The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat

Chapter 6





Erma Mae cried on Barbara Jean’s shoulder as a crowd of friends surrounded them murmuring words of sympathy and support. Barbara

Jean felt a hand stroke her back and she turned her head to see Carmel Handy standing behind her, shrunken and bony in her best

Sunday dress. Barbara Jean knew what the first words out of Miss Carmel’s mouth would be and she held her breath, bracing herself

to hear them. Miss Carmel didn’t disappoint. In her high-pitched, feathery voice she said, “Sweetheart, did you know you were

born on my davenport?”

Barbara Jean’s mother, Loretta Perdue, was drunk when she gave birth on the living room sofa of Miss Carmel, a woman she had

never met. Her friends had thrown her a baby shower that day at Forrest Payne’s Pink Slipper Gentlemen’s Club, where she worked

as a dancer. She often told Barbara Jean how she only drank whiskey sours when she was expecting because everyone knew that

drinking beer during pregnancy would make your baby nappy-headed. “See, honey,” she would say, “your mama was always lookin’

out for you.”

Loretta had plans to give her daughter, and herself, a leg up in life. After reading the news of Clarice’s birth in the

newspaper, and seeing how people went on about it, she decided that her child would be the second black baby born at University

Hospital. Clarice’s mother was just the wife of a shady lawyer and no better than she was, Loretta figured. Now that the color

barrier had been broken, she would just show up at the hospital when the first pain hit and take her rightful place among a higher

class of folk. Like most of Loretta’s schemes, it didn’t work out that way.

Things went wrong for Barbara Jean’s mother when the man she had arranged to see that evening sprung a surprise on her. She’d

told him five months earlier that he was going to be a father, and he had seemed to be pleased about it. Or rather, he was pleased

Loretta was not going to tell his wife. She was content merely to accept a small monthly payment in exchange for her discretion.

This same arrangement also suited each of the three other men Loretta had informed that they were the father of her unborn child.

Loretta had set up a meeting with Daddy no. 4 (going by the order in which she had told them about her pregnancy) at a quiet

roadside diner in Leaning Tree after the baby shower. At the diner, she was going to remind him of just how fair she was being and

then, when she had him feeling appropriately grateful to her for being such a good sport, she would casually mention just how much

easier a new Chevrolet would make life for her and his child. If she worked it right, by sunset she would have a new car and he

would travel back to his wife and family in Louisville thanking God that he had knocked up such a reasonable woman.

She seated herself at a booth and drank coffee to come down from her whiskey sour buzz and waited for Daddy no. 4 to join her.

When he stepped through the door with Daddy no. 2 right behind him, she knew that the jig was up.

As the men approached, Loretta, always quick on her feet when cornered, made one last desperate move to hold her plan together by

playing one daddy against the other. She said, “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’ve tried so many times to tell him that I love you and

it’s all over with him, but I was just too scared. He’s so mean; I didn’t know what he might do to me and our baby.” She said

it to both of them, hoping each would assume she was talking to him alone and that she could slip out of the diner while they

fought over her. Later, she could separately thank both the conquering hero and the valiant loser for defending her honor,

assuring each that she loved only him. With luck, after the dust settled, her plans could go forward unchanged.

Loretta was a stunning beauty, and she knew it. She thought it was only logical that men should fight over her, and they often

did. When she got sick with the cirrhosis that killed her at thirty-five, the hardest thing for her—harder than dying, Barbara

Jean thought—was saying goodbye to her beauty. Loretta died hard and she died ugly. Liver disease whittled away her cute, round

face and bountiful figure to nothing—a mean turn of fate for a woman who, as one of her men described her, “looked like she was

made out of basketballs and chocolate pudding.”

Daddies no. 2 and no. 4 presented a united front in the diner, with Daddy no. 4 doing most of the talking. He told her she’d

never get another dime from either of them, and he carried on as if he were some sort of genius detective for single-handedly

figuring out her plot. The truth, blurted out by Daddy no. 2, was that Loretta had been the victim of her customary bad luck. The

fathers had ended up seated next to each other at Forrest Payne’s joint, and after they had sucked down enough of Forrest’s

watered-down liquor to loosen their tongues, they started bragging about their women. It didn’t take them long to realize that

they were each bragging about the same one.

Forrest Payne had pretensions of running a gentlemen’s club instead of a country strip joint and whorehouse, so he greeted every

customer at the door dressed up in his signature canary-yellow tuxedo. Then he escorted them to their seats with all the flourish

of a French maitre d’. Since he didn’t trust anyone else to handle the door and the cover charge money, Loretta knew it had to

have been Forrest himself who had seated the daddies next to each other. This, in spite of the fact that she had left explicit

instructions that none of her baby’s fathers should be placed within ten feet of each other. For the rest of her short life,

Loretta blamed Forrest Payne for ruining her.

Daddy no. 4 leaned across the table and wagged his finger at Loretta’s nose. He said, “I was too smart for you, li’l girl. You

been outplayed at your own game.”

Loretta stared at Daddy no. 4, who had once been her favorite, and wondered what it was she had ever seen in him, with his wide,

lopsided mouth and his strange, Egyptian-looking eyes. Then she thought about the ring he had bought for her, a decent-sized ruby

with tiny azure sapphires arranged around it in a daisy pattern, and she recalled why she had put up with him. She slid her hands

from the table so he wouldn’t see the ring and get it in his head to demand its return. When she tried to pawn it a year later,

she would find out the stones were glass.

