God Save the Sweet Potato Queens (18 page)

I believe I have told you that I am a very large woman—six feet tall, no shoes. I read where Elle MacPherson is six feet tall and weighs a hundred and thirty pounds. As I said, I am six feet tall. There will be no discussion in my book about my weight, thank you very much. Suffice it to say, I outweigh Elle by a few. A guy would need to be spending some time in the gym before he took to hoisting me up a flight of stairs. One of the Queens, Tammy, is what our precious Michael Rubenstein so sweetly refers to as a “normal-sized” woman, like myself. Tammy and I have discussed at length, on many, many occasions, how the only reason we wish sometimes we were tiny is so that men would snatch us up and prance off with us from time to time. We felt better when all the itty-bitty Queens confessed that nobody is snatching and prancing with them, either.

At any rate, normal-sized Tammy works out at the Y with me every morning, and our favorite birthday present to give and receive each and every year is getting picked up by Orange Young. Orange is this large, gorgeous law-enforcement officer who works out in the mornings when we’re there. The Queens do so love law enforcement; we are under the personal protection of the Sheriff of Hinds County, Mississippi, Malcolm McMillan. But back to Orange. He’s a big dog now and is usually in regular-guy-shirt-and-tie stuff. On rare occasions, he will have on his actual cop suit—with the badge, the gun, the handcuffs, the whole deal—and we just go into veritable paroxysms of delight at the sight of him. There is just something about a man in uniform. Maybe it’s the handcuffs that set us off. We are effusive with our praise and panting after him. Orange just grins. One day we said, “Orange, you look so fine in that uniform—we bet you sleep in that thing!” “Just the top,” he said, grinning. We were on the floor. Anyway, Orange has biceps—big, big biceps—the kind for which the term “guns” was coined. So when Tammy’s birthday arrives each year, I ask Orange to just march up to Tammy in the weight room, sweep her off her feet, and stroll around with her a little bit. She has Orange do the same for me. This is the best present we ever got.

Before I got sidetracked, I started telling you about Sandra Williams. Besides painting, the other thing Sandra Williams does is that she is a federally certified Wildlife Rehabilitator. You probably didn’t realize that it is illegal for you as a regular uncertified human being to fool around with wild animals, even if you are trying to save their lives. Probably not a lot of tickets are given for the offense, but just the same, you’re not supposed to be doing it. Sandra, on the other hand, is supposed to be doing it. She has been so ordained by our own federal government and, I personally think, by God as well. She provides a wonderful, miraculous service.

Any mother can attest to the sinking feeling one experiences when one’s child has discovered a wounded or stranded baby animal. The child looks to you—the great and powerful mother—to fix this poor creature. Alas, your skills at breast-feeding are rusty at best, and even at peak performance were pretty much restricted to baby people. The child cannot believe there is nothing you can do; the child believes you can do anything. Sandra makes it possible to do something. You can sack it up, whatever it is, and take it to her in the comfortable knowledge that she will most likely fix it. I have taken her tiny baby squirrels—so young they were still pink and hairless—that had either fallen or were for some reason pushed out of the nest. Sandra not only raises them to adulthood, she does it so the squirrels can return to the wild, completely able to take care of themselves.

Snow White is what Sandra is. Remember in the movie, how the animals and birds would hang around and sing and talk to Snow White all the time? Well, the first time I ever took BoPeep with me on a mission of mercy to Sandra’s house, Sandra was standing on her front porch waiting for us to arrive, with one bluejay on her head, another on her shoulder, several on low-hanging tree limbs in front of her: They all seemed to be having a little chat. As we walked up, she turned and walked in her open front door. When she did, all the birds went in with her—into the living room. And they were in there flying around, squawking away. When she got ready to come out again, she offhandedly said, “Y’all come on out now,” to the jaybirds, and they did. ’Peep just stood there, mouth slightly ajar, completely mesmerized by this woman whom the very birds of the air obeyed.

We were delivering some fallen baby chimney swifts for her care. I have no idea if these birds exist all over the country and I am not about to go look it up, but around here, if you don’t have a cover over your chimney, in the spring these birds will come and build their nest in there. They are chimney
swifts,
not sweeps. Sweeps are those people who figure prominently in
Mary Poppins;
swifts are birds—federally protected birds, I might add. Did you know it is a federal offense to disturb one of their nests—with a large fine as well? Yet every exterminator under the sun advertises in the yellow pages that he will happily come out and remove all of your chimney swift nests. This makes Sandra slightly wild.

