I would return with a daily medical report, typically encompassing some new sickness I had never heard of. Of course, Aunt Sissy was entirely too knowledgeable to be any kind of serious about made-up African illnesses; she was a retired nurse. And anyway, Sissy was always up and tottering around in her room, an especially tall, bony, chocolate lady with a round face, a pleasant smile, and a head of gray hair cut close. Whether or not she needed me to run any errands, she would fumble around in her little purse for a couple of pennies for me for candy.
She shared her house with a short, silent woman named Miss Ora Boyd, and occasionally they would both sit on their porch in the early evening, though they didn’t seem to communicate with each other much. If I went by after dinner, Sissy was immediately animated, always ready for a conversation.
“How come Aunt Sissy doesn’t have children?” I asked my grandmother once.
“Sissy was married,” my grandmother said, “and she had a son named Jimmy Doe who died.”
“From what?”
“He had a very badly curved spine. It made him look like a hunchback, and it got worse as he got older until his spine pressed in on his heart and killed him.”
I tried to organize a picture of that in my mind and failed.
“What is it? How do you get it?”
“It’s called scoliosis. It’s a curvature of the spine, a lateral curve. Sissy had a less disfiguring case of it.”
“Aunt Sissy got the epizootic,” I reported confidently. “From Africa. She said we come from Africa, me and her. Do we?”
“She came from Memphis and you came from Chicago,” said my grandmother. She sounded exasperated, the way she often did when Aunt Sissy was the subject.
I thought it over quietly.
“The epizootic won’t kill you, right?”
“Scotty, nothing will kill you if there’s no such thing. I’ve heard all that foolishness from Sissy about what she’s got and you know what it is? Nothing. That’s what. Nothing.”
You don’t only get what you want from your ancestors. Or, you get everything from your ancestors. I didn’t know as a child that I had scoliosis, and that it was something that would be a problem for me all my life, tilting me to the left like a six foot curiosity of Italian architecture. I found out years later, when I was given a physical in high school.
But Aunt Sissy running her bony fingers up and down my spine was not searching for our African ancestors. She was looking for Jimmy Doe, and happy he wasn’t there.
6
I am very proud of the education I collected through seventeen years and ten institutions, from south town in Jackson, Tennessee, to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. The easiest way to describe the total experience would be “different.” Had it been a career I was describing, the word “checkered” might have come to mind, even though that word reminds me of an old taxicab company rather than what I’m trying to say: black/white/black/white, an extensive journey that covered all of the educational possibilities, including being taught at home. Because that’s where my education began, in the center room of the house on Cumberland Street at Lily Scott’s side. That is where I learned to read and count and where I acquired my respect for education. From a woman with only a little.
Maybe the whole black/white/black/white thing would be no more descriptive than saying, “like a nun rolling down a hill.” But it worked out; from a Black and then a white school in Tennessee to the same things in New York high schools and through college, the alternating stops held true. And it all began with a black/white school, Black children taught by white folks in Jackson.
My grandmother took me over to St. Joseph’s the day I turned five. Me and my grandmother, our short legs pumping purposefully, wearing some semi-Sunday clothes, down two blocks on Tanyard Street and past the projects to the three-story haunted brick residence of funny-looking clothes horses, employees and confidants of white folks’ God—represented, it seemed to me, by a penguin (it was my first look at a nun). The white folks refused to let me in. I was finally admitted when I was confessing my true age of five and a half.
The school was in a dilapidated tenement-feeling building—purgatory for the few nuns and the red-faced priest sentenced to work there. It was a creepy damn place, and it provided an eerie and frightful voyage through shadow-cloaked hallways filled with an eternity of God-fearing intimidation for young Black kids like me imprisoned there. The proof of the school’s physical condition gained validity after my second year, when it was closed and the building condemned.
