He had a clearly defined fighting side and woe to anyone who walked on it. He was entirely capable of killing, in a mob or alone, and if the Citizens Council’s goon squad had fire-bombed Bres’s house, he probably would have approved when he found out why. To his way of thinking, it would have been revenge for Quint’s death at the hands of the Communists. The worst of the South? Yes, but also the best. There was no telling what he would do if he got riled, yet he had an underlying sweetness, an almost female tenderness, that had saved my life and sanity. He was that many-splendored thing called a good ole boy. He said grace, he said ma’am, and he loved his countries—both of them.
When dawn came, I wrote a note and left it on the night table:
I’m taking the bus back to Oxford. I can’t see you anymore, but I want you to know it’s not because of anything you did or said. I cried because somebody I loved died. Your kindness helped me more than I can say. You’re a gentleman.
I knew he would be parched when he woke up. Fetching a can of beer from the cooler, I put it beside the note and, feeling a little like Tosca, slipped silently from the room.
The spring dawn was gently pink and the air bore the vigorous tang of the river. I walked across the street to the station and bought my ticket. Having an hour’s wait, I was about to buy a cup of coffee from a machine when suddenly I realized I was hungry. I walked to a nearby diner and ordered a breakfast of ham biscuits, grits, and gravy. When I had scraped the plate, I ordered two doughnuts to eat with my coffee refill. Never, before or since, has food tasted as good as it did that morning.
When I got back to campus, I threw away my unfinished thesis and spent the remaining month of my year at Ole Miss writing true confessions. Two more sold, so I now had seven hundred dollars, more than I had started with back in September.
The year came to a close. Tulaplee left a few days early to go to Europe with her parents, sending her maid and two of her father’s black employees up to campus to pack her winter wardrobe and lug it back to the old plantation. They arrived in a big truck and went to work. Some hours later a knock came at my door. It was the maid, holding a huge, gaily wrapped box.
“Does you be Miss Flarnz King?”
I said I was.
“Miss Tulaplee, she say Ah’s to give dis to you. She tell me to tell you sumpin, too. She say, ‘Tell Miss Flarnz dat Ah fixed it so nobody do huh duht.’”
I frowned. “She fixed it so nobody would do me dirt?”
“Yes’m. Dem huh verra wuhds.”
“Did she say anything else?”
“No’m.”
I thanked her and shut the door. The box contained a dusky blue cashmere knitted suit soft enough to pull through the proverbial ring. I had never owned anything like it in my life. The enclosed card said simply, Merci beaucoup, and underneath was a drawing of a tulip.
Do me dirt …
Suddenly I remembered Bres saying at Thanksgiving that the anonymous phone calls had stopped. The White Citizens Council … Tulaplee’s father owned half the Delta … money … power … Tulip Enterprises, Inc … . Daddy’s little girl.
A good ole boy and a Southern belle, two types who should have been my enemies, yet they had turned out to be my friends. One was a perfect gentleman and the other was a great lady.
The day I left was like a film running backwards. Mr. Reece the cab driver took my luggage out as he had once taken it in, and Miz Arvella surged through the door in the opposite direction as she accompanied me down the walk. I was going to miss her and her thrice-told tales. She hugged me and gave me a box lunch she had prepared for me, and I got into the cab.
When the bus crossed into Tennessee, I turned around and looked back at the WELCOME TO MISSISSIPPI sign. Bres, Bres, rhymes with dress …
“You want a fellowship here? I’ll fix it up.”
“No, not here. I’d like to see another part of the country.”
“What part did you have in mind?”
“The Deep South …”
“Well, how about the University of Mississippi? …”
“All right.”
How casual and happenstance it had been. As with my college scholarship, I had grabbed the first graduate school offer that came my way without even bothering to apply for any others. It was one of the few ways I was like Mama; I had inherited her impatience. How much heartache I could have avoided if I had said no to Ralph’s first suggestion and investigated some other schools. Did I wish I had said no?
No.
