BORN JUNE 1929
MARRIED 21 YEARS WHEN WIDOWED IN 1973
3 CHILDREN
5 GRANDCHILDREN
5 GREAT-GRANDS
Mrs. Davis reminds me of actress Cicely Tyson. She is cordial, but serious, soft-spoken. She wears cat eyeglasses, which were popular in the 1960s. I love the style, and bought a pair of imitation retro ones several years ago and refuse to change my frames; I just keep updating my prescription. She has the real deal and I check out her glasses with envy.
“Excuse me for a few minutes,” she says, “I’m going to change into my outfit for the interview.”
It is significant to me that she trusts me enough to leave me alone in her living room although we’ve just met less than five minutes ago. I walk around the plush sofa in a room where time has stood still, full of photos in frames on a metal bookshelf near a wall clock that chimes, next to a curio full of knickknacks. There are glass candy jars and photos of her family on the mantel. A postcard of President Obama hangs on a mirror.
She comes back wearing a metallic gold two-piece skirt suit and a gorgeous hat with a big tulle bow in the front. “Is this okay?”
“You look beautiful!”
Soon she has told me that she wrote a book, too. “It’s called Drifting into Falcon, a story about living in the all-black town in Falcon, Mississippi.” Later, when I look it up, the census records only 317 people in the year 2000 and the last recorded statistics report 159 people in 2013. The town is 14 miles north of her home in Marks.
I came to live in Marks with my aunt in 1943. I was 14 years old. I lived with her and went to school here, the ninth grade and the tenth grade, and this was junior high school. There were nine of us in the ninth grade, about the same number in the tenth grade. My principal was Mr. Victor H. Williams, from Memphis. He said if y’all come back another year, I will add eleventh grade, so about five or six said we would come back. And the next year he said, if you come back, I’ll add the twelfth grade, so about four or five of us came back and he added the twelfth grade. When we marched, there were three of us to march—the first graduating senior class in 1947. I was the valedictorian. I was so happy and proud because if he had not added that, I don’t know if I would have gone any farther than the tenth grade.
My mother passed away when I was young. It affected me emotionally, it did, but one thing about it, it gave me a determination to try to go on and do something for myself. I didn’t ever forget my mother telling me, “I want you to go to college. I’m going to send you to Rust College.” She would tell me that so many times. And when I did go to Rust College and I finished at Rust—it took me about seven years ’cause I had to work and save my money, work and save my money, until I did finish. I went to my mother’s grave—sometimes I get so emotional—stood at the head of her grave and I said, “Mom, I went to Rust College.”
I believe my mother’s in heaven, looking down on me, and I think she’s very happy and proud that I did do what she wanted me to do.
Her story touches me. I then learn she earned her bachelor’s in elementary education from Rust College and later her master’s in elementary education from the University of Mississippi. Education and her mother are, I believe, on her mind, but when I ask Mrs. Davis what she wants to talk about, she talks about her daughter Wanda, who passed away in 1995.
She was a wonderful child. One morning when she was maybe about five or six years old, she came to our bedroom door and knocked. Her father and I were in the bed. She said, “I can’t get my breath.” He told her, “Get back in the bed, nothin’ wrong wit’ you.” And she turned around, such a humble child, and went back and got into the bed. The next morning she said, “Momma, I can hardly get my breath.” I said this child here has asthma. I just dressed right then, said c’mon, and took her to the doctor. I said I know that’s what she has, asthma.
She had asthma and we started giving her treatments. Doctor said, “Now if you don’t do something for her, when she gets to be an older woman, her lungs will not be able to make it.” He sent me to the doctors in Memphis and they found out what she was allergic to—gave me a list of things. She was even allergic to us! So I built a room for her and put her bath in there. There would be a long time before she would have an attack or anything. She did quite well for a while.
She said, “I want to be in the band.”
Well, I said, “You can’t be in the band.” So I went to the instructor to see if he would let her be in the band, and he said that he would. She has to do nothing that would cause her to breathe deeply—like the trombones or clarinets. She played something that she beat [I can’t remember the name], but she was in the band, and she was able to walk. She liked that so much.
