Under Magnolia : A Southern Memoir (9780307885937)

by Mayes, Frances

  I was unguided, rebellious, solitary, a prankster, at war. No side to take. I taught myself the bull’s-eye with arrows. I could disappear in the tops of trees. I walked to school every day past the Spotted Pig restaurant, down the pig trail, through the Blue and Gray Park, past poor houses, sidewalk graffiti (only one word, relentlessly repeated), cottages draped with peavine. Lonely, rowdy, I knew everything (like all children) and pretended to know nothing. I reported to the flat streets. I passed Mrs. Drummond every day, her huge bulk in the rocker behind the lard cans of geraniums lining her porch. Her daughter, Emma Sue, worked at the Pig and brought home leftover chicken-fried minute steak. I know because Judy Pike and I combed the alleys and pulled things out of trash cans. We held up bloody sanitary napkins, odd balloons like squashed jellyfish, bills demanding payment, the tinfoil and remains of the old steaks. As I walked home every day, I smiled a sweet six-year-old smile at Mrs. Drummond, who said, “How you today, little Missy?” Like policemen are said to understand crime and are trained to respond with a shot—they’re closer to crime, in their fastest blood—so was I to innocence. A girl in a blue-checked pinafore skipping home. The apple of her daddy’s eye. Mrs. Drummond had a brass vase made out of a bomb her son brought home from Germany. In bad taste. She weighed at least three hundred pounds, all steak. Her false teeth were whiter than Chiclets. One day, on my way home, a spot of warm blood blown by the wind landed on my blouse. From where? An angel with a halo, a bird, a body going to heaven? I could not be sure.

  When I look in the mirror for the scar, I can’t see it. But I run my finger above my upper lip and I feel a slight ridge. So much lost to sight remains for the touch. What is stranger than memory, that selects a certain day to remain vivid, when thousands of others are totally lost?

  That morning, the first thing I said was, “I won’t go to Willie Bell’s.”

  “Now hush. She’ll hear you. Think of someone other than yourself.” Years from then, when I heard “The walls have ears” in history class, no one had to explain it to me. In my childhood, someone always was almost within earshot, about to hear the truth, from which, of course, they must be protected. My mother tips the Shalimar bottle and dabs the glass stopper behind her ears and on her wrist pulses. Willie Bell comes in to tell her Mrs. Parrott doesn’t like to be late and she better hurry. Willie Bell looks down at me.

  “What ails you? You look pouty.”

  “I don’t like school. Julie Sykes is the teacher’s pet.”

  “That’s not true.” My mother brushes her hair back and opens her lipstick. Because of the way she twirls the tube, it’s shaped like one of the Monopoly “men,” like the top of a circus tent. “Miss Goff told me you were adorable. She said you were in ‘A’ group. Put that lip in; I could ride to town on it.”

  Soon I would be in the first-grade classroom with all the letters of the alphabet cut out of colored construction paper and tacked around the blackboard. There I can watch the clock’s long minute hand click and jump from one line to the next, see time pass between the numbers. At recess I’d play red light. “I like school,” I say softly.

  “There, I knowed you did all along.” Willie Bell pulls up my socks and ties my sash for the third time. Mother, still in a peach satin and lace slip, snatches her soft buff-colored suit out of the closet and quickly dresses.

  On mornings when Mother started dressing before I went to school, I knew what was up. She’d stand at the mirror, clip on square topaz earrings, pat two triangles of rouge on her cheekbones then rub them in with fast little upward motions. I begged to go to Macon, too, thought of Morrison’s cafeteria next to Davison’s where we shopped, of the green plastic trays sliding along shiny tracks. Rows of red Jell-O cut in cubes, cream pies with banana slices, an enormous roast beef, and stainless steel boxes of steaming, limp vegetables. I could take two desserts without her noticing until the end of the line when it was too late. She went three or four times a year on major shopping expeditions. My father, who later would find bills hidden among the tablecloths in the sideboard, was never told until after the fact. He’d come home from work, pull in behind her car still ticking from the fast ninety-mile drive. He held his hand above the hot hood, seeming to count the bugs splattered on the windshield.

