Mississippi Sissy (15 page)

I, on the other hand, no longer used the N-word myself after Matty May had set me straight on the morning after the Academy Awards show in which Sidney Poitier won Best Actor for
Lilies of the Field.
I had walked into my new bedroom at my grandparents' house that Tuesday morning where she was making my bed before I caught the bus for school. “How you doin'?” she asked, the greeting she always started the day with when she'd first see me, the salutation sounding more like “How y'dwine'?”, that “dwine” the most welcome of endearments to my young ears. I initially found the sound of it peculiar,
privately laughable, but quickly grew to rely on its regularity, knowing that as long as Matty made a point of asking after my well-being then I would be “dwine” okay.

“Did you watch the Oscars last night, Matty?” I had asked her that morning. “Can you believe a
nigger
won Best Actor?”

Matty May sat down on the bed. A long slow sigh slid from her. She reached over and took a sip of the Tang she liked to drink instead of a morning cup of coffee. “Oh, baby . . . ,” she kept saying over and over and running her palm along the chenille spread. “Oh, baby. . . .” The look of sad resignation in her eyes—all slyness had disappeared from them—was the same I had seen in my mother's only the day before in her hospital room, a look of utter fatigue, defeat. “I thought you was different, child. Lawd be, if they can get you t'sayin' such things, there ain't no hope. No hope.” She started to cry. I sat down next to her and reached out and held her hand. I turned her palm over and, as I loved to do when taking a nap with her sitting at my side, I gently rubbed her calluses with my fingers, amazed by their toughness and how very tender they made me feel. “No hope. No hope,” she kept repeating.

“Nigger's a ugly word?” I quietly asked her, trying to understand this newest storm of tears in my presence.

“Child, it's d'ugliest. Jesus never say nigger in d'Bible. God made us colored folk in His own image too, you know. So if we a nigger, God a nigger, too. You think about that. And you think about old Matty cryin' here like this, if you ever think about sayin' that agin.” I looked up at her and asked her what I should call her then, since my grandparents, careful never to curse around me, used the word several times a day within my earshot. She straightened her bent shoulders and roughly pulled me up by the collar on the shirt she had just ironed for me to wear to school. She stood me up right in front of her. She always made sure to use a sweet tone when addressing me, but not in that moment. Her voice took on a hard edge, not lashing
out at me exactly, but making me notice the angry dignity with which it was suddenly imbued. “Ah-woe!” she said, that special exclamation she always used for emphasis when she wanted your attention and was sure to get it. “I got a name, child. Call me by my right name—Matty May. That's got a pretty sound to it. You don't need to use some ugly name when my mama give me two pretty ones. Sometimes when I'm shopping at Paul Chambers,” she said, referring to the owner of the general store where many of the country folk in the area shopped for groceries, work clothes, and gasoline, “and I hear some white fool use that word around me I just say my name over and over in my head to drownt it out, Matty May Matty May Matty May. Now I got a new one I can use—Poitier Poitier Poitier,” she said, practically singing the name, her face aglow with pride. “Sounds almost as pretty as my own.”

I helped her make up the rest of my bed that morning. “Matty May,” I asked, “when somebody calls me a sissy at school, can I say your name over and over in my head to make it go away?”

She teared up again. She offered me the last sip of her Tang. I took it, defying my grandparents' admonition never to get a colored person's germs. “Child, you can use old Matty's name all you want,” she said, kissing me on top of my head. “Plenty of me to go around now that I got something as pretty as Sidney Poitier to pronounce inside myself.”

________________

I was anxious to tell Matty about my new friend when she appeared, but Epiphany said she would keep me company only if I, in turn, kept her a secret. I agreed, quite comfortable with such a request, for secrecy was becoming, along with death, the twin motifs in my life. Though she was no older than I—I was now eight—Epiphany's imagined voice had a knowing tone to it as she would drawl her favorite appellation for
me, “Ch
iiii
ld,” in her rather drawn-out and stilted Swahili-tinged lilt, using Matty May's own favorite name for me but stretching that vowel even further than Matty May could until it sounded like I did when Matty made me open wide so she could see how sore my throat really was, and if “you sho'nuff just mightn't better stay in this here bed and let ol' Matty make you—ah-woe!—a hot totty out'a Tang and a tea-spoon of that Old Kentucky ‘cause Miz Jake and me done fount where Mr. Lyle hides it up yonder on that top shelf in the kitchen behind them extra sacks of Martha White Self-Rising Flour.”