Daddy no. 2 surprised Loretta by bursting into tears. He buried his face in his hands and wailed as if he’d been stuck with a

sharp stick, blubbering on about his lost son. Daddy no. 4 put his arm around his new friend and then put both of their feelings

about Loretta into words. He leaned toward her and launched into some very loud and creative name-calling. The other customers in

the diner looked their way, wondering what the commotion was about.

Loretta was a firm believer that, if a woman was smart, she acted like a lady by the light of day no matter what she did after

sunset. This situation, one daddy crying his eyes out and the other loudly exploring the limits of his vocabulary, was just the

kind of thing that got you ostracized by decent folks—the kind of people she planned to be spending her time with as soon as she

’d had her baby in University Hospital and elevated her status. Loretta hurried away from the booth and, for the benefit of

anyone who might have been listening, said, “I can see that you two do not intend to behave like gentlemen. I shall not stay and

risk losing my poise due to your crass behavior.” What she said to herself was “F*ck this. I still got Daddy no. 1 and Daddy no.

3.”

She headed back toward Forrest Payne’s place to cuss him out, and was halfway there when her water broke. She made her way to the

best-kept house on the block, thinking that its owners would be likely to have a telephone—not everyone did in 1950. Mrs. Carmel

Handy, a schoolteacher Loretta would have known if she hadn’t left school in the sixth grade, owned the well-landscaped brick

bungalow she chose to stop at. Miss Carmel answered the insistent knocking at her door and found herself confronted with a very

attractive, massively pregnant young woman supporting herself against the doorjamb.

Between groans of discomfort, the girl said, “Hi, I’m Mrs. Loretta Perdue, and I was admiring your front yard and thinking that

whoever lived here must be a person of class and would surely have a telephone. I myself have a telephone, but I’m a ways from

home and I’m not feeling well. So, if you don’t mind, I need you to call my friend, Mr. Forrest Payne, at his place of business

and tell him to come get me and drive me to University Hospital where I plan to have my baby like folks of substance. It’s the

least Forrest could do since my situation is entirely his fault.”

Because she had been in the middle of pressing her hair and she didn’t want to stand there with her door open for any passersby

to see her with her head half done, Carmel Handy permitted Loretta to enter her home. Careful not to burn Loretta with the still-

smoking straightening comb, she helped her into the house. In her foyer, Miss Carmel listened politely as Loretta recited Forrest

Payne’s telephone number, all the while thinking how funny it was that this girl was trying so hard to make Forrest sound like

anything but the pimp everyone in Plainview knew he was.

Miss Carmel led Loretta to her living room sofa to rest while she made the phone call. But instead of calling Forrest Payne—she

wasn’t about to have her neighbors see that man coming and going from her house, thank you very much—she called a nurse who

lived down the block.

The nurse brought Barbara Jean into the world right there on the sofa while Carmel Handy made the first of a dozen phone calls she

would make that day to tell her friends what had happened in her home and to extol the benefits of plasticizing your furniture.

That first call began “Some girl just popped out another of Forrest Payne’s bastards right in my front room,” starting a rumor

that would follow Barbara Jean for the rest of her life.

The baby was named Barbara Jean—Barbara for Daddy no. 1’s mother and Jean for Daddy no. 3’s.

When Loretta’s child was first handed to her, she took note of the infant’s lopsided, half-smiling mouth and the almond-shaped

eyes, already fully open, that were tilted up at the corners like an Egyptian’s. Loretta recognized that face instantly and said

to herself, “Ain’t this some shit. It was No. 4 all along.” Then she turned to Mrs. Handy and said, “Got any whiskey?”

On a September morning fourteen years later, Miss Carmel read Barbara Jean’s name aloud from the roster in her ninth grade

English class. After placing her clipboard down on her desk, Miss Carmel walked over to Barbara Jean and, for the first time,

uttered the words that would begin most of their encounters for the next four decades. “Girl, did you know you were born on my

davenport?”

Once Barbara Jean had married Lester and his business had taken off, most of the town lined up to kiss her ass in order to get on

Lester’s good side. But Carmel Handy continued to greet her that same way. Barbara Jean supposed it spoke well of Miss Carmel’s

character that the wealth she came into didn’t change her old teacher’s behavior toward her one bit. But she still hated her for

it. It shamed her to admit it, but Barbara Jean felt relieved when, in her eighties, Miss Carmel developed the habit of telling

each black woman around Barbara Jean’s age who crossed her path that she was born on her sofa. Eventually, the tale of the baby

born in her front room became so bound up with Miss Carmel’s short-circuiting brain that nearly everyone forgot that the story

was rooted in fact or had anything to do with Barbara Jean.

Carmel Handy’s block was one of the first to be demolished when housing developers and the university bought up most of Leaning

Tree in the 1980s and ’90s. On the day they bulldozed that little brick bungalow, Barbara Jean drove over to Miss Carmel’s

street and drank a champagne toast in the front seat of her new Mercedes.

As she stood in the All-You-Can-Eat at the center of an expanding circle of grief over Big Earl’s passing, Barbara Jean listened

to Carmel Handy reminding her, yet again, of her low origins. Barbara Jean thought then of the taste of the champagne she sipped

that day in her car as she watched the workmen scratch Miss Carmel’s home out of existence. That delicious memory helped her not

to scream.