I asked her if she seen all of those birds in the jungle, and she said she did. I said, “Tootie, you look bad. What happened to you?” She said a big mamba snake, nine feet long, went crazy and bit five Africans and some goats. Tootie cut off its tail with a hoe, but that only made it mad and it chased after her and bit her too, over there on the Dark Continent. Her life and health was bad ever since. Still she gave me hell because of what I eat, and I told her that if the Lord wanted to take me, I was ready to go. I would go up to heaven and see Chunky again and Wilbur, my second husband. Since Tootie was a nun, I asked her who I was supposed to be married to—Chunky, my first man, or Wilbur? Tootie told me she didn’t believe in God. I said, “Tootie, you are a nun, and when you was little and had your headaches, the angels talked to you and Jesus talked to you,” and she just laughed a bitter laugh. She told me that being a nun was no different than if she had stayed in Aurora and lived a normal life with a man. She said there wasn’t nothing to it and for sure there was no God. It was all just make-believe. But Tootie took Monk to the AA. She had a power over people and could make them well without giving them shots or medicine, she believed in herself so. Every day for ninety days she drove Monk to the AA, sometimes two and three times a day. In this she was a hypocrite, because she didn’t have any more belief in God, but she could still lay it out pretty good, and for Monk this was the cure, not the AA. She even got him to quit smoking.

One night Tootie came by in her car and caught me eating fried pork rinds and peanut brittle. It made me guilty but I told her, “Tootie, you can talk to me until you’re blue in the face; I ain’t going to change. I’m too old for it. A person has to eat.”