The Mighty Miss Malone

By late that afternoon, Father is not home yet, and Deza begins to worry. Mrs. Henderson comes by to tell Mother that Mr. Henderson expected to fish only until noon, and that they should go to where he usually parks to check on them. Worried now, Mother leaves with Mrs. Henderson, and Deza proceeds to sit and worry for an hour. Mother stops by in Mr. Rhymes’ car to check in, then leaves for the lake. She returns at 8 pm, and Deza can see Mother was crying. Mother thinks the men got lost; she and Mrs. Henderson found Mr. Henderson’s truck but no sign of the men. Deza sleeps with Mother that night. Sometime overnight Deza wakes because a neighbor, Mrs. Kenworthy, and Mr. Rhymes are back to collect Mother to go to the hospital. Mother is wailing, and Mrs. Kenworthy says, “Peg, they don’t know for sure” (96). Deza tries to go to Jimmie, but he has a pillow “tight over his head” (97).

Mother arrives back home the next morning and tells Deza and Jimmie that authorities found the bodies of the two men who accompanied Father and Mr. Henderson. Jimmie insists that Father is still alive. A week goes by, and Deza feels time pass in an unreal, otherworldly way. Mrs. Henderson comes each day to sit with Deza, Jimmie, and Mother.

On the seventh day, Father suddenly arrives home unannounced, but Deza thinks it is not Father at first—just some homeless man whom Mother only thinks is Father. The man is thin, ragged, and injured with stitches in his face and a swollen lip. He can barely talk, and when he does, he has a lisp from his mouth injury. His face is bruised, and his hair messy and tangled. Father must tell Mrs. Henderson that Mr. Henderson “didn’t make it” (108). She leaves in grief, and Mother sends Jimmie to take her home. Deza finally sees that it is Father.

Deza sits and reads to Father in the coming days as Mother must go to work and Jimmie goes to help at Dr. Bracy’s. She kisses Father three times in a row every day, the way her parents do when she has a fever. Finally Father’s fever breaks, and he tries to talk more and joke. Deza lisps like he does when they talk, then explains she is doing it out of respect and devotion like the royal attendants of the lisping King of Spain do for him in a story she read, so that his lisp will not seem so pronounced. One night at dinner, Father shows up in the dining room, having gotten himself out of bed and down the steps. He says he wants to tell them all the story of what happened on the lake, but he cannot get further than, “It went wrong right away but we couldn’t do anything about it, how can you thay who did what wrong?” (111). Mother gets him back to bed as Jimmie tells Deza that it is like Father has lockjaw: “[T]here’s still something inside that can come back and kill [him]” (112).

As the summer progresses, Jimmie and Deza alternate days tending to Father. One morning Deza stops by Father’s room before leaving for the library with Clarice. She hears Father telling Jimmie the story of what happened on the lake. A fog bank covered the men’s boat before they could out row it, and they discovered the anchor had broken off the chain. They had drifted into a shipping lane without knowing it. A massive freighter’s wake flipped the boat violently, knocking out Father’s teeth and cutting his face. He managed to hold onto the boat until the ship rescued him; he ended up in a Chicago hospital until he became conscious and returned to Gary. The men who went fishing with him, though, were dead.

Over Chow Chat, Father convinces Deza of the importance of the upcoming boxing match between Max Schmeling and Joe Louis: “Sad to say, the boxing ring is one of the few places in America where your skin color doesn’t play a huge role” (121). Father says Hitler thinks that “no black man can ever beat a white man” (121), and that it will be an important piece of history to prove him wrong. Deza better understands the importance of the fight but cares even more that Father is well enough to instruct her on a topic in his “own strong voice” (122) again.

The Malones and Clarice go to Mr. Bobbin’s barber shop to listen to the fight’s live broadcast on the radio. Joe Louis loses. No one in the barbershop wants to talk or look at one another, and Deza sees many folks crying and sitting on curbs on the walk home. Father insists on picking her up and carrying her like a little girl on his hip when they encounter some broken glass on the sidewalk; Deza understands that Father is holding her to comfort himself. Clarice and Jimmie hold hands until she leaves them for her home. Deza sees “six or seven of Clarice’s brothers sitting on the porch in a little ball crying” (124).

That night Deza hears a lengthy conversation between her parents in their bedroom. They never fight, so their disagreement is scary. Father wants to go to Flint for work because he cannot find a job in Gary. He says he will send for Mother, Jimmie, and Deza when he finds work. Mother tries for a long time to talk him out of it, saying that he is upset over the fight and still grieving for his friends, so he should not make such a weighty decision just then. Father implores Mother to understand his guilt and obligation as a father; he feels awful that they cannot afford a doctor and good nutrition to deal with Jimmie’s lack of growth, nor can they afford to fix Deza’s bad teeth. Deza hears Father mention that he cannot stand the smell of rot coming from Deza’s cavity-stricken teeth. To him, this connects to his worry about Deza growing up in poverty: “If I come home and see that the spark that makes Deza so precious is gone, I’ll hate myself” (129).

Mother cannot talk Father out of leaving. He goes to Jimmie’s room to explain and say goodbye. Jimmie begs him to stay and offers to get a job to help out, but he cannot change Father’s decision. Father next comes to Deza’s room to say goodbye, but she is so mortified and upset that she pretends to be asleep even when he tries to wake her. He kisses the pillow she keeps over her head, then leaves. Deza forces her jaw closed so hard that some of her back teeth “crunched and crackled” (134); there is blood on her pillowcase from her teeth.

