Mississippi Sissy (38 page)

Everybody looked at Frank Dowsing for his reaction to Frank Hains's story. Everybody but Miss Welty. She sat staring at her vanilla ice cream. She ate a spoonful. “I think,” Frank Dowsing said, “you
have to be a privileged white person to have the luxury of a reply such as that.”

“Well, Frank is not quoting me exactly—my thoughts on the subject lost some of their complexity in his journalistic penchant for succinctness—but your point is well taken,” Miss Welty stated before a discussion could ensue or an uneasy silence settle in around the table once more. “Good for you, Mr. Dowsing,” she said, then looked up from her ice cream and right at him. “I knew I liked you the minute you said I feared no evil.”

“Touche,” said Frank Dowsing.

“Honey, nobody's fencin' here,” said Miss Capers.

“How about some Sondheim?” asked Frank Hains. “I think it's time for the Frank Hains
Follies.
” One of his fondest memories was escorting Miss Welty to see Follies when they happened to be in New York during the same week. He found the album in his library in “record time,” as he liked to describe the alacrity with which he could locate a choice among the thousands arranged in their room. The first song, “Beautful Girls,” began to fill the house after the orchestra played its prologue to the show.

“Except for seeing Jane there as Edna Earle in Frank's version of
The Ponder Heart
at New Stage,” Miss Welty said, “attending
Follies
on Broadway with him was one of my best nights in the theater—though the production, finally, was neither this nor that. But perhaps that was its underlying allure for me.”

Throughout the subsequent numbers, the ladies around the table discussed other favorite theater experiences of theirs, and the latest bits of New Stage gossip. “I'm gonna skip over these next few songs to get to that Yvonne De Carlo one,” Karen said, and got up to do just that. As she came back into the kitchen she was singing along with the truncated version of “I'm Still Here” that was recorded for the Broadway album. “Good times and bum times, I've seen ‘em all and, my dear, I'm still here,” she sang.

Yvonne De Carlo took over for a few lyrics, then Jane prompted Miss Welty, “This is your part coming up, Eudora. Go!”

“I've slept in shanties, Guest of the W.P.A,” Miss Welty sang. “But I'm here! Danced in my scanties, Three bucks a night was the pay, But I'm here . . .”

The rest of us applauded her and, as the song continued, the women, the two Franks, and I sang along when we thought we knew enough of the words. Karen really belted out the names, “Herbert and J. Edgar Hoover” at one point, then turned her attention to Miss Capers. “Charlotte, you've got to sing,” said Karen when she noticed her buddy was biding her time to join in. “Come on. Sing!”

Miss Capers downed the rest of what was in her glass and, squaring her shoulders, croaked out her own lyrics over De Carlo, giving Sondheim a run for his money. “Singing's not something I've ever dared, ‘cause—
merdel
—I sound like Melvin Laird. But friends never gave a damn nor cared, so I'm here!”

I thought Miss Welty was going to fall off her chair with laughter. We all were laughing and trying to see who could now sing the loudest, after Frank scampered into the next room to retrieve the lyric sheet inside the album sleeve. I began to clear the table of the empty glasses and ice cream bowls. I turned from where I was standing at the kitchen sink and saw them all now with their arms around each other—Frank Dowsing especially included—as they headed toward the end of the number. The lamp hanging above the table bathed their faces in a glow of sheer happiness. “Lord knows at least I was there, and I'm
here
!” their voices rang out. “Look who's
here
! I'm still
heeeeeeeeeeere
!”

That night, that song, those lyrics, those women, those dear two Franks, that moment I turned from the sink and glimpsed pure joy for a second or so has echoed throughout my life. I wondered what they all would look like in bedsheet togas singing another Sondheim number. The last time I had been privy to such joy was watching my
mother rehearse her secret performance just for me, all those years before. Who would be the last person standing from this group, I also wondered, for I had been already conditioned to consider when everybody, including myself, would die. Who among us would still be here? The first to go was Karen Gilfoy who, after a career as a judge, died a recluse and alcoholic. Miss Capers, by then residing in a nursing home, was the next to pass away, dying suddenly of a heart attack right before a Christmas Day she had hoped to spend with Miss Welty. Jane Petty, living life to the very end on her own terms, succumbed to cancer after stopping treatment and refusing sustenance for the final two weeks of her existence. Miss Welty, outlasting them all, died in 2001 of complications from pneumonia at the age of ninety-two. She even outlasted the two Franks.

