Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

by Mayes, Frances

  While the iron heats, Willie Bell sits down. “What are you going to color me? You color me a pretty picture and I’ll hang it there by the door so’s I see it every time I go out.”

  I study the pages and select a colt looking down at a daisy in a meadow. I begin to zigzag two shades of green crayon over the grass. Willie Bell takes a droopy black dress off the back of the door and holds it up to the window. “I’ve got to get this dress ready to go to the funeral.” She dips a corner of a rag into the pot on the stove and rubs at the sleeve.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I clean off spots with coffee. You can’t wash this kinda material.” When she irons, the scorched smell of sweat rises in a steam around the iron. I remember the flowery mildew smell around Auntie.

  “Where is Auntie?” I make dark blue loops for the sky.

  “Why, you know, she’s laying out at Riggs’s.”

  I put my face down on the cool porcelain. I keep coloring slowly. “I saw her, too.”

  “What? Yo’ mama ain’t going to like that one bit.”

  “I won’t tell her. I wanted to see. What happened to her?”

  Willie Bell pushed back my hair. “Sugar, she had a seizure, a fit; she’s just gone, that’s all.”

  “Did she go to heaven?”

  “Yes, they says so.” I wait for her to say more but she goes back to the iron and carefully presses the piqué collar. What’s a seizure, I wonder, something like an enormous hand shaking you? I imagine Auntie walking down Lemon and a bony hand coming out of the pecan trees and shaking her to death. Could a seizure happen anytime? I run my tongue around my mouth, counting my teeth to myself.

  Outside the window I see the wooden shed over the well. I remember Mother reading me a story out of the Atlanta Journal about a little girl who fell down an old well in a vacant lot. If I go running in any field, the ground could collapse; I could fall, fall, fall, splash into black water and no one would hear me scream. If I tried to climb up the sides, the way I shinnied up doorframes, I would slide back down the slimy stones. I remember Willie Bell has a well, too. “Can’t we get a drink from the well? I’m thirsty again.”

  Willie Bell slides the cover off and I lean over and see my face, small as a nickel, way down in the water. The bucket goes down on a rope, tips and slips under water, then Willie Bell cranks it up, dips in a gourd, and pours a drink into a jelly glass. I hold up the glass and see little specks swimming. Just as I am about to ask Willie Bell why it doesn’t taste like faucet water, a rooster comes out of a row of dry corn. He flexes his wings and lifts up on his claws. Every instinct I have turns me toward Willie Bell but she is taking sheets off the line, just out of reach. The rooster gives a low, broken cackle. I raise my arms with a little cry just as he squawks and flies at my face. Pecks and flaps. Willie Bell lets go of the sheets. In one motion she kicks the rooster hard and jerks me away. The rooster, suddenly indifferent, ruffles his feathers and struts around the house. Willie Bell slings a clod after him.

  A thin line of red drops darkens my red skirt, as in summer when I got nosebleeds that wouldn’t stop until Willie Bell held cold scissors against my back. Willie Bell lifts me on the kitchen table and swabs my face with water. I stare into her brown face as she paints the cut with a cold wand of iodine. She looks as though it hurts her, too. She frowns and makes little clicking noises. “Lord, Lord.” I kick at the table legs as the medicine burns into my cheek. Sudden stings of pain force my tears. I burrow against Willie Bell’s arm. “You cry all you want to.” Willie Bell holds me on her lap, rocking me back and forth. The rooster seems to fly at me over and over. The hard, beady eyes and the hooks of his feet. I think I never can get away from the feeling of his feathers all over my body and I am right. I curl as small as I can, crying until I stop and my chest feels tight with no more tears. Something dense and heavy, like a stone growing inside, keeps me still.

  At six o’clock, the blare of the Oldsmobile horn. As I open my eyes I see Willie Bell’s black dress still draped over the ironing board. My hair sticks to my forehead. Willie Bell buttons my sweater and hands me the crayons and coloring book in a paper sack. “You can finish tomorrow. Now run on, yo’ mama’s waitin’.”

  I climb in the backseat. My mother looks at me through the mirror, then turns around, her smile disappearing as she sees my face. I watch her mouth move into an O. “What on earth happened to you? You look awful.”

