by Tena Clark
“Tena, GODdamn it!” Daddy roared so loud I pushed the receiver hard against my ear, hoping no one else could hear. “You s-s-s-stop this bullshit and g-g-g-get out of there before something bad happens. You’re playing with fire. Now g-g-g-git the hell OUT of there!”
“Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, turnip greens, and of course, your favorite, corn bread and peach cobbler. Virgie and I are havin’ veal cutlet.”
“You get your ass home NOW, young lady!” he yelled and slammed the phone down.
“Okay, Daddy,” I said into the dead phone. “Suit yourself.”
As I hung up the receiver, I looked over at Mr. Petty and smiled. “Daddy decided he’d just eat his lunch at home.”
Hoping my legs would hold me, I walked over to our table and sat down.
Virgie looked at me miserably.
“Mister Lamar’s mighty upset, ain’t he? I could hear his yellin’ from here. Oh Lordie, girl, what you got me into?”
“Oh, don’t worry, he’s fine,” I lied. “He’s just hungry.”
Virgie shook her head ever so slightly, and we both turned back to the now-cold mess of our lunch. When we finally managed to finish our meals, Virgie rose and started to clear the plates off the table.
I heard a few customers snicker and saw them nod in our direction. I reached out and put my hand on her arm.
“No, Virgie, sit down,” I said as quietly as I could so others wouldn’t hear me. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Well, sure I do, Miss Tena. Them plates sho not be clearin’ themselves.”
“That’s what we paid for, food and service. They’ll come get the plates.”
Virgie looked at me, scared and confused, and I finally, finally understood. I realized that I had exposed someone I dearly loved to ridicule and scorn and actual danger, all for my own sense of pride. I had brought her here to show her that change had come to the world, even to Waynesboro, and instead, all I did was show her that Mr. Petty and every other white Southerner in the place hadn’t changed an iota. If I hadn’t held her arm, refusing to let her pick up the plates, she would have cleared every plate in the cafe, powerless against the pull of tradition, of our shared dark history.
With my hand pulling on her arm, she finally sat down, slowly and with great effort, her head still bowed. Not wanting to wait for the check, I pulled out a five-dollar bill, more than twice what we owed, and put it under my plate. Now it was my turn to keep my head down so that the other patrons couldn’t see my tears.
“Come on, Virgie, let’s go home.” She didn’t argue.
Virgie climbed in the backseat, and I didn’t protest. In silence, I drove her home to Hiwannee.
As she got out of the car, I finally spoke.
“I’m so, so sorry, Virgie,” I said. My eyes filled with tears, and I pushed them away with the back of my hand. “I really thought you would like it. I thought it would be a big deal. To make history.”
“I knows you did, baby girl, I knows. I sees you tomorrow.”
She turned and moved toward her house, her head slowly rising and her shoulders squaring as she walked up the porch stairs and disappeared through the front door.
Chapter Twenty-Three
* * *
I grew up in a town where a lot of people lived lives of lies, and rumors surrounded them like mosquitoes around a porch light. Some of those rumors involved whether the husband, but never the wife, was homosexual. It was speculated behind closed doors and gloved hands, with titters and snickers. I listened to those rumors, wondering if any other woman in town, besides the Cotton women, was a lesbian, but no one else ever was suspected. It was always the husbands whose sexuality was gossiped about. Then one night, I got the answer to my own question.
I was fourteen, the perfect age for babysitting, when my sisters and their friends starting having their kids, so I was never without work. And loving kids, I loved the work. One night I was babysitting for a lady I’ll call Mrs. Robinson (like the fictional cougar in The Graduate), when she came home early from a party without her husband. She seemed flushed and nervous, but I figured she’d had one cocktail too many, something I was all too familiar with. I gathered up my homework and headed for the door.
“Hey, sugar,” she said, slightly slurring “sugar” and making me instantly uneasy. “Would you mind waitin’ one minute while I go get my checkbook?”
