Stopping by the Iron Skillet restaurant with all the youngins was usually the free ticket to ride. Daddy had a sense for finding the old truckers who liked picking up hitchhikers with stories to tell, and they’d load us all up in the cab. Sometimes Bean would get to pull on the horn. Bell would always say extra kudos in the nightly prayers for the nice ones who treated us like we were normal human beings. I sure wasn’t giving any extra praises for the ones that let Bell Pepper turn the radio station to what she wanted to hear—which was always country music, for Pete’s sake. Wasn’t our life a walking, talking country song from the minute we were conceived?
On the road, we heard about a homeless shelter in Newport News. Trucker number two told us about another hitcher he’d helped once who had been there, coming back along the road into North Carolina. I almost choked on my water when the trucker said he thought the name of that place was The Home. Funny, that was what Maize wanted and what Bell had prayed for. Goose pimples rose on my arms.
When we arrived in that place of all things new, we hit one city road that merged into another, snaking into the heart of the skyscrapers. The city looked nothing like what I was used to. It was all metal and concrete and iron—no trees or rolling fields of corn as tall as a bus. It was a dull gray. The feeling of loneliness hit me even harder when I realized I wouldn’t have trees to hide in.
When we hit that six-mile bridge, I thought I had seen it all. There was nothing like the experience of crossing that monstrosity on truck brakes. My heart drummed as we jolted and inched forward, the brakes screeching. Something told me I wouldn’t see the other side of that road. Once I had crossed, one way or the other, we’d either live or die in this place. Living and dying were much the same, so it didn’t really matter, in the end.
Newport News was a beautiful sight as you crossed over that James River Bridge. Bean pressed his face to the glass, straining to see all the flashy, fishing boats skimming along the edges of the marsh and the Navy building ports loomed fierce in the distance. Mansions jutted from the shorelines and the tall banks, and I thought of all those folks riding high up there, and how they must have had a fresh view of life every morning as they read their paper and drank cappuccinos in monogrammed coffee cups.
We didn’t turn onto those fancy subdivision roads but told Mr. Bill, our nice trucker chauffeur, that we needed a stop near a gas station, if he didn’t mind. We had to fill out the lay of the land while Daddy figured out how to get to the closest shelter. The Home, if that was what it was truly called, would just be a temporal thing.
Mrs. Betty Atkins, the director, patted Bell on the shoulder. She said, “You must be one blessed family indeed. A room happened to be made clear for a family. Looks like we’ve got a family in need.”
Daddy said, “You sure do. You mean you’ve got us a place we can all bunk?”
“The number seven. Usually they don’t last a day when the word hits the street that our family unit has an opening.”
Bell lit up like a sparkler stick exploding and nudged me in the side. “I told you that prayer was the way to go.”
We got twenty weeks here, so Daddy took the little pocket planner Mrs. Betty gave him, and she helped him circle the date. If that wasn’t some kind of warning to us all, I don’t know what was.
Daddy marked the calendar on the week of Christmas. What a gift that would be—back out on the street like Joseph and Mary, looking for an inn. I couldn’t think of that right now. I was a one-day-at-a-time survivor, not a long-term planner with goals and a vision.
Come to find out that our school was a charter called The Dream Academy. Daddy was transported down there to fill out all of our paperwork, and he brought me back a school calendar, all the manuals, and lists. At first, I knew that Daddy was telling a fat one, because the thought of us all being side-by-side in K-12 buildings made my heart swell with gratefulness. It was too good to be true. Having Bean and Bell away from me wracked my nerves to the core.
I snuck down to Mrs. Betty’s office and asked if she could pull up the school on the internet, so I could see pictures of it myself. When I saw it with my own eyes, I had to ask the good Lord to forgive me for calling Daddy a liar.
Later that night, in my bunk, I visualized the calendar taking human form and sauntering toward me with a smug look of contempt. Calendars were never friends—more like my nemesis. I tried to Jackie Chan it, but it was so much stronger than me, forcing me into submission. I found myself totally spent of all emotion. Could I ever move again? I was so battered and bruised on the inside with the kind of scars that rarely heal on their own. That obnoxious calendar raised its hand in victory, the pages somersaulted by, and I remembered my birthday was coming up in those twenty weeks. I’d be eighteen.
Once, I remembered Momma making me a cake and all the birthday jazz that goes with it, including a balloon tied up on the chair at the head of the table. I had been so blissful then, and now I couldn’t even remember which birthday that was. We didn’t have photos or mementos with dates. We didn’t have that luxury on the road.
