Later on that night when Bubba Ray had gone to bed and Jackson checked in on Mama before retiring himself, it being one of Daddy’s meeting nights with the Council, mother and son had a heart-to-heart.
You’re a good boy, Jackson, Mama began, a mother couldn’t ask for one better, and I am fully aware that on the other hand Bubba Ray is a ruckus and a half. As you know, I’ve lost my temper with him once or twice myself. But you have to understand, as Daddy and I do, that he’s not like you. He’s not very smart and he’s not good-lookin’, that’s the pitiful truth of it. He does, however, possess a certain charm. Daddy calls it the shrewdness of the willfully ignorant, but your daddy’s always been hard on you all. Lord knows, Bubba Ray can get outta me whatever he wants on charm alone, and I am convinced that will be his saving grace, how he’ll get by in the world. Maybe he’ll sell something in one of your uncles’ stores. Or, as he’s big and burly enough, maybe he’ll be a sports star. That’s what I like to fancy for him. Isn’t that queer? A sportsman has to apply himself, and he requires a lot of sleep, don’t he? but I can’t get the idea out of my head nonetheless. Bubba Ray hurtlin’ through the goalposts, Bubba Ray sailin’ over the finish line, Bubba Ray knockin’ one out of the park. That’s what I think about when I picture your brother in days to come. Well, time will tell, time will tell. The thing of it is that I do believe Bubba Ray wishes he were you. Wishes he were smart and handsome. He feels his lack bitterly. But brains and looks were not what the Lord gave him. So I want you to try to be compassionate. Understand that when he torments you, it’s out of jealousy, plain and simple. Rise above, son, rise above. Your brother does not have the capacity.
Considering his mother’s delicate condition, there wasn’t much Jackson felt he could do. He was old enough to know there was no arguing with a mother’s love. He promised Mama he’d try, although he found her opinion of Bubba Ray to be maternal love gone delusional. By his lights, Bubba Ray was a selfish, lazy, good-for-nothing destined for penury and prison. He didn’t possess charm so much as a blighted soul basted in snake oil. The only thing he was precocious in was growth: He seemed to have twice the body mass his elder brother marshaled and not yet twelve, he already shaved twice a week. Yet Jackson was too busy with the demands of home and school to dwell much on the subject of Bubba Ray’s grotesqueries. Whenever he could, he ignored him, worked around him, and squelched the resentment he felt at having to feed and clean up after the greedy devil.
To Jackson’s relief, by the time a month had passed, Daddy came up with a maid and cook of whom Mama could approve. The doctor announced her impending arrival at supper.
Well, while I thank you, son, he told his eldest, I thank you very much indeed for your efforts during the past number of weeks, I am delighted this is the last evening I have to chomp down on chicken drier than a boar’s teat. I have located us a replacement for Sukie and Eleanor. She dropped by this afternoon while you boys were at school, and Mama liked her just fine. She’ll start tomorrow. Jackson, you got clean sheets in the house? I think we ought to drag Sukie’s old cot out of the basement and make it up nice and fresh to welcome her proper. She’s a young one, never lived away from home before, saving up money for her wedding, so the story goes.
Jackson asked where he’d found her.
Actually, she came to my office lookin’ for a way to repay me for takin’ care of her two young sisters. Twins. Asthmatics misdiagnosed as tuberculars, can you believe it? I had those two pups in my office not two weeks ago on charity night croaking out what sounded like their last breaths after some midwife witchdoctor down in the village tortured ’em with mustard plaster and pepper soup. Why anyone with half their senses thought that would cure tuberculosis, I haven’t a clue. I don’t know who it was diagnosed them, but it didn’t sit right with me, don’t know if I can tell you why, it just didn’t. I took ’em over to the hospital next day when I went for my morning rounds and had ’em X-rayed and blood tested on the QT, otherwise that gal’d never be able to pay for it, and I wanted to know, dammit, I wanted to know. Turned out I was on the money. Allergy-induced asthma. Both of ’em. One, two, three, I fixed them up with atomizers, and they breathed easy last week for the first time in a year, big sister tells me. Like I said, she was thankful, brought me over a home-cooked lunch. Catfish and spoon bread and Lord, it was delicious, much better’n yours. Better’n Sukie’s, too. Little side of black-eyed peas spiced tangy. Don’t know what was in it, but it was fine. Didn’t bite your mouth, just nibbled it. I asked her if she could cook low-fat and low-sugar just as well, and she’s a proud one, she said, Why yessir, I can cook anything on God’s green earth. Well, we got to talking. Ipso facto, Jackson’s reprieve. How’d you like that, son? Perhaps you can look forward to a carefree spring and summer before you’re off to Yankeetown and the shining future of your dreams after all. Providing this little miss works out.
