One Mississippi

by Mark Childress

  “Sir? Maybe you didn’t hear what I said.”

  My mother leaned across the seat. “Officer, that truck is from Allied Van Lines, isn’t it?”

  “Why, yes ma’am, it is.”

  “Well see, I’m Peggy Musgrove, and this is my husband Lee? And the thing is, I do believe those are our belongings on that truck.”

  “Hm.” The man’s face didn’t change. “Y’all movin’ down this way?”

  “Yes, sir, we were,” Mom said, in a voice that probably sounded chipper to him, but seemed to me one note short of a scream.

  “Well, I hate to be the one to tell you, ma’am, but I don’t think you’re gone be able to save too much out of that.” He indicated the conflagration with a little wave of his hand, as if maybe we hadn’t noticed it. “Could you ask your husband to come up here and talk to us a minute?”

  “I don’t think he is able, right now,” Mom said. “Would it be all right if I came in his place?”

  Bud opened his door. “I’ll go with you, Mom.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “Bud, you come. Daniel, you and Janie stay here with Daddy.” She glanced at her hair in the mirror and got out, smoothing her skirt.

  I had often seen our mother rise to one occasion or the other, but I’ve never seen her rise as she rose that afternoon. She marched with Bud up among all those troopers and stood answering their questions as if she had practiced for just such an occasion.

  We watched the truck burn. Dad squeezed the steering wheel.

  The Allied driver sat under a tree with his head on his knees. The other man crouched beside him, whispering in his ear.

  In the roaring innards of the split-open trailer I saw Mom’s antique hall tree ablaze, all the wardrobe boxes, the jumble of the dinette set, chrome legs drooping like wilted flowers. Our possessions made a hot fire. The firemen stood watching with excited eyes. I guess they had decided to let it burn awhile before turning on their hoses. I heard a great crackle-cracking and a BOOM as our television shot straight up from the inferno, sailed through the air, and smashed facedown on the pavement in front of me.

  A fresh cloud of fire billowed up from the wreck. Some of the passing cars honked their horns, cheering this display.

  After a long time, Bud and Mom got back in the car. Dad started the engine and gunned onto the highway, spraying gravel.

  We rode at least a mile before the first sound — the scritch! of Mom’s Zippo. “Lee,” she said carefully, around a mouthful of smoke, “I understand if you’re too upset to talk. Probably just as well. But we’re all here, honey, we’re all together and safe, and it doesn’t matter if we lost those things. Just things, Lee. The insurance will replace it. It’s none of our fault — not yours, and not mine. It was that driver. The son of a bitch was drunk.”

  “Mama, you cussed!” Janie cried.

  “Shut up, Janie. He was drunk, Lee, I could smell the whiskey from ten feet away, and the troopers, they smelled it too.”

  “I didn’t take the insurance,” Dad said.

  Mom cocked her head to one side. “What was that?”

  “Homeowners don’t cover stuff while it’s on the truck. The movers wanted extra for it, and TriDex won’t reimburse it. So I declined. I had to sign a paper saying I declined.”

  “You did that?” Mom said.

  “You know how much they wanted for insurance that only lasts three days?” he said.

  “Well!” She let out the breath she’d been holding. “Isn’t that interesting.” In our house the only thing worse than “different” was “interesting.”

  How long do you think five people can ride in a car without talking? Let me tell you, it’s longer than you think. We kept driving, long after dark. I would bet we drove for three hours without anyone saying another word.

  At last Mom gave a tentative cough. “Lee, shouldn’t we be close to Jackson by now?”

  My father never even glanced away from the road.

  Mom said, “Honey, that sign said twelve miles to Hattiesburg. Isn’t Hattiesburg south of Jackson? You know, I believe it is. I believe we have done rode right past Jackson. Bud, would you please hand me that map?”

  My father kept driving. Even when Mom turned on the dome light and confirmed that we were seventy miles southeast of Jackson and getting farther away every second, my father had nothing to contribute to the conversation.

  As we entered the outskirts of Hattiesburg, Mom said, “Lee, now, you’re scaring me, honey. Let’s just stop for the night at one of these motels. I’m sure we’ll all feel much better after a good night’s sleep.”