Mr. Dowsing never graduated from medical school. After a few more dates, he and I became bar buddies. He liked his young white boys too much and I couldn't stop him from cutting a sexual swath through Jackson's small gay community before he moved on to New Orleans and Atlanta, where he became—I heard through the grapevine when I'd come home for visits from New York—a pharmaceutical salesman. We finally lost track of each other and I was heart-broken to hear from Joe Rex, who himself ultimately died of a suspected drug overdose alone in a hotel room, that there were rumors around Jackson that Frank Dowsing had contracted HIV and, suffering from AIDS, had moved back home to Tupelo. This is what his obituary said in the fall 1994 issue of the Mississippi State University alumni newsletter:

Frank Dowsing Jr., of Palmetto, the first African-American football player at Mississippi State and the only African-American Mr. Mississippi State University, died July 11, 1994. He was 43. . . . Dowsing enrolled at Mississippi State in 1969 and played defensive back under Coach Charlie Shira, subsequently
being selected all-SEC and all-American. He graduated with honors in 1973. Before illness forced him to retire, he was district manager with AT&T in California. On his return to the Tupelo area, he became very active in Palmetto CME Church and had enrolled at Memphis Theological Seminary. He was instrumental in starting a scholarship program, which the Tupelo-Aberdeen CME District named after him prior to his death. Dowsing was a steward of Palmetto CME Church, a Sunday-school teacher, founding president of the church's Mass Choir, and a lay leader for Palmetto's Lay Council and the Aberdeen-Tupelo Lay Council. Acquaintances, former teammates, and coaches have described Dowsing as a pioneer whose quiet determination earned him universal respect as a positive influence on race relations in the state.

Those last words could have been written also about Frank Hains. He marshaled his arts and entertainment pages to advance inclusion. He abhorred violence. When President Kennedy was assassinated he used his column to cry out at its senselessness:

The assassination of President Kennedy was one of those unbelievable acts of mindless malice which shocks not only by its viciousness and by its tragic waste but also by a frightening realization which it brings. It is the realization that there can exist within one human animal—within one who is one of us—such disposition to violence and hatred. Indeed, no man is an island. Every man shares in the responsibility for that which is in every other man. When any man hates other men, all of us are befouled by his hatred. When any man carries his hatred to the extent which allows him to kill, any one of us who actively pours out hatred for any man adds the pressure of his own finger to that which pulls the trigger: any one of us who is passively indifferent
to those outpourings of hate is guilty of failing to stay that pressure.”

Rereading those words now makes it even more difficult for me to write about Frank's death. How do I start? How do I explain it? Though I had suffered through the deaths of both my parents and at the undenied hands of Dr. Gallman, nothing in my short life could have prepared me for what still awaited me. I wish now, as I write this, I could summon some of Yvonne De Carlo's boastful, infectious pride at having stuck around long enough to bear witness. But I feel more like Frank's beloved Black Swan singing about what she's going to tell her children when they get home for supper.

