Mississippi Sissy (22 page)

She paused, looking down at her gnarled hands submerged in those dirty suds. “Never grow old, Kevin. Or if you do, make sure you've got at least one good thing you can ponder on like that. It's the only ponderin' your Mom's got that's still a pleasure. But it's such a right fine thing to ponder it beats havin' a heap a'stuff stuck in my old brain to choose from. I just go straight to that. No dawdlin'.” Mom had no way of knowing it at the time—neither had I, for that matter—but standing there with her as I dried the last of the dishes she handed me and heard her recall such a time in her life remains for me just such a “right fine thing to ponder” in my own. In my darkest moments—and there have been dark ones—I find myself humming, like her, the tune to “Alice Blue Gown,” the lyrics still as fresh to me at the beginning of this sorry century as they were when my grandmother first learned them at the beginning of her sorry one. “I once had a gown almost new,” I can sing, hearing her voice and the bit of happiness she could barely still wring from it, “Oh, the daintiest thing, it was sweet Alice blue, With little forget-me-nots placed here and there. When I had it on, how I walked on the air. And it wore and it wore and it wore, 'Til it went, and it wasn't no more . . .”

I looked over at Lola's open face. I was grateful she knew what to say to my grandmother to alleviate, if only momentarily, a bit of the sadness that overtook her when Alice Blue Gown ceased to be her
nickname and life became harder for her to deal with than any lyric could describe. Lola winked at me in a way she had that let me know she was aware of what she was up to. Durable old Aunt Lola. She hardly ever wore makeup or perfume. She instead smelled of her cooking ingredients and, when cold weather came, the red brick hearth of her fireplace. She and Uncle Benny never went to church, but instead gassed up their newest Chevrolet and headed out to “Singin's” each Sunday to meet a bunch of like-minded backwoods Mississippi sorts who gathered in designated spots all over the state to have dinner-on-the-ground (which meant basically a pot-luck picnic lunch) and sing in unison or in groups the twangy gospel music white folks kept time to that was so different from the gospel of their black counterparts. They took me with them sometimes and I reveled in the raucous toe-tapping rhythms of those Singin's. White gospel consists of music based on precision, its tunes sung at an earthly clip, more like a canter than the Holy Ghosted gallop of black gospel. Yet even on those Singin' Sundays Lola only looked more scrubbed clean, not dolled up, her housedresses maybe a little more flowery. In fact, if you didn't know better you'd swear she was a Mississippi country version of a beautiful unadorned lesbian, butch but never loutish.

Nothing, however, could have been further from the truth. Mom even confided to me once, two years later when I was in sixth grade and finally a little taller than she (which wasn't such a big deal, as she was about the same size as Matty May, both barely five feet) that Lola had stolen Benny from his first wife. Sharing such a salacious confidence with me seemed for my grandmother to be her way of accepting the fact that I was growing up way too fast; there was nothing she could do about it, so she might as well tag along.

My two years of good-boy behavior were coming to an end by the time I reached sixth grade. I couldn't shunt my true self over to the side any longer and had intercepted my grandmother's Book-of-the-Month Club order form—I had been the one who insisted she join—and
replaced her order of Catherine Marshall's
Christie
with my own for Jacqueline Susann's
Valley of the Dolls.
There had been much consternation when Susann's book arrived in our house, but I had convinced my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Fikes, to let me do my second-semester book report on the “scandalous tome,” as Mrs. Fikes kept calling it. My grandmother had not only been appalled by my hijacking her order form but also by Mrs. Fikes's allowing me to read such a book. (“He's a precocious child, Jake. If we don't guide him in his precociousness, he's going to get into some real trouble, that's the way I see it. We'll just keep this a secret from Dot Ishee. She'll have a fit if he's not reading something on the approved list. And, God knows, this is not approved. I bet he won't even understand half of what's in that book.” My grandmother, against her better judgment, had acquiesced. “I guess it's okay,” she said. “Bless his heart, the only valley he's been an expert on up until now has been that yea-though-I-walk-through-the-valley-of-the-shadow-of-death one. Guess he's earned him a walk through this'un.”)

