by Tena Clark
I put the lid back on the box and Virgie replaced it on the shelf, exactly as we had found it, without taking a single bill. A $100 bill was not something I could hand Mr. Ramey without raising a lot of eyebrows. Reaching into a pair of Daddy’s nearby pants, I came out with a handful of coins.
“Bingo!” I squealed. “Let’s go!”
With my pockets jingling, I ran out to the end of the driveway, desperate not to miss Ramey’s bus, while Virgie followed as quickly as her old knees would allow. Jumping up and down at the edge of the driveway like a nervous horse before a race, I watched the bend in the road for signs of the faded blue bus. When it finally appeared, we both waved our hands, yelling for it to stop, as if a crazed white girl and her patient black nanny standing by the side of the empty road could somehow be missed.
“Well, howdy do, Miss Tena, Miss Virgie,” Mr. Ramey said, opening the school bus door and tipping his hat. As we clamored aboard, he said, “Whatch’all be having today?”
Virgie still seemed a little stunned from our discovery in the hatbox, so I went about the business of choosing among the peanuts and ice cream and moon pies and Popsicles and strawberry taffy and PayDay and Nutty Buddy and Hershey’s candy bars. Once we had settled on a bag of Planters peanuts poured into our ice-cold bottles of Coca-Cola for our treat, we paid Mr. Ramey and walked slowly back to the house, feeling the sweet summer air on our faces and wishing every moment of every day could be so easy. Those times, walking back down the road from our looting of Ramey’s Rolling Store, were some of the rare moments when Virgie didn’t bow her head in subservience. They were also among the few times when I saw her smile. Otherwise, the only times I saw her smile were for Jack.
Jack was tall, lanky, and thin to the point of being bony. I assumed he was her husband, but I actually had no idea, then or now, if they were ever legally married. I had heard my whole life that “colored folks never bothered getting married.” People said it in the same way they said that “coloreds just loved to pick cotton and ride in the back of the bus.” Whether or not Virgie and Jack were married, they had nine children together, had buried one before he reached the age of fifteen, and raised several of their children’s children in a tiny three-room Jim Walter house, a cheap prefab sold by Sears Roebuck for $600, assembled.
Jack never looked me in the eye or even spoke out loud when I was in the room. I realized later his reserve was because of fear, nothing more. Jack didn’t have an unkind or rude bone in his body. Virgie always said, “He’s just shy,” when he wouldn’t answer my greeting, “Hey there, Jack!” But he had grown up in a time when black men were routinely beaten or even lynched for speaking “out of turn” to a white girl or woman, and no matter Virgie’s place in my heart, he feared crossing that invisible line. Jack worked harder than any man I knew to keep a roof over his family, and on the weekends he liked to sip on his jug of moonshine whiskey and listen to the Yankees play baseball.
Theirs was a house of peace and calm, and although I could never admit it out loud, I often wished I could live there too. When I was at Virgie’s house, everything felt calmer, more relaxed. I even breathed easier. I could also be myself, rather than Lamar Clark’s daughter. With Virgie, and with Beulah Mae and Aunt Mary’s maid, Princie Mae, and Mayfield and all the other black folks in my life, I felt more me in my own skin.
Virgie’s personality had no extremes. I don’t think I ever heard her use the words “love” or “hate,” as in, “I love sweet potato pie,” or “I hate Mississippi summers.” Virgie lived in the gentle middle ground between accommodation and acceptance. And all around her the air felt softer, even kinder. Her children flocked around her like baby ducklings out for a walk, staying close for safety as well as direction. So did I.
I began to take any excuse to go out to Hiwannee and sit in Virgie and Jack’s crowded kitchen while she cooked for her brood. Her daughter Cindy was just four years younger than me, and even though there weren’t any other white girls in her life or black girls in mine, not in school or in town, Cindy and I became close friends. She was funny and sweet and we got along famously, but sadly, I think she always considered herself a white family’s black maid’s daughter. There was just no getting around it.
