DeeDee called her Aunt Priss, but to Mike she was only, and always, Priss.
“I’m not your aunt,” she had once said to DeeDee. “I’m not your father or mother’s sister. Be precise, DeeDee. Call things what they are.”
But DeeDee was not precise and could not remember.
“That’s all right,” Priss said to Mike later. “I ask the difficult, but not the impossible.”
5
WHEN MIKE WAS FOURTEEN, BAYARD EVERETT SEWELL moved with his widowed mother into the old Parsons house three doors up, and her precariously spinning world settled into place around him like a kaleidoscope. Everything that had before seemed lonely, murky, or hostile seemed all at once crystalline and beautiful, sweet-fitting, anchored. Bay Sewell was wonderful; he was life and breath and noise and laughter; he was almost too good to be true. But he was true; he was real and solid, and from almost the precise instant that they met, in the Parsons house driveway where Mike had gone to gawk at the men unloading the scant Sewell furniture, he was there.
Bayard Sewell was dark-haired, blue-eyed, open-faced, and handsome; forthright, funny, and easygoing; bright, articulate, and even-tempered. He was as graceful as a cat; he could have been a consummate high school athlete, but he worked after school and on weekends to augment the slender earnings of his mother, who did custom baking and tailoring when her rheumatoid arthritis permitted it. Within the year he held every honor and office at Lytton High that did not demand after-school time, and he had the third highest grade average in the school’s history. Within three years it was apparent that Bayard Sewell was what the educators of America meant when they spoke of “prime college material.”
He had few prospects for college, but he did not complain, and matter-of-factly made plans to go to night school for his degree after he graduated from Lytton High and got a full-time job. By the time he was a senior, his mother’s condition had progressed to the point that she no longer accepted work of any sort, and their genteel poverty was on the point of sliding over into the dirt-poor category. Work after high school was simply a given. His mother’s pension would keep only one.
“Don’t you hate working all the time?” Mike asked him once, early on.
“Nope,” he said. “I only hate two things.”
“What are they?”
“Small towns,” he said. “And being poor.”
He was just Mike’s age, and from that first moment in the driveway, they spoke a strange, identical language of the heart and were inseparable. He did not think her looks queer or her opinions outrageous or her actions objectionable. He thought her beautiful, brave, brilliant, and funny, and in the sun of his approval Mike stepped from her chrysalis and moved quite near those things. He also seemed to feel that she was in need of his immediate protection, and trounced with neat efficiency one meaty town boy who made fun of her. No one did again. Courted, defended, and cherished, Mike lost her sense of being a cuckoo’s chick in an alien nest and her veins hummed with peace. This must be what DeeDee has always felt like, she marveled to herself. This is what my mother must have felt like. How awful to die and lose this.
And she felt anew the long-buried lance of guilt for the death of Claudia and a shamed yearning to make up to her father for his immeasurable loss at her hands. Out of her new happiness she sought for something to give him. As it happened, what she brought him was Bayard Sewell.
Bayard did not have many spare hours, but those he did he spent in her company. Usually they studied. After that, they necked. The boy was admiringly respectful to John Winship, and by the time he and Mike began their senior year in high school, John was spending many of his evenings with the two of them. He would come out of his study, rubbing his eyes and stretching, and put the coffeepot on in the kitchen and settle into the wing chair in the living room that had been his in the years when he and Claudia and baby DeeDee had gathered there in the evenings, and Bayard Sewell and a reluctant Mike would close their books and sit up straight on the couch, and John would engage Bayard and, peripherally, Mike in conversation.
Mostly, they talked about Negroes. Or John Winship did, and Mike and Bayard Sewell listened.
John Winship had become in his mid-forties one of those conflicted and caricatured well-placed Southerners who professed to care for and understand individual blacks, but who feared and hated the race collectively. He had fed and supported Rusky and J.W. in his home, seen to their welfare, paid their medical bills, trusted his children with Rusky, paid her funeral costs, and was now supporting and educating her son. But he had no words but harsh and bitter ones for Negroes in the aggregate.
