Mississippi Sissy (18 page)

My grandmother at first bucked at Matty's impertinence, her head jerking back with a start at the “just yet” Matty had used, the death of a daughter so implicit in the term. But then she calmed. She considered the suggestion. She continued to rub the marble tabletop, a gesture she would try to conjure after she had a stroke a couple of years later, when I'd watch her as she'd lift her right hand up there with her functioning left one and fight to feel the marble top once more, a memory of smoothness all that was left her. “Yes. Maybe we should leave it up to Nan,” said my grandmother. “That's a good idea, Matty. I could use some cake and coffee about now. Did you make coconut or lemon today?”

“You was out of coconut and I couldn't find no more lemon extract in the pantry so I went with the Duncan Hines,” Matty said. “Put pecans in the chocolate icin'. You want a piece, child? Put them pecans in there just for you. Matty knows how much you like to fancy stuff up with pecans. I'll cut you a extra big piece. You want one?”

I lifted myself into the chair next to them. I dried my eyes a little more. I nodded yes.

“Chocolate pecan cake it is, then,” said Matty and kissed me on top of my head. She went into the kitchen.

My grandmother stared over at me. She continued to rub the marble tabletop. “What are we gonna do with you, Arlene?” she asked, shaking her head. “I pray about that all the time after I get through praying about your mama. But I ain't got no answer yet. I think the Lord is near ‘bout puzzled by you as the rest of us are.” She stopped rubbing at the table and took off her glasses so she could rub at her eyes. “Pour me just half a cup of coffee!” she shouted to Matty in the kitchen. “That's all I need right now. My nerves is jangly enough as it is.”

________________

My mother gave her permission for me to go as a witch to the carnival. I knew she would once it was determined she would have the deciding vote. She was always encouraging my endeavors, no matter what they were, no matter how sissified. I could do no wrong in her eyes. Yet there had been one incident in which I was involved about which she did not approve at all. Only the month before, when I had started third grade in stern and staccato-voiced Mrs. Johnston's class, I had gotten in trouble for having a Little Miss Goldwater contest during recess. My grandparents were big Goldwater supporters; it was all they talked about leading up to the ‘64 election, when they weren't talking about my mother's health, her latest turn for the
worse or turn for the better. I had even gone into my grandmother's closet and retrieved a big golden bow she had saved in her Christmas bow box and secretly taken it to school to use as a Little Miss Gold-water crown. I had also conducted a poll as to which candidate, Johnson or Goldwater, the teachers and students and janitors and maids were rooting for. The big vote-getter for Little Miss Goldwater was a blonde named Diane O'Bannon whom everybody, girls and boys alike, agreed was the prettiest girl in class. Goldwater also won in a landslide. In fact, Johnson got only one vote and it was from Flossy, the elementary school's tall black maid who regally swept the hallways each day while she hummed her favorite hymns to herself. “Tryin' t'rustle me up some peace a'mind,” is how she put it when I had asked her why she was always humming.

Mrs. Johnston had overheard me that day asking Flossy about her choice of candidate and my subsequent berating of her for having the audacity to choose LBJ. Flossy, who up until that moment had always made a point of being nice to me, since everybody in town knew about my orphan-pending circumstances, flew into a rage at my questioning her vote. I thought she was going to hit me with her big push broom. Mrs. Johnston, hearing the overheated discussion, came out into the hallway and snatched my presidential survey from my hand and then marched me out to the playground to snatch the bow just as angrily off Diane O'Bannon's head where I had placed it with a flourish. Mrs. Johnston's accent wasn't soft and Southern like that of the rest of the adults I knew. My grandmother thought that her dead husband must have been a Yankee or Midwesterner and she adapted her cadence from him, it being “just a little too distant for my tastes,” my grandmother had said upon meeting her when she took time off from the hospital to register me for school that year: “Don't act right friendly enough, but that might be the Presbyterian in her.”