Daddy, I wish you’d stop calling it Yankeetown. It’s New Haven. It’s Yale.
Well, all I can say is that if it were Oxford or Durham, we might be able to afford a maid and a cook again rather than have to lay all our hopes on one skinny li’l gal.
Jackson held his tongue, but what he wanted to say was: Can’t you be proud of me for once in your life, Daddy? If you were, maybe I wouldn’t feel so cooped up in Guilford that I’d crawl to the ends of the earth just to get away from you. Doesn’t it mean anything to you that I’m valedictorian? That the Ivy League wants me? But it’d been a long day of shopping and housework, school and study. He was too tired for the argument he knew would ensue, as they’d had it so many times before.
You’re a Southern boy, Daddy would say. They won’t be able to freeze that outta you up there, no matter how cold it gets. You’ll be on display, like some circus monkey. They’ll call you quaint and backwards and worse. I’m not denying you’ll win yourself a fine education, but you’ll be lonely, and you’ll be homesick. It’s not that easy to leave home, boy. You can’t just turn your back on the familiar and embrace the foreign, which will not embrace you back in any case. Mississippi will haunt you. You’ll long for down-home cooking and the smell of river mud, for a kind word from people who know who you are and take you as you are, no questions asked. They’ll move too fast for you. Everyone up there wakes up hell-bent in a rush to nowhere. They’re rude, too. They have no social graces. Employin’ bad manners is how they pass the time of day. You’ll feel slapped in the face five times an hour by damn Yankees, who haven’t got the sense to know they just finished insulting you. Or they do and don’t care. I know you think I’m a fool, don’t know what I’m talking about, but remember I lived up there in Philadelphia PA for an entire month examining veterans after the war. Worst month of my life. I know of what I speak. Can’t no one deny it.
After supper, Jackson and Dr. Sassaport got Sukie’s old cot up from the basement, along with the Korean screen Uncle Max sent home from his war. Jackson felt the new maid might want to enjoy some privacy, a commodity Sukie never gave a fig about, but she was old, he figured, and this new girl was young. Even Daddy was impressed by his thoughtfulness and threw him a bone of praise over it. Encouraged, he sponged the dust off the screen, then sprayed it and the cot all over with Mama’s lavender after-bath cologne to get rid of an odor of must. He made up the cot with clean sheets, a blanket, some pillows, and then, in a moment of inspiration, set down next to it a small table fetched from the front porch and on that he set a lamp from the same place and a bud vase into which he stuffed a branch of wisteria before he left for school.
Throughout the day, he imagined Sukie’s replacement finding her corner of the kitchen all cozy and spruced up, and he felt pleased with himself. For the first time since Mama took sick, he was eager to go home at the end of the day despite the fact that Amanda Riley herself passed him a note during civics saying she’d like to talk to him about something after class. He sent Amanda his regrets through Booster Cochoran. He surprised even himself that he was that anxious to meet the new
help. He imagined the reason was that he was deeply thankful someone had finally pleased Mama enough to release him from servitude. Such a creature must be truly rare, he thought, a special case, worthy of his curiosity and excitement. When he burst through the kitchen door, smiling broadly, about to make this marvel’s acquaintance, he realized his intense anticipation was prescient. The new maid was Katherine Marie.
His first sight of her was a back view as she worked over the stove, but he knew her, he knew her instantly. It was her hair, he thought later, black and kinky like every other Negro girl’s, but braided from the center high on her head the way the horsey girls at school did theirs and with a paintbrush of a tail, thick and shining and full, flipping up. Or her neck, maybe: long, sinewy, with a sweet constellation of moles forming a perfect circle at the nape. It was not her body, although images of those long muscular legs and the short tiny waist had plagued him frequently since that time a year earlier in the backyard of the village whorehouse. It couldn’t have been, as she was dressed in a shapeless shift, gray-colored, modest as a cloister’s habit, which ended past her calves. Whatever it was that sparked his knowledge, it caught him by the throat, and he stood there just inside the screen door speechless with wonder at this turn of events. He watched, slack jawed, openmouthed, while her slender shoulders rose and fell. She turned her head, giving him just the point of her elegant chin, a sliver of nostril, the half moon of one brown eye profligate with lash.