From the beginning, the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement had nearly maddened him.
“They’re looking to take over everything. Our schools and churches, our daughters, our very land. We have to stop them here and now,” he would intone, and Mike and Bayard Sewell would stare at him in the lamplight, seeing in the flush of animation on his ascetic face something of the magnetism that had first drawn Claudia Searcy to him. They listened attentively to his cant, but they paid little heed to his words. Somewhere in the long twilight of his isolation, John Winship had become a bigot, fearing and scorning, in addition to the Negroes, Jews, Republicans, and Northerners. The latter three were little more than the butt of his jokes, but the Negroes could move him to corrosive rage. Even though Mike and Bayard had heard these diatribes many times before, they always nodded, and Bayard usually would murmur something like, “Yes sir,” or “I can see why you might say that.” Mike knew that he did not share her father’s sentiments, and she had, in the beginning, challenged his sincerity.
“Well, I like your daddy,” he said. “He doesn’t have anybody else to blow off steam to, and he’s got a lot of sense about most other things. It doesn’t hurt anything to listen to him.”
And indeed, it did not. John Winship seemed, so far as he was able, to dote on Bayard Sewell.
“He’s going to make his mark, that’s for sure,” he would say. “It’s a shame there’s no money for college, but I’ve spoken to Flora, and there isn’t an extra cent. A boy like that shouldn’t have to grub for a night-school education.”
“You did, Daddy,” Mike said.
He frowned. “But you always hope it’ll be easier for the boy coming after you,” he said.
“What about the girl?” Mike did not say.
To Bayard Sewell, she said, “You’re the son I was supposed to be. You’ve made him happier than I ever could.” She did not say it with bitterness, but gratitude and a sense of the fitness of things. She felt not the slightest curl of anger. Mike’s anger had always radiated outward from the Pomeroy Street house, not in upon it. When she met Bayard, it had faded like smoke.
The whole town adored Bayard Sewell.
“You’re a lucky girl,” someone or other was always saying to Mike when it became clear that the friendship was more, was a flame, consumed everything, was destined to endure. And it was all those things. Mike was in love with every atom of her being. It was Bayard Sewell who was sensible and restrained in the long summer nights on the wisteria-hung side porch of the Pomeroy Street house, when they kissed until Mike was nearly mad with it.
“It’ll be all that much better for waiting,” he would say raggedly, pushing a blinded Mike away from him.
“But I don’t want to wait,” Mike raged to Priss Comfort on the day after one such episode. “What if I do get pregnant? We’re going to get married anyway. We’re going to have children anyway.”
“Not, I hope, while you’re still children yourselves,” Priss said acidly.
“We’re not children. He’s not, anyway.”
“You’re right about that,” Priss said. “There’s nothing childish about Bayard.”
“Then why wait?”
“Because not to wait is stupid, Mike. And you’re not stupid. You’ll be a mother, I hope, and a good one, but there’s so much more you need to be first.”
“Like what?”
“Like a person.”
“I’m a person now.”
“No. You’re a promising cadet. Go on home, now. I’m tired and I want a bath and F. Scat Fitzgerald wants his supper.”
By the time they were midway through their senior year, it was settled that they would be married the following August and John Winship would send them both through the Atlanta Division of the University of Georgia and Bayard could take an evening job if he liked, and they would live in the Pomeroy Street house until they graduated. There was more than ample room in that echoing temple to Claudia, and Flora Sewell was just up the street and could be kept under the watchful eye of her son. John Winship was as nearly jaunty as Mike had ever seen him, talking expansively, waving away their thanks. Bayard Sewell was incandescent with happiness and gratitude to John. Mike was stupid with joy. For the first time in her life, she felt her essential Winshipness, and sometimes she would look at her father, and he would catch the look and smile at her, or nearly, and she would think, I am Mike Winship. Micah Winship. I am him, and he is me. And she would know with an honesty far beyond her years that it did not matter in the least with what coin she had bought the belonging, nor how late. That only the belonging mattered. To belong. To be Mike Winship and to belong to John Winship and to Bayard Sewell. I have done well, she knew within herself.