One day she went to a college fair and wanted to go to Hampton Institute [what it was called at the time]. I said, “If you want to go, I will see that you go.” She went there and I told her I really wanted her to go into the medical field, because she had asthma and she could always be able to help herself if she needed to. She graduated and she was a registered nurse.
She went to Chicago for a while and then got married. She moved to Gary, Indiana, and she worked at that hospital for 16 years before she passed. I can remember her telling me—and I didn’t even question it—she said, “Momma I am going to have a short life. I want to raise my children.” She was the mother of three children.
I said, “You gonna live to raise your children.”
She said, “But, Momma, if anything happens to me, I want you to come up here and help my husband raise my children.”
She died at the age of 39—the twenty-first of October 1995. When she passed away, I remember what she said, so I went to Gary, Indiana, and I stayed up there with them for 2½ years until their father got remarried.
FUNNY, I’M JUST LIKE GRAM
Gram died of colon cancer in 1994.
It runs in our family. She was diagnosed on her sixty-second birthday and died 96 days later. The cancer had spread to her liver. I remember her in a hospital bed at home. We removed the furniture in the formal dining room to make it her makeshift bedroom. She wouldn’t eat. I heated up some chicken noodle soup. “Gram, please eat,” I begged, fighting back tears. “Please. Just one spoonful.”
She looked at me. Like a little mummy—skeletal face, dentures barely fitting inside her mouth—she takes a spoonful. It took everything for her to lift her head. I believe she did it to appease me. I was 25 years old and home from college in Pittsburgh. If she could just get the nourishment in her body from the soup, I thought, she could fight it.
That day, not long after I tried to coax her to eat, my aunt Marie pulled me from the dining room. “Lisa, don’t cry in front of Mom. You’ll upset her. Be strong,” Marie said. “I’m calling the ambulance. She’s not getting any better. Be strong.”
Tears flow down my cheeks. Marie frowns at me. I trudge upstairs, pull the curtains back, and watch the paramedics arrive and load Gram into the back of the ambulance. The rest of the family is downstairs. I am upstairs. Alone. Crying. Sad. Angry at myself. All those times I fought her. All those times I was hardheaded, I think. So many regrets. I know the end is near.
I never see her alive again.
Such sadness. I regret not being strong enough not to cry in front of her. I regret not being there with the rest of the family showing support. I couldn’t do it. Feeding her that chicken soup was the last time I saw her alive. She died not seeing me again. I never forgave myself for being weak, for not being braver for her. I do not have the words to describe my pain. The day of her funeral, I asked, “Pop-Pop, do you think Gram knew I loved her?”
“Yes, Peach. She knew you loved her.”
“I was so hardheaded. I know I gave you guys a rough time over the years.”
“You didn’t give us any harder of a time than the kids. You were just a kid. You did normal things.”
What he says didn’t comfort me. I felt like the most ungrateful child. I talked back, pushed the
limits with curfew, fought her old-fashioned ways every chance I got.
Now those memories flood my mind again. My time with the Jewels has done a funny thing—shown me I’m just like her. I don’t have children, but I teach my classes the same way she taught me: no excuses; don’t be late; meet deadlines; follow directions. I have little patience for nonsense, little patience for excuses. Just like Gram.
MRS. MAGOLIA M. FOX, 92
GRENADA
BORN MAY 1922
MARRIED 58 YEARS WHEN WIDOWED
8 CHILDREN
19 GRANDCHILDREN
26 GREAT-GRANDS
Mrs. Fox is a quilter. It’s winter when I meet her. She has a heater in the front room with her quilting loom set up. I see a thimble on top of the quilt that is midway finished.
When I asked her how many she has made, she says she has no idea, maybe hundreds.
