by Tena Clark
Bernie followed her in, took off his hat, and nervously looked around the room at each of us.
“Surprise! Welcome home, Mama! We’re so proud of you!” we said, finally finding our voices and hesitantly moving toward her.
She deftly stepped around us and walked into the kitchen. We followed her through the house. She put her purse on the kitchen table with a plunk, opened the clasp, and took out a pint of Jack Daniel’s. Without a word, she untwisted the cap and threw it across the kitchen where it bounced off the far wall. It was the only sound in the house. She paused, standing there with the bottle in her hand, going from face to face, looking each of us in the eye to make sure she had the full command of the room. It was unimaginable to think she didn’t. A hurricane could have taken the roof off the house and none of us would have budged. Then, with her eyes not blinking, not wavering, she raised the bottle to her lips, threw her head back, and drained the entire pint in one long pull. I don’t think it took her more than five or six swallows to empty the bottle. As the last amber drop disappeared down her throat, she slammed the bottle on the table, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and looked each of us square in the eye.
“I will stop drinking when I am good and DAMN ready and not one minute sooner. Let’s go, Bernie.”
She turned on her heel, shoulders square and head held high, and left. Bernie quickly put on his hat and tipped it in our direction before scampering out the door after her.
We ran back into the living room and watched as she walked down the front stairs, got in the car, closed, not slammed, her door, and sat there waiting for Bernie to start the engine.
Unable to just let her leave after not having laid eyes on her in six weeks, I ran out to the car.
“Mama! You just got home! Where are you going?”
She looked at me and I thought—I hoped, at least—that I saw a softening in her eyes. Maybe there was, but she still didn’t smile.
“Aloha, baby,” she said, just as Bernie put the car in gear and jerked out of the driveway.
“I love you, Mama!” I yelled as the car turned onto the street.
As they drove away, her hand emerged from the car window and with a single flick of her wrist she flung her cigarette into a ditch. Mama never looked back.
Even if her drinking killed her, she was not ever going to let another soul tell her what to do or when to do it. Daddy had been the last.
* * *
After Mama had returned from Whitfield and her six weeks of forced—and failed—rehab, she got back to the business of hard drinking. And I moved back in with her to once again make sure she didn’t burn the place down. I think the only time she didn’t drink from sunup to sundown was when I was sick, and she would sober up and bring me soup and take my temperature and hover over me the way mothers just seem to know how to do. One day, when I was home sick from school, she looked out the front window and saw my father lingering on the sidewalk. She cursed and opened the front door.
“For heaven’s sake, Lamar, get in here! I’m not gonna bite you! I’m not even gonna talk to you!”
Daddy came in sheepishly and skirted by her like he was avoiding a rattlesnake in the road. He came into my room with a bag of Popsicles and his pocketful of medicine, which we jokingly called his Iffers. He and Mama both had them, their supply of cure-all medicines: “If I git a headache, I got aspirin. If I git a stomach bug, I got a pink Pepto. If I git dizzy, I got another pill.” Iffers, they called them. This was parenting, Clark-style.
Most days, Mama held court from her worn, blue velvet recliner with the manual leg lift, cigarette burning in one hand while her other held a glass of whiskey or moonshine, telling us the ways of the world or reading from the Bible. After leaving Daddy, she had become your garden-variety, born-again Southern Christian. She read from the Bible like Daddy read from his morning newspaper—every day and with a fierce commitment to the Word’s literal meaning. She then pontificated about being saved and going to heaven or hell and always, always tithing your 10 percent to the Lord.
But one thing seemed to confuse her: Jews. She wasn’t quite sure if she should keep her distance because they were going straight to hell for not believing that Jesus Christ was the son of God, or if she should kneel down to them because they were, after all, God’s Chosen People. So, she struck a balance and every month sent a check to a rabbi in New York City she’d read about who preached about helping Jews make a pilgrimage to their homeland of Israel because that was what God wanted. So, every month after she received her $150 alimony from Daddy, she’d sit at her table with its Naugahyde cover and write out fifteen one-dollar checks to her list of charities. For over thirty years the rabbi in New York received one of those checks. Later he told me Mama was his most faithful and fervent tither, Jewish or Christian, in all his years at the altar.