Whether God himself actually lived there somewhere, I could not decide initially. I did, however, determine that in spite of the youthful appearance of these nun-women in dust-dragging black, they had been around St. Joseph’s for years and remembered my grandmother and her children, and it turned out they had refused me until I was five and a half on purpose. They didn’t let me in because my grandmother wasn’t afraid of white folks. So I was punished, and made to feel uncomfortable.
There were lots of myths that other Black kids built up about Catholic school—like how they would wash your mouth out with soap. But I never saw any of that. In fact, I don’t remember getting a whipping until I got to public school two years later. The classrooms were upstairs, above the church part, which was on the ground floor. They held mass every morning before classes. If you were late for mass, you were considered late for school.
We studied the catechism. It was all taught by rote, so I could probably still recite the prayers. You remember them just like the Pledge of Allegiance; even if you didn’t know what you were saying, it was understood that God was listening. I decided I couldn’t be a Catholic. At least not right then. There were too many fucking rules and regulations about where to stand, where to sit, and when. At morning mass it was standing, sitting, kneeling, wheeling, dealing, silent, on prompts from occasional mumbling from the altar. Phooey!
The weird thing was what it did to the kids. How uptight and un-all right it made us. And that, too, became a life lesson about allegiance that I came to recognize as such. I had my introduction to the tattle at St. Joseph’s. The rollover. And we were learning to do those things to ourselves for others who were not.
One early spring morning, I found an old rusty knife on my way to school. Later on someone told me it was a Swiss army knife, but that morning it was just a short, fat object of total fascination. As I crossed a corner of the grass part of the walk in front of Liberty Street Church, my foot touched it. Dislodged it. And when I bent over to see what it was, I could not believe my good luck.
It had been white at some point, a pearl or oyster color, and, man, was it cool. It had three or four different-sized blades, a corkscrew (for a very short cork), a bottle opener, a whittling blade, and parts so glazed over with rust that I couldn’t pull them out. I was thinking about how I would remove the rust when I got home.
I got lost examining the wonders of my discovery, continuing on a path that my feet knew by heart. At the end of Tanyard Street, take a right to walk past the projects. Until about a block from St. Joseph’s, I was still so intrigued by my find that I hardly noticed . . . Ann Morris. She was a classmate, but not someone I knew that well. She was already growing in her two permanent front teeth and reminded me of Bugs Bunny.
But today, this morning, anyone was a good friend because I needed to show someone my knife. So I showed Ann Morris as we walked through the gate and up the front steps of the school. And I dropped my prize into my coat pocket.
By lunch time it was forgotten. And after lunch, during recess, when a whole posse of first through fourth graders ran after each other and from one another in dizzying purposeless circles, I felt and became aware of, without any actual signal, a change in the tenor of the game playing and each-other chasing. When I turned to check out what was going on, I saw a gathering, a ragged huddle of small black and brown faces turned upward to the chalk white face that seemed stuck halfway through the “habitual” cowl, scowlin
g down earnestly. In the midst of this forming circle was Ann Morris and the subject of her earnest speech.
They were coming my way. All of them, with Ann Morris appearing even smaller and shrinking next to sister whatever-her-name-was holding her hand.
I don’t really remember how the interrogation began, but it had been about Ann Morris telling the woman that I had a knife, making it sound like a machete and me a midget Zorro. I said I didn’t have one, that I’d thrown it away. And then Charles Dawson, on orders from the penguin, was designated to rummage through my pockets until, beneath a tissue and two gum wrappers, in the coat lining . . .
I felt a wave of religious irony then: when you needed help you called for God. When you got it, you thanked Jesus. When you didn’t get it, you cursed God. But I didn’t. I cursed Ann Morris. And Charles Dawson. And sister whatever-her-name-was, who used this drama of the search and discovery incident after my denial as a God-sent lesson that, (1) Thou shall not lie because, (2) God will be sure thou art caught, and, (3) you will be punished. Sister whatever-her-name-was took charge of (3), and to illustrate it, I was sentenced to stand up against the fence every day during recess. And I hadn’t reached seven years old at the time. But every day during recess, I felt like I was a thousand years old.
