Coming of Age in Mississippi

by Anne Moody

  Every day after that I would sit in my classroom after the lunch hour and watch the other girls on the team practice. Once or twice Mrs. Willis asked me to come back to the team. But I wouldn’t. It was one thing to play ball among people you knew but I didn’t like playing outsiders.

  Just before Christmas, I came home from Mrs. Claiborne’s one evening and found Mama’s sister Alberta at the house. As I walked in, she was running around like she was lost. Mama was in bed. I looked at Mama and she had big drops of sweat dropping off her face. Her eyes were closed and she was biting her lips as though she was in great pain. I stood there looking at her for a long time before Alberta saw me standing there.

  “Essie Mae, come here and help me find some clean rags,” she said to me.

  “What’s wrong with Mama, Alberta?” I asked her.

  “She is about to have the baby,” she answered, plowing her way through the clothes in the dresser drawers.

  “Look in that big box behind the door in Junior’s room,” I said. “Mama’s got a lot of rags in there.”

  “I hope Raymond hurry up,” she said. “Toosweet is going to have this baby and I don’t know what to do,” she continued, almost crying.

  When she said that, I ran back in the room to look at Mama. Her eyes were still closed and she was lying flat on her back clutching the sides of the bed. I looked at her belly and saw it move. I thought sure the baby was coming. I opened my mouth to call Alberta but the words wouldn’t come, I was so scared. “Essie Mae! Come out of there! Go outside and see if that water is getting hot!” Alberta yelled to me. But I couldn’t move. “What is she going to do with hot water?” I thought. “Get to the yard and look at that water, Essie Mae!” Alberta pushed me all the way through Junior’s room to the kitchen door. I walked outside and found a big fire burning around the washpot. It was now dark and the fire lit up the whole yard. I just stood there staring at the pot full of water and the big blaze leaping up around it. The whole scene was like killing a hog at night.

  As I was standing out there Raymond drove up, hitting the brakes so hard he sent rocks sailing into the air. He ran around to the side of the car and opened the door to help some old woman get out. She was carrying a ragged-looking black medicine bag, and looked so dried up she could hardly walk. Raymond was leading her to the front porch when he noticed me standing in the yard. “Essie Mae,” he called to me, “what are you doing here? Go on over to Pearl’s where Adline and Junior is.”

  I walked out of the yard and headed down the road toward Miss Pearl’s, but halfway there I turned around and went back. I stood behind Raymond’s car for a long time looking and listening. At first it was real quiet. They had cut out all the lights but the one in Mama’s room. I couldn’t see anyone moving around inside. A little while later I heard Mama screaming and hollering and carrying on. Raymond came running out in the backyard and got a bucket of hot water from the washpot. All I could hear was Mama hollering from the house. Except for her yells everything else was still.

  I stood out there thinking how bad it must hurt to have a baby. I would never have a baby if I had to holler and carry on like Mama, I thought. And that old lady. What did she know about delivering babies? Suppose she did something wrong and Mama died from it? I would kill Raymond if she died. “He should have taken Mama to the hospital,” I thought. “Instead he went out in the country and got that old woman to deliver Mama’s baby.”

  When Mama finally stopped yelling, I went over to Miss Pearl’s. Well past midnight Raymond came over there and told us we could come home. As soon as he said that, Adline, Junior, and I ran all the way home to see the little baby. For the first time we weren’t scared to run down that dark road that late at night.

  I was the first one to make it home. When I walked in the door, that old lady was sitting beside the bed with her little black bag at her feet. She looked up and smiled at me when I walked over to see the baby, and something started crawling all over me and I started to shake. “Why is she still here?” I thought. “Something must be wrong with Mama.” But then I saw that Mama was asleep.

  “Is the baby here?” Adline asked as she came in the door with Junior following her.

  “Stop all that noise!” Alberta said from the kitchen. Why was Alberta still here too, I wondered.

  Adline, Junior, and I were all standing at the foot of Mama’s bed and the old lady just sat there smiling. “Mama must be sick,” I thought.