Mrs. Johnston, still clutching my Little Miss Goldwater bow in her fist, ominously told the class after we had settled in to our desks after
recess that there was a “ticking time bomb waiting to go off around us here in Mississippi and you children had better start behaving yourselves, especially around the colored help. They are entitled to their opinions. They are entitled to vote for whomever they want,” she said, staring right at me. “It's none of our business . . . and yet, well, it's everybody's business, I guess,” she said, confusing the class with such circuitous reasoning. Mrs. Johnston, her usual staccato voice becoming shaky, barely audible, seemed scared to find herself in such a place, in such a time. She had only one son, Ray, who was the quarterback on the high school football team, and he was slated to graduate. Listening to her warn us about the world in which we all lived, there in Forest, Mississippi, circa 1964,1 realized that she would soon be more alone than even I was. Instead of being mad at her for scolding me over my Goldwater behavior, I began to feel sorry for her. The year before, when President Kennedy was assassinated, the only two teachers who cried during the emergency assembly called by our principal, the brusque and Avon-deprived Miss Ishee, were my second-grade teacher, Miss Mills, too young to be an old maid but as yet unmarried, and Mrs. Johnston. I remember the other teachers pointing at them and whispering about their reactions. Eyebrows were cocked. Dry-eyed stares were curiously pointed their way. Within two years, no longer able to deal with the ostracism that began the day they had so openly displayed their grief at President Kennedy's death, both teachers moved away from Forest and headed for parts unknown in California, never to be heard from again. (Miss Mills added to the gossip by escaping with her widower next-door neighbor in the gleaming Airstream trailer parked in his drive.) “Some of your parents will tell you bad things about the civil rights movement,” said Mrs. Johnston that day of my Goldwater escapade, summing up her thoughts. “But the civil rights movement is not bad. It is how we choose to react to it that can be bad. Don't be bad, children. Mississippi is already full of enough badness.”

The next day Mrs. Johnston, asking me to follow her into the hallway, stopped Flossy after she had dropped off our pre-recess cartons of chocolate milk, the squeaking wheels on her milk cart always announcing her approach. She instructed me to apologize to Flossy. Miss Ishee witnessed what was going on and told me to hurry off to play before recess was through. Over my shoulder, I could hear her telling Mrs. Johnston that she had had some telephone calls from parents about her “little speech” the day before. I turned and saw her shaking her finger at Mrs. Johnston, who, we were told by Miss Ishee when she substituted for her the following week, “is home for a few days' rest. Remember that little speech she gave you boys and girls about colored folks? Well, whenever anybody talks about colored folks around you these days, you don't listen to them. It's nothing children should worry about. Colored folks don't have anything to do with reading and writing and arithmetic.”

I raised my hand. “Is Flossy at home for a few days' rest, too?” I asked, having not seen her and her push broom that day.

“Flossy doesn't work here anymore,” Miss Ishee said with her signature brusqueness.

If one Ishee weren't enough there was still another, the principal's look-alike younger sister who taught the requisite Mississippi History and Driver's Ed courses for the high school's incoming freshmen one building over, her own respective lesson plans full of Bilbos and turn signals and Choctaw chieftains. “Them two is sturdy women, them Ishee-or-ain't-she gals,” my grandfather once said, nodding his head in greeting after they had passed him in lockstep, their gait prideful, puzzling me at his turn of phrase as he chuckled to himself. Neither Ishee had married at that point, nor seemed to put much store in the institution. The younger of the two did, however, like people to think she was dating our district's congressman, G. V. “Sonny” Montgomery. I'll never forget the afternoon when I was old enough to take her Driver's Ed course that she told me to floor the
gas pedal in the Driver's Ed car and “blacktop the road” when an old African American man was crossing the street in front of me at the Rexall drugstore. “Go on, what you scared of, Sessums? Blacktop it,” said that Ishee-or-ain't-she, nudging me in my ribs. The other two Driver's Ed students in the back seat laughed at her joke but I blanched at its crudeness. “What's the matter? You don't think that's funny?” she asked me, her lacquered and overly teased hair unmoved by the balmy wind blowing in from her opened window on the passenger side of the car. “I keep forgetting,” she said, checking to make sure her hair wasn't moving. “You think you're better than the rest of us.”

Word had gotten back to my grandparents about my Goldwater antics and Mrs. Johnston's scolding. It was the talk of the town that September of 1964- My grandparents had even bragged to my mother in the hospital about it, but she was quick to tell them that it was nothing to be proud of. It was the one time I felt she was disappointed in me, and my liberal politics were undoubtedly born in that moment I looked into her disappointed face. “You know I voted for Kennedy,” she told my grandmother. “When will you face up to that? Seems like my cancer is easier for you to face than that.”

