Catfish Alley (45 page)

Rita and I walk over to meet them. I think we're both
holding our breath, wondering if this man is who we think he is.

As we greet Billy and Daniel, the man removes his hat,
revealing closely cut graying hair and a handsome, deeply lined face. Billy
places her arm through his and says, "Ladies, I'd like you to meet Mr.
Albert Jackson, Jr."

He shakes our hands warmly, and just as we step aside
to bring them over to the grave, where Jack is just helping Grace up, we hear a
gasp and I look up to see Adelle clutch her hand to her chest. Fearful that
it's her heart again, I start to rush over to her. But I see quickly, as she
stands and fixes her eyes on Junior, that this is joy, not pain. She tears her
eyes from her brother and says, "Gracie ... Gracie ... look who's
here."

Grace has unfolded herself into a standing position and
is brushing off her dress when Junior reaches her. She looks up, freezes, and
her hands fly to her mouth as the small spade she was using drops to the
ground. I can see the tears forming instantly in her eyes. "Junior?"

We all stand back and watch as the prodigal brother is
enfolded in the arms of two women who never stopped loving him or believing that
he might return someday. I think to myself, maybe Grace was right. Life is full
of pain, but there is joy, too. Today, I choose joy.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

First of all, let me say that
Catfish Alley
is entirely a work of fiction. That being said, in some ways it is entirely a
work of fact, albeit with author's license in some historical details.
Catfish Alley
is loosely based on places, events, and people in my hometown of Columbus,
Mississippi. I grew up just outside of Columbus in a rural community called New
Hope. My mother says that when my grandparents moved to New Hope, the school
doubled in size. That was the early 1900s, and my grandparents eventually had
fifteen children, so that explains the sudden increase in the school
population. I lived in that community until my late twenties, graduating from
the same high school as my mother had.

My grandparents were cotton farmers, and my sister
still lives on what remains of that farm in the house built just after the
Civil War, where my mother, the thirteenth child, was born in 1924. As a young
girl, I spent many hours in the gardens, fields, and orchards of Mississippi,
picking peas, pulling corn, gathering pecans, shaking apple trees, and digging
up peanuts. We canned or put up everything we ate, so if it could be shelled,
shucked, peeled, or cracked, we or somebody we knew grew it. My brothers hunted
and fished, and there was frequently a deer hung from a tree in my mother's
backyard, waiting to be skinned and dressed. I admired my mother's ability to catch
a string of bream or crappie, clean them on a piece of tin laid across two
sawhorses, and then fry them up into delectable morsels, accompanied by hush
puppies and coleslaw.

We certainly never considered ourselves poor and never
lacked for good food and plenty of it. My mother, at eighty-six, still keeps a
small garden and still makes pickles in a hundred-year-old butter churn. None
of this seemed unusual to me. It was my life and a good one. It was not until I
reached adulthood and left Mississippi for graduate school that I realized very
few of my colleagues had similar life experiences. I guess in some ways I've
always been a throwback to a previous era.

As a child I spent many long, hot summer days with my
grandmother and my mentally disabled aunt Mary. Aunt Mary was a classic example
of the Southern credo of keeping your special people at home. Aunt Mary was one
of my best childhood friends. We shared books like
The Bobbsey Twins
and
Trixie
Belden.
During the long afternoons, while Grandma
and Mary napped, I sought shelter from the heat under an old oak tree that had
rooted up the sidewalk in front of Grandma's house. I think that's when
storytelling came alive for me. Making up stories was a way to pass the time
for a little girl who spent much of her childhood in the company of old women.

My grandmother always had her afternoon nap in her
four-poster feather bed — the same one where many of her children were born —
under the watchful eye of her father staring out from an old-timey photograph.
The day my great-grandfather was discharged from the Confederate Army, he had
this picture taken. His discharge papers peek out of his coat pocket as he
stares solemnly into the camera. I always wondered what else he did that day.

There were no black maids or housekeepers working for
my family. As a matter of fact, we had very little interaction with black
folks. It's difficult to explain how ignorant you can be of what life is like
for a whole other group of people unless you've experienced a segregated world.
It wasn't until I went to nursing school alongside black women that I was brave
enough to ask why a person would put oil in her hair, instead of constantly
trying to get it out like the white girls I knew; or what it meant to have ashy
skin — a word not in my repertoire.

Because my world and my perspective were so narrow and
defined by the seasons — spring and summer when we worked in the garden, fall
when we went back to school, and whatever was in between that passed for winter
— I never really developed an appreciation of my local history. Like so many
Southern white children, I was oblivious of the issues of race raging around me
in the sixties. It was not until my school was integrated when I was in the
sixth grade, in 1971, that I found myself mixing with blacks. I can only
imagine how difficult it was for the black kids who lost the school they had
attended for years, only to be thrown in with a bunch of white kids who had no
knowledge of their lives and no appreciation of their struggle. Forces outside
of us pushed Mississippi toward integration. I'm not sure it ever would have
happened otherwise. In most ways we remained segregated, even after formal
desegregation.

We played separately, ate separately, shopped
separately. And when my own daughter graduated from New Hope twenty-five years
later, in 2002, there was still a black homecoming queen and a white homecoming
queen.

