Mississippi Sissy (20 page)

My grandmother's hand grabbed my shoulder. “Want to go inside the haunted house?” she asked, sensing the stir we both were causing when it began to sink in that she had allowed me to come costumed better than any little girl at the school. Who was to blame here, some seemed to be thinking: the boy or the old lady who let him out of the house like that? My grandmother led me to the second-grade classroom where many of the mothers, dressed as ghosts and monsters and witches themselves, had created a scary environment full of fake cobwebs and skeletons. “Want to go on in?” she asked, pushing me forward
so I would be out of sight and just maybe the whispers would stop. “I'll wait out here for you while Lyle takes Kim and Karole down yonder to bob for apples.” I shrugged and headed inside the haunted house. Nothing could be as scary as the crowd we had just made our way through. As soon as I saw what awaited me, though, my arrogance abated. When one of the mothers, dressed like Frankenstein's bride, her towering green hairdo made from uncooked spaghetti, put my hand in a vat of eyeballs made from Jell-O, I began—uncontrollably—to scream. The other mothers tried to catch me and calm me down as I ran from their grasps, knocking over cardboard coffins and cauldrons full of dry ice. As I tried to find my way out of the darkened room, my screams grew even more bloodcurdling. My grandmother came rushing in and started shouting at the costumed mothers, “Call him Arlene! That'll slow him down! Arlene! Arlene!” She grabbed me by the shoestringed whistle around my neck but I shimmied free, continuing my rampage about the room and leaving her holding the whistle. I broke one mother's tackle. Then another's. One, costumed as a werewolf, grabbed me around the neck but I bit her hairy forearm and freed myself to run wildly in circles some more. By the time three of the fattest mothers ganged up on me and held me down to hand off to my grandmother, my witch's black dress was torn, my wig was askew, my makeup was ruined. When I finally emerged firmly in my grandmother's grasp, I discovered that all the carnival-goers had gathered around the door to the haunted house to find out what all the screaming was about. Again the crowd parted as I made my way back through it. They were even more appalled by me now.

“I think we should go home. This whole thing was a bad idea,” my grandmother angrily whispered as we kept on walking straight for the exit. Now holding my father's coaching whistle in her hand, she wasn't quite sure what to do with it, so she hung it around her own neck. She jerked me forward. My grandfather and Kim and Karole,
whose little worried faces were still wet from bobbing, arrived on the scene and followed us out to our car. “I don't know why I let your mama and Matty convince me this was okay,” my grandmother said, once we had settled in for the ride home. Kim and Karole, more frightened of me by now than any of the crowd back at the carnival, huddled together on their side of the backseat. “She's not in her right mind, your mama,” said my grandmother. My grandfather, his breathing always more pronounced through his hairy nostrils when he was upset, said nothing. He only wheezed in disapproval and gripped the steering wheel tighter before bumping up the headlights to high-beam when we got out on the country road where we lived. The eyes of the cows in the pastures we passed flickered, like fireflies pairing off, as they glowered at the sound of our family's Plymouth whining its way into second, my grandfather pushing harder at the gas pedal. “I ain't in my right mind, neither, these days,” my grandmother continued. “Shoot. I barely have a mind left. But I tell you this—slow down, Lyle, you're gonna get us all kilt—I've never been so embarrassed in my life. I told your mama something like this might happen. But she wouldn't listen. She forgets where she lives half the time. Always did. This is Mississippi. We don't stand for no nonsense down here.” She lifted the silent whistle around her neck and stared down at it. “Sometimes I think she'd'a been better off if she hadn't been pregnant with you, and her and Howard would've just went ahead and moved up yonder to New York City with all them heathens in them high-rises. You'd like it better, too, up yonder, I bet. Wouldn't you, Arlene?” she asked, her voice dribbling disdain atop the question like the sweet yet bitter sorghum syrup my grandfather liked to dribble on her biscuits. “I know Howard would have loved it. He loved to show off—you get that from him—and New York City is full of show-offs as far as I can figure from watching that Ed Sullivan mess. Next year, I tell you what, it's John Glenn for you. You'll look right cute in all that silver. You'll see, I'm as good at making spacesuits
as I am a witch's dress. I bet aluminum foil would work right nice for a spacesuit. Cheaper, too, than that crepe wool you're wearing.” I straightened my wig beneath my pointed hat and watched the night go by as we headed back into the pitch-black countryside. I counted by twos—up to sixteen—the eyes of the cattle when they caught the Plymouth's light. Why had the haunted house scared me so? It wasn't the monsters and the ghosts and the other witches with which I was confronted. I knew all that was fake. What was not fake were those mothers themselves who, unlike my own, were not dying. I know now it was that coven of the living that caused my screams, the rent in my dress. But back then I was just angry at myself for losing control. Somehow I knew that the appalled crowd had won a round. I vowed to myself never to lose control again. The rest of the rounds were mine. I pulled off my hat and wig and threw them on the seat between Kim and Karole and me. They huddled closer and scooted farther away. My grandfather turned into our gravel drive, that soft growl of home the sound we had all been waiting for.