“Sure,” I said, and sat back on the couch to wait. She disappeared into the bedroom.
When she hadn’t reappeared in five minutes, and then ten, my uneasiness became jittery apprehension. I took a few steps toward the bedroom door, calling out, asking if she was okay and was it all right if I headed on home.
“Tena, come in here for a sec, would you?” she called from inside the bedroom.
Every instinct I had told me to run in the opposite direction, that whatever awaited me on the other side of the door could only mean trouble. Nonetheless, I pushed it open. There sat Mrs. Robinson on the edge of the bed, naked, a sheet covering her lower half.
Of all the violent rush of emotions that instantly flooded through my body, from the hair follicles on the top of my head to my now-cement feet, two were predominant: panic and desire. I had no idea what she was up to, but the sight of her breasts and her offer of them to me was something I had never, ever thought possible, not in my world, not in Waynesboro, and certainly not from a beautiful, sexy, adult woman. The realization that I wanted nothing more than to reach out and explore their beauty struck me dumb, and I stood in the doorway, paralyzed.
She smiled a slow, languorous smile.
“Come over here, sugar, and sit with me for just a bit,” she said, lightly patting the bed next to her.
“Ah, ah, ah, I really should be g-g-g-gettin’ on home,” I said, suddenly developing a nervous stutter as bad as Daddy’s.
“Come on now, just for a minute,” she repeated, her hand now reaching out for mine.
Ignoring her hand, I nonetheless approached the bed and sat down a few feet away. She scooted over so that her leg pressed up against mine through the sheet.
“Look at me, Tena.”
Obediently, I looked at her, keeping my eyes so far from her breasts I was practically staring at the ceiling.
“Do you think my breasts are beautiful?” she asked, her fingers tracing one of her breasts and then lightly cupping it.
“I-I-I think I should go,” I said, now more afraid than aroused. Where in hell was this going? And what in hell would I do if it went any further?
“I asked you,” Mrs. Robinson said, her voice getting hard and a little mean, “if you think my breasts are beautiful.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, hoping beyond hope that would satisfy her and she’d let me go.
Instead, with a great whoosh of her arm, she pulled back the sheet, revealing her entire naked body.
“I want you to see a woman’s beautiful body.”
Finally, I got up, ran out of the bedroom, through the house, and out the front door. I didn’t stop running until I made it to Mama’s house five long blocks away.
Scared, confused, and terrified of what might come next, I stupidly told Mama what happened. To my horror, she immediately picked up the phone and called Mrs. Robinson and began cussing her out from here to Tuesday, even threatening to call the sheriff. Then Mama got quiet and looked at me as she held the receiver, listening to Mrs. Robinson. After a few more moments, she nodded and hung up without saying goodbye. She turned to me.
“She says you just happened in on her while she was changing. Tena, honey, did she really say those things to you or did you just let your imagination get carried away on you?”
I desperately wanted my mother to protect me from things like what just happened and to always have my back and believe me unconditionally, but I also was glad for the escape hatch. I could just say that yes, it was all a misunderstanding, and maybe convince myself of it too. That way I would never have to confront the fact that I had
been aroused by the sight of Mrs. Robinson’s breasts, or to wonder why she felt that I, at fourteen, was a ripe target for her frustrated desires. The last thing I wanted was to face all that, so I too, like every other person in my life, just let it be.
Habits die hard, and they die particularly hard deaths in the South when it comes to secrets and truth.
Mama and I never discussed it again, but I did run the scene through my head over and over, marveling at what had happened and trying to find an explanation. Sure, I was a tomboy, and I had no interest in dating, to say nothing of having sex with boys, but did this woman think I was a lesbian or was she attracted to me because I was a tomboy? And why, with all of Waynesboro to choose from, would she single me out to touch her breasts? Whatever the reasons, I prayed to God to give me just a chance to figure it out. Just one encounter with a girl. I was sure that was all I needed to get rid of the feelings, the urges, once and for all. Maybe one kiss would make them go away.