Matty May was always the voice of reason in my young life. And Epiphany? Perhaps she was only my own adult voice arriving too soon inside my head because of the tragically grown-up circumstances that crowded my thoughts in those days. I do know that for the few months I made pains to mimic Epiphany during my most private moments—her akimbo stance, her head tilted just so in contemplation of how we had both arrived in such a place—she was as real as my lingering sorrow. Indeed, she was the very cure my sorrow demanded. Her presence was a dare to it.

From the moment she alighted, fully formed, out of the very light of the television screen, Epiphany was constantly by my side. I can't say I was shocked by her presence, or even spooked by it, for I knew that I had created her. She was not real. I was bereft, as close to crazy as a kid can be when his parents' lives are kicked out from under him, but I was not crazy enough to believe Epiphany was a flesh-and-blood little girl. I see now she was a way to witness the narrative of my life, which by the age of eight had become too difficult for me to comprehend any longer as a participant. Epiphany was the first character I would make up before I ever tried my hand at writing fiction or magazine profiles or fashioning a memoir into fable. I almost always remained indoors amongst the grownups—a welcome relief from the constant play of six-year-old Kim and four-year-old Karole as I sat perfectly still, saying nothing, hearing everything—and Epiphany,
unseen to them, sat by my side and held my hand. She was a way to keep myself calm, to keep myself company there in the middle of them all, a confidant with whom later I could share my increasingly well-formed opinions about all the conversations we'd sat through regarding a rash of subjects, including the future of Kim and Karole and me (“Should we divide ‘em up or keep ‘em together?”); all the unkind names they could come up with to call a Kennedy; the continuing debate concerning who was prettier, Linda Lee Mead or Mary Ann Mobley, Mississippi's back-to-back Miss Americas from a couple of years earlier; whether watermelon was better with or without salt and whether watermelon-rind pickles, one of Aunt Lola's specialties, were worth the effort of working in a hot kitchen to put them up in such unrelenting heat; the hordes of hateful Ivy Leaguers descending on us all that summer and “looking down their noses at good God-fearing folks like us”; how Fannie Lou Hammer had “showed off her fat self up in Atlantic City at the Democrat convention,” according to my grandmother when she felt like complaining about everything in life, not just the Ivy Leaguers, “making the whole country think we can't handle our niggers down here—why can't they all be as sweet as Matty there, huh, Matty—but old Fannie Lou got one thing right when she said she was sick and tired of being sick and tired, I feel like that myself almost every day I breathe”; how Elvis, a good Southern boy, must hate “them sorry Beatles”; how the Communists were winning; how funny Red Skelton was; and how many BTUs were needed in the Fedder's they were planning to buy at cost from Mr. Dearman up at the hardware store where my grandfather worked so they could air-condition the sewing room once my mother moved home from Lackey Memorial now that they were able to get a hospital bed in there for her. A friendless boy's invention, Epiphany was a much-needed ally in a place where allies were nonexistent. Epiphany understood, in her obvious otherness, how I felt in such a world. She even mothered me from time to time, after she took it upon herself to
point out that my sick mother, as much as she loved me, never really mothered me, treating me more like a sibling.

