I almost knocked it over. With my head hanging low, I shuffled around the corner and down the hall to my bedroom. I’d been born in the same room, and the way my life was going, I had a feeling I’d die in it too.
Branson was a typical small town in the southern part of Alabama. It was known for its cotton and sugarcane fields and beautiful scenery. Fruit and pecan trees, and flowers of every type and color decorated most of the residents’ front and back yards. But things were just as gloomy here as the rest of the South.
Our little city had only about twenty thousand people and most of them were white. Two of our four banks had crashed right after the Great Depression started almost five years ago. But a few people had been smart enough to pull their money out just in time. Our post office shared the same building with the police department across the street from our segregated cemetery.
Jim Crow, the rigid system that the white folks had created to establish a different set of rules for them and us, was strictly enforced. Basically, what it meant was that white people could do whatever they wanted, and we couldn’t eat where they ate, sleep or socialize with them, or even sass them. Anybody crazy enough to violate the rules could expect anything from a severe beating to dying at the hands of a lynch mob. A lot of our neighbors and friends worked for wealthy white folks in the best neighborhoods, but all of the colored residents lived on the south side. And it was segregated too. The poor people lived in the lower section near the swamps and the dirt roads. The ones with decent incomes, like my family, lived in the upper section.
The quiet, well-tended street we lived on was lined with magnolia and dogwood trees on both sides. Each house had a neat lawn, and some had picket fences. The brown-shingled house with tar paper roofing and a wraparound front porch we owned had three bedrooms. The walls were thin, so when Mama and Daddy started talking again after I’d bolted from the supper table, I could hear them. And, I didn’t like what they were saying.
“Poor Joyce. I just ball up inside when I think about how fast our baby is going to waste. I’m going to keep praying for her to find somebody before it’s too late,” Mama grumbled. “With her strong back she’d be a good workhorse and keep a clean house and do whatever else she’ll need to do to keep a husband happy. And I’d hate to see them breeding hips she got on her never turn out no babies.” Mama let out a loud, painful-sounding groan. “What’s even worse is, I would hate to leave this world knowing she was going to grow old alone.”
“I’m going to keep praying for her to get married too. But that might be asking for too much. I done almost put a notion like that out of my mind. This late in the game, the most we can expect is to fix her up with somebody who’ll court her for a while, so she can have a little fun before she get too much older,” Daddy grunted. “Maybe we ain’t been praying hard enough, huh?”
“We been praying hard enough, but that ain’t the problem,” Mama snapped.
“Oh? Then what is it?”
“The problem is this girl is too doggone picky!” Mama shouted.
“Sure enough,” Daddy agreed.
I couldn’t believe my ears! My parents were trying to fix me up with a stock boy, not a businessman, and they thought I was being too picky. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. A lot of ridiculous things had been said to and about me. Being “too picky” was one of the worst because it couldn’t have been further from the truth.
I had no idea how my folks had come to such an off-the-wall conclusion. I couldn’t imagine what made them think I was too picky. I’d given up my virginity when I was fourteen to Marvin Galardy, the homeliest boy in the neighborhood. And that was only because he was the only one interested in having sex with me at the time.
I was so deep in thought, I didn’t hear Daddy knocking on my door, so he let himself in. “You done gone deaf, too?” he grumbled.
“I didn’t hear you,” I
