My best memories of him were from his episodic attempts at engagement. During the longest-lasting of these episodes, once every month or two he would come pick us up and drive us a few miles west on Interstate 20 to Trucker’s Paradise, a seedy, smoke-filled truck stop with gas pumps, a convenience store, a small dining area, and a game room through a door in the back. It had a few video games, a couple of pinball machines, and a pool table. Perfect.
My dad gave each of us a handful of quarters and we played until they were gone. He sat up front in the dining area, drinking coffee and being particular about the measly food.
“Is this soup fresh or from the cain?!”
We loved those days. To us, Trucker’s Paradise was paradise. The quarters and the games were fun but easily forgotten. It was the presence of my father that was most treasured. But those trips were short-lived. My father soon sank back into his sewer of booze and women.
And so it was. Every so often he would make some sort of effort, but every time it wouldn’t last.
When he wouldn’t come to us, my mother would take us to him, trying to keep some connection between a bunch of boys, their father, and his folks. She’d drive us to the house in Bienville where he lived with his two sisters and their husbands.
The house was a U-shaped building that surrounded a grass-bare courtyard with a tree withering in the middle. It had high ceilings and dark rooms, especially the spooky, blood-red-painted bathroom, lit by a single exposed bulb, that scared away my need to pee.
On one side of the house was my father’s fast-talking, foulmouthed sister, a woman prone to wild exaggeration and flat-out lying who lived with her mixed-race husband. He had a head of greasy gray hair, straight as strings, although it wasn’t really gray, or white, but dingy, like three-day-old snow when the grime and mud and dog piss gets mixed in. He was the preacher without a church who had married my parents under the tree. He ate fried fish whole, bones and all, and liked to tell us about the disgusting ways white people described black people when they mistook him for one of their own, a mistake easily made since there were no discernible echoes of Negro heritage in his appearance.
On the other side of the house lived my father’s ever-smiling, dwarfish sister, whose overweight frame sweated like a cold drink in a glass jar. She had the kind of look that the world treats cruelly, the kind that pushes a person to extreme pleasantness or extreme bitterness just to survive it. She chose pleasantness. She lived there with her no-account husband, who rarely worked but always drank, and their fun-loving son, who liked to wrestle and loved to laugh.
My father had a room in the middle, between the two families.
Our visits weren’t always warm ones. My father, if he was even home, rarely spoke, and my mother had an uneasy relationship with his sisters. She liked the dwarfish one, but that one kept a nasty house. And the other one was a liar. My mother often reminded us of what my father’s mother had said about the lying sister: “She’s my daughter, Billie, but she sure can lie.” My mother detested liars.
Not all of my father’s folks were too keen on my mother either, which they made known when my mother wasn’t around. My mother’s conservative bent, the way she didn’t curse in mixed company, her going back to college as a grown woman with children, none of it seemed to set right with them. To them, such things were the mark of a woman who thought too much of herself. And they couldn’t comprehend why my mother had left my father.
What kind of woman strikes out to raise all of us boys on her own? What kind of woman puts a man down just because he’s acting up? Surely a piece of a man was better than no man. They reckoned that it was a woman’s lot in life to make do with a scrap of a husband if that was what she was given. My mother reckoned differently.
They slyly pleaded my father’s case to us boys, but I was the kind of boy who always saw my mother’s way as right, so their side-taking soured me on those visits.
As my mother was struggling to keep my real father in my life, Jed, the man I counted as my first father, the one I loved most, was on his way out of it.
Jed fell ill—lung cancer, from a lifetime of smoking. He was in the hospital for a spell but came home when there was no more the doctors could do. He was bedridden, thin, nearly gone. Toward the end, my brother James came to stay with us in Gibsland for a week, but it was not a happy time. Something was wrong. I could feel it. No one said anything, but something came through the silence like the buzz in a too-quiet room: nothing, but something.