Cindy worked in the same fields that her mother had, earning fifty cents for a day’s labor, either picking cotton or peas or digging up potatoes. Like most poor children, black or white, they worked from the time they could walk, sunup to sundown, and were grateful for it. The fields were owned by Van Covington, a good ole Mississippi boy and distant relative from Mama’s side of the family, who would sit on his wide porch and watch over his workers, occasionally shouting at one of them, “I can see you, you lazy nigger!” and warning them to “get back to work” before he came out to the field “to git you back to work myself!” Cindy worked the Covington fields full-time from about four years old until she went to school, and then on the weekends and during summer vacations all through her childhood and adolescence.
As much time as her mother spent with me and with my sad, out-of-control family, and as jealous as she was of it, Cindy never let me know. And, rather than resent being given my “poor box” of clothes, as we called hand-me-downs, she appreciated it. In fact, she and her sisters loved that they were the only girls in their one-room school in Hiwannee sporting barely worn Bobbie Brooks pedal pushers and blouses, some with the tags still on. Years later, she said she could still remember the smell of that box of crisp, new Bobbie Brookses. I must have had a lot of clothes I barely or never wore, because between Rita Faye and Cindy and her sisters, there were a lot of girls running around in my discarded clothes and shoes.
It didn’t happen very often, but Cindy would occasionally come out to the farm with Virgie in the morning and we’d play all day. She told me that I was the only white girl who ever talked to her, much less played with her. And mine was the only swimming pool she was allowed into, even though she was scared to death of getting in the water because she couldn’t swim. Taking a page from Daddy’s “trial by fire” training, and I have to confess, with more than a touch of Dennis the Menace in my blood, I would push her into the pool, hoping she’d somehow just get the hang of it. But all I did was instill a lifelong fear of swimming in her.
As often as I could, I’d go with Virgie to her Hiwannee Baptist Church. Where I grew up in the South, church, like football and barbeque, is not only religion, it’s mandatory and I’d been going to church my whole life. All of us Clark girls were stuffed into our Sunday best and packed into a pew, lined up like dolls on a shelf, piety painted on the faces around me while we listened to the exhortations about damnation and salvation from the pulpit. Even as a girl of eight or nine, I’d look around me and recognize people I’d seen with Mama or Daddy at a party the night before, sometimes drunk, often out by the swimming pool smoking cigarettes and talking about “the nigger problem.” I’d look up at the choir ladies in their perfectly pressed white robes and think, How does that work? You drink all night, gossip all day, and come here and sing about taking “A Closer Walk with Thee” and it’s all forgiven? But if I dared utter a word in question to Mama, she’d answer with a stinging pinch on my arm and a sharp “Hush up!”
I had been baptized in the Methodist Church and later again in the Southern Baptist Church, after Georgia was finally able to convince Daddy that the Baptists had better youth programs. They also had better baptisms. In the Methodist church, I had been sprinkled, but the Baptists, who didn’t recognize the Methodist baptism, gave me the full dunking in a big tub by the altar. Once I was a Baptist, I too would be swept up in the preacher’s admonition at the end of the service, “The Lord has put it so strong on my heart, that there is someone out there to be saved, you know who you are! So we’ll sing one more stanza of ‘Just as I Am,’ while you make your way up. He knows who you are and so do you. This could be your last chance. Come on now. God is waiting.”
I probably went up two or three times a year to be saved, not that I
felt any particular shame had to be erased from my soul, but it was nonetheless an intoxicating brew of theater, fear, and faith.
Virgie’s Baptist church was different. Not only did I not know the troubled lives of the faces around me, but the main event was not the sermon, although the reverend sure could work up a sweat talking about THE GOOD LORD JESUS! A-MEN! It was the music. I didn’t care what the hymn was, but the minute I heard the first chords from the upright piano near the altar, I would leap out of my seat, eager for the choir to start in. Soon, the walls and rafters in that small little building would all but bend and creak with the power of those voices. None of the folks needed a hymnal to sing along, and soon neither did I.
