Mississippi Sissy (27 page)

My book report on
Valley of the Dolls
was due on April 5th. I remember that date so precisely because I was putting the finishing touches on it the night before while I was watching Chet Huntley and David Brinkley talk about Martin Luther King being killed only a few hundred miles north of us in Memphis. The next day, when I arrived for Mrs. Fikes's class, my fellow students, parroting their parents, no doubt, were giddy with the news of King's death. Mrs. Fikes told me to shut the door because the school's maid, Flossy's more circumspect successor, might hear the celebration going on around us. It was in front of a room full of all that repressed redneck delight—more obscene than any prurience Jackie Susann could come up with—that I read to them about Jennifer and Neely and Anne. I saved my most inspired prose, however, for that battle-ax, Helen Lawson, who could belt out a Broadway tune. As an example of what a Broadway tune was, I belted out bits of “Comedy Tonight.” I then held up a container of one of my grandmother's prescription medicines, which I had pocketed on the way out the door that morning, and explained to the class that “dolls” were pills. A girl in the back row interrupted my recitation: “Well, that's just dumb.” The last lines of my book report? “God forgive m-m-me. I have sinned. I have read
V-Valley of the D-D-Dolls.”
Mrs. Fikes gave me an A.

________________

King's assassination, followed by Robert Kennedy's a couple of months later, and the reactions of those around me to both, hastened my desire to escape Mississippi. It is hard to describe the fear and disgust I felt when witnessing others' elation over the deaths of those two men. I was not yet thirteen but grew up immeasurably during the spring and summer of 1968. If my parents' own deaths had deepened my perception of the serendipitous nature of life, the deaths of King and Kennedy expanded it to include a concept of cruelty much greater than that needed for the utterance of the sissy epithets that I had had to suffer up until that point. Kim and Karole and I were visiting Aunt Gladys and my father's extended clan when RFK was shot. My father's brother, J. D. (short for Joy David), was visiting from Augusta, Georgia, with his wife, Pauline, and their two children, Janice Kay and a lanky son called Little Joy. Aunt Gladys's husband, Dallas, reeking as usual of liquor, was home from working on another oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and their teenage daughter Glenda, a Hinds Hi-Stepper, was pouting in her room listening to an album by the Mamas and the Papas.

Aunt Drucy, my father's mother's sister and a honky-tonk proprietress from way back, was sitting sharing her Lucky Strikes with J. D. and watching the news of the RFK shooting on television. Their cigarette smoke filled the living room as Uncle Dallas whooped with delight at the announcement that Kennedy was officially dead. The others began to clap, but they all became surly when ABC cancelled plans to air some baseball game they had hoped to watch. “Both nigger-lovin' Kennedys and that bastard Martin Luther King!” Uncle Dallas hollered and scooted to the edge of his recliner to get a closer look at the television, one of the few times I ever saw him rouse himself to sit straight up. “We're gettin' ‘em all. Them Yankees may have whupped us back yonder all them years ago, but we showin' ‘em now. Hot damn!”

Aunt Drucy pulled on her Lucky Strike and wanted to know if anybody still wanted to go with her to the VFW hall to play bingo as Glenda turned up her stereo to drown out all the commotion, Mama Cass singing “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” Kim and Karole divvied up the butterscotch candy Aunt Drucy had given them after she dug around to find it in the big purse she always kept sitting in her lap, her elbows propped on it as if she were protecting whatever was in it besides the butterscotch. I saw a pearl-handled pistol in there once when I went snooping for some candy of my own. “This don't change nothin',” Aunt Drucy said, staring at the television and motioning with her cigarette lighter for Dallas to turn it down. “Y'all all crazy if y'all think this does. I even found out the other day that Louella is a member of the NAACP,” she said, referring to her cook up at the latest honky-tonk cafe she owned on Terry Road in a rough section of Jackson. “Had a good mind to fire her on the spot, but that's the times we live in. NAACP or not, she can still make the best breaded veal cutlet I ever put in my mouth and veal cutlets is my bread-and-butter at the cafe. That, along with that shuffleboard table I put in when Toy told me to. He said our cut of the silver it took to play the thing would add up. He was right. That's my bingo money tonight.”