Maize waved his hand in front of my face. “Are you praying out loud?”
I smirked. “Need to be, don’t I?”
I didn’t realize that what was rambling through my head was coming out of my mouth. Sometimes I had an awful bad habit of that.
He glanced around our tiny room. “It’s not the worst place ever.”
And he was right. This one had all the other places beat. At least we had a private bathroom. That I could be eternally thankful for. Even if I had to share it with five people, at least those people shared my genetic makeup and stink pool.
Bell was lying on her bottom bunk, listening to the iPod her teacher gave her on her birthday this year. Mrs. Betty was lovely enough to recharge it for her. She’d been without her music player all summer, since we didn’t have no access to no plugs, and now she was crawling her legs up the wall like an itsy-bitsy spider, sliding back down in time to some unheard melody, probably some kind of musical. She was into that. The whole Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz thing. Let’s escape our current situation by making like we could be anywhere else in the world, over some rainbow—but not here. Never here.
Bean was out with Daddy, and I was secretly relieved. Bean was the one who couldn’t sit still, and Daddy knew it. He would take him on long walks to wear him out before bringing him back into a cramped-up little space. They were on some kind of adventure that had taken them nearly all day and evening, out looking for restaurants within walking distance of The Home.
Daddy was a cooker. Not a high-priced chef, now. He was just a cook man. He’d always loved that, and with us not actually having our own stove or burners, he liked borrowing other people’s. Daddy met Momma like that, going down to the farm to buy some fresh produce for some hotel he used to work at in Johnston. Right after him and Momma married, the restaurant turned into a nightclub, and they went to only serving fruit, yogurts, and them little cereal boxes that you have to peel the lid off. Daddy’s days making them fine-dining meals were over.
Momma wanted him to work at the hog plant, but the wages weren’t enough to bring home the bacon unless he worked the hours away from us, and he wouldn’t compromise the time. He wanted to find new hotels or restaurants to cook some fancy bacon-wrapped scallops in, but Momma never wanted to leave.
Well, now that he’d been traveling around from one place to the next, Daddy seemed to always have a knack for finding some local place that needed an extra hand in the kitchen, even if it meant he had to wash dishes or peel the potatoes for the line cooks. He always kept his eye on the big-money job that he swore to us he would land one day, over some rainbow. Talked to us about his plans for opening his own little diner and calling it Mixed Vegetables. Our little inside joke. Not very funny, huh?
Maybe today would be his day. With Bean at your side for eternal optimism and a sunny disposition, who could fail at finding a perfect job?
Maize was apparently talking to me about how it would be to be in high school, and I was totally lost on everything that he said.
“Sis, seriously. How is it going to be?” He shook my shoulders, almost knocking me off the bed.
“What?” I breathed heavily, trying my best to focus on him. I was staring at the rusted fan making slow circles over my head, taking in little gasps of the coolness that was making its way down to me.
“Freshman here! High school! Girls! You know! Have you even been listening to me for the past hour?” He threw the course schedules onto my lap.
I hadn’t even had the energy to glance at mine. With a school called The Impossible Dream or something, what could it be like? Impossible to ever fit in. Impossible to have a chance. Chances didn’t happen to the Joneses. Messes did.
“Oh, high school. Well, it’s middle school on speed. Does that mean anything to you?”
How could I let him know the truth? How he would be tortured practically every day of his high-school existence for a name like Maize? How the coursework would get harder, and the projects would pile up, and the test demands would be out of this world? How he didn’t read like the rest of us or behave the way the teachers expected, he’d fail the second he walked in them doors, and there would be nothing I could do to shelter him from the cruelty of the world? And oh, how I wished I could’ve been his protector since the minute he was born, but truth be told I’d done nothing for him at all.
“I can run fast if that’s what you mean. I’ve been ready to find me a place with a proper football team. That’s my ticket out of Pickville, U.S.A. Get on the team, and nobody will mess with me.”
I rolled my eyes. But maybe that was his own way to cope. Sports was never the answer for my sweet, baby brother. It hadn’t been in the past. We weren’t stable long enough for him to finish out a season, or his grades were never too far away from the D list, and he’d never make it past a progress report. This time, he swore it would be different. Maize vowed he’d be new in Newport News. It had a solid ring to it. What could I be?
Just plain ol’ me. There was no point in me trying to even set some kind of New Year’s resolution in August, because I knew how those always panned out anyway. I glanced down at my schedule. Daddy had me signed up for Foods, History, Trig, English, Financial Management, and Theater. Wait … drama class? Was that man crazy?