Along with the music, I loved the sheer spectacle of Sunday service in Virgie’s simple church. Here were folks who struggled to put clothes on their children and food in their bellies, but on Sunday, it was different. On Sunday, these same folks walked down the center aisles in stiff dresses and pressed shirts and pants and clean white gloves and fancy hats— Oh, the hats those ladies wore! Feathers and plumes and veils and eight-inch brims in colors I didn’t know existed in hats—fire engine red, emerald green, canary yellow, electric blue, and royal purple. Oh yes, Sunday was the day when all their hardship and poverty, oppression and fear, stayed outside while they praised the Good Lord to the rafters, and thanked that Good Lord for everything they did have, not bemoaned what they lacked. I watched it all in wonder, and absorbed the lesson of their gratitude as best I could.
While I was welcomed into Virgie’s all-black church, and I considered her part of my family, the racial fears and hatreds roiled around us throughout the South, where schools, churches, stores, buses, lunch counters, bathrooms, water fountains, hospitals, and doctors’ offices remained stubbornly segregated. I’d see the separate entrance for COLORED around the back of Dr. Dabbs’s office, and even at ten years old thought, Oh Lord, they think that colored people have different germs? Different blood in their veins? Is there different medicine for them?
I knew not to ask Daddy about it, that he would just dismiss me with a “Now don’t you go thinkin’ like a girl, Tena Rix. You know it’s just the way it is.” So I’d ask Mama what they were thinking with the WHITE/COLORED dividing line drawn through the middle of our town, but she would just echo what Daddy said and what I had heard my whole life: It’s just the way it is, Tena. It’s nothin’ for you to worry about. Just let it be.
Then one afternoon it was something for me to worry about. Mama was driving me and my girlfriends to our dance class at the famous Mary Alpha studios in Meridian, about an hour north on Highway 45. Her pint bottle of bourbon was tucked discreetly, she thought, under her left thigh, out of sight of the girls in the backseat.
My girlfriends all had on their tutus and ballet slippers, but I loved tap dance and sat in Mama’s front seat clicking my shoes together, excited to show the teacher what I’d learned while doing my tapping exercises across the linoleum kitchen floor and driving Virgie half nuts in the process. As we left Waynesboro and started crossing over the Chickasawhay River, we were stopped at a police roadblock.
I shot a sideways glance at Mama, who moved her leg so that the bottle was fully hidden underneath it. I could only pray the police officer didn’t lean in the window and get a whiff of Mama’s breath.
“Well, what’s wrong, officer? Has there been some kind of a wreck?” Mama asked.
So far so good. She didn’t even slur “officer.” By this time in the day, Mama was usually a good two or three hours into her drinking, so I was relieved she was able to come to a smooth stop and put a concerned look on her face.
“Well, ma’am, you gonna have t’ take a dee-tour,” the policeman said, pushing his hat back off his forehead and wiping his sweaty brow with a dirty handkerchief. His belly hung over his belt, and I could see sweat stains spreading under his arms and around his collar. “We’re draggin’ the river, looking for that nigger and those two Jew-boys from up North who are stirrin’ up trouble, tryin’ to git our niggers t’ vote. Now them boys’ve gone missin’ and they got us lookin’ all over for ’em.”
I looked at my two girlfriends in the backseat, but they didn’t even seem to notice we’d stopped and continued chatting away and comparing their tutu ruffles. I looked at Mama, who gave me a warning glance. Her unspoken words hung between us: Don’t you make a peep.
“My Lord! How awful!” Mama said, putting the car in gear.
“Well, them folks up North juss don’t git it. We’s fine down heah,” said the officer, adjusting his belly with a great hoist of his belt. “Niggers’s happy, we’s happy. I guess those fellas shoulda stayed home and minded they own business. They had it comin’. Sho did.”
“I s’pose you’re right,” she said, rolling up the car window. She drove away fast, before I could ask why the men had it coming.
Two weeks later, the bodies of twenty-one-year-old James Chaney, twenty-year-old Andrew Goodman, and twenty-four-year-old Michael Schwerner would be found in an earthen dam, ninety miles north, in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Chaney, a black man from Meridian, Mississippi, had been beaten and shot three times. Goodman of New York City and Schwerner of Pelham, New York, both white, had each been shot once through the heart by the KKK. As a boy, Michael Schwerner had defended a schoolmate of unusually small stature from bullies. That boy was Robert Reich, the future U.S. Secretary of Labor.
