Ghost on Black Mountain by Ann Hite

Author:Ann Hite
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2011-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

Part Four

Rose Gardner

Thirty-four

My first memory was of Mama making a deal with one of our neighbors to sell me for a thousand dollars. The poor woman had lost her husband in the Great War with Germany, and she was lonely in an awful sad way. I was three years old but smart for my age. The widow taught me to cook, read, and cuddled me on her lap. When the time came for Mama to turn me over and take the money, she backed out. So, somewhere inside her mixed-up mind, she truly loved her only child, me. But all the same, I worried that the widow had been my only decent chance in life and one day Mama would abandon me for good. I never complained about fending for myself and made good use of the time. At five I had read the Bible through twice and found a wonderful book called Tom Sawyer that I swiped from a bookstore next to the shop where Mama worked. Often people looked at me with pity in their eyes: Poor Rose, she has the worst kind of mama. But I loved her all the same with my whole heart, the kind of love that saw no wrongs. I taught Mama to read better, did her nails, and cooked her supper, hoping these things would keep me in her favor.

Mama was a beautician who ran the numbers and conjured hoodoo spells on the side. By the time I was fourteen, she had taught me everything I needed to know about men. Useful stuff like how to get jewelry, trips, and good meals. How to make them smile when they wanted to beat me instead. I was born in Louisiana, right in the heart of hoodoo and voodoo country, New Orleans. But Mama pulled up our roots, and I couldn’t remember a thing about the city. We moved around the South, living in every state below the Mason-Dixon Line. Mama couldn’t abide Daddy and pretended he never existed. Sometimes she made out that my birth was no different from Mother Mary’s divine conception. That was my mama just full of herself. So I never had a steady male figure in my childhood. Mama looked just like Mary Pickford, and this got her a lot of attention, but the kind of men Mama picked was here today and gone tomorrow. She wore her welcome out with every relative we had and some who weren’t even kin.

When I was seventeen, we landed on our feet in Atlanta, but not before I had attended ten different high schools and gave up altogether. Mama said I was smarter than any of the kids I was going to school with. She was right, but still I wanted to go. She had found work in a decent beauty shop right close to Oakland Cemetery. The year was 1938 and times were hard. The Depression wouldn’t go away even with President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Women—even the well-to-do ones—weren’t having their hair done as often.

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