Miss Black America by Veronica Chambers

Author:Veronica Chambers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307419132
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2009-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

By dinnertime, I was too hungry to continue my sleep-in. I went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and changed out of my pajamas into what Mommy called home clothes. Home clothes were school clothes that were too ratty to wear out. Every September, Mommy went through my closet and pulled out a few things that no longer made the grade: a sweater whose pills defied repair, pants so worn that the butt was shiny. Then she’d fold them neatly and put them in the bottom drawer of my white wood dresser. “Home clothes!” she’d say cheerily, like we’d just discovered something unexpected, like a dollar in the pocket of a coat you haven’t worn since winter or an extra slice of pie, hidden at the back of the fridge.

I leaned against the dresser for a moment, realizing for the first time that in real life a person’s gifts do not disappear when they do. In “Cinderella,” at midnight, everything goes—the fairy god-mother, the dress, the horses, the carriage. But when Mommy left, every material thing that I associated with her stayed behind—her records, her straightening comb, most of her clothes, this dresser. The dresser was white with gold ribbons painted on each drawer. There was a big mirror with wavy edges and more gold ribbons painted as a kind of trim.

Mommy paid down for nearly two years to buy me that dresser on layaway at Levine’s Furniture on Flatbush. The month before she left, she’d taken me there on a Saturday. Two buses and a train from the Bronx. She wanted me to see the matching canopy bed she’d been paying down on. After she left, I wondered what happened to my bed and how much money Mommy had already put down. But I did not want to anger my father by asking. Maybe a little part of me thought that when Mommy came home, she would want to get the bed herself.

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