The Joker: A Memoir (16 page)

I thought about it and then offered up—was this what she wanted to know?—that one of the girls was chocolate.

“Chocolate!” Mom said, laughing. “Chocolate!” After she stopped laughing, she chuckled about it, off and on, for the rest of the afternoon.

So chocolate isn’t a word for describing people
, I thought. She told and retold the story to my father, my grandmothers, aunts and uncles, and her friends, all of whom laughed at my charming innocence, which at that age was indistinguishable from ignorance. That’s why they were laughing at me, wasn’t it? I wasn’t just wrong, I thought, feeling mocked and ill-used: I was so wrong it was funny. No, not just funny: hilarious. Yet from the way she’d pussyfooted around asking me, trying not to let me see there was anything charged or complicated about the color of the chocolate girl, I saw too that she was trying to protect me from the very information that she was trying to extract. But once she heard my answer, she was so amused by the cluelessness of my misunderstanding that she had to tell everyone. So I became alert to race, its secret importance, and its uneasy connection to humor.

I had not until then noticed that the characters on
Amos ’n’ Andy
were black. When we got our first TV, I left the room while Mom watched
As the World Turns
, which she called “my show,” as did both my grandmothers. The gloom and fraught intensity of the drama drove me away, but I always came back to sit by Mom as she ironed, smoked, and watched
Amos ’n’ Andy
. I cannot think of that show without seeing it through the rickety, pincered legs of an ironing board, hearing the flick of water as Mom sprinkled the wrinkled laundry with water to moisten it, and smelling Pall Malls smoldering in an ashtray. Damp shirts sizzled under the hot iron and the stringent smell of spray starch filled the room.

I was often baffled by what was actually going on with the Kingfish, Amos, Sapphire, and the Mystic Knights of the Sea; and I puzzled mightily over why the show was called
Amos ’n’ Andy
, since sweet-natured, ineffectual Amos had such a vanishingly small role. I laughed at the predicaments into which the raffish Kingfish constantly enticed Andy, and I identified with my namesake’s childlike gullibility and desire to be in-the-know. But most of all, I was enchanted by the pleasure they took in rolling the words off their lips to such exaggerated effect, especially the Kingfish’s affectation for pretentious words that he mispronounced: “Andy, I’se re-gusted!” Sometimes I even understood the gap between what he meant and what he said, especially when my mother repeated the mispronunciations and chuckled. That’s what I really loved, the plushness of her chuckle. It is a sound that I have been susceptible to in women ever since. What a respite my mother’s laugh was from the sorrow that, like standing water, dampened our house, a sorrow I could not then name. But I could recognize when laughter came in, and for a few minutes, divided the waters.

My mother’s pleasure in
Amos ’n’ Andy
must have been partly racist and partly, like mine, innocent, motivated by the high jinks and malapropisms of the characters, irrespective of race. Still, along with the brilliance of its comedy,
Amos ’n’ Andy
was also teaching me the conventions of racist humor and the assumptions behind it. Though no one ever said so, the show was whispering,
Look at those ignorant colored folk and laugh at the comical troubles they cause for themselves by pretending to be smarter than they are
. No one ever said it out loud, except my grandmother, who growled, “I can’t abide looking at that nigger foolishness.”

•  •  •

A graduate of Spalding County High School, my mother had worked in the Dundee Mills before marrying my father in the chapel at West Point. She was uneasy with officers’ wives who had Ivy
League degrees and attitudes. Part of her never left her mother’s house on Vineyard Road in Griffin, Georgia.

My grandmother, her mother, was the angriest person I’ve ever known who wasn’t actually unhinged; in fact, she might have been. Much of her explosive rage was aimed at “niggers.” With every casual use of the word
nigger
she hit the short
i
and hard
g
of the word, her voice crackling with contempt, fury, and, though I was slow to see it, fear. She packed a lifetime of negation into the word. Toward the end of her life, my parents’ repeated strenuous opposition forced her to modulate the word to “nigra” most of the time when we visited. She could never quite bring herself to say “negro,” the polite word of the time, though occasionally she’d allow herself “colored,” the polite word of her youth. But when she genuinely wanted to praise a black woman she’d unself-consciously declare that Annie or Willa was “a good nigger.”

Knowing that “nigger” sometimes ruffled my mother, always infuriated my father, and jolted me, made it even more tempting to her thin lips—an orneriness I admired in general, though I was uneasy and embarrassed when it amplified her racism.

