God Don’t Like Ugly Read Online Free Page A

twitching his eyes and screwing up his lips. I got even more nervous when he started tapping his foot. “Well, the next time she go to the store, tell her to carry her feet with her.” Then he left, slamming the screen door so hard the footstool fell over. I turned around just in time to see Mama’s feet sticking out from behind the couch before she leaped up and started brushing off her sleeveless gray-cotton dress.
    Mama made some baloney sandwiches, we packed our clothes that night, and left behind our broken-down furniture and that lumpy mattress. We spent the next few days eating baloney sandwiches and sleeping on a couch in the house of a lady from our church. We lived like that for three weeks, roaming from one church member’s house to another until we ran out of people willing to put us up. I felt more adrift than ever. Mama and I got on our knees and prayed harder than we usually did. By the end of the month we had found a place to live. “God done come through again,” Mama sobbed. We moved into a dank room in a run-down boardinghouse in one of Miami’s worst neighborhoods. The windows had plastic curtains you could see through, and there was a sink in a corner with a faucet that never stopped dripping. There was nothing else in the room. It reminded me of a prison cell I’d seen in a movie on television at one of the white women’s houses. Mama got us a hot plate, a pan, and a blanket from a secondhand store. We couldn’t buy any food that needed to be refrigerated. When we did, we had to eat it all up the same day.
    We ate our best meals behind the backs of the white women Mama worked for. One afternoon, peeping out of one of those women’s kitchen windows and talking with her mouth full, Mama told me, “Annette, hurry and finish that filet mignon steak before old lady Brooks come home! Wipe that grease off your mouth! Wrap up a few chunks of that good meat and slip ’em into our shoppin’ bag! Grab a loaf of French bread from the pantry! Grab them chicken wings yonder!” Whatever I managed to hide in our shopping bag, I usually ate behind Mama’s back. Every time I did that, she thumped the side of my head with her fingers and yelled at me all the way home. “You greedy little pig! For bein’ so hardheaded , God’s goin’ to chastise you and make you spend your life trapped in a body big as a moose.” Because of my hard head, our meals at the boardinghouse were usually baloney and stale bread, grits, some greasy meat, and greens.
    The boardinghouse had just one bathroom for the two floors of tenants. It was always either occupied, too filthy and smelly (people would use the toilet and not flush it), or out of order. We used an empty lard bucket that I had to empty every morning for a toilet. We heated water in the pan on the hot plate and bathed in the sink in the corner.
    “Mama, we poor?” I asked, several weeks after we’d left the house we shared with Daddy.
    “Not in the eyes of the Lord,” Mama replied.
    We were walking home after cleaning and cooking for Mrs. Jacobs, an unpredictable old woman with hair on her chin and breath as foul as cow dung. Of all the white women Mama worked for, the Jacobs woman was the only one I disliked because we never knew what to expect from her. Some days she was nice and would send us home early with extra pay and leftover food. When she was in a real good mood, she’d have her chauffeur ride us home. When she was not in a good mood, usually when she was mad at her husband or one of her children, she treated us like trash. She would throw away good food rather than give it to us, but we’d always fish it out when she wasn’t looking. She suffered with severe flatulence and would pass gas right in front of us and not say excuse me. As soon as she entered a room, Mama stopped whatever she was doing and opened a window. One particular day, right after her husband had slapped her, she marched into the kitchen where Mama was sitting at the table