Southern Discomfort

by Tena Clark

  If Virgie was a stand-in mama, Beulah Mae was a raucous and crazy aunt, the kind of crazy aunt who would never end up in an institution and yet perhaps shouldn’t be allowed to run around entirely free-range either. Most days, Virgie would pay Beulah Mae twenty-five cents for a ride from Hiwannee to Waynesboro and back. Beulah Mae had a license and a car, one of the few black folks who did in those days, but that was about where her ability to drive a car ended. More days than not, Virgie would stumble out of Beulah Mae’s car, shaking from head to toe in both fear and rage.

  “That crazy fool almos’ kilt us!” Virgie would exclaim, as Beulah Mae sat behind the wheel laughing. “She done drive right down the ditch and out t’ other side with cars comin’ straight fo’ us,” Virgie would cry out. “I done say my prayers this mo’nin, I did!”

  Beulah Mae and Virgie were the original Odd Couple. Where Virgie was quiet and reserved, Beulah Mae was loud and profane. Where Virgie barely opened her mouth, Beulah Mae would peel back her lips, revealing the gold of her capped teeth, and hiss, “I’m gonna git me some moonshine tonight and go honky tonkin’.” Where Virgie quietly hummed gospel hymns as she worked, Beulah Mae could scare the crows out the trees with her rendition of Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road Jack.” Where I never once saw Virgie take so much as a sip of liquor, Beulah Mae would upend the Ball jar of clear moonshine whiskey to her lips and empty it down to the last drop. And where Virgie’s laughter was rare and guarded, Beulah Mae’s guffaw could be heard from Georgia’s house clear across the road. They were the best of friends.

  But most of the time, Virgie didn’t approve of Beulah Mae’s behavior. One afternoon, after Beulah Mae and Mama had shared their tall glasses of whiskey, I heard Virgie scold Beulah Mae as the two of them were getting in her car for the ride back to Hiwannee.

  “Yo’ doin’ Miss Vivian no favors, givin’ ’er reason t’ drink the afternoon away,” Virgie said, shaking her head and clucking her tongue.

  “She sho don’t be needin’ no reason t’ gettin’ liquored up, you knows that!” Beulah Mae shot back.

  “You sho ain’t helpin’ matters any, s’all I sayin’. Gettin’ to be so she be drinkin’ all day now. Last thing that po’ lady need is somebody drinkin’ with her! Miss Vivian’s a good woman, she just be so sad all the time.”

  Virgie got in the car and shook her head with her arms crossed tight in front of her, muttering, “M-m-m. No good a’tall.”

  Chapter Ten

  * * *

  While Mama drank and sang along to her records in her room, I played. The best days were when Miss Catherine would drop Burke off for the day and he and I would ride around the farm on my horses for hours, both of us bareback and topless, wearing only shorts, exploring the rolling fields and hunting field mice and rabbits. I imagined myself another Little Joe from Bonanza, looking just as handsome and brave on the open plains. I relegated Burke to playing Hoss, which he accepted with his usual sweet deference. We turned the hay fields and ponds into a magical world of cowboys and Indians, soldiers and invading armies, trappers and wild bears. But what the magical kingdom and old Western forts never had were any damsels in distress or squaws. Burke and I always were a team of two, two boys against the world.

  To say I was “confused” about my sexuality would be inaccurate. In fact, I was never confused. I simply never thought of myself as a girl. I thought of myself as a boy. Biologically, I knew I was a girl, with all the female body parts, but I never considered myself one. While the adults around me commented on “how positively darlin’ ” it was that I preferred to wear cowboy boots and overalls instead of dressing like other little girls in their crinoline and pin curls, I never gave it a second thought. I belonged in a dress as much as a grizzly belongs in high heels.

  Mama and Daddy didn’t know what to make of my rejection of girlish pursuits and the dresses my sisters favored, beyond labeling me the family tomboy, and assuring themselves and everyone else that “she’ll grow out of it, ’ventually.” Years later, when I watched the film To Kill a Mockingbird, I saw Scout and nearly wept with recognition. It was like I was watching a version of myself on screen. “That’s me,” I whispered.