One thing she was never confused about was sex, or more precisely, what she called nasty sex. Her lectures on that would go something like this:
“Sex is just plain nasty . . . Never have sex, and remember, even if you don’t have sex you can still get pregnant just by being in the same room with a boy’s penis. And don’t EVER let a boy lie on top of you, because even if you both have clothes on, his sperm can still get inside you and make you pregnant. So it’s best to just steer clear of boys and their penises altogether . . . All boys are after one thing and one thing only . . . Girls who do anything besides holding hands with a boy are whores . . . And don’t ever masturbate; you’ll go blind.”
She always told us one too many things about our daddy.
“Your daddy is disgusting,” she’d say, taking a long swallow of her drink. “He’s always got a cloth up under his front seat. Now, girls, don’t you ever touch that cloth.”
“Why, Mama?” we’d ask, playing right into her tale.
Mama accused Daddy of all sorts of evils and sins. To this day I don’t know if any or all of it was true.
We also heard a lot about hymens. A lot. My sister had fallen off the high end of the seesaw in second or third grade. Much to my sister’s torment, Mama would tell the story often about how she had been called to the school, and when she arrived found my sister, “bless her heart, with blood in her panties and a broken hymen and, oh my Lord, now she’ll never find a man because once your hymen is broken no boy is ever going to want to marry you.”
Mama didn’t quite fill in the blank of how the boy wouldn’t know you didn’t have a hymen until after he married you because, Lord knows, he would never find out before the marriage, unless you were a filthy whore. But then he wouldn’t have married you in the first place because no good boy would ever marry a girl without a hymen.
And around and around her “logic” would go, same lecture, same prohibitions, her tone a reflection of how much she’d had to drink before she started. My sisters all commented later that it was amazing any of us ever had sex or got married, given Mama’s rants against all forms of carnal knowledge.
Strangely enough, even with all that talk about hymens, she never actually told us where the damn thing was or what it was there for. So, when the day finally came for me to find out, I went running into the living room screaming, “Oh my Lord, Mama! I’m bleeding! Where’s it coming from?” Her answer stopped me in my tracks.
“The third hole.”
Say again?
“Well, baby, you have three holes down there.”
I looked at her as if she had just said, “Oh, and by the way, you were born with two heads but we chopped one of them off.”
“I most certainly do not! I have two! One for pee and one for poop!” I shouted, as adamant as I was petrified of the possibility she was right.
“Nope, you got three. There’s one in the middle of those other two,” she said, then went back to her crossword puzzle.
And so ended my mama’s anatomy lesson.
Puberty also brought me unwanted breasts that I just wished would go away. I had absolutely no use for them. I particularly detes
ted mine because they were very out of balance: an A cup on my left, a C on my right. No one in my life really made a big deal of it, except Elizabeth, who, in typical older-sister fashion, took every opportunity to make fun of me. She even called me Cyclops more than once. But then again, maybe she was just jealous that I still had my hymen intact. Come to think of it, I guess I still do.
I never explained to Mama the real truth of it: I had no real use for my female body parts. They felt like they belonged on someone else’s body. Ever since my days of playing with Burke, just the two of us boys, I rarely gave my sexuality a thought, except of course in some detached way when I remembered the majorette or the Cotton Drugstore ladies. But those women were somehow separate beings, not like me at all. I thought of myself as an entirely unique being. No one else was like me, shared my thoughts, or felt disconnected to their physical selves and their sexual bodies. And in fact, I had never really thought of sex in any way but functional, something animals and other people did occasionally and only then to reproduce. It was that simple and nothing I had to worry about.
