Mrs. Wiggins

Book 1: Lexington, Alabama Novel

by Mary Monroe

Genres: African American Historical; African American Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Reminiscent of her captivating, scandalous Mama Ruby series, New York Times bestselling author Mary Monroe crafts a story set in the Deep South during the Depression, in this tale of a woman determined to have a respectable life—no matter what it costs to keep it …
The daughter of a prostitute mother and an alcoholic father, Maggie Franklin knew her only way out was to marry someone upstanding and church-going. Someone like Hubert Wiggins, the most eligible man in Lexington, Alabama—and
the son of its most revered preacher. Proper and prosperous, Hubert is glad to finally have a wife, even one with Maggie’s background. For Hubert has a secret he desperately needs to stay hidden. And Maggie’s unexpected charm, elegance,
and religious devotion makes her the perfect partner in lies …
Their surprising union makes the Wiggins’ the town’s most envied couple— complete with a son, Claude, whom Maggie idolizes. Until he falls in love with the worst possible fiancée. Terrified, Maggie won’t let Daisy destroy her son. And
when her employer’s brother sexually harasses her, Maggie knows something needs to be done about him as well. In fact, she realizes there are an awful lot of sinning “disruptive” people who should be eliminated from her perfect world …
But the more Maggie tries to take control, the more obstacles are thrown in her way. And when it seems like the one person she always expected to be there is starting to drift away, Maggie will play one final, merciless game to secure what
she’s fought so hard to earn …

Release date: March 30, 2021

Publisher: Dafina

Print pages: 306

Sample

Friday, November 17, 1939

I SAT STOCK-STILL AS THE DOCTOR AT THE COLORED CLINIC TOLD ME they had pronounced my twenty-one-year-old son Claude dead. Dr. Underwood looked young enough to be my son. I would have preferred somebody older with a lot more experience, but this “youngster” was the only doctor on duty that night. In a gentle tone, he told me, “I suspect it was either a heart attack or a stroke, or maybe something that can’t be diagnosed here. I’m so sorry for your loss, Mr. Wiggins.”

“You ain’t as sorry as I am! You need to tell me more than that!” I blasted as I wiped tears off my cheeks.

“If I could, I would. I’m almost certain that it’s a genetic issue,” Dr. Underwood said, still speaking in a gentle tone, as if it was no big deal to him. I scolded myself for coming down so hard on him. With all the sick and dying folks he had to deal with, death was second nature to him. He couldn’t let his emotions get in the way. Death was also second nature to me because I was a undertaker. I’d seen more dead bodies than this doctor had and I never let my emotions get in the way neither. But losing my son was almost more than I could stand.

“There ain’t no genetic or any other health issues in my family,” I protested.

Dr. Underwood furrowed his eyebrows and caressed his smooth chin as he gawked at me. “Didn’t your daddy’s brother die of a heart attack some years ago?”

My head was spinning like a tornado, and there was so much bile rising in my throat, I didn’t know how I was able to keep talking. Somehow I managed to get a grip so I could answer. “Um, yeah, he did. But he was eighty pounds overweight and ate everything he shouldn’t have.”

“Maybe there is something defective on your wife’s side,” he suggested. “I heard that Maggie’s daddy and mama died way before their time.”

“My late father-in-law was a alcoholic and drunk hisself to death. His wife died when she caught that virus that was going around the world about twenty years ago. But Maggie has always been as strong as a bull. And so was Claude.”

“Mr. Wiggins, I declare, even the most robust bulls die sooner or later.”

My son had never been seriously sick a day in his life and neither had I. If what had happened to Claude was heredity, it had to have come from Maggie’s side of the family, or his birth daddy’s. Me and her was the only ones who knew I wasn’t the boy’s real daddy. We hadn’t been able to create a child the normal way (I’ll explain why later). Out of desperation, we’d set up a stranger and tricked him into getting Maggie pregnant. I never met the man and didn’t know nothing about his background.

The staff at the clinic did the best they could for us colored folks, but they wasn’t as sophisticated and knowledgeable as the doctors at the hospitals that only treated white folks. One of their doctors might have been able to offer a better explanation as to what killed Claude. Segregation laws varied from one county to another, so the coroner in our little country town couldn’t perform autopsies on colored corpses. Sometimes we never found out exactly why one of us died.

When Maggie came home this evening after helping serve at a party given by one of the wealthy white women she knew, I was barely functioning. It took all of my strength for me to compose myself enough to tell her that our only child, Claude, had suddenly up and died a few hours ago. Maggie was devastated because she loved that boy more than she loved life. On top of that, he was the only blood relative she had left in the world. My nightmare continued.

