Southern Discomfort

by Tena Clark

  “You’d better not come round asking me for a dime as long as you live,” Big Papa thundered, his finger in Lamar’s face. Then he took his finger and flicked Lamar’s hat off his head and into the dirt.

  This is the part of the story that Daddy loved to tell because it was here that he knew he’d won. He’d gotten Big Papa to show his weakness. Flicking a man’s hat in the dirt was a straw tiger’s last resort, not a true hunter’s best move. Daddy reached down, picked up his hat, gave it a few swipes to wipe off the dust, and put it back on his head. Without a word, he turned his back on Big Papa and walked back to his truck. He also turned his back on Mama, still lying in the dirt.

  When her brand-new husband walked by her without stopping, Mrs. Vivian Clark pulled herself up, smoothed her hair back over her ruined ear, and followed him to the truck. If she cared that Daddy hadn’t reached down to help her, she never said so. She climbed up into the truck, closed the passenger door, and scooted across the front seat to sit leg-to-leg against Lamar. She never glanced back at her mother and father, but then and there she said a silent prayer: Thank you, God, for getting me out of their house. And she swore a silent oath: And God, I promise you, no matter what happens, I will never go back.

  Lamar started the engine, and they sped away like Bonnie and Clyde from a bank robbery—in a squeal of tires and dust. They left Big Papa and Big Mama standing in the road, scowling as the truck disappeared around the bend.

  It was the Fourth of July, 1936. Like the fireworks in the sky above them on their wedding night, my mother and father’s love was combustible, and it too didn’t last long. As with most fires that burn hot, theirs burned out fast. In fact, the romance didn’t even last through the wedding night. Rumor has it that Daddy snuck out to a whorehouse in nearby Laurel, barely an hour after consummating his marriage to Mama.

  Chapter Three

  * * *

  By the time he was in his thirties, Lamar Clark was the richest man in Waynesboro, and one of the richest in all of Mississippi. He had steadily worked his way up from nothing, starting in his father’s fields and sawmill, then doing odd jobs and day labor when he could. After he and Mama married, he left his father’s modest sawmill and started driving lumber trucks for Big Papa’s much larger mill.

  Big Papa may have hated my daddy for having the audacity to run off with his daughter without asking permission, but he couldn’t help but admire the savvy businessman his son-in-law was proving to be. So Big Papa stepped back, allowing Lamar to efficiently, almost effortlessly, take control of the business.

  It was just a matter of time before Lamar owned Big Papa’s entire operation. Not bad for a man with barely an eighth-grade education. However, family gossip had it that Daddy didn’t exactly play by the rules and that he got his first real break when he sold some of Big Papa’s timber on the black market during World War II. Sounds about right. Regardless of how he made his first real money, Daddy was well on his way by the late 1940s. People still talk about how “Lamar Clark could buy a jackass for fifty cents and before he got it to town, somebody would be trying to buy it off him for a buck.” He ran an impressive game, constantly buying, selling, and trading, and always getting the better deal.

  Other businesses would follow the sawmill—real estate, hotels and motels, oil leases, cattle. In each one, his tireless work ethic and personal—some might say deadly—charm proved a powerful combination. He loved to say that Big Papa’s early threats and indignation were the keys to his success. He said he was determined to prove Big Papa wrong. But I don’t think it was that simple. Daddy liked to say he could have made money in a coma, and it seemed to be true. Decades later when he was on his deathbed, he carried on about all the deals he was working and how he could make more money lying in bed than most men could make in a year.

  His philosophy was simple: Never owe anyone anything, never be owned by anyone, and never, ever, have to answer to anyone. And he never did, especially to anyone in his family, not even Mama.

  One Sunday, Daddy went to the curb store to buy his paper. But the owner, his cousin, had just closed up so he could go to church and refused to reopen for Daddy. Within a few weeks, there was a brand-new Clark’s curb store right next door with better prices and longer hours, including Sunday. Daddy’s cousin was soon out of business. It’s no wonder some folks called Daddy the Dictator of Waynesboro.

