Grace After Midnight_ A Memoir - Felicia Pearson [25]
“So my life was perfect. Absolutely perfect. He wanted me to go with him to France for the summer. Of course I loved the idea. But then this one little problem kept coming up: my children. He hated children. He said I couldn’t take the children to France. By then, though, Mom had died and all my aunts had moved away.
“‘We’ll hire a nanny,’ I told him.
“‘I don’t want a nanny,’ he said. ‘I don’t want kids. Kids ruin everything.’
“‘I have my kids, though,’ I told him.
“‘Long as you have your kids, you don’t have me,’ he said.
“I tried to reason with the man, but he wasn’t reasonable that way. He had his attitude. He also had his choice of any woman in the world. I knew that. I saw them coming and going. But I also saw that he was ready to make me his queen. How many women get a chance to be a queen? So I did what I had to do.”
L stopped talking. Her green eyes were cold as ice. I didn’t want to ask her, but I had to.
“What did you do?” I pried.
“I burned down the house,” she said matter-of-factly. “But it was okay. The children were asleep. It happened so fast they couldn’t feel anything.”
Wait a second, I was thinking to myself, this crazy bitch done burned her house with her kids inside? And she’s sitting here saying it like it was no worse than overcooking the hamburgers. This is one wack job I’m avoiding for as long as I’m staying at Grandma’s House.
One of the bitches who’d been listening to her along with me couldn’t contain herself.
“That’s some horrible shit,” she said.
“I couldn’t help it,” said L. “The man just hated kids.”
“THAT’S WHY
THEY CALL IT
GRANDMA’S HOUSE.”
I heard a lot of stories about why the Cut started being called Grandma’s House. The one that gave me the most chills, though, came down through a woman I’ll call Z. I didn’t know whether to believe her, but I had a couple of nightmares over her story.
She was in her forties, maybe even older. Had scars all over her face. She’d been cut up and burned something awful. She was ugly to begin with—maybe that’s why she was so pissed off at everyone. If you got close to her she’d hiss at you like a cornered cat, so you sure-enough left her alone. No one wanted to fuck with her. There were dozens of rumors about her case but she never talked to anyone. Then she started playing basketball with us. She was over six feet so we put her at center. Even though she was older, she could keep up with the young girls. With the passes I’d feed her, she scored like crazy. That got her to like me.
One day we won a big game because of her inside moves. That put her in a great mood, and she started talking to me. She had a low voice that was scratchy. Even her lips were scarred something awful.
“I know no one likes looking at me,” she said, “and I don’t give two shits. Fuck ’em.”
I didn’t say nothing.
“Everyone wants to know what happened to me,” she went on. “You wanna know too, don’t you?”
Still didn’t say nothing.
“Everyone wants to ask me but they too scared. You scared too, ain’t you?”
“Hell, yes, I’m scared,” I said.
That made her laugh. Made her like me even more.
“Happened when I young. When I was young. My grandma listened to this song that said, ‘When I was nothing but a child, all you boys tried to drive me wild.’ You ever hear that song?”
“No.”
“Old fucked-up blues song. I don’t know nothing about those old blues. Grandma would drive me crazy with those old blues. Sounded like shit to me. I don’t even like music. Music gives me a fuckin’ headache. You like music?”
“I like Pac.”
“Oh yeah, Pac. Well, that ain’t music. That’s poetry, ain’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Grandma played her blues music night and day. I hated that shit until I busted up a few of her records. She’d just go out and buy more. She did it to drive me crazy. You know how bitches will drive you crazy.”
“Yeah.”
“You have a grandmother?”
“Well, I have a foster mother who’s like a grandmother,” I said. “I call her Mama but she’s old enough to be my grandmother.”
“You like her?”
“Yeah.