As Grandmomma grew older, her swollen legs made it harder and harder for her to walk, even with a walker. For a couple of years before my aunt and cousin moved in with her, my mother and my Uncle Buddy hired a black woman to clean the house and look after Grandmomma during the day. Angry at having to turn her house over to someone else’s care, Grandmomma at first referred to the woman as “that nigger Carrie.” Later, as Grandmomma warmed to her, the woman became “the nigger Carrie,” and, later still, as Grandmomma grew to like the idea of having “help,” she began to refer to “my nigger Carrie”—proud at last to have one, the way the rich folks did. Though I was squirmingly uncomfortable with how her pleasure expressed itself through the possessive pronoun and the word
nigger
, I was pleased, and embarrassed to be pleased, that she
had found a way to enjoy her growing helplessness. When I whined to my mother, “I wish she wouldn’t
say
that,” Mom just laughed and answered, “Let her enjoy herself. She’s not hurting anybody.” It’s hard not to think of Huck Finn’s conversation with Aunt Sally. Huck, lying, tells her there’d been an accident on the steamboat.

“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”

“No’m. Killed a nigger.”

“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”

My mother and Aunt Sally’s instinctive empathy extended only so far and then it ran into a wall so tall and thick and long that it seemed like the end of the earth instead of a wall. Yes, Grandmother’s antipathy was monumental, but as instinctive as her empathy.

In the months after the Watts and Detroit riots, Grandmomma was so incensed by the looting and burning she’d seen on TV that she could barely talk. While I sat at her kitchen table eating grits and country ham or fried chicken and mashed potatoes with redeye gravy, my uncle argued that the only goddamn solution was as plain as the nose on your face: line the niggers up against the wall and machine-gun them. Buddy railed that only machine guns and tanks and bodies bulldozed into mass graves would put a stop to all this nigger bullshit, and Grandmomma nodded in furious agreement, occasionally spitting out half a syllable of inarticulate rage.

I loved her.

Short, hugely squat, Grandmomma had a round bulldog face, her blunt pink features laced with broken veins and her small chin jutted forward as if to say what she often said, “Don’t mess with me, boy. I’m not going to take no mess off you.” Will emanated from her face the way heat emanated from the bedroom gas heater she used to overheat the whole house. It emanated even from her legs. They’d bloat till the skin was so taut it shone, and then they’d deflate slightly. The skin, distended and slack at the same time, looked like blotchy crepe de chine.

At the ends of her painful feet grew thick, dirty-yellow toenails, humped and twisted. She had to soak them for hours in warm water before she could trim them. I was fascinated. To me, a child of relative ease, those malformed nails represented an older, harder world, the physical consequences of forty years standing at a loom in the Dundee Mills making towels, and I loved to look at them because I was not supposed to. It was rude, Mom said. But Grandmomma never seemed to mind. I was her favorite, perhaps because I was a listener, and to a talker, few things are more tempting than an attentive child who is blood kin.

We lay on our bellies on her lumpy, buckled mattress and watched
Queen for a Day
, our favorite show. We had opinions. We discussed, dissected, and evaluated the relative misery of the wretched women who told their sorrows in competition for a prize that always turned out to be a Maytag washer-dryer combination.

It was nice, that Maytag washer-dryer combination, nicer than the wringer-washer Grandmomma kept on her back porch, and which she still loved because it was a magnificent improvement over a washboard and tub. When she washed, I got to turn the crank.

Because she understood the value of a new washer-dryer combo, which she did not possess, Grandmomma possessed a flawless and unchallengeable eye about what women might say to get one.

“She’s lying,” Grandmomma said as a woman ended her tale of woe.

“How can you tell, Grandmomma?”

“Just
look
at her! She’s lying and you can see she’s lying.”

Grandmomma also had a sure sense of what true suffering was. “Pfft!” she said, “that’s not so bad”—meaning, though I did not know it then—that she’d lived through worse. When Jack Bailey named the day’s champion sufferer and draped the queen’s robe on her shoulders and set the crown on her head, we sometimes teared up a bit. We tried to conceal our tears from each other because we
were tough eggs, not easily fooled or satisfied. We were cynical and sentimental in exactly the proportions that Jack Bailey and Maytag required us to be. Because its life-transforming properties were deemed so evident as to need no explanation, I never had the courage to ask Grandmomma how a Maytag washer-dryer combination or, more rarely, a refrigerator, compensated for a husband crushed to death by industrial machinery (Grandmomma: “He’d been dranking. You just know he’d been dranking.”), a son in reform school, and a daughter crippled with polio. Obviously something about women’s lives improved, spiritually as well as materially, when the burden of laundry was eased.