  “A rooster pecked me and scratched me.”

  “You were teasing him?”

  “I was not. You always …” I run my finger over the rough welt that is now my face.

  “Always what?”

  I don’t answer. I don’t know what I even started to say.

  “Well, look in the pink bag on the floor and you’ll feel better.” I find the bag among the other boxes and sacks. Before I see it, I feel the white musical puppy with blue velvet under his ears. I wind him and put him to my ear. He smells new and I can hear the little mechanical purr under the sound of the music.

  “Mammy, did you know Auntie died?”

  “Um-hum. That was sad, wasn’t it?”

  “I was scared of that rooster.”

  “Awful. Wasn’t Willie Bell looking after you?”

  “Yes, but she couldn’t help it. He was too fast. He shook me in his beak.”

  “That’s not so, but I just hope it doesn’t leave a scar.” I see my mother’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “Is so.” She is looking straight ahead at Roanoke Drive. Even in the dusky light her eyes are blankly clear, almost like the blind beggar I saw on the sidewalk the last time I went shopping in Macon. He sold a cup of yellow pencils, his milky blue eyes tipped up toward heaven. But my mother looks soft, too, especially with the rusty-colored foxes around her neck. I over-wind the new dog and he plays his song double time all the way home.

  Many primitive charms must be worked in solitude. On the island I slipped out early to walk the beach washed clean of footprints. My father taught me about the beach at sunrise. All the years I was small, he often would wake me up and say, “Come on, Bud, let’s go to the beach.” At this hour it’s easy to see why these are called the Golden Isles of Georgia. The first peach-cream rays slide over the water and strike the sand first, lighting the beach as if from underneath. We pick up sand dollars together and line up our collection along the driveway wall. I tell my father the little bones that rattle inside are doves of Jesus’s because I saw that on a Legend of the Sand Dollar postcard, but he says nonsense, sand dollars are real money that mermaids use. When I break one open, the “doves” that fall out look like my baby teeth that I’ve saved in a ring box at home.

  They’ve warned me not to go in the ocean alone. The undertow pulls even in shallow water. My father was sucked under as a boy. He said he knew not to fight, not to try to get back by paddling against a current stronger than man or beast. When a current pulls you out, swim sideways, parallel to the beach, gradually angle in, and let the current help you. Since I know that, of course I swim alone. I am nine and I’ve had lessons. I can sidestroke all day. I’m a cold-blooded animal and walk into the water at dawn with little shock, ride waves in until my fingertips shrivel, then cartwheel dry. By the time the wobbling gold orb hoists out of the water, I’m on the beach wrapped in a towel with my knees against my chest, every ugly hair on my arms standing straight up, my teeth chattering though the air is soft and my skin powdery with salt. I like to stare out at the straight line of blue ink horizon. How could they ever have believed the earth was flat? Why couldn’t they see the ocean water would drain off the edge? Where could the tide go when it went out? Someday I will live here alone and have my own boat and sail out exactly to that line where the ocean and sky meet. I will have candles and a bunk bed and a two-piece bathing suit. So very vulgar to show the navel, my mother says.

  Sometimes Willie Bell comes out to find me and swears she will tell if I do this one more time. On the island she doesn’t wear the black or wh
ite uniforms she wears at our house in Fitzgerald. Here, she’s in a pressed red plaid dress, with short sleeves that point, and sandals. We’re the only ones up and I walk back to the kitchen with her. She makes me a piece of oven toast—I don’t like toaster toast—and a soft fried egg because I will dip my toast into the yellow with lots of salt and pepper and she will eat the white.

  We love St. Simons, Sea Island, and Jekyll. Summer is here, less than three hours from home, on this string of barrier isles, ocean on one side, marsh on the other. We stay sometimes on St. Simon’s, sometimes on Sea Island. Jammed with my mother, sisters, and Willie Bell (my father and the dog traveled in a separate car with a driver), along with a month’s supply of clothes, games, cheese straws, fudge, and beach towels, we cross the rickety bridge from Brunswick to St. Simons and I see the marsh grasses waving, sense suddenly the land not earth, not water, but both, with the grass moving in time with the tide and the sulfur-laden wind. Then it comes to mind, the poem I’d just been required to learn by heart in third grade:

  As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,

  Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God:

  I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies

  In the freedom that fills all the space ’twixt the marsh and the skies

  The jolt of connection. “Look—the marshes of Glynn. We had a poem about them,” I shout. No one seems impressed. They’re talking about the reek of the paper mills. But I experience a pure surge of joy. After that, I have a new sense, like taste and smell.