Looking back years later, I realized that Mrs. Robinson had manipulated my youth and my fear and my nascent homosexuality to her advantage. But back then, all I could do was wonder at my kaleidoscope of emotions and wish that they would go away, while at the same time I was fascinated and somewhat obsessed that I had those feelings at all. And yes, I was proud that she found me attractive. I’d been called cute and adorable and precious my whole life, but this was different. This was sexual and it sent a shiver straight through me.
There was another woman in Waynesboro—my friend Lynn’s aunt Wendy—who also became a curiosity to me because she lived with a woman, but not as her roommate.
“Her girlfriend, but we don’t talk about that,” Lynn told me when we were playing at her house and I saw a picture of Aunt Wendy on the shelf.
Before I knew what it meant, I heard Mama and her friends calling Aunt Wendy a “bull dyke.” I didn’t know what a “dyke” was, but she did in fact resemble a bull: thick, stocky, and totally masculine, so at least that made some sense. And in my confusion about my own sexuality, I joined in the town’s snickering and finger-pointing.
One day, Lynn and I were in my room at Mama’s house playing records and drinking Coca-Colas. Our talk turned nasty, as young girls’ talk about other girls often does, and Virgie suddenly appeared at the door. It was her one day working for Mama and she had been in the living room ironing. She didn’t say a word, but the look on her face instantly silenced my cruel chatter.
After Lynn left, I went into the kitchen and sat at the counter. Virgie turned from the sink, where she was washing the lunch dishes.
“You’s remember, baby girl, everybody be somebody,” Virgie said, and she turned back to the sink and continued washing the dishes.
Chapter Twenty-Four
* * *
In 1968 the world was reeling. Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated within two months of each other. I watched bloody riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago protesting war halfway around the world in a little-known country called Vietnam. And I saw Olympic athletes in Mexico City raise black-gloved fists against racism back home in America. But in Waynesboro, people quietly went about their business, as they always had, and as they would continue to do for another staggering forty-five years, when Mississippi was finally shamed into officially abolishing slavery. That’s right. The paperwork abolishing slavery in the good ole Hospitality State of Mississippi wasn’t filed until 2013, and only then when a reporter doing some research discovered the “oversight” by lawmakers.
“We’re just fine down heah. We don’t want change, id’n that right?” I would hear Daddy’s friends say over and over. “Everybody’s happy. The coloreds’s happy, we’re happy. Just leave it be.”
Oh, we had our share of racial unrest, but if you weren’t black or in the Klan, you might not have known anything was amiss at all. The most I heard from folks around town in reaction to Dr. King’s assassination was that “the uppidy nigger was just askin’ for trouble. Had it comin’, if you ask me.” Like President John F. Kennedy’s murder nearly five years earlier, his killing was not mourned by anyone in my white world. And even though I had only been ten years old when Kennedy was assassinated, his loss scared and confused me, and it broke my heart.
During JFK’s short presidency, real change had seemed possible, even in Waynesboro. I had watched the president’s 1963 landmark speech on civil rights with quiet admiration. His simple yet powerful words—And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free—filled me with hope and they echoed often through my head. But with his murder, I had felt, as so many of us did at that time, an adult’s sense of hopelessness, confusion, and despair. Meanwhile, my parents, to all appearances, were unmoved by it. While they didn’t cheer at the news and launch into a raucous rendition of “Dixie,” as some of the customers outside Petty’s had done, they didn’t mourn him either, at least not openly. In the days that followed the assassination, my father sat at breakfast with his coffee, a cloud of cigarette smoke enveloping him, and the Jackson Daily News spread across the table. In between sips of coffee, he muttered that President Kennedy probably had it coming.
“The man was a nigger lover,” he said. “Shoulda known better.”