Several hours after I’d told Maggie about Claude’s passing, I found her unconscious on our living-room couch with puke all over the front of her nightgown. I refused to believe she was dead, even though it was obvious that she was. I drove her to the clinic anyway. The staff was just as shocked as I was that I had returned so soon with another body.

The doctor on the graveyard shift told me the same thing about Maggie that the evening shift doctor had said about Claude: She had died of a heart attack or a stroke. Words could not describe my pain. I went back home to grieve some more.

Less than a minute after I walked back into my living room, I blacked out.

I woke up the next morning in my old bedroom at my parents’ house. Mama was hovering over me with her eyes so bloodshot and glazed over, she looked like she belonged in bed herself. “Was I dreaming, or is it true that Maggie is dead too?” I asked in a raspy tone.

Mama sniffed and nodded. “We done lost them both, son. Me and your daddy found you passed out on your couch last night, so we brought you over here. You must have fainted.”

That was the last thing I remember before I fainted again. I didn’t come to until the next morning. I was so weak and disoriented, Mama had to bathe and feed me. I don’t know how I made it through the day without fainting again or losing my mind.

I wasn’t doing much better the next day. Back at my house, me and Mama was sitting at my kitchen table. It was the middle of the afternoon, but I was still in my bathrobe. On top of the bags underneath my puffy eyes, I hadn’t shaved in two days and my hair was so askew I looked like death warmed over. But I didn’t care how bad I looked, it wasn’t half as bad as how I felt.

“I can’t believe God would allow all this misery to happen to me at the same time,” I complained to Mama. I wondered if He had finally decided to punish me for loving men.

“Baby, don’t question the Lord’s actions. One thing you have to keep in mind is that He don’t put no more of a burden on nobody than they can carry,” she insisted.

“Hogwash! What kind of God thinks losing my whole family at the same time ain’t more of a burden than I can carry?” I shot back.

“Don’t put all the blame on God. Have you done anything that would deserve His wrath?”

Mama’s last question threw me for a loop. “Who me?” was all I could say. If God was punishing me for loving men, how come He hadn’t chastised me before now? I’d started having relationships with men when I was in my teens, more than twenty-five years ago. “Um . . . I can’t think of nothing I done wrong,” I mumbled.

I decided to change the subject. The last thing I wanted to hear was Mama implying that I was doing something that the devil had put me up to and that God was only trying to get my attention back. I blurted out the most appropriate thing I could think of: “I guess I shouldn’t question God’s mysterious ways, right?”

“Right. You and nobody else should be that brazen. Shoot. Jesus didn’t and He was the Lord’s son—and perfect in every way!” Mama screamed. She stopped talking and sucked in a deep breath. Her tone was much softer when she added, “Baby, try to remember that it was their time to go.”

I had heard that phrase so many times, all it did now was irritate me. For one thing, it didn’t make no sense. Whenever a person died, it was “their time to go.” But I didn’t like to argue with my mama because I usually lost anyway. I decided to be as cool and calm as I could. “I’m going to get through this and go on with my life as quick as possible,” I declared.

“Me and your daddy will do all we can to help you do that,” she said with a heavy sigh. “You ain’t got no close friends to keep company with you, and you don’t need to be by yourself too much right now. You want to move back home with us for a spell?”

I shook my head. “I want to be by myself tonight. The sooner I get used to being alone, the better off I’ll be.” I didn’t give Mama enough time to respond before I went on. “Um . . . I’m going to get in touch with the Fuller Brother morticians. I want them to handle the funerals,” I announced. I never thought I’d give business to my only competition.

Sixty-year-old Ned Fuller and his fifty-eight-year-old brother, Percy, had been thorns in my side ever since I’d inherited the business from my daddy’s deceased older brother. They was so hifalutin and insensitive; their funeral home had a great big WELCOME sign tacked up on the wall by the side of their front door! Knowing how jealous they was of me because I got the most business, I knew they was going to charge me a pretty penny. But I didn’t care. All I wanted was for this double funeral to be over and done with as soon as possible so I could move forward.

Mama scrunched up her face and threw up her hands. “The Fuller Brothers? I declare, I can’t believe you want to give them snooty devils your business. Y’all been feuding for years. Besides, this involves our family. Don’t you think Maggie and Claude deserve the best home-going possible? Folks will think you done lost your mind!”

“Mama, I don’t care what folks think. It’s bad enough that I ain’t never going to see my wife and son alive again. After all I done already been through, the last thing I want to do is handle their funerals. And, as much as I don’t want to admit it, the Fuller Brothers’ work is almost as good as mine.”