  “Alberta, is Mama sick?” I asked as she walked into Mama’s room.

  “Is you crazy? Sho’ she’s sick after just having a baby.”

  Then Mama opened her eyes and saw all of us, me, Adline, Junior, and Alberta standing at the foot of her bed. “Show them the baby, Toosweet,” Alberta said, “so they can go to bed.” There it was lying right next to Mama. She lifted the cover back and Adline, Junior, and I walked to the head of the bed and peeped at it. It was a girl. She didn’t look like she was just born like most babies. She looked like she was already four or five months old.

  “She is some big!” I said.

  “She is big,” Mama said. “She weigh ten pounds and three ounces.”

  “That’s as much as I weigh, huh, Mama?” that little stupid Junior asked.

  “Your belly weigh that much,” Mama said to him.

  “You weigh that much, Essie Mae, when you came,” the old lady said to me.

  I didn’t know how she knew I weighed that much. I wanted to ask her but I was scared. Something about her gave me the creeps. “Your mama brings big babies,” the old lady said. “Every one of her babies weighed from eight to ten pounds.” I looked at her shocked this time and I figured she must have delivered all of us. “No wonder she looks so old,” I thought.

  “Aunt Caroline, you ready to go?” Raymond asked her as he walked in the door.

  “Yes, I guess so, and Toosweet is going to be all right,” the old lady said.

  “Y’all go to bed!” Raymond said to us, and he and the old lady left.

  I got up early the next morning because I wanted to talk to Mama and get a good look at the baby before I went to work. Mama was asleep when I went into her room. Her face looked different, I thought—so calm and young. She hadn’t looked young for a long time. Maybe it was because she was happy now. She had never been happy before to have a baby. I remembered how she had cried all the time after Junior and James were born. I thought she’d gotten to the point where she hated babies.

  For a long time I stood there looking at her. I didn’t want to wake her up. I wanted to enjoy and preserve that calm, peaceful look on her face, I wanted to think she would always be that happy, so I would never be unhappy again either. Adline and Junior were too young to feel the things I felt and know the things I knew about Mama. They couldn’t remember when she and Daddy separated. They had never heard her cry at night as I had or worked and helped as I had done when we were starving. No they didn’t know the misery Mama suffered. Not even Raymond knew. Mama loved him too much to fight with him or have him see her cry.

  But even while I was standing there with all those dreams about the eternal happiness I wanted for Mama, I knew deep down in my heart that it wouldn’t last. Deep down, I knew that she wasn’t really happy now and that she hadn’t been since we’d moved. I had seen her sit on the porch too many times and look over at Miss Pearl’s with hate in her eyes. I also knew that Raymond’s people hadn’t really accepted Adline, Junior, and me either, even though we went to their houses often and played with their children. But the biggest worry I had was the fact that Raymond still hadn’t married Mama. Now she would have two babies for him and three for my daddy and still no husband. Mama didn’t think I knew this but I did. I knew that even though she was living in the same house with Raymond and even though he supported us, she still wasn’t safe without being married to him.

  Some Sundays, Raymond would go over to Miss Pearl’s and spend the afternoon. Mama would be so uneasy every minute he was over there. And if Raymond came h
ome in a bad mood, I would hear Mama mumble to herself, “I know they don’t do nothing but sit over there and talk about me.” I was always afraid that any day Raymond could be taken away from Mama. I didn’t think she could take it if that happened. She had waited for him so long.

  I got myself all flustered standing there thinking about Mama and all we had been through. Now I didn’t even feel like seeing the baby or talking with Mama. We were out of school for the Christmas holidays and I was helping Mrs. Claiborne do her Christmas cleaning, so I just left Mama sleeping and went to work.

  That evening as I was coming home a little early from Mrs. Claiborne’s, I saw Raymond and Miss Pearl walking down the road toward our house. “She can’t be coming to see us,” I thought. “After all she doesn’t even speak to Mama.” But she certainly looked as if she was coming. When I reached our front walk, I hurried inside. Mama was sitting up in bed when I walked in.

