Mama, on the other hand, had long grown weary of what she referred to as my inquisitions. Often she’d ignore the questions I asked about Granny Ruth or her own childhood, or why she and Granny Leona didn’t get along. She pretended to be too busy or lost in thought to answer me. Sometimes she reprimanded me for asking so many questions. “What do you wanna know that for? Are you planning on writing a book?” The sharpness in her tone usually shut me up, at least for an hour or so.
At home I was often petulant and mean-spirited. I was filled with self-righteousness over the indignities I felt I suffered because of Mama’s errant behavior. I wanted a mother who wore a string of pearls, linen suits, and pillbox hats. Who went to church, read her Bible, belonged to the Women’s Missionary Union, and preferred sweet tea to beer. Come to think of it, I guess I thought all mothers ought to be like Pastor Smitty’s wife, Betty.
While I prayed faithfully for Mama every day, my prayers were limited in nature. My first prayer was that Mama would quit smoking. My second was that God would send Mama a handsome rich man to take care of her, and me, for the rest of our lives. Lewis had given Mama a sparkly engagement ring, and they said they would marry someday. But I wanted God to send Mama somebody else to marry. Frank, for sure, didn’t want her to marry Lewis. Neither of us ever told her how we felt, but she had a pretty good idea anyway.
When I wasn’t at church or school, I was often hanging out at the home of Angie and Wesley Skibbey. Like so many of us Crystal Valley kids, Angie and Wes didn’t have a dad. Pauline, their mother, was a native of Italy who’d married a soldier boy from the Carolinas and followed him to the U.S. She left him because he’d used her as a punching bag once too often.
Pauline was a beautiful woman, with olive skin and close-cropped brunette hair, and a seductive but subtle cut to her waist and breasts. Angie didn’t look a thing like her mama. She had hair the color of wheat at harvest, and Dolly Parton–sized boobs. She never could wear the button-front shirts that were so popular in those days. Pauline didn’t smoke, but Angie did. I can’t ever remember her not smoking. She held her cigarette in that same elegant but exaggerated fashion of screen star Bette Davis, as if the thing she held between two fingers was a glittering wand, not a cancer stick. Her nails were long, shaped into ovals. Angie liked to watch soap operas all day long and hold séances at night. She bored me. But I felt differently about her younger brother, Wes.
Even as a seventh-grader, Wes towered over me. He hadn’t quite reached six feet, but he wasn’t far from it. He was almost too skinny. His hair was blond like his sister’s, and he wore it long, as was the fashion. He was always flipping his bangs off to one side because they kept falling down to his nose. His eyes were blue. Not silver-blue but bright blue, like the sky above Waikiki Beach. And when he smiled, it always looked as if he was holding something back. He had a lopsided grin that gave him a perpetual sly-dog look. He wasn’t the kind of guy who stopped a gal in her tracks, but he could slow her down.
For the most part, I kept my infatuation with Wes a secret. I pretended he was a bother, a nuisance, like all younger siblings. We called each other stupid names and wrote ridiculous notes in each other’s yearbooks. Like this one, scripted by Wes in one of mine: “To a big bag of trouble. I hope you straighten out.”
Sometimes I invited Wes and Angie to go to Rose Hill with me, and sometimes they did, but neither of them ever felt like they belonged there the way I did. The whole time I lived at Crystal Valley, Wes and I never did anything more than hold hands, when we thought nobody else was watching. But as fatherless children, I always felt we shared a common destiny, something I didn’t have with the boys at Rose Hill.
My friendship with Angie and Wes began to diminish during the fall of 1971 because of two events—forced busing and an impending move.
SOMETIME SHORTLY BEFORE Frank headed back to Alabama for his senior year, Mama suggested I consider going to a boarding school in Virginia. I’m not sure if it was Mama’s idea or Lewis’s, but I wasn’t going anywhere, and I told Mama so.
It didn’t matter what a person’s income bracket was, a lot of white folks who could ill afford to do so began sending their kids to private schools when busing was implemented. It was the only way to make sure their kids didn’t get bused clear across town to Carver or Spencer, the town’s two predominately black high schools.