1917

ME AND HUBERT HAD ONLY BEEN MARRIED A LITTLE OVER FOUR hours when he brought up the subject we’d been discussing quite a bit lately.

“Maggie, I can’t wait for us to find a man to get you pregnant. Decide what fake name you want to use. Keep it simple so you won’t forget and slip up and give him your real name, or a different fake name. Once we become parents, nobody will ever suspect we ain’t normal.”

My husband sounded so casual; you would have thought he was talking about the weather.

“I’ll call myself Louise.”

“Good! That’s a perfect name. You look more like a Louise than a Maggie anyway.”

I rolled my eyes and let out a loud breath. Just the thought of being in bed with a strange man—even one we’d handpicked—turned my stomach.

Hubert stared at me with his eyes narrowed. “Maggie, we will have to keep talking about it if we want our plan to work. You agreed that if we added a baby to the mix, this would look like a real marriage.”

I was glad he sounded more serious now. But I was still tired of talking about this subject.

We occupied the bed we’d be sharing in the house he’d been renting for the past six months. He was stretched out on his back with his arms folded across his chest. I was lying on my side, gazing at the side of his face.

It had been fairly warm this afternoon when we got married. But now it was colder than usual for a January night. The wind had got so strong in the last couple of hours, it was rattling the windows and howling like a wolf. We had changed out of our wedding clothes into something warmer. Hubert had on beige flannel long underwear, buttoned all the way up to his neck. I had on a floor-length cotton gown that my mama had made out of flour sacks. My hair was in four plaits, covered in a thick scarf. Hubert had a stocking cap on his head, pulled all the way down over his ears. We both had on wool socks. We didn’t look nothing like newlyweds was supposed to look on their wedding night.

“I been thinking. Maybe it won’t be necessary for me to get involved with another man. Everybody in this town knows that me and you have been real close friends since we was little kids. They ain’t never seen neither one of us on a ‘date’ with nobody else. So they ain’t got no reason not to believe our marriage ain’t for real. From now on, we will have to tell a heap of lies and act a certain way in public, and that won’t be easy.”

Hubert abruptly sat up and glared at me with his eyes blinking and his jaw twitching like he was having a spasm. “Just a doggone minute now! What are you trying to tell me? You having second thoughts now after we done come this far?”

“I ain’t having ‘second thoughts’ about our marriage. I’m just making comments. I think getting married is the best thing in the world for messed-up people like you and me. But I’m skittish about us setting up a stranger to get me pregnant. That’s the part of this hoax I hate the most. Just the thought of a man touching me that way makes my skin crawl.”

“Look, girl. You want children as much as I do, right? As far as I know, the Virgin Mary was the only woman in history who got pregnant without having sex with a man.”

“Don’t be cute. You didn’t have to come up with a example that extreme.”

“Well, you know your Bible, so you know it’s true.”

“Yeah, I know. Praise the Lord. But making a baby is something we can do on our own . . .”

Hubert gasped. “That means we would have to have sex!” The last word shot out of his mouth like a bullet.

“I know what it means. It would be for a good reason, though, and there wouldn’t be nary bit of pleasure involved. Shoot! I don’t like sex any more than you do, but I’m willing to do it just enough times to make a baby. I’d love to have six or seven kids, but I know I couldn’t stand to have that much sex. So I’ll settle for just one.”

Hubert gazed at me like I’d suddenly sprouted a beard. “Maggie, I ain’t never said nothing about not liking sex. Making love is a wonderful activity and I enjoy it.”

I let out another loud breath. “All right, then. Let me put it another way. I don’t like sex, period. You don’t like sex with women.”

“Exactly.”

“You know for sure that’s the direction you want to go in from now on, right?”

“I’d give up sex before I did it with a woman.”

I reared back and looked at him with my mouth hanging open. “Well! That don’t make me feel too good about being a woman. You hurt my feelings.”

“Aw, stop pouting,” he snapped, waving his hand. “Don’t get too upset. You know I didn’t mean no harm. I could have said it a better way, though.”

“Okay, then. We’ll find a man to get me pregnant.” I sniffed and sat up. “When do you want to start hunting for one?” I had just turned seventeen a week ago and Hubert was twenty. We’d always been smarter and more mature than some of the other young folks our ages who lived in the same small country town of Lexington, Alabama. Even so, I couldn’t believe we’d decided to go through with a fake marriage and the far-fetched scheme of me having another man’s baby and pretending it was Hubert’s. I’d thought it was a boneheaded notion when he first brought it up a week before our wedding.

“We’ll start whenever you want to.”

“Let’s wait at least a couple of weeks, maybe even longer.”

“I thought you had a itching to get this over with.”