Toy was Drucy's husband, who had one glass eye and scared the daylights out of me when he stared at me with his one good one. Like Dallas, he always smelled as if someone had doused him with something cheaper than Dewar's. He married Drucy when she was fourteen and, childless, they had spent their lives around jukeboxes and blue plate specials. A story they liked to tell was about the time they owned a cafe at 313 West Capital Street back during World War II, when a soldier on leave and bivouacked at the old Jackson airport was shot dead at the place during a drunken scuffle. Drucy didn't want the police to be called so she had some customers dump the body in a barrel of discarded cooking grease in the alleyway, to be found in the morning by the garbage collectors. “No need to interrupt
business,” she had said. “We're having a good night.” For years she and Toy had a big old rambling boardinghouse down West Capital from that lethally boisterous juke joint and one of their favorite boarders was a man named “Crooked Joe,” not because of any dishonesty on his part but because he had broken his back in his youth and walked around completely bent at the waist so that his torso was parallel to the ground. “But if you put him up behind a steerin' wheel, it was a right nice fit,” said Drucy, who enlisted Joe to chauffeur Toy and her to Vegas on several occasions when they wanted to gamble on bigger games of chance than bingo. “Come on, y'all. I want to get a good table close to the caller and pick out my cards before the VFW gets too crowded,” she told the rest of the clan who still sat transfixed by the RFK news, having quickly forgotten about the cancelled baseball game. “Them folks at the VFW is gonna be all worked up with this latest Kennedy rigmarole same as y'all. I can snag my favorite cards while they're all a'goin' on about it. Gonna win me that final blackout card jackpot and buy them two over there some more butterscotch.”

Pauline sipped some iced tea out of one of the Dixie cups she always brought with her on her family's visits from Augusta. She was a secretary at the Dixie cup factory there and she made sure to keep Gladys supplied in boxes of the product. She touched her overly teased hair. “Janice and J. D. want to go with you, Aunt Drucy. But I'll stay here with Little Joy in case the baseball game comes on,” she said.

I stole a butterscotch from Karole's pile. She complained but I put it in my mouth before she could snatch it back.

Mama Cass, muffled now behind Glenda's slammed door, continued to sing.

“Hot damn!” said Dallas once more at the television set.

Drucy lit another Lucky.

________________

The deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy politicized me even more than my mother's look of disapointment at my Little Miss Goldwater shenanigans four years earlier. That summer I stayed glued to the television during coverage of Nixon's nomination at the Republican convention in Miami and the riots that overtook the Democratic convention in Chicago, when “Chessy Cat” Humphrey, as my grandmother liked to deride him, won his party's nod. I couldn't get enough of the fiery speeches and the newscasters' commentary during both events. (Mom and Pop were, of course, George Wallace fanatics during the presidential campaign, having mourned his wife Lurleen's death from cancer that May with almost the same intensity that they had my mother's.) Those political conventions—Mom kept shaking her head at my interest in them—were even more entertaining to me than the Barbra Streisand concert in Central Park that aired after Labor Day, and, let me tell you, that was a transfixing experience of another sort for a sissy child who was busying himself with making cultural choices all his own.