  Dad didn’t answer. When we drew abreast of the Rebel Yell Motor Lodge, he suddenly turned the car in and jerked to a stop at the office. He left the motor running. He went in and came back with a key.

  I don’t know why I felt moved to speak. It was like when I was little, playing hide-and-seek — I could find a good place to hide, but I couldn’t stand staying hidden. I always gave myself away.

  I got up on my knees in the backseat to peer out the window. “Dad,” I said, “are you crazy? We can’t stay here. The pool doesn’t even have a slide.”

  It’s a good thing there are laws against killing your kids. What I will never know is how he managed to hit me all the way from the car to the room without making a sound of his own.

  2

  THE OLD SCHOOL bus labored up the hill toward us, belching and groaning, flashing its one working headlight as a warning. The bus was so dilapidated I had to laugh — it looked hilarious, ridiculous, like a cartoon of a hillbilly school bus in Mad magazine. We had only been in Mississippi for two weeks. So far everything about it struck me as pretty damn funny.

  “Last bus to Hooterville,” I announced.

  Bud didn’t even smile. He was still half asleep. Janie hopped up and down on one foot and ignored me.

  The bus squealed to a halt and flapped open its door. “Hurry up!” said the red-faced man at the wheel.

  I climbed on after Janie and Bud. The bus lurched ahead, sending the three of us stumbling, free-falling down the aisle, crashing in a heap to the floor.

  The other kids roared with laughter. Apparently this was a trick the driver liked to play on newcomers who didn’t have the sense to hold on.

  I untangled myself from Bud. We helped Janie up from the floor and tucked ourselves into the nearest empty seats. I saw the driver’s grin in the overhead mirror. The air on the bus smelled like sour milk. The green vinyl seat covers were so worn you could see cheesecloth showing through the gaps.

  Janie said, “I think I hurt my arm.”

  “This is all a bad dream,” muttered Bud. “I just want to wake up.”

  “Too late,” I said. “We should have run away while we had the chance.”

  “I’m working on it,” Bud said. “I didn’t get to be seventeen and a half just to get dragged down to this stupid hellhole for the rest of my life.”

  A red-haired boy turned all the way around in his seat to gawp at us. “Y’all!” he cried. “Listen at ’em talk! Go on! Say somethin’ else!”

  “Excuse me?” said Janie. “Are you speaking to us?”

  Her Yankee accent brought a titter from both ends of the bus. The black kids leaned up in their seats to hear better.

  We’d had a lecture from Dad about keeping our heads down, staying out of trouble. Our first day of school also happened to be the first day of court-ordered integration in the public schools of Mississippi. Everyone was half expecting knife fights and riots.

  The red-haired boy couldn’t get enough of us. “Where y’all fum?”

  “Indiana,” I said. “But our parents come from Alabama originally. Are you guys all from Mississippi?”

  Everybody laughed. Nobody from Mississippi pronounces the middle syllable, as I would come to know. They say “Mis’sippi,” as if it’s too hot down here and too exhausting to say the whole word. Another boy repeated what I’d said exactly, “Mis-sis-sippi” and “originally�
�� and “you gize” in this high-pitched nasal imitation of me that brought a big laugh from his friends.

  I felt my face redden. I was used to being the one doing the laughing.

  “Make the girl talk again,” someone called from up front.

  I pressed my face to the window and let my mind wander outside. The bus stopped at every kind of house, down to the shackiest tarpaper shack. Some of these places were so poor you couldn’t tell which of the fallen-down structures were for people and which for the animals. The kids from the poorest houses were white — skinny, sickly-looking kids with faces like wild kittens. They clustered at the front of the bus, three and four to a seat.

  The black kids walked past us to the back of the bus and sat together. Everyone knew they didn’t have to do that, not since Rosa Parks in Montgomery, but they seemed to prefer it that way.

  In Indiana you never saw people like this. In Indiana everyone was white, we were all the same. We lived in neat ranch houses and bought our clothes at Sears, Roebuck. On this bus, we three Musgroves stuck out like dressed-up Sears mannequins. We were nothing like these unsmiling black kids, or the tough redneck boys and their sisters, or the bus driver who barked at every last kid to hurry up, even the ones who were already hurrying.