“My gracious, Nan,” said my grandmother.

“I told you I was going to vote for JFK when you kept sticking that Harry F'ing Bird and Strom Thurmond Dixiecrat literature under my nose. Can't believe you voted for those two awful fools. And I'm now an LBJ girl. If I'm still around come election day I'm checking off his name. You bet I am. ‘Well, hello, Lyndon, yes, hello, Lyndon, it's so nice to have you right where you belong!' ” she sang to the tune of “Hello, Dolly!,” her love of show tunes and liberals combining into the ditty that Carol Channing was singing on the campaign trail in those days. My grandmother's face turned ashen above her light-blue nurse's aide uniform. My mother, satisfied by the response she had gotten, then turned her attention back to me. “Kevin, honey,” she
said. “You have to admit that Little Miss LBJ has a more ALLITERATIVE ring to it. Do you remember what ALLITERATIVE means?”

“It's when two words start with the same letter,” I told her and watched her disappointment at my Goldwater antics at school disappear when I came up with the right answer. It wasn't just my love of liberalism that started that day at Lackey Memorial. Alliteration's allure also took hold.

________________

“You're not voting for LBJ are you, Matty May?” asked my grandmother when she and Matty were working on my witch's costume in the sewing room during those last few days before Halloween. “I couldn't stand the thought.”

“Naw, now, Miz Jake, you know Matty ain't never voted a day in her life,” said Matty May. “And ifen I could, ain't nobody I'd want to vote for ‘cepten two folks—Sidney Poitier and Jesus Christ.”

I sat under the Singer and tried to give my grandmother's foot an extra push in the ritualistic bit of sewing teamwork we had come up with over the years, but for the first time she kicked my hand away. Shocked, I stood next to the sewing machine waiting for the results of her work to be fitted on my ready body and watched as a raw fury overtook her. That foot of hers on the Singer's pedal became spastic with rage at her acquiescence in all this nonsense, at the continuing tragic turns of events in our shared life. Her right hand, always so steady when pushing the fabric through the slot where the needle did its woodpecker-like work, tremored with some sort of seismic knowledge that foretold how feeble it would one day become once a blood vessel broke inside her head and paralyzed her whole right side. I stared, in fact, at a blood vessel, which, in that moment, made its presence known on her flushing temple, a blueish worm that wiggled to the surface as if it were like the more earthly worms that my grandfather
helped Kim and Karole dig up from our backyard soil and send sailing on their fishing hooks out into our pond. She finished the witch's dress and cape and tossed them both over to Matty May to try on me. The dress zipped up perfectly and the cape was an added touch I wasn't even expecting. Matty had fashioned a golden witch's hat just like the one described in
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
on which she had drawn rubies and diamonds. She put it on me while my grandmother went into my father's foot locker, which contained his personal effects that my mother had saved after his accident, and retrieved his coach's whistle to put around my neck like the one that Matty mentioned was worn by the Wicked Witch of the West in the book I'd been reading to her. The whistle was attached to a long knotted shoestring from a discarded sneaker and it hung like a makeshift necklace toward my navel.

“Howard's gonna cuss so much with that filthy mouth of his once he looks down and sees you wearing this whistle with a dress that he'll have to leave heaven sure'nuff,” my grandmother said. “Saint Peter Hisself'11 give him a push.”

Matty coughed up a laugh at such a comment and they shared one of their conspiratorial giggles, which seemed to calm my grandmother a bit. Matty next handed me an umbrella like the Wicked Witch had carried around in order to complete the outfit, but even at age eight I knew that the secret to accessorizing was knowing when to edit. Too much added flair could kill an outfit. I handed the umbrella back. “Suit yourself,” said Matty. “All we need now is to go up to the Ben Franklin and get you a witch's wig and green face paint and you can use some of Miz Jake's leftover Avon to top it all off,” she said, our having decided to forgo the one-eyed look since we couldn't figure out how to disguise my own two. “You gonna be—ah-woe!—one fine witch, boy. Gonna scare all them other chirren at that carnival so bad they gonna be wishing there weren't no such thing as Halloween.”