During the last commercial, we selected the winner, and we never disagreed. If the audience selected the hard-luck case we had selected, we knew there was justice in the world. If they did not, we poured our contempt on them, fools who were taken in by a lie or a pretty face—fools who couldn’t see that a better parent would have kept her son out of reform school in the first durn place. Why, they were just rewarding some woman for raising a criminal.

As much as we agreed about
Queen for a Day
, I was prissy—“nice-nasty,” was my mother’s amused epithet—about Grandmomma’s snuff. With a dexterity that seemed impossible, she kept a dip of Bruton’s Snuff lodged between her right cheek and gums, while back on the molars on the left side of her mouth she worked a wad of gum. Overnight and during meals, the gum, used and reused, sat on the top of the red-and-white snuff tin by the sink. When, while exploring the crawl space beneath her house, I was stung by a couple of yellow jackets, Grandmomma grabbed my wrist and dragged me to the kitchen. Holding my arm out straight, she opened the tin with her free hand and scooped out a big dip of tobacco. While I struggled, trying to break her tight grip, she reached into her mouth and slapped the wad of snuff on my forearm. The pain of the yellow jacket bites vanished as I watched the brown juice stream down
my raised arm. I gagged and pleaded, bucked and fought, but she didn’t let go until she was satisfied that the snuff had drawn out the poison.

On bus trips or in the car, she carried her spit jar, a quart Mason jar stuffed loosely with Kleenex to keep the spit from sloshing. Sitting next to Grandmomma in the car, I tried not to look at the brown slop saturating the pink tissue. I was afraid I’d retch. But as I sat there and tried not to think about it, my eyes kept slipping back to it. I had to test my persnickety gag reflex against what I knew was her pleasure, and I wanted to train myself not to be so judgmental. I was ashamed that I could not accept her in her entirety.

My mother laughed at her mother’s snuff habit and made jokes about it when Grandmomma wasn’t around, but I doubt anybody ever had the temerity to suggest that she quit. It would have been a waste of breath, and an affront. Like a lot of mill workers, she got hooked on snuff because, unlike cigarettes, it left her hands free to work the looms. Once, her voice swelling with old triumph and more than a trace of lingering outrage, she asked my mother, “Sister, you remember when they tried to take the spittoons out of the mill and everybody just pulled the thread aside and spat through it onto the floor? When the foreman finally noticed the dried-up tobacco under the looms, they couldn’t get them spittoons back in there fast enough.” Thinking about the bosses and their stupidity, she gave an angry grunt. Mom laughed. Like me, like Dad, like all my family, she honored cussedness.

As I said, I loved her.

At the University of Alabama, I read, in a linguistics textbook of all things, the assertion, “Nobody can love a racist.” Immediately I thought of my grandmother. Though I was sometimes afraid of her, I never doubted my love. At times, I wondered whether it was wrong—whether it was a
sin
—to love a woman who was often angry, bigoted, and mean. But I knew such wondering was merely
forced moralizing. Grandmomma had always loved me, loved me with a hot, furious love, which frightened me almost as much as it comforted me. As I pondered the textbook’s magisterial claim, all I could finally say to myself was that life is more complex than absolutists and some linguists find it to be. Love is not love that can only love those already flawless. That kind of love requires no enlargement of the self: It requires no love.

My Grandmomma’s racism was the pigheaded racism of the old school—staunch, unrepentant, and all the more ferocious as it saw history turning against it. Against such racism, I saw my mother as racially enlightened. When I was about twelve my mother carried back to Grandmomma’s house a pile of worn-out quilts that Grandmomma had made for her long ago. My grandmother was not sentimental about her quilts. They were quickly and sloppily pieced together, backed with cheap muslin, and quilted with long loose stitches. When they wore through or pulled apart, she didn’t patch them. She simply tacked a new piece of muslin to each side and quilted the cloth sandwich together—or, as she did this time, found a black woman who lived out in the country so poor that she agreed to do the work for next to nothing.