  His parents, it seemed, received most of Daddy’s charity, if not compassion. After the war ended, with his pockets already stuffed, Daddy paid back the debt on the house Nettie and Lee had lost several years before and moved them back into it. He’d visit his father and mother and quietly slip a $100 bill into Nettie’s apron pocket. Years later, when Nettie died, Daddy moved his father into a nursing home, but not until he had a new room built there just for Lee, filling it with his belongings from the house so that when he woke in the morning he would feel “at home.” Then Daddy had their old house bulldozed into the gully. To him, it represented nothing but poverty and strife and he made sure he never had to set eyes on it again.

  Years later, Daddy seldom talked to any of us about his business dealings and associates. And while I never saw him in white robes, or heard him talk about Grand Wizards and lynchings, in order to do business in Mississippi, particularly with the growing civil rights movement in the 1950s, many white men joined, condoned, or at least turned a blind eye to the Ku Klux Klan. Others joined the less violent and what was considered the “more gentile” Citizens’ Council, feeling the Klan was a bunch of redneck hillbillies bent on crass violence. But after the deadly riot against integration at the University of Mississippi in 1962, the Council lost its base as more and more white Mississippians decided that guns, burning crosses, and lynching ropes were the means by which to stop integration in its tracks. And while I don’t believe Daddy was an actual member of the Klan, he sure as hell never condemned them. In fact, he’d sooner put up a NO VACANCY sign on his empty motel than rent one room to a black family.

  * * *

  While Daddy was busy building his empire, Mama was busy with her babies. By the time she was twenty-one she had three daughters: Penny was born in 1938, Georgia in 1941, and Elizabeth eleven months later in 1942. Daddy was at the hospital for every birth, pacing the hallways, passing out cigars he didn’t smoke, and betting anyone who would take the wager that this time he was sure to have a boy. But he never did. He had three girls, one after the other, and each of them grew into beauty queens and majorettes. But Daddy didn’t want another beauty queen; he wanted an heir, a son who could take over his growing Clark enterprises. After all, wasn’t it Vivian’s duty to give him that boy, James Lamar Clark, Jr.? (Daddy didn’t seem to know or care that the father determines the baby’s sex.) But Mama kept pushing out girls. After hearing the news of girl after girl’s birth, Lamar would throw his remaining cigars in the trash bin and drive away from the hospital, usually to his latest mistress to soothe his disappointment.

  Mama, on the other hand, adored each new baby, and vowed to be a different kind of mother than the one she’d endured. She longed to be loving and attentive, not the sort of mother who picked favorites and pitted her children against each other. When her girls were young, she devoted herself to them completely and relished buying them the frilliest, prettiest dresses with satin sashes and lace collars and matching hats and white gloves and shiny Mary Janes, doing their hair up in a mass of curls, and proudly walking behind them into church every Sunday, looking like a page out of Make Way for Ducklings.

  But as happy as she was with her growing brood, she was increasingly unhappy with her husband. Over the years, as my father accumulated more and more wealth and power, my content and cheerful mother grew lonelier and more isolated. Daddy always had a woman on the side, and Mama often found herself pacing in front of the living room window late into the night, waiting for his car to pull into the driveway. Many nights it never did.

  When their third daughter, Elizabeth, was ten, Mama and Daddy decided
to try for one more baby: the boy my father longed for, finally, the heir to his empire.

  “You were supposed to be the ‘save the marriage baby’ that didn’t save the marriage,” Mama said years later. I’m not sure she should have told me that, but she did.

  On December 19, 1953, Daddy once again paced the maternity ward of Rush Memorial Hospital in Meridian, passing out cigars. This was it: He was 100 percent positive his fourth baby was a boy, and gave all takers 3:1 odds.

  For the last time, he lost his bet.

