History Lessons

by Clifton Crais

  They lived in a trailer at the back of a house in Gulfport that belonged to Pat, the woman our father was seeing. Dad had met Pat through my oldest sister Susan, who dated and then married Pat’s son Joe. Pat had been a vaudeville performer from southern England. During the 1930s she toured Germany while the Nazis rose to power. She came to America with her husband; they were on their way to Hollywood to make it big in the “talkies,” they assured themselves, leaving the dreariness of bombed-out London for Los Angeles’s promised light. But Pat’s husband died. She never made it out West. With the few dollars she had in her purse she bought a little bit of property in Mississippi next to the train tracks, took a job as a telephone operator for Southern Bell in Gulfport, and showed anyone who asked how to Charleston.

  No one talks much about this period in our father’s life, including Joe and Susan. My other siblings aren’t able to offer much information. Divorce and familial crisis jumbles the expected flow of time, making it hard to assemble an ordered story of anyone’s life. But I wonder if behind the silences lay something else. Postmarks and legal correspondence reveal my father living in Mississippi around the time of the divorce, and that he was already involved with Pat. Their relationship had begun in the late 1950s when my parents lived on the Gulf Coast and Joe and Susan had begun dating. Mom was drinking heavily. She also had grown attracted to a younger man, a teacher in an English class she took at night, though the experience left her feeling bereft. Nothing but an alcoholic rage could flow into the spaces deep inside her that had been hollowed out by years of taking care of children and a marriage that never lived up to its early promise. Mom railed at Dad’s long history of broken employment and his saccharine pledges of a better job next time. Dad drifted away. I do not know when he and Pat started sleeping together, but it seems clear that our father was having an affair while our mother’s life was falling apart.

  I visited once for a short while during the school year. The documentary record tells me I was in first grade. I want to say it was the fall, perhaps October, after the Southern heat had broken and the light had become a littler clearer, a bit more pure. It was a few months after my father had pleaded with the court to grant him custody. Kinta tells me we slept in the trailer. I try imagining what the days were like. Kinta was at St. Joseph’s Catholic school in Gulfport, and the adults were at work, so I was alone most of the day. Decades later I stand watching diesel engines with their tanks of toxic chemicals rumbling through the stands of pine trees. The smell of the sulphurous rocks conjures an image of my waiting for the trains to pass, sitting on the gleaming tracks that were nailed to wooden ties blackened with creosote. For a moment I can see my childhood self balancing a penny on the track, looking for it after the brown caboose disappeared into the pine trees, finding it flattened smooth and shiny.

  I am driving along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, heading east from New Orleans. Highway 10 whisks you through the northern parts of Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian, Gulfport, and Biloxi. Billboards summon drivers to the casinos. There are concerts to hear, food to eat, and, most important, money to win. A woman smiles down at me. “Letisha won $20,000. Next Exit.” Strip malls turn into a concrete and plastic blur before the interstate dips into a forest of pine and swamp.

  Most everything along the highway seems perpetually new, as if the architects and urban planners figured out a way to erase history. It is now impossible to tell that Hurricane Katrina devastated this area. To see the hurricane’s destruction you have to go inland a few miles to Old Route 90, known to locals as Beach Drive. The road began in the colonial period as a small trail, connecting the various coastal towns whose inhabitants mostly lived by scraping the sea bottom for oysters or dipping nets into the Gulf for shrimp. The storm leaped across the road and tore down one house after another, leaving behind front stairs and foundation pads. A decade later you can still see heavier personal items peeking through the dirt, a spoon or a pot or some other shard from someone’s life.

  In the years after the storm the Biloxi county government worked out of a trailer. The public library was in a trailer too. The storm exacted a terrible human toll. Families cracked apart. The divorce rate skyrocketed. The death rate increased as well. Quite a number of the elderly simply gave up living, as if they had said, Enough is enough. The casinos were the first to return, rebuilt far more quickly than homes. I drive up to one casino, read the billboard for the next concert. There is a competition to win a brand new house. I wonder if any of those displaced by the hurricane thought of taking the chance.