I did get several positive things out of St. Joseph’s. For one thing, I got an education that was good enough for me to be skipped a grade when I got to public school; I did the third and fourth grades in one year. And for another, I got to make my debut as a vocalist in the second grade at St. Joseph’s during one of the many talent shows. I did an unaccompanied version of “Jamaica Farewell,” by Harry Belafonte. It was number one at the time.
“Down the way where the nights are gay . . .”
Hell, it was a hit.
7
When St. Francis was condemned, I landed at South Jackson elementary school. I didn’t do a lot of singing there, but every once in a while my best friend Glover and me would call ourselves doing something that was supposed to be singing. The prettiest girl in our class was named Wanda Womack. She had two sisters and they were all fine, but Wanda was the one in my class. Somehow in fifth grade the word around school was that Wanda and I were “going together,” like girlfriend and boyfriend. It seemed as if people looked around and put people together, just like that.
Ritchie Valens had just put out the song “Donna,” and Glover and I were fooling around and I was switching the words so that it was “Oh, Wanda” instead of “Oh, Donna.” Glover dared me to sing it in class. I said I would if he’d do the background. The crowd went wild! Naturally, we tried another tune right after that. We went into “All in the Game,” and it was awful.
Wanda and I ended up going together for a few years, until seventh grade. Though back then you’d have to stay up all night to be up early enough to know much about sex. I guess we might have kissed once or twice when I walked her home from school. I went on one date with Wanda, if you could even call it a date. There was a banquet held at our church in honor of our basketball team. Usually we were lucky to finish the season; that year we finished first.
To be honest, Wanda and I were competitors more than girlfriend and boyfriend. There was a stiff competition for grades between the three top girls and the three top boys in our class, and that meant Wanda, Dorothy Nell Bobbitt, and Alice Bonds against me, Glover, and John Odom. I was still a report card Scott in Jackson, and was an A student through sixth grade.
Though I did well, I didn’t have good study habits. I depended on my memory of the classroom discussions and the notes I would take from the blackboard while the class was going on. But grades were important, and I took pride in getting good grades. I had a lot to live up to. My mother’s sister Gloria was already teaching English overseas. She’d been in Indonesia and Israel, and sent me a camel saddle from Egypt. It was the only one in Jackson.
Despite the lack of mementos and photos from those early years, I can reach down into a barrel, it seems, and bring up scraps of yesterdays once tossed aside like gum wrappers. The raw feelings, like shock or sharp pain, or fear suddenly grabbing your heart, are closest to the top, easiest to reach. They return to me unbidden at times.
I burned the back of my right hand badly on the coal and woodstove that sat like a cast iron Buddha in the living room, my grandmother’s bedroom. Another time I needed a dozen stitches in my left leg from a frantic slide into third base. I played little league baseball and football and basketball. Shortstop, pitcher, quarterback, pass catcher, guard, imagining I was preparing for Merry Lane High and Lane College. I remember playing nearly all sports. Except soccer, which we scarcely knew about in Jackson.
I can see other disconnected pieces of my childhood life in Jackson. I remember Harry Caray announcing the St. Louis Cardinals games from all the neighborhood radios. I remember going to Sunday services at church as regularly as a deacon. First flashes of what I thought was love, sensations close to shock each time I saw the prettiest girl I had ever seen. The memory frozen like an ice sculpture as I stood with barely a heartbeat; a “don’t let her know” grin shattering like a windshield all the “be cool” I was reaching for. Stacks of these images sit neglected in the barrel—fascinating, nearly faded slices of my life.