  That said, my parents tried like hell to move me along from my tomboy “phase,” always buying me the frilliest dresses and Little Bo Peep hats and propping me up like a mini mannequin for pageants and pictures. They even involved my sister Elizabeth, who tried to teach me how to do the runway model walk and turn in my Easter bonnet and dress for the camera. I tried to mimic her strut, but I kept looking up to her as if to say: Ya ’bout done with this nonsense so I can get back to the jungle gym?

  Once, and only once, Daddy hired a fancy photographer to come to the house to take my picture. He wanted me to pose with a toy Texaco oil truck for an ad in the company’s annual stockholders’ report, and Mama had chosen a dress so big and so stiff the skirt stood up on its own. Kicking and screaming, I was finally wrestled into the dress, its collar scratching against my throat and the crinoline slip making my legs itch. Begging to have a quick pee while the photographer got his lights set up, I grabbed one of Daddy’s cigarette lighters, buried it in the folds of the skirt, and ran into the bathroom. Behind the closed bathroom door, I ripped off the dress, opened the linen drawers, which were built into the wall, and with one hand holding the dress, climbed up into my favorite hiding place—the deep top-shelf cupboard above the drawers. It always felt like a fort, where I would imagine myself guarding against the invading Indian tribes. Once settled, I flicked the lighter at the dress until a tiny flame took hold of the stiff material. As I watched, the flame slowly began melting the ugly pink sateen, and as it did, the noxious smoke got thicker and thicker.

  “Why do I smell G-G-G-GODdamn smoke?” Daddy yelled as I heard his heavy shoes run toward the bathroom. “What in hell’s g-g-goin’ on in there?”

  Suddenly the cupboard door opened, and there I was sitting with the smoldering dress and the cigarette lighter still in my hand. Without a word, Daddy grabbed me with one arm and threw me over his hip and grabbed the dress with his other arm and threw it in the tub, turning on the water to douse the flames.

  Another dress soon replaced the ruined one, and while I didn’t try to burn it, I ignored it nonetheless. I just wanted to wear what the boys did so I could climb over fences and jump on horses and scramble up trees.

  Aunt Clifford, Mama’s sister who had freed her from under the bus years before, would watch me come in from playing, my overalls half-undone, my feet and chest bare and dusty, and my hair a tangle of burrs and curls, and exclaim, “Well, my Lord, Tena! You’re just a born tomboy! You know, sugar, since you really want to be a boy so much, if you can kiss your elbow, you’ll turn into one!” And she’d snap her fingers. “Just like that!” Little did she know she started a years-long struggle I waged against my upper arm bone, pushing my elbow back while craning my neck and lips forward, trying trying trying to connect the two. Although I came close a couple of times, I very much remained, to my dismay, a girl.

  Then one day it all became very clear to me. My sister Elizabeth came home with one of her girlfriends from a high school football game in which they were both majorettes. Elizabeth’s friend was a tall beauty with white-blond hair halfway down her back. She had long, bare legs that disappeared into an emerald-green sequined leotard and wore white tasseled boots. I looked up from where I sat on the floor playing with my Lincoln Logs, dazed and transfixed. She was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. Not yet aware of sex or sexuality, I nonetheless knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with this goddess, or one just like her.

  Right then and there I knew I didn’t want to be a majorette, I wanted to marry one. I was six years old.

  After that first sighting of the majorette, I suddenly became more aware of girls and women around me, particularly those who, like me, didn’t quite fit in. Whenever I drove with Mama or Daddy into town, I hoped we might stop at Cotton Drugstore. Two women ran the store and
they were like nobody else in town, mostly because they weren’t married and they lived, not with their parents or crazy kinfolk, but with each other. Like roommates, I guessed. One day I asked Daddy about them and he told me they were “Spinsters, old maids, because they never got married.”

  “Why not, Daddy? Why didn’t they get married?” Women had to get married. Didn’t they? I didn’t know any respectable woman who hadn’t.

  “Don’t ask so m-m-many questions,” Daddy said.

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  When I asked Mama, she laughed.