  Janie was almost thirteen, a whiz kid at math, a significant pain in my butt. Just now she looked like a little child on the verge of tears. “Why are they laughing at us?”

  “Oh, you’ll be okay,” I said. “Just ignore ’em. Pretend we’re still in Indiana but everybody talks weird. That’s what I plan to do.”

  “How come y’all ain’t going over to the Council?” said our red-headed friend. “You look like you oughta be going over there.”

  “Our dad is too cheap to send us,” Bud said.

  Council schools were springing up all over Mississippi, the White Citizens’ Council’s answer to desegregation. Dad said he didn’t care how bad the public schools were, he wasn’t about to pay to send us to a private school operated by the Ku Klux Klan.

  Instead he made sure to buy a house in one of the “consolidated” school districts springing up around Jackson — integrated enough to be legal, white enough to be comfortable. Our new house was in the country eleven miles outside Minor, which was ten miles outside Jackson. The sign at the Minor city limits meant to call it One of Mississippi’s Nicest Towns, but someone had changed it with spray paint:

  ONE OF MISSISSIPPI’S TOWNS

  From the outside, Minor High looked like a regular school: low and long, with tan brick, a flat roof, and one modernistic touch, a round glass-walled library nestled like a flying saucer in the front courtyard. The halls smelled of chalk dust and disinfectant, lunchroom spaghetti, Brut, Charlie, Right Guard. I heard lockers banging, gym shoes squeaking on a floor, a trumpet section rehearsing a fight song.

  I was relieved to see other kids in clothes that might have come from Sears. Not everyone looked as rawboned and poor as the kids on our bus. Maybe it was because our house was so far out from town. Those were country kids on the Hooterville route.

  In my shiny new Florsheims I clopped down the hall to Miss Anderson’s homeroom. All the black students sat together at the back. I sat in front with others of my kind. Miss Anderson was a pleasant black lady who called roll, then sat quietly painting her fingernails until, half an hour later, the bell rang.

  Every class was like that, all day. After all the uproar in the newspapers about integration, nobody even mentioned it. It was hard for us whites to feel threatened, since we outnumbered them four to one and they sat in the back.

  Nobody tried to teach us anything. The teachers took roll, handed out textbooks, then spent the hour gossiping in the doorway with other teachers while the students fired spitballs and caught up on their summers.

  Fourth-period English was Mrs. Thomas, a big black lady who got our attention by smacking the blackboard with her open hand. “Listen up! Y’all gonna learn one thing in my class, and that is the writings of Mister William Shatespeare. He just about the best writer they ever was.” She wrote his name on the board, Shakespeare. We would be reading a “whole mess” of his plays, she said, including “Julius Seizure,” “Hamblit,” and “Henry V-8.”

  I looked around to see if anyone else found this amusing. I saw a smirk lighting up the face of a pale, lanky kid with a shock of black hair falling into his eyes. He was struggling to keep from laughing out loud.

  After Mrs. Thomas went to chat in the hallway he swung into the desk beside mine, darkly muttering, “Henry V-8!”

  That cracked me up.

  He said he was Tim. I told him I was Daniel. We shook hands on it. I was pleased to find they used the same cool-guy handshake down here as in Indiana — hook thumbs, then wrap your hands together to make a mutual fist.

  “What if I told you Mrs. Thomas is one of the best teachers?” he said. “Wait till you see her act out the parts. She does an incredible Romeo.”

  “I thought there weren’t any black teachers last year,” I said.

  “Hey, what are you saying?” Tim looked shocked. “You mean — Miz Thomas is black?”

  It took me a second to be sure he was kidding.

  He winked to confirm it. “Minor’s always had a few Negro teachers,” he said, “to show we’re not prejudiced.”

  “But no black students, right?”

  “Not till today.”

  I followed him up the hall. “So I guess the whole integration thing turns out to be not such a big deal after all, huh?”

  “Oh, it’s a big deal, all right. Everybody’s killing themselves trying to act like it’s not, but it is. Don’t worry, you’ll catch on to how things work down here. The one thing you’re never supposed to do is talk about it.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  Tim smiled. “I mean to other people. You can talk to me about anything. I can translate for you. I have been trained to speak and understand most forms of Yankee.”