Chapter Twenty-Two
* * *
President Johnson and the U.S. Congress had declared civil rights for all the law of the land in 1964, but Mississippi stubbornly ignored the message. Black and white Mississippians continued to live entirely segregated lives. Any white who dared challenge segregation was declared a communist, or worse: a nigger-loving communist. The few white folks—and most of them were ministers—who did speak up in favor of integration, faced losing their country club memberships and their pulpits. I attended a segregated school, worshipped in a segregated church, shopped in segregated stores, and ate in segregated restaurants.
At Petty’s Cafe, where we had dined several days a week for as long as I could remember, the humiliation of watching Virgie eat outside rankled me to the core. Even as a little girl, I’d tried to take a stand.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Daddy asked me when I stood up from the table, my dinner plate of veal cutlets and hush puppies in hand. I was five and Virgie had just started working for us.
“Out to the back step to eat with Virgie. If she can’t sit in here, then I don’t want to either.”
“Now don’t you be making trouble for Virgie,” Daddy said. “You sit your little butt right down, ya hear? Besides, maybe Virgie doesn’t want you out there with her.”
On that last point, he was right. She in fact didn’t want me out there with her, making a scene. That was the last thing she wanted.
“Go on back in, Miss Tena,” Virgie said as soon as she heard the screen door squeak behind her. “You’s sure gonna get me in a heap a trouble.”
But I didn’t go back in. I squeezed next to her on the porch step, pushing at her bottom with mine until we both fit on the narrow step and had settled our plates in our laps. As we ate our veal cutlets and sipped our sweet tea, I’d steal quick smiles at her and sometimes, just sometimes, she’d smile back.
In the summer of 1967, Daddy and I were watching the CBS Evening News when I heard Walter Cronkite announce that President Johnson had nominated the first black American, Thurgood Marshall, to sit on the Supreme Court. Now, finally, I thought, it’s time. Waynesboro can’t stop civil rights any longer.
The next day, I decided to introduce Petty’s to their first black customer and I drove over to Virgie’s house.
“Virgie, come on. We’re going to lunch!” I said.
She met me on her front porch.
“Well, where’s we goin’?”
“Petty’s!”
Her face froze.
“Oh please, Miss Tena, no no, no ma’am, no way,” Virgie begged. “Mr. Lamar’ll kilt me dead, he will, if’n he hear I be eatin’ inside Petty’s. Please, you is gonna get me in real trouble.”
I finally convinced her to get in the car, but not until after another battle when I insisted she sit in the front seat with me. I actually had to reach back and lock the rear passenger doors to prevent her from slipping into the backseat. When she finally tucked herself into the front seat, she scrunched so far down I don’t think she could see over the dashboard. Nonetheless, I was thrilled that I would be introducing her to the inside of Petty’s and to the first meal served to her by whites. Her entire life, she had been the one serving them. But times had changed. I thought.
When we drove up, I saw that there was a line out front of Petty’s. It had only seven tables, so it wasn’t rare to wait, but with Virgie by my side, I knew it would be the longest wait for a table I’d ever had. I parked the car and opened my door.
“Please, baby girl, let me wait here. Please,” Virgie begged. By this time she had scrunched so far down in the seat she was practically under the dashboard.
“Virgie, stop,” I said. “It’s the law. They can’t refuse to serve you!”
I was so excited to share this with her, to give her this gift of progress. But as we got out of the car and took our place at the back of the line, the chatter among the lunch regulars went dead.
“Hey there, Mister Earl, Miss Betty. How y’all today?” I asked two of my parents’ friends whom I recognized from church. “Isn’t it a pretty day?”
I looked each angry person in the eye, smiling, challenging them to say a word. Challenging them to say something to Lamar Clark’s daughter. They didn’t, as I knew they wouldn’t. They didn’t dare. They just glared at me, and all but spit at Virgie. Virgie kept her eyes on the ground, and kept as much of her body hidden behind mine as she could, as if trying to disappear, not an easy thing to do since she had a good seven inches and close to a hundred pounds on me.
