HUNGER WAS THE WORST PAIN I EVER ENDURED AS A CHILD. Mama’s beatings were abusive, and I took some shots from the bullies I met along the way, but no physical pain I encountered affected me quite so deeply as our lack of food and the perpetual gnawing I felt in my stomach. I grew accustomed to the abuse and the bullies, but I never got used to being hungry. Nor could I understand why there were so many cockroaches in our house, when there was hardly ever any food for them to eat.
Of course we had food for the first week of each month, when the food stamps arrived in the mail. But after that there’d be no food for the next three weeks because there’d be no food stamps left.
Going to bed hungry became a familiar way of life. Sometimes I tried to stay in bed as long as possible in the morning so I wouldn’t feel the emptiness in my stomach quite as severely.
But one Sunday morning I noticed something different. The night before, Mama had dragged a mattress out in the yard; because the roaches were so bad, we couldn’t sleep in the house, so Patricia, Mama, and I had slept outside. Her husband was passed out in some sort of stupor and probably didn’t even notice the roaches crawling over his face.
As usual, when I woke up, my stomach was aching from not having eaten since school on Friday, when Patricia and I last received a free lunch. I sat up on the mattress and sniffed the morning air. A distinct aroma of bacon wafted through the air. And it sure smelled good! Bacon? Surely not. Mama’s not making bacon for us, is she? I sniffed the air again. It was bacon, all right, but it wasn’t coming from our kitchen. It seemed to be drifting in my direction from the neighbors’ house next door—the same neighbors who didn’t like us much. Those neighbors rarely spoke to my family, and they never opened their back door, the one that faced our house.
But today the back door was open, except for a screen door, through which the tantalizing scents were flowing. I sat there for a few moments, breathing deeply and looking longingly at the neighbors’ door, and then, like a zombie drawn to the cemetery, I stood up and slowly walked toward their back door.
I stopped short of their steps, dawdling as though I were looking for something but, every so often, peeking toward their screen door. No one was in the kitchen or sitting at the table, so I gingerly walked up the steps, put my face against their screen and got a closer look. With my nose pressed against the black screen, I could see the food they had left on their table, and the smell of bacon was even stronger now.
I slowly pulled open the screen door, making sure the spring didn’t squeak. It didn’t, so I slipped carefully into the neighbors’ kitchen. I could hear voices in the next room; it sounded as if the family was getting ready to go to church.
I tiptoed over to where it appeared they had just finished eating breakfast but hadn’t yet cleared the table. For a moment, I stood still, listening intently to make certain no one was coming. I sure didn’t want the neighbors to catch me inside their house. But then I saw it. Just an arm’s length away from me was a plate with some scraps of bacon. A short distance away was another plate with more breakfast scraps; a little farther away was yet another plate half-filled with leftovers. I smacked my lips, and I could feel my mouth salivating. I reached over with my right hand and grabbed the bacon someone had left on the plate. At the same time I used my left hand to hold up the bottom of my shirt, forming a pocket where I could stash the leftovers and partly eaten food. I quickly began filling up the front of my shirt with the table scraps I retrieved off the food-smeared plates. I was so excited! My eyes were as big as silver dollars; I couldn’t wait to dig in to this feast.
That’s when I heard a man’s voice, yelling, “Hey!”
I didn’t take time to look or to figure out who was yelling at me.
“Hey, who are you? What are you doing here? Why you . . . get out of here!”
I didn’t answer; I turned and ran through the kitchen and out their back screen door, clutching the front of my shirt to my chest, trying desperately not to jostle too much and lose my stolen scraps. The screen door smacked the doorframe loudly behind me as I leaped off the porch, raced across the yard, and hid behind our house.
When I was certain that I had not been followed, I sat down on some wooden steps and ate every piece of scrap stuck to my shirt, leaving behind nothing but a big greasy circle. I hate to admit it, but I didn’t even share the table scraps with Patricia; I ate every morsel myself.
BEING HUNGRY SOMETIMES EMBOLDENED ME TO DO THINGS I wouldn’t ordinarily do. On one occasion, I walked across Walnut Avenue to where an elderly lady was standing in her yard. “Excuse me, ma’am,” I said, trying to be polite. “Do you have any bread I could eat?”
The elderly woman looked at me pathetically and said, “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
I waited at the bottom of her steps. She returned with a half loaf of bread and a pack of ham.
“Oh, thank you, ma’am,” I said. “Thank you!” I ran up the steps and took the bread out of her hand and then raced back toward my house.
The woman called out, “But I brought you some ham too . . .”
I stopped in the middle of the street, turned around, and said, “That’s okay. I have mustard.”
Say what? Mustard?
The dear woman watched me as I ran all the way home. I charged into the house, carrying the bread like a football and immediately began making mustard sandwiches for Patricia and me. I was so hungry that it never occurred to me that the bread and mustard might have tasted better with a bit of ham. But I didn’t mind; after all, I was grateful the woman gave me what I had asked for—some bread.
MAMA KNEW WE WERE HUNGRY MOST OF THE TIME, AND every so often she would take some special steps to help. No, she didn’t get a job. Instead, one night Mama woke Patricia and me around one o’clock in the morning. She had gone down the hill, sneaked into the preacher’s garden, and stolen a few ears of corn. No doubt the preacher would have given Mama the corn had she asked nicely for it. But begging wasn’t in Mama’s nature. Stealing? That was okay. Using men to get what she wanted? Oh, yes, that was acceptable too. In fact, almost any means of obtaining what she wanted was legitimate to her—anything but hard work and common decency.
But I didn’t think about scolding Mama for stealing. Patricia and I hadn’t eaten all weekend, and we wouldn’t eat again till we got back to school on Monday, so when Mama boiled us some corn on the cob in the middle of the night, I certainly wasn’t going to complain.
FOR ALL HER VACILLATING VALUES, MAMA STILL TRIED TO instill within Patricia and me a sense of personal pride. Before we went out to wait for the bus one morning, Mama said, “Make sure your hair is combed; it’s picture day at school.”
Picture day! That was always exciting. We bought few of our school pictures, but it was fun to have our picture taken and look at the proofs. Sometimes the photographer even sent them home, though that was rare since we weren’t the only family with a less-than-100-percent return record. When the school sent home the thumbnail-sized proof stapled to the sales pitch, Mama peeled off the proof. That was our school picture for that year until it faded away.
I stood on the side of the auditorium stage that morning, along with my classmates, and waited for the teacher to call my name. Since my last name was Barber, I was one of the first to be called. I walked onto the stage and sat down in a wooden school desk the photographer was using as a prop. Right before he took my picture, I yelled out, “Wait a minute! Mama said I had to comb my hair.”
“Okay, fine, kid,” the exasperated photographer said. “Comb your hair. But hurry up. I have a lot of pictures to take today.”
I reached in my back pocket and pulled out a small black comb, the kind you could stick a piece of white paper in and form a makeshift harmonica by blowing on it.
But the white flecks on my comb were not from paper. And my teacher noticed. As I ran the comb through my hair, the teacher walked over to me and looked more closely. “What kind of comb is that?” she asked suspiciously.
“It’s the comb my mom gave to me,” I told the teacher. “It’s a lice comb we had to use a few days ago.”
The teacher said, “Go to the principal’s office.”
“But my picture . . .”
“Go! Now! And take that comb with you.”
All my classmates stared at me, some making hideous faces as I left the auditorium.
I didn’t get my picture taken that year.