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Blues & liquor
Bertha Jones had a nigga-stroke,
as she called it, a stroke brought on by a
series of typical yet unfortunate events
associated with life in the ghetto:
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Her abusive husband of 43
years died suddenly and uninsured.
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The same week as her
husband’s death she went to the casino and
won $10,000. She bought an overpriced
casket for $5,000, the rest she placed in
her bottom jewelry box drawer with her
teeth. Two days later the money was
stolen, along with her teeth, by one of her
children who ventured with dirty fingernails
into her room for a jar of TCB grease.
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Her youngest daughter dropped
dirty and was sentenced 3 years for a
violation of her parole.
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Wells Fargo scammed her in a
reverse-mortgage-gentrification scheme and
threatened to repossess her home.
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Her garage was burglarized.
The thieves walked away with her gas bar-be-que
grill, her granddaughter’s pink 10-speed and
the hubcaps off her Cadillac Sedan Deville.
(You could not convince her that it wasn’t
Wells Fargo).
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Her cable got turned off.
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She had the gout in her right
foot.
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and Type II Diabetes.
Needless to say, she found every
day pleasure in a variety of activities that
amused and busied her. These included gumming
rag bologna with crackers, scratching lottery
tickets and watching Judge Mathis. She used to
watch Judge Mablean until she decided that Judge
Mablean was not a real judge by the
low-class manner in which she delivered her
rulings. Except for the constant streaming in
of six her children asking for money or teat and
the doorbell ring of neighborhood people who
remembered the heaviness of her pocketbook
before the crack epidemic, Bertha Jones existed
without the day to day companionship of somebody
she felt who loved her. Her ill uncle briefly
came to visit, live, and die. The two spent
three weeks talking and remembering. She’d
realized that she shared more about herself in
three weeks than while married. Her
older-women-friends were dying, one murdered by
a crackhead errand boy, the others sold their
homes and moved back down south to escape the
chaos that
progressive-city-great-migration-living had
become. Her parents passed away back-to-back
over thirty years ago and her one clean
bourgeois child spent every phone conversation
trying to convince her mother of the Westside of
Chicago’s ills and asking why don’t you want
to move back down south to Mississippi?
“What the hell I look like living
in a small town with small minded people?” was
her response. “If I wanted motherfuckas to know
when I shit, I would go out to the front porch
and tell them. In this city! Ain’t nothing
down there for me but up the road and down the
road, to the mailbox and back up the hill!”
Bertha Jones didn’t mind the
thought of small town life as much as she
despised the memory of living a squared red dirt
and expectation driven existence as the child of
schoolteachers in Jim Crow Mississippi. Every
memory to her was like a ruler hand slap.
Chicago happened on a whim . She’d come up for
a wedding in ‘52 and never went back. In ‘53
her brother drug her out of Bee’s Tavern for
drunkenness, ill-talking, and shit-starting the
way he had back in Mississippi when she, with
red wavy hair and
bright-bright-damn-near-white-skin, snuck to
backwoods jook joints for blues and liquor
against the feeling of being good and being a
girl.
Now, her eldest daughter offered
the first floor servants room in her mansion.
This room, decorated with antique oak let out
through French doors to a deck and six acres of
green grass and pecans the ground ate up. The
historic brick home was a confederacy remnant
and had its very own brochure. Needless to say,
this daughter, would not let Bertha Jones smoke
her Pall Mall’s inside of her home and Bertha
felt that it was such a chore to not smoke in
bed while half sleep with the ashtray right
there. Shidddd! The stroke had left her left
side stiff and low not her mouth. She hobbled
throughout her own house, gripping various
pieces of furniture for balance just to go to
the bathroom. She felt that the invitation was
a nasty attempt to curb her smoking, which she
would not have.
So she stayed in Chicago,
upholding the sancity of this block on the tip
of her cane like the top-hatted man on a bottle
of Johnny Walker Red. Nothing was as desirable
for her as a cigarette and a glass of Canadian
Club or V.O with Coke. It had been years since
she drank, since her granddaughter balanced a
V.O gallon on her scarred knee and poured liquor
into a glass until grandmama said when. The
cart-bar in her dining room had collected
layered dust and sticky screw on caps over time
as less people came by to socialize and more
came by to beg for a cigarette and pilfer. She
had grown damn near evil. Neighborhood people
who saw her children in and out of Madge’s
Tavern or Texas Lady suspected that her ways had
slowly imploded each child at a time. Starting
with the oldest boy on down to the youngest
girl, who police found by the curb picking up
abandoned pieces of tin foil.
Inside the house with the
air-conditioner mixing with cigarette smoke, she
felt sewn up. Every so often a car with bass in
the trunk would pass by and rattle her windows.
A mouse would bore a hole through the Wonder
bread and grateful, she would ask somebody to go
to the Bill’s corner-store and feel satisfied
when they lingered for conversation, change,
cool air or a can of Pepsi. Slow-walking and
shuffling she scooted her swollen pink feet over
the berber carpet, three shades darker from
cigarette soot, and made her way to the t.v.
where dvd’s appeared and disappeared. It was
where she kept her cassette tapes. Nothing
new. Old blues songs and remixed versions that
somebody, trying to be nice would bring by to
impress her. She would shell out a twenty and
the visitor, leaving to go get change would
never come back.
She bundled the black Casio
cassette player under her right arm while
gripping the couch, then the chair, the wall
paneled over with fake rosewood and stopped half
way to the front-door. Suddenly, she plopped
down in an upholstered swivel chair, brushing up
against bleached lace curtains and looked for an
electrical socket. Next to the front door, the
tape sang:
When you meet a friend, you smile
because you’re glad
When a friend deceives you, it
makes you feel so bad
Gripping the wall, she made her
way towards the back of the house, where the
mini-bar sat next to a china cabinet with
depression era glass plates and saucers. She
wiped the inside of a “Sweet Home Chicago” glass
mug with the bottom of her floral muu-muu and
walked out to the porch with phone in dress
pocket just in case it rang and somebody wanted
to come over for a drink with her, for a drink
to commiserate. It had been so long.
When you meet a friend, you smile
because you’re glad
When a friend deceives you, it
makes you feel so bad
When you lose your loved one, it
makes you feel so blue
And then you’ve got a heartache,
and there ain’t nothing you can do
There ain’t nothing you can do, I
said there ain’t nothing you can do.
On the porch she waved and drank,
Hey Mizz Jones and drank.
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