Anyway, we had this nest in our chimney—a delightful experience, let me tell you. Once the babies hatch out, if you make the slightest noise in your house—like if you sneeze or something—they start screaming. There are usually just a few of them in there, but, man alive, are they ever some loud sumbitches! Their screams echo and amplify down that chimney. It’s as if several thousand people with extremely long fingernails were scraping the world’s largest blackboard, and the sound was being run through some big ole Peavey speakers for your listening pleasure. And it lasts until the babies are big enough to fly out of the nest and go away. You will not have this happen to you more than once; you will cover that chimney in religious fervor every year for the rest of your life. Anyway, we had some one year, and before they could get grown and fly off, they got to roughhousing around in their nest and knocked it down. So now, instead of screaming and hollering halfway up the chimney, they were screaming and hollering right there in the den with us—at us. And they were never going to grow up and fly off because their mama couldn’t feed them since grown-up chimney swifts don’t land on the ground
ever,
according to Sandra. This meant we had to (a) wait for them to starve to death (there’s something fun you want to do with your three-year-old); (b) feed them ourselves (which I imagined would involve catching and partially chewing up worms to spit into their tiny, uplifted, wide-open, screeching birdie beaks; or (c) scoop them up and take them to Sandra.

I picked C. ’Peep got a shoe box and put a warmed towel in it, and we dug around in the sooty fireplace until we found the little boogers. You have heard it said all your life, and so have I, that a baby anything is darling. I believed that to be true until I viewed baby chimney swifts: Let me just say that they look just about as good as they sound—not quite, though. Them’s some ugly babies, plus they’re nasty from living in the chimney, and even more so after wallowing around in ashes. Even BoPeep thought they were homely, and babies just love baby animals. ’Peep still wanted them saved, but even she had no desire to keep them at home, which was lucky for me. We called Sandra, and she said she would be happy to have them; she could use her bathroom for the aviary. Said she wasn’t worried about them hurting anything: The raccoons had taken all the wallpaper off the walls already and there was a wood duck in the bathtub. As I said, she was communing with the bluejays when we arrived and ’Peep handed her the box of birds. She reached in, as delicately as if this was a newborn’s bassinet, and lifted each tiny swiftlet out and clasped them all to her bosom to impart body heat to them as quickly as possible. She then whisked them off to check their status, feed them, and get them settled in the aviary.

Several weeks went by before we heard from Sandra. She called to tell me the most miraculous, wonderful story I have ever heard: When the chimney swifts are old enough to be released into the wild, it is a very dangerous undertaking for them. Sandra must be absolutely certain that they can fly high enough to reach a tree limb; if they cannot, they will die, because chimney swifts do not land on the ground, they live in treetops only. And remember, her bathroom was the only aviary these particular birds had ever known, so they’d never actually flown higher than nine feet. So she took one bird at a time and gave it a slight toss into the air. If it couldn’t fly, she’d catch it and take it back inside for a few more days of strengthening. But, she said, the most incredible thing would happen when she released one that could fly high enough. Out of a clear sky, no other birds in sight, when this baby bird flew up to the trees for the very first time in its life, out of nowhere would come two adult birds to meet it. She said she stood on the ground and wept as she watched. The two birds would stay with the youngster, guiding it for a time. And it happened again and again. Each time another one would reach the trees, two more birds would come to help it. I just bawled when she told it to me and can scarcely repeat the story today without crying.

The first person I told the story to was my beloved Beth Jones, to whom I dedicated my first book, as she was dying of cancer. We agreed that if God can make and implement a plan for a chimney swift, as utterly unappealing a creature as you might ever find in a worldwide search for ugly beings—if God looks out for them, He must surely have a plan for us and send us help when we need it, even when we don’t know what we need or how to ask for it.