When I returned to school after the Halloween carnival I was even more ostracized than usual. “Witch Boy” became the newest moniker to be hurled at me at recess. I coped with all the meanspirited ribbing by pretending I really was a witch and could silently cast spells on my tormentors. After a couple of weeks of this, Miss Ishee's deeply timbred, disembodied voice, summoning me, issued from the intercom system's wooden box located above the chalkboard, the same box that slightly vibrated each morning at 8:15 when a specially picked student read a devotional from the
Upper Room
as well as an Ishee-chosen verse from the Bible before leading, too loudly, the whole public school in the Lord's Prayer. At first I thought I was being called to the principal's office because I had begun to spout my “Witch Boy” incantations right in the faces of my tormentors instead
of suffering in silence. “Ep-pe pe-pe kak-ke ziz-zy zuz-zy zik!” spewed from my black-magic mouth as I warned them of the toads and other terrible things they would turn into during the night if they dared to fall asleep. Parents, I had heard, were beginning to complain that their sons and daughters were frightened to go to bed and they were blaming it on me, “that Sessums child, bless his heart, who's takin' out all his sufferin' on our young'uns. Them spells he's castin' at recess is takin' holt. That's why all them young'uns can't keep their heads off their desks. Toads, my foot. Stop that child. Stop him now or he's gonna be the only one awake enough to take a ‘rithmetic test. Witch boys in school is near ‘bout worse than a bunch'a coloreds.”

The fear of being punished for my behavior quickly passed, however, for there was another fear, the one that filled my thoughts every school day. Each time I was summoned to the principal's office and made that slow walk from Mrs. Johnston's third-grade classroom, the very last one along the elementary school's hallway, I was afraid I was about to be told that my mother had died. Usually it was just a relative, most often Aunt Gladys, who had come to take Kim and me out of school early on a Friday afternoon so that, along with Karole, we could have a weekend visit far away from hospital rooms and frazzled grandparents. That day, however, I was certain it was not going to be Aunt Gladys. I prepared myself for what awaited me. The time had come to face the one fact I would have to face the rest of my life: My mother was dead. It was more than something I knew as I walked toward Miss Ishee's familiar office; it was something I felt. It imbedded itself in my Witch Boy body as her spirit, finally freed from her own body, swept me forward down the hallway, holding up my trembling chin with her still warm hands, hands that smelled, in that wondrous moment when they wafted by me, of the last bit of Jergens lotion my grandmother had but that morning massaged into the translucent flesh of her now translucent palms. My angry heart pounded faster. I focused on its pounding. “Dare I?” I heard my mother's voice, more
disembodied even than Miss Ishee's over that loudspeaker, whisper in my ear one last time. “Dare I? Dare I?” I did not pretend I could not hear her, for if I were to be the Witch Boy I was accused of being by all those other children at recess—if, indeed, I were now to be an orphan—the only source of comfort left me would be just this: the supernatural.

When I rounded the corner to the principal's office, all was confirmed. There sat Charlie “Chunkin' ” Ward. He was holding Kim, who had already been roused from Mrs. Stroud's first-grade classroom, in his lap. I stepped into the office. Ishee-or-ain't-she sat, a clump of efficiency, in the swivel leather chair behind her desk. I did not want to look at her or Charlie, scared that the badly camouflaged sadness that all adults seemed to have in their eyes whenever they looked at me would set me off and I'd start spouting my patented incantation right then and there in their carefully composed faces. I did not want to look at Kim, either. Every time I looked his way I longed to have his ease at being a child. I stared instead at the huge microphone on the intercom's console behind Miss Ishee and thought of the day I had been chosen to read from the Upper Room and how, the night before, my grandmother had written out the words to the Lord's Prayer for me so I wouldn't forget them. I began silently to say the prayer—as much of it as I could recall—while I stood there waiting for someone to speak. “Hey there, Kevinator,” said Charlie, the fake cheer in his voice piercing right through the somber our-Father-who-art-in-heaven words filling my head.

