Mississippi Sissy (23 page)

Benny laughed when I showed up at his house wearing that clip-on tie which I had carefully chosen to match the beige “pickin' sack” Mom had made for me. I ignored his laughter; ridicule was, after all, the first rite of passage any Mississippi sissy had to master. We climbed into his pickup truck and I put on the seat between us the paper sack with the baloney sandwich and Fritos Mom had prepared for me. I placed my thermos full of iced Tang between my legs. Lola had made Benny some fried chicken and wrapped it up in aluminum foil. His thermos was full of Barq's root beer, he informed me after I told him what I had in mine. “Tang?” he repeated, the word itself tickling him. “Ain't that what them astronauts drink up in space where they don't belong?” he asked as he cranked up the truck and we headed for his farm.

Uncle Benny considered cotton a business and wasn't so sure he wanted his fields to be used as some sort of family playground. But he was by nature a deeply bemused man—more than Tang tickled him in some private way—and shrugged off any concern he might have of
my making his field hands less productive with my distracting presence. On the drive out to Harperville he warned me not to leave any of the cotton behind in their bolls so he'd have to send one of the hands back around to re-pick what I had left. He told me of the few times Jim had unsuccessfully attempted to pick cotton, all the while gently patting me on my leg like “Chunkin' ” Charlie had patted me that day when, speaking in code, he told me my mother had died. Benny's leg-patting, however, was habitual and it always ended up with his grabbing at your knee and saying, “That there's how the horse bites the apple.” When we pulled up to the cotton field he reached up from my appled knee and snatched that tie from my neck. “Give that thing here,” he said, wadding it up and stuffing it into one of the pockets on his overalls. “Them niggers out there is gonna be put off by a little upstart like you anyhow takin' cotton out of their sacks and money out of their pockets. Don't want ‘em laughin' at you, too, do you? Ain't nothin' worse than bein' laughed at by a nigger.”

We had pulled up next to a big flatbed truck into which all the cotton would be dumped at the end of the day. A scale was attached to the side of the truck where each sack full of cotton would be weighed and the pickers would be paid according to how much of the crop they had managed to pack into them. Uncle Benny's going rate was twenty-five cents a pound. I looked out in the cotton fields that lay down the hill from where he and I were parked. The workers were already busy bending over and moving along all those rows of bulging white bolls. A low hum filled my ears. At first it sounded as if the pickup's engine were idling, but I knew Benny had just turned off the ignition. I had watched him do it after pocketing my tie. So where was that hum coming from? Then it dawned on me: It was the murmur of the field hands out there—hymns sung in a kind of fevered cacophony from their collective past, conversations filled with the patois of their collective pain, an eked-out chuckle or two at their collective lot in life—a sound low and concentrated, keeping them
all focused at the task literally at hand as they reached over and over and over into those bolls and snatched the cotton free, gathering it up into huge black fistfuls of white fluff until it looked like what they were harvesting was not cotton at all, but something cumulous, heavenly, something God meant for man to reach for but not to carry around here on this earth. A wave of nausea rippled through me. What I was seeing was as beautiful as it was horrible. I was suddenly frightened to get out of the pickup. This was now the latest world in which I did not belong. What had I been thinking when I agreed to such an outlandish idea as this? Up until that point I had been proud of my “pickin' sack,” considering it the newest addition to my wardrobe. But staring out at the workers I realized how puny my little sack was. Theirs, even those belonging to children as young as I, lay as long as dragon tails down the many dusty rows. The very size of my sack proved I was not serious about this cotton-picking idea. Uncle Benny was right: This was just a lark to me and not, as it was for those out there in the already searing morning heat, a livelihood. I wanted him to re-crank his truck and take me back home.

And then I spotted Matty.

I jumped from the pickup and ran straight for her, my little sack flapping behind me like the one wing left on a wounded bird who still believed it could fly. Her stooped shoulders bent low toward the bolls as she muttered to herself those three syllables that had once been an incantation all her own but now seemed nothing but a curse as she, bending farther downward to the lower bolls, thrust it up from deep within her throat, each syllable accompanying the motion of her hands as they picked two bolls at a time. “Poi-ti-er Poi-ti-er Poi-ti-er,” she'd grunt and pick, keeping time to each grasp-twist-pull grasp-twist-pull grasp-twist-pull of the cotton until her hands could hold no more and she stuffed it all back behind her in her sack. I stood in the row waiting for her to look up at me. Her face was glistening. She glowered down at each boll that needed her attention. “Poi-ti-er Poi-ti-er
Poi-ti-er,” she continued to grunt. She was bent over so far now I could see down into her dress and noticed that she wore, as was her wont on such summer days, no bra, her breasts dangling before me. “My—ah-woe!—skinny ninnies,” she called them when she caught me staring at them one August morning as she bent down to get the newly washed laundry from the basket to hang out on the line in my grandparents' backyard. I handed her the clothespins and hurried her along so we could head into the kitchen and discuss not only her cake-making wisdom but also the importance of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. This was a conversation she made sure was whispered in case we were ever overheard, an intimacy much more profound than my having caught a glimpse of her nipples, so pointy and black they looked like the sharpened lead in my prized Berol Mirado No. 2 pencils.

