“You sure play football like a gladiator. Has she ever seen you?”
“I don’t guess so.”
“Next time we’ll tell her to watch.”
He looked at me like he wasn’t so sure about there being a next time.
“How come your name is Trip?”
“My daddy is Samuel Thompson Westbrook Junior, which makes me Samuel Thompson Westbrook the Third, so they call me Trip, like ‘triple,’ get it?”
“I get it.”
“Mama is Virginia Lynn McKenna Westbrook and my sister Ginny Lynn is named after her. Meemaw’s name is Farish McKenna and my sister Farish is named after her.”
“Oh.”
“But it’s hard to think about Meemaw having any other name besides Meemaw, you know?”
“Ain’t got a meemaw.”
“You don’t have a grandmother?”
“Or granddaddy either. Died before I was born. Don’t even have a daddy anymore. He lives in St. Louis.”
I didn’t figure he wanted to talk about that, so I didn’t ask anything.
Mama came out to the porch.
“Did you get all cleaned up? Hey, Dee.” She smiled at him like “Isn’t he cute?”—the way she smiles at a puppy.
Then she looked at the rose bed and the smile went away. She tromped down the steps and marched over to the rose bed and stood there with her hands on her hips. She reached out and tried to make the propped-up ones stand up by themselves, but they flopped over as soon as she let go. Then she dug around and picked up the ones I had hidden. I thought I buried them better than that.
“Trip Westbrook! Do you want to explain this?”
One hand was on her hip and one hand was full of broken roses. She was mad, mad, mad.
“What have I told you about getting into my roses?”
“Ma’am?”
“Don’t you act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“Well, I, uh—you mean those roses?”
“You are cruisin’ for a bruisin’, young man!”
“Miz Westbrook,” said Dee. “It wasn’t Trip that…”
I frowned at him and shook my head. When Mama’s eyes get black like that, you do not want to be the reason. She was the kind of mad she gets when her day has been too busy with errands and projects and meetings, and she needed to lie down and take a nap a long time ago, but people would not let her take a nap and somebody, somebody was going to have to pay for this.
“He means we don’t exactly know what happened, Mama. We don’t exactly know who broke your roses. We tried to be so careful.”
“And those you propped up, you might just as well have broken off. They’re not going to make it. Do you exactly know who bent them and then propped them up like that so I wouldn’t notice, instead of telling me honestly what had happened?”
“Well…well, I was gonna tell you about it as soon as you got home.”
“Miz Westbrook, the truth is…” Dee still did not understand that he was in danger.
“The truth is that I did it, Mama. I couldn’t stop running in time and ran in there and accidentally broke them and tried to hide it from you. I’m sorry.”
She stared at me and you would not have thought that I was her beloved firstborn, you would have thought that I was a redheaded stranger and the punishment didn’t exist that was horrible enough for me, but she would invent it.
Probably the biggest reason that I’m a good kid is that I’ll do anything not to make Mama that mad. The last time I saw her like this was a few months ago, when I rode on the back of a motorcycle. Daddy always said he would buy me a car when I got to college if I promised never to ride on a motorcycle. Mama told me he had a friend in high school who got killed in a motorcycle wreck, and that’s why he felt so strongly about it. He also said he would pay me a thousand dollars when I was twenty-one if I never touched a cigarette or a beer until then. That part sounds like an easy thousand. But I have always wanted to know what riding motorcycles felt like. Mama and Daddy left for a party one Saturday afternoon, and I was hanging out in the yard and here came Johnny Adcock on his new Yamaha YM1, which he was almost old enough to legally ride. He said he would take me around the block.
I would see what it felt like and never do it again. Just around the block. It wasn’t like I was driving it myself. Anyway, who would ever find out? So I got on the back and hung on to Johnny, and we took off around the corner. He opened it up all the way down Waynedale, and I was so happy I had made this decision.
Then, soon as we turned back onto Oak Lane Drive, even though they weren’t supposed to be home until late, here came Mama and Daddy. I ducked as low behind Johnny as I could, but it was too late. They were standing in the driveway, waiting for me. Mama had forgotten a cheese ball for the party. So thanks to that cheese ball, I got into the worst trouble I’d ever been in and finally understood what God was trying to tell me: “You will never get away with anything.”
Now Mama turned before she went back inside and shook the dead roses at me: “When Meemaw leaves, you and I are going to improve your understanding of ‘yard rules’ and what happens to those who violate them.”
The chances of me ever playing football in the front yard again didn’t look very good. Or of ever being let out of my room again.
I decided to stay outside until Meemaw came. Dee went back to raking, and we talked about school. He has a lot more kids in his classes than I do, thirty-five or forty, and the teacher has to spend so much time making everybody act right, she hardly has any time left to teach anything. He said he didn’t mind school, that he wanted to learn about stuff, especially arithmetic, which I personally cannot understand anybody wanting to learn about. He said he learned more from reading library books on his own than he did in class.