“Ch
iiii
ld, y'all act like y'all sisters,” she said, sitting up under the sewing machine with me after school one of those days my mother was recuperating at home in her new hospital bed. Proud of my reading talents for which she rightly credited herself, my mother listened as I read to Epiphany from a page or two of
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
before something called a morphine drip, the newest device wheeled into the room the day before, began to do its work and she drifted off to what had been promised us all, a painless sleep. Epiphany and I sat there and watched her as she reflexively moaned at whatever nascent dreams were beginning to sweep through her unconscious. Since the new Fedder's air conditioner had been put in the sewing room's window, the two of us had staked out that spot underneath the old Singer as our favorite meeting place. Epiphany loved it when I'd let her push my grandmother's foot on the sewing machine pedal while my grandmother was whipping up some new dotted Swiss shirts for Kim and me to wear to school and talking to my mother about whether “Lady Bird's a nigger-lover like the rest of that bunch,” or what new mischief Coco had gotten into that afternoon, or what had happened on one of her soap operas that day when Matty had ceased being the maid at one o'clock and reverted to being her old friend as they had their coffee and pieces of coconut cake and watched
Another World
and, appropriately enough,
The Doctors.
Epiphany hated all that Katherine Anne Porter I kept making her listen to when I was practicing my reading skills on her. “Ch
iiii
ld, I'm a child. You a child. Why you keep reading all this grown-up bullshit to me?” she finally asked me one day, her mouth as salty as my father's. “Ain't you got no chirren shit you can read? How about that story about that other girl with the pigtails from where I come from?”

“What other girl from Africa?” I asked.

“No, ch
iiii
ld. I come from out'a the TV. I didn't come from out'a no
Africa. You always getting that mixed up. I keep telling you, Tarzan wasn't no ape man. He wore more makeup than Jane. Almost as much as Cheetah,” she'd say and slap my own knee when laughter overtook her. “Comin' out the television is a shitload more EXOTIC than coming out'a Africa, stupid head. I'm talkin' ‘bout that girl that sings about them rainbows and's got that dog I'd like to give a poison bone to.” Epiphany had a phobia about canines. Coco made her crazy. She insisted I keep them apart. “Didn't I see a copy of
The Wonderfulest Wizard of Oz
around here somewhere? Or what about all that Dr. Seuss nonsense your mama's real two sisters keep giving you? Read that shit to me.”

I pouted and went to the bookshelves next to the dining room and brought back the copy of the abridged illustrated version of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
that Aunt Pat had bought me. She was another of my grandmother's older sisters. She lived down in Woodville and was a few years past Venomous Mae in age. Aunt Pat, a retired elementary school teacher, was the spitting befuddled image of Aunt Clara on
Bewitched
and loved to present us with the badly painted, slightly cracked ceramics she proudly brought forth from the kiln she kept in an attic apartment in the rambling family homestead down in Woodville. “Let's buy you a book. You love books. Not many boys love books, but you're one of them. I see that. I certainly do,” she said to me one afternoon in that voice of hers that waddled in the air just like her round hips did when she dawdled about doing whatever struck her fancy. She took me to the Ben Franklin Five-and-Dime on Main Street in Forest after a particularly upsetting visit with my mother before the doctors decided that morphine was the only option left them. “Looks like all they've got is some Zane Grey paperbacks and a bunch of comics. Who's this Lulu?” she said, perusing some brightly colored pictures. “This won't do. Not right for you. Oh, here. Look at this,” she'd said, and handed me the book with L. FRANK BAUM in big colorful letters printed across the bottom in a
palette even brighter than Lulu's. I agreed to the purchase and when we got home I put it on the shelf next to the gigantic World Book dictionary and never thought of it again.

Aunt Pat, bless her easily harried heart, had volunteered to look after us while my grandmother tended to my mother at the hospital during a few of the most difficult weeks of her illness. Though she was an astute babysitter when it came to keeping us amused with games, helping Kim and me with our homework, and telling us all bedtime stories—her favorite, and ours, was one about an elfin creature called Hop On My Thumb—she became flustered when household duties were to be performed. She more than once burned our morning toast, which Kim and Karole and I insisted be sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and buttered just so, with four pats, one in each corner, then baked in the oven until golden, not simply browned in the toaster and spread cinnamonlessly with homemade muscadine jelly. Her scrambled eggs were never soft enough. She ignored the bacon in the refrigerator. Tang confounded her. There was a discussion one night about her fraying nerves and she departed before she was supposed to, heading back to her kiln, glad to tuck her tail, much like Coco was doing more and more as so much distress and confusion in the house likewise confounded her in Tang-like proportions.