»seventeen«
I HAD regained most of the weight I lost but not all of it, so the two champions of wholesomeness pounced the moment I walked in the door.
“Babe, you look lak sumpin de cat drag in! Dint dem peckerwoods feed you?”
“You’re wasting away! You look consumptive!”
“Granny, you judge everybody by Lillian Russell.”
“I know bad lungs when I see them.”
“Since when are you interested in lungs? They’re at the wrong end.”
“Doan you sass yo’ big momma!”
“Cough into this handkerchief, I want to see what comes up.”
“Granny, would you like me to get a chest X-ray?”
“Doctors don’t know anything.”
It went on like this for the rest of the evening. Mama gave me her shrewd look but said nothing, and Herb questioned me eagerly about William Faulkner. In short, a typical homecoming.
Herb was the only member of the household who recalled that I was supposed to return with a master’s degree. Granny called graduate school “going through college all over again,” Mama looked on it as some sort of extra inning or double-header, and Jensy was au courant only with divinity school.
“Did they write your degree in Latin?” Herb asked. “I’ve always wanted to see one all in Latin.”
My heart turned over and I felt my throat tighten. The only thing that could save me from tears was an uproar, so I started one.
“I got bored with academic life, so I tore up my thesis and became a writer,” I said as flippantly as I could. “I’ve sold several short stories to the true confessions magazines already. The first one was called ‘I Committed Adultery in a Diabetic Coma.’”
That did it. Jensy’s eyes rolled, Granny’s hand fluttered to her heart, Mama chortled, “Well, shit a brick,” Granny cried, “Oh, Louise!” and whatever Herb said was lost in the ensuing chorus about trashy women and the devil’s pencil. I wished Bres could have heard it; it surpassed any imitation I had ever done for her.
Not surprisingly, they all came around to my side. When I got Herb alone and explained to him how I felt about writing, his disappointment faded and a new enthusiasm took the place of the old one. A week later, when two checks forwarded from Mississippi arrived in the mail, practical-minded Granny sat up and took notice. Jensy went wherever Granny led, so descriptions of the red-hot tip on the devil’s pencil ceased; and Mama, who had made no objections to begin with, repeated her “Well, shit a brick.”
I treated them to the biggest roast of beef I could find and we had a festive celebration of my new career, complete with a new kind of table talk. Instead of polyps and clots and things that go splat at Colonial Beach, Granny and Jensy recalled all the diabetics they had ever nursed, describing in loving detail the sores that broke out on Mrs. Ewing’s legs and the time poor Mrs. Warren gave herself an insulin shot without her glasses and pulled out a vein “by the roots!” Herb, who had long since learned to eat silently and steadily through any conversation under the sun, did so.
For dessert we had Fudgsicles. Everybody had to eat them every day because Mama was saving the wrappers to send away for a full-color portrait of Mickey Mantle suitable for framing.
Having had a private room at Ole Miss for the first time in my life, I now found it hard to readjust to Granny as a roommate. There was also the problem of finding a quiet place to write. Where there was Granny, there was always a steady stream of people coming to call; and where ther
e was Mama, there were noise and mess to an unparalleled degree.
It was time for me to live alone. I rented an efficiency apartment in the Mount Pleasant district near the library Herb had taken me to when I was little. Furnishing it was no problem; the attic of our house was full of Mrs. Dabney’s old stuff—the reason why I could not write in the attic—and our cupboards overflowed with the Bingo prizes Granny had collected over years of compulsive gambling. I took my pick of the toasters, coffeepots, dishes, and lamps stashed in various odd places—six iron skillets lay under the living room sofa—and promised to return for dinner each Sunday to eat my share of the Fudgsicles piled in the freezer.
My furniture smelled like the unguents Granny and Jensy had rubbed on Mrs. Dabney’s failing joints; I wrote on one of her sixteen card tables and piled my manuscript on an occasional table supported by a pug dog caryatid. I loved the apartment. The rent was seventy-five dollars a month, and if I bought more than ten dollars’ worth of groceries at a time I needed a delivery boy to help me carry them home, so I managed to support myself.