“I still got a itching to get it over with. But after thinking about it a little more, I’d like to get used to being a married woman first.”

“That’s fine by me, so long as we stick to the plan.” Hubert sucked in his breath, stood up, and walked around to my side of the bed and stood in front of me with a serious expression on his face. “It’ll have to be a man that lives out of town. Some joker looking for just a good time, not for a woman to get attached to. I’m sure we can find a good one in a town like Hartville.”

“Hartville is only one town over. That’s too close. A lot of folks here in Lexington got relatives there,” I pointed out. “What about Birmingham or Huntsville?”

“Naw. Them places is too far away. That’d be too much wear and tear on that old auto of mine, not to mention a heap of money on gas. We might have to make a whole lot of trips.”

A “whole lot of trips” meant a “whole lot of sex.” My skin crawled again, and there was a nasty taste in my mouth.

“Setting up strangers for me to go to bed with, just so I can get pregnant, is starting to make me nervous.”

“Why? Once the deed is done, you won’t never have to see none of them strangers no more. Shoot!”

“Seeing them at all would be bad enough.”

Hubert was looking so impatient and frustrated now, I felt guilty. I was starting to feel impatient and frustrated myself.

“Listen to me, Maggie. If you want a child as much as I do, you’ll get them thoughts out of your mind and keep them out. We need help to get what we want. It’ll be easier than you think. I know every one of them jokers we find would love to get their hands on a sweet young thing like you.”

“Do me a favor and stop saying things like that. This is going to be hard enough on me.”

“Okay. So, what about us starting in Mobile?”

“Uh-uh. I’d rather start at a bar in a small town like Toxey.”

“All right, then. That’s where we’ll go on the first night.”

“What if I can’t keep one on the hook long enough to get me pregnant? Then what? If I have to be with a different man every week, I’d probably lose my mind.”

“If you do crack up, don’t you think you’d enjoy being crazy better if you had a sweet little baby to fuss over?”

I thought about Hubert’s question for only a split second before I answered. “Uh-huh. I do believe I would.”

WE STAYED QUIET FOR THE NEXT FEW MOMENTS. BY NOW, THE wind was so strong, branches on the pecan tree by the side of our house was hitting against the bedroom window. I had no idea what Hubert was thinking, but there was all kinds of thoughts spinning around in my head. If somebody had told me a few weeks ago that I’d be involved in such a outlandish situation, I would have told them they was crazy. But then again, maybe me and Hubert was crazy. Whether we was or not, I wasn’t going to back out now. I needed this man, and I didn’t want to do nothing to ruin our relationship. He was too important to me.

I knew a lot of people, but I didn’t have no close friends. I had never even had a boyfriend or a close girlfriend. I had been living with my mama and daddy all my life, but there had been times when it seemed like I was the only one living in the house. I’d read magazines for hours on end to keep myself occupied and to stay on top of what was going on in the world.

Daddy was the town drunk and Mama was a used-to-be prostitute. She’d turned her life around before I was born, but folks never let her forget what she once was. They never let me forget it neither.

Now that Mama was a more righteous woman, she worked long hours doing everything that the wealthy white ladies didn’t want to do for themselves. When she was at home, me and her talked about a lot of different things. Her main focus was me. She wanted me to have a better life when I grew up, and she didn’t think I could make that happen on my own.

“It’s a heavy burden, but a woman’s purpose is to find a good man and raise a family. That’s what God made us for.” She’d told me that more than once. And I believed her, even though she didn’t seem too happy being married to Daddy.

I never asked a lot of questions. I just listened to my folks, other grown folks, and tried to get through life with as little discomfort as possible. Now that I had a husband, my burden was only half as heavy. With a baby, I wouldn’t have no burden at all.

Hubert cleared his throat to get my attention. He rubbed the back of his head and gave me a woeful look. “Maggie, if we lucky, the first man you get with will get the job done.” Hubert got a dreamy-eyed look on his face. “I always wanted to be a daddy and I can live with raising another man’s baby. It could be ugly as hell, but that wouldn’t matter to me. I’d still love him or her.” He laughed.

“I’m glad to hear you say that. I’d hate for you to ignore or mistreat the child because of their looks.”

“But it’s important for us to find a man who favors me. Me and you got medium brown skin. So I doubt if we’d be able to convince anybody that a real light-skinned child or a real dark-skinned one with none of my features is ours. You know how folks talk in this town. They’ll start spreading rumors that you fooled around with another man.”

I snickered. “Hubert, I will be fooling around with ‘another man.’ That’s the whole idea.”

“I know. I’m just talking off the top of my head. But I’m serious about us needing a baby that got some of my features.”