Mr. Jackson, is that you?
His heart pounded. She remembered him. She remembered him. She remembered him. He could only nod.
Home from school so quick?
Yes.
She turned to face him. Held out her hand. A bold move, completely unorthodox, he thought, as bold and as unorthodox as he was to take that dry fine-boned member in his own damp palm and give it a good, single shake as if it were the most common thing in the world for a white boy in 1959 in rural Mississippi to take the proffered hand of a Negro girl, a servant in his own home, to show her respect like that, as if there were no difference between them either in race or station. She smiled and raised her eyebrows. It was a haughty look and one of approval also, which for some reason pleased him enormously. He grinned back, showing all his teeth, every one of them, which must have made him look like an idiot or threatening maybe, because then Katherine Marie blinked a few times and abruptly turned back to the pot she was stirring. An uncomfortable silence dangled between them, which Jackson did not know what to do with, so he stood immobile, his lanky arms hanging by his sides.
Are you hungry, Mr. Jackson? Katherine asked at last. Shall I get you something?
Well, a little, but I can fix up something myself. And please, I’m just Jackson. There ain’t no one ever called me Mr. to my face and under my own roof except for Big Bokay, and he’s been gone now three years. He was a very polite man, of the old school I do believe.
Jackson suddenly remembered that Dr. Sassaport had said the new help was saving for her wedding, and according to what he’d spied last year, surely Li’l Bokay must be the one. Hopefully, she appreciated the awkward compliment he’d paid to a man who would have been her granddaddy-in-law had he lived. Lord, he felt like an imbecile as well as standing there looking like one. She turned to smile at him again, which caused a frantic flutter in his chest.
Alright, Jackson, alright.
Thank you, Katherine Marie. Thank you.
He then started whistling, as he couldn’t think what else to do, and bustled about in the pantry for some bread and peanut butter to make himself a sandwich. By the time he finished, Mama’s bell rang with all the force her muscled, if hypochondriacal wrist could muster. Katherine Marie brushed past him as she rushed upstairs. Though he ate very slowly awaiting her return, he was long done, patting a finger around his plate hunting for crumbs before she arrived.
Everything alright up there? he asked.
Katherine Marie held a hand up and shook it at him in a frazzled, “I’m too busy to deal with you right now” manner. One after another, she opened, searched, and shut cupboards with alarming speed. Dang, dang, dang, she muttered after each fruitless inspection. What’s wrong? What’s wrong? Jackson rose from his seat at the table to block her way and plead yet again, What’s wrong? before she answered him, irritation studding her words like rivets.
Your mama needs her twisty straws or she cannot drink. Her throat is dry as a bone. It’s time for her medication. She has collapsed against her pillows and swears she has not the strength to lift up her head.
Jackson responded with the urgency her irritation, if not Mama’s request, demanded, obtaining the twisty straws from their drawer in the pantry with the speed of a champion sprinter.
Here they are, here.
Katherine Marie looked like she might kiss him, she was that happy at his find.
But she did not.
Thank you, thank you, she said with a smile Jackson considered as bright as a hundred lightbulbs switching on all at once, then she bounded back up the stairs to Miss Missy’s sickbed.
His heart racing, Jackson sat again and waited. He waited quietly, without movement, so he could hear her approach. He held his breath at every creak of the old house in case it turned out to be her step down the stairs. He listened to the refrigerator hum. He listened to a branch of sweet gum buffet the beams of the back porch. He listened to a door open and close, which caught his breath, but then he heard water rushing through pipes in the wall, realized it had only been the bathroom door, and suffered disappointment. What was Mama doing to her? he wondered. What if Mama got all unreasonable and drove her away? The idea of having Katherine Marie living in his house one moment and banished the next terrified him. Why did he care so much? Although the answer to that question was swiftly becoming obvious to him, he examined himself on it in great detail. Was he simply thrown back by the unexpected sight of her to the moment they met, the panic he’d felt and how she’d saved him? Was it the old gratitude? His childhood vow to even the score with her? Was it that Katherine Marie possessed the only pair of Negro breasts he’d ever seen half-naked? Was it as venal as that? Did he lust after her? Any more than he lusted after every girl he met? Did he love her?
