A Good Friend

Last night, I called a good friend of mine who’s old enough to be my mother. She’s 66 years old, Black and Southern. Miss Bee (let’s call her that), is the kind of tough, no-nonsense and fun type of Black woman who reminds me so much of my own Mom.

I was feeling down about life and needed to talk. She was getting ready for bed and wrapping her dreadlocks up in a silk scarf.

“What’s going on baby?” she asked. I could hear a TV in the background.

“Nothing,” I replied. “Just wanted to talk to you so I could feel better.”

I know a lot of people but don’t have many friends. And those that I do have don’t live close by. They are five states over, in different time zones, hemispheres or continents. Years can go by without us seeing one another. Miss Bee though, lives a state away from me and we’re in the same time zone. We get to see one another often and talk on the phone a lot.

Miss Bee told me her life story when I had gone to visit both her and her best friend Miss Linda last year. 

“Honey, I grew up right there in the ghetto,” she said. We were driving past a horrid looking set of buildings at the time. Miss Linda was at the wheel, I was up front with her and Miss Bee was at the back.

“Of course, back then, they didn’t look like that,” she said, as we went past the projects. “Back then, we had flowers in the front and vegetable gardens in the back, and we didn’t lock our doors. In the summertime, we pulled our mattresses out on the porch and slept out there because it was so hot. It was fun.”

Miss Bee grew up in the United States South, when the South was the South. When people got lynched, you had to step off the sidewalk and let white folks past…, when white folks could come into your house, take the food off your table and walk out like they were the kings of the world. She survived this, moved to Europe where she worked with the U.S. Army, married an African American soldier from her home town, and tried to raise two children.

“You know I almost shot my first husband,” she said during that car ride past the ghetto, right after Miss Linda recounted the story of how she shot her second husband but “he only got away with a line on his scalp where the bullet grazed him”.

“What did he do?” I laughed and asked.

“Well, we had just gotten married,” she said. “And I guess that motherf*cker thought he could treat me any way he wanted to. One night, he didn’t come home as usual and I stayed up all night worrying. I called everyone we knew, his family, mine… I called the hospitals…, I was a mess thinking he had gotten in an accident and was laid up in a ditch somewhere. He didn’t come home all night and showed up at eleven o’clock the next night!”

Miss Linda shook her head and smiled though she knew the story already.

“No he didn’t,” I said. “Eleven o’clock?”

“And when I asked him where he’d been, he threw a punch at me,” she continued.

“What??” 

“But I ducked,” she continued. “Then I ran into the bathroom and locked myself in.”

“And what did he do?” I asked.

“He went to bed,” Miss Bee replied. “And I waited for hours in that little bathroom remembering all that my mother had taught me in life; how I shouldn’t let a man treat me bad. So, when I was sure he was snoring, I snuck out that bathroom and went and got his gun.”

I gasped.

“Then I got on the bed, put that gun on his head and woke him up,” She continued. “And I told that motherf*cker he had made the biggest mistake in his life, throwing that punch at me. I made him get up, get in the car and drive me home to my Mama’s house.”

And the whole time, she was pointing that gun at him.

“Don’t you ever let a man think he can treat you anyhow honey,” Miss Bee told me.