And Ruin Followed Behind Her

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Mama never liked to eat at home. Home was a cold, dark place on the outskirts of town that she only visited when she needed to sleep. It used to be a warm, welcoming place with a down to Earth charm to it when I was growing up, even in the worst times. But since I’d left for school, it turned into a place I barely recognized. The furniture was the same, but the soul had gone from it.

Mama raised me by herself, which meant she hustled and bustled my whole life. When I was a kid, she ran a daycare out of our back yard. She kept her rates low since our neighbors couldn’t afford much, and that made her very popular. Our house was always full of kids, laughing and playing. Mama loved kids, but the daycare was about more than that. It was about survival, and in my neighborhood, you did what you had to do to get from the beginning of the month to the end of the month without going belly up.

It ran her ragged, though. To eke out a living, she had to take on a lot of kids, and the more kids she took on, the more help she needed, but that meant paying people, and she couldn’t afford to do that without eating up every dollar she made. So, she ended up with too many kids and too little help, which made her entire life...challenging.

When I got up in age I tried to help after school, but Mama wouldn’t hear of it. She worked extra hard to make sure I could study and focus on school. She wanted to make sure I could leave if I wanted, even if she didn’t think I’d ever want to go somewhere else.

She was wrong about that. I’d wanted to leave Chandler from the moment I exited the womb. What I never wanted to do was come back, but that’s all that Mama wanted for me. Sometimes, I think she got old just to spite me.

When I got back to Chandler, things were different for Mama. She treated herself to the finer things since the house was paid off, and she got a social security check every month. It didn’t hurt that I had a decent salary and could pay for a few of life’s niceties which passed mama by in her younger days. I didn’t mind spoiling her a bit, either. After all, she raised me. Back when I was a kid, we could never eat out. Money was always tight, like ketchup on bread tight—and stale bread at that, so we didn’t leave the house much.

Eating out these days was more than just luxury, though. Nothing tickled Mama more than having dinner at a restaurant that had refused to serve her when she was young. She took great pride in sitting at a lunch counter in a place she once couldn’t even step into without getting arrested and munching on food that white people said she couldn’t have until the government forced them to treat her like a human being.

Her favorite place to eat was called Charlotte’s Diner, right across from the mystery spot. For years, they’d had a sign on their window that said, “No Coloreds Allowed,” but the government forced them to take it down. Mama liked to sit right by the window, where that sign had mocked her for so long, and stare out at the park, where every resident of Chandler could get a good look at her.

She would sit in that diner, sometimes all day, while I worked, just staring at that the mystery spot, which is exactly what she was doing when I entered the diner to the jingling of bells over the door. Mama never told me where she was going, but Chandler’s a small town and there weren’t that many options.

“Mama!” I called to her from the entrance. She sat at a booth looking out the front window of the place, through the big lettering that plastered CHARLOTTE’S on the front sign. Mama didn’t look up as I sat down across from her.

“Didn’t you hear me?” I asked.

Finally, she turned to me. Her wrinkled face cracked on its edges into a warm smile. “I heard you, but I was deep in thought. I’m glad you found me, even if you are late.”

“Of course, I found you, Mama. You’re always here.”

She chuckled. “I’m not always here, my love. I’m just mostly here. And if I wasn’t here, you would find me somewhere else. I do very much like that Chinese place around the corner, too.”

A kindly, old woman named Martha came up to us. She was dressed in the powder blue waitress outfit common among all the wait staff, but she was different in her spirit. Martha was the only one who treated us like customers whose money was just as good as anybody else’s, and not a nuisance It took me months to realize it, but she was the only person who would ever come to our table.

Everybody inside Charlotte’s turned up their noses at us when we entered the place. Waitresses turned their backs and refused our calls for service. Patrons asked to move away from our table. Under their breath, of course, but there would suddenly be a chorus of shuffling tables and scampering feet whenever we sat down. Whenever I passed by the diner and Mama wasn’t there, nobody ever sat in Mama’s booth, as if we were contaminated with the plague.

Then, there was Martha, who smiled brightly at us just like we were any two other humans. “Good evening, Julia! What can I get for you?”

“Coke and a burger, please. Medium. You know how I like it.” I returned her smile. Behind her, a couple scowled at me, but I didn’t break my grin. You couldn’t let them see you break, ever. “Mama, what do you want?”