As far as I was concerned, the only school I wanted to attend was Columbus High. I had gone to three different junior highs and four different elementary schools; I was bound and determined I would go to one high school, come hell or high water. And it didn’t matter one bit to me how many blacks I had to maneuver my way around in the hallways; I had started high school as a Blue Devil, and I wanted to remain a Blue Devil until I collected my diploma. I was fed up with transferring schools and trying to find somebody to eat lunch with. I certainly didn’t want to go to some hoity-toity boarding school in Virginia. I figured I had more in common with black kids from the projects than with a bunch of rich white girls. I knew I might end up at Carver or Spencer, but I was more worried about Hardaway High, a relatively new school in town that might as well have been a boarding school because it was full of white kids from middle-to upper-class neighborhoods.
The bus that picked up kids at the Crystal Valley trailer court stopped at three high schools—Hardaway, Jordan (pronounced “Jerden”), and Columbus. When the Fifth Circuit Court issued an order to the district to integrate, the Muscogee County School Board approved an assignment plan striving for a 70–30 white-to-black ratio in each school, with a faculty ratio of 75–25. Sometime before Labor Day weekend, I got a letter confirming me as a Blue Devil for at least one more year. But my sophomore year started off with a tension that hadn’t been there my freshman year.
For the most part, Columbus is a town of well-mannered people, so the protests against forced busing had a modicum of civility to them. To be sure, there was a lot of ugliness involved, but nobody burned down neighborhoods or shot the sheriff. Prior to the first day of school, hundreds of white parents gathered at the school district office and burned an effigy of William Shaw, the superintendent of schools. A petition was circulated calling for his resignation. Many threatened to pull their kids out of public schools. Hundreds did.
What I remember best were the school fights, many of them in the student parking lot out behind the school. I was fourteen and too young to drive, so I wasn’t worried about getting hurt. I was standing outside the music class, leaning on a railing in the courtyard, when a boy ran up to a group of us and said, “There’s a big fight going on. They got knives and switchblades. Somebody got cut already.” I heard later that that somebody was Frank’s old pal Joe K., from the other trailer park.
I got into a few scuffles myself and had a couple of near misses. One occurred while I was walking to my locker, which was in the school basement. I headed there with Fran Hart after lunch. Fran was a little thing, probably not quite five feet tall, and about eighty-five pounds. But I was already five feet six, and I’ve never been slight of frame. We approached a set of stairs where a group of four black girls sat. One girl called out to me. “Where did you get that skirt?” she asked.
I was wearing a blue skirt with a patchwork pattern, a common style in those days. I didn’t answer because white girls like me were told to never speak to blacks, under any circumstances. Fran and I stepped around them as we headed down the stairs.
“I think that is about the ugliest skirt I’ve ever seen!” another girl called out. Then they laughed.
Now, that made me mad. Whipping my head over my shoulder, I called out, “I don’t rightly care what you think!”
Fran was mortified. “You shouldn’t have done that, Karen,” she said.
We kept going. The hallways were empty. The bell hadn’t rung yet, and most kids were still in class or eating lunch. Fran waited as I turned the combination lock on my locker and reached for my history book. All of sudden, we were surrounded on either side.
>
“Hey, girl, what did you say to me back there?” The girl asking the question towered over me. Her buddies were glowering at the two of us. I think Fran quit breathing. But I wasn’t about to back off.
“I said I didn’t care much what you think about my skirt,” I answered, trying to feign a coolness I didn’t feel.
She moved her head in closer to mine. “Well, you ought to care,” she hissed. Her girlfriends snickered.
I wasn’t that good at math, but it only took me a moment to do the counting and to figure out that I was about to get my butt kicked. I wasn’t worried too much about myself; I’d been in some dogfights before when I lived at Lake Forest. But I was pretty sure Fran had never been in one and would never talk to me again for involving her.
But in one of those saved-by-the-bell moments that honestly do happen, it rang, and the hallway was flooded with kids. The four girls turned and walked away, their glares still fixed on me in warning.