I continued to watch her work the cotton. Her plaited hair was grayer than I remembered, strands of it almost as white now as the bolls she hadn't yet gotten to, the morning sun beaming down onto her scalp and causing rivulets of sweat to run down between the plaited rows into her eyes. She stood to wipe her brow and take a breath. She spotted me but she did not speak. Her eyes looked a little yellow in their hollowed-out sockets and reminded me—I had been too excited to eat breakfast that morning and my stomach now ached with hunger—of the last bits of banana pudding she would let me lick from the spoon after she would empty the mixing bowl full of the thickened concoction into the vanilla wafer crust. I longed to be back in that kitchen with her and not standing here in a dusty cotton row. I unbuttoned the top button of my shirt where it remained fastened because the tie had been clipped there beneath my collar. I could see Matty's tongue getting ready to say something, that busy way it had of running itself along her gums and the inside of her cheeks until it looked like “a critter, June say, tied up in a sack and about to git drownt.” She straightened her stooped shoulders as
best she could and held me in her gaze. Her tongue continued to try and free itself there inside her mouth but still nothing was said. I decided I would have to be the first to speak. “So, how y'dwine?” I asked, mimicking her old greeting, the dialect tripping off my tongue with a practiced ease since I had begun to use just such expressions when I wanted to make Mom laugh as we washed dishes together and kept watch out that window to see if Lola was coming our way.

It was the first time I had ever seen Matty May's old stooped shoulders straighten all the way up. She had never heard me use my dialectal expertise, and the authentic sound of it—a child's taunt, but a taunt nonetheless—seemed to strike her right in her sternum. She took a step back. “How you think I'm a'dwine?” she asked, her tone as pointed as the one she had summoned that morning when I had asked her in my bedroom if she'd seen Sidney Poitier win his Oscar and proceeded to use the N-word in her weary presence. “I'm a'pickin' cotton, ain't I?” she said, wearier than ever. “When a soul's a'pickin' cotton, child, it ain't got no time to think about
how
it's a'dwine. It's only got time to think about
what
it's a'dwine.
How
's a luxury out here in all this heat. A cotton field ain't no place a'tall for no
how.
Lawd be. How'm I dwine . . . hmmph,” she said and grunted in disgust at the affront of such a question. Her yellowed eyes looked up the hill at Uncle Benny leaning against the front of his pickup. He was staring down at us. His hand was feeling around inside that pocket where he had put my tie. I was certain he was wrinkling it and I would never be able to wear it again to church. The thought of him touching my tie disquieted me, just as Matty's next question did. “So how
you
dwine, Arlene?” she asked.

Matty May had been dead set against anyone calling me that when she worked for my grandparents. What was she doing calling me that name now? “I ain't Arlene no m-m-more,” I said and straightened the strap on my empty cotton sack as if, incongruously considering my
protestation, it were attached to a gown Arlene herself might be wearing on
What's My Line?
“I don't like folks calling me that,” I said, sticking to the lie I had chosen to tell my grandparents to make them feel better. “I ain't Arlene.”

“You never wuz, child,” Matty said, shaking her head. “You never wuz. What'chu got on there? That's a sorry excuse for a cotton sack. That thang won't hold but two bits' worth'a cotton ifen you lucky. What'chu up to out here? You gonna help old Matty pick cotton today? I swuny. I done seen it all now. Little sissy thang like you wantin' to get out here in this sun and chop cotton. What's the world a'comin' to? Was this Mr. Benny up yonder's idea?”

“It was Aunt Lola's and M-Mom's,” I said.

“Hmmph,” she grunted again and ruffled her sack back behind her, evening out the cotton already in it. I wanted to go lie down on it like the toddlers several rows over who used their mama's sack as a makeshift bed and were dragged along behind her on top of it while they napped. “Wonder what them womens was a'thinkin'—ahwoe!—comin' up with something like that—you pickin' cotton,” said Matty. “Can't rightly figure on that.” She wiped her brow again.