  “Raymond and Miss Pearl is coming down the road,” I said. “She look like she is coming here.”

  “What?” Mama asked me as if she didn’t believe me. She got all nervous. Her face went through a million different changes as she started patting her hair, straightening the covers on the bed, and looking at the baby to see if she was wet.

  In what seemed like seconds Raymond and his mother were walking through the door. I just stood at the foot of Mama’s bed, waiting to see what was going to happen.

  “Come on in,” I heard Raymond say to Miss Pearl.

  “Where is my little girl?” Miss Pearl cooed as she entered Mama’s room.

  Mama looked at me and then pulled the covers off the baby.

  Miss Pearl didn’t come all the way into Mama’s room. She stood in the doorway and didn’t move one step from there. She acted as if Mama wasn’t even in the house. Raymond walked over to the bed and picked up the baby and carried it to her.

  “She does look like her grandmother,” Miss Pearl said, shaking the baby and carrying on over her.

  “I told you she looked just like you,” said Raymond. Then he pulled in a chair from the living room for her to sit on.

  All this time Mama looked like she was so anxious for Miss Pearl to just speak to her. The least Miss Pearl could have done was ask Mama how she felt even if she didn’t mean it. But Miss Pearl wasn’t even about to do that.

  “I ain’t got time to sit down, Ray. I gotta go cook dinner,” she said quickly, and gave Raymond back the baby. He took the baby over to the bed and handed it to Mama. Then he and Miss Pearl left the house.

  As soon as they walked out, Mama starting fussing. “She got some nerve coming in my house and not even speaking to me. How dare Ray bring her in here and run over me.” I looked at Mama and now tears were running down her face. I didn’t say a word to her, I just turned and walked out of the room onto the front porch. Miss Pearl and Raymond were standing in the road talking. I sat down on the front steps and stared at them.

  I thought of the calm, peaceful face Mama had had that morning before I went to work. After seeing her tears again so soon I knew that, as long as Raymond’s people could make her cry, they would. “Raymond is just a fool,” I thought. “He is not a man at all. He could easily put a stop to this. No, he’s too scared of hurting their feelings.” I sat there on the steps wishing that Mama had never moved in with him. Looking at him now, I could see he would never break with his family for Mama and they would never accept her, no matter how hard she tried to make them like her.

  A few days later Aunt Caroline came by to check on Mama, and see if she was ready to name the baby. She brought some papers for Mama to fill out and send off to get the baby’s birth certificate. I had heard Raymond and Mama talk of naming the baby after Miss Pearl. But I knew Mama wouldn’t do that now. Mama named the baby Virginia after Mrs. Johnson and called her Jennie Ann, same as Mrs. Johnson is called.

  After Aunt Caroline left, Mama told me that she had also delivered Adline and Junior, and all my grandmother’s children. She and Aunt Mary Green, who had delivered me and James, had been midwives for every Negro baby between Woodville and Centreville for the past forty years. Aunt Caroline even delivered babies for families who had moved out of the county. When Mama told me Aunt Caroline only charged her ten dollars, I figured she must have had to deliver a lot of babies to keep alive. After I had heard all this about Aunt Caroline, the thought of her didn’t give me the creeps anymore. In fact, now I thought of her as a great old lady. She must have really enjoyed bringing babies to bring them for so little and to continue doing it at such an old age.

  A week later we had our first Christmas in our new house. When I got off work Christmas Eve, Mrs. Claiborne gave me five dollars for a present and paid me seven dollars for helping her do her Christmas cleaning. In addition to that she gave me something that was wrapped so prettily I was tempted not to open it. Twelve dollars was more money than I had ever had at one time. When Mrs. Claiborne first gave it to me I felt like hugging and kissing her. The Claibornes and the Johnsons were the nicest white people I had ever known.

