by Fannie Flagg
The Woodlawn Theater ran weekly serials: Buster Crabbe, the Green Hornet and Jungle Jim. My favorite is Nyoka, the Jungle Girl, who I like even better than Jungle Jim. Who cares about Johnny Weissmuller without Boy and Jane? Some people have no business sense. Nyoka could swing through the jungle faster than Tarzan any day.
Daddy would show me next week’s serial at night when the theater closed. I was always the first to know that Nyoka hadn’t been killed. I swear I never told, not once.
Nyoka has a lot to do with how I look in person. Daddy spent a whole day making me a swing rope on a tree in the backyard, but unfortunately he made an error in dynamics, as he put it. I grabbed ahold of the rope and he ran me back as far as he could and let go and it swung me right into the tree and now my right front tooth is chipped. Daddy thinks it makes me look different. Momma thinks it is awful.
Momma has a theory that Daddy has tried to kill me on several occasions. Once when I fell asleep in the living room, Daddy cracked my head carrying me into the bedroom. He also knocked me off the pier into the Pearl River when I was three and didn’t come after me for a long time because he felt that young children, like young animals, could swim if they were scared enough. But I wasn’t scared enough. You should have seen the trash I saw on the bottom of that river when I was waiting for him to come and get me … tin cans, an old Roi • Tan cigar box and an old Firestone tire. The Pearl River attracts a lower class of people if you ask me.
Then there was the time when he picked up a two-by-four on the side of the road and put it in the front seat by me and stuck it out the window. He told me to hold it, which I did, but when the wind hit the board, it turned around and hit me in the head and knocked me out. Another time, when a friend of Daddy’s bought a brand-new Buick, Daddy pressed the push-button window up on my neck. But that time I think it was just a matter of him not being familiar with the equipment.
The main thing Momma bases her theory on is once Daddy, who is very artistic, wanted to make a life mask of my face. He put plaster of paris on me but forgot the breathing holes. On top of that he also forgot to put Vaseline on my face. He had to crack the plaster off with a hammer. Momma didn’t speak to him for a week on that one. I myself was sorry that it didn’t turn out.
She also says he is going to ruin my nervous system because of the time he sneaked up on me when I was listening to Inner Sanctum on the radio. Just as the squeaking door opened, he grabbed me and yelled, “Got ya,” real loud, which caused me to faint. She also didn’t like him telling me Santa Claus had been killed in a bus accident and making me throw up.
The Pettibones have very delicate nervous systems. That’s true. Momma is nervous all the time. She’s worn a hole in the floor on the passenger’s side of Daddy’s car from putting on the brakes. Momma always looks like she is on the verge of a hissy fit, but that’s mainly because when she was eighteen, she stuck her head in a gas oven looking at some biscuits and blew her eyebrows off. So she paints them on like little half-moons. People love to talk to her because she always looks interested, even if she isn’t.
If Daddy is dangerous to my health, Momma’s not much better. She nearly got us both killed in the street last winter. Momma had read the movie ad saying, “Every woman will want to see Joan Crawford as the woman who loves Johnny Guitar,” and I guess she did. I wanted to see Francis, the Talking Mule, so I wasn’t in a good mood anyway. When Momma takes me downtown, it is an all-day ordeal. She was crazy about mother-and-daughter dresses at the time and she made me wear some ratty dress I hated. Whenever we go downtown, she starts her window shopping. Look, look, look! It drives me crazy.
We always go to Morrison’s Cafeteria to eat. That’s OK because I can get three Jell-Os instead of vegetables. After the meal, Momma sits and smokes and drinks coffee. I have to watch her like a hawk. My job is getting up and pouring her more coffee. That goes on for hours. Then I have to pull her chair out and help her on with her coat. She is big on children having manners. This night I sat through eight cups of coffee and Joan Crawford, so to make me feel better she said I could pull the cord on the streetcar on the way home.
It wasn’t my fault that there was a country woman on the streetcar that was crazy and talking into a paper sack. I was busy looking at her and missed our stop. Momma was mad because it was so cold and we had to walk two blocks back. She had on a big silver fox fur coat and she had her alligator purse, with the alligator head on it.
