Southern Discomfort

by Tena Clark

  Daddy and Mister James were also business partners, with Mister James taking advantage of Lamar’s Midas touch as well as his often questionable inside deals. Once, Burke heard Mister James tell Miss Catherine, “If I was doin’ half of what Lamar is, they’d put me under the jail, not just in it!”

  I thought Burke and his family were perfect, like the television Cleavers. What I wouldn’t learn for years was that both of Burke’s parents were also serious drinkers. But nobody ever said a word about that. The same way they didn’t talk about hearing Daddy scream insults at Mama in the driveway, or having seen him with such-and-such young lady over at the Dew Drop Inn on Highway 84.

  Miss Catherine and Mama formed a fast friendship and spent long hours together. I like to imagine that privately, with a bottle on the table between them and no one else privy to their secrets, they shared some of their demons, divulging some of the darkness and sadness they both suffered. But I have no way of knowing if they ever did. Once we moved from Clark Street, and particularly after Mama moved out of the farm, she didn’t see much of Miss Catherine anymore. I wonder now if perhaps Daddy saw to that. If he somehow let it be known to Mister James that Miss Catherine was to keep her distance from Mama. And if Mister James ever thought Daddy’s treatment of Mama was cruel or his adultery wrong, he knew to keep his mouth shut or risk losing a solid chunk of his business that insured Clark Oil and Clark Construction and Clark Timber.

  While our parents went about their private and public affairs, Burke and I happily rode our bikes all over Waynesboro, ran after the DDT truck spraying for mosquitoes until the poison made us dizzy, caught harmless garter and pine woods snakes while avoiding the deadly cottonmouths and water moccasins, raced my go-cart around and around our semicircle driveway, drank an entire case of warm Coca-Colas on a bet to see who could drink more, only to have it all come back up on the lawn, and got sno-cones at Mary’s Store.

  Mary was a towering black woman who owned and operated her small, cinder block store on Glitter Lane, a curious name given that it was nothing more than a dirt road lined with tin and tar paper shacks. Mary would welcome us, her only white customers as far as I could tell, with an enormous smile. I never saw her enter sales numbers or a customer’s debt into a ledger; she somehow kept all the figures sorted in her head. Instead of a cash register, she had an old suitcase into which she’d throw the coins and dollar bills and from which she’d count out people’s change. I never heard a sharp word or an unpleasant exchange with anyone in all the years we visited the store.

  I always felt comfortable with Mary and her friendly mix of customers, the same way I did when I visited Virgie or Beulah Mae in their houses in Hiwannee, a tiny community north of Waynesboro where many of the “help” lived. In fact, I felt more comfortable there than in any other store in Waynesboro or Meridian or New Orleans. On any given day, there’d be three or four men sitting around a barrel, on which sat a piece of plywood as a tabletop, playing checkers or cards or dominoes, laughing at each other’s stories and drinking ice-cold Coca-Colas. Mary kept jars of pigs’ feet on the counter, along with vats of giant pickles that she’d wrap in wax paper and hand out to the customers. And her sno-cones were out of this world—succulent, thick, fruity syrup drizzled over shaved ice. One day, Burke and I decided the whole town needed to know just how special they were, so we got a piece of plywood and painted BEST SNO-CONES! MISS MARY’S STORE, 5 CENTS! Bless her heart, she put the sign up in the window and it stayed there for years and years, until the letters had faded to the point where you couldn’t read it anymore.

  * * *

  When we moved to the farm, I learned I would lose Viola. She was my first nanny and had been the one steady adult in my world since the day I came home from the hospital. It was Viola who ran my bath and brushed my hair and kissed my scraped knees before putting on Band-Aids. I adored her and considered her a member of our family, even though she kept her own plate and fork and cup on a separate shelf in the kitchen. But Mama and Daddy told me that she lived fifteen minutes from the farm instead of five, and that that was too far for them to have to drive her back and forth every day. Like most black people in our town, Viola didn’t have a car and there certainly was no bus service out to the new house. When our moving day came, I buried my face in Viola’s skirts and clasped my arms tight around her waist until my parents pulled me away. I never saw Viola again.