I intended to write something better eventually but I kept at the confessions for the time being. Besides supporting me, they were the best possible training for a fledgling writer. The most important thing they taught me was how to
Capture your reader, let him not depart
From dull beginnings that refuse to start.
That’s from Bres’s translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica. I ached for her. I spent that first winter crying myself to sleep, trapped in the futile litany of “This time last year,” but when spring came and the first anniversary of her death passed, taking the unbearable phrase with it, I knew the worst was over.
Gradually I began to think about finding somebody else. I was not sure what I wanted. In my most objective moods I wondered if Lesbianism had been my ultimate exercise in nonconformity—after all, my different drummer could play anything—rather than a bona fide sexual preference. I knew that my real proclivity was swimming against the tide, yet I also knew that I had loved Bres. I was beginning to suspect that my real love was going to be my work, but I was young and horny as well as lonely, and I wanted somebody. The question was, who? Or more precisely, which?
Sometimes it seemed wiser to forget about “Ole Miss” and go back to men. Several times I almost went up to my old campus to find Ralph; I would have enjoyed being in bed with him, but my psyche was not ready for a man. My affair with Bres had ended with such dizzying swiftness that I was left with an unfinished feeling about women, an “overness” that I did not want. I needed to know more women as lovers before I could decide whether I was gay or straight, or both.
I’m sure Washington was full of Lesbians but I had no idea where they were. The only ones I could identify were the butches one saw in the dowdier sections of Georgetown around M Street, with combs and wallets in their back pockets, but they repelled me physically. The kind of women I found desirable were the kind who would never be taken for Lesbians by anybody, including me.
I knew there were such things as gay bars but I had no idea where they were, either, so I haunted the museums and concerts, looking for certain “signs.” These were still the days of the pinkie ring signal, so I looked for pinkie rings. Very few women wore them because everybody knew what they meant, but a few women did. I tried to find significance in their unconventional habit, but given my family history, I was incapable of finding significance in any unconventional habit. Besides, I was put off by memories of the Tom Mix Clubs of my childhood. If I let myself look for pinkie rings, I would end up looking for Lesbian lunch boxes, Lesbian Thermos jars, and women who went around whispering, “Hot Ralston for your breakfast.”
Remembering the way Bres’s eyes had widened with recognition the moment she knew for sure she would get me, I looked for “the look.” Any women who really sees another woman is giving out a signal whether she knows it or not. A couple of times I thought I spotted the Lesbian look, but the logical next step—inviting a possible to join you for an after-concert cocktail—invariably foundered on the shoals of the Nation’s Capital. Given Washington’s longstanding reputation as the official city of lonely women, being seen drinking in pairs was anathema to all Washington women, including me.
Then there was the security clearance problem. Anyone who has an affair in Washington usually has it with a bureaucrat. Writers make everybody nervous but we terrify Silly Service workers. Our apartments always look like a front for something, and no matter how carefully we tidy up for guests we always seem to miss the note card that says, “Margaret has to die soon.” We own the kind of books that spies use to construct codes, like The Letters of Mme. de Sévigné, and we are the only people in the world who write oxymoron in the margin of the Bible. Manuscripts in the fridge in case of fire, Strunk’s Elements in the bathroom, the Laramie City Directory explained away with “It might come in handy,” all strike fear in the GS-7 heart. Nobody really wants to sleep with a writer, but Silly Service workers won’t even talk to us.
As they say in the soaps, I tried, God knows I tried, but I couldn’t find a girl. What Lesbians need to get together is a cult atmosphere. Bres and I managed with no trouble because school is the biggest cult of all, but there were few other cults around in 1960. The Daughters of Bilitis had been launched in San Francisco but I didn’t know about it, and even if I had, the name would have been an insurmountable stumbling block in my case. However, if they had had a Washington chapter, I don’t need to tell you who would have joined it proudly as a matter of course without even knowing what it was. That would have solved all my problems because every dyke in Washington would have been up at the house.
