Coming of Age in Mississippi (15 page)

When they had carefully pinned the crown to my hair, Mrs. Willis said, smiling, “Turn around, Queen, look at yourself.”

I pulled the stool out a bit. I was scared to look in the mirror now that they were all finished. But from the way Mrs. Willis was looking at me, I could tell that I must look pretty.

When I turned I had to touch my face to see if it was me. I sat there in front of the mirror for a good five minutes; I kept staring at myself, at my piled-up hair, my full breasts and wide hips—I realized that I was no longer a little girl. Then Mrs. Willis was tapping me on the shoulder, motioning that it was time to go. As I got up, I took one more glance at myself. Full figure, I seemed even less real. Seeing how perfectly the gown fitted, I thought of Daddy and wished that he could see me in it, riding down the main street of Centreville, Queen of Willis High.

As I stepped outside behind Mrs. Willis, the cold November
breeze hit my bare shoulders, sending a chill through me. But as I looked around and saw all of my classmates staring at me, I grew warmer. The boys stood gaping and oohing and the girls looked on enviously. Mrs. Willis was now walking beside me, smiling proudly. As we walked up to the crowd, she gestured with her hands, and they made a space for me to walk through. I felt like I was walking on a velvet carpet. Suddenly I saw the float, all covered with blue and white crepe paper. My whole court was there, waiting for me, the girls sitting in their white gowns and the boys standing behind them in their dark blue suits. As I walked up to them, Joe Lee, my escort, came forward to the edge of the float. I looked up and saw that he had tails on. I figured he must have gotten them from New Orleans too.

There was a chair that was being used by everyone to step up on the float. Just as I was about to do so, one of the big guys in my class who liked me rushed up to me and, sweeping me into his arms, whispered, “The queen deserves to be carried.” Then another guy, getting into the act, jumped up on the chair and I was passed into his arms and he carefully placed me on the float. Once I was seated with my court behind me and Joe Lee standing by my side in his tux, I felt more than ever like a queen.

As soon as I was seated, the floats started lining up behind the band. A few minutes later we were slowly moving toward town. As we turned the corner into Main Street, it looked like just about every Negro and white in Centreville had turned out for the parade. The stores were deserted and I saw salesmen I knew standing on the street. Everybody was waving and cheering. Then I saw Mama standing where she said she would be, in front of the service station. I waved at her and I could tell she wasn’t sure that it was me. Turning slightly, I found myself looking into a group of white faces. There was Linda Jean, staring like she didn’t know me either. She started to wave, but hesitated. Then I waved at her and she waved back, giving me a look that said, “My, how beautiful you are,” as if she was surprised that a Negro could look that beautiful.
I wanted to answer her and say, “Yes, Linda Jean, it’s me. Negroes can be beautiful too.” I got an urge to yell it to her but instead I just smiled and waved some more.

When the band reached the center of Main Street, they stopped marching and began playing. As they hit the first notes of “Dixie,” I thought I would die, especially when I saw some of the familiar white faces bellowing out the lyrics. There was one big fat man in the crowd that cracked up Joe Lee and the others on my float. He was so fat that every word sent his big pregnant-looking belly jolting up and down. I sat there for a while trying to keep my cool and not laugh and carry on like the girls behind me. But when he raised his arms and his pants fell under that big fat belly, I forgot I was queen. I just couldn’t hold in the laughter. He was so overcome with sentimentality for “Dixie” that he just let his big naked red belly shake, and every time it shook, we laughed harder and harder. “Dixie” seemed to have made everyone happy, Negroes and whites. After the band finished that tune they played a very fast one and the majorettes did their little steps. Then they tuned up and swung into “Swanee River.” It seemed like the whole town was singing now. As they sang I sat up there on that float and had the strangest feeling. Somehow I had chills all over my body and I was overcome by a sudden fear. The faces of the whites had written on them some strange yearning. The Negroes looked sad. I sat there wondering, trying to get some meaning from the song as I listened closely to the words:

There was something about “Swanee River” that touched most of those old whites singing along with the band. There was also something that made the old Negroes even sadder. I got a feeling that there existed some kind of sympathetic relationship between the older Negroes and whites that the younger people didn’t quite get or understand.

The feeling that the song conveyed stayed with me all evening, and I was cold. I shivered throughout the rest of the parade. That night, when I was crowned Homecoming Queen during half time of the football game, I felt even colder. As soon as the ceremony was over, I left for home. I felt like I was coming down with something.

Shortly after I was crowned queen, my name was changed. Graduation was approaching in May and Mrs. Willis had asked us to bring our birth certificates to her for school records. I found I didn’t have one. It had been lost with Junior’s and Adline’s when Junior set the house on fire. So Mama sent off to Jackson to get new copies for each of us. They came about a month later. But instead of one for Essie Mae Moody, they sent one for Annie Mae. Mama returned it even though all the information on it was correct but the name. Two weeks later she got it right back again—this time with a long letter saying there must have been some mistake during the original printing. She was told she could get the name changed for a small fee, but by this time it was only two weeks before graduation and Mrs. Willis had received all the certificates but mine. After much persuasion on my part, Mama decided to let me keep the name Annie. I was so glad, I had always thought of Essie as a name suitable for a cow or hog.

I shall never forget when I handed the certificate to Mrs. Willis and made my announcement: “Mrs. Willis, here is my
birth certificate. Mama said it’s too late to have it changed and to go on and use Annie.”

Mrs. Willis held the certificate up so everyone could see it. “Class! Class!” she called out. “Queen Essie is now officially Queen Annie.” When she said that I felt just like a real queen.

The changing of my name didn’t really make a difference at school or at home. The first day I carried the certificate to school, a lot of my classmates had teased me about it but they kept on calling me Moody as they had before. And at home I was still called Essie Mae. Mama insisted that it was “bad luck” to change your name. So she wouldn’t even let Adline them call me Annie.