A month goes by without any word from Father. Mother’s employers, the Carsdales, decide to go to Europe, so Mother is out of a job. She decides that she, Deza, and Jimmie will go to Flint and find Father. Deza is very sad to leave Clarice and her plans for tutoring by Mrs. Needham, and mopes in bed for four days. Finally Clarice comes to take Deza to the library; her mood improves. Mother brings home an important letter from Mrs. Carsdale that is to serve as a reference for getting a new job in Flint with a friend of Mrs. Carsdale’s. Mother keeps it in their “file cabinet,” under a sofa cushion. Deza is immediately suspicious that Mrs. Carsdale sealed the letter. When Mother leaves to visit Mrs. Henderson, Jimmie carefully steams open the envelope.

Deza reads the letter; her suspicions are correct. Mrs. Carsdale discusses the annoyances of the Depression, then dismisses Mother as only “competent” and mentions her illness that took a year from which to recover. She refers to Black workers as “those people,” claims “I’ve found that one is a carbon copy of the next” (144), and leaves her friend with the advice, “Hire her at your own peril” (144). Jimmie and Deza attempt to save the day. Jimmie steals paper and ink from the Carsdales when he goes to help Mother close up their home for their trip to Europe. Deza copies Mrs. Carsdale’s penmanship in an entirely new letter that praises Mother’s work ethic and family members. They place the letter in the “file cabinet.”

Mother tells Deza they do not need to move anything but clothing and personal belongings to Flint, as they rented all their furniture along with the house; they will even leave behind the wardrobe on which they marked Jimmie’s and Deza’s heights growing up. Jimmie goes with Deza to say goodbye to Mrs. Needham, but she is not at home. Next they go to say goodbye to Clarice, but Mrs. Johnson reminds Deza that Clarice left for Nashville with her father and brothers to take some work with an uncle. Deza cries so hard she cannot even write a note to Clarice with the crayons Mrs. Johnson brings, so Jimmie draws a picture for her to leave instead. It shows Deza and Clarice making their special best friends sign and crying, and Jimmie draws a box around Deza’s actual tears that fell onto the paper. He labels those “DEZA STEERS.”

With three days left on their lease, Mother is outraged when the landlord suddenly demands they leave by noon that day. She and Jimmie go to rearrange their ride plans with Mr. Rhymes, leaving Deza to watch over their packed boxes. Noon comes and the landlord shows up to clean, kicking her and their belongings out of the house. Next the new tenants arrive. Deza is kind to the daughter of the new tenants, telling her about marbles under the porch and how the screen door slams.

Mother finally returns with no ride for them; Mr. Rhymes lost his car to the bank. She sent Jimmie to the post office to arrange for their mail to go by general delivery to a Flint post office. Suddenly Jimmie arrives in a shiny black car with Marvelous Marvin, a known “numbers man” who has offered the home of his girlfriend to the Malones for a week. Mother says that Marvin “steals poor people’s pennies with a gambling scheme,” but Jimmie says Marvin’s schemes “always pay off” (164). Mother is upset but out of options, so she and Deza get in the backseat of the car. Marvin and Jimmie put their boxes in the trunk. Deza is amazed at the interior and the radio. They enjoy the Burma-Shave advertisements on the highway to Chicago before pulling up to a nice house.

Marvin’s girlfriend is kind to Jimmie but tells Deza not to snoop in her sister’s things while she is out of town; Mother says they will be out as soon as possible. In the sister’s bedroom, Deza is amazed by the perfume atomizers and furnishings. Jimmie comes in, happy with the arrangements, but Mother slaps him and lectures him about keeping Marvin’s company. She is worried and upset that Jimmie will now be indebted to Marvin. Jimmie cries and leaves the room, upset: “You don’t give me credit for nothing. Nothing!” (173).

In the backyard, Deza and Jimmie meet Miss Carter and her daughter Epiphany. Miss Carter works for Marvin’s girlfriend but wants to go to Detroit. She would like a ride there if Jimmie and Deza get one, but Jimmie and Deza hear what Miss Carter says about “riding the rails” from one of Chicago’s “million boxcars” and wonder if they can convince Mother to get to Flint that way.

To their surprise, Mother wants to know from Miss Carter how to ride the rails. Miss Carter looks at their packed boxes and tells them to wrap only what they absolutely need in three blankets, one for each of them to carry. They plan to leave behind the breakable things like dishes along with Father’s boots and clothes. That’s when Deza discovers that she accidentally left her box with her graded essays and the new clothes from Mrs. Needham behind in Gary. She is devastated.

The stuffy boxcar smells terrible, but conditions improve once the train starts moving and the air circulates. On the eight-hour trip to Detroit, Miss Carter tells Mother to be careful once they are traveling alone and staying in “camp” in Flint, to lie and say her husband is near, and that there is safety in numbers. They get off the boxcar in Detroit, and Miss Carter asks a homeless man which trains are going to Flint. Then she tells the Malones, “Get right into the shantytown. You’ll need somewhere to rest at least one night” (182).

Once in Flint, a kind homeless man tells them it is a half hour’s walk to Flint but that they will be welcome to stay in the camp, which is just through some trees adjacent to the railyard: “A train just left going west, should be plenty of huts opened up. Ask for Stew […] You just give what you can, food, work, anything. Folks find a way” (183). They thank the kind man. Mother says it will be for just one night, as she plans to find Father’s mother the next day. Jimmie is upbeat and reminds Mother and Deza that they are a family on a trip to a place called Wonderful as he points to the glow through the trees.