by Sissy Spacek
“Eddie, I hear you’ve got a tame crow living in your yard,” said the warden.
“That’s right, Carson,” said Daddy.
“Well you can keep it,” he said. It turned out that his sons Don and David had trained the bird to talk, but now they had gone off to college. “Our kids have grown up,” said Carson. “Let yours enjoy the crow.” We did keep it for a while, until one day it just took off again.
Along with the dump, the courthouse square was a great place to find pets. Every Saturday morning, people would park their trucks in the shade of the big old sycamore trees and hold an informal swap meet right in the parking lot. One Saturday morning we noticed some commotion around a pickup truck. A farmer had caught a full-grown alligator out at Lake Lydia and wanted to show it off. The man had taken its nest, too, so there were a bunch of eggs in the truck bed that were starting to hatch. Robbie and I, who were about ten and nine years old, hoisted ourselves up onto the side of the pickup and watched, drop-jawed, as the tiny heads poked out into the sunlight. The man was letting people take the hatchlings, and of course Robbie just had to have a baby alligator. He rode his bike home with one stuffed inside of his shirt and named it Allie. The alligator lived in a tin washtub in the boys’ bedroom until it started getting too big. One day Robbie came in for breakfast, holding up one of his fingers and wincing. “Allie bit me!” he said, astonished at the sudden turn of events. His pet alligator had hurt his feelings. We all pitched in to feed it worms and flies and spiders if we could catch them. Allie lasted about six months before she died mysteriously.
There was always something interesting going on around the courthouse and the town square. The Spit and Whittle Club congregated there every morning; that’s what we called the old men in overalls who sat on benches and traded stories. The courthouse square was like the beating heart of Quitman, where all the parades ended up. Santa Claus arrived there every year on a fire truck; there were Easter egg hunts and political rallies. Competitions were judged on the grassy lawn in front of the courthouse, including a hula hoop contest that taught me one of my first life lessons. I was a wizard with a hula hoop. I could spin it around my knees and ankles and even my neck. If I put my arms up in the air and held my hands together, I could spin that hula hoop up over my head and around my wrists. I could keep it going for hours if I wanted, and none of my friends could outlast me. So when I marched up those steps and started swinging that hoop around my hips, I was already planning my victory speech and wondering where to put my trophy. All my short life, I had played to win.
When I was a toddler, my parents took me along to an Easter egg hunt out in the country. They gave me an enormous basket and lined me up with kids of all sizes at the edge of a lawn covered with colored eggs. Before the man who organized the hunt could say “Ready, set, go!” I was out in front of everybody, scooping up eggs. They couldn’t hold me back. I had tunnel vision in a world of eggs and I wanted them.
One time we were visiting some family friends out in West Texas, where we’d swim all day in the pool on their big ranch. Our host would throw silver dollars into the deep end and challenge me, my brothers, and cousins to dive in after them. I was one of the youngest, but I could hold my breath the longest and swim the deepest, so I got them every time. I would let my eyeballs explode and pop out of my head before I would risk losing one of those silver dollars. I was the champion.
So I couldn’t imagine not taking first place in the hula hoop contest in front of the county courthouse. I watched in horror as the hoop started to wobble and then dropped around my feet. I could hardly believe it. I had lost. My mother would have said, “Never count your chickens before they’ve hatched, Sissy.” I’d say: “Never celebrate before the trophy’s in your hands!”
The event we most looked forward to was the Old Settlers’ Reunion, held in Jim Hogg Park every August since 1900. Part carnival, part county fair, it was set up on the sandy ground amid tall oak trees. The same company would come every year, and they knew exactly where to put the midway and the rides and the Ferris wheel, the colored lights draped throughout the leafy canopy and rising up above the branches, transforming the park into a magical landscape. People came streaming in from everywhere in Wood County and beyond.