Chapter Sixteen
* * *
Mama mostly drank alone in her dreary apartment as she watched television and did her crossword puzzles. On the days I would visit, I kept a careful eye on her, making sure the area rugs didn’t trip her up, that she had at least a little food in her stomach, and that her cigarette was firmly extinguished after she fell asleep. Some days, she would decide she’d had enough of her four walls, and get in her Cadillac and drive around town drinking. In fact, for all of my mother’s insane drunk driving, ironically it was my sober-as-a-church-mouse father who tempted death behind the wheel: In the logging truck that nearly crushed him; in the rollover that nearly took his arm; then when he all but slid off a bridge and came within inches of killing himself, me, and Rita Faye. But Mama? Nothing more than a skinned knee falling out of the car once she got to where she was going. Miraculously, she drove as drunk as anyone I ever knew without killing herself in the process. More than once we were nearly killed when she flew over the railroad tracks as the train barreled toward the intersection.
“Mama!” I’d scream.
“Lawd have mercy!” Virgie would gasp from the backseat.
She’d accelerate all the more as the train passed by us so close I could see the eyes of the terrified engineer.
“Mama! It nearly hit us!” I’d say.
She’d put the bottle to her lips and smile. “Nearly, but it didn’t.”
But what about next time? What if I’m not in the car to warn you? I thought, but said nothing as my constant worry about keeping her safe fluttered through my stomach.
Drunk or sober, Mama always drove as if she were escaping something, like a bank robber jumping in the front seat with the loot and yelling to his cohort to “step on it!” And if she wasn’t a safe driver, she was at least a well-practiced drunk one.
Some afternoons she and Aunt Jean would decide to visit their favorite bar in Laurel, thirty miles west on Highway 84. Unlike Waynesboro, in the heart of dry Wayne County, in Laurel you could go to a bar, have a few drinks, and buy a bottle for the ride home. Or, you could also just go to the drive-thru and buy a bottle without leaving your car. On most trips to Laurel, “the Mothers” would drop me and my cousin Michael at the city’s largest and legendary music store, where we’d spend hours strumming the bass guitars and pushing the trumpets’ and clarinets’ finger buttons. One day I wandered over to the drum set, my fingers hesitantly reaching out to feel the taut “skin” of the drumhead nearest me. I had been “drumming” on random surfaces my whole life—crib slats, school desks, concrete sidewalks,
fences—but didn’t connect my obsessive tapping to any real instrument. Seeing my fascination, the store manager handed me a pair of drumsticks and said, “Go for it, honey. You sure cain’t hurt ’em any.”
At first shyly, and then with growing confidence, I tapped on the drums. From random ratta-tats on the drumhead, I quickly progressed to a more rhythmic beat, until I was lost in the sound, the vibrations coursing through my fingers and arms, and my breath in sync with my hands. Although I was only ten, I knew that whatever that sensation was, I wanted more of it. Soon, I was picking up anything that even faintly resembled a drumstick—pens and pencils, forks and spoons, sticks and fence slats, rulers and letter openers—it didn’t matter so long as I could hold them between my fingers like the man at the store had shown me and hit some hard surface. The best part was, unlike my awkward strumming on a guitar or my pitiful honks through a trumpet, my drumming felt like music and the music felt like it was coming straight out of me.
Mama loved that I loved music, like she did, and started taking me with her on her now rare trips to New Orleans. Walking into the Blue Room with her, I realized why she had persisted in those trips all those years, even in the face of Daddy’s torment. As we crossed the threshold, the bandleader’s face lit up when he saw Mama and he waved to his orchestra to stop the music. Mama and I stood in the doorway and waited. I looked up at her and saw a smile on her face that I hadn’t seen in a long, long time. It was simple and pure; it was joy.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” the bandleader boomed. “May I present the talented and beautiful woman who wrote this next song, my dear friend, Mrs. Vivian Clark!” And with that, the band started in on her song, “My Sweet Buzzin’ Sea Bee,” a simple ditty about a handsome sailor in World War II.
She never made any real money selling her songs, but writing them and hearing them played gave her some of the few rare moments in her life of pride and happiness; more than money could have bought.