I shoved my schedule at Maize. “Look at this! He actually signed me up for some drama class!”
A sideways look crossed his face. “He wouldn’t have, would he?” Maize looked down at his paper and fell back on the bed. “Not me, too. With you? Oh, Lordy, I’ll be creamed.”
“What?” I picked up his schedule.
If it wasn’t torture enough, I’d have to endure a dramatic arts class where you would have to do some kind of public speaking or pantomime or actually communicate with another human being, I had to do it with Maize. Sixth period, too? Come on, people. They would say our names back to back, and that wouldn’t fly.
“Daddy has lost it this go around.” I looked over to the calendar that was forcefully stuck on a too-big nail in the wall. Already, I was wishing my days away.
I’d never done that. Even though Daddy was always on some kind of countdown in his life—to some midlife crisis, by the looks of my course schedule—I never tried to focus too much on the passing days. It was hard enough breathing in the one that God had granted me to try thinking about what the next one might hold. But drama class with Maize in a school called The Dream made the obsession with the calendar a little more understandable. Time to move on.
Daddy burst in with a smile on his face as bright as the stars. That had to be why Momma loved him—a tall, proud, handsome man from a small, farming community on the outskirts of Johnston County. He told me once the families didn’t take too much to mixed marriages way back then, but she had to love that smile when he came up on her for the first time. When he smiled at me like that, I forgave him for not having that stable job. I forgave him for not giving me a proper home. I even forgave him for drama class.
The smile didn’t fade. It was stuck on him like the Joker. I knew what that meant. He’d landed him a job, and by the looks of it, it fit him to a T. I knew automatically that it wasn’t no landfill cleaning crew job or some dumpster duty like he’d done for the summer work, scraping by with enough money to keep us all fed each night on a bag of gas-station delights.
Bean was hiding behind Daddy, thin as a rail. He could very well have disappeared; except I could see the edgings of two brown bags poking out behind Daddy’s knees. Not one handheld bag, but two big, brown, grocery bags.
Daddy twisted around, lifting Bean about four inches off the ground, making him almost drop the extra-large brown bags in his hands. I knew the look on Bean’s face meant there was food in those bags. My little toothpick of a brother was always on the lookout for food. That boy could eat a whole refrigerator full, maybe even the spare parts and door handle, too. Bean opened up the bag to collards, fatback, a mess of black-eyed peas, hoecakes wrapped up in wax paper, and a thick slab of half a ham that even seemed to look like the shape of a smile. What had Daddy up and done? Held up the store?
Daddy said, “This was an advance on my first paycheck on Friday.”
We pulled out Styrofoam plates and little spork packets and went to town. We were all silent, sure the story was coming but too busy gulping down the helpings to worry about all that now. We’d have the whole night for Daddy to illuminate us since we weren’t fortunate enough to have cable or satellite systems or those game boxes. All I could focus on was how delicious it was and how on every Friday night, when Daddy brought home the paycheck, he’d been promised a whole ’nother heaping two bags of food.
Daddy’s smile was contagious, and I couldn’t help but give him a mirror-imaged one right back. He said, “It’s good people, Sweet Potato. I’m telling you, good people.”
I asked, “What’s the name of this place?”
I was always interested in the names and makings of restaurants—the romanticized story of how it all began. Names intrigued me, I guess. I wanted to believe somewhere out there in the universe names meant something other than how Momma named us all by the way she put up the picket signs at the beginning of every summer selling season.
Sweet Potatoes
Maize
Beans
Bell Peppers
Bean yelled, “Soul Food!” He made that funny, little snort-laugh I adored.
Bean kept cutting in anytime Daddy would try to tell us the story, but I did learn that the owner of the restaurant, Mrs. Sunshine Patterson, was a godly woman who believed in the spirit of helping others. Since we were in a world of need, she’d held out her hand to Daddy. I loved that name, Sunshine, and I couldn’t wait to see what her face looked like. I imagined her being a white lady with golden-orange hair colored from a box and a plump figure as round as the sun, wearing those flowered-up housedresses and bedroom slippers.
Daddy said that Mr. Patterson was the head cook, with Mrs. Patterson running the front. They had a son who bussed the tables and helped on the line when needed and a niece who was a waitress. So, it was a family-owned-and-operated business. Letting Daddy in was something she said that they had never done, but something in her spirit told her it was right. That let me know that it was religious type place. Maybe seeing Daddy like this every day, feeling the tiny twinge of hope inside me, staying in this room and sleeping on this actual cot … maybe God was coming to visit me.
Some Soul Food was just what we were about to need, and I didn’t even know how bad.