  I cross over the St. Louis Bay Bridge and drive through Pass Christian. A few people have parked their cars and are playing in the water. The sand is a radiant white, the gray flat waters of the Gulf of Mexico ghostly still. I take a left turn, drive a few blocks through the ruins heading east on Second Street, looking for the old house, hungry to remember that summer of 1967 when I joined my father and siblings in Mississippi.

  Nothing comes of these wanderings. Even when I think I have found the house, doubt creeps in, and no new memories follow. Nonetheless, I take photographs and jot down a few notes, adding them to the archive of my self, hoping that by some magical transubstantiation they will turn into personal memory. It’s an article of faith we amnesiacs have. By chance or by effort our pasts will return. The gap will be closed between what is ours but lost and the world that holds our traces. This archive will be my remedy, I tell myself, the place outside me that will fill in the empty spaces.

  There is enough information to get a sense of my father’s life in Mississippi in the mid-1960s and to imagine the time my siblings and I spent there. My father found a new good job, perhaps the best job he ever held, at the Stennis Space Center in Hancock County on the other side of the bay. In April 1966, NASA had begun the first static test-firing of the Saturn V rockets that would take Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon. NASA tested the rockets late at night or in the early morning hours before sending them along Highway 10 on the slow ride east to Kennedy Space Center. I have an image—not a memory, more of a feeling, even a fantasy—of the rocket engines strapped down like some primordial beasts and the earth shuddering against their fury. Outside my bedroom, branches sway and pecans tumble to the ground and heroes whirl through the cosmos.

  The Space Age brought good steady jobs to an area that mostly relied on fishing, tourism, and Keesler Air Force base in Biloxi. Dad worked out of a trailer doing the books for a NASA contractor. He was single again, divorced from Mom, and no longer shacking up with Pat. He found a small rental house a half a mile from the beach and set back from the road on a huge plot of land filled with pecan trees and dappled light and shadows that seemed to go on forever. From the nearby pine forest marched the evening chitt-chitt-chitt of crickets, and in the summer, after a thunderstorm had cleaned the air, fireflies turned on and off, obeying some inscrutable commandment. There was a kitchen in the back, and in the front a generous screened-in porch in which to while away the time. The house was clean. Once a week a black woman swept and mopped, hung out the laundry, made the place neat and ordered. We had an old three-legged dog, Chester, that chased squirrels and one day disappeared into the forest.

  I like to think that for a while at least we were children again, or perhaps children finally, and that the world scarcely extended beyond the beach a few blocks away. Gus had managed to go part of the way through high school in New Orleans, living on his own in a beat-up apartment. Mississippi offered a reprieve of sorts. He hid himself in broken-down cars suspended on cinderblocks and surrounded by Craftsman wrenches and sockets scattered on the ground like the bones of some torn-apart carcass. When Gus wasn’t working on a car he was out on the Gulf fishing, returning at twilight sunburned and content. My brother was happy out on the water and in the evenings driving fast on Mississippi’s straight roads, or at least happier than he had been for a very long time. He could try forgetting for a moment what he had endured in New Orleans and the war that was taking one friend after
another to Vietnam.

  In 1967 Kinta was fifteen, with an innocent face and a body that suggested an experienced woman. In the summer months she headed to the beach, unfurled a blanket and coated herself in Coppertone cocoa oil. She turned dark and lustrous. Once she fell asleep on her raft and floated out with the tide more than a mile before some fishermen rescued her. She was a beauty queen and a cheerleader. Boys simply couldn’t stay away from her. She spent a lot of time on the beach, making out around bonfires—good, clean, late-1960s teenage fun, she tells me now, kissing, letting boys feel her breasts, sometimes even heavy petting, but never real sex. Dad would be asleep in the front room when she got home from a date. Kinta would tiptoe past him, change the clock from midnight or one o’clock in the morning to ten-thirty, and, once he went to bed, sneak in again and return the clock to the proper time.

