Georgia Bottoms

by Mark Childress

  He was such a good kisser I couldn’t stop, I know I should push him away. Anyway HUH????? BIG SECRET! When we finished he said he will take the kitten to his house to look after. So he is a nice person too. But still I have a BIG PROBLEM. I like Skiff, crazy about him I think, but OF COURSE can’t see him again!!!

  So there it is, what to do? Don’t tell anybody not even Krystal.

  —G.

  She always signed her entries that way—“G.”—trying so hard to be cool. Like addressing the diary as “Dairy,” an eighteen-year-old’s idea of hilarious.

  She hadn’t been able to bring herself to state in writing the nature of the BIG PROBLEM: Skiff was black.

  Now she tucked that letter with Eugenia’s letter into the front of the diary. She flipped through the pages, breathing in the shallow girl she used to be. She thought there might have been other coded entries about Skiff, but she couldn’t find even one hint that he existed. She had set down in detail every party, every gossipy phone call, 4-H club meeting, and book report. Not a word about Skiff. Except in that secret letter to herself the day they met, Georgia hid what was happening, even from herself.

  She remembered how horny they got for each other—meeting under the bleachers at dusk to play with their kitten (“Rags”) and make out. Not just kissing—some pretty heavy petting, her hand rubbing on him although she had not opened his pants yet, his hand rubbing hard against her underwear, making her feel sexy and overheated. But if he tried to touch her nipple, or tugged at the edge of her underwear, she batted him away. That’s exactly how much virginity she had left.

  She started sneaking out late at night to meet him. You could only put in so much time in the scratchy weeds under the bleachers before you found your way to the cushy backseat of Skiff’s daddy’s brown LTD, with things going a little further each time.

  Then one time you went ahead and said yes. Well, not really said it, hardly a word was spoken. But everything about you cried, Yes.

  Come on admit it, Skiff was not even the first. First was Denny Ray Patterson in his father’s blue Nova. Until she did it with Skiff she thought Denny Ray was good, but then she found out he was nothing at all. He never made her feel all sexy wild the way Skiff did. Skiff’s fat sexy lips kissed all over her face. Skiff’s fat tongue was a living thing, jumpy squishy sexy hot-blooded animal with a mind of its own. That tongue and those lips kissed her right off her feet into the back of the LTD, where on a certain Friday night Skiff and Georgia sailed past their previous limits.

  When they did it, they went on and did it. So much hotter and better than Denny Ray. This was definitely what all the fuss was about—three wild animals in the backseat: Georgia, Skiff’s tongue, and Skiff.

  Make that four.

  There was one huge surprise, then, and one BIG PROBLEM. The problem, of course, was that Georgia and Skiff could not be seen in public. They could not go on a date, in daylight or in darkness. Because Skiff was black and Georgia was white and this was Six Points, 1985.

  Georgia sometimes wondered if she went for Skiff as a secret revenge upon her mother. She had rebelled all through her teen years. Little Mama hated black people so much, maybe that’s what made Georgia so hungry to have one, to taste one, to feel her lips pressing against the lips of one. It made her feel wild. Naughtier than any girl in town. Skiff liked it too, what a little firecat she became when he touched her. He loved how he could get her motor running using only his pillowy lips, and that smoldering look in his eyes.

  Her white boyfriends were boring: Ernie Woolard, Jeff Bright, Denny Ray. Silly uninteresting boys, cars and football and cars. Whereas Skiff was moody and mysterious, deep into Georgia, her mouth, her lips. Her legs. Her breasts. Every square inch of her. His warm brown fingers touching her white skin. She loved sneaking around with him, almost getting caught—by his father, her mother, random people in the outer reaches of Hull’s parking lot, once a farmer in their secret spot by the catfish hatchery. They drove the LTD up in the deep shade of three enormous oak trees, hidden from the road by a tangle of blackberry bushes. Through the windshield, they had a nice view of a pond and the spray of cattails at its marshy edge. They listened to Duran Duran and Air Supply, and French-kissed until their jaws ached.