  We pull into the driveway of a long brick house with a breezeway and a little house out back for Willie Bell. My mother jumps out of the car, holds out her arms wide enough to embrace the summer.

  By noon, the island sings with heat. Cicadas hum like high-power wires, and air rising off the road wavers so that what I walk toward is real but looks like a mirage. The tree frogs won’t shut up, either. We love the ocean, all of us. On weekends, Daddy catches the sunrise. Mother takes long walks down the beach, scudding her soles to smooth away callouses. As she swings out her leg to slenderize her thighs, her toes sketch arcs in the sand. My two sisters, home from college for the summer, slather themselves with oil and lie on beach towels for hours. They don’t want straps to show, don’t want red noses; they run splashing and screaming in the ocean to cool off, then baste themselves again. Their burnished gold gleaming bodies radiate the dense smell of coconut and salt and hot sand, the smell of summer. I don’t tan. I burn and freckle like a quail egg. I love the warm powdery sand sifting through my fingers, the drip castles I build at the edge of the water.

  In the afternoon heat when there is nothing to do I take pictures. My mother thinks I should rest so I won’t get polio, but I never will. I snap a lizard asleep on a leaf, my dog Tish asleep under a bush, my sandals on the slate steps, my sisters coming in from the beach laughing together. In the lens of my Brownie, I center Barbara and Nancy in hourglass bathing suits. Briefly they pose in fifth position, their bare feet tender on the oyster shell driveway. They squint and smile over my shoulder, impatient.

  They are older, with clothes on their minds and boyfriends. What they do not want is me pestering them. In my notboredom but lack of available activity, I eavesdrop from their closet, hunching down among the Capezios and crinolines piled on the floor.

  They talk and talk about beach parties, Ralph from Augusta, the local lifeguard, Neil. “Who is that girl visiting the Addisons? She was about to pop out of that corny gypsy blouse. I don’t know what her reputation in Macon is, but …” Whatever the revelation I wait for, it never comes. When I become annoyed with hiding, inevitably I make a noise.

  Nancy, ironing a skirt, flings open the door, shouting, “What are you doing? This is the limit!” I race around her, leaping to the twin bed next to the wall. I bounce higher and higher, my fingertips smudging the ceiling, until her shouting reaches a crescendo. Barbara stares into the dressing table mirror. “Just don’t pay any attention to her. She’s just trying to attract attention. Spoiled brat, brat, brat.” Barbara smooths Aquamarine Lotion on her legs.

  “Meow, Meow,” I call, louder and louder.

  “Would you shut up? Now.”

  “Make me. Make me.”

  Nancy carefully turns her skirt, spreading the eyelet flounce as flat as she can against the board. “Get off. That’s a new bedspread!”

  I keep catcalling louder and louder. “Try and make me!”

  Nancy bangs down the iron on the metal holder. She lunges for me as I leap back onto the pillow. Her foot catches in the twisted cord and the hot iron falls, browns into the carpet. She grabs my ankle, pulls me down. Suddenly we smell the singed animal odor of burning wool. Barbara jerks the iron from the scorched triangle in the pale blue rug and I bounce one more time. “You did it, you did it. Ya ya ya ya Ya ya.”

  “You little …”

  As I run out I see Nancy giving me the finger and Barbara rubbing a washrag on the rug. Nothing came up. She just streaked old makeup across the burn.

  They didn’t bother to tell on me since my parents never listened anyway. Certainly, Willie Bell wouldn’t tell. She got the fingernail scissors and snipped away the tip ends of the rug fibers. In the soft pile, the slightly shorter threads hardly were noticeable. She always knew a solution.