Another cherished, departed friend of mine, Ronnie Wesley, a saxophone-playing fiend, used to say, “Ain’t no danger—just ain’t no danger.” I always took this to mean that we should live life to the fullest, without fear. I tell this to BoPeep when she has the occasional clingy moment, worried about me flying in a plane or something. I’ll tell her that if God wants me, He’s not just waiting for me to get on an airplane to snatch me up; staying in my house, under the bed, night and day, wouldn’t ensure that I would live forever. We all die, some sooner rather than later. We are all just a breath away from it, all the time.

Don’t fear being near-death—but rather fear, dread, loathe, and do all you can to avoid
near-life
experiences. Nobody goes to the grave or to the nursing home wringing their hands and gnashing their teeth and just wishing they’d served on a few more committees, worked a few more hours. Too often we are waiting until we (and then later, our children) finish school, waiting until the mortgage is paid off, waiting until we lose weight, waiting until we retire. We are always, as we say in the South, just “fixing to.” After this thing or that one happens,
then
we will travel, write, play, rest, visit friends,
then
we will live. And, lo and behold, before any of that stuff can happen, it is over, and we never got around to living.

No more near-life experiences, please. Whatever it is you are going to do
someday,
well,
someday
is here. Have at it. I am here to tell you, it is way better to live your dream than it is to dream it.

20

Matters of the Heart

 
I
’ve written this whole entire book to avoid writing this chapter. Just writing that line has made me cry, but it must be written. I must tell you about two men.

Whenever I sign a book for a guy, I write in it, “To the only man I ever really loved.” So if your husband comes home with that inscription in his book, relax; I’ve written it to every guy on the planet and I only meant it once. Winston Brown really is the only man I ever really loved. Oh, I have been in love, deeply so, with some others—even married some. But I never loved anybody the way I loved Winston Brown. I was only sixteen when I met him. He was eighteen and he had the blackest hair and the bluest eyes. His eyes were the color—well, in Mississippi, around October every year for about two or three days the humidity will drop and the air will get very, very clear and the sky turns this amazing shade of blue—it is deep yet bright, and it makes your heart feel funny to look at it for very long. Also about that time of year, the leaves on the sweet gum trees turn a vivid yellow, and when you look at those leaves against that sky, it makes the sky seem even bluer, and that’s the exact color of Winston Brown’s eyes. When we were grown and I hadn’t seen him for twenty years, every October of those twenty years I would see Winston’s eyes in that sky. My love for him was different because I was so very young. It was overpowering and it was totally without guile or reservation. I had never been in love like that and so it never occurred to me not to trust it and him completely. Since I had no frame of reference for heartbreak, I had no armor. To this very day, out of my entire life—including the birth of my precious child—the very happiest moment of my existence was when Winston Brown told me he loved me. There’s a hymn that says “and suddenly there were thousands and thousands of angels”—that’s the way it felt. Because it was the one moment—totally free of fear—of pure, unadulterated joy. It is my treasure.

But, by and by, he did break my heart, and though I have certainly loved others, the knowledge that love can hurt so much tempers and restrains just ever so slightly.

I loved Winston then, still love Winston, will go to my grave loving Winston—he just tickles me. That’s all I can say. He just tickles me slap to death—his turn of phrase, his laugh, just him. He loves to be in the woods. He was telling me one time about trying to teach his new dog to hunt and the dog was real smart and doing great for a while, but now it seems all the dog will hunt is armadillos. How in the hell did that come about, I wanted to know. Well, he guessed it was really his fault. The dog had run up on one and chased it down and he (the dog) was so happy with himself, he (Winston) shot it for him (the dog), and so now he (the dog) thinks that’s what he (Winston) wants him (the dog) to do, and so each and every time they go into the woods, he (the dog) thinks they are on another armadillo hunt. So basically the dog is useless for hunting now? I asked. “Well, yeah,” he said, “except one good thing about it is, if you get lost in the woods, the first thing you want to do is find an armadillo.”

Well, I had never read this particular tidbit in any hunting/hiking/camping material about what to do when you get lost in the woods. I’ve never known anybody to advise finding an armadillo for any worthy cause. Most folks down here don’t even believe there’s such a thing as a live armadillo anymore; it does seem like we’d run out of ’em sooner or later, as many as we run over. So I pressed him urgently to find out why it is, when you are lost in the woods, you must find an armadillo—and by the way, how lucky he was to have a trained armadillo-hunting dog. Winston was so happy and proud to contribute to my outdoor education. “You want to find an armadillo and follow it,” he said, “’cause that sumbitch is heading straight for a road.”