  Chapter Four

  * * *

  Other than her four daughters, the one thing that kept Mama going during her unhappy marriage was her passion for music. It almost took her mind off Daddy’s affairs. Almost. Mama loved all music, from big band and blues to classical and show tunes. As a young girl, she had walked from one end of her family’s long shotgun house to the other in her own dreamy world, humming out new songs in her head, sometimes spinning through the rooms as she added a dance step to the tune. Usually, her sisters would roll their eyes and do their sniff-in-the-air taunting: “Oh, look who’s here, a member of Our Gang!” But Vivian was undeterred and would curtsy deeply, as if thanking her audience for its ovation, and pirouette her way through the narrow house and onto its wide front porch. Lord knows she had the looks for Hollywood or New York, and some even said she had the talent. What Vivian never had was encouragement, from either her family or her husband.

  Lamar Clark was certainly not unusual in expecting his wife to stay home and tend to his house and children, like a proper Southern wife was supposed to do. It was Mama who was unusual: She thought she could be both the mother and wife Lamar wanted her to be, as well as achieve success in the musical world. But Daddy couldn’t begin to imagine such a life. She was there to raise his children and tend his house and look pretty on his arm and in his bed. That was it. End of story. And Mama did all that, but she often needed a tumbler of bourbon to get through the day.

  By the time I was a little girl, Mama’s musical passion didn’t just annoy Daddy; it infuriated and embarrassed him. He didn’t read music, he didn’t listen to music, he didn’t even particularly like music, with the sole exception of The Tennessee Waltz. If Daddy couldn’t understand something, it wasn’t worth knowing, and he definitely didn’t understand music. And he certainly didn’t take the time to appreciate Mama’s innate musical talent. I suspect, at the core, he was jealous. She had something she cared about as much as, hell, maybe even more than, him. And in Lamar’s world, nothing was more important or powerful than Lamar.

  “That ain’t real m-m-music,” he’d taunt when she played one of her 78s she had specially produced in New Orleans. “Sounds like something a t-t-two-year-old would write,” or “You’re fooling yourself and wasting my m-m-money on these records. You’ll never be one of those songwriters.”

  As much as he belittled her talent, she kept at it with the dogged determination of a passionate artist, relishing every note and polishing every verse on the page until she was satisfied. With no musical prospects in Waynesboro, she would drive four hours on the old Highway 11 to New Orleans to record one of her songs. Never having learned how to read music, she sang the songs into a tape recorder and then had a musician transcribe them onto the page. I still have her old 78s, and whenever I hear Mama’s smoky voice coming through the scratchy vinyl, it reduces me to tears. My sweet, sad mama.

  For many years, despite Daddy’s fierce opposition, she regularly drove to New Orleans to work with songwriters and musicians. But she would put off telling Daddy she was going until the very last minute, when her bags were packed and in the car.

  “You’re not going!” he’d command.

  “Oh, I already have the appointments. Wouldn’t look good to cancel now,” she’d say, her voice light and casual.

  He’d accuse her of being unfaithful to him, because why would she be driving all that way for nothing? They would go at it for a while, and then she’d throw her mink over her shoulder, take a drag off her cigarette, toss an “Aloha!” over her shoulder, and waltz out the door.

  Whenever she returned home after a trip, Daddy would accuse her of sleeping with the bandleader, or one of the music producers, or a sound engineer. She’d laugh him off, with the same dismissive Atkinson-girl sniff in the air, reminding him that they were all “fat, bald Jews,” and why would she “ever sleep with the likes of that?” This would shut him up some, given that he had had absolutely no interaction with a single Jew his entire life and if he thought of them at all, he considered them “farners” (foreigners). But it wouldn’t take him long to start in again on Mama’s trips. It would be the same attack every time she returned from New Orleans.

  Sometimes Daddy would send Mama’s niece, Francis, along to New Orleans to keep an eye on Mama. A tall, beautiful blonde, she was the Jayne Mansfield of the Atkinson clan and everybody loved having her in their entourage. As they got ready to leave for New Orleans, Daddy would hand Francis wads of $100 bills and tell her, “I want you in charge of paying for everything because I don’t want your aunt Vivian to drink it all up. You know how she loves the Sazerac Bar at the Roosevelt. Take her shopping. She can buy anything she wants, except a drink. I need you to take care of her for me.” On one trip, the wad totaled $2,500—close to $20,000 in today’s money. Francis’s parents didn’t have two nickels to rub together, so it was doubtful that she’d ever seen a $10 bill, never mind a wad of $100s.