“Oh, I already ordered.”

Martha jotted my order down in her notebook. “Yes, she did. I’ll have both your orders up right away.”

She scooted away as the other patrons went about their business. Charlotte’s wasn’t a big place, and I could hear the animosity oozing from every table. Luckily, I got very good at drowning it out, though, and replacing it with idle chatter. Mama taught me that.

“How was your day?” she asked.

I just sighed. I opened my mouth to speak, but I just...couldn’t get out the words. All I could do was grunt. Luckily, Mama knew exactly what that meant after hearing it every day since I came back.

“That bad, huh?” Mama asked in her most comforting voice.

“As bad as yesterday,” I said, shaking my head. “Better than tomorrow I’ll bet.”

“I told you I could put in a good word at Taft. Good people over there at Taft.”

“No money over there at Taft, Mama,” I said, exasperated.

“We don’t need money, dear. We got the house free and clear.”

“You still gotta eat.” I gestured at the room. “This place ain’t free.”

She stared out to the park. The school loomed beyond the mystery spot. “I don’t gotta eat here, my love, just like you don’t gotta work there.”

“Then why do you?” I asked.

“Same reason you do it, my love,” she replied, knowingly.

I knew why I did it, and I knew why she did it, too. It was because we could, and because we could, we were compelled to do it. The rush was exhilarating, making everybody else in town uncomfortable, just like we made them uncomfortable when Dad went missing. It had been sixteen years since sheriffs found him hung from an oak tree in Mystery Spot Park.

“You know it’s his birthday next week,” Mama said.

“I know,” I replied. “How did you know I was thinking about him?”

“Thinking about him all the time these days, aren’t you?”

She was right. I thought about him often. I thought about him every time I passed by the park where he was snatched, and every time I stood under the tree where they hung him for the whole town to see for the high crime of being a loud, black man in a town full of quiet, black men.

“It’s not his birthday, though, Mama. Birthdays are for people who are alive.”

Mama nodded. “That’s true, but he was still born then, my love. Nobody can take that away from him.”

“No. They could just take away his life.”

The whole diner stopped in that moment, as if the needle on a record player skipped a beat. Waitresses stopped their deliveries as the patrons stared at us.

“Hush yourself,” Mama said. “That’s not polite. There’s a line, baby.”

She was right. My dad being lynched wasn’t something you talked about in polite company, especially not during dinner.

It wasn’t decent to talk about men stringing up your father. It wasn’t proper to talk about how they watched his face turn purple as he struggled for breath, or to discuss them cutting his throat and watching him bleed out. That wasn’t proper conversation in Chandler.

The act wasn’t decent, either, but talking about it was taboo. If you were black, you didn’t talk about justice unless you wanted to wind up on a tree yourself, and when you can’t talk about something, you can’t convict somebody of it, either. Not that a white jury was going to convict good ole boys of killing a black man. So, we just had to move on and swallow our pain.

They didn’t even talk about it on our side of the tracks. My dad’s death sent a message to the whole community. Shut your damned fool mouth. They didn’t just string him up, they cut his throat across the voice box to remind us not to say a word.

When I was growing up, there was a lynching like that just about every six months, for over a decade. Like clockwork. White folks needed to send a message every once in a while, whenever we forgot our place. It could have been any other black man on any other day, but that day it was my father. It wasn’t some other little girl who lost her daddy. It was me.

That kind of act, it built up a lot of resentment between black and white folks. Even though there hadn’t been a lynching in ten years, the animosity never went away.

I looked out at the diner and saw a dozen hostile eyes staring back at me. There was no shame; they didn’t even avert their gaze. Worse, they were disgusted that we weren’t ashamed at interrupting their dinner with our insistence on existing. In that chorus of ugly, beady eyes, I lost my appetite.

“Can we go, Mama?” I asked.

“No. I’m hungry,” she said, unaffected by their gaze. “And I’m gonna eat, damn it. You don’t gotta eat, but don’t go spoiling my appetite. You gonna keep spoiling my appetite?”

I shook my head. I knew the code. Shut your damn fool mouth. “No, Mama.”

Martha smiled when she brought us our food and the eyes of the other diners eventually turned away from me. The chatter of the diner drowned out my thoughts. Mama and I ate in silence, her staring out at the mystery spot, and me staring at her, both watching with wonder.