  Last time in Davison’s, I threw a tantrum for a little white dog that played a song when you wound him up. I’d never seen anything like that and had to have it. She said no. I hit the floor, kicked and rolled. My mother grabbed my hand and, squeezing until the birthstone ring cut into my fingers, pulled me along the floor. “I want it! I want it!” Sitting on the floor of her bedroom, I almost hear my shouts and I smile a little. My mother slips on her alligator pumps. What will she bring me? A full skirt with wide rickrack to twirl in, patent leather shoes with a button on the side strap, a white angora sweater? I think of Willie Bell’s, chickens scratching under the porch, and how dark it is beyond her screen door with its balls of cotton stuck on with bobby pins to catch the flies. Even from there the smell of boiling turnip greens smacks you in the face.

  After the two-thirty bell, I want to play on the swings but I’m supposed to go straight home. I can feel how cold the blue bars of the jungle gym would be if I stopped to climb. The janitor, Mr. Fountain, rakes leaves into a ring of small piles. He has a dozen children and a wife with wonky eyes, and they live in one room. He leans on his rake, watching the sycamore leaves catch, smolder. The air fills with eye-stinging smoke. I wave my painting of my own handprint, with many ruby and emerald rings drawn on the fingers. Julie Sykes skips across the playground toward her mother’s car. Her dress is too short and I see her ugly underwear. Her mother has something wrong and won’t go anywhere except to drive Julie because she might pee-pee on herself. My mother picks me up sometimes, but usually she is busy. The Magnolia Garden Club has to replant the parks that went to weeds during the war. They have luncheons to plan the flowers. They play bridge constantly.

  I run across Blue and Gray Park (named for the uniforms of both sides in the real war), passing the Northern marker near the street and the Confederate one close to the creek. Once I saw a Negro man in the sour grass, spitting on the Confederate stone.

  From a block away, Willie Bell recognizes the triangle of my red skirt running under the pine trees and begins to wave. She’s ready to go. She has changed from her uniform into a skirt and a sweater set that used to be my mother’s. “We’re going by a viewing on the way. Now if you’re good—and you know what good means—we’ll get you a drink afterwards.”

  “What viewing?”

  “There’s nothing for you to pay no mind to. My auntie”—she pronounced it ont-ee—“passed away and she’s up at George Riggs’s. I want to pay respects.”

  “Do what?”

  “It just means good-bye. Her funeral’s tomorrow. She was my daddy’s baby sister. You knowed Auntie, she worked for the Earlys.” We turned down Sherman. Willie Bell walked fast toward colored town.

  “Was Sherman a Southern or Northern, Willie Bell?” The town of Fitzgerald was a refuge for both sides.

  “I don’t know. That was too long ago but we’re almost there. I want you real quiet. It’s disrespectful to the dead to make noise.” She opens a door under a flaking sign that says NEARER MY GOD TO THEE. An oily man in a suit with white lines on the pants looms in the dim light. The smell of roses feels so heavy it’s as if we’ve stepped inside a flower. Pink shades on hanging lamps make the room glow like inside a shell. I see racks and wreathes of flowers. “You stay right here till I get back, you hear?”

  I hunch down on the red rug between the feet of a coat-rack. I understand dead. People die all the time. I’d just seen a hump of clay at the cemetery with a pot of purple plastic tulips. Mother said how cheap that was of Mrs. Parker, him not dead two months. In the flower room, I see Willie Bell talking to two old women. All around them are roses, carnations, bows sprinkled with sequins, and big gold flowers like my sisters wear to football games. Waves of scent roll out of t
he room every time the front door opens. The old women come out. Leaning on one another, they almost step on my outstretched legs. The shriveled woman has a handkerchief pressed to her nose and her cheeks are streaked with tears. As they leave they sign in a book on a stand. God and Santa Claus write down everything you do in a book then look you up when you get up to heaven and when you send your Christmas list. I stand up and walk to the doorway. The man in the suit slowly walks over to me with his hands behind his back. He leans over. I don’t like his stuck-together mustache. It curls down around fat pink lips that look like a plucked dove. He smiles a big gold smile at me. I see a long box up on a table draped with a shiny pink skirt. “I expect you better wait over here. You just wait pretty.” The fat man goes to the door to greet someone and I slip around the corner and quietly into the flower room. Willie Bell’s kneeling, her face in her hands. Everything’s swagged like a puppet show. There’s another smell now, the same as the back of my mother’s closet where the old shoes get mildew on the insides and the summer dresses crush together with their stale perfume. I look in the box.