  In Viola’s place, Virgie appeared. When I first saw Virgie in the kitchen ironing my daddy’s white shirts, I ran into the corner and cowered like a scared puppy, refusing to look at her. Finally, I came out of the corner and looked her straight in the eye.

  “I hate you!” I screamed. “I want Viola!”

  I half expected Virgie to turn back to the stove and ignore my tantrum, but no, that was not Virgie’s way. She slowly wiped her hands on the apron tied at her waist and knelt down in front of me, her already arthritic knees cracking with the effort. She didn’t smile, but her round brown eyes were as kind and understanding as any I’d ever seen.

  “I knows yo’ do, baby girl. I knows.” She reached out her hand, and just like that I took it.

  Virgie had been born in the nearby cotton fields in 1919, the child of freed slaves who had to give her up for adoption because they couldn’t afford to feed another mouth. Like generations of slaves and laborers before her, her body became the fuel that fed the machines of a young nation, machines that produced cotton, soybeans, steel, and gold, but mostly cotton. She worked those fields from the time she could walk, all day, every day, even through her nine pregnancies, wearing large overalls to accommodate her bulk. When it came her time, she’d quietly go off and deliver the baby and return to the field soon after with the infant strapped to her back. In 1958, she came to us straight from those fields, grateful for the “easier” work and elevated station of maid to a wealthy white family.

  Even though Virgie stood about five feet ten inches tall, she could walk down the main street of Waynesboro and barely turn a head. She was as invisible as a flesh-and-bones person could be. She kept her head down and her gaze on the ground. Her posture was hunched after years of working the cotton and when she came to work for us, she bent those same shoulders over our stove and toilets and beds. When she worked for my family, she was paid $1.50 a day, and it was considered good money in 1958 Waynesboro. In fact, she earned 50 percent more than any other black maid in town. I’d like to think it was because Daddy was generous, but I suspect it had more to do with his wanting everyone to know that Lamar Clark paid his “help” more than anyone else in Waynesboro.

  So then it was Virgie who ran my bath and brushed my hair and kissed my scraped knees. It was Virgie who hummed her quiet hymns while rocking me when my mother would leave the house in a screech of tires and a cloud of dust on one of her wild rides. Sometimes Mama stayed away for days and it was Virgie who got me dressed and ready for school. Often it was Virgie who tucked me in at night, sometimes after first putting Mama to bed and cleaning up one of her messes in the bathroom. While Mama smelled of her favorite perfume, White Shoulders, it never quite masked the even stronger smell of cigarettes and bourbon. But Virgie—as Viola had—smelled of comfort: melted butter on toast and crisp cotton sheets fresh off the line and skin warmed by the sun. Virgie was comfort. She was also safety. And in my world there was very little of that.

  Virgie lived in the black section of Hiwannee, just north of Waynesboro. Every Southern town had one. Some were called Colored Town, others Africa Town, some Nigger Town or The Quarter. But most towns had one, many still do, and every one of them pulsed with hardship. Dirt and stones surrounded the wood and tar paper shacks. Flies covered the walls and the stench of the outhouse was overpowering. There was no running water. Old newspaper was used to help insulate the walls. Laundry was done by hand in a tub on the front porch and hung on a line in the back. There were no screens to keep the tormenting mosquitoes outside. There was no air-conditioning or indoor heating. Some lucky folks had fans
in the open windows during the worst of the summer, and most had pot-bellied stoves or used their stovetops to warm at least the kitchen on the coldest days. But propane tanks went dry and the electricity came and went without warning, so people learned to live on their front porches in the summer and bundled up in layers of tattered clothing in the winter. If it rained, people got wet. If it snowed, their feet got cold as they walked through the ice and slush, often ruining their one pair of shoes.

  But as poor as their neighborhood looked to me through the window of Daddy’s Cadillac, its residents, and those of a lot of black towns across the South, felt lucky to have a roof over their heads, no matter if it had a few holes in it. And while it was poor, anyone could see that it was full of pride. Flower boxes hung from the windows and there were little smokehouses and gardens in most backyards. Dirt front yards were swept with brooms made from tree limbs, leaving a pattern like a comb through wet hair. The curtains that hung in the windows were thin, but clean. Women who spent long days keeping white folks’ homes spotless made sure to do the same for their own.