“I agree with you on that. And finding such a man shouldn’t be too hard. You just a regular-looking colored man. There ain’t nothing that stands out about your looks. I done seen quite a few who look enough like you to be your brother.”

“I have too. Now that we done got that out of the way, let’s move on.”

“I just thought of something else we ain’t considered. Something real serious.”

“What?” Hubert looked frightened as he scooted a few inches away from me.

“Getting involved with a stranger could be risky.”

“You think you might stumble into a maniac?”

I shook my head. “No, I wasn’t thinking about that. But that is something we need to consider too. My mama told me she got with a man one night that tried to choke her for no reason. After she’d got away from him, she found out that the crazy house had just turned him loose.”

“Well, we’ll be taking risks, no matter what. There is oodles of crazy folks that ain’t never been in the nuthouse. And some of the sane folks running around town do all kinds of crazy stuff.”

“You got that right. But I was thinking about something else. It’ll be hard for me to find a suitable man, and keep him interested long enough, if I can’t tell him my real name and where I live. On top of that, having to find one that looks like you will make that part of the plan even harder.”

“If you got some better ideas, I sure would like to hear them.”

I sighed. “I ain’t got none. It’s just that this is really beginning to sound like more trouble than it’d be worth.” I had to count to five in my head to keep myself composed so I could stay focused. “We need to have another plan in place. If we don’t find the right man in the first few weeks, or if I can’t stand to have sex long enough to get pregnant, let’s find a couple.”

Hubert gave me a confused look and hunched his shoulders. “A couple of what?”

“A man and a woman. We could pay them to have a baby for us. As soon as the woman gets pregnant, I’ll start telling folks I’m pregnant. When it comes time for me to start showing, I can strap a pillow on my belly.”

“Is that what you call a good idea?” Hubert laughed. But when he seen the serious look on my face, he stopped laughing and gave me a thoughtful look. “Hmmm. Maybe you done hit on something good, sugar. I’m sure there is a man and a woman out there in need of money who would be willing to help us out.”

“All we’d need is for one of them to look like one of us. We shouldn’t have no trouble finding a couple with a woman who looks like me. Everywhere I go, I see women with round faces, thin lips, and big brown eyes like mine. I get mistook for one of the Martin sisters all the time. And the Hardy girls.”

“That’s a fact.” Hubert squinted as he gave my face the once-over. “I done seen men all over the place that favor me. But the couple would have to be from out of town too. And we couldn’t tell them our real names and where we live at neither.”

“I know that.” My breath suddenly caught in my throat and a sharp pain shot through my chest. “I just thought of something else.”

“Another good idea?”

“Not this time. What if we paid a couple to make us a baby and they decided to keep it . . . and the money? Then what?”

Hubert shook his head. “Anything could happen, sugar. They could even ask for more money after we done already paid them. Now is the time for us to decide exactly what we want to do. Other than us plucking a child from that colored children’s orphan asylum, where your mama and daddy grew up—”

“No! Some are already in their teens. I ain’t but seventeen. I ain’t about to have somebody a year or two younger than me calling me Mama and giving me a hard time like most teenagers. I want a fresh, newborn baby.”

“Okay. We’ll stick to our original plan. But if we find a man and you think it’s taking too long for him to get you pregnant, then we’ll look for a couple. If that don’t work, well . . .”

“In the meantime, we can still act like a regular married couple without children. If worse comes to worst, and we ain’t got no baby after a year or two, we’ll tell folks that a doctor told me, or you, that a physical condition is the reason we don’t have no kids.”

“Oh, well, if it comes to that, that’s what we’ll tell everybody. I guess we could still have a decent life with no children,” Hubert said with his voice cracking. His last comment caused a lump to swell up in my throat.

“I hope to God it don’t come to that,” I whimpered. I couldn’t even imagine never being a mother. But, if we didn’t have no choice, I’d have to live with that. “Now, let’s turn in and get some rest. We’ll need a lot of that because we’re going to be very busy in the next few weeks hunting up a daddy for our baby.”

I NEVER THOUGHT I’D HAVE A HUSBAND IN THE FIRST PLACE. AND the last man in the world I ever thought I’d marry was Hubert Wiggins. Even though we’d been raised in the same part of town, his family and mine was from two different worlds.

Daddy’s mama had died giving birth to him, and none of his other relatives had wanted to take him in. Mama told me she was the child of the man who’d raped her mother when her mother was only thirteen, and her family had not wanted to raise a rapist’s child or have anything to do with it. Once Mama was born, she never saw or heard from any of her family again, including her mother. That was why my parents had ended up in the asylum orphanage for co. . .