When I think about quilting, I’m just concentrated on my work. I want all of my children to have a quilt, a nice quilt. It’s just something I want to do for them. I know they can remember me without the quilt, ’cause like I told them when my mom died, “I can remember her without anything you give me. I’m not worried ’bout nothin’ you give me.” Back then I was afraid of dead people and I didn’t want nothin’ of no dead person. I was so afraid of them, I couldn’t touch my mama, wouldn’t touch my daddy, my sister died in 2006, I didn’t touch my husband—none of them. I just could not.
And when my son Robert died in March of 2012, that’s the first time I was able to touch one. Now, I’m not afraid of dead people. I was afraid of them, dead people. I loved them to death, but when they died, I was done with them. When my son died, I was there holding his hand when his last breath left him. I got on the bed with him when he died, and I closed his mouth and eyes and I rubbed him until he got cold. They let me stay on the bed with him until they got ready to give him a bath. They dressed him and then they let me get back in the bed with him until the funeral directors came and picked his body up. That was my oldest son. That mother’s love changed everything. When he passed, I was holding his hand. I held my hand on his chest. I felt his chest when it opened up. You know when a person die, their chest opens up and I felt it.
I told my daughter, “This is it.”
She said, “No, Madea.”
I said, “Oh yes, this is it.”
And his hand just give way. He opened his eyes and looked at me. Looked like he smiled and it was gone that quick. So I knew he was gone then. Something took all the fear away. I didn’t want to leave him, although he had left me, but I didn’t want to leave him.
We are both crying. And then she continues with two more powerful remembrances.
My grandmother Maggie looked just like a white woman, long black hair. Her daddy was white. Her momma was a slave for him. Her momma had 12 children; had one of them by a black man and that white man beat her so about that. Told her she better not never come up there with another nigger baby. All the rest of them was his children, they all was white.
A man had this horse; he would get down for you to get on his back, and when you get on, he would get up. He let me ride that horse to church all the time.
My momma and daddy and them—the other children—they went in the wagon, but I wanted to ride that horse. I put on some pants. Back then girls didn’t wear pants, but my daddy always let me wear a pair—overalls of my brother’s. I’d get on that horse and have my clothes in a sack and I’d ride to the church and go down in the woods, hitch my horse, and re-dress.
So this special Sunday, the first Sunday in May, I went ’cross the churchyard wit’ that horse and he was runnin’ so pretty. And I was likin’ the boys then. I called myself courtin’. Some of the boys had nice horses, too, but mine was the prettiest.
My granddaddy was sittin’ out there, and when I come up, he said, “What in the world you come across this church ground wit’ them britches on?”
I didn’t say nothin’, I just went on down there and I changed my clothes. Now, I had on this white organdy dress. My momma made it. It was so pretty. And I got back up there and he was standin’ out there wit’ his whip. “I’mma learn you how to come across this church ground wit’ britches on.”
I said, “Poppa, I had to change my clothes. I had to ride the horse and change my clothes.”
He hauled off and hit me wit’ that mule whip and he pulled the plug out of my hip with that mule whip and blood shot out of my leg and all on my dress. There was another lady out there by the tree. I told her to go in and tell Momma to come out the church right quick.
So Momma got up and come out there and said, “What’s wrong, Mag?”
“Poppa hit me.”
He said to my momma, “Hush up, don’t say nothin’. I give you some. That gal came ’cross that church ground with britches.”
Mom said, “Mag, go on and go back home.”
I went over there and put them overalls back on. I came across that church ground and said to the horse, “Get down, Dan.” He squatted down. When I said, “Get up, Dan,” Dan raised up and he lit out. Granddaddy embarrassed me because he know the guy that called himself courtin’ me was lookin’ at all of that and that just like killed me. I was 16 or 17 then.
When I’m ready to go, she hands me a jar of muscadine jelly that she’s made. “What is muscadine jelly?”
“It’s a form of grapes. Try it.” I’m not a jelly person, but when the Jewels give me something, I simply take it and say thank you.
A few weeks later I buy bread specifically to try her jelly and right away call to tell her, “I love your jelly!”