I still made my Sunday treks. One afternoon when the table was set, I called down the cellar stairs to tell Jensy dinner was ready and got an uncharacteristic reply.
“Y’all go ’head without me. Ah got dat ole pain in my arm again.”
“You want me to bring your plate down?”
“No, babe, Ah ain’t hungry jus’ now.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with her arm.” Granny sighed. “It’s always the left one. It starts in the shoulder and goes down. She says it’s because she’s left-handed and she must have strained something.”
“Why in the hell doesn’t she go to a doctor instead of that crazy faith healer who speaks in tongues?” Mama demanded.
“Doctors don’t know anything. I tried to get her to go to one but she refused.”
Herb and I exchanged “our” look. Without Jensy feeding Granny lines, dinner proceeded in relative silence. Mama finished eating first, as usual, and lit a cigarette. Suddenly there was a crash below stairs.
“What was that?” we said in unison, and then we knew.
She was on the floor where she had fallen. Mama and I got there in time to hear the words “Miss Lura” from lips that were going blue, but by the time Granny negotiated the steep cellar stairs, Jensy had died.
Granny groaned and started to sink down. Mama and I caught her and held her heavy swaying body between us. Her face was flaming. When Jensy’s minister came in answer to Herb’s summons, the doctor he brought with him had to treat Granny; her blood pressure was over two hundred. Not daring to let her walk upstairs to her room, we put her in Jensy’s bed. When the undertaker’s men came, she turned her head to the wall and sobbed the terrible sobs of an old lady as they put Jensy’s body in the basket.
When they had gone, she recovered a little and insisted on holding court in Jensy’s apartment, greeting the Lily of the Valley ladies whom the minister notified. We all sat in the small room and discussed the funeral plans.
The minister was almost white, with that fine-drawn look that Granny called “good blood.” It was a Lee-Byrd-Randolph-Carver-Calhoun- Dandridge- Fairfax- Warfield-Oglethorpe-Devereaux look, and probably for good reason.
“I would take it kindly, and I know Sister Jensy would, if one of you-all would say a few words at the church service,” he enunciated carefully
.
“Mr. King would do that very well,” Granny said.
Herb nodded. “I’ll be happy to, sir.”
The minister made a little bow from the shoulders.
“I thank you, sir.”
It was a lovely moment, worthy of Versailles.
Herb gave us no indication of what he planned to say. I saw him look up a quotation in Bartlett’s but he made no notes.
Jensy had a perfect fall day for her funeral. The church smelled of bay rum, Florida water, and sugary perfume. Several of our old neighbors from 1020 for whom Jensy had worked were there; Miss Inez and Miss Rose Shields, and Mr. and Mrs. Koustopolous. The eulogy was profuse, the kind Jensy always said she wanted. As I listened to the shouts and moans I wondered if Herb might be too much of an anticlimax. I glanced at him, but his face was as inscrutable as ever. In fact, he was the only member of the white delegation who did not look slightly uncomfortable.
The minister finished speaking.
“And now, brothers and sisters, Mr. Herbert King is going to tell us about Sister Jensy.”
As Herb rose and went forward, a voice from the pew behind us whispered, “Dat de scarf man.” He stepped into the pulpit and looked out over the church, his face still inscrutable yet somehow immeasurably sad. He began.
“A great lady has left us.”
A wordless stir went over the mourners, a sound of surprise expressed in slight shifting movements; stockings against stockings, hands against sleeves, worn soles against worn carpet. Beside me, Granny sighed and wiped her eyes. The word that she and Herb had argued about for years, the word that set his teeth on edge, he had uttered at last for Jensy.
He began telling Jensy stories, small, lighthearted, yet touching incidents that had occurred over the years, making himself the butt of them in a way that brought unforced smiles to black faces. I marveled at his deft touch; no white Southerner could have done it.
Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady Page 25