So it came to be, with her knowing how I'd had my nose stuck in that Jackie Susann book for days on end as I sunned myself on a chaise longue lawn chair out back, that she turned to let me in on this Lola piece of family gossip. “Yep, she was Benny's mistress before she was his wife,” Mom whispered that day. We were washing the dishes together yet again and we saw my aunt through the kitchen window lumbering down the road in one of those flowered house-dresses for another of her visits with us. The diminutive sounding term “mistress” seemed so ill-fitting for such a formidable woman as Lola, who carried what femininity she had as if she were a locomotive and it were the cargo she was delivering to the man who wanted it. He was nothing but the depot, as far as she was concerned, where she had to slow down and chug to a scheduled halt. “When Benny's first wife found out about him sleepin' round with Lola,” Mom kept talking and scrubbing at our cast iron cornbread skillet, “she sprinkled
some of her homemade pepper sauce on the outside of one of his rubbers.” She cut her eyes over at me, the way Pop would, I assumed, when he wanted to get a quick gander of her when she was wearing something blue. “Oh, don't look so shocked,” she said. “Ain't you readin' ‘bout stuff like that in that book about dolls? Even as a littler boy you was always findin' a way to play with a doll. Stealin' your sister's Chatty Cathy. Beggin' for a Barbie come that Christmas after your daddy was kilt in his car wreck. Guess this is just you fancy in' a doll again,” she reasoned out loud. I was so startled by this piece of Lola news that I didn't even have the presence of mind to let Mom know that the “dolls” in the book's title was a slang word for amphetamine pills. It wasn't only this piece of family gossip that was shocking me so, but also the fact that she was its bearer. It seemed as if my dead father had possessed my grandmother in that moment and she were channeling him, for this sounded exactly like a story he would tell to make my mother blush before they shut the bedroom door behind them. My grandmother checked the skillet for any greasy residue, then waved at my aunt who was turning toward us at the end of our gravel drive, that tawny-haired head of hers bobbing a bit as it always did atop her body as she trudged along. “Lola burned for a week from that peppered-up rubber,” Mom whispered.

I loved going up to Aunt Lola's and Uncle Benny's farm over in Harperville and hanging out at their fishing cabin next to their pond, or donning long sleeves in the summer heat to pick okra so its vines wouldn't sting my arms or, at the first nip of fall in the air, helping make syrup from the harvested sugarcane crop which had been hauled to one particular ridge where it was ground for its juice by a rigged-up combine, its clear sluice running down chutes toward the fishing pond and emptying into vats that sat atop roaring fires. I loved stoking the combine with those sugarcane stalks, but loved it even more when it was my turn to lead one of the plow mules that Uncle Benny had specially chosen that year for the syrup-making task. He
pretended it was a reward for the mule who had plowed the straightest row that year. He'd yoke a pole to the mule's back, which would then be attached to the combine and, by leading the animal round and round, it ground the gears in the most rudimentary fashion while expertly mashing the cane, the animal snorting out of dizziness or boredom or perhaps even equine pride while Benny grabbed a stalk or two of the cane to cut with his pocket knife into bite-size bits and hand around so we all could put them in our mouths like chaws of sweet tobacco. The gurgling vats would be skimmed of the cane scum that covered the cooked juice, and after the remains would be jarred and divvied up, we'd have the kind of syrup for our upcoming winter biscuits “that'll have such a kick to it it'll put hair on your chest,” Benny always promised.

One of my favorite things to do at their farm was to hang out on a shanty stoop with two of Benny's sharecroppers, Sister and Brother, who, despite such incestuously generic names, were not related except by marriage. At the end of the syrup-making day, Sister always had some biscuits ready down at her shanty so we could have the first taste of what our hard work had wrought. Sister was an African-American version of Aunt Lola—large and lovely, with bobbed hair and a troublingly enticing butch demeanor that attracted men to her “like white on rice,” which was one of her favorite expressions. Sister taught me how to shell Crowder Hull peas with my thumb alone and the right size a butterbean pod had to be before one should pull it from its vine. “Sister and Brother'll watch after him, if he can't take the work,” Lola said that afternoon back when I was still in fourth grade and she fixated on how her cotton-picking idea would rough out my smooth edges. “You think you're man enough to pick you a sack'a cotton, boy?” she asked me.