  Auntie Gray. But her face doesn’t look like polished wood anymore. It’s the color of rust and she has on her little gold glasses even though her eyes are closed. Is she really dead? In the tiny space between her lips she might, secretly, still be breathing. Her hands are folded over her stomach like Daddy Jack’s when he naps. Suddenly I have to go to the bathroom. I cross my legs to hold it. I reach out and put my hand on Auntie’s. She’s hard as a candle. I try to lift up the hand but it’s frozen like the frog I found in a bucket. Auntie sometimes stopped by to see Willie Bell. She’d pour her coffee into the saucer then pour it back into the cup. Then, she was just one of the maids who walked home down Lemon toward colored town every afternoon. Now she looks so important with purple crepe dress and lace collar. She had a soft cackle of a laugh; now her fingernails are the greenish color of old bruises and her hair lies in flat crimps around her face. Still, like a doll of herself. Someone behind me breathes fast and I turn, expecting the owner. It is a man with a hat in his hands. He looks at Auntie, not me. His lips begin working but I hear no sound. His eyes are popped out and cloudy like a dead catfish’s eyes. Swallowing down the sound my throat suddenly wants to make, I run back to the other room, hunch against the coats again.

  Willie Bell comes out walking fast. She reaches over me for her sweater. “You were good—you can be good when you try. Let’s go get you that drink.” I jump out into the hard winter light. Everything looks the same: the mean little stores and men in overalls leaning along the walls, pale sun that looks as if it shines through white tissue paper. I want to ask Willie Bell something. What? And Willie Bell has her shoulders hunched up, her big lips stuck out. I don’t ask anything. I turn two cartwheels on the sidewalk, not caring if my panties show, and wipe the mud on my skirt.

  In Lester’s, Willie Bell unknots her handkerchief and takes out the change Mother gave her for me. I open the drink box and look down at the bottles standing in the dark cold water. I fish out an orange Nehi from all the RC Colas. “Who’s that you got, Willie Bell, one of Cap’n Jack’s granbabies?” Lester had a wad of something in his jaw. “Just the spit of her old man, ain’t she?”

  “She’s like her Mama some, too.”

  “Yessir, I guess nobody will have to show the bobcat’s chil’ how to spring,” he says, laughing.

  “I’ll bring the bottle back tomorrow.” Willie Bell snaps her purse shut, cutting off further talk.

  “You play outside awhile. I got thangs I need to do.” Willie Bell gave me a big spoon and a pail. “Find some worms. We’re going fishing tomorrow.” I did not want to find worms. We’d been given tin compacts at school. We had to put our own “specimen” in it for hookworm tests. When the results came back, Arnold and Lucy were sent to the nurse and we all knew they had worms. Willie Bell said they didn’t need a nurse; worms will be driven out if you eat chinaberries.

  I run to the fence and look for Tat. There she is on the side of her house waving a stick. Willie Bell, changed into a wash dress, bangs the back door. She starts up the fire for boiling dirty clothes in an iron pot. Willie Bell told me that Tat plants sweet potatoes in the dark of the moon. Shame weed spreads out from her one-stump step to the edge of the corrugated clay road.

  Stabbing the forked stick against hard ground, she rises up on her dewclaws and douses for water, but the willow shakes wherever she points.

  Tat’s hair twists into a bulb and a red rag winds around her head. Thin as a hoe, she works herself around the packed dirt yard. Squawking mad or mouthing silent words to a few frizzle chickens. Then she walks backward, sweeping away her own footprints with a broom made of palmetto fronds. Tat’s feet: big as a man’s.

  Tat is dark as longleaf pine bark, dark as slash and burn fields. (My mother, white as Wonder bread. My mother has vanishing creams.)

  Tat never shut up. God must have grown tired of that harangue, though sometimes God shouted back through her own mouth then shook her by the teeth. She raised sand. She humped glory. She buried candles in the four corners of the yard. She grabbled in the dirt with her bare nails, digging fast like a dog. Odd: Her legs were orange as a heron’s.

