Southern Discomfort

by Tena Clark

  As incongruous as it now feels, I competed in pageants my whole life, as had each of my sisters. Our family home movies, most of them dutifully shot by our proud mama, are chock-full of images of us headed to our pageants and proms, dressed to the nines and looking like Scarlett O’Hara headed to the Wilkes’ barbeque. Elizabeth insisted I be part of something she considered important and traditional and part of the life of any girl who was raised in the South. Southern belle, and all that. For over ten years, I dutifully played the part she wanted me to play. But when I graduated from high school, I knew I was also leaving pageants behind. The 1971 Mississippi Junior Miss Pageant was my last. For the talent portion I played the drums.

  From that first moment when I put drumsticks to drum at the music store in Laurel, I had been obsessed with the drums and dreamed of one day playing professionally. I wanted to play like I had heard Mahalia Jackson sing or Martin Luther King Jr., speak—with power, with grace, with joy, and with a language all my own. In seventh grade, I had gone to the school’s band director and asked him for an audition.

  “Miss Tena,” he said, sizing me up, “we are a marching band and, what are you? Five feet if you’re an inch? You are way too small to carry a snare drum back and forth across the field.”

  But if I could . . . ? And so I convinced the band director to let me try out, and at the next football game I marched with the band and played “The Pink Panther Theme Song” for the length and breadth of the field and back. The song was frivolous and the snare drum’s sound a monotonous staccato, but as I marched and whaled away on the head with the drumsticks, I felt a surge of joy, deliverance even. The harder I beat the drum, the better the sound. The better the sound, the louder the crowd roared. It felt like a shot of adrenaline was flowing from my hands and arms and right through my hip where the drum rested, like an unwieldy messenger bag. It was nothing short of redemption, from what I’ll never be sure, but I beat those sticks so hard my teeth vibrated and my hands blistered and sweat poured into my eyes.

  I made the band and had been playing the drums ever since. I was pretty good. Actually, I was damn good. My friends knew I could play the hell out of them, and they even compared me to the best of our day: Karen Carpenter, Keith Moon, and even Ringo Starr. But the Junior Miss Pageant audience sitting in the Waynesboro Central High School gym had no idea I could beat the tar out of a set of drums. So I decided to have a little fun.

  When it was my turn to perform, I walked out in a little girl’s pinafore with a white apron, a white bonnet, tap shoes with white anklet socks, and a demure “aw-shucks” expression, looking around in mock surprise at finding myself in an auditorium full of people. I tapped my way over to the drums, still looking around, wide-eyed, as if to say, Why, Lord have mercy, what’re these?

  I picked up the drumsticks and, putting a finger to my cheek, iced the cake by asking, “Well, I might as well give it a try? Wha’ ch’all say?”

  By that time, my friends were cheering and whooping; they knew what was coming, while the rest of the audience was trying to figure out why a seventeen-year-old girl was wearing a skirt short enough to shock the church ladies in the audience.

  I sat down at the drums, mumbling, “Well, by gosh and by golly, I’ll see if’n I can figure these here things out.” After a few timid taps of the drums and a clang or two of the cymbals, I let loose in a no-holds-barred rendition of the drum solo in “Wipe Out.” Soon the bonnet went flying, my stiff bouffant was in my eyes, my pinafore had ridden up to my hips as my legs spread wide to pound the foot keys (I had thought ahead and worn little shortie shorts), and my hands were a blur.

  I won. My closest competition, Mary Lou Smith, had sung a decent enough rendition of “New York, New York,” but once I had the audience on its feet, even she knew she was cooked.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  * * *

  Ever since the day I had cast my innocent eyes on my sister’s friend in the majorette outfit, I knew my attraction to that beautiful girl was about more than just her sparkling green leotard and tasseled white boots. For years I didn’t know what it was called and in my head I thought I was the only one who had these feelings. I have to assume I was Waynesboro’s lone white radical, and I was evidently also one of its only lesbians, except of course for the two women who ran the drugstore, my friend’s aunt Wendy, and possibly “Mrs. Robinson.”