A few days after I gave Mrs. Willis my certificate, we spent an entire day computing class averages to determine the scholastic rank of each student. Mrs. Willis told us it was now time to see who would be Valedictorian and Salutatorian. I hadn’t even heard those words before. But within minutes I had learned what they meant from the student sitting next to me. Automatically I looked over at Darlene. She sat there looking so confident. I began to wonder what had caused the change in her.

Mrs. Willis drew a small square on the board in the left-hand corner. Within it she listed the numerical equivalent for each letter grade. After she had done this, she went and sat in the back of the classroom. She then began calling us to the board five at a time.

Didn’t any of us know our final grades. But everyone in the class expected me and Darlene to be the Val and Sal because we had always maintained the highest averages. Most of the other students weren’t as interested in their own grades as they were in ours. So they just sat tense in their seats and waited for our averages to be determined. And the way Darlene sat there smirking, I was sure she knew she had finally beaten me. Had it been any other time I wouldn’t have
cared so much but for graduation … She would never let me live it down.

As the students returned to their seats from the board, they discussed their grades with their friends. And the room was getting very noisy. But when Mrs. Willis called Darlene’s name then mine, silence fell over the entire room. Now only Mrs. Willis’ voice could be heard calling out grades. And Darlene and I stood at the board sweating. She had been cool and seemed so sure of herself when she was in her seat. Now she was shaking. She was second in line at the board. She had all A’s and B’s when her grades were called. After hearing her grades, chills went all over my body. “If I get just one C or three B’s I have lost,” I thought. I was the last in line. When Mrs. Willis called my first grade, it was a B. My hand was trembling as I wrote it on the board: I didn’t even breathe until my last grade had been called. Discovering I had all A’s and B’s, I sighed with relief and heard the whole class sighing too. When I finished figuring out my average, I stood looking out of the window, afraid to even look in Darlene’s direction. Suddenly there was a lot of noise in the room and I heard someone whisper, “Darlene won.” I almost fainted. “What’s your average, Darlene?” called Mrs. Willis. Darlene almost shouted her 97. When Mrs. Willis got to me my 96 could barely be heard.

I went to my seat sick inside. “How did I let that happen?” I asked myself over and over again. I jotted down Darlene’s grades on a piece of paper and began adding them. But while I was doing this, someone shouted out, “Betty Posey got 98.” All the eyes in the room stared at the board. Betty stood there—gasping over her average. I looked at Darlene and saw her jot down Betty’s grades to add them as I had done with hers.

I didn’t even pick up a pencil for Betty’s grades. I just looked to Darlene for the answer. Then I saw some of the delight fade from her face. Betty had always been a pretty good
student but Darlene and I had not considered her a threat at all. We were in for a lot of surprises that day. Betty had won. She was the Val, Darlene the Sal, and I was to give the Welcome Address on Class Night. So it was and school ended.

That summer Mama succeeded in getting Raymond off to California to look for a job. I hadn’t believed she could ever get him out of that bottom, but somehow she did. For years his relatives in Los Angeles had been urging him to go out there, telling him he could easily find a job, but Raymond had wanted to try and make it as a farmer in Mississippi. Finally, after two years of bad luck with the farm, he gave it up. Now there was nothing else he could do.

In Centreville there weren’t any factories or sawmills that employed unskilled Negro men. The nearest mills were fifteen to fifty miles away in Woodville, Crosby, and Natchez. White businesses in town employed Negroes as janitors only, and there was never more than one janitor in any single business. The Negro man had a hard road to travel when looking for employment. A Negro woman, however, could always go out and earn a dollar a day because whites always needed a cook, a baby-sitter, or someone to do housecleaning.

Raymond stayed in Los Angeles for about a month. Within that time he wrote home twice. The first letter came about two weeks after he left:

The second letter came about two weeks later. It said:

Three days later he was back.

We were all disillusioned. Poor Mama was hurt some bad. All of her hopes for ever getting out of that bottom were gone. She had sat around the house talking about California the whole time Raymond was gone. “Y’all can go to school with white children and be real smart”; or “We are gonna git a real nice house out in California ’cause Raymond kin make more money,” or “Essie Mae, you kin make ten dollars a day doing housework.”

The future looked very dim for us. It seemed as though we were doomed to poverty and more unhappiness than we had faced before. Raymond was out of work again. And again our diet consisted of dried beans and bread. In addition to the lack of food and money, Mama was about to have another baby. She would soon be the mother of seven. She always chose the wrong time to have babies. It seemed as though every time we were encountering a streak of bad luck she shot up. One day you would look at her and she was flat and the very next day seemingly she was in labor and Aunt Caroline was being summoned to the house.

As usual when she was pregnant and times were hard she cried a lot. She cried so now she almost drove us all crazy. Every evening I came home from work, she was beating on the children making them cry too. Raymond couldn’t say a word without her biting his head off.

I was still working for Linda Jean during this family depression and contributed five of my six dollars to the cause. But that didn’t help very much. There were just too many mouths to feed, and soon even my six dollars wouldn’t be coming in. Mr. Jenkins had been building a house in the country for over a year and it was nearly finished. As soon as they moved I would be out of work. I looked forward to that time with intense fear. I began wondering what white woman I would end up working for next. The five I had worked for so far had been good to me. But I knew that all white women in Centreville weren’t good to their maids.

By the time Linda Jean was ready to move, Raymond had gotten together a few men and started dealing (cutting and hauling) pulpwood. He had picked up a ragged old truck somewhere and most of his money was spent on repairing it every day or so. But a little money was coming in—enough to buy food with, anyway. Now I would be able to take a week or two and look for a good job.