MRS. MARGARET HENRY, 92
MOUND BAYOU
BORN SEPTEMBER 1922
MARRIED 35 YEARS WHEN WIDOWED
11 CHILDREN
45 GRANDCHILDREN
120 GREAT-GRANDS
Mrs. Henry’s son Roland tells me to cross the railroad tracks after a certain turn when he gives me directions to her home. I call him: “Mr. Henry, I think I’m lost. I don’t see the railroad tracks.” I went several miles out of the way—heading away from town—when he says, “Well, there haven’t been tracks there for years, but we all know them as the old railroad tracks.” The tracks are now a small grassy bump I drove over several times.
Mrs. Henry is in a wheelchair when I enter her home. She looks me up and down. I know that look by now. “What do you want to know?” she asks. She crosses her arm across her lap. “I don’t have any stories. I can’t remember.”
I sigh and look at Roland, who asks, “Mama, what about the mules you used in the fields?”
She says she doesn’t remember and backs her wheelchair away from me. I laugh and grab the wheelchair arm and pull her closer to me. “Where do you think you’re going? Come here and tell me a story. Tell me something about yourself.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with her today because she has a good memory,” Roland says.
“I retired as a cook the I.T.M. Elementary School. I worked there 20 years.” She tells me the number of children and grandchildren she has, how long she was married, and then as I ask her a question, she says, “When are you leaving ’cause I’m tired of you?”
My first thought is to remind her I hadn’t been there long, but instead I reply, “I’ll leave when you tell me a story.”
“Well, you can stay here all day then.”
“Okay, perfect.” I look her in her eye. “I have several hours of free time.”
She cocks her eyebrow. I cock mine. It’s a standoff for more minutes than my schedule can accommodate.
“If you want to be in the book, you have to tell me a story. If you don’t want to be in the book, I will leave. I don’t want to trouble you.”
“I want to be in the book.” A smile forms at the corners of her mouth. I have just been punked by a 90-year-old. I don’t want to bully. I can find other mothers, even though I am falling in love with this feisty one. “Will I be in the book?” she asks after my long silence.
“No, because I don’t have any stories from you. I’m going to have to call Rev. Hawkins and tell him you’re playing with me.”
“Call him.”
I pull out my phone.
“You callin’ him?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She slowly backs the wheelchair up.
I grab the wheelchair, pull her closer to me, and wink at her. “Rev. Hawkins, I’m at Mrs. Henry’s. She says she wants to be in the book but she doesn’t want to talk. I’m going to leave unless you can talk to her.”
“Oh no, she’s not cooperating?” He chuckles. “Put her on the phone, please.”
I hand Mrs. Henry my phone. “Hello, Rev. Hawkins…,” she says. I don’t know what he says to her, but she listens, and after a few minutes, they hang up. “Go ahead and ask your questions,” she says.
“How did you meet your husband?”
When I started school with my husband, I wasn’t liking him then. It had to come to me, though. I didn’t like him too much; I didn’t like his looks; he wasn’t handsome enough. Well, he had long legs. We used to play ball. I used to call him Long Legs and he used to call me Long Hair.
During that time, [when] we were little girls, when we was growing up, we wasn’t likin’ boys. Boys started to like us. So finally we got together. So things changed then. I was about 15 or 16. How he started to liking me: We go to church around Bayou. Finally he started to just come see me. From then on we started a dating each other until we married. I married him when I was 19 years old.
When he first started coming by my house, he never did come in the house. He’d just come, you know, to the steps. We’d stand on there, talking. Finally we started dating one ’nother and then he would come in. I wasn’t nervous [dating him]. Wasn’t no need to being nervous. I wasn’t scared or nothing like that. We just stood there and talked until 9 o’clock then he had to get away from there. He couldn’t stay no longer than 9 o’clock because my parents didn’t allow him to stay longer than 9 o’clock. If he would have stayed longer, I would have heard them hittin’ on the wall—knockin’ because it was time for him to get up an’ go. You see, parents then were more strict on children than they is now.
Delta Jewels Page 17