  When my own cousin Bubba told me in confidence that he was gay, I stood there in shock, my mouth hanging open so long I could have caught flies. But it wasn’t the surprise of his being gay—I had known for years that he had no interest in girls. My shock was that he would say the word out loud, in Waynesboro no less. And I also feared he would then ask me straight up, “Well, you are too, right?”

  Yes, I had feelings for girls, but I didn’t want anyone else to know. Not here. I figured if I could ignore those feelings, then no one else would have to know either, and I could quietly escape and figure it out later, far, far from Waynesboro.

  I put up a decent façade. I was still considered a tomboy in many respects—I loved sports, hated dressing up, played the drums—but I was never without a boyfriend, and I could play the part of prude. Thankfully, things were different for junior high and high school girls in the 1960s and 1970s South. Sure, there were those girls who did fool around, even slept around, but by far the majority of us were “good girls” who easily maintained our virginity without a lot of pressure from our boyfriends. It was just the way it was. All through high school I dated a sweet boy, David, and in fact loved him as deeply as I would ever love a man, as much as I was capable of loving any man, but only as a treasured friend, not as a romantic partner. In fact, the thought of having sex with him, or with any man, was foreign and wrong. I just couldn’t even imagine it. And I didn’t want to.

  After high school, most of my girlfriends were heading off to early marriages—typical of that time in the South—and I realized someday I too would have to marry, even if it meant suffering a miserable marriage and maybe even taking my own life in the end. I knew that if I tried to live out my life as a heterosexual, the lie would eventually destroy me. I had watched the television shows and movies, read the books and magazines, and listened to my mother and sisters and girlfriends talk about marriage and sex and babies. But it all felt and sounded like a fantasy world, totally unrelated to me and to what I wanted for my life.

  All through high school, I thought that if I had to marry a man, it would be David. He loved me unconditionally, and I knew he would understand and maybe even accept that our marriage wouldn’t be a traditional or physically passionate one. But in the end, I couldn’t do that to him, so I ended it. He deserved better. So after David and I broke up, I figured I’d have to find some other man, get married, have the standard 2.3 children, settle into my faux-Colonial house in the suburbs, and at least make my family happy.

  In the fall of 1971, I headed off to the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, because of the three colleges available to me—Ole Miss, Mississippi State, and USM—USM had the best music program. Once settled, I soon found a series of boyfriends, all from good families who put fraternity pin after fraternity pin on my collar and never once questioned why I didn’t want to progress beyond our chaste kisses. No questions were asked, and I didn’t volunteer the truth: Far from enjoying those boys’ kisses, I could barely stomach them.

  I loved college but only tolerated my studies, knowing I might need my education to fall back on if my music didn’t pan out, but it was Mama who ended up having the time of her life. She visited me often and would party like she was the sorority sister. As much as I loved my mama, her visits were every college student’s nightmare. Rather than get a hotel room, she stayed with her best friend, Midge, who was the nearby Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity’s house mother. That’s right. My mother would stay at USM’s Pike House, as it was called; the party frat on campus. During most of her visits, she was boozed up as she made the party rounds to fraternity houses
and the local bars. Everywhere she went, she was surrounded by an entourage of my friends, who all adored her. She was the life of every party as a college drunk, so different from the way she was when I was younger and she drank largely by herself, alone in her living room. Often I would come back to my room after classes and find a gaggle of my girlfriends, and sometimes a few boyfriends, at Mama’s feet while she held court, telling stories about getting married at fifteen and being hunted down Highway 84 by her Big Papa and chasing Daddy through town with a loaded .38, her audience laughing until the tears rolled down their cheeks.