  Mama knew there was a boy, but not who. Georgia wasn’t brave enough to tell her. She enjoyed the knowledge of how hysterical Mama would be if she ever found out.

  One time “all the way” was all it took. You can’t get much more fertile than a horny boy and girl of eighteen. Five weeks later, out of the blue in second-period American history, Georgia felt a startling urge to throw up. Bent over the toilet in the girls’ room she had a deadly moment of realization.

  She was two weeks late but tried to put it out of her mind. She almost managed to forget it for a day or two. She thought Skiff had used a rubber but she wasn’t sure, being so wonderfully distracted at the time.

  Krystal was her best friend on earth, but this was so serious Georgia couldn’t tell even her. Getting pregnant was a hell of a lot more rebellious than she meant to be.

  Knowing whose baby it was, she saw only two options: get rid of it now, or run away somewhere and hide until she had it. The only thing that stopped her from running away immediately was knowing how worried Mama would be if she vanished without a word. She didn’t mind appalling Little Mama, but she didn’t want to scare her to death.

  Finally she screwed up the courage to tell Skiff. His eyes got so big she couldn’t help laughing. That made him mad—he thought she was making fun of the situation.

  She couldn’t believe he had the nerve to get mad at her, when he was the one who knocked her up. “I’m gonna get rid of it,” she snapped, although she didn’t really think she could do that. “I can get it done in Mobile. I need four hundred dollars.”

  “You can’t be doing that,” Skiff said. “It ain’t only your baby, remember.”

  “Oh, I do remember,” she said. “But it happens to be inside of me, not you. And if you think I’m gonna have it, you’re out of your mind.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why do you think? Look at yourself. Look in a mirror.” Maybe that was mean, but Georgia wasn’t in any mood to be nice.

  “You got to have it,” said Skiff. “God put it in there. Nothing we can do about that.”

  “God didn’t do it, Skiff. This one was all you.”

  His face stiffened. For a moment she was almost scared of him. At last he said, “Are you sure?”

  It took her a moment to realize what he meant. “Am I sure?” she erupted. “What are you trying to say? Come on and say it, I dare you.”

  “Aw shut up,” he muttered. “You know what I mean.”

  “You think I’m a slut,” she said, “because of what I did with you?”

  “Not what I said.”

  “But it is what you think.”

  “Naw it ain’t.”

  “You were the first, Skiff,” she lied. “You were the only boy I’ve ever been with.”

  “We could go somewhere and get married,” Skiff said. “We could go up north. There’s a lot of people up there like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Where the white go with the black, and get married.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I heard about it,” he said. “It’s all right if you in Chicago, or Detroit.”

  “You really want to marry me, Skiff?”

  He got real quiet. Even though he was the one who’d said the word “married” first, hearing the word from her mouth shut him up.

  “I didn’t think so,” she said. “Don’t worry. I don’t want to marry you either.”

  He frowned. “I will, if that’s what you want.”

  She thought: Hell, that’s more than Denny Ray would have said.

  Skiff didn’t want a baby any more than Georgia did—he was clear about that—but it sure looked like they’d made one, he said, no matter what either one thought about it. Did she really want to k
ill it? After a lot of arguing in the LTD they decided to find somewhere for Georgia to hide out until she had it, then give it up for adoption.

  Luckily graduation was only three weeks away. The gown hid Georgia’s thickening middle. The other kids went off to summer jobs and vacations. Georgia told everybody she was going to stay with a cousin in North Carolina. Krystal was not so nosy back then. She was so excited about going off to Auburn in the fall she didn’t even notice her best friend lying to her face.

  The day before Georgia was to leave, she went to the front of the house, where Little Mama was working the switchboard. This was the eighties, and by this time all of Six Points had direct-dial telephone service, so Little Mama’s formerly buzzing central switchboard had dwindled to an answering service with five clients: two doctors, the funeral home, the drugstore, and the ambulance service.