He asked me what seventh grade was like, and I told him I liked walking around on my own and having a lot of different teachers. But I was still getting used to how many more people there were at junior high. Plus, the PE classes are run by mean old guys with paddles. The meanest was the head football coach, Coach Montgomery, who had long teeth and a long nose. Stokes said it looked like a ski jump for flies. Coach Montgomery made us run laps until we collapsed on the track, and climb ropes with our bare hands until we had rope burns and couldn’t hold on anymore.
When Coach Montgomery asked me why I didn’t go out for football, and I told him about Mama wanting me to wait a year, he looked at another coach and laughed. He said, “Gotta wait till Mommy says it’s okay? That boy doesn’t want to play football.” What he meant was “You are a sniveling little sissy who doesn’t deserve to go to my school, and I am going to hurt you every chance I get.”
It’s bad enough the coaches make you run around for an hour and only give you ten minutes to take a shower and get dry before your next class, but if you mess up the slightest bit or even if they just think you’re not trying hard enough, they’ll make you grab your ankles and give you some licks with those paddles just for the fun of it. They drill holes in the wood to make it hurt more.
“I had never even had a man teacher before this year, much less a mean man teacher with a paddle,” I said to Dee.
“Sounds pretty rough.”
Meemaw pulled up in the driveway in her brand-new Cadillac. The late-afternoon sun lit up her earrings and her necklace and her big smile when she leaned down to give me a hug. She’s sixty-something, but I can see why people say she’s still beautiful.
“How is my big man doin’ today? Just getting so taaalll…”
Even though I see her all the time, she likes to look surprised and say how I’m getting so tall, like tall is the best thing anybody could possibly be. I wish I really was getting so tall, like Daddy. He says be patient.
Meemaw walked up the steps slowly, watching her feet.
“That’s Dee,” I said, pointing.
“What, sweethaht?”
“Willie Jane’s son.”
“Well, hello, Dee,” she said, laughi
ng.
“This is Meemaw.”
Dee held up his hand and smiled.
“Dee’s a good raker,” I told her.
“I can see that,” said Meemaw. “Don’t woik too hahd, Dee.”
“He’s a good football player, too,” I said, but she was already opening the front door and singing “Woo-ooo” like she always does instead of knocking.
Farish and Ginny Lynn and me sat in the living room with Meemaw and had a “nice visit.” We only have to sit there long enough to talk about something great we’ve done lately, and then we can go. Later, Mama called us back to the living room to say good-bye and Meemaw said, “Love ya good,” and hugged us and drove off.
Mama declared that she was going to take a nap before supper. So that was good. She might be in a whole different mood by the time we improved my understanding of yard rules.
The kitchen smelled like fried chicken, which is probably the best smell in the world, and also like turnip greens, which are slimy and stinky. Why do people pretend turnip greens are okay to eat? Daddy says they’re good for you and puts hot sauce on his.
Willie Jane put on her sweater and called Dee into the house to say good-bye.
“Tell ya mama when she’s awake that everything’s ready, she just has to warm up the rolls.”
She picked up a sack of cantaloupes Mama had gotten for her at the farmers’ market and said she would see us Monday.
Dee whispered, “Thanks for not telling your mama who tore up her roses.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” I said. “You’re too young to die.”
Then he held out his hand. It seemed kind of like out of a movie, this kid shorter than me trying to shake hands like we were grown-ups. I just looked at him for a second. But he kept it out there, smiling at me. So we shook.
—
I was reading about the Trojan War, but my mind kept wandering to new plays for the game next weekend when me and Dee would beat ’em again. When I glanced up from my book, Daddy was standing in the doorway, which can be a scary surprise because he fills up the whole space. He played basketball at Tulane.
“Hi, pal.”
Mama came up behind him and said they were wondering if we could “chat” for a minute. They came in and sat on the end of the bed. Here came the yard rules. I clenched my toes.
But they didn’t seem mad. They seemed sorry about something. They hadn’t said anything sad at supper. Maybe they wanted me to know before my sisters did. I had a sudden, terrible thought: Meemaw’s dead!
“Your mother tells me that Dee played football with you and the gang yesterday.”
What was sad about that?
“You oughta see him throw a pass, Daddy. He’s real fast, too.”
“Well, I think it’s great that you included Willie Jane’s boy in your game, but it’s just that sometimes there are, well, larger issues involved, and—”
“We’ve gotten some phone calls,” Mama said.
“About what?” I asked.
“There are concerns among the neighbors,” said Daddy. “They are concerned that—”
“Listen, honey, this is all my fault,” Mama said. “I told you it was okay for Dee to play with y’all, but…he really doesn’t need to be out there in the front yard like that. It upsets people.”
“What? He was playing football! He wasn’t hurting anybody!”
“We know, pal,” Daddy said.
“Well, what are people all concerned about? Who called, anyway?”
They just looked at me. Then Mama said, “Mrs. Sitwell, Mr. Bethune—”
“Mr. Bethune? Mr. Bethune parked his truck and watched us play! Why would he stop and watch us if he—”
“It doesn’t matter who it was, Trip. They are our neighbors and a whole bunch of people around here, not just Pete Bethune, but a whole bunch of people are upset about having to integrate schools—”
“And neighborhoods,” said Mama.
“The Civil Rights Act,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Miss Hooper told us all about it in history.”