  Willie Bell went in the kitchen to make pork gravy and corn bread for supper. Shucking corn, snapping beans, clanging the black skillet she called “spider.” Willie Bell paid no mind to Tat, her everyday background music. They lived side by side in small wood houses. Willie Bell, a one-person domestic industry, all action. Willie Bell, biding her time. Tat raving to the stars and trees, crazed, her brain on fire.

  Sometimes she’d look up and in a suddenly sane voice call “Frankie!” as though someone were stepping over the ditch toward her, someone wonderful from a long time ago just alighting from a convertible. No one was there, but the startled wonder and joy in her voice made me look and look again. Who was Frankie? That’s my mother’s name, but Tat didn’t mean her—didn’t even know her.

  To tat was something I was supposed to learn, the tiny edging on tea towels. My mother liked piecework. She trimmed my dolls’ panties and gowns. That takes patience. My hands wouldn’t. I snapped the balled-up thread. She monogrammed hand towels. Fussbox Tat didn’t decorate anything. I could see inside her bare shack: silvered boards, wallpaper made from Sunday comics, calendar Jesus looking straight through the room and out at corn stubble fields and a big sky.

  Tat’s shifts were sudden, like streak lightning, or St. Elmo’s fire in the swamp. She cut loose. I was attracted. She shouted all the bad words, a thrill. I wished my aunt Hazel could hear; she’d turn to butter. My grandmother who only seemed to say the same nice sentences over and over—she would croak if she knew what I heard. Turkeyfucker. Shitass. Fuckface. I did not even let my lips form the words—felt that if they passed into sound I would be ruined. But her other language she really let rip. (Was it a long holdover from Fante or Bantu, taught by a slave grandmother?) Was it God’s own? Sometimes in a dream I expect to hear that language again: Tat’s whooping o’s and l’s, rising and falling to a growling whisper. Tat’s voice rolled and sped, seemed to catch me later in the dark when I couldn’t sleep. She gave herself to the small scorpion roaming her brain. At night in bed, her face zoomed close to mine then pulled back fast, crying. I never imagined terrible haints and night monsters since I knew one so plainly by daylight.

  Finally evening cooled. She sat on the stump, dipped a little snuff, pulled the rag off her head, and cursed to the ground. “Sons of bitches, bastards, motherfuckers, all of them motherfuckers. Jesus knows you. He DIED for you. YOOUUUU.”

  Where was my mother? Not that I wanted to go home, but I didn’t want to stay at Willie Bell’s either. When my mother was mad she could start to rant. Not like Tat but closer to Tat than to her usual self. Tat was what happened if you let yourself look in a certain direction. Had my mother looked? At Bible school they said the smallest seed, placed under a dead man’s tongue, could grow into the tree that ma
de the cross. Here’s Tat in a dirt yard baying like a bird dog. What words should be spoken? What should never be said?

  Was Tat always that way? Willie Bell said so. “Long gone,” she said, rotating her finger beside her temple. “Lun-a-tic.” Tat spit and foamed, never noticed me hanging on the wire fence getting rust on my smocked blouse. She drew X’s in the dirt. All she had was an old hinny tied to a bush. He looked as if I could push him over. Mule or donkey I didn’t know, but I licked my thumb, pressed it to my palm, then stamped my palm with my fist for good luck. When it whickered and whinnied, she stared at the sky. Anger bolted her to the ground. “The wicked gonna perish from the earth. The wicked KNOW who they are.” Her words almost sparked. Then she’d get the gift of tongues and shout in her own secret language. Sometimes a string of drool roped down from the corner of her mouth and I’d laugh, then duck, afraid she’d turn her wild eyes on me. Willie Bell, relentlessly calm, shook her head with disgust so I did, too. She took my hand and led me into the house.

  I follow Willie Bell through her dark living room into the kitchen. From her paper sack she takes out a new coloring book and a thirty-two-color box of crayons. She sits me at the white porcelain table, and then turns on the iron. The kitchen has two other tables instead of counters and Willie Bell covered them in red oilcloth and stapled it underneath the tops. Over the drainboard hangs a picture of Jesus with his eyes rolled back, and three iron pots swinging from nails. I like the things Willie Bell has—the straight chairs with pony skin bottoms and the cigar box of forks stamped with U.S. NAVY. Her plates are each a different bright color.