  Kinta and Sabrina always had been close, but in Mississippi they could be lazy, lounging out on the beach, going to the pool, whiling away time, a hiatus of sisterhood, for Kinta a final pause before womanhood.

  Kinta often reminds me that she taught me how to swim; she says it so often that I have created a memory of what happened. Or is it a fantasy?

  Go ahead. Jump in. Come on. I’m right here. I’ll get ya.

  I am standing at the edge of the pool. I can see Kinta’s legs kicking outward. Her hair is long, black, the ends curling in the bluish water. She is smiling and teasing me, but only gently.

  Come on. I’m right here. I’ll get ya. Jump.

  I feel the water, clean and cool against the sun on my back in summer’s still heat. I try to keep my head above the water, but I feel myself going under. Then two hands grab hold of my chest and push me upward. Panic turns to glee. Kinta brings me to the edge so I can climb out, do it again. I do this until my knees are raw, climbing out, running around, jumping, being caught, until I realize I’ve not paid attention. I am in mid-air, and Kinta isn’t there. I tumble into the water. I look up. Light shimmers, images split into a thousand pieces, until my head breaks the surface. I flail at the water but manage to move, until I reach the edge, pull myself out, realize I can swim.

  On weekends we went fishing and crabbing. Dad bought cane poles, crab traps, and chicken necks and shrimp for bait. We drove out to the Bay St. Louis Bridge. We mostly caught catfish and croakers and the occasional trout, but sometimes we came home with enough crabs to boil in a pot seasoned with a bag of Zatarain’s. In the evening we would sit out on the porch picking crabs and eating cold watermelon sprinkled with salt, listening to the crickets and watching the fireflies.

  My sisters sprayed Aqua Net into their hair and talked about boys. Gus had become a man who worried about a faraway war and carried the injuries of being an adolescent amidst our mother’s insanity. I was the odd kid out, but in Mississippi it was the closest I would ever be with my siblings. We were children again, for one last time. Pass Christian seemed eternal. The Gulf’s muddy salt air drifted through the trees and settled on our porch. Raindrops tapped on the metal roof. We collected pecans and spent hours on the porch cracking nuts and chasing one another through the house, slamming the screen door, squealing with laughter. The white badminton cock sailed through Sunday afternoon skies.

  I came down with a bad case of measles. I don’t remember when it was exactly, but it was sometime in winter when men were out hunting rabbit, squirrel, and duck, when on clear days the sky turns a cotton candy blue. I took the big front room where my father usually slept. The blinds were pulled, the room darkened. From the windows and the door that my father kept closed, thin lines of light turned the old yellow pine floor to shades of deep golden brown.

  Sometime that week my mother arrived. She placed a cool compress across my forehead. I imagine her sitting there in the darkened room in a chair near the wall. At times I think I wondered if she was even really there, or if I was dreaming. I do not know where she slept the night, nor did I ever hear my mother and father talking, but I was faintly aware that somehow my parents were together, and that they shared a concern for me, their son.

  It must have been in the spring of 1967, and it must have gone something like this. They arrived straight from the courthouse. This is Dorothy, my new wife, Dad announced. Dorothy smiled, cordially, went to the bedroom, and unpacked her bags. It was as simple as that. This is how things were with Dad. He lived by quiet proclamation.

  Dad met her through Pat, the woman he had been seeing around the time of my parent’s divorce. Jeanette, Pat’s daughter, was married with two daughters of her own. Dorothy was Jeanette’s mother-in-law. Jeanette drowned when her car tumbled from one of the bridges between Gulfport and Bay St. Louis. Dad went to Jeanette’s funeral. Dorothy was there, and so were my sister and her husband. There was a reception at Pat’s house, where Dad met Dorothy for the first time. They started dating soon after and married within a few months. The divorce came two years later.

  Dorothy despised the house. It was old and dirty, too much in the woods, too uncivilized. We moved to a small subdivision away from the beach, a typical 1960s planned neighborhood of nondescript ranch houses deposited alongside a cement road that curled about for no particular reason. There was a clothesline on the side and a chain-link fence enclosing a flat square of grass, and inside there were suburban amenities like air-conditioning, Formica counters, and a low minimalist couch and glass coffee table opposite a television.