  All the way home I thought of how nice these people were to us. Mrs. Claiborne was white but she and Mr. Claiborne treated me like I was their own daughter. They were always giving me things and encouraging me to study hard and learn as much as I could. Mr. Johnson’s mother, Miss Ola, had done the same. She taught me how to read when I was in school and helped me with my homework when my own mother was unable to do it. Then I began to think about Miss Pearl and Raymond’s people and how they hated Mama and for no reason at all than the fact that she was a couple of shades darker than the other members of their family. Yet they were Negroes and we were also Negroes. I just didn’t see Negroes hating each other so much.

  When I got home, Alberta was there baking cakes and Mama was sitting in the kitchen with her. Alberta and Mama got along very well. Alberta was married now and had just moved to the neighborhood about two weeks before. I was glad that Mama would finally have someone to talk to. Now she wouldn’t have to sit out on the front porch and look over at Miss Pearl’s. She and Alberta could visit each other.

  The following morning I got up and smelled apples and oranges all over the house. The kitchen was scented with freshly baked cakes and I heard carols playing on the new radio. I thought of the past and what all the other Christmases had been like. For the first time this seemed to me like a real Christmas.

  Chapter

  FIVE

  Even though Mama stopped going to Mount Pleasant when we moved from the country, she continued to pay her membership dues. Raymond and Miss Pearl them belonged to Centreville Baptist, the largest Negro church in town. Now that we were living with Raymond Mama started thinking about joining Raymond’s church. She figured that maybe she could get in with Miss Pearl them by going to their church regularly.

  One Saturday in early spring she went to town and bought a new dress and hat for herself. That night, before we went to bed, she told us that we’d have to get up early the next morning because we were going to Centreville Baptist. I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time, thinking about going there. Raymond had once taken us for a ride and showed it to us. It was a big white frame building on a brick base with cement steps all the way across the front. It had great big windows painted in different shades of blue and green. I wondered as I fell asleep what it was like inside.

  Next morning when Mama woke us up, she was already dressed and our breakfast was on the table. She rushed us through eating and all and then helped us dress in our best Sunday clothes. “They can’t say we came to church half dressed or lookin’ any kinda way,” she said. All the way to church she kept looking at us in the back seat of the car. “Stop messin’ with that ribbon fo’ you untie it!” she said to Adline, who was playing with the ribbon on one of her three plaits. Mama was so nervous. Once she looked back and Junior had his hand in his mouth and she slapped him. Raymond drove along smiling and acting like he wasn’t nervous but I could tell he was.

  When we got there we wer
e late. Everyone was already inside and we could hear them singing. As we walked in the door, two ushers met us. One directed Raymond down the right aisle to the men’s section. The other led us down the left aisle where a group of ladies and children sat. About halfway down, I spotted Miss Pearl, sitting with Cherie and Darlene and their older sisters, Betty and Vera, in the center pews. When they saw us, they started hunching and whispering and I knew they were saying things about us. The usher directed us to seats in the right pews somewhat behind them. I could see them easily now and I was glad the usher had seated us there. I kept looking at them and every now and then they would look back to where we sat. “Stop looking over there at them!” Mama said as she caught me smiling at Cherie and Darlene. I was sorry that I had looked and smiled at them, since they didn’t smile back. Now that they were out in public with Miss Pearl and Betty, they were acting like they didn’t even know us. “After this, I’ll never play with them again,” I thought.

  After we were seated for a while, I forgot about them and I began looking around. Since it was pastoral Sunday, Reverend Polk’s regular preaching Sunday, the church was crowded. Just like at Mount Pleasant every member showed up to pay his dues and put on a good front for the pastor. I tried to notice every little thing that happened to see if things were different in a big town church.

  First, a couple of deacons began the service by offering two long, boring prayers. As each one finished, he hummed a song and the congregation hummed along with him. At Mount Pleasant the men sang through their noses, and here the deacons were doing the same thing, singing through their noses and hollering and going on. At Mount Pleasant I had even seen men cry in church like women, when they finished praying. At least these men weren’t crying, I thought, but they were hollering just the same. And just like at Mount Pleasant, I couldn’t understand one word of any song. All the old ladies did, though. They were humming right along with them.