  Willie Bell looked like Nefertiti. When our third-grade class did the unit on Egypt, I first saw the famous profile and recognized Willie Bell’s, without her gold-rimmed glasses. She must be a descendant of the distant queen, the genes for that flat sloped forehead and chiseled cheekbones spinning along the DNA of generations of royalty, then slaves, and finally manifesting again with force in Willie Bell Smith. Her grandmother was a slave. I knew her as a child-sized, ancient gray woman with hair tied in colored strips like kite tails. It seemed impossible that she’d once been something as exotic as a slave. I didn’t know when or where Willie Bell was born. We measured her age only in how long she’d been with us, six years, eight, eleven. Out of the many years she worked for us, I remember her most sharply on the island because there I first saw her as separate from us and felt the first inkling that there was something wrong between the races.

  The light on the islands is white, reflecting off the white sand dunes and oyster shell roads that can shred your feet. In late evening, after a long twilight, the sky darkens quickly, like a room someone walks out of while holding up a lantern. Even after the fringed tops of pines disappear into the dark, the bright sand holds down the light that suffuses the air with soft silver. Sky and ocean disappear into each other. Twisted coastal oaks draped with Spanish moss make the landscape doleful or romantic, depending on one’s frame of mind. In The Mind of the South, W. J. Cash maintained that the blue air, softening all edges, gave us our ambiguous ways of seeing things. And yes, it is as easy to imagine the early settlers vanishing into time as to imagine them raising houses, greeting Chief Tomochichi, and planting pot herbs and fruit trees: debtors—altruistic James Oglethorpe called them “the worthy poor”—hauled out of English jails and sent to paradise to start a silk trade.

  Walking with Willie Bell around the tabby remains of Oglethorpe’s settlement, I stood looking at the site of the baker’s house, just an outline of crushed shell, and imagined the oven, women walking under the oaks to get their bread, the fragrant smell as they stood at the door. I thought I’m walking here just as they walked, just as I walk they walked. That was my first inkling of how the past pounces: Once they were here so I can be here thinking of the fragrance of their bread.

  Minding me, Willie Bell was allowed on the beach but did not wear a bathing suit. She sits in a low chair at the tide line, her feet close enough that the waves run over them. My swirly blue beach ball looks like a world globe and I like the particular rubbery ping when I bounce it to her. She throws it into the waves and I splash out to grab it before the undertow does. She smokes and buries the butts in wet sand.

  In the quincunx of fami
ly, my parents—never one of the girls—take turns at center position. On the island, I can step out of the thrall of that pattern and it’s Willie Bell who centers my memory.

  She lived out back in the brick cottage with a dressing table made from a treadle sewing machine base, a maple sofa printed with American eagles, and bright yellow walls from the same paint can as the kitchen in the main house. Between the twin beds was a night table for the white Philco and a cranberry red lamp made of bumpy glass. Now I see that she left her family to go to the island with us. Did she like that? Her old mother with rheumatism took care of Willie Bell’s adopted daughter, Carol. (Willie Bell asked me and I named her after one of my friends. Was that way of naming a leftover custom from slave times? Later I named Willie Bell’s son Robert Nelson Smith after Lord Horatio Nelson.) Willie Bell’s mother ate big spoonfuls of damp red clay. Did she coax Carol to try some? Willie Bell’s husband kept working for my father at the mill.

  Willie Bell takes me crabbing on Saturdays. We buy chunks of rotten meat at the grocery and take crab baskets to a bridge so low it almost touches the black marsh water when an occasional car passes. We lean over the rail for hours pulling in crabs. Mother will be so pleased; she never has enough crabs, shrimp, or flounder at home. Willie Bell picks them up by the pincers and throws them in a croker sack. Over and over I ask, “How can you eat crabs when they eat rotten meat?” She’d answer, “Just don’t think that way.” Then I’d wonder, how do you have a choice in how to think when the smelly hunk of meat lies in the bottom of the crab box?

  Willie Bell met Kitty, the maid who came from Detroit with some people who made Fords up there. Kitty wasn’t crabbing for her employers, only out walking. “They can buy, honey,” she explained. I think Willie Bell never had met anyone of her own color from the North. Kitty’s employers had a lot more money than we ever dreamed of, and her world must have sounded impossible to Willie Bell.