  “Oh, your daddy just means they’re lesbians. That’s when two girls like each other and live together,” Mama said. Then, quickly: “But it’s a sin. Leviticus, chapter twenty, verse thirteen.” She quoted by heart, “If a man has sexual relations with a man, both have done what is detestable and they are to be put to death. Their blood will be on their own heads . . . So there you have it. Don’t you be hangin’ around their store.”

  Too late. I was hooked, and whenever I came up with an excuse, I would go to Cotton’s and pretend I was taking my time choosing a comic book or a candy bar while I peeked around the corner to gaze at these exotic creatures who never got married and liked each other instead of men: lezbeins.

  Chapter Eleven

  * * *

  While I daydreamed of these mysterious women and what it could possibly mean that they could live with, maybe even love, other women, life around me at the farm continued to disintegrate. Mama was downright miserable and took to calling the house “Vivian’s Folly,” because Daddy built it thinking it would make her happy. But really, he built it to give her something to do besides chase him around town with her .38 Colt.

  She tried her best to love the house and had put her heart and soul into making it a showplace of ornate wrought iron grillwork, designer chandeliers, custom-made grass wallpaper, French Provincial furniture, and a painted mural of an antebellum plantation, right down to the Greek Revival mansion and oak trees draped in Spanish moss. Mama also loved the color pink and made sure she was surrounded by it: imported pink slate from Italy for the patio, pink wool carpeting and matching pink walls in the bedrooms, and half a mile of baby pink rose bushes lining the length of our long U-shaped driveway. But the big house and the fancy grillwork and the Italian slate patio hadn’t worked to lessen Mama’s sadness. Often, when I came in from playing in the fields, I’d find her just sitting, listening to Nat King Cole, reading her Bible or staring out the window, at what I didn’t know. I’d crawl up into her lap, put my arms around her, and lay my head against her chest, and we’d sit there in silence. I felt as though, if I hugged her hard enough, I could melt away all her hurt. But that hadn’t worked either.

  It didn’t help Mama or the marriage when Big Papa moved in with us for a spell after Big Mama died. Always a mean old cuss, he got downright ugly in old age, peeing in the corner of the guest room like a dog marking his yard, rather than bothering to walk down the hall to the bathroom. But we had it easy. He stayed for a spell with each of his daughters, and in Aunt Mary’s home he took to defecating into a sock and twirling it around the room, flinging his shit all over the walls, furniture, and brand-new, purple, wall-to-wall carpet, which she and her husband had saved for years to afford.

  But mean, crazy, or both, Big Papa sure did love me and I loved him right back. He generously bestowed his rare hugs and smiles on his youngest grandchild and took me for rides around town. One hot and muggy afternoon, we saw an old black man walking along the side of the road, his shirt soaked to his skin and his face shiny with sweat. Big Papa slowed the car and leaned out the window.

  “Hey, boy,” Big Papa said, “ya tired of walkin’?”

  The old man stopped, took off his hat, and bowed slightly.

  “Well, yessir, I am, I rightly am.”

  “Well then, ya bes’ git to runnin’, nigger!” Big Papa said, throwing his head back and laughing as he hit the gas pedal, sending dirt and pebbles flying into the old man’s face.

  I turned in my seat, looking back as the man wiped the dirt from his face with a clean white handkerchief. I didn’t say a word, and driving away in the car, I felt the shame of Big Papa’s cruelty as if it were my own. And maybe in my silence, it was, even if I was only eight years old.

  Big Papa died in March of 1963, but his leaving the house didn’t improve my parents’ marriage. It was a good thing we lived way out in the country, because they didn’t just fight: they brawled. Hands and fists and feet and hair and nails were all mixed up as they went at each other, Mama screaming drunk and Daddy playing defense and trying to keep her away from one of her guns. Eventually she’d find her pistol or a shotgun, and then he’d have to wrestle her to the floor, where they’d roll around and around like something out of a barroom fight on Gunsmoke, while she screamed about how she was “gonna kill his cheatin’ ass!” And he’d scream that she was “just p-p-plum crazy drunk! Nothing was g-g-goin’ on!”

  As soon as they started rolling around, I knew I had a job: dodge their wrestling bodies and grab the gun out of Mama’s hands before she got a shot off. Then I would run, throw it in the swimming pool, and call Georgia.