  Mama never glanced up from the switchboard. She kept right on taking messages while Georgia explained she was nine weeks pregnant by a boy she did not intend to name. She was going to North Carolina to stay with the boy’s aunt. She intended to have the baby and give it away.

  “And then what?” Little Mama said.

  “Come back here, I guess. If it’s all right with you.”

  “You’re always welcome.” That’s all Mama said. She didn’t want to know any details.

  When she drove Georgia to meet the bus at the Texaco station, she handed over two hundred dollars and said it was a good thing Daddy was dead, because this surely would have killed him.

  Georgia put on a solemn face but she was thinking, oh lady, if you only knew what I did, and who with—if you knew what color your grandbaby is going to come out—you’d be a hell of a lot madder than this.

  She fought the impulse to blurt out the truth. She couldn’t bring herself to hurt Little Mama that much. She put the money in her purse and kept quiet.

  Little Mama didn’t even notice the bus was headed toward HATTIESBURG, the opposite direction from North Carolina. Georgia was proud to have pulled off the deception. In fact she was headed west, to stay with Skiff’s Aunt Ree in Laurel, Mississippi.

  Ree turned out to be Eureka Blanchard, a fat jolly mama with a taste for Riunite pink wine and men recently out of jail. Georgia feared for her life the whole time she lived in Ree’s house. She wrote Krystal saying how nice and peaceful it was in North Carolina, what a lovely lady the cousin was, taking her to socials and teas at the best houses in town.

  Ree’s house was set on an isolated cul-de-sac among gloomy sweet-gum trees at the back of a neighborhood where people threw trash on the ground and nobody picked it up. You never knew whose car would come rumbling and booming down the street at eleven o’clock on a Friday night. Often it was some big tough brother looking for Ree. Georgia cowered in her room, cradling her big belly in her arms, entertaining lurid ideas of what went on in the living room while she was trying to sleep: dope smoking, for sure—she could smell it under the door—and a lot of humping, and a boatload of malt liquor along with the Riunite, to judge from the bottles standing around in the morning. Al Green and the Staple Singers on the stereo, loud. Always, always the TV. For Georgia, it was a real education in how people live.

  But Ree was good to take her in. Never asked for anything in return, not a dime. Didn’t seem to disapprove of Georgia’s looming belly. When Georgia’s back hurt, Ree gave her a back rub. When the stretch marks appeared, Ree bought a special cream she said would make them go away. It didn’t work, but it was nice of her to try.

  Georgia gave birth two weeks before Christmas at the county hospital, in the dead of night. Everyone was very kind until the baby came out. Georgia saw one of the nurses make a face. Maybe the woman hadn’t been prepared for the sight of a black baby—although he was not really black, but a halfway shade, the color of golden oak.

  The look of distaste on the face of that nurse haunted Georgia. As if she had suddenly become a lesser human because of what came out of her.

  The way black people must feel every day.

  All along she’d known it would be a boy, and it was. The nurse asked if she wanted to hold him. Georgia was crying and so was the baby, a raggedy pip-squeak sound. She was afraid to hold him. If she ever put her hands on him, she might not let go. So she said no, thank you.

  In all the years since, that was her main regret. She wished she had held him for just a minute before they took him away. She thought she might get another chance, but she never saw him again.

  Two days later, she took the bus back to Six Points. All the way to Alabama, she stared at the rising and falling power lines tracking her mood like a graph. She made elaborate plans about how to stay out of trouble in the future.

  She rolled her suitcase from the bus stop to the house on Magnolia Street. She was so plump from the baby that no one recognized her on the street.

  Little Mama was glad to see her, which surprised both of them. Georgia hung around the house until she had starved off the baby weight. She answered the pile of letters from Krystal, who was living with an aunt in Birmingham, working at the Pizitz cosmetics counter.

  “Everybody says I look so well rested,” Georgia wrote. “Must be that Carolina mountain air.”

