Mississippi Sissy (2 page)

Ross Barnett, George Hamilton, and Arlene Francis

“
When I am asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it's because we are still able to recognize one,” said Flannery O'Connor. The first time I read that remark, I laughed at O'Connor's knowing wit and divine slyness. And yet—as in her stories when such wit, such slyness, can curdle together into a kind of wisdom that sits like clabber atop the churned-up innocence of our lives—it also left a sour, long-ago taste in my mouth. It tightened my throat. The first freak I ever recognized down South where I was born half a century ago now was my own reflection in a Mississippi mirror.

I was confronted with a glass of such clabber, served ice-cold with day-old corn bread crumbled into it, on the day of my mother's funeral—November 19, 1964—when my brother and sister and I
officially moved in with our maternal grandparents, who lived in the country, a few miles outside a little town called Forest. Our father, a sports celebrity of local renown, had only recently been killed in an automobile accident. His death—he flew from his beloved baby-blue Volkswagen Beetle after running a STOP sign at a country intersection and colliding with a car with Neshoba County plates—made headlines across the state. One year later our mother was now dead of esophageal cancer. Dying so soon after my father, my mother enabled me to utilize what little sorrow I was feeling for him. Her dying deepened it, allowed it to seep forever into my life like the blood that ran from his flat-topped head when it hit that newly paved country road. Red thick yolks of the stuff oozed past his butch-waxed thatch of bristles and blackened even more the fresh asphalt, drawing the flies that buzzed over a neighboring pasture where they swarmed around cattle that looked up, for a second, at the sound of the crash then turned away to focus on their cuds.

Different sorts of headlines followed the death of my mother, my siblings and I being the subject of “human interest” features located next to a bunch of Ladies Club columns in weekly county newspapers, nestled among the stories about high school football, pork futures, and fire-bombed churches. “The Sessums Orphans” became our handle as we were paraded around the state and asked to do some fancy dribbling at the halftime of charity basketball games set up for our college funds in little country gymnasiums. Such places became secular sanctuaries to me. The sweet syncopation of balls bouncing against hardwood during a shoot-around was as competitive, as alluring as that Rich
vs. Roach
record of battling drummers I listened to once I grew up and let my love of Ella Fitzgerald lead me to other LPs.
Gym-na-si-um:
It was the first big word I ever learned. It made masculinity musical to my little ears. I went around saying it softly to myself over and over, proud that I was able to pronounce it, loving how pretty it sounded in my mouth.
Gym-na-si-um:
A man's name was in there,
see
was in there
too, the very sound of
mmmmmm,
I knew to say when I really liked something, when it tasted good, when I wanted to taste it again. A gymnasium was also the place where my stern father felt secure enough to show me some tenderness. He had been an All-American basketball player at the state's Southern Baptist institute of higher learning, Mississippi College. Drafted by the New York Knicks in 1956 after my mother had just given birth to me, he had returned home from Manhattan at her behest. A Southern belle through-and-through, she could not see herself managing to survive in the vertical hustle and bustle of a Northern urban high-rise with a squalling new-born to care for. She told my father he had a choice: Either he could play for the Knicks and live alone or come home to her and his child and make a more horizontal life in Mississippi, where there were
lawns,
honey, and languor was an assiduously honed attribute.