“That was so dumb of you,” Fran said. She spoke in a whisper full of exasperation and relief, the kind of tone a mother might use in a hospital emergency room. “They could’ve killed you. Don’t you know you never talk back to blacks?”
About a month later I heard that same remark when a black girl came up to me in the school bathroom after I backhanded a black boy in homeroom class because he wouldn’t quit playing with my hair. “Whoowee, girl!” she said. “Don’t you know better than to slap a black man? Nobody slaps a black man and lives to tell about it—especially not a white girl!”
The ruckus had started shortly after I’d taken my seat. The pudgy-faced boy sitting behind me fingered the ends of my hair every single day. It annoyed me like all get-out, and I’d told him so on several occasions. I started out asking him to “kindly leave my hair alone, please.” But he kept doing it. To avoid a confrontation, I’d lean forward as far as I could, out of his reach. Or pull my hair down around my shoulder as I hunched over a book. He would laugh and continue messing with me and my hair.
After a couple of weeks of this, I grew downright pissed. So one day when he reached up and began playing with my hair, I turned around and backhanded him across the face. “Leave my hair alone!” I screeched.
Momentarily stunned, the boy jumped to his feet. He grabbed me up out of my chair and slapped me with powerful force across my left cheek. Before I could reach up to my face, hot and flushed, he grabbed my right arm and twisted it up behind my back, between my shoulder blades. The whole time he was screaming at me. “Stupid bitch!” he said. “I’ll teach you to hit me.”
He was pushing me down the aisle.
Miss Patch, a new teacher, was on her feet, her face as flushed as mine.
“Stop it! Stop it!” she yelled. “Let go of her now!”
The boy ignored her cries. “I’m going to throw this dumb bitch out the window!” he yelled back as he shoved me toward the open windows that faced the school’s courtyard. We were on the second floor. The courtyard was mostly concrete. I was struggling to break free, but I wasn’t about to hit, slap, or kick the kid again. I looked at Miss Patch, my eyes pleading with her to do something.
She pulled out a silver laser device. With one flash of that laser pen she could activate an emergency call to the front office. The burly security staff, typically retired or off-duty firemen and police officers, would be at the door within minutes. The class of onlookers who had only moments before been yelling “Fight! Fight! Throw her! Throw her!” grew silent. Nobody had ever been in a situation that required activation of the laser pen. All eyes were upon Miss Patch. Would she really do it?
“LET GO OF HER RIGHT NOW!” Miss Patch yelled, pointing the pen toward the call box bolted to the far wall. She had yet to activate the laser.
The boy dropped my arm, but he didn’t quit quietly. “Don’t you ever touch me again!” he said. “I’ll kill you.”
I didn’t say a word.
Miss Patch pulled us both out into the hallway.
“I’m referring you both to the principal,” she said. She was visibly shaken. Her hands were trembling.
Fighting for any reason was cause for expulsion. I knew if I got expelled, Mama would send me to a boarding school for sure. But first, I figured, she’d take a shotgun to the school and put the fear of God into the boy who dared slap her daughter. I begged the principal not to call Mama. I told him she was itching to send me off to a private school, and this incident was all she would need to seal my fate. The boy didn’t say a word. He didn’t care if he got expelled. He didn’t care if the principal called his mama. I was pretty sure he didn’t care if all the white girls at Columbus High got sent off to boarding school. It wasn’t going to affect his life none.
The principal rubbed his hands through a thick fluff of his silver hair and lectured the two of us on the need for “everybody to be nice and get along.” He made us swear we’d leave each other alone from now on. And he ordered us to sit on opposite sides of the classroom. Then he dismissed us to our next class and told us he’d “study the matter some more” before calling our parents. Mama never did get a call, but I figured what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt me, so I never told her about the incident.
Mama might not like her kids going to school with blacks, but I don’t ever remember her using the ugly slang, the n-word, that some of our kinfolk used. However, there was no question that she felt, then, that blacks and whites shouldn’t run in the same circles or attend the same bars, churches, or schools. But she didn’t put up a fuss about it either. And she would never join a segregationist group creating the ruckus at the district office. Mama was never the kind of woman to jump on a bandwagon for any cause. She was way too independent for such nonsense. Besides, she was too busy for marches or boycotts. She had much more practical matters to tend to—like finding her family a new home.