Even though I took Mississippi history in school, I
knew very little of the history all around me in the town of Columbus. I didn't
know until I grew up and left my own hometown that Columbus was the birthplace
of Tennessee Williams, the famous playwright; Red Barber, the baseball sports-caster; and Henry Armstrong, the world boxing champion. All of these men were
born right around the same time as my fictional characters Zero Clark and
Junior Jackson.

I didn't know that the women who met to decorate
soldiers' graves in the late 1800s were part of the origin of what we now call
Memorial Day. I didn't know that in the 1920s, Eudora Welty attended what was
then called Mississippi State College for Women, later renamed Mississippi
University for Women, in Columbus, where I earned my first degree. At least I
knew that "the
W,"
as it's called, was the first state-supported college for women in the
country. Maybe I read that somewhere on the admission paperwork. In retrospect,
I'm amazed at my own ignorance.

During the Civil War, in order to protect the lives of
wounded soldiers sheltered in the grand mansions-turned-hospitals, Nathan
Bedford Forrest negotiated to keep Columbus from being destroyed by Union
soldiers. Thus, a large number of antebellum homes were left unscathed. In
1940, the historic foundation started the annual pilgrimage tour of homes. That
tour is now recognized as one of the best and most authentic antebellum home
tours in the country. Not until many years later were the historical sites of
African-Americans acknowledged. What began as highlights for Black History
Month evolved into an African-American Heritage Tour with a list of historical
venues recognizing the businesses, homes, and contributions of the
African-American community.

Later in my life, once I'd gotten some distance from my
home state and the widened perspective of graduate school, I began to wrestle
with what had been integral to my growing-up years: the racial jokes; the
almost complete segregation of the races; the dubious way that Southern blacks
viewed whites and vice versa. While in my doctoral program in Austin, Texas, I
made my very first close black friend; she was from big-city Brooklyn, New
York, and I was from rural Mississippi — our life experiences couldn't have
been more different. My friendship with Mae helped me across that color line
drawn in my youth.

When I returned home to Mississippi to visit, I became
conscious of a feeling I would get from young black women, who seemed to view
me as an object of disdain. I didn't understand it, yet I thought that I
deserved it — not for any particular act of racism on my part, but simply
because of my color. My friend Mae had helped me understand that my whiteness
was accompanied by privilege whether I chose to exploit it or not. Those women
knew this; they had always known. I was the latecomer to this understanding.

As the years went by and I continued to wrestle with my
relationship to Mississippi, I found myself drawn more and more to its history.
I found myself wanting to understand what was bred into Mississippi whites that
moved us so slowly toward accepting the equality of blacks. Was it that we were
still so close to a generation of slaveholders who genuinely believed that
blacks were born to a life of service? Was it, as many whites said, because
blacks are different? So often I heard Southerners say that it's easy for
Yankees to preach about integration and equality because there aren't any black
people where they live. Was that true?

When I began to research antebellum homes for some of
my writing, I ran across the list of sites for the Columbus African-American
tour. I began to wonder about the stories of the men and women who might have
lived during those early years of the twentieth century. I started to research
places that I'd grown up around but never really noticed. I discovered that you
can live in a town, reach adulthood, marry, have children of your own, and
never fully understand the cultural struggle going on all around you. Whether
by choice or by ignorance, the pressure to keep the status quo in Mississippi
is like the humidity — ever present in the air.

In my research, I discovered the name of O. N. Pruitt
and recognized that his name was inscribed on the photographic portraits of my
oldest sister and brother hanging on the wall in my mother's bedroom. These
were portraits that my mother had Mr. Pruitt take in the early 1940s to send to
my father, who was a soldier stationed in Germany. I found that Pruitt did much
more than produce sweet portraits of babies.

He also photographed freak shows, circus acts, dead
children, tent revivals, river baptisms, and, much to my surprise, lynchings. He
was even part of the group of photographers who produced the lynching postcards
that were circulated throughout the South in the 1920s and '30s. I found a
scholar, Berkley Hudson, whose dissertation work was a study of O. N. Pruitt's
photography from 1920 to 1960. The gruesome image of a 1930s double lynching of
two young black men that occurred in the same county where I grew up touched
something deep inside me and made me want to tell this story.

So, out of all of this imagery, memory, and life
experience, the story of
Catfish Alley
was
born. I only hope to touch on the reality of what it's like to live in the
South, not with judgment or any assumption of righteousness, but with a simple
desire to tell a story. They say "write what you know." For me, it's
been more about writing what I need to understand. In the end, it's just a
story about two women, two women who form an unlikely friendship. But then, I
believe that's how we really change how we see our worlds — one relationship at
a time.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For my sense of place and the rootedness that sustains
me wherever I go, I thank my Southern family. I thank my Colorado family for
the daily love and support that grounds me through the ups and downs of
writing. Thanks to my dear friends in the original writing group who encouraged
me to persist.

Thanks to my wonderful agent, Kevan Lyon, for believing
in my work and guiding me through this process. And finally, thanks to my
amazing editor, Ellen Edwards, for her meticulous attention to detail, and for
those thought-provoking questions that made my novel stronger and continue to
help me grow as a writer.

Conversation

Guide
Catfish
Alley

LYNNE BRYANT

This Conversation Guide is intended
to enrich the individual reading experience, as well as encourage us to explore
these topics together — because books, and life, are meant for sharing.

A
CONVERSATION WITH LYNNE BRYANT