Mama asked, “So why are you up drinkin’ all this water at this hour?”
“I woke up hot and needed to cool down,” I said, taking another swig. “Hot flash.”
“Hot flash? I thought you were done with the change.”
“I thought so, too, but I guess I’m still changing.”
“Well, you might wanna get that checked out. You don’t wanna change too much. Your aunt Marjorie started changin’ and kept it up till she changed into a man.”
“Oh, she did not and you know it.”
“Okay, maybe she didn’t switch all the way over to a man, but Marjorie grew a mustache, shaved her head, and took to wearin’ overalls to church. I’m not sayin’ the look didn’t suit her; I’m just sayin’ you can draw a straight line between her first hot flash and that bar fight she died in.”
I ate a grape and said, “Point taken.”
We sat in silence, me thinking about Big Earl in spite of telling myself I wouldn’t, and Mama thinking about God knows what. She stood up and walked to the window that looked out onto the side yard. She said, “It’s gonna be a truly beautiful Sunday morning. I love it hot. You should get some rest before you go to church.” She turned away from the window and said, talking to me like she used to when I was a kid, “Go on to bed now, git.”
I obeyed. I put my glass in the sink and replaced the half-empty bowl of grapes and the water pitcher in the fridge and headed back toward my bedroom. I turned around and said, “Say hi to Daddy for me.”
But Mama had already slipped out the back door. Through the window, I saw her slowly making her way through my sorry excuse for a garden. She stopped and shook her head with disapproval at the stunted stalks, insect-chewed vegetables, and pale blooms that made up my pitiful little plots. I knew what I would hear about on her next visit.
Back in the bedroom, I climbed into the bed and squeezed in close to my husband. I propped myself up on one elbow, leaned over James, and kissed the rough scar on his jaw. He grunted, but didn’t wake up. I lay back down and pressed myself against his back. Then I reached around and brought my hand to rest on James’s stomach. Squeezed against my man in the center of our king-size bed, I fell asleep listening to the rhythm of his breathing.
Throughout the year that followed, I thought about that Sunday morning and how Mama’s visit had cooled me down and cheered me. Even during the worst of the troubles that came later, I smiled whenever I recalled that visit and how sweet it had been for her to come by, looking all done up in that cute sky-blue dress I hadn’t seen in the six years since we buried her in it.
Chapter 2
I was born in a sycamore tree. That was fifty-five years ago, and it made me a bit of a local celebrity. My celebrity status was brief, though. Two baby girls, later my best friends, came along within months of me in ways that made my sycamore tree entrance seem less astonishing. I only mention the tree because I have been told all of my life that it explains how I ended up the way I am—brave and strong according to those who like me, mannish and pigheaded to those who don’t. Also, it probably explains why, after the initial jolt passed, I wasn’t much troubled when my dead mother showed up for a chat.
I started out life in that sycamore because my mother went to see a witch. Mama was smart and tough. She worked hard every day of her life right up until she dropped dead from a stroke while she was winding up to throw a rock at a squirrel that was digging up bulbs in her showplace of a garden. All of Mama’s toughness had evaporated, though, when she found herself halfway through the tenth month of her pregnancy, wondering if it would ever end. Seven years earlier, Rudy had been born right on schedule. But three lost babies followed my brother, none of them managing to remain inside my mother’s womb for longer than a few months. Now I had come along and refused to leave.
Before she went to see the witch, Mama tried all kinds of things her country relatives told her to do to get the baby to come. My grandmother advised her to eat hot peppers with every meal, claiming that the heat would drive the baby out. Mama did it for three days and ended up with indigestion so severe that she was fooled twice into thinking she was in labor. Two times, she and Daddy went to the colored hospital in Evansville, and both times she came home with no baby.
My mother’s sister whispered to her that the only way to get the baby out was to have sex. Aunt Marjorie said, “That’s how it got there, Dora. And that’s the only sure way to get it out.”
Mama liked the sex idea, if only just to pass the time while waiting, but Daddy was less than enthusiastic. She was twice his weight even before her pregnancy, and when she straddled him in his sleep one night demanding satisfaction, the terrified look in his eyes as she hovered over him made her back down from the sex solution and look to sorcery instead.
Like I said, that was 1950, and back then a fair number of people in Plainview, black and white, consulted a witch from time to time. Some still do, but nowadays it’s only the poorest and most superstitious of folks, mostly the ones who live in the little Appalachian clusters outside of town, who will admit to it.
Mama went to the witch expecting a potion or a poultice—poultices were big among witches—but what she got instead were instructions. The witch told her that if she climbed up into the branches of a sycamore tree at straight-up noon and sang her favorite hymn, the baby would come.
Witches were like that. They almost always mixed in a touch of something approved by the Baptist church—a prayer, a spiritual, or a chant warning about the godlessness of Lutherans—so people could go to a witch and not have to worry that they’d pay for it down the line with their immortal souls. It absolved the clients’ guilt and kept the preachers off the witches’ backs.
So, on a windy afternoon, my mother hauled a rickety old ladder out to a sycamore tree by the woods behind the house. Mama propped her ladder against the tree and climbed up. Then she nestled herself in the crook of two branches as comfortably as was possible considering her condition and began to sing.