At least that is what his older sister, my aunt Gladys—corpulent, overly rouged, incautious of tongue—told me a couple of years after my parents' deaths. I, newly nine, was sitting on the floor next to her chair during a weekend birthday visit at her house in Van Winkle, Mississippi. My brother and sister, rowdy with innocence, were down the street being corrupted by the neighborhood ruffians who ran roughshod through the backyards and alleyways of Van Winkle, equipped with BB guns and Bazooka bubblegum and a few half-smoked Viceroys they had purloined from unknowing, know-nothing parents. But all of that was
out there.
I sat inside and busied myself reading Aunt Gladys's collection of movie magazines, which she kept in a cut-down laundry basket by her Barcalounger. “Such a shame, too, such a shame. Yo' daddy always wanted to play ball against number fourteen, Bob Cousey,” she said, mentioning the great Boston Celtic player, as she pushed back in her chair and I perused Dorothy Manners's syndicated column in
Modern Screen
for any mention of George Hamilton or Susan Oliver. I had just seen the two starring in
Your Cheatin' Heart
at a Saturday matinee back at the Town Theater in Forest and fallen
madly—confusingly—in love with both of them. “Yo' mama and daddy could fight with the best of ‘em. But they were devoted to each other ever since second grade in Harperville, where we all grew up as best we could,” Aunt Gladys said, kicking off her waitressing shoes. I stared at her corn pads. I pouted at the very mention of my dead parents and pretended I could not smell her feet. “Never let nobody tell you different. Not even me,” she said. “Sometimes I wonder though, what would have become of ‘em if they had lived a little longer. Love's a funny thing.” She yawned, drifting toward sleep. “So funny I forgot to laugh.”

Dorothy Manners mentioned neither George nor Susan. I stood and watched from the window as my little brother and little sister now raced in circles around the magnolia sapling that Aunt Gladys had planted at the front of her house on the very morning of my father's accident, her hands still dirty with the freshly dug-up soil when my grandfather telephoned to let her know the awful news. Kim and Karole competed now with Gladys's gathering snores, lacing the steady stream of her snorts with their bursts of sturdy laughter. Even encumbered with our brief and tragic history, my brother and sister had not forgotten how to summon such a sound. I was jealous of the ease with which the very hum of their happiness always hovered about me. As they hit the ground felled by the hilarity of their nascent dizziness, I too dropped back down on the floor. I opened up a
Photoplay.
I searched again for George Hamilton. Searched for Susan Oliver. Searched for that feeling I had the Saturday before when I slumped in the darkened movie theater and let the tingling I felt for them, a nascent dizziness all my own, alleviate my loneliness.

My father succumbed to my mother's challenge of a more grownup, pussy-yearning kind of loneliness and returned home to Mississippi from New York City. He got a job coaching basketball at a high school in a friendly hick-filled hamlet in the middle of the state called Pelahatchie. Almost immediately—legendarily—he took the
eight-member team to the state championship. I've often wondered if the look of sad disdain he always delivered my way was the professional remorse of which my very presence reminded him. I am certain this was his recurring silent plaint:
If only she had not been pregnant with you.
Yet it was more than that. Much more. My father and I were like two magnets with their identical poles pressing against each other. It is my most vivid memory of him: that magnetic force field that brought us always to the brink of closeness. As we got to know each other in the first seven years of my life, the last seven years of his, I came to realize it was less a look of disdain than one of perplexed fear that flitted across his face whenever I came into view.
What kind of creature is this? This is a part of me? Flesh of my flesh? Why don't you want to go out and play with the rest of the boys? Shit—go shoot some hoops, son. Get into some trouble. Why do you want to sit inside laughing with the women all the time? Must you laugh with the women?

My father was a little over six feet tall. His flattop set off the chiseled features of his face. His eyes were the color of Kentucky bourbon and his ears were a tad too big. Swarthy and smooth-skinned, he appeared to have a bit of Native American heritage hidden away somewhere. Soon after he arrived at the small high school, he decided to change the team's name from the Demons to the Chiefs in accordance with Pelahatchie's own Native American heritage. “You'll be the only little demon left around here,” he had told me, shaking his head as he watched me run up and down the old gymnasium (perhaps
prance
is a better word) that summer day, right before school started, when he took his buckets of red, blue, white, and yellow paint in there to get rid of the devil at the center of the court and replace it with his colorful rendering of an Indian chief in a full-feathered headdress. As his work progressed and I tired of my prancing, I curled up next to him and watched his handiwork. He hummed, then sang, some country-and-western tunes sung by vocalists on the albums he loved to listen to: Frankie Laine, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Jim
Reeves. He let me, only once, dip the brush into the paint and tip a feather with red atop the chief's dignified head while he sang Reeves's “Scarlet Ribbons,” the song he put on the stereo when he wanted to slow-dance with my mother. I fell asleep by his side, my head swimming with his slow-dance voice. The fumes from the paint. The salty, sweaty musk of his bare chest and underarms after he had taken off his shirt and rolled it up for me as a makeshift pillow.

