Grace After Midnight_ A Memoir - Felicia Pearson [2]
When Mrs. Simms left us, my mother sat down on the edge of the bed. Something was wrong. She was crying and shaking. I didn’t know why. She didn’t hug and kiss me like she had in the park. She didn’t even look at me. I just stood there.
Then her mood changed. She got up from the bed and told me to take off my clothes. I didn’t understand why. I wouldn’t do it.
“Do it!” she cried.
She screamed at me until I did it. I took off all my clothes, dropping them on the floor.
“Now get in there,” she ordered, pointing to the closet.
I tried to run but my mother caught me. She pushed me into the closet and locked the door behind me. I began wailing at the top on my lungs.
“Stop crying,” she said. “I’ll be back.”
Then the sound of her leaving the apartment.
The darkness.
The fear of being locked in.
Naked fear.
Baby girl fear.
Pure terror.
I carried on. Kept crying. Kept screaming louder, but no one heard. Cried so loud and long that I cried myself out. I finally fell to the floor and started kicking. I had to get out. Someone had to hear me.
I don’t know how much time passed, but when I heard the voices of Mrs. Simms and my foster father, I screamed my head off. They broke open the door and set me free. I was hysterical.
“Imagine that,” I heard Mrs. Simms tell my foster father, “selling her little girl’s clothes to buy crack.”
I was never allowed to be alone with my mother again.
Sometime in my childhood my mother reappeared at the house on Oliver Street.
Each time the visit was short, and with each visit she looked less beautiful. Her eyes were crazy. Sometimes her dress was dirty and worn. She’d come into the front room and just look at me. She’d try to smile, but the smile wouldn’t come. She’d cry and leave.
Her visits became more infrequent. Finally they stopped.
That’s when Mrs. Pearson became Mama and Mr. Pearson became Pop.
COLD-BLOODED KILLER
For the first eight years of my life, I was not only teased for being a foster child, I was teased for being cross-eyed. Mama told me I looked fine, and so did Pop, but I knew better. I knew because the kids on the block wouldn’t leave me alone. They teased me something fierce. They called me weirdo. Called me ugly. “How many fingers am I holding up?” they’d ask. And they’d laugh and say I was blind as a bat.
At first I didn’t fight them. I was too small. Their cruelty hurt my heart, but I didn’t know what to do about it. Didn’t cry. Didn’t lash out. Just held it in and kept to myself. Became a loner.
“You ain’t ugly,” said a handsome man who came to visit one afternoon. “You as pretty as your mama.”
He wasn’t talking about Cora Pearson. He was talking about Loretta Chase, the woman who took off my clothes and locked me in the closet.
“This here is Bernard,” Pop said to me as we sat in the front room. “This here is your real father.”
Unlike light-skinned Loretta, this man was black as midnight. Like Loretta, though, he had his hair in waves. He brought me a little doll I didn’t want. I didn’t like dolls. As he sat there, I looked into his eyes and saw ice. I felt ice.
“You a good girl?” he said.
I looked down at the floor and didn’t say nothing.
“You got all those pigtails,” he said.
I still didn’t say nothing.
He got up and put his hand on my cheek. His hand was cold.
“Be a good girl,” he said.
He left without another word.
Later I heard Mama and Pop talking in the kitchen.
“He’s a stick-up man,” said Mama.
“Worse than that,” added Pop. “Man’s a cold-blooded killer.”
Didn’t take long to learn what that meant.
Killing was part of our neighborhood. Death lived on our block. Death was the business of Collins Funeral Home, just down the street. Seemed liked death rode down Oliver Street more often than the ice cream truck. Death was a regular. Even as a baby girl, death—up close and real as rain—was part of my life.
THE SMURFS
Death is a lot for a kid to contend with.
The Smurfs are the opposite of death. Smurfs never die. Smurfs live forever in a dreamland