On the Sunday morning of July 13, 1975, I awoke to the smell of bacon frying and the sound of Julian Bream, the classical guitarist, playing Bach. How could I not feel at home in a house filled with such a smell, such a sound, or in the presence of a man who chose to fill his home simultaneously with each? I felt, yes,
at home
with Frank Hains. I guess that's the best, most basic way to put it. I was comforted by his taste, his take on life, the grace with which he honed his vast curiosity. He had offered me the front bedroom of Bleak House to live in that summer while I worked as a salesman at the Jeans West store at the Jackson Mall in order to earn some extra money for my move to New York City in August. Frank had been instrumental in convincing me to audition for the Juilliard School of Drama as well as the drama school at Circle in the Square. He knew that Millsaps was turning into a frustrating experience for me. “You're much too much a free spirit to spend four years at that Methodist prison up the hill,” he joked one time, while we sat up late having one of our heart-to-heart talks. “Lance Goss doesn't understand someone like you. He much prefers Tab Hunters to James Deans in his department. You're talented enough to get into a school in New York.” The discussion that night veered into finances, as all my discussions back then
tended to, and I told him I didn't have enough money in the bank to buy a round trip ticket to New York if I got accepted for one or both of the auditions. He got up from his reading chair, tying his sash about his kimono so it wouldn't flap open to reveal his naked body beneath it, and found his checkbook. He pushed his reading glasses down on his nose from where they so often rode on top of his balding head. He wrote my name on the check and signed it. He left the amount blank. “Once you get the auditions and find out how much the plane ticket on Delta will cost, you fill in the blank with the right amount,” he said, handing me the check. “I trust you. Now let's come up with what you should audition with. They'll probably want something classical and something modern.” We decided I'd do the “Now I am alone. O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I” soliloquy from
Hamlet
(he lent me a recording of Richard Chamberlain's television version to listen to) and speeches from Leonard Melfi's one-act
Bird-bath
and Israel Horowitz's
The Indian Wants the
Bronx. I got an audition for both schools and called Mom and Pop from New York and told them what I was doing once I was up there, afraid to let them know beforehand. They had gotten accustomed to my surprising them with my headstrong ambition and after I received a scholarship to Juilliard they accepted the fact that I was going. I never asked for their permission. I simply let them know that it was the latest phase in my life. The amount of love and trust it took for them to let me go to college at seventeen was nothing compared to the amount it took for them to let me move to New York City only two years later. Frank, of course, was ecstatic for me, though saddened that I would not be around much longer for our heart-to-hearts. He wouldn't hear of my paying him back the money for the ticket.

“Is that bacon?” I asked as I entered the kitchen that morning bare chested in my gym shorts, knowing he usually ate only a bowl of corn flakes before dashing out the door to the office or tending to whatever was on his ongoing to-do list. “What's the occasion?” I asked.

“Oh, I just felt a little like Berenice Brown when I got up. All I could think about was
pork.
You just know Berenice liked her bacon,” he said, referring to Ethel Waters's character in
The Member of the Wedding.
“Want some coffee?” he asked and poured me a cup, having taught me to like it “strong and black,” he said once, “like that dashing Mr. Dowsing. I wish you two had worked out.”

I told him that Sunday morning Frank Dowsing and I had, in fact, been hanging out together the night before at Mae's Cabaret and that we talked about the night I had brought him to dinner at that very table. “He's still upset that he might have insulted Miss Welty,” I said.

“Dear boy, Eudora's a tough old bird. She can take care of herself,” said Frank, draining the bacon strips on the sports pages of the combined
Clarion-Ledger/Jackson Daily News
that the two papers' one publisher put out on Sundays. “You want an egg or two?” he asked, having also taught me to love how eggs could be poached, not just scrambled or fried.

“How ‘bout I make us some pancakes,” I said. “I saw some Aunt Jemima in a cabinet, I think.”

“I'm not sure that's still good. It's been in there for a while. Can pancake mix go bad?” he asked.

“I don't think so,” I told him and proceeded to make a batch. We sat down to our bacon and pancakes. I had failed to check to see if we had any syrup but Frank solved the problem by sprinkling sugar on the pancakes and cutting up some strawberries he had left over in the refrigerator from the daiquiris he had made us on Friday night. We were just beginning to relax again in each other's company since we had had a falling-out at the beginning of the summer. He had asked me whether, if he directed a production of
Butterflies Are Free
at the Vicksburg Little Theatre, I would star in it as the blind boy, Don Baker. I said sure but then backed out when I realized I had to earn some money that summer and would have to work most nights at the mall. He accused me of waiting too late to tell him—which I did, a
few days before rehearsals were supposed to start—but ended up forgiving me, as I knew he would, when he found another boy for the part just in time.