The year that followed was filled with images from a rock festival in a place called Woodstock and a landing on the moon by a preppy-looking guy named Armstrong on whom I had another of my secret crushes. Hurricane Camille hit the Gulf Coast.
Easy Rider
opened.
Hee Haw
began, and
The Brady Bunch
and
Marcus Welby, M.D.
Jack Kerouac died. So did John Kennedy Toole. I'd sit on the pot every morning before heading off to school and think about my draft number. I'd wait to wipe my ass and read about Vietnam in the
Clarion-Ledger,
Jackson's morning daily thrown onto our gravel drive at dawn, and wonder if I were old enough, what I would do if that draft number were called. On the bottom right-hand page of the
Clarion-Ledger/Jackson Daily News
one Sunday morning, I read the same story about the Stonewall riots over and over and over and over, though Judy Garland (the story said she had died) was still just Dorothy to me in
The Wizard of Oz.
In eighth grade a whole new decade started and everyone around me was
glad to see the sixties disappear completely. I played football and ran back kickoffs and interceptions for touchdowns and played first-string guard on the basketball team and hated every minute of it, especially when I made a great play and was cheered from the stands. I felt like an impostor. I did not want cheers. I wanted recognition of a different sort. I wanted respect of a deeper kind. I continued to watch
Ironside
with Mom on Thursday nights and let her go on about how wonderful Raymond Burr was (a sexual fellow traveler of mine, I would discover later in life). I saw
Patton
and M.A.S.H. at Saturday matinees at the Town Theater but not
Midnight Cowboy.
I grieved for the students killed at Kent State and, a week later in Mississippi, at Jackson State, while I listened to Simon and Garfunkel sing “Bridge over Troubled Water” and next put the needle down on Neil Young's nasal plaint of “oh” and “lonesome” and “me.” Most important, back in 1970, I read two first books by women I would come close to worshiping. Maya Angelou's I
KnowWhy the Caged Bird Sings
spoke to me in a voice that took what I heard out of the mouth of Matty May and molded it into poetry, into magnificence. And Toni Morrison's
The Bluest Eye
I found myself reading aloud in my backyard under that tree where my grandparents and I had sat after my mother's funeral. As I heard my voice reading Morrison's words, I hoped my dead mother could hear me and understand how someone had rightly replaced Katherine Anne Porter in my life. “Pecola,” I'd mutter over and over the name of the book's main character to myself, just as Matty muttered “Poitier,” both names metered with the same rhythm and weighted, for me, with the same aural wonder, the same importance, each imbued, as a word, with a noble mien, ever nuanced, never simple. “Pecola Pecola Pecola . . .”

But none of these things proved as significant to me as Billy Graham and his crusades. In 1969 and 1970, they were televised, respectively, from New York and London. I had reached a point in my life around the seventh and eighth grades, as my teenage years approached, when the difference I was feeling had become oppressive.
My grandmother knew I was struggling. Her solution? More church. More prayer. More preaching. The Billy Graham crusades broadcast over Channel 12 fit right into this remedy of hers, which, with Graham's presence, had become a rather homemade one since he was right there in our living room. My deep-seated differences—sexual, political, cultural—were no longer ways for me secretly to revel in my superiority. They had begun instead to chafe at my soul. I was primed therefore to answer Graham's altar call one night from New York's Madison Square Garden when he turned to the camera as if speaking directly to me, though it was Ethel Waters, yet another black woman demanding attention be paid, singing “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” at that same crusade who first convinced me to believe that His eye was also on me and that I was finally truly seen. “Every word that you speak,” Graham intoned after Waters's wobbly yet piercingly beautiful solo, every one of her syllables carefully pronounced as she approximated their every note, “every thought, every intent,” continued Graham, “everything that you ever did in the dark, everything that you swept under the rug, everything that you thought
had been hidden,
will be brought to light . . .” That night, I listened as his North Carolina drawl—so much more soothing, more proper, than the hick-encrusted accents I had grown up around in Mississippi—told the congregation at the close of his sermon to “come now, don't
lingah,
you up at the top sections—
come,
your friends and family will wait, we will pray with you and give you some
lit-tra-toor,
come now, come, come,
come.”
Cliff Barrows, Graham's musical director, began to lead the choir in the invitational hymn, “Just As I Am.” If I had been in New York in those top sections I would have gotten out of my seat, just as I was, and headed down toward the makeshift altar. I would not have lingered. But there in my house in the Mississippi countryside I did not move from the couch where Mom sat beside me as she sang every lyric of “Just As I Am” from memory, a miracle in itself, I remember thinking, because she had only recently suffered her
stroke and was more than forgetful. She was enfeebled. I reached out and held her newly crippled hand. “Come, come, come,” Graham intoned. I continued to sit completely still and listened to my grandmother making her way through every verse of that hymn, her voice in its post-stroke state even more wobbly than Miss Waters's. Graham insisted: “Come.” Though I did not move from my seat, I did silently pledge to live a better life. But was I giving that better life to Christ, as Reverend Graham insisted I must? Was I, in that moment, being born again? Was such a thing even possible? Or was it all just spiritual claptrap? Mom's crippled hand grasped mine as best it could, as if I were the paraffin the physical therapist had so often poured into her palm, so she could try to shape me now inside that fist she could not quite yet form. “Just as I am, though tossed about with many a conflict, many a doubt,” she sang, finding the words somewhere within her. “Fightings and fears within, without. O, Lamb of God, I come. I . . .” “Come,” said Graham. “Come, come.”