Yesterday, I Cried_ Celebrating the Lessons of Living and Loving - Iyanla Vanzant [31]
Daddy’s wife could have been a model, except she was too short. Her fair complexion, shapely frame, keen facial features, and long black hair were quite acceptable to the world at large. And it was precisely these things that made everyone else in the family despise her.
“Who does she think she is?” one of the more endowed aunts would ask when Lynnette was not within earshot.
“She must think she’s white!” was Grandma’s pat answer. “She acts just like them highfalutin women uptown who ain’t got nothin’ but their looks to offer anybody.”
Everyone, including Rhonda, called Daddy’s wife Nett, and she had more than looks. She was beautiful. She was stylish. And she wore jewelry. As a matter of fact, one of the things about Nett that so endeared her to Rhonda was her jewelry, all of it gold. She wore a pear-shaped opal on a gold chain around her neck. It was her birthstone, she said. Nett also wore two beautiful gold rings, one on each of her ring fingers. One was her wedding band, she said. The other was a thin gold band that had a beautiful round stone called a diamond. Rhonda liked it when Lynnette made the diamond reflect light onto the wall. Nett also wore two bracelets, called bangles, on her left arm. They were made out of pink gold. “My mother gave these to me when I was a little girl,” Nett told Rhonda. “One day they will be yours. I will give them to you, just like my mother gave them to me.” What Lynnette didn’t tell Rhonda was that on the day she would inherit the bangles, Nett would be dead.
Nett always wore a colored skirt, white blouse, and low-heeled pumps. The neck of her blouse was so heavily starched that it stood up on its own. There were times when Rhonda liked to sit and just stare at Lynnette because she was so beautiful. She was also kind, gentle, and very affectionate. Rhonda could tell that Daddy thought Lynnette was beautiful, too. She could tell by the look in his eyes whenever he was around her. Sometimes Rhonda wished that Daddy would look at her the way he looked at Nett, but he never did. But everything that Nett did made Rhonda feel beautiful for the first time in her life. And Nett was everything that Grandma wasn’t.
It would be too mild to say that Grandma didn’t like Nett. Hated would seem more appropriate. But it wasn’t just that Grandma hated Nett, it was that she went out of her way to be mean to her and to say nasty things about her. Rhonda wasn’t sure if it was a blessing or a curse. On the blessing side, it meant that Grandma spent so much time complaining about Nett, she’d go for days without complaining about Rhonda. From the curse perspective, her liking Nett made Rhonda a double enemy in Grandma’s eyes and added new fuel to her repertoire of verbal abuse.
“She paints her fingernails! You like that, don’t you?” Grandma would say, building up steam. “Only whores paint their fingernails. Guess you want to be a whore just like her. You want to be just like your daddy’s whore, don’t you? I don’t know what that trash is she wears, but you can smell her coming a mile away. Bet you want to smell like that, too. Don’t you? Homemade soap ain’t good enough for you, huh? Want to smell like your daddy’s whore, don’t you.”
At the time, Rhonda had no idea what being a whore meant, but if it was good enough for Nett, it was just fine by her. What really stuck in Grandma’s throat had nothing to do with Nett’s fingernails, nor the fragrance she wore. It had a whole lot to do with Nett’s heritage. Nett’s parents were Caribbean, she was a mixture of Jamaican and Cuban. Back then, black people from the South neither liked nor understood black people from the Islands.