  “Mama’s drunk and the gun’s in the pool again!”

  Georgia and Bobby always came in minutes, picked Mama up off the floor, and got her to bed with ice packs on her bruises. Sometimes the bruises were so bad that the doctor was called and I knew to tell him that Mama had slipped in my puppy’s pee, once again.

  “My, my, Miss Tena. Haven’t you housetrained that pup yet?” was all he’d say.

  Sometimes the fights didn’t involve guns and my parents would just scream at each other until they were hoarse. Those times, I would see Virgie’s lips tighten to a thin line and her head move back and forth so slowly and so subtly it was easy to miss. Then she would take my hand and say, “Come on, baby girl, let’s you and me go out and see if Frank be lonely out there in the barn all by hisself.”

  Before my sisters married and moved out, Daddy and Penny would get after it. Mama always said they were like oil and water, but I think they were more like gasoline and fire: they just set each other off. They were also very much alike, in all the wrong ways. Like Daddy, Penny was short, probably only about five feet one inch, and she also had his big personality and a mouth to match it. She never minced words, especially when she probably should have.

  Daddy would tell her there was “no way in hell” she was going to date some boy or another, and next thing you knew she’d be headed out the door to meet that very boy. One Sunday, when we were having dinner after church, we heard a faint honk from the end of our long driveway. Penny got up and grabbed her purse.

  “Where the hell d-d-do you think you’re g-g-goin’?” Daddy asked.

  “Mr. Clark,” she said, her voice dangerously mocking, “I have a date with Jack LaRue.”

  “I t-t-told you I don’t want you anywhere near that b-b-boy!” Daddy yelled, his fork pointed up to her face.

  For whatever reason, my sister never saw, or perhaps didn’t care, that Daddy’s anger could become blind rage with the flick of a switch.

  “Well, Mr. Clark, I can go out with anyone I please.”

  Daddy was on his feet so fast his chair tipped over behind him and he had her by the hair before it landed on the floor.

  The house blew up.

  “Girls, grab Tena and your dinner plates!” Mama yelled to Georgia and Elizabeth. “Get in the bathroom and lock the door!” I think it was less for our protection than for keeping us from seeing our father beat our sister to within an inch of her life.

  Just before we stumbled down the hall with our dinner plates, I looked back and saw Mama trying to pull Daddy off Penny. While he held Mama off with one arm, he kicked Penny where she lay on the floor, his sharp wingtip dress shoes hitting her stomach with a sickening thud thud thud. From behind the bathroom door, Georgia, Elizabeth, and I cried and listened as glass broke and Penny screamed and Mama threatened
to kill Daddy if he didn’t stop. Later, Mama said she didn’t think Penny would ever be able to have a baby, because he’d kicked her that hard.

  Even with his vicious beating, Penny wasn’t cowed. A few weeks after Daddy kicked the tar out of her, she walked through the kitchen loudly popping her gum. Daddy sat on the couch reading the Clarion-Ledger.

  “S-s-spit out that gum, right now!” he yelled. “You know I hate it when you p-p-pop gum. Makes you sound like an ignorant hillbilly.”

  Mama watched nervously from her chair. “Come on now, Penny. Spit out the gum. You know your daddy doesn’t like it.”

  Penny ignored her. She looked at Daddy, blew a large bubble, bent toward him, and popped it right in his face. Still eyeballing him, she grabbed his feet from the coffee table where they rested, and jerked them off the table in a move so swift and strong, he was knocked clear off the sofa onto the floor, his butt hitting the rug with a thump.

  He was off the floor and on her so fast Mama didn’t have time to get us in the bathroom. Again, he beat and kicked her hard enough to leave bruises from her belly to her shins.

  I think my father hated my sister until the day he died. He sure acted as if he did, and really, what was the difference? Cruelty was cruelty and Penny suffered more than her share. Even getting married and moving out of the house didn’t spare her his scorn. After she had children, she was never able to lose the baby weight. She would diet and fail, diet and fail, until her weight ballooned to obesity and it began to take a real toll on her health in the form of hypertension and diabetes.