“Then you can understand why people are upset.”
“But I don’t understand. I hear people at school saying bad stuff about colored people—they’re lazy, you can’t trust ’em—and I want to say, ‘When did you ever hang out with colored people to know anything about them?’ I wouldn’t say those things about Willie Jane and Dee. Would you?”
“Of course not, honey,” Mama said. “Your father and I—”
“So what would be so bad if some of the kids at school were colored?”
Daddy was thinking. Mama leaned over and put her hand on mine and smiled that smile that says “We both know how right I am.”
“It’s not that anything is wrong with colored people, honey,” she said. “It’s just that they are different. And we can’t have them going to our schools and living in our neighborhoods, can we? When you’re older, you’ll understand.”
I pulled my hand away. “I don’t see why not.” Maybe I sounded kind of crazy, but it was said, so I looked hard at both of them. “I don’t see what everybody’s so worried about.” I looked at Daddy. “Are you worried?”
He stretched his lips like it was something he didn’t know how to talk about. “It’s a complicated issue, pal. I see colored patients every day and listen to their problems. I know things need to change.”
Daddy cares about his patients. They come up to me in the grocery store and say I must be Dr. Westbrook’s son because I look just like him, and he delivered all their babies, and they love him so much. One lady told me how he saved her life and started crying right there in the cereal aisle.
“So do the colored ladies still have to sit in a different waiting room?” I asked.
“Don’t be disrespectful,” Mama said.
“I’m just asking.”
Daddy took a deep breath. “I’m working on the waiting room issue. I have a couple of people on my side up there.”
“But Dee playing ball with us is simple. You used to play ball with colored kids in New Orleans. That’s all I was doing.”
“That was a different time and place,” Daddy said. “Look, your mother and I are not like these people who have been calling and complaining, and I would never want you to think we are.”
“They’re a bunch of mean, stupid people. Especially that old bag Mrs. Sitwell.”
“Trip Westbrook!” Mama made a shocked face.
“I’m sorry.”
“Some of them are stupid,” Daddy said. “Or at least ignorant.”
“And we’re not giving in to them, right?” I said.
They looked at each other and didn’t say anything. And it hit me: they had come in here to tell me something, and now they didn’t agree on what to tell me. It felt strange. I knew they didn’t always agree. Mama teased Daddy about being a “soft-hearted liberal.” But when it comes to us kids, they’re always together. One voice makes the rules around here, the Mama-Daddy voice.
Mama finally said, “Honey, we simply cannot allow—”
“No, pal,” Daddy interrupted, “we are not giving in to them. Y’all go ahead and play with Dee. We just wanted you to know what was going on.”
He stood up like that was all that needed to be said. Mama looked at him like she was definitely not finished. Then she walked out real fast, and Daddy went after her.
“That is not what we—” Mama whispered.
Daddy whispered something.
Then Mama said, “We have to live here, Sam!”
—
I heard Mama say at a party once that she said she was “bound and determined” to get out of Mississippi and go to college in New Orleans, which was where she fell in love with Daddy. And it was hard to bring home this “exotic” older man as her fiancé. I looked that word up, “exotic.” It means “unusual.”
It didn’t matter to her parents that Daddy was almost a doctor; what mattered was that he was from the Marigny district of New Orlean
s, where a lot of poor people lived. They expected her to marry somebody from a rich family no farther away than the Delta. Daddy was just part of a rebellious phase, they said, which had started when she picked Sophie Newcomb over Ole Miss, where all the Jackson debutantes went.
It took forever to get their approval of her marriage, and she wasn’t sure she had it yet. But if they ever cut her off, she said, she had her degree and would enjoy using it. It was hard to hear her say “my parents” and put that together with Meemaw and Papaw. I don’t think I wanted to put it together.
Mama and Daddy were having one of their serious talks at the dinner table, and the rule when that happens is that children must temporarily lose their hearing. They started out on Martin Luther King and his marches and speeches. Daddy was all for him, Mama was undecided. Then Daddy talked about when Governor Barnett tried to keep James Meredith from going to Ole Miss, and the military police came. “People died because a colored man wanted to go to school with white people,” Daddy said, like he dared anybody to believe it.
Mama said she did not agree with Ross Barnett about everything, but some of her lifelong friends had been his strongest supporters, and the new reservoir was named after him, for goodness’ sake. Daddy said Barnett was a buffoon. Mama cut her eyes at us to remind Daddy who else was at the table, even if we had temporarily lost our hearing.
But that made Daddy talk even louder about all kinds of stuff, like he would rather get his information from the national news on TV than from that racist rag of a newspaper we have here in Jackson, and he would cancel our subscription if Mama would let him; and if we expect Negro men to go fight in a war with white men, it’s “high time they had the same chances in life when they got back”; and he’s worn out from trying to get the other doctors at his OB-GYN clinic to open the waiting room to colored patients, instead of making them sit somewhere else, and the other doctors won’t do it because they’re a pack of self-interested, nearsighted racists.
Mama raised her eyebrows at Daddy and said, “Well, I am not a racist.”
Yard War Page 5