  And even from where I sat in the front seat of the car, I could see that Hiwannee had a lot of love on its slanted porches and in its crowded rooms. Love and laughter and comfort and a lot more of what I didn’t have. My home, despite its luxury and acres and acres of land, felt terribly lonely by comparison. A big part of me wished I could live in Hiwannee too.

  Chapter Six

  * * *

  After the initial shock of moving out of town and away from Burke and losing Viola, things got immediately better when I realized what endless adventure and beauty life on the farm provided. My sisters were all at least eleven years older than I was and were busy with their own lives. Penny, the oldest, was at college, and Georgia and Elizabeth were both finishing up high school and getting ready for their early marriages. So, I spent most days alone wandering through the fields and pastures, escaping into the fictional worlds I created around me, making forts in the trees and barn, battlegrounds in the fields, and playmates of my dogs and the farm’s cows, goats, and of course, Frank, my burro.

  Many Saturdays, my aunt Clifford and Penny, my oldest sister who really loved fishing like I did, would come out to the farm to go fishing in the pond behind the house with me and Mama. Virgie would pack us a picnic of Vienna sausages with mayo on Sunbeam bread and cold Coca-Colas and I’d sit on the bank as the older ladies sat perched on their minnow buckets, our four cane poles stretched out into the murky water. I couldn’t concentrate on the fishing because I was so busy listening to their gossip, trying to figure out who all and what all they were talking about. Decades later, we four would gather at the pond’s edge as often as time and schedules would allow.

  On the days when no company would come, I’d go down to the pond alone, hoping to shoot an alligator or a water moccasin with my BB gun. Sometimes I would just sit and listen to the red-tailed hawks screeching or the singing whippoorwills as they circled above, feel the warm, moist air as it moved through the fields, its smell heavy and sweet after the hay had been cut or the gardenias and honeysuckle bushes were in bloom, and watch for deer darting in and out of the woods, careful not to rouse the attention of a coyote. I always had something to do between riding Frank and my horses, helping feed the cattle, or training my collies how to herd without getting stomped. Sometimes I would sing to the cows, marveling at how they would make their slow, plodding way to where I stood in the field and then stand and listen like the best of captive audiences. I thought their doleful stares and motionless bodies were because they were awestruck by my voice. I didn’t yet understand that cows’ stares are always doleful and they do everything in their power to avoid moving. But they sure would circle around me and stay there until I was finished. Sometimes Mama would look out the kitchen window and shriek, “Tena! Get away from those cows before you get yourself trampled to death!” She didn’t understand I considered them my friends.

  It didn’t take me long to love the farm, and I thought Mama did too, until the day the migrant workers came to pick our pecans. That day I realized just how miserable she had become.

  Late fall was pecan-picking season in Mississippi. We didn’t have a huge orchard, or really much of a crop, but there was enough for Daddy to give a bag here and a bag there to the business owners around town with whom he worked, and probably to a few of their wives as well.

  One evening toward the end of September when I was five or six, Daddy said he expected the pickers in the morning, so the next day I got up early, pulled on my overalls, and started toward the front window to wait for them. As I passed by her open bedroom door, Mama yelled, as she always did, for me to put on a shirt.

  “It’s chilly and you look just like a boy without one!”

  “Aw, Mama, it’ll just get sweaty and dirty!”

  “Well, at least put on some shoes! You look like a field hand, and I won’t have the workers talking about some poor little white child runnin’ around the Clark farm!”