The next week, when we took James back to Arkansas, there were strange cars in the yard of the yellow house and strange people inside it—sad people, pacing slowly, in a daze, like people do when they stumble out of a wrecked car, having seen death up close but walking away from it. They were whispering sad things that my ears could hardly make out but my sorrow filled in. I looked around, and through a gap among the unfamiliar folks I saw Big Mama slumped in a chair, face swollen, jaw drooped, eyes blood red and holding the last puddles of a flood of tears. This was bad.
James ran to Jed’s room, the last place he had seen him, but Jed wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere. He was gone. Dead, they told us, their manner grave, doing their best to choke back their own sadness and lessen ours.
Nothing could have prepared me. The earth shook. I was now old enough to know what death meant, what it really meant to lose someone you loved, not just people sleeping in a big ol’ suitcase, but the hollow-making finality of it all. Overcome, I stood still and cried. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to hold my body. I closed my eyes because I didn’t want to look into Big Mama’s.
I couldn’t believe it. I went to the bedroom so that I could see for myself. The room was cleaner than I had ever seen it. The bed was perfectly made, without a wrinkle. But Jed wasn’t there. Life was gone from that room. Big Mama would never sleep in that room again.
I wandered around the house, lost and shell-shocked. I overheard Big Mama talking to someone on the phone. “He jus’ start coughin’, coughin’ up a lots of blood, and dat was it.”
And that was it. My first father, the one who knew what love was, gone. The ocean had dried up. And that changed Big Mama in ways that I was unable and unwilling to handle.
She hung a plaque with the Serenity Prayer on it next to the front door:
God, grant me the serenity to accept
the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
But serenity was now the furthest thing from that little yellow house.
Jed had held Big Mama’s heart and seemed to take half of it with him when he crossed over. His death scarred her deeply. Most of the ache she kept in, but some leaked out.
She began to spank us kids more frequently and more severely. Sometimes she used a switch. Other times she used one of Jed’s old belts. Once I saw her beat James with a water hose.
This was an odd and unsettling turn for me.
My mother was not cut from this cloth. As unforgiving as she could be when crossed by grown folks, my mother didn’t take well to the notion of spanking children. She spanked, but rarely. Maybe it was a generational easing. Maybe it was her unending rebellion against Big Mama.
My mother told us that Big Mama had a mean streak, but I had never known it. My mother often recounted a story of a particularly harsh beating she had received. Big Mama had assumed that my mother had done something wrong. When my mother tried to explain, Big Mama told her to shut up and started whipping her. Refusing to be silenced, my mother kept yelling, “Mama, let me tell ya! Mama, let me tell ya!” Infuriated by my mother’s insolence, Big Mama kept beating her. Eventually, Grandpa Bill had to step in and tell Big Mama, “Don’t beat ha no mo’!” Neither one of them was going to give up anytime soon, or ever after.
Even when my mother thought it necessary to spank us she couldn’t always bring herself to do it.
Like the time at the hairdresser’s. Twice a mon
th we boys would go there with my mother. The hairdresser lived in a rundown house at the end of a dead-end road, past a small sugarcane farm with a one-mule press. She had transformed her modest living room, crowded with knickknacks and covered in family pictures, into a makeshift salon. A beautician’s chair sat in the middle of the room, where she used flame-heated irons to fry my mother’s hair into neat rows of tight curls, small clouds of sulfur-scented smoke rising from each ringlet.
There was a lumpy, threadbare sofa facing the chair, and another one in a small alcove off to the right, where we boys sat with the hairdresser’s mother, who never spoke but always chewed gum, amazingly producing several popped bubbles with every chomp.
We sometimes had to wait there for hours, under strict orders from our mother not to cause a commotion or ask for, or accept, any food or drink—it would have been rude.
“You better not go nowhere and act like I ain’t never fed you.”