There were things growing everywhere, and a lot of talk about what folks were planting and how various crops were doing. That part of the country is known for its black, fertile soil that was “good to grow,” and people did some growing. Outside of town there was cotton by the bale, tobacco by the pound, and strawberries by the quart box, plucked from the bushes that grew shin high. But the farmers out in the “country,” which is what we called everywhere outside of town, weren’t the only ones growing. In the front and backyards of the houses in town were displays of the yesterdays, displays that showed these townsfolk’s roots were not too solidly city; that only their houses were planted in town while something within them drove them out to dig and hoe and rake and dirty their hands in the dying sunlight, to plant if only a single row of vegetable memories, to turn full spades of the thick black soil over and slice it with their shovel tips to a depth of eight inches. Then they could reach into the pockets of their gardening aprons for seeds to sprinkle among the decapitated worms.
In the backyard on South Cumberland Street, my grandmother and I were an unlikely farming duo. There was an annual yield from a peach tree, and a grape vine weaving its way along the south fence. Half the backyard space was cleared one fall and flattened near where a basketball backboard was erected with a netless orange rim, but otherwise there was a row of tomatoes, a couple rows of thin spring onions, and an attempt at cabbages one year. In the front yard there were roses and snowball bushes and the prize of the yard, a pomegranate bush that grew in season with its branches loaded down by the pale red apple-looking fruit bursting with tiny, juicy buds.
It was in the backyard that I first encountered and defeated a snake, hoeing an arm’s-length nonpoisonous chicken snake to mince, slashing at the earth with such unaccustomed energy that my grandmother came to take a look.
“I knew you were doing more than weeds,” she said, trying to assess the danger and confirming that there was none.
“Aw, boy,” she chided, “this was harmless.”
“It is now,” I told her, trying to catch my breath.
Just knowing that there were several species of poisonous snakes in Tennessee, most notably water moccasins and cottonmouths, put me in no mood to check on pedigree before deciding that the state could do with one fewer.
I had a black cat with a small patch of white at its throat. I didn’t like most animals. I didn’t like dogs, showing their attention with wet tongues and cold noses. I did not like fish or birds because there was nothing to pet. I loved cats and still do. But somebody poisoned my cat, and my grandmother didn’t want me to see the cat dying under the back porch.
That’s how I became acquainted with cruelty—and with the fact that death doesn’t always j
ust happen, it can be caused. The memory is of me sitting and crying on the back porch with my grandmother holding me by my shoulders both to comfort me and to keep me from looking beneath the porch where my cat had crawled away to die.
I had felt somehow like the prince of the neighborhood, who knew everyone and was cared for by all. But evidently not, because I had to be shielded and warned away: someone had poisoned my cat. Someone killed Snowball.
Other images of death follow on from that: Mr. Spann’s funeral, when they should have kept the casket closed after he lost control of his car and burned up inside it. The services for a little girl of seven I knew who had a heart attack and died. I hadn’t known that death took people that you knew and children so young. And once I knew that, I knew what it meant when I saw an ambulance in front of Aunt Sissy’s house, which I could see from the window of my school. She was brought out on a stretcher and I knew she wouldn’t be back.
The images—of relatives, good friends, and the neighbors who were close enough to be called cousins and uncles and aunts even though they weren’t kin—are clear. Some of them are animated, moving through the parts of their lives where I saw them most often. Some of the ladies are dressed up and clean like Sunday mornings; the men are covered with the dust and grime of a day’s work like a second skin. Most are smiling, enjoying something, but others are bent to nearly broken in half, crying in front of my grandmother, who is lying in a coffin surrounded by flowers.
I found Lily one sorry Monday morning in November, during seventh grade, cold to my touch. I’d gotten up to make her breakfast, and I knew it was strange that she wasn’t stirring. I slipped quietly down the back hall to the kitchen to get the food going and saw her laying there, her profile clear in bed in the shadows of her darkened bedroom. When I dropped a pan, I took another furtive glance but she still hadn’t moved. I went on frying strips of crackling bacon and eggs in the skillet, and as they were sizzling I took a wash pan of heated water and a washcloth to her room and placed them on the nightstand. I called her name softly and touched her wrist to wake her. She was as cold as ice and so stiff with rigor mortis that I could barely lift her arm.
The Last Holiday Page 4