I have to admit, the idea intrigued me on many levels. I knew even then it had the makings of a story I could always recall to shock the friends I planned to have in New York City when I grew up. I also
knew that it would probably be one of my last chances to participate in such a Southern tradition because manual labor for such back-breaking work was being phased out. Uncle Benny's farm was one of the few that still relied on human hands instead of machinery to pick his cotton. And by the looks of the dilapidated old cotton gin we always passed on our weekly visits to my parents' graves in the Harperville Cemetery, I knew King Cotton was about to abdicate its throne in my world. Most important, however, I knew I'd get to see Matty May once more. She had quit working as our maid soon after my wicked-witch Halloween fiasco and after having not been invited to my mother's wake. I'm not sure if either or both of those factors were the reasons she and my grandmother had what appeared to be a falling out. All I knew is that I missed her desperately and that she and her husband, June, were part of the crew who picked cotton for Uncle Benny. Matty had once told me the stoop in her shoulders was caused by all the years she had worked those rows. “I'm m-man enough to pick me some cotton,” I told Lola, squaring her in my sissy sights. “Will M-Matty M-May be there?”

Lola looked over at my grandmother, who continued to inspect her pie crust. “Yeah. Matty'll be there. She ain't never missed a pickin' long as I've known her. I think she can forget about Martin Luther King and that crowd long enough to chop a row or two.”

“Do her good,” said Mom. “Do him some good, too,” she said, nodding over at me.

“Want m-me to tell her hi for you?” I asked my grandmother.

“I reckon you can do that,” said Mom. “Go ahead on and tell her hi all you want.”

My grandmother at first seemed nonplussed by the idea of my picking cotton. But as soon as she started sewing me a cotton sack to wear, fitting the lone strap attached to the sack across my chest so the sack's mouth would hang along the side of my waist in order for me to more easily deposit the picked cotton into it, she seemed even more
excited about the prospect than I did. It sure made her happier to whip me up a “pickin' sack” than that witch's ensemble the year before. The day I was to accompany Uncle Benny in his green pickup to his farm, I rose early and put on a white shirt and my favorite clip-on necktie. I had put on a tie because part of the family legend I had heard while listening to the grownups talk was about Uncle W. F. when he was Benny's overseer. W. F. was Pop's and Lola's baby brother. He had run Benny's cotton operation “back in the day,” according to Pop, “and he'd make them nigger men all wear shirts and ties to pick cotton. You talk about a bunch of mad niggers. But W. F. said they should dress like they was goin' to work, just like white folks. He wore him a necktie, too. Dangdest thing you ever saw when you looked out in them fields. High noon and neckties and niggers as far as the eye could see. Women in Sunday dresses. Some of ‘em in their Sunday hats. All of ‘em singin' that nigger church music cause they was dressed in their Sunday-goin'-to-meetin' clothes anyway. W. F. didn't last long in that overseer job.”

W. F. didn't last as long as Lola and Pop, either. He ended up committing suicide after moving from Neshoba County into a trailer between Lola and Pop so he could be closer to them when they all grew even older and alone, Mom having died of pancreatic cancer, Benny of “hardening of the arteries.” After getting divorced from a woman named Peggy with short-cropped bright red hair—he doted on the two stepdaughters he had with her—W. F. had lost all sense of direction. He always bragged to anybody who would listen that he knew exactly who killed Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, those three civil rights workers whose names everybody around me had memorized and could spout with seemingly the same urgency as “God, the Father, and Holy Ghost,” though that former trinity of names was spoken as if they encompassed the evil against which the latter could be invoked. The earthen dam into which the civil-righters' bodies had been buried was close to W. F's house. For a few seasons he
farmed a plot of land out there close to the dam, with black plastic spread over the ground and holes punched into the plastic where, he insisted, the shoots would sprout after he targeted the fertilizer there. He'd walk Pop around all that plastic and Pop would just shake his head and hold his tongue. Lola found W. F. with a gunshot wound through his temple, lying in his blood-splattered bathtub in that tiny trailer he parked, divorced and despondent, between Pop and her. “I know what I can do if I can't take it no more,” Pop would say years later. “I'm a diabetic,” he'd remind me. “I know how to give myself the wrong amount of insulin. I know how to do myself in. Just like W. F.” More than once I listened as he told me how he knew how to kill himself, yet, when he got tired enough, he died suddenly at an old folks' home. He keeled right over in his wheelchair by the reception desk. I've always wondered if his last thought was of W. F. Or Mom. Or me.