I’d load up on Cokes and hot dogs, frozen custards, cotton candy, and my personal favorite, candy apples, before getting on the rides. The scarier the better. Somehow I never got sick, which is kind of amazing for someone who couldn’t even sit in the backseat of the car without turning green. My favorite was “The Tubs”—a diabolical contraption where you were strapped into big metal buckets that spun around on huge mechanical arms, which were also whirling and dipping crazily. I’d ride the Tubs over and over, then move on to the Ferris wheel, which spun at a leisurely pace and lifted you up for a bird’s-eye view of the fair. If you were lucky, or cute enough, the carnies would let you stay on for an extra turn while they let everyone else off, and then make sure you stopped for a long time at the very apex of the wheel, rocking in your cart, breathing in the tree-cooled air, taking in the lights below and the stars above.
The Old Settlers’ Reunion lasted for almost a whole week. But the traveling circus that came each summer would only stop in Quitman for one enchanted day and night. The circus would arrive in Mineola by train, and the keepers would walk the elephants, trunks holding tails, along eleven miles of hot dusty asphalt to Quitman. My brothers and I would pedal our bikes to the great big field near the courthouse square to watch the spectacle. First we’d ride out to the field and marvel at the tall green grass swaying in the breeze and the quiet empty space—where we knew there would soon be a circus! Then we’d watch as the wagons arrived and the workers set up the big canvas tent. In the daylight, everything was a bit shabby and tattered, both the animals and the circus workers looked flea-bitten and malnourished, like they had really hard lives. Finally the elephants lumbered into town, shimmering in the heat like a mirage from the African plains. While the keepers watered the animals, and the performers put on their costumes, my brothers and I would rush home for supper. Then we’d rush back with the whole family for the evening show.
But once the lights came up, it was all magic. The lions and tigers seemed sleek and supple, jumping through naming hoops while the ringmaster cracked his whip. The clowns and trapeze artists dazzled us as we stuffed ourselves with popcorn and cotton candy and cheered from the benches. Then it would be over. The next day my brothers and I would pedal back to the green field and find it empty and wonder: Had we imagined it? Had the circus really come to town? Then we would see the trampled grass where the big top had been, and elephant poop where the pens had stood, and some trash blowing around: proof that it wasn’t a dream, the circus had really come to town.
… 4 …
Quitman was luckier than a lot of small towns; it had its very own picture show called the Gem Theater. It belonged to an older couple named Mildred and Theo Miller who were friends of my parents. The entrance was in a boxy storefront on Main Street, and the only thing fancy about the theater was the art deco sign out front that said GEM in neon letters and stuck out from the brick facade like a single feather in a headdress. Theo always manned the front booth, where we paid 15 or 25 cents to get in. It was tiny inside, with a black-and-white checked linoleum floor that rose up as it funneled you to the popcorn counter and the theater itself. My favorite thing was to buy a big dill pickle for 5 cents before the movie started.
At first I would go with my parents, and sometimes I’d end up in the “cry room,” a place set aside for mothers to take their babies and young children when they acted up. As I grew older, I was allowed to tag along with my brothers to matinees. We’d watch old Tom Mix cowboy movies, or ones with scary dinosaurs chasing people, or Zorro, which I loved. What was going on up on the screen seemed so real to me that I believed that stuntmen who died in the movies were actually condemned prisoners who had volunteered for the job. I could lose all track of time and forget everyt
hing else for an hour or so, sunk down in the dark seats and pulled into the flickering magic world on the screen. I sometimes had a hard time focusing my attention on any one thing for a long time, but at the Gem I was completely absorbed.
When Mildred and Theo retired and shut down the Gem, we’d have to drive to Mineola to watch movies in the Select, a bigger, more modern theater. Once I was a teenager, my date would pick me up at six-thirty in the evening, and we’d drive to Mineola to go to the picture show. We never thought to find out what time the movie started and would stumble down the aisle trying to find two empty seats in the dark. We would watch the end of the movie, then stay for the beginning of the next showing, leaving when we’d gotten to the part where we’d first come in. The challenge was to figure out what the movie was about. It was like solving a puzzle. Years later, when I got to New York, I learned how real film lovers watched movies, from beginning to end, and I thought, Gee, this is easy!