  My sisters called her “Dorothy the Witch.” Dorothy got rid of us one at a time. Gus went first. I was next. Dorothy considered me repellant, deviant. Evidently I played with myself. “He has to leave, now,” she told Dad. By September I was back in New Orleans. Kinta she both envied and detested. Dorothy accused Kinta of being lascivious, but when my sister was not around Dorothy tried on her bikinis, especially the pink one. Dorothy would sun herself in the small backyard, wearing the bikini as if it might somehow replenish her youth, and in the evenings she giggled and laughed as she and my father made love in the shower. By Thanksgiving, Kinta had returned to New Orleans. Only Sabrina, then just becoming a teenager, remained behind. Soon the three of them headed west for Southern California.

  “It was like the end of an era,” Kinta says. She had been away from New Orleans for nearly three years living with our father, often just the two of them, a child’s dream come true. She had thought he would be like the prince of her childhood dreams, providing the protection she had never had in New Orleans—a parental shield strong enough to allow her to venture safely into adulthood. Now another woman had come between them, and worse, had tried to become her. Kinta could imagine Dorothy peeling off her pink bikini and frolicking with Dad in the shower.

  Kinta didn’t want to return to New Orleans. She loved Mississippi, the warm Gulf upon which she floated away the summer days. Kinta had just begun tenth grade, not yet sixteen, and was a basketball cheerleader. A boy was crazy about her. But there was no choice. Dorothy hated her. Kinta fastened a dress to the inside of her jacket, stuffed pockets with underwear. Her boyfriend drove her to the Greyhound Bus station. Kinta was back in New Orleans by the end of the day, and Dad did nothing to bring her back.

  Kinta entered Fortier High School and took a job downtown at Maison Blanche. Work and school and friends kept her away from the apartment, kept her away from Mom’s boozy ranting and all the jealousies she hurled at her daughter. Kinta left the apartment as soon as she graduated, enrolling at the University of New Orleans and working a few nights a week at the Playboy Club in the French Quarter. Management made her pay for the white cuffs, the black bow tie, and the blue satin outfit. In the dressing room Kinta sat with the other bunnies in their black stockings, curling hair, smoothing make-up, and drawing their Maybelline eyes.

  Kinta liked exciting the men, protected by the strict rule that they could look but not touch. She learned how to do the bunny dip while serving drinks so that customers could enjoy her young body as they traced the dark line between her breasts. She watched their eyes turn liquid and wistful
and hungry. The tips they offered brought her closer. She could smell the tobacco and the sweet Manhattans on their breath, and see their eyes falling across her olive skin. The Bunny Mother promoted Kinta to a costume of red satin and to playing bumper pool in the Playmate bar, where she learned how to lean over the pool table so that her breasts would nearly touch the green felt and men could see a nipple’s edge. She took her time with each shot, and would imagine the fantasies running through the slack-jawed men, smiling and looking up at them as they pressed their pelvises against the pool table.

  Gus left New Orleans for California, living in one of Los Angeles’s sunlit valleys, where he smoked dope and dropped acid and hoped the Vietnam War would end before his luck ran out. Sabrina returned home to New Orleans, beautiful, independent, and smart, fourteen years old. As with Kinta, the apartment was a place to avoid, even flee. Sabrina spent most of her time with friends Uptown in some of the fine homes near Broadway and Tulane.

  I wonder at Kinta’s recollections, her library of memories. They seem so well-ordered and so fulsome, a repository to which she can reach to narrate her life. I listen to stories shimmering of youth and of abandonment and vulnerability: boyfriends, rouge and mascara, electric curlers and Aqua Net, how I learned to swim, the songs they danced to, where they made out, how they escaped the apartment late at night, men chasing them down the road, school and work, Mom’s insults, the sailor, all the injuries alcoholics inflict on themselves and others. It’s intoxicating to me, and it leads me to more documentary sources, interviews, walks down Second Avenue, to new questions about our family’s past.