  Those visits were both embarrassing and endearing. I cringed at the sight of my mother stumbling drunk at a Pike party, or dancing too close with some random frat boy. But she and I also had some of our best talks during that time, sitting at opposite ends of the couch, our legs stretched out under a quilt, our toes touching. She told me of her childhood, and her mean mother and spiteful sisters. She told me about her marriage to Daddy, and just how painful it had been. She told me that she’d had a lot of manfriends after Daddy, probably too many, but that her one chance at remarrying fizzled when I had refused to move with her to Meridian, where the man’s business was based.

  She also admitted that she had fallen in love with another man close to the end of her marriage to Daddy, a sweet man from town named Curley. And I remembered that Daddy used to just talk about Curley all the time, obsessively. She told me that she had loved Curley “because he was nice to me and he liked my music and he thought I was funny. And, he thought I was really beautiful.”

  “And so what happened, Mama?” I asked her.

  “Well, I wasn’t ready to leave your daddy.”

  “Do you wish you had?”

  She thought about it for a minute, then shook her head slowly.

  “No, because I needed to be on my own for a while. To see if I could find Vivian. I had lost Vivian a long time ago.”

  I looked at her, my surprise showing. “Mama, I’ve never heard you talk this way.”

  She smiled her sly little smile and nodded. “I know, baby, but even your old mama can do some real thinkin’ every now and again.”

  On one visit, she stayed sober until well into the afternoon, reading in my rocking chair at my apartment and waiting for me to come in from classes.

  “Come here, honey, and sit down. I got somethin’ to say,” she said, patting the couch near where she sat on the rocker.

  Instantly worried that she was sick, or had some other awful news, I sat down.

  “Honey, I feel like you’re keepin’ somethin’ from me, and it hurts. It feels like there’s a wedge between us, and I don’t like it. We’ve always told each other everything, but now . . .”

  I looked into her sweet, beautiful eyes the color of black coffee, and tried not to break down sobbing. I knew it was time. It was finally time. A few weeks before, one of my friends in a nearby fraternity had been “outed,” although we didn’t call it that at the time. He had gone home to tell his parents that he was gay, and afterward, had gone to the guesthouse behind their garage and shot himself in the head. When they found him, he had the gun in one hand and the Bible in the other. I too had fought against the truth of who I was for so long. Now, facing my mother’s pleading eyes, I was almost relieved to be done with the lie.

  “It’s big, Mama,” I said, my words barely a whisper. “It’s really big.”

  “Oh Lord, Tena,” she said and grabbed my shoulder. “Are you pregnant?”

  I almost laughed, but thankfully didn’t.

  “No, Mama. It’s not that.”

  “Oh my Lord. You havin’ an affair with a married man?”

  “No, Mama, I’m not. It’s not that either,” I said, a chuckle finally escaping me.

  “Well, those are the two worst things I can think of. What else is it, then?”

  She sat back in the chair and rocked, waiting.

  Well, I thought, if those are the two worst things she can think of, maybe I’m in pretty good shape here. I took a deep breath.

  “I’m gay, Mama.”

  She never blinked, but looked at me with the saddest eyes I’d seen since she left the farm so many years before. Her eyes filled, and a huge tear rolled slowly down her cheek.

  “Are you sure, baby?”

  “Yes, Mama. I’ve always been gay, I just didn’t know what it was.” Then my tears started. “I’m so sorry, Mama.”

  She shook her head slowly from side to side, opening her arms.

  “Come here, baby, and sit in my lap.”

  Like a child, I crawled into her lap on the rocker and she held me as tightly as she ever had. We rocked in silence, and she stroked my hair and wiped the tears from my cheeks. Then she spoke.

  “I’m not cryin’ because I’m ashamed of you, or wish you were any different. I love you with all of my heart and always will.” She began to sob. “I’m cryin’ because it’s gonna be so hard for you, baby, so hard. I wish I could protect you from the world of pain and hurt coming your way, but I can’t. That’s why I’m crying.”

  I felt her arms tense to hold me tighter as she took a huge breath, letting it slowly escape her lips. I pressed my head against her as we rocked. I couldn’t speak.