One day at the hairdresser’s Robert got really thirsty but was afraid to ask for water. Suddenly he sprang to his feet, eyes closed, arms outstretched, with limp wrists like the mummies in the television cartoons, and began to walk slowly, taking goose steps, while dragging out his words: “I . . . want . . . some . . . wa-ter. Give . . . me . . . some . . . wa-ter.” My mother sat straight up in the chair, head half done, fuming. The other women, waiting their turn in the chair, laughed hysterically, urging on my brother’s performance. “He sleepwalkin’, gurl! Don’t wake ’im up! They say it’s dang’ous when you wake ’em up.”
We thought that surely this little act, though hilarious, would get Robert beaten. When we got in the car, my mother chastised him while she fought a smile—“I shoulda to’e yo’ behind up”—but she never spanked him. It was just too funny.
Big Mama didn’t seem to have that lighter side anymore. It seemed to have left with Jed from the room containing the bed that now had no wrinkles. She seemed given to pain and sorrow without him. Ironically, in Big Mama’s job as a housekeeper and babysitter, she was the most gentle, even-tempered, quick-to-laugh person you could imagine—the grandmother I wished I could have back. Maybe this was just a survival skill—though I doubt it, based on the number of wallet-sized pictures of white children tucked into the corners of the frames that held our portraits. I could never reconcile those two sides of her.
I would still go to Kiblah to stay for a couple of weeks in the summers, but things had changed too much and the good feelings were fading. It was no longer the safe, beautiful place it once had been.
That fall I was six years old, on the edge of my seat, clinging to the dashboard of a speeding car. My mother was behind the wheel, cradling her pistol, trying to catch a woman we had never met.
It was Thanksgiving Day, and just hours earlier our home had been filled with the sounds of excitement and the smell of food. Grandpa Bill had come from Houston. He was newly separated from his beautiful young wife. Big Mama had come from Arkansas, newly widowed by Jed. My father was there as well, newly exiled from my mother’s affections.
It was a year that had torn at the fabric of our family, yet there we were, all together, smiling and laughing, resetting our faith, and reaffirming our love.
The air was filled with the smell of celebration—fruit and nuts, cakes and pies, ham and turkey, cornbread dressing and giblet gravy.
As always, Grandpa Bill held forth with his stories. He talked and laughed loudly like a man trying to be heard across a field, happy that the day’s work was done. No one could tell a story like him, the way he locked eyes on you and drew you in. He started slowly, setting the scene with colorful details. Then his voice would begin to swell and his tempo quicken. By the time he reached the climax, he was screaming the words and howling with laughter, as were we.
Between his stories, he’d offer his opinion of me and my brothers. Like my father, he was impressed with my brothers’ resourcefulness and break-it-down-and-fix-it-up nature. But he didn’t know what to make of me, a boy who clung so closely to his mother. He would often say, as if I wasn’t there, “That boy is never going to leave Billie’s side.” He said it not out of malice, but it hurt every time all the same. I knew even then that it meant he thought I would never make much of myself, that I would be stuck under her wing, afraid to spread my own.
I didn’t agree with his assessment, but I didn’t know how to refute it. All I knew was that I was smarter than I was strong. And that I was drawing something special from my mother. I was learning more by following her and watching her than anyone had ever set out to teach me. I just had no idea if it would be enough to help me make it in the world without her.
That Thanksgiving, Big Mama chatted Grandpa Bill up and egged him on. She openly flirted with him. He gently brushed her aside. It was easy to see what had drawn them to each other and what had made their union unsustainable. They amplified each other, but to a dangerous degree. There were no brakes. Neither of them had the will or the power to turn it off, only to turn it up. Besides, the fact that Big Mama was nearly his age made her too old for his current tastes. But that didn’t stop the old girl from trying.
My mother bounced about in the kitchen, clinking pots, occasionally yelling a playful interjection or letting loose a belly laugh. While Big Mama’s presence often irritated my mother, Grandpa Bill’s presence excited her. He was the parent in whom she delighted. She was his namesake. She lit up for him, vying for his attention, bending over backward to make sure that he was comfortable and satisfied, still trying desperately to be daddy’s little girl.