It was so dark we had to walk in the middle of the street. We’d gone about a block when she saw a car coming a mile away. She got hysterical and started running and screaming for me to get out of the street and jump up on the curb. I just stood there and watched her have a fit. She ran over to the side of the road and jumped up on the curb, but there wasn’t even a curb on that side, just an embankment. She hit the side of it so hard that her high heels stuck in the mud and she bounced back out into the middle of the street. When she landed, her coat flew over her head and she skidded with her purse out in front of her.
By this time the car had come around the corner, and when its lights hit the eyes on her alligator purse, the man in the car ran off the side of the road. I hadn’t moved because it was so interesting to see Momma having a running fit like that, and the man didn’t get out for a long time. All he saw was an alligator head on a fur body in the middle of the winter in Jackson, Mississippi.
Finally, I went over and told him that it was only a woman in a coat that had jumped on the side of a hill. We helped her up, and I got her high heels out of the mud. Boy, was she mad. She wasn’t hurt much, just skinned her knees and ruined her stockings and lost an earring.
Walking behind her the rest of the way home, I started to laugh and almost choked myself to death trying not to because I knew for sure she would kill me. I tried to pretend I was coughing. My face turned beet red and tears were streaming down my face. It’s funny how when your life is in danger, you can’t stop laughing, but when Momma turned around to beat me to death or worse, I was saved. She started to laugh. Then we both laughed so hard we had to sit down in the street and I ruined my mother-daughter dress.
But I’m in a lot of trouble with her now for a play I wrote. I thought it was real good. We put it on at school. It was called The Devil-May-Care Girls. Two beautiful career girls live in New York and wear evening gowns all the time. When the maid tells them Harry Truman is coming to dinner, they invite all their friends and hire a band and everything. It turns out that Mr. Truman is an insurance man with the same name. Ha-ha, boy, were they surprised!
I was the star, and my best friend, Jennifer May, was the other girl. Sara Jane Brady was the maid. I only cast her because she was so tall. She almost ruined the play by reading all of her lines right out of a notebook. Other than that, it went very well. We did it for the whole school. Momma is mad because I had the girls drink twenty-seven gin martinis.
I try hard to please her, but I think she is disappointed in me. Every time she gets mad at me she says I’m just like my daddy. I made her cry last Easter. She had bought me a pretty Easter outfit with a pink straw hat, white patent pumps and purse to match, but I got a black eye the day before Easter when Bill Shasa called my daddy a drunk. I tried to hit him in the back of the head with a brick, but I missed. I hate a boy who will hit a girl, don’t you? We spoiled his Easter, too, though. Daddy gave me some Ex-Lax in a candy wrapper and Bill ate the whole thing.
Momma had her heart set on me playing the harp after someone once said I looked like a little angel. There wasn’t anybody in Jackson who could teach harp music, so she settled on tap dancing. The Neva Jean School of Tap and Ballet promised to have your child on their toes in thirty days. The school was on top of the Whatley Drugstore, where they make the best banana splits in the whole world. I was a petal in the recital called “Springtime in Greentime” with a special number by the Gainer Triplets, who played a three-leaf clover. Skooter Olgerson was cast as a weed, but his momma didn’t want him playing a weed and she ya
nked him out of the show. I didn’t do too good in the recital. I was not in step but once.
Momma let me quit when I ruined all her hardwood floors practicing my shuffleball chain. Besides, Neva Jean said I was holding the whole class back. The only fun I ever had in that dance class was the day when Buster Sessions showed up in tap shoes that were too big for him. He is a real sissy and when his momma came to see him in the class, he got to tapping so fast, showing off, that one of his shoes flew off and hit the piano player, Mrs. Vella Fussel, in the back. Buster’s mother wasn’t even looking. She was sitting there in a fold-up chair, chewing a whole pack of Juicy Fruit gum and reading Screen Secrets.