“They said it would cure me of the girl in me,” I told her.

Matty studied me for another moment. “Well, they be right ‘bout that,” she said. “I was fo' year old when I chopped my first cotton. Got the girl out of me f'sho. Weren't no little girl a'tall left in Matty at the end of that day. Naw, sir. Not enough to speak of no mo'.”

I reached for my first boll of cotton, but Matty May shouted for me to stop before I could yank it free. “You leave that alone, child. That's cotton for my sack, nobody else's, not even yo' no-count one,” she said. “You git on out of Matty's way. Don't you be takin' no cotton out of these rows right'chia,” she said, spreading her arms toward the ten or so rows around us. “These here rows is mine. Always is. Ever' year. These rows line up real good with them two oaks down yonder. Come ‘bout an hour from now I can catch me some shade down toward
them limbs. I need all d'quarters I can get from Mr. Benny today. June's birthday gonna be here d'rectly. You go on over yonder to Sister's rows. Or Brother's. Or some of them folks that showed up from Homewood I never seen hide-nor-hair of befo'. Mr. Benny keep lookin' down here at the two of us. Git. I got work t'do.”

Sister had overheard my conversation with Matty and motioned for me to come join her over in her section of the field. “Forget about Matty, baby. She's done got like that old mule Mr. Benny had that turned too mean t'plow. Don't know what got into that mule. Whatever it was is the same somethin' that done got into Matty. I wouldn't go standin' behind her, that's f'sho. Might get kicked.”

I turned and watched Matty May over in her rows huffing and puffing “Poi-ti-er” over and over, then started saying it myself as I tried to pick the cotton as best I could. “Poi-ti-er Poi-ti-er Poi-ti-er,” I said in Matty's rhythm, trying to approximate her very voice, as I pulled at the bolls. The cotton clenched inside them didn't want to budge.

“Harder than it look, huh, baby,” said Sister, who could pull five or six bolls free of cotton before I could empty out one.

After about an hour of the strenuous work I walked up the hill and asked Uncle Benny if I could take a break. He looked at me up and down and didn't appear bemused at all. “I'm gonna tell you the same thing I told Jim when he pulled this same shit on me back when he tried to pick. You can stop, but if you stop you ain't goin' back down in them fields. If you pick cotton with the niggers then you pick it just as same as them. Nigger rules is your rules. No stoppin' till lunch. Then no stoppin' till them sacks is full. Quicker you fill ‘em up, quicker you stop. Your choice. You near ‘bout had enough?”

I stared right back at him. My shirt was drenched with sweat. Must everything be a choice? I thought. Why do grownups make everything a choice? I wanted my tie back but was afraid to ask him for it. “Hmmph,” I said, trying some of Matty's indignation on for size. I headed back down the hill toward the fields. “Fooled me, boy,” I
could hear Benny back behind me. “Nigger rules, then, it is for you. But best be careful,” he said. “Jim did the same thing. Turned on his little Miss Priss heels just like you did. Far as I can tell, he's been playin' by nigger rules ever since.”

By lunch I had barely filled up half my sack. I was surprised at how easily the cotton scrunched down on itself and how tightly it could be packed, so tightly that it seemed I could never get it to reach the top. Benny would walk through the rows and use a blunt-headed instrument to stick down into the sacks of the field hands who didn't even break a stride or miss a yank as he made sure the cotton was stuffed deep down into those already seemingly overstuffed sacks, making room for even more. After his third trip through the rows with that cotton-packing stick, he called a lunch break. I looked over and saw Matty slowly heading toward the shade those twin oaks offered her. From one of her pockets she handed June something wrapped in a napkin—his lunch, I surmised—as he passed her and walked on over to the row where all the men had gathered around Brother. The women, except for Matty May, made their way to sit in circles around Sister. They called their children to them. Matty, alone, unstrapped her cotton sack and sat down atop it under the oaks to gnaw at a stringy fried chicken wing she unwrapped from another napkin she had stuffed into the other pocket of her dress. I went to Benny's truck and got my sack lunch and thermos and decided I'd try and join her for a bit. “W-w-want some Tang?” I asked, knowing she couldn't turn down such an offer. I unscrewed my thermos and handed it to her. She took a giant swig and wiped her mouth. “Good, huh,” I said. “Can I sit d-down?”