The Select is where I saw some of the most influential films of my life: The Night of the Hunter, a noir classic with Robert Mitchum. The Miracle Worker, with Anne Bancroft—with whom I was thrilled to work once I became an actor myself. My favorite of all time, though, was To Kill a Mockingbird.
There are so many reasons why I love that film, and the book on which it’s based, but what really pulled me in, I think, was the depiction of small town life in the South, a time and place where “somehow it was hotter then.... And people moved slowly.... A day was twenty-four hours long, but seemed longer.” The fictional town of Maycomb reminds me so much of the Quitman I knew in the 1950s and ’60s. And the way the story is observed through the eyes of a young girl resonates to my bones. I was a tomboy, like Scout, who climbed trees and spoke her mind and hated wearing dresses; who kept a box filled with private treasures stashed under her bed. Like her, I had a wise and capable father who loved me unconditionally and never tried to break my wild spirit. My dad was my Atticus Finch. But I was much luckier than Scout, because I had a mother.
There were other similarities. While Quitman had never gone through a racially charged trial like the legal lynching of Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman—a scenario that drives the narrative of To Kill a Mockingbird—my hometown was just as much a part of the Jim Crow South as the fictional Maycomb. I’d heard whispers of a lynching by an angry mob on the courthouse square sometime back in the nineteenth century and rumors of a dark side to my otherwise sweet little town.
The first time I noticed the segregation of races was at the Gem Theater, where African-Americans had to line up outside a separate side entrance and then sit in the balcony. I didn’t understand it. Pretty soon it dawned on me that whites and blacks had separate just about everything. The Wood County courthouse had separate bathrooms: I’ll never forget the signs, one for WHITE LADIES and the other for COLORED WOMEN. Even as a child, I knew that had to hurt someone’s feelings. During my days of snooping around the courthouse, I couldn’t resist walking into the colored restroom to see what it looked like. An African-American woman whirled around from the sink when she saw me. “You’d better get yourself on out of here, young lady,” she scolded. “You don’t belong in here.” Wide-eyed, I backed out the door. The courthouse also had separate drinking fountains labeled WHITE and COLORED. (My husband, Jack, grew up in Illinois, and the first time he saw a “colored” drinking fountain he thought that rainbow-colored water was supposed to come out of it.) The Jim Crow rules were perplexing, but segregation was all we ever knew. To white children, it was an abstract concept. So many white folks say, “There was never any trouble in our town,” but that’s only because it wasn’t trouble at all for them. So I don’t really know what race relations were like in Quitman, because it really didn’t touch my world. Except for one time.
Like just about everywhere throughout the South, whites and blacks in Quitman had their own schools and lived in separate neighborhoods. Sometimes we’d be driving through the “colored” part of town, and my brothers and I would stare out of the car windows at families sitting on their front porches enjoying the evening; the kids would look back at us with similar fascination. We might as well have lived on different planets.
But if their mothers or fathers did housekeeping or sewing or yard work, they would often bring their young children along and we would play together. Churches and schools might be separated, but commerce was different, and trading for services was the way people got to know one another back then. And all children are color-blind unless they’re taught otherwise.
We had some favorite friends, Sevitra and Brusker Fannin, whose mother, Martene, was a schoolteacher who also had an upholstering and sewing business at home. Mother often drove out to her house to drop off fabrics or pick up finished pieces. Robbie and I always went along to play. The Fannins lived on rolling farmland a few miles north of town, and they had the softest, sandiest soil in their yard, like a sandy beach or flour that had been carefully sifted, so that it felt wonderful on bare feet. We loved playing with Sevitra and Brusker, just running around like crazy while our mothers visited inside.