Even DeeDee, worn with teaching, housework, and caring for the new baby, and thickening with Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinners, approved.
“Imagine my little scrawny chicken sister with a man like this,” she said.
Priss Comfort alone did not seem entranced with the union.
“You just make sure you don’t get pregnant before you finish high school and do some serious work,” she snapped. “Do you know what to use?”
“Oh, Priss, of course. DeeDee told me …”
“DeeDee’s a fine one to tell anybody about birth control,” Priss growled, and took Mike to an Atlanta gynecologist to be fitted for a diaphragm.
“Aren’t you glad for me?” Mike asked her once. “You don’t seem to be.”
“Let’s just say the jury is still out,” Priss said. More than once that winter, as spring approached, Mike found Priss frankly drunk on the sofa in the stone house. But she did not go there so often anymore, so it was hard to tell if Priss was drinking more than usual or not.
6
IT WAS IN PRISS’S SENIOR ENGLISH LITERATURE CLASS THAT Mike found another great piece of herself. Priss had them reading Othello, and Mike had fallen under the rich, glinting spell of the tragic Moor. His complexity, grandeur, foolishness, pain—his sheer humanity—roared in her ears and filled her mind. She did not think she had ever encountered so complete and finished a human being. In this, she knew, she was alone.
The class was made up of Mike and a few other town students and a number of gangling, heavy-handed eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who dropped out each spring to plow and plant and each fall to harvest. Some were taking Priss’s class for the second and third time, for unlike many other Lytton teachers, who sighed gratefully as soon as tenure was assured and automatically passed everyone who could write his name, she was adamant about her students earning at least their D’s. And even Priss’s D’s came hard. Few of the farm and bus students liked Priss, but all were afraid of her. None of them liked Shakespeare. All of them hated Othello. It was well into the third week of January before Mike understood why.
“Well,” Priss said on a gray morning of cold, tired rain, “we can see how external events conspired to set Othello up for his fall. But what about the internal things? What about the forces within the man himself? What single thing about Othello can you think of that, more than anything else, brought about his downfall? Yes, Wesley?”
Mike turned her head curiously. Wesley Cato was a lank, bull-necked giant from up around Red Oak, chiefly famed at Lytton High for the BB that had been lodged in his eyelid since he was a child and the fact that he had repeated the twelfth grade more often than any other student in the school’s history. Mike had heard that this was his fourth go-round; she did not know how old Wesley must be by now. He was old enough to have fine, webbed lines in the thin, pouched skin around his prominent white-blue eyes, but that might have been from the sun. When Wesley was not working his father’s fields, he was abroad on his Harley-Davidson. Mike had never heard him say a word in Priss’s class.
“It’s because he was a nigger,” Wesley drawled adenoidally. “Everybody knows a nigger will screw up ever’ time he gits a chance.”
There was absolute silence. It rang in Mike’s ears; it seemed to go on forever. She snapped her head around to look at Priss Comfort. As Priss opened her mouth to deliver doom, the class exploded in laughter, and whatever she had been going to say was drowned out. He’s talking about J.W., Mike thought incredulously. He’s talking about Rusky. She took a deep breath. She felt as if someone had struck her in the stomach and knocked the breath out of her. She felt as if she were watching them all from a distance of about fifty feet in the air. From this cold, remote blue height she watched herself rise from her seat and turn back to Wesley Cato, and she heard her voice say coldly, “That’s not true. That’s a rotten thing to say. Don’t you ever say ‘nigger’ again in this class or in this school, you … trash. Othello is one of the saddest, best men I ever heard of; he’s five hundred times a better man than you are.”
And while she was saying it, Mike was perceiving it as a profound truth, as new and simple and world-consuming as the fact of her existence: the black people I know are fully as good as I am or anybody else, and we have been treating them dreadfully for hundreds of years. They are like me; they are me, and I am them. This is wrong, all of it is wrong. Why didn’t I know this before? Why didn’t somebody tell me this?