My father sat quietly, occasionally managing a grin or a chuckle, but mostly trying to blend into the background of a family to which he no longer belonged. My mother continued allowing him to visit, particularly on the holidays, for the sake of me and my brothers.
Soon my mother called everyone to the table, my grandfather said a prayer, and we dug in. That was what I loved about Thanksgiving: it was one of the only times that we ate together at the table. Most of the time we ate on the run or in our rooms with plates in our laps.
After dinner, we lounged around, drifting in and out of conversation and in and out of consciousness as my mother and Big Mama put away food and washed dishes. The phone rang. My mother answered it, but there was no response on the other end. After a few seconds, the caller hung up. My mother thought nothing of it. A few minutes later, the same thing—a ring, an answer, but no response. This kept up for more than an hour. My mother grew suspicious and irritated.
Then, on one of her trips from the kitchen to the dining room, she caught sight of a car creeping by outside. The joy drained from her face. Her eyes widened and her lips pursed. It was the car of one of my father’s women—had to be. That was who had been playing on the phone, hoping that eventually he, not my mother, would answer. Now she had shown up. It was an act of disrespect, and disrespect was my mother’s trigger.
Without saying a word, she walked out of the door and got into her car. As usual, I followed, ever the mama’s boy. We quickly looped around the block until we caught sight of the woman’s car again. Now my mother was sure. Her outrage boiled over. The woman had practically come to our front door. She had violated my mother’s zone of dignity. Now she would see how much of a mistake that had been.
When we got all the way around the block, my mother stopped in front of our house and gave me instructions: “Go in there and get my pistol outta my pockabook and don’t let nobody see you.” She wanted to keep her eye on the woman’s car. She was so blinded by rage that she couldn’t see how wrong it was to send a six-year-old child to retrieve a loaded gun.
My mother wasn’t a troublemaker, but if trouble came calling, it would be met with force. That happy Thanksgiving Day—in her mind, pumped up by hours of Grandpa Bill’s stories about gun-pulling and chain-whipping—trouble had come calling. That was what Grandpa Bill did to folks, what must have made him such a great soldier: he made everyone around him feel braver, more reckless, more the defenders of hon
or than they had been before.
I walked into the house, got the gun, tucked it into my pants, covered it with my shirt, and walked back out to the waiting car. No one suspected a thing. I got in and passed my mother the gun, and we sped off. We soon caught up to the woman, but when she realized we were chasing her, she pushed the pedal to the metal. My mother responded in kind. We raced through the town’s narrow streets, then onto Interstate 20. The woman was weaving through cars, dodging onto the shoulder, and dipping into the median. My mother was right behind her, not giving an inch. I clung to the dashboard, adrenaline pulsing through my body. I was excited and terrified at the same time, repeating in my mind, “Git ha, Mama! Git ha!”
I don’t know what made my mother stop chasing the woman, but I always believed that at least in part it was the image of her little boy awash in her bloodlust, glassy-eyed and salivating for a horrible end to the chase. It was sad and wrong, and she knew it. It was dangerous and futile, and she knew it. So she took her foot off the gas pedal and let it all go. Her indignation was costing her her sanity. The car, and my heartbeat, began to slow. The woman got away and my mother gave up—gave up fighting my father’s women and her ghosts. She set herself free.
There is nothing like the presence of a gun, and an earnest intent to use it, to draw the totality of a life into sharp relief. That was a lesson I would learn early and often. But even more important was the idea that, at any moment, we all had the awesome and underutilized power to simply let go of our past and step beyond it.
We went back home and rejoined the conversation as if nothing had happened.
Later, my mother made plates of the leftovers and delivered them to people in the community who needed a good meal and a little help. That was the way it was with my mother, constantly vacillating between hotheaded vigilante and beneficent exemplar—between the temper she had inherited from Grandpa Bill and the temperance she had absorbed from Mam’ Grace.
Fire Shut Up in My Bones Page 6