I turned and said this to him, only this: “I know what this means.”

He did not, as he had a year before outside the Emergency Room, disabuse me of the notion. Kim? He seemed only happy to see “Chunkin' ” Charlie, for Charlie was, fake cheer aside, a truly jolly sort. Maybe that was why my grandparents had called him and asked him to be the bearer of such news.

Kim and I piled into the front seat of Charlie's Pontiac and he
drove around our small town pretending he had some place to take us. Kim was beginning to look a bit puzzled as we instead circled about the residential streets and Charlie, choking up, turned back onto Marion Boulevard toward the elementary school from Highway 35. “Your mama has gone to sleep, boys,” he said. “She's at peace. She's not in any more pain.” He cleared his throat and nervously adjusted his rearview mirror. I looked up into it and saw Miss Ozella Weem's beauty shop down the hill behind us. I knew what was expected of me at that moment. I was expected to cry. And watching the tears surface in my eyes in the adjusted mirror, that's exactly what I did. It was but my latest bit of conjuring, something I had gotten good at since Epiphany left me to my own devices. (Yet Matty had called it something else. “You got the real thang in you since that Halloween carnival crybaby mess Miz Jake tolt me you got yo'self into,” she had said when I wouldn't stop pouting post-Halloween about what had happened. “Miz Jake say she plumb vexed by you, child. But Matty ain't no such thang. I ain't vexed a'tall. I know voodoo when I see voodoo. Something's took a'holt' a'you. Devil's got you in his teeth. And the devil ain't nothing but a feist dog when it comes to a body's soul. We'd'bones all right. Nothing but a bag a'bones, that's what we is. Devil's'd'teeth.”) Charlie reached out and patted my leg. Kim, confused, looked on. I concentrated on my face in the rearview mirror until another voodooed tear fell. I imagined myself in the devil's mouth.

It wasn't until the next day, when we arrived at Ott and Lee Funeral Home, that Kim figured out what had happened and he had a little meltdown when he saw our mother laid out in her open casket. He's told me in the years since that he can't remember it, but it is one of my most vivid memories, watching him wail in a way that was even more frightening than my own wailing inside that haunted house a few weeks earlier. It was in that moment—witnessing my little brother's unvarnished pain, a six-year-old's sobs full of the elemental alarm of
being left alone in the world—that I realized what had happened had happened to
us
—to him and to Karole—not just to me. Vena Mae was sitting next to him—stoic, unstirred Vena Mae—and she put an armful of jangling bracelets around him. I wanted to pry him free and go get Karole, who was being watched by another batch of aunts back at my grandparents' house, and run away with the two of them. I fantasized about putting them on the back of my witch's broom and escaping high in the sky until we scraped that bit of heaven where our parents, we had been told, now resided. I wanted to protect them, Kim and Karole, wanted it with all that was left of my heart. But I knew I could not. “Go pay respects to your mama,” Vena Mae told me as my grandmother knelt in front of Kim and the two women tried to calm him down.

I walked over to the casket and on tiptoe stared at my mother's overly rouged face. I hated the way she looked. She had been dolled up in death in a way she had never allowed herself to be in life. She had never worn that much makeup. Miss Ozella had been pressed into service to fix her hair in a crown of blond curls about her head, where it rested on the satin pillow. She wore her yellow nightgown. Kim continued to sob behind me. My grandfather came and put a hand on my head and then on my neck before resting it finally on my shoulder. He was crying, too. Everyone in the room was crying but me. All I could do was despise the way my mother looked. Her face, set in such lipsticked seriousness, seemed never to have shared a secret laugh with me, to have sung her Broadway tunes, to have moaned beneath my father, to have introduced me to Miranda. I looked at her plastic-like flesh and silently said my incantation, “Ep-pe pe-pe kak-ke ziz-zy zuz-zy zik,” but it did not work. She did not rise. She did not issue one last “Dare I?” before climbing out of the casket to scare the mourners who milled about. All thoughts of my being a witch melted away right there in the funeral parlor standing on tiptoe in front of my mother's open casket. I pretended to put the incantation
beneath her pillow inside the polished, satin-lined box where it would remain with her in her grave, not language exactly, but the sound of language, the music she had taught me to hear whenever letters were strung together. I would always believe in the power of that music—it was my inheritence from her—but I would never again believe in magic.