  We rocked until the room was dark.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  * * *

  Even though I had shared my secret with Mama, I was far from being “out.” While I understood, intellectually, that I was gay, I was still stuck in the middle ground between embracing it as a concept and living my life authentically. All I felt was frustration and confusion. And as loving as Mama had been when I told her I was gay, she was conflicted morally: I knew she would soon be quoting me chapter and verse on the evils of homosexuality, just as she had those many years ago when I asked her what Daddy meant by “spinster.” Then one afternoon, a notice was put up in my sorority house about an upcoming talk by two representatives from something called the Campus Crusade for Christ. Sounded like one of those hippie cults from California we had been hearing about. I audibly groaned when I read the notice because attendance was mandatory—or else face getting a demerit. So that evening, dragging my heels and slumping my shoulders, I went in and sat down.

  Sure enough, Ron and Nancy Kaiser were an attractive twentysomething couple from California. They were positively perky. Typical! I thought, and sat in the audience mentally chanting, Don’t listen, don’t listen, don’t listen—it’s all a bunch of culty crap. Then I heard: “God isn’t about what your neighbor is doing, or even what your priest or preacher is doing; God is about you and your relationship with Christ. And no matter what that relationship is, He loves you, and loves you unconditionally.”

  I sat straight up in my chair, a chill running the length of my spine as the words settled. Who were these people? Young and hip, how could they also be Christians? I didn’t know you could be all those things at once.

  All my life I had seethed at the hypocrisy of the so-called faithful who drank and swore and sinned on Saturday night and then stood up in the choir as if they had halos floating above their heads; at the hypocrisy of the message “God loves all of his children,” but evidently not his black children; at Mama’s hypocrisy as she held the Bible in one hand and a tumbler of Jack Daniel’s in the other. It had never made any sense to me how someone could behave terribly one day and then sit in church with an angelic little smile on his face as if his slate had just been wiped clean of all and any sins. And here was an answer: This couple’s simple message was that others’ hypocrisy doesn’t matter. It was only my relationship with God that did.

  I felt something in me shift, and as I left the lecture I realized that what I felt was free. Free from the hypocrisy, free from the heavy cloak of righteousness, free from the burden of witnessing others’ sins and worrying that I needed to do something about it. A few weeks later, I received a letter from the Kaisers urging me to think about joining their next Bible study workshop in California. I turned the letter over
in my hands, then folded it carefully and tucked it in a drawer.

  * * *

  On my next trip home after coming out to Mama, Elizabeth suggested we go for a ride. In my family, “Let’s go for a ride” was always code for “We gotta talk some shit.” Once Elizabeth and I had bought some Cokes and were parked out at the old farm, her lips started to quiver and she turned to me with tears in her eyes.

  “Tena, I just gotta ask you. Are you a homosexual?” the word coming out of her a pinched, painful squeak.

  I couldn’t stop myself. I laughed and said, “Yes, I guess I am a homosexual, if that’s what you want to call it.”

  She immediately began crying, wailing actually, and her words came out in a great tumble of tears and gasps of breath.

  “No! You’re not! You’re just confused because you’ve never been with a man. But I have a plan. We’re gonna go to the Ramada Inn, we’ll each get a room, then we’ll go to the bar and drink and dance, and I want you to pick out a guy, any guy, and once you take him up to your room, you’ll see you are NOT a homosexual!”

  Amused as well as horrified, I knew I could parlay her crazy idea into leverage.

  I jumped up in my seat, full of righteous indignation. “I’m going to tell Daddy what you said!”

  Her eyes got big as saucers.

  “Tena! Listen to me, it’ll work! Daddy doesn’t have to know a thing! And then you’ll be cured! You won’t be a homosexual anymore!”

  “Oh my God, take me to Mama’s now!”

  We drove back into town without speaking and she dropped me at Mama’s. I slammed the car door and went into the house.

  “Hey, baby, how was your drive with Elizabeth?” Mama asked.

  “Mama, did you tell Elizabeth I was gay?” I demanded.