The smell of such gym-housed sweat regularly filled my nostrils. It became an inaugural desire. My father would allow me to come to basketball practice—even let me run down out-of-bound balls—if I kept quiet and out of his way. He would also allow me to sit on the bench with him if the games were not close, in an attempt to keep me from sitting with the cheerleaders and mimicking their routines to the delight of the crowd. But he would never let me into the gym's inner sanctum: the Chiefs' downstairs locker room. No matter how much I begged him, tearfully at times, he would not allow it. The more I was denied, of course, the more I longed to know what was behind that door. Once, while he held me tightly in his arms for some sort of rough comfort—before passing me off to a cute, pudgy little pimply-faced team manager named Jack “Tip” Myers—I saw the locker room door open as my father, furious at his team's loss, strode colossally inside. His entrance halted any thought of horseplay and silenced the room except for the incessant hiss of a row of hot showers. A bit of sweat-infused steam from the heat of those showers—a bare shoulder scurried by—escaped from within and warmed my face before the door was slammed shut by my father's hand. It was the first time I felt my heart break. Four years old, I was inundated with adult emotion. I lunged forward. Pimply-faced Myers pried my fingers from the knob. My father's hidden voice rose. The berating had begun.

The following season, after winning a local tournament, my father surprised me by scooping me up from the cheerleaders. He took me
straight into the locker room after the game. The delight I felt was as pure as it was profound. The steam from the hissing showers that had once only teased my curious face was now encompassing me as my father put me down on the concrete floor and the players, stripping off their uniforms—giddy and lithe—were teasing each other with that high school athlete's palaver of “asshole” and “dickhead” and “faggot.” Buttocks were bared. Bodies, rank with victory, dodged the repeated snaps of tightly wound terrycloth. A gravelly screech, followed by echoes of shared laughter, bounced about all the concrete when the terry hit its target. My father smiled—a handsome crooked grin of a smile—at all the roughhousing, the random merriment. I tried to smile just like him. I can't remember ever being as happy as I was at that very moment. All attempts at happiness over the years have been failed conjuring acts to replicate those first few moments in that locker room, the one and only time I felt my father truly loved me. “Watch Kevinator for a minute,” he told Pimply-faced who was handing out the towels. “I'm thirsty after screaming at those refs all through the overtime. Doncha love overtime games, Kevinator?” he asked, running his hand along the bristles of my flattop, a miniature version of his own. “Gotta get me a RC Cola in the coaches' lounge. I'll be right back.”

Left fatherless amid the faint smell of liniment and a landscape of inchoate pubic hair, I felt a pleasing knot inside my stomach. Pimply-faced hit me hard atop my head. “Hey, man!” one of the players shouted and hit Pimply-faced back. “Don't pick on Coach's kid. Just ‘cause we pick on you.” The player, on his way to the showers, lifted me to his chest, the sweat of his neck slick against my cheek. “You okay, buddy?” he asked me before kissing my scalp and putting me back down on the concrete floor. I scampered over to his vacated locker area. I sat down surrounded by the player's discarded gym clothes. I picked up his jockstrap. Pimply-faced laughed at me.

“What's so funny?” my father asked, coming through the door while chugging his RC. Pimply-faced pointed my way. I hid the jock behind my back. “What you got there, Kevinator?” my father wanted to know. “Want a sip of my RC?” He walked toward me. I looked guiltily up at him. I held the jockstrap out, flourishing it with the pliancy I was developing in my wrist.

A few of the players began to snicker.

“What's going on?” the teammate who had rescued me asked as he headed toward us dripping from his shower. He began to towel off in mid-stride. I would not let his jockstrap go. My father, surprised by my strength, finally pulled it from my grasp. He tossed the strap to the player who now stood naked at my side.

“Here. I think this is yours,” my father said. “So . . .” was all he said next. The locker room was quiet. He chugged the rest of his RC. “So . . .” Pimply-faced sneered at me. “Take him to the coaches' lounge while I finish up in here,” my father told him.