Anyway, Winston broke my heart, and we didn’t see each other for twenty years, but what I did do as soon as I could form a thought in my head after we broke up was the only thing a girl could do, under the circumstances, I started dating his best friend, Bill Hollingsworth. I went with Bill for several years and then we broke up and then life just sort of got away from all of us until the next thing we knew, it was twenty years later. So there we were twenty years later and who did I run into but Bill and he told me Winston was lawyering in a small town in north Mississippi, where everybody in town adores him, and that he’d built a house out in the woods on a little pond and he hunts all the time.

So what did I do but pick up the phone and call his office. He answered the phone and I didn’t say hello or anything, just, “Well, I thought since it’s been practically twenty years to the day since you ripped my heart out and stomped the fucker flat, you might have the decency to come to town once in a while and take me to lunch.” He didn’t even ask who it was, just said, “How about Friday?” And I, of course, said Friday would be just fine, thank you. So he came and took me to lunch and proceeded to tell me that he had loved me his entire life and that his one regret—the one thing he would change if he could—was losing me. I said if I had written him a script and paid him to read it, he couldn’t have done any better, and I felt all that, too, but that since we did find ourselves married to other people at the moment, perhaps it would be best if we didn’t date. But we stayed in touch and had lunch from time to time and he would come to the house if he was in town on business and we would call Bill to come go out with us. So here we’d go—me and Moon Pie and my two old boyfriends—out on the town. Hilarious.

More time passed and Moon Pie and I came to our parting of the ways, and who handled all the divorce stuff for me? Winston. Then I wrote
SPQBOL,
and who are the first two people at my first book signing? Winston and Bill. The Queens threw a huge party at Hal and Mal’s after the first book signing, and there sat Winston and Bill—the whole night. Whenever I would introduce them to anybody, they would announce that they were my two oldest boyfriends and they had both been in love with me for thirty years, and then they would argue back and forth over which one of them loved me the most and, more important, which one I loved the most. Oh, it was entirely satisfactory, let me tell you.

From then on, whenever I had a book signing within four hundred miles, they would be there, the two of them, telling their tale to whoever showed up. It was pretty gratifying. And it all felt so safe and wonderful; I’d known and loved these men for literally thirty years and here we were again, hanging out, just like high school.

Picture this: I am in Tupelo, Mississippi, signing books at this great bookstore there, Gum Tree Books, and all of a sudden, a woman strides in the front door, walks past everyone standing in line, comes up to me directly, and asks me if I am Jill Conner Browne, to which I have no choice but to respond affirmatively, whereupon she, without a word, hands me a blue folder. If you have ever in your life been sued for anything, you know what a blue folder is—it’s a court summons. So I’m standing there, in front of Lord knows how many people, and I have just been served with a court summons. You have no doubt heard the expression about not knowing whether to shit or go blind: Those seemed to be about my only choices at the moment.

I opened the blue folder and started scanning the pages. The best I can tell, I (and my publishers) am being sued for $5 million by some women named Tammy Bochamp, Candy C. Wygle, Brandy D. Prichard, Georgia Pennypacker, Heather Sharp, and Deloris Thigpen—all of whom, according to this official court document, are actual former Crowned Sweet Potato Queens from Vardaman, Mississippi (the self-proclaimed Sweet Potato Capital of the World). (I noted with interest that Deloris Thigpen used an “X” to fill in the signature space.) The litigants were, it seems, incensed that this book
SPQBOL
was on display and being sold at “Thigpen’s Feed and Seed on Highway 8, west of Calhoun County, Mississippi, a mere seven miles from the town of Vardaman.” And that this book, it went on to say:

dishonors the solemn position and grand stature of the award of being a Crowned Sweet Potato Queen. That since the publication and dissemination of the publication the Plaintiffs have been unable to walk the streets of their home town of Vardaman without unseemly remarks being directed at them as a direct result of contents of said publication. That the contents of the publication was published with the knowledge that it implies that the Plaintiffs would lie about the performance of certain unnatural, unspeakable, and illegal sexual acts (crudely referred to in the publication as “Blow Jobs”) in order to get members of the opposite sex to perform menial tasks. This was done with full knowledge that real Sweet Potato Queens do not and would not lie. That the contents of the publication was published with the knowledge that it belittles the Plaintiffs’ participation in pageants and contests of beauty, poise, and breeding to the point that it brings into question not only the intelligence of all participants involved in pageants but also the legitimacy and importance of such activity as a self-actualizing exercise and life-learning lesson for all participants.