Mama used to joke that if she had chosen something more sedate, something along the lines of “Mary, Don’t You Weep” or “Calvary,” she might not have given birth to such a peculiar daughter. But she dug her teeth into “Jesus Is a Rock” and swayed and kicked her feet with that good gospel spirit until she knocked over the ladder and couldn’t get back down. I was born at one o’clock and spent the rest of the afternoon in the sycamore tree until my father rescued us when he got home from his shop at six. They named me Odette Breeze Jackson, in honor of my being born in the open air.
As it often happened when a child was born under unusual circumstances, old folks who claimed that they’d been schooled in the wisdom of the ancestors felt called upon to use the occasion to issue dire warnings. My grandma led the chorus in forecasting a dreary future for me. The way she explained it, if a baby was born off of the ground, that child was born without its first natural fear, the fear of falling. That set off a horrible chain reaction resulting in the child’s being cursed with a life of fearlessness. She said a fearless boy had some hope of growing up to be a hero, but a fearless girl would more than likely be a reckless fool. My mother also accepted this as fact, although she leaned more toward the notion that I might become a hero. It should be remembered, of course, that Mama was a grown woman who thought climbing a tree in her tenth month of pregnancy was a good idea. Her judgment had to be looked at with suspicion.
Nearly everyone, it seemed to me, believed that coming into the world in any manner that could be seen as out of the ordinary was a bad omen. People never said, “Congratulations on managing to deliver a healthy baby while you were stuck in that rowboat in the middle of the lake.” They just shook their heads and whispered to each other that the child would surely drown one day. No one ever said, “Aren’t you a brave little thing, having your baby all alone in a chicken coop.” They just said that the child would turn out to have bird shit for brains and then went on to treat the child that way even if the kid was clearly a tiny geniu
s. Like the doomed child born on the water and the dummy arriving among fowl, I was born in a sycamore tree and would never have the good sense to know when to run scared.
Not knowing any better, I listened to what I was told about myself and grew up convinced I was a little brown warrior. I stomped my way through life like I was the Queen of the Amazons. I got in fights with grown men who were twice as big as and ten times meaner than me. I did things that got me talked about pretty bad and then went back and did them again. And that morning I first saw my dead mother in my kitchen, I accepted that I had inherited a strange legacy and visited with her over a bowl of grapes instead of screaming and heading for the hills.
I know the truth about myself, though. I have never been fearless. If I ever believed such a thing, motherhood banished that myth but quick. Still, whenever logic told me it was time to run, a little voice whispered in my ear, “You were born in a sycamore tree.” And, for good or ill, the sound of that voice always made me stand my ground.
Chapter 3
Clarice and Richmond Baker claimed seats at opposite ends of the window table at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat and waited for their four friends to arrive. The restaurant was an easy walk from Calvary Baptist and they were always first to show up for after-church supper. Odette and James Henry’s little country church, Holy Family Baptist, was farthest from the All-You-Can-Eat, but James was a fast driver and, being a cop, unafraid of getting speeding tickets. So they usually arrived next. Barbara Jean and Lester Maxberry were members of grand First Baptist, the rich people’s church. It looked down on Plainview from its perch on Main Street and was closest to the restaurant, but Lester was twenty-five years older than the rest of the group and he often moved slowly.
Clarice caught her reflection in the window glass and imagined that she and Richmond must resemble a luminous peacock and his drab mate. She was hidden, neck to kneecaps, beneath a modest, well-tailored beige linen dress. Richmond, leaning back in his chair and waving hello to friends seated at other tables around the room, demanded attention in the pale gray summer suit Clarice had set out for him the night before along with his favorite shirt, a cotton button-down that was the vivid ultramarine of aquarium rocks.
He had always worn bold colors. Richmond had such a Ken-doll handsomeness about him that the women in his life, first his mother and then Clarice, couldn’t resist the urge to dress him in bright hues and show him off. On the occasion of Richmond’s first date with Clarice, his mother had adorned her teenage son in a peach jacket with white rope trim ornamenting the lapels. A getup like that would have gotten any other boy in town ridiculed and called a sissy—it was still the 1960s, after all. But Richmond Baker sauntered up Clarice’s front walk and managed to make that outfit look as masculine as a rack of antlers. Clarice often pictured that loose, powerful way he walked back then before the surgeries stiffened him. It was as if he were constructed entirely of lean muscle strung together with taut rubber bands.
By coincidence, Clarice had chosen a peach skirt for that first date. Her skirt matched Richmond’s prissy jacket so perfectly that everyone who saw them out on the town later assumed they had planned it that way. Clarice and her mother had peeked through the curtains and watched him step onto the front porch. Her mother, who was as excited as Clarice was, had dug her fingers into Clarice’s arm until her daughter pulled away from her. All the while, her mother had gushed that their matching ensembles were a sign Clarice and Richmond were made for each other.