It was hot and dusty in the summertime, and playing hard made us thirsty. There was a covered well beside the house, and one afternoon we all climbed up there for a drink of water. Brusker lifted aside the wooden lid and dropped a bucket deep into the well, while we gathered around in a circle, staring down into the hole. After Brusker hoisted the bucket up with a rope, he filled a metal dipper and started passing it around. Everybody took a sip, and then it was my turn. This was the time of polio, and I’d been raised never to drink after anybody. I didn’t even drink after my brothers. Now the prospect of sharing seemed even more illicit, and thrilling. I’m doing something I’m not supposed to be doing, I thought, as I held the dipper to my lips and drank long and deeply. It was the coolest, sweetest drink of water I’d had in my life. In that moment I had an epiphany. From then on I would trust my own instincts about people and their rules. If I always did what was expected, I might miss out on the most wonderful things in life.
I started riding cows at a young age. My parents thought I was too little for a pony, so I decided the old milk cow that grazed in the fields across from our house would have to do. My girlfriend Vickie Johns would run the cow down in the gully and I’d jump on its back. Then I’d run it down in the gully and she’d jump on its back. We’d ride that cow until we got pitched off, then we’d start all over again. One day a lady called my mother and said, “Mrs. Spacek, do you know your daughter and her little friend are out back riding a cow?” When I got home my mother said, “Honey, you shouldn’t be riding that cow. You might sour its milk.”
Vickie Johns and I were always having adventures together. Sometimes in the summer months, when Vickie was sleeping over with me, we’d wait until everybody was asleep in the house and then slip out for midnight walks around town. In our pajamas. We couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old, and I can’t tell you why we did it other than for the thrill of doing something forbidden. Of course we would take Vickie’s old dog, Queenie, along with us for protection, as we walked the back streets toward town, past the empty brick school buildings, past the church, through the cemetery with the moon throwing scary shadows between the rows of stones (we hurried a little through this part), and then looped back into the center of town with its quiet shuttered stores. We weren’t afraid of anything except getting caught by the night watchman, Shorty Horton. There was no crime to speak of in Quitman back then, and we didn’t have much of a police department. The county sheriffs and Shorty were the only protectors of public order while the city slept.
Shorty’s nickname was not ironic; he was a very, very small man who wore a large cowboy hat and cowboy boots and patrolled the night streets in a very large pickup. We knew he would turn us in to our parents if he found us wandering around in pajamas. So we kept our eyes and ears open for that white truck; it added to the danger of our walks. One night he nearly caught us. We were roun
ding the corner of a three-sided parking shed, just past the graveyard, when suddenly there was Shorty, coming the other way. We ran around the other side, but he’d already spotted Queenie standing next to the building so he decided to stop and investigate. He was a nice man and he leaned down to pet Queenie.
“What are you doing out this time of night, girl?” he asked the dog. “Shouldn’t you be at home asleep on the rug?”
He pointed his flashlight beam in our direction just as we made the corner. With our little hearts pounding—and trying not to giggle—we stayed just ahead of him as he circled the building. He finally gave up and drove off into the night. We ran the whole way home with Queenie as our sentinel.
I was always a good student, but I wasn’t the smartest in my class. That was Hill Goldsmith, my sometime boyfriend. We sat next to each other in first grade while we were taking achievement tests. It was multiple choice so we had to color in a little circle with our pencils next to the right answer. I happened to glance at Hill’s paper and saw that one of his answers was different than mine. So of course I changed my answer. But when I got my paper back, the answer I’d copied from Hill’s paper was wrong. You would think that experience would have taught me a lesson, but I had one more ill-fated brush with cheating.
Vickie Johns was my childhood partner in crime. We were both in Mrs. Frost’s fourth grade class when we came up with another brilliant idea: I liked to do math, which was simple for me, but hated writing out all the spelling sentences. Vickie loved to write but hated math. So we decided to join forces and do each other’s homework. We figured it was stupid to have to suffer through work we didn’t like, when the solution was so obvious. For about a month we had a real production line going. The last thing I’d always say when I handed Vickie my assignment was “Remember! Write like me!” Apparently, she was a pretty good counterfeiter. But we made the fatal mistake of bragging about our system to some friends.