  All you need is one friend who makes you laugh, who laughs at the same things you do. Almost at once I knew Tim Cousins would be my friend. We had three classes together. He enjoyed making fun of everything as much as I did. Right there on the first day of school, we formed a team, just the two of us.

  Tim said Minor High was perhaps the best school in the greater Minor metropolitan area. I said my lousy first impression probably stemmed from the fact that I was a Yankee snob from Yankeeland. The teachers seemed to be fresh out of junior college, or else they were cranky old women teaching out their time until retirement. In retrospect my teachers in Indiana seemed witty, dynamic.

  “You should have stayed up there,” Tim said. “If I’d known you were coming, I could have warned you.”

  “It wasn’t my choice,” I told him. “My parents kidnapped me and brought me here by force.”

  I explained how we had lost all our worldly goods on the trip south, so we were having to furnish our new home one garage sale at a time.

  “Your family sounds almost as weird as mine,” Tim said. “How long are you in for?”

  “Twenty to life.”

  He grinned, and clapped me on the back. “Me too! We can be lifers together!”

  After lunch the day slowed to a crawl. I made elaborate doodles in my notebook with my new felt-tip pen. It seemed forever until the three o’clock bell.

  Bud plopped beside me on the bus. “How’d it go?”

  “Okay, I guess. I met one guy that’s cool.”

  “That’s one more than me,” he said. “Are all your teachers complete morons?”

  “Seems like it.”

  “Mine are, definitely.” He cast a disparaging eye at the kids getting on the bus. “We gotta tell Dad. We can’t go to this school. We’ll be as dumb as these people in a month.”

  “Are you crazy, Bud? Don’t you dare say a word. Think about it — guaranteed straight A’s from now on, and we never have to crack a book. I mean, I’m a junior, and they’re just now reading ‘Julius Seizure.’ We read
it in ninth.”

  “I swear our history teacher was drunk,” Bud said.

  I told him everything I’d learned about the school from Tim Cousins. Mrs. Passworth, the algebra teacher, was rumored to have spent time in a mental institution. Miss Williford’s French I and II classes were legendary; she spent two-thirds of every class period showing slides of her three trips to Paris. Mr. Mapes, in social studies, would write the answers on the board the day before a test, and he never gave below a C. Every day in fifth-period chemistry, Mrs. Deavers put her head on her desk and took a nap. You were welcome to nap too, do whatever you liked, as long as you didn’t disturb Mrs. Deavers.

  Janie got on the bus with this smirky grin.

  “You okay, Idjit? How’d you make out?”

  “Daniel, this school is so easy!”

  “Shhh . . . that’s gonna be our little secret.”

  Mom and Dad never asked how we became straight-A students overnight. At school I quickly learned to modify my Yankee ways. I rolled up my sleeves and let my shirttail hang out at the back, in keeping with the fashion down here. After enduring dozens of sarcastic remarks about my Indiana accent I began saying “y’all” for “you guys,” “Co-Cola” instead of “pop,” and “seb’m” for the number after six. I learned to say “ain’t” and “cain’t” and “hale, yeah,” and of course, “Mis’sippi.”

  Bud did not try to adapt. He lived in his room with his portable TV, except for the daylight hours, when we were mostly outside cutting grass. Our new house was a brick rancher, with four dinky white columns holding up the front porch roof, but it was set on a rolling lawn so huge that Mom said it made her feel like Scarlett O’Hara. I pointed out that Scarlett had slaves to take care of her yard. “And I have you boys,” she said with a smile.

  Three acres of grass in Mississippi was a job that never ended. By the time you mowed down the last patch of V-headed stalks, new V’s had sprung up where you started. If you missed a couple of days, the lawn turned into a jungle of high green uncuttable Mississippi piano wire, teeming with biting flies, no-see-ums, yellow jackets, and fire ants.

  Dad bought us a huge Yazoo mower with a thirty-inch blade and bike-sized rear wheels for leverage — a real Rottweiler of a mower that made our old Indiana Lawn Boy look like a poodle by comparison. It took strength just to push the Yazoo across the flat part of the yard. Great gouts of grass spewed up from the chute, bathing me in a swirl of green dust.