The suit further stated that “at no time during any competitions present or past has ‘butt tape’ been used to secure clothing to a contestant’s body. Moreover a roll of ‘butt tape’ cannot even be found within Calhoun County, Mississippi.” When it got around to listing specific damages suffered by the Plaintiffs, this one figured prominently: “Georgia Pennypacker would show that she suffered special damages in that her fiancé called their scheduled wedding ‘off’ after reading only a portion of the publication and stating to Miss Pennypacker that ‘There is no way I am going to marry a woman that thinks it is OK to make a promise of something like that and not actually deliver,’ and thereafter accused Miss Pennypacker of being a ‘communist’ and stormed out of the room. She has not seen him since.” In conclusion, it stated that, if awarded, the Plaintiffs would use the five million bucks “to assist and be applied to their never ending quest for World Peace and Prosperity as each promised when Crowned.”

The attorney listed on the summons was Honorable Armis (“Jabo”) Thigpen, but of course, I knew his true identity. Indeed, as I looked out the window of Gum Tree Books, I saw the real author of this six-page “legal” document strolling (and grinning) down the street. It was Winston, of course, with Bill Hollingsworth right beside him. He had typed this whole thing up himself, driven to Tupelo, gone into an office and somehow convinced a woman he’d never seen before to get up from her desk, leave her office, and walk down the street and into the bookstore to deliver to me this phony lawsuit. God, don’t you just love a man who knows how to play?

In May of 1999, I had a book signing scheduled at That Bookstore in Blytheville, Arkansas, which was a pretty good distance away, so I decided I would drive halfway—to Oxford, Mississippi—and spend the night, get up and drive the rest of the way to the signing, and then come back to Oxford afterward. Winston and Bill planned to meet me for drinks and dinner in Oxford both days. I got to the City Grocery (a great bar and restaurant on the Square in Oxford) first and ordered a drink. Shortly, Winston came in and ordered. We sat, drinking and visiting, waiting for Bill. Winston was sweating buckets—it was hot outside but cold in the bar, and he just wasn’t cooling off. He used all the cocktail napkins on the bar mopping himself off, and I finally asked him just what the hell was wrong with him, anyway. He said he’d eaten some bad pizza a few days earlier and had just felt like shit ever since. I said, Is your stomach upset? No. Do you have fever? Didn’t think so. I felt him—like ice. I’ve got something tightening in the pit of my stomach, and I ask him, Does anything hurt? His shoulders. “Well, that does it,” I said, “let’s just go get you one of them EKG’s.” He says no, it’s not his heart—the pain doesn’t go down his left arm. And I said yeah, and this ain’t TV, and I don’t care if it doesn’t look like all the heart attacks he’s seen on TV, he’s having one now and we are by God going to the hospital and there’s no point arguing because I am not gonna shut up about it and don’t make me go call an ambulance because I will and it will cost you a fortune.

He wanted to wait for Bill and to finish his drink and his cigarette. I said this whole thing won’t take ten minutes; if you’re not having a heart attack, we’ll be back before Bill even gets here. I finally convinced him to go, but of course, he had to drive. We get to the emergency room, and I tell them I want an EKG on him ASAP, cited three days of cold sweats and chest pains, forty-eight-year-old heavy smoker whose father dropped dead at fifty-something of a heart attack. They asked him if the pain was constant; he proudly answered that oh, no, it comes and goes—as if that was a good thing, which it isn’t. About that time his blood pressure pops up on the machine—something impossible like 198/125—and they snatched him up so fast and ran him down the hall, he didn’t have time to protest. They told me he was having a massive heart attack as we spoke. They told me what all they wanted to do to try to stop it, and I told them by all means to do that and then some.