  Being accused of looking poor, or worse, looking like poor white trash, was just about the lowest insult and embarrassment Mama could imagine. She grew up in what was then and remains to this day the poorest part of the poorest state in the country—Wayne County, Mississippi. Many people were so poor that the only thing that changed after the Depression was that when a rabbit ran across the road, no one tried to shoot it for dinner. In the 1950s, when I was born, cars were a luxury for many and the still-unpaved streets of Waynesboro were lined with troughs to water the horses because that was how many folks came and went from town. Horse and buggy. By the time I was five, 55 percent of Mississippians—black and white—were living in poverty, and not some “below the safety-net” benchmark of poverty. There was no safety net. This was poverty that killed, starved, and riddled with disease. This was poverty covered in lice and bleeding sores. This was poverty with rickets and distended bellies and tuberculosis and scurvy. This was poverty in tents and hole-in-the-ground toilets. Some of my classmates came to school so dirty that teachers would ask the child’s mother if they could take the girl or boy into the janitor’s closet to comb the lice out of their hair.

  Except for some of the kids in school and the folks in Hiwannee, I didn’t see much of the ruin around me, sitting at my dinner table or eating platefuls of fried chicken and mashed potatoes at Petty’s Cafe, and fried shrimp and hush puppies at The Fish Camp Diner. I lived the sheltered, comfortable life of white privilege. Mama made sure of that. For her, having me and my sisters fed and dressed in the best money could provide was insurance against ever being thought “poor” or “trash.”

  “I left my shoes outside,” I told her over my shoulder as I settled myself in the window to wait for the pecan pickers. “I’ll put ’em on out there.”

  The house behind me was quiet. Daddy was out in the orchard with his foreman, a large and stoic black man named Mayfield, awaiting the workers. Mama was in her room, and Virgie was in the kitchen cooking biscuits and bacon by the smell of it. She and Mama would likely serve the field hands and pickers some of those biscuits with a glass of sweet tea out the back door, come about one or two in the afternoon. I rested my chin in my hands and leaned on the windowsill, waiting. They were late but they’d be here. They came every year, right as rain, all I had to do was wait.

  Finally, I saw the dust rising above the trees down the road—vehicles were approaching the farm. Not just vehicles but trucks. As soon as I saw them round the last bend, I was out the front door and running toward the barn before they cut their engines.

  “Tena Rix, don’t you be runnin’ like a g-g-g-girl and get hit by them trucks!” Daddy yelled. He was always warning me off doing anything “like a girl”—running, playing, crying, and least of all, thinking and talking like a girl. I guess he hadn’t yet noticed I was one.

  The pecan pickers’ trucks were dirty and covered in rust. They didn’t even look like they could make it up the driveway, never mind to the next farm down the road, a
nd then the next after that, as the workers made their rounds, finding the seasonal work where they could.

  About ten men and women scrambled down from the flatbed truck and its cab, all of them black and looking like it had been some time since they’d seen a hot bath and a good meal. A little girl I guessed to be about my age was the last one to clamber down from the flatbed and onto the dusty road. She had on a tattered dress, held together at her shoulder with safety pins, and her hair was braided into tight plaits that stuck out all over her head like little, curly antennae. Her feet were also bare, like mine. I guessed she was probably too young and too little to be of much use in the field, so I ran up to her, grabbed her hand, and asked if she wanted to play. She turned to a woman to ask permission and we were waved off with a smile.

  Soon, we were running through the fields, laughing. I loved pecan-picking season because it usually brought kids my age to the farm. Except for occasional visits from Virgie’s daughter Cindy, none of our help were allowed to bring their children to the house while they worked. So it was usually just me and the cows, horses, and dogs. But that day, and for the first time in as long as I could remember, there would be another little girl to play with on the farm.

  “TENA!”

  Mama’s scream echoed across the field, and the girl and I skidded to a stop. All the workers’ heads turned toward the big house, their eyes huge in their heads.

  “TENA RIX! Get in the house, NOW!” Mama yelled from the back door.

  I dropped the girl’s hand and sprinted toward the house, careful to avoid the thorny thistles and cow pies scattered in the field. Mama met me at the back door and before I could ask if someone had died, she grabbed my right arm, her fingers pinching my skin. I tried to squirm out of her grip, but she held fast, even tighter as I struggled. She bent down so that her face was just about touching mine, her eyes wide with anger. I could smell that she’d already had a nip or two. I’d seen Mama plenty mad, but it was rare to see her this mad at me.