Clarice, though, had already seen all the signs she needed. Young Richmond had a handsome, almost pretty face with a small, well-shaped mouth and long eyelashes. He had a football scholarship waiting for him at the university across town. He was a preacher’s son, his father having been the pastor of their church before moving on to a larger congregation just across the state line in Louisville. And he had those beautiful hands.
She had been in awe of his hands long before they brought him glory for palming a football in high school, college, and a professional career that had lasted only one season.
By the time he was eleven years old, Richmond was using his already large paws to show off for the girls by pulling walnuts from the low-hanging branches of the trees that lined the streets between the schoolyard and their neighborhood. He would make a grunting, grimacing production of crushing the nuts between his palms until he tired of his solo act and joined in with the other boys who ran in his pack, tossing the walnuts at the girls as they ran home squealing and laughing.
The children had named the walnut trees “time bomb trees” because when the nuts were past their prime they turned black and made a quiet ticking sound on hot days. Years later, she often thought it was fitting that her earliest recollection of the boy who would become her husband was a memory of him lobbing time bombs in her direction.
Lit by the afternoon sun from the window at the All-You-Can-Eat, Richmond Baker still looked like a square-jawed young football hero. But Clarice was doing her best not to look his way at all. Every time she glanced at her husband, she thought back to the hours she had sat up worrying until he finally staggered in at 3:57 that morning. The sight of him brought to mind those horrible, slow-passing minutes of waiting and then the time spent lying in bed beside him after he finally got home, pretending to sleep and wondering whether she possessed sufficient upper-body strength to smother him with his pillow.
At breakfast, he had dragged himself into the kitchen, scratched his private parts, and told her a tale that she knew was a lie. It was the old reliable story of having to work late and finding that every phone within a ten-mile radius was broken. For the new millennium, he had updated his excuse to include cellular phones mysteriously losing their signals. He deserved some credit for keeping up with the times, she thought. After he told his lie, he had sat down at the kitchen table, blown a kiss in his wife’s direction, and tucked himself into the breakfast she had prepared for him, attacking it as if he hadn’t eaten a meal in weeks. Screwing around, Clarice thought, must stimulate the appetite.
Before church that morning, Clarice had mulled over her situation and decided that her problem was that she had gotten out of the habit of ignoring Richmond’s little lapses; he had been on such good behavior for the past couple of years. She figured that if she just avoided looking at Richmond through breakfast, morning service, and maybe during the walk to Earl’s, she could relocate that old wall in her brain she used to hide behind at times like this. Then she’d soon be back to merrily pretending things were just fine, as she had done for decades. She had gazed at the kitchen floor through breakfast. She had stared at the stained-glass windows during church. She counted the clouds in the sky and the cracks in the sidewalk on the way to the All-You-Can-Eat. But the remedy didn’t work. The throbbing at her temples that bloomed each time she watched Richmond’s pretty, lying mouth spread into a grin told her that she needed more time before she could step back into the old routine, the way her husband apparently had.
Clarice heard a deep male voice whisper, “Hey there, gorgeous.” She looked to her right and saw that Ramsey Abrams had slithered up beside her. He placed one hand on the table and the other on the back of her chair, and then he leaned in until his face was just inches away from hers.
Ramsey had been Richmond’s number one running buddy for years, the two of them continuing to sow their wild oats together long after they were married and the fathers of several children between them. With his nose nearly touching hers, Clarice could see that the whites of Ramsey’s eyes were laced with bright red veins. She detected the odor of stale rum on his breath.
She began to create a picture in her head of how the previous evening had started. Richmond would have been in his office at the university where he and Ramsey both worked as recruiters for the football team. Ramsey shuffled in and said something along the lines of “Come on, Richmond. Just join me for a quick drink. I’ll have you home by ten. You can stay out till ten, can’t you? Your woman ain’t got that tight a hold on
your balls, does she?”
She had no real evidence that he had been the instigator of Richmond’s night out, and she knew Richmond was perfectly capable of getting into mischief all on his own. Still, Clarice itched to slap Ramsey’s stupid face and tell him to get back across the room to the table where his son Clifton—the son who had been in and out of jail since he was thirteen, not the other son who sniffed airplane glue and touched himself inappropriately in women’s shoe stores—and Ramsey’s bucktoothed wife, Florence, sat glaring at each other.
She said, “Ramsey, you keep sweet-talking me like that and I’m going to have to try and steal you away from Florence.”
He laughed. “Baby, I sure won’t stop you from trying. Just don’t tell Richmond.”
Clarice said, “Ramsey, you are so naughty,” and she slapped his hand in that way that men like him interpreted as Please do go on, you sexy bad boy. Then he leaned in closer and kissed her on the cheek. She let loose a kind of girlish squeal, the sound of which made her want to kick herself. No, not only herself, but her mother, too, for drumming this business of responding to male attention with adolescent giddiness so firmly into her head that it was automatic now.
She delivered another slap to Ramsey’s hand. This time, she accidentally allowed her true feelings about him to creep into her gesture. He let out a very sincere “Ouch!” and snatched his hand away before walking toward Richmond’s end of the table. As she watched Ramsey rubbing his knuckles, her headache eased just a bit.
The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat Page 2