Mama Read Free Page B

grease and smoke and couldn't even catch my breath long enough to go to the bathroom. And who was the one got corns and bunions from carrying plates of ribs and fried chicken back and forth at the Shingle when I was five months pregnant, while you hung off the back of a city garbage truck half drunk, waving at people like you were the president or the head of some parade?
    She put her foot back on the floor and lit another cigarette.
    Never even made up a decent excuse about what you did with your money. I know about Ernestine. I ain't no fool. Just been waiting for the right time. Me and the kids sitting in here with the lights and gas cut off and you give me two dollars. Say, "Here, buy some pork-n-beans and vanilla wafers for the kids, and if it's some change left get yourself a beer." A beer. Just what I needed, sitting in a cold-ass house in the dark.
    Mildred's eyes scanned the faces of her five kids, framed in gold and black around the room.
    And you got the nerve to brag about how pretty, how healthy and how smart your kids are. Don't they have your color. Your high cheekbones. Your smile. These ain't your damn kids. They mine. Maybe they got your blood, but they mine.
     
    Mildred had had Freda when she was seventeen, and the other kids had fallen out every nine or ten months after that, with the exception of one year between Freda and Money. Crook had told her he didn't want any more kids until he got on his feet. Freda was almost three months old when Mildred realized she was pregnant again. She was too scared to tell Crook, so she asked her sister-in-law what she should do. Curly Mae told her to take three five-milligram quinine tablets. When that didn't work, she told her to drink some citrate of magnesia and take a dry mustard bath. A week later she went to the bathroom feeling like she was going to have a bowel movement and had a miscarriage.
    Motherhood meant everything to Mildred. When she was first carrying Freda, she didn't believe her stomach would actually grow, but when she felt it stretch like the skin of a drum and it swelled up like a small brown moon, she'd never been so happy. She felt there was more than just a cord connecting her to this boy or girl that was moving inside her belly. There was some special juice and only she could supply it. And sometimes when she turned over at night she could feel the baby turn inside her too, and she knew this was magic.
    The morning Freda came, Crook was in a motel room on the North End with Ernestine. Curly Mae drove her to the hospital. From that point on, Mildred watched her first baby grow like a long sunrise. She was so proud of Freda that she let her body blow up and flatten for the next fifty-five months. It made her feel like she had actually done something meaningful with her life, having these babies did. And when she pulled the brush back and up through their thick clods of nappy hair, she smiled because it was her own hair she was brushing. These kids were her future. They made her feel important and gave her a feeling of place, of movement, a sense of having come from somewhere. Having babies was routine to a lot of women, but for Mildred it was unique every time; she didn't have a single regret about having had five kids—except one, and that was who had fathered them.
     
    Mildred lay down when she felt the heaviness of the pill beginning to work. Bells were ringing in her ears, and it made her think of Christmas, which was only two months away. For the past nine Christmases Mildred had had to hustle to buy Chatty Cathy dolls, Roll-a-Strollers, ice skates, racing car sets, sleds, and bicycles. Crook had helped her sneak them through the side door at midnight. She didn't know how she would manage this year.
    She shook her head. Should've never let you come back after you got out the sanitarium, she thought. Should've let you have old sorry, ancient Ernestine, 'cause y'all deserved each other. But I felt bad for you 'cause I thought tuberculosis