Only Virgie seemed to feel the loss as I had. For days, her broad cheeks had been damp from tears that she wiped away before Mama or Daddy saw them. Her expression was grave while she sat bent over a pile of peas, shucking them into a bowl, or knelt scrubbing the tub. We never discussed it—she never uttered a word to me about it as long as she lived—but in those days after his killing, her dark eyes held an aching sorrow. I did what I could to comfort her, sitting extra close to her when she sat at the counter to make some sweet tea, and letting my hand linger in hers when we walked back from the mailbox together. But there were no words I could say. I just registered the suffering that flowed from her like a silent song, a low, constant humming of sadness.
At first I assumed Virgie and I were alone in our heartache. But I was wrong. On the day of Kennedy’s funeral, I had gone to the kitchen for breakfast and found my mother and Virgie standing close together. They didn’t notice me lingering in the corridor. I stood very still. Mama put her hand on Virgie’s shoulder. The two of them leaned against the sink with their shoulders nearly touching, their heads bowed together, Mama speaking so low that I couldn’t make out the words but their cadence felt like a prayer. As I watched from the doorway, I understood for the first time that my mother had a secret side, a part of her she would never let my father or my sisters or even me see, and that somehow Virgie was privy to it.
I had felt a fierce pride for my mother then, even though I understood that her sympathies were ones she would never be able to acknowledge out loud. Not in Waynesboro. My mother was unorthodox in many ways, but when it came to relations between blacks and whites, she accepted that things were what they were. Sure, she might invite Virgie to sit at the kitchen table to eat lunch when it was just the three of us, but if Daddy was in the house, Virgie ate in the laundry room on a stool pulled up to the washer. And sure, Mama had served sweet tea out the back door to the black field hands who worked on our property, but she never once invited any of them to come inside out of the heat or the cold. I never even saw Virgie use our indoor toilet. Not a single time. To this day, sadly and shamefully, I don’t know where Virgie relieved herself when she was working at our house. It’s possible she held her bladder until she was back home in Hiwannee, twelve miles away. I hope she wasn’t reduced to squatting in the fields or behind the big magnolia tree in the backyard. Maybe she used the bathroom in the pool house. But I simply don’t know.
Mama and Virgie’s moment by the sink lasted less than a minute, but it seemed to ease Virgie’s sorrow a bit. She lifted her shoulders and nodded, then got back to work scouring a pan in the sink.
And here we were again, four and a half years later, mourning not one, but two great men who had pr
omised hope and change and equality. Once again, I grieved, but for Southern blacks, and the rural Southern blacks in my life, the dual assassinations of King and then Senator Robert Kennedy six weeks later left them devastated, but also frightened for their own safety. Over the past fifteen years, they had lived through the deaths of nearly two dozen civil rights workers—and those were just the ones who made the news, so while losing Dr. King was tragic, it was as if they half expected it. But Robert Kennedy’s death was different. First of all, he was the brother of the former president of the United States, and while he had been a spearhead of racial change and spoken so eloquently on the night of King’s death to a black crowd in Indianapolis, his powerful status in white America supposedly protected him from violence. So, the fact that a gunman walked up to him in a crowded Los Angeles hotel kitchen and shot him dead sent a clear sign that anybody who spoke up, spoke out, and demanded change could and perhaps would be murdered anywhere, anytime. And while it’s true that on many levels Virgie and Beulah Mae and all the black people in my life had known that awful truth their entire lives, to have two of their heroes, international heroes at that, assassinated within weeks of each other was new. And it was terrifying.
The message was powerful: No one was safe from the violent and often murderous forces that fought against social change. I too felt that something was irreparably broken in the world. Is this what happens if you go out and fight and try to do the right thing? But again, I mourned quietly and only with Virgie and Beulah Mae, and only then behind the safety of closed doors. There were no protests in Waynesboro like the ones throughout the rest of the country, no marches or demands for civil rights and justice for Reverend King. And if there had been, it’s very doubtful if even one black person would have shown up. I never heard of Virgie or Beulah Mae or Mayfield or any black in town registering to vote, or even talking about it. Their lives were about day-to-day survival, not social change.