Daddy and I bought a record of Mario Lanza singing “Because of You,” as a surprise, and I learned the whole thing for Momma’s birthday. When she had some of her girlfriends over, Daddy put me in one of his jackets and a tie and painted a mustache on my face. He announced me and I came in the room and sang “Because of You” as loud as I could. Momma suggested maybe I should learn one of Patti Page’s hits.
She was expecting a Mixmaster for her birthday, but Daddy got her a pair of expensive toenail clippers instead. I got her some Coty toilet water with sachet powder and two giant tubes of Colgate toothpaste and some Palmolive shaving cream for her legs. She tried to pretend she liked what I got her, but I know she didn’t. I’m too young to buy a Mixmaster and I don’t even know where they sell them.
What I can’t figure out is, Felix is a calico cat and her kittens are black and white and real ugly.
April 12, 1952
Well, you are not going to believe what happened. Daddy froze five cartons of English red worms and when we thawed them out, they were all dead as door nails! Nobody is going to buy dead English red worms. Rats! The only other way Daddy could get that $500 is to ask his daddy to loan it to him, but Grandfather Harper won’t do it because he is mad at Daddy and is never going to speak to him again as long as he lives.
My granddaddy, Blondie Harper, is pretty well known around Jackson. When they used to have stage shows here, he ran the spotlight at the Pantages Theater. He was mean and if he didn’t like someone’s act, he would holler at them and turn the spotlight off. People used to come to the theater just to hear what he would yell at the Yankee comedians.
When Granddaddy first started the stagehands’ union in Mississippi, he put stink bombs in theaters where they didn’t want the unions, and that is why he is president of the stagehands’ union to this day.
He never liked my daddy from the beginning. He thought Daddy was too little and skinny, and worse, he wore glasses and did bird imitations. Grandpa thinks he is a sissy, which he isn’t.
Grandpa bought me a blue suede cowgirl outfit with white leather trim and boots to match, so he’s all right in my book, but I feel sorry for Daddy. Grandpa calls Daddy a bad husband and father and all kinds of ugly things just because he happened to see him talking to a woman at Dr. Gus’s Beer Joint. Daddy explained that he was simply talking union business. Grandpa said there weren’t any women in the union. Daddy said that was exactly what he had been talking about at the time. If things weren’t bad enough already, last week he had to go and put a whiz bomb in Grandpa’s car.
I’ll miss not seeing my Grandpa and Grandma Harper. I used to love to go see Momma Harper, because she and Aunt Helen would let me open their Miller High Life beers for them and have a sip.
My Aunt Helen is real pretty. As a little girl, she used to sleep with her arms folded like an angel, so if she died in the middle of the night, she would look beautiful. She doesn’t like Daddy, either, because he put her boyfriend’s picture on the back of the toilet seat once.
Momma still doesn’t want to move to Shell Beach, but Daddy says that since nobody in her family or his family is speaking to him, we wouldn’t be all that happy in Jackson anyway.
The only good thing that happened was that last night my dog, named Lassie, ate Momma’s roast beef right off the table and we had to go out for supper so I got to see my Aunt Bess, who runs the Irondale Café across town. She’s about sixty-five years old and has never been married. She told me that they may put “Miss” on her tombstone, but that she hasn’t missed a thing.
She is Grandma Pettibone’s sister. Her café is great. It is right by the railroad tracks and most of her customers are railroad men. The food is good, too. She has five colored ladies that work for her and they cook biscuits, turnip greens and pork chops. Aunt Bess even has possum listed on her menu. Momma said it was only a joke or she hoped it was.
When Aunt Bess was twenty, her daddy looked at her and knew she was never going to get married like her other sisters, so he gave her enough money to start a business. She opened a barbershop, but sold that. Then she and her friend Sue Lovells started the Irondale Café. It is very successful.
All of the Pettibones are Methodist and hit the church every time the doors open. They get upset with Aunt Bess because she won’t go with them. She loves to fish and one time when my grandmother was having one of her bingo parties at home, Aunt Bess, who was drinking, drove up to her house with a string of dead trout hanging out the side of the car. George, the colored man that she takes with her, was sitting right beside her in the front seat
Aunt Bess is getting rich because all the old railroad men die and leave her their money. Most of them are bachelors and love Aunt Bess. But she gives it all away.