  This was not the first time Francis had been recruited as a spy. But it turns out she was a bit of a double agent. On any given day, she and Mama would drive downtown and park in front of the bank next to Daddy’s Cadillac. Mama would hand her a quarter and say, “Now you go on into the bank and see if your uncle Lamar is talking to any women in there.” Francis would pocket the quarter, walk into the bank, and approach Daddy. He, in turn, would hand her a quarter and say, “Now I want you to tell me if your aunt Vivian talks to any men while y’all are out shopping today.” And on and on it went.

  But, even with Francis’s chaperoning the all-expenses-paid trips to New Orleans, Daddy eventually wore Mama down and her trips became less and less frequent. When she did go, she’d return to Waynesboro distant and sad. She’d spend hours at a time alone in her room, dressed in one of her flowing negligees and matching silk robes, listening to Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole, or sitting with her Bible, reading and circling passages that moved her. With little solace found anywhere else outside of her bottle, she escaped into the pages of parables and convictions, finding rare acceptance and approval.

  Chapter Five

  * * *

  When I was five, we moved from our first house on the corner of Spring and Clark Streets (the latter of which was named by my father, who had by then plastered his name across much of Waynesboro) to a sprawling house he had built for us on a farm just outside of town on the Chickasawhay River. Pronounced chick-ah-sah-HAY, the river, like many places in the South, was named by one of the many Indian tribes that once roamed its rich earth. The farm was over one hundred acres of rolling hills and fields, thick with the sweet, rich smells of honeysuckle and daphne, jasmine and magnolia, hanging wisteria and succulent banana shrub. Our house was a four-bedroom, two-bath rambler built in the style of an antebellum mansion—even though it was only one story. Mama surrounded the house with weeping willows because she loved to watch the wind play through the branches. There was a pasture filled with animals—cows, horses, and goats—and plenty of fences and long-limbed oak trees for me to climb.

  When we moved from Clark Street I didn’t care about the farm’s potential for fun because the move took me miles away from my best friend, Burke. Burke and I had lived directly across the street from one another since the day we were born. His father, James (“Mister James,” always), and his mother, Miss Catherine, were my parents’ best friends. Miss Catherine was a Southern belle through and through who got up at four every morning just to “put her face on” so Mis
ter James would never have to see her without makeup. Somewhere, I have an old black-and-white picture of Mister James holding me when I was two months old while Daddy holds six-month-old Burke. No one can remember exactly when their friendship started, but it endured throughout their entire lives.

  Burke and I played all day, and then at night we’d signal each other from our beds with flashlights and bird calls. He was the truest friend I ever had—and he also somehow understood, without my ever having to explain, that I too wanted to be a cowboy in our pretend games, never a princess or, heaven forbid, the doomed lady on the railroad tracks. We “was like peas and carrots,” as Forrest Gump says of his best friend, and in fact, years later Burke would tell me that I was his “Jenny.” On the day we moved from Spring Street, I sat on the back of the flatbed truck crying and waving goodbye to Burke, who stood crying and waving from his driveway. We both thought we were never going to see each other again, and we were inconsolable; we thought I was moving not to the country, but to another country.

  There are stories of Daddy and Mister James before I was born, then both new husbands and young fathers, getting drunk and going down by the river to “fish.” But what they were really doing was “telephoning,” a shady practice that involved using a car battery and an old crank-up phone to electrocute schools of bottom-dwelling catfish, sending them to the surface and scooping them up with a net. This wasn’t exactly legal, even back in the 1930s and 1940s. One time, the town’s game warden got wind of what Lamar and his buddy were up to and gave the young men a tongue-lashing, then he confiscated the catfish to fry up for supper because he knew that fried catfish were just as good as food can get.