It was a moment out of time, unlike anything she had ever felt before, and she stood alone in the enormity of it, in Priss’s stale, overheated classroom, for a long moment before Wesley Cato’s furious drawl pierced it: “Well, it looks like Miss Mike Godamighty Winship is a nigger lover, don’t it?”
A slow cold rage started in Mike, and a profound surprise. The thought formed in her mind and hung, perfect and heavy as fruit: How dare he call me that? How dare that white trash call me that? I am Micah Winship. She stared at him, anger coiling in her stomach.
“Sit down, Mike,” Priss Comfort said into the silence that had fallen with Wesley’s words. “Wesley, leave this class and take your things with you. Don’t come back. I will not have that kind of talk in this classroom, and I will not have you in it either. I don’t care if you graduate sometime in the year two thousand.”
Wesley Cato stared at her insolently for a long moment, but he dug his books and letter jacket out of his desk and swaggered nonchalantly out of the room, slamming the door behind him. Mike sat down, her chest and forehead burning. She felt faint and light and cold with outrage and revelation. The rest of the class stared raptly into their Shakespeares, most of them for the first time since September. Priss went on with the lesson.
“That was quite an outburst,” she said that afternoon, when Mike came by on her way to the library. “What on earth got into you?” She was looking at Mike very intently, as if trying to read her face for something outside Mike’s ken.
“I don’t know,” Mike said, fidgeting a little, as she often did, under Priss’s green stare. “It just seemed all of a sudden like … I can’t explain it …”
“It’s called an epiphany,” Priss said. “Saul of Tarsus had something similar happen to him on the road to Damascus. Fair jerked him inside out, it did. Well. Now that you’ve had your epiphany, what are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” Mike said. “I have to think about it some more. It does feel like something you have to do something about, though. Or I do. Only I can’t think what. What do you think, Priss?”
“I think you’ll know what you ought to do when the time comes,” Priss said. “You might start with that essay. Go on to the l
ibrary and see what’s there about the Civil Rights Movement … though God knows, I doubt if anything much is, in Lytton … and put some facts behind this fine new passion of yours. That’s a good place to start.”
Mike thought, as she left, that she caught the nearest flicker of wetness in Priss’s eyes, but only one lamp was on in the dark, crowded little living room, and she could not be sure. On reflection, she thought she must have been mistaken. Priss in tears was like the madonna in a fever of sexuality, simply beyond imagining.
“Good for you, for standing up to that jerk Cato,” Bayard Sewell said, when she told him about the incident. “But you better hope your daddy doesn’t hear about it. He’d have a fit.”
Mike, who had been poised to tell him about the remarkable perception that had accompanied her words, did not. Somehow she had expected him to sense what she had felt, to understand, to share the fullness of it with her. She could not have said why she kept silent. He was, after all, dead right about her father. But there had been no thought in her mind of standing up to Wesley Cato; that had not been what her words were about. It was the first time their private lexicon had faltered. It disturbed her, and she did not mention it again.
As the slow spring came on, Mike devoted herself to her essay at the library while he worked evenings at Pembroke’s Drugs, and when they met afterwards to talk of the day and the future and to hold one another and exchange their endless hungry caresses, the tremulous new truth in Mike’s heart stayed there mute between them, as warm and living and secret as an embryo.
7
SHE WAS WORKING ON AN ESSAY FOR A CONTEST SPONSORED by the Georgia Civil Liberties Union. The prize was a year’s full scholarship, covering tuition, room and board, to the University of Georgia, and Mike yearned to present it triumphantly to her father, in the presence of Bayard Sewell, when the proper time came. She was aware that her new status as acknowledged daughter in the Winship house and her tentative favor in John Winship’s eyes had been won by Bayard Sewell and by no innate qualities of her own, and though she was not resentful of this, still, the opportunity to make such a grand gesture shone in her mind like a lit white taper.
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