  A couple of years later, Skiff’s mother and father ran up under a log truck out on State Road 47. Not long after that, Skiff got arrested the first time. Georgia couldn’t tell a soul how much these things bothered her. It wasn’t that she imagined being with Skiff again, but she had loved him more than any boyfriend she’d had. He belonged to a warm and loving family when they met—now they were gone. Was it Georgia’s fault? Was she the bad luck charm?

  Ree wrote to say that no one would adopt the baby because of how he came out—big surprise—so Ree had decided to keep him. She named him Nathan, after Georgia’s favorite song that summer. Ree said she was moving to New Orleans to live with her mother, who promised to help with the baby.

  Ree never asked for money, but Georgia knew her responsibility. The day she got that letter, she walked downtown and found her first job, ringing a register at Planters’ Mercantile, so she could send money every month.

  That was twenty years ago. The fourth Saturday of every month she wired as much as she could to New Orleans. In return, all she asked was no contact.

  Sad to think of Ree in prison. She wasn’t a bad woman but she did have a thing for bad men. And now her poor old mother needs help. I will just have to find a way to send more.

  Lord, why is it always up to me?

  Call the old lady tonight. She needs to understand there is no reason to think of sending the boy here. That will never work—not for him, not for me or anybody.

  You have to draw the line somewhere.

  9

  The ring of the phone had an odd submerged quality, a froggy nostalgic ring, as if New Orleans was not just another place but another time, as well. That ring stirred Georgia’s longing to discover the place for real and not just from movies and books, to breathe the exotic smells and absorb the thump of music on the air. Everything she’d read about New Orleans mentioned the smell of the river, the spicy food, and the music—just walk down any street, they say, and you will hear raucous music pouring from every direction. Sometimes when a yearning swept over her, Georgia would drag down her Chef K-Paul Louisiana cookbook and cook up some mouth-searing dish that called for a pound of butter and one quarter teaspoon of twenty-seven different kinds of pepper. The first bite of Creole Shrimp Jambalaya was enough to transport her imagination to a white-draped table overlooking Jackson Square.

  Someone picked up the phone and fumbled it. There were several seconds of bumpety-bumping, then a quavery old-lady drawl: “Hello?”

  “Hey, this is Georgia Bottoms, may I speak with Miz Eugenia Jordan, please?”

  Of course she knew she was speaking with Eugenia, but with old folks you can’t take shortcuts on the courtesy. All they have is time to sit around reflecting on the miserable failings of youth.

  “This is Eu
genia,” said the quavery lady. You-JIN-ya. “Who is it again?”

  “It’s Georgia Bottoms. In Six Points.”

  “I’m sorry, baby, I can’t hear you. Let me turn down this noise.”

  Eugenia set the phone down. The TV was so loud Georgia could hear Regis Philbin saying “That’s ridiculous!” and the audience laughing. The sound switched off. Georgia was thinking how long it had been since she knew anyone with a TV you had to get out of a chair to turn off.

  “Now!” the lady said. “Who did you say it was?”

  Patiently Georgia explained, and this time Mrs. Jordan said, “Oh hello there, how are you, baby? How you doin’? I can’t believe you got my letter that quick.”

  “It came today,” Georgia said. “I’m calling you as soon as I got it.”

  Eugenia said, “You know, I hear people complain about the post office, but honestly I don’t know how they do it. I only put it in the box down by the corner here in Na’walyins the day before yesterday. And they done already carried it all the way up to you?”

  “Yes, that is good service, all right,” said Georgia.

  “How y’all folks doing up there, y’all got you some hot weather like we got ’round here?”

  Georgia settled in for a few minutes of howdying and weather comparing. After a while she saw an opening and squeezed through it: “Now Miz Jordan, reason I’m calling is, well I’m just so sorry to hear about Ree. What happened? What did she do to get put in jail?”

  “I don’t rightly know. They tried to tell me what it was, but I couldn’t ever get clear on it.”