The café has gunshot holes all over the floor and ceiling from when Aunt Bess plays poker with the railroad men after she closes. They get to drinking and pretty soon there’s a fight Aunt Bess watches until she thinks it has gone on long enough, then she shoots off her gun.
Aunt Bess likes Daddy—thank goodness! The other night she kept slipping him Wild Turkey whiskey in a paper cup and it made Momma mad. Momma is real proper and hates it when Daddy has a good time. She put me in Catholic school because she thought it would make up for having Daddy for a daddy. Everybody says he is a bad influence on me.
Daddy won’t let me be baptized a Catholic, but those nuns are having a good time trying. I have a lot of holy cards and get lots of attention because they think I’m going to hell. I like the nuns very much, all except Sister Plasida.
I have two boyfriends, Dwane Crawford and Luther Willis. Luther wears bow ties. When we had our fifth-grade dance, Luther and I were dancing to “The Tennessee Waltz” and Sister Plasida came over and took me into the hall and tried to wipe the lipstick and rouge off of me, which I wasn’t even wearing. Momma, who was there in the PTA group, came in and told her not to do that because when I got excited, I had natural coloring.
I don’t like catechism too much either. Daddy was the one that told me that the Epistles were the wives of the Apostles. That old priest went all funny when I asked him if Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ girlfriend. He doesn’t want you to ask questions at all.
I am a second-year Brownie. I got a first-aid badge that really comes in handy. One time after school, Jimmy Lee got hit by a car and was bleeding all over the place. I remembered what to do. I sat down and put my head between my knees to keep from fainting.
Once a colored man was in a wreck in front of my grandmother’s house and had his ear cut off. When the ambulance came, they said to my grandmother, “We can’t take him, you’ll have to call a colored ambulance.” Can you believe that they wouldn’t help him with his ear? Boy, were we mad. Daddy said things were pretty bad when rednecks were in the medical profession.
I personally don’t trust any of them as far as I can throw a gum wrapper, especially after the time Dr. Clyde told Momma that my tonsils would have to come out and that it would be a snap. He talked all about the ice cream I could eat and what fun it would be, and Momma took me to the Rexall and bought me a Sparkle Plenty doll.
When I got to the hospital, Dr. Clyde promised me my momma and daddy would be with me the whole time. Then they put me on this table and rolled me down the hall. I was OK until we got to these two big screen doors and my momma and dadd
y were told they would have to wait outside. I sat right up when I heard that. Momma and Daddy were looking scared, but those people at the hospital rolled me in the room alone and closed the doors.
Then some other people with masks started fooling around and even tried to take my Sparkle Plenty doll away. They asked if I was Catholic, which made me real nervous before an operation, and then they put this strainer on my face and tried to kill me with ether, one of the worst-smelling things I have ever smelled in my life.
When I heard a commotion outside the door, I tried to get up, but five against a little child is not fair. It was the worst experience of my life. I heard bells, sirens, and saw terrible things. I dreamed a story about a magician with a magic stick that scared me to death.
I found out later that as I was being rolled into the operating room Momma turned to say something to Daddy, but Daddy had run down to the end of the hall and shut himself into a telephone booth. Some doctors got him out and gave him a shot, he was so upset. I love him, but Daddy isn’t much help in a real-life crisis.
Don’t ever let them fool you with that ice cream stuff. I couldn’t even taste it and didn’t want it, to boot. After I got my strength back, I opened up the head of my Sparkle Plenty doll and pulled the eyes out.
Grandma Pettibone came over to the hospital and fanned me with a bingo card and I got to miss school, but other than that, the hospital was the pits.
May 2, 1952
Jimmy Snow called Daddy and asked if he had the $500 yet. I got to talk to him, and he sounds very nice. Daddy has decided to try and get on I’ve Got a Secret to win the money. Boy, you should hear some of the secrets he has come up with so far. When Momma told him the secrets have to be true, he put me in training for Beat the Clock. He thinks I can beat the clock because I am very well coordinated. Nobody has the heart to tell him they don’t let children on the show.