He was on the verge of admitting that last and contemplating the whys and hows and whats of it, when the object of his disturbance reappeared with her hair disheveled and little rings of sweat beneath the armholes of her shift. Jackson pretended he’d just finished his snack and rose to put his plate in the sink.
Mama alright? he asked with his back to Katherine Marie so he could feign a casual manner without betraying himself.
Sure. She needed a little help getting to the facilities and a back rub, is all.
She returned to her stewpot, where she set to scraping the bottom as she’d been gone so long it’d begun to clump up. Dang, she muttered, dang. Jackson looked around the room trying to figure out an excuse to continue hanging around. Then he hit on one he decided was perfect in every way.
Katherine Marie, he said, I’m accustomed to doing my homework in the kitchen. Do you mind? Will I be underfoot?
It was not as if custom allowed her to refuse him. She assured him it was just fine, that her job was to help the family, not get in their way. They continued their little dance of politesse that first week until it appeared habit for Jackson to return home from school every day and spend as much time in the kitchen as Bubba Ray did in front of the television. He read his texts, scribbled his papers at the Formica table situated not three feet away from her screen and cot while his head filled with images of her sleeping there, in a nightgown if it were cool weather, out of one if it were hot, reading Mama’s castoff magazines, listening to the transistor radio on the countertop next to the toaster. Katherine Marie had many duties that took her out of that room, and when she left it, he took a chance now and again to put his nose against her sheets and pillows for the joy of catching the female scent of her, and he was so quick about it not once was he ever ca
ught.
Around suppertime, just before Daddy came home, Jackson would scoop up his belongings and head to his room feeling a reluctance he hesitated to name. Often, he’d forget a pen or a slide rule or some such as an excuse to return after the dishes were washed up so that he and Katherine Marie could exchange a few pleasantries. Or he might find her finishing her chores and help out by putting the silverware away, as, he told her, Mama was very particular about her silver, and perhaps it was best that he took care of it. Every chance he got, he tried to let her know by his comportment that he wasn’t like other white boys whose acquaintance she might suffer, in that she was a person to him, not just a retainer or a Negro. He went so far as to engage her on the subject of her upcoming marriage, asking to be remembered to Li’l Bokay, underscoring his friendship with that man in the long-ago. The mention of Li’l Bokay opened her up considerably. By the end of the week, Jackson and Katherine Marie were as easy together as the oldest of friends.
On Friday night, Mama left her bed to come downstairs and have what she called a traditional sabbath dinner. This perplexed Jackson quite a bit. Unless it was New Year’s or Passover, they’d never had a sabbath dinner that was in any fashion at all traditional, at least by the lights of how Rabbi Nussbaum described one during his bar mitzvah lessons. Usually on Friday nights, Mama lit candles whenever it was that Daddy got home, whether before sundown or after. Daddy would quick-ass mumble a blessing over the wine and bread, and then they’d have pizza or barbecue Daddy picked up in the city after his evening hospital rounds. Mama said that if it were forbidden to work on the Sabbath she didn’t see why she or Cook should have to be scrubbing pots and pans after the family ate, whereas tossing away a pizza box or cartons of coleslaw and rib bones wasn’t work at all. Still, in preparation for her first Friday night at the house, Katherine Marie spent much of the day chasing dust, washing table linens, baking braided bread, and roasting chicken. In addition, Mama instructed her to bring out the good crystal and china and lay a party table out for them all. When Jackson got home from school, he found her struggling to polish the giant silver candelabra Mama kept behind glass in the pantry, which hadn’t been used in so long the tarnish made it look forged from iron. It was his pleasure to rescue the girl from such a mammoth chore. He sat at the table polishing away while Katherine Marie whisked eggs for vegetable kugel. Mama had unearthed the recipe from the back of a family photo album no one had looked at for as long as Jackson could recall.
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