EVER SINCE AUNT CIL had died, Grandpa Harve had been shuffled around from pillar to post. First, Uncle Carl and Aunt Blanche took him home to Clinton, Tennessee. Carl’s home wasn’t big, but it was bigger than our trailer. And it was probably as comfortable as anything any of the Mayes family owned at the time. But Grandpa hadn’t been there very long before Carl and Blanche decided he’d be better off in Oregon with Uncle Roy and Aunt Katherine. Mama wasn’t involved in the decision-making process and wasn’t even told about the move until after it was done.
She wasn’t happy about it, but at the time there wasn’t much she could do other than make plans to bring Grandpa back to live with us. As soon as Mama started bringing home a regular paycheck from her Medical Center job, she started talking to a Realtor about finding a house she could afford.
In the meantime, she gave Lewis back that big ole diamond ring he’d bought her and called off their engagement. Mama decided she couldn’t marry him after all. Not because she didn’t love him, but because she feared he didn’t love us kids enough. And Mama simply could not bear to be hitched to a man who didn’t adore us kids the way Daddy had. She broke the news to us casually over supper one night.
She’d brought home a bag of Krystal hamburgers. The steamed burgers were smothered in mustard and pickles and could fit in the palm of a kid’s hand. Since they only cost a quarter each, Mama could buy a sack of twenty for five bucks. Still, a meal from Krystal was usually reserved for special celebratory events. As she stood at the kitchen counter, taking the burgers from the bag, Mama told us that she’d given Lewis his ring back.
“How come?” I asked.
“Just because,” Mama said. I knew better than to press her for any more explanation than that. The “Just because” answer meant all discussion was finished as far as Mama was concerned. I don’t recall any of us kids being upset about Mama and Lewis breaking up.
A change was taking place in our lives. Once she finished school and started working full-time, Mama quit her honky-tonking. She was working the 11 P.M. to 7 A.M. shift. She’d start getting ready for work at about 9:30 P.M. She’d leave at about ten-thirty and get home in time to
see Linda and me off to school in the mornings. When we got home in the afternoons, Mama was up, the trailer was cleaned, the laundry was all folded, and dinner was being contemplated. Except for the obvious absence of men in our household, life seemed almost routine, like it had been before Daddy died.
In fall 1972, Mama up and sold our trailer and bought a house. It was a three-bedroom brick home, just a block off Manchester Expressway, on Johnson Drive. It wasn’t anything fancy, less than fifteen hundred square feet, but it was situated on a corner lot, which meant we not only had a front and backyard, but we had a side yard as well. And the house had a concrete foundation, instead of cinder blocks to hold it up. There were lots of windows and glossy hardwood floors in the living room and bedrooms, and a bathroom with a tub and shower. The trailer had cost $5,700. Mama sold it for $2,000 five and a half years later. She used that money to put a down payment on the house and financed $14,000. That was a great sum of money for a woman making less than three dollars an hour.
It didn’t take us long to box up everything we owned. A bunch of the kids from Rose Hill got their parents’ cars and trucks and helped us move. Mama appreciated that. All day long she kept humming that Roger Miller tune—“King of the Road”—“Trailer for sale or rent.”
Linda and I got to decorate our room the way we wanted. We picked out a pair of hot-pink curtains with ruffles on the valances and the hem. Our bedroom faced west, so when the sun set, its dappled light came right through our window. The afternoon sun drifting through those cotton curtains gave the room a rosy glow that seemed magical to us.
Mama’s room was next to ours, facing east. And even though he wasn’t living at home, Frank got a little corner room that was big enough for a twin bed and not much else. Every door had a glass doorknob, and there was even a dining room separate from the kitchen. The kitchen seemed especially spacious. I couldn’t just turn and reach the refrigerator from the stove or sink. I actually had to walk across the linoleum floor to get eggs from the fridge. But the best thing about the kitchen was the picture window above the sink. It looked directly into the bedroom window of the very cute teenage boy who lived in the house next-door.
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