When it was finally our turn, we walked in, the little bell above the door ringing as it opened, and every head in the small restaurant turned to stare. Not just stare, but gape—mouths open, forks and coffee cups stopped in midair. You could have heard a mouse fart in the storeroom. I guess they thought my lining up outside with Virgie was a stunt, and that I wouldn’t possibly dare to bring her inside.
“Come on, Virgie,” I said, “here’s a table.”
Virgie’s head was down and her eyes on the floor. All other eyes in the café remained on us.
“Please, Miss Tena, less juss go home,” she whispered.
“Hold your head up, Virgie. You belong here just as much as anybody,” I whispered back.
I reached for her hand and gently pulled her toward the table. I felt like her feet were stuck in eight inches of mud. Finally, she sat down.
“Whaddya say we git one of Mr. Petty’s famous veal cutlets?” I asked, my voice louder than necessary since I was the only one talking in the entire restaurant.
Mr. Petty walked over to our table. He was tall and skinny, reminiscent of Mr. Green Jeans on Captain Kangaroo, and just as sweet a man. He was beloved in Waynesboro. Not only did he attend every single football game at the high school, the town would eventually name the field after him. My bringing Virgie into his restaurant clearly embarrassed him in front of his other customers, but I hoped he would be too worried about losing his best customer, Daddy, to make a big scene. And while he didn’t yell at me or throw us both out, he did have to let his other customers know this wasn’t his idea.
“What’ll it be, Miss Tena?” he asked, ignoring Virgie, whom he knew as well as he knew any other citizen of Waynesboro. Behind him, I could see Mrs. Petty as fat as he was thin, and their black broiler cook and black dishwasher—all three staring at us over the kitchen’s swinging saloon door. I ordered for the two of us and Mr. Petty walked away without a word. Virgie kept her head down and her eyes on the Formica tabletop.
“Come on, Virgie, it’s fine. I promise. It’s finally legal for you to be here. No one’s gonna kick you out. They can’t!” I said, still whispering and hoping I was right.
When our lunch was ready, Mr. Petty approached our table with the two plates. Without a word, he dropped Virgie’s plate of veal cutlets and mashed potatoes onto the table from about four inches up, splattering her
blouse and face with gravy and bits of potato. I was amazed the plate didn’t break in half. He put my plate on the table in front of me and walked away.
The other patrons watched, but said nothing. I thought I heard someone snicker, but I couldn’t tell who.
Virgie hadn’t moved. The potato and gravy slid slowly down her cheek.
“Virgie,” I said, and reached out with my napkin to catch a piece of potato before it fell off her cheek, “you hold your head high. You have every right now to sit here.” But Virgie’s head remained bowed, and she said nothing as she picked up her fork and began eating, quickly and without pleasure.
Suddenly, the pay phone on the wall rang and Mr. Petty walked over to answer it.
“Yup, she’s here all right, Mister Lamar,” he said, looking at me. He reached the receiver out. “It’s your daddy, Tena,” he called out, loud enough for everyone to hear.
“Oh Lordie,” Virgie moaned.
My Keds squeaked on the linoleum floor as I stood up and took the phone. There wasn’t another sound as every pair of eyes in the room watched me.
“Hey, Daddy,” I said, trying to sound relaxed and cheerful, “whatcha want?”
“Tena Rix Clark, you g-g-git out of there NOW,” Daddy roared. “You know very g-g-g-good GODdamn well you can’t be takin’ no n-n-nigger into Petty’s, even V-V-Virgie.” I could almost feel his spit through the phone.
The other customers stared at me, their forks and sweet tea glasses suspended above their tables, waiting. My stomach churned and I’m sure my face was beet red, but I’d be damned if I was going to let them know I was nervous.
“Why, Daddy! It’s pretty much the same as every day. You know Petty’s”—I gave Mr. Petty my sweetest smile over the receiver—“it’s always good, but I’ll read today’s specials to you if you want.”