Southern Discomfort

by Tena Clark

  She suddenly got very interested in her puzzle, avoiding looking at me.

  “Why, heavens no,” she said, but without a lot of conviction.

  “Mama?” I persisted.

  She threw the puzzle on the table. “Well, all your sisters have been askin’ me what’s going on with you, why you’re not datin’ any college boys anymore, and Elizabeth just wouldn’t let up. I couldn’t keep it from her any longer!”

  “And Georgia, did you tell Georgia?”

  “No, I did not!” she said, outraged at the mere suggestion.

  “All right, then. I gotta go and tell her,” I said and headed to my car.

  I walked into Georgia’s kitchen and started right in.

  “You better sit down, I have something to tell you,” I said.

  Georgia sat down obediently and looked at me as she always had: the sister-mother always there to pick up any of my scattered, shattered pieces. Her dark brown eyes were the same color as mine. Had I never noticed before that none of us Clark girls got Daddy’s steel-blue eyes? We all got Mama’s Indian princess dark brown. The realization made me happy.

  “I’m gay.”

  Her eyes got a littler bigger, but that was her only reaction. Without a word, she got up and came around the kitchen counter to sit next to me. She put her arm around me and pulled me close.

  “I don’t quite know what that means, but you’re my sister and I love you, and that’s all that matters. I love you.”

  Like with Mama before her, we sat holding each other for a long, long time.

  Last among the siblings to hear my news, Penny instantly turned it into a social occasion.

  “Listen, I want you to come to the football game at USM next week. There are two men who go to every game who we tailgate with and they’re friends, if you get my drift. Not just friends, but together together. And they’re so cute and so nice, bless their hearts, and I told them that I have a sister that’s like them and—”

  “You already told them, before you heard it from me?”

  “Well, Lord knows how long it was going to take you to tell me! Besides, they’re so nice and sweet and I know you’ll just love ’em!”

  Of all my sisters, Penny was not only the bravest one when it came to facing down Daddy, she was also the most progressive in her politics. For her, my being gay was merely an excuse to raise a beer at the football game with their gay friends. Being nearly fifteen years older than me, she was closer in age to my mother, and our relationship was filtered through that age difference. But the times we were together remain vivid and dear, particularly plum-picking season when she’d drive over to the farm and yell down the hall to me in my room, “Come on, Tena! Grab your pail! The plums are ripe and we’re goin’ plum pickin’!”

  “Just you and me goin’?” I’d ask.

  “Yes, just you and I are goin’,” she’d say, correcting my grammar, like Mama always would. Being from the South, especially Mississippi, we have our own language, using words I’m not even sure exist in the dictionary. But Penny knew the difference and she’d let me know it too. I hated the lessons then, but I try to remember them now, because now I miss them.

  We’d spend the afternoon picking red plums and, when they were in season, the gumball-size yellow plums, and eat through just about our entire pails before we got back to the house.

  While Penny was arranging a night out for me with her gay friends, Elizabeth had been busy telling Daddy. As Georgia and I sat around a few days later sipping sweet tea, he pulled up to the house, honked twice, and waited for me to come outside.

  “Get in. Let’s go t-t-take a drive,” he said, waving toward the passenger door with a lit cigarette in his hand.

  I got in as commanded, my stomach knotting up. We cleared the downtown streets of Waynesboro, crossed the railroad tracks on the west side of town, and headed to the farm where I’d spent most of my childhood. Daddy had long since sold the house, but we still owned the land around it. When we got there, he pulled into the pasture and turned off the engine. His face held its usual scowl, betraying nothing.

  He lit a cigarette, looked straight out the windshield, and made his statement, pronouncing the word as if for the first time in his life.

  “Well, Tena Rix, your s-s-sister tells me you’re a HO-MO-sexual. Is that true?”

  While fearing I might throw up if I opened my mouth too fast, I nonetheless had to smile. I waited until my nerves were calmed a bit before speaking.

  “Well, Daddy, that’s not a word I use, but now that you bring it up. Yes. Yes, I am.”

  He shook his head, taking a long drag on his cigarette and letting the smoke out in a slow exhale.

  “I j-j-just don’t git it,” he said, his thick Mississippi accent sounding thicker than usual. “Can you p-p-please explain that to me?”

  And in a flash I knew just what to say.

  “Well, Daddy, you know how you really love women, a lot of women?”

  He looked at me confused. “Well, ah, ah, ah, yeah . . .” he sputtered, actually confessing his infidelity to me for the first time.

  I waited a few beats for effect. “Well, so do I.”

  I wish I had taken a photograph of his face. For perhaps the first and only time in his life, he was speechless. Then he cranked the truck and we headed back out onto the main road as if we’d just talked about the cows in the pasture. That was it. He never spoke of it again.

  * * *

  Whenever I came home from college, along with making the rounds to my mama’s, daddy’s, and sisters’ houses, I would visit our family chiropractor, Dr. William Jones. Billy, as we all called him, had worked on the entire family for years, from Daddy on down. My father may have hated doctors, but he swore by chiropractors ever since his log truck accident years before.

  In addition to being a chiropractor, Dr. Jones was a fire-breathing Christian fundamentalist and a Holy Roller preacher. Even with all of the Bible-thumping, the whole family trusted, even loved him, and he loved us right back, me included, albeit with some serious reservations after I came out as gay.

  On one particular visit, I went to him for my regular adjustment and he locked the door behind me. Uh-oh, I thought. This can’t be good.

  “Now, Tena, I’m gonna pray over you cuz you have the demon in you and that demon is HOMO-sexuality!” His eyes were flashing and his hands were already coming toward me.

  Oh my God, I thought, how in hell am I gonna get out of this one?

  “I gonna beat that demon right out of you, but you gotta trust me! I’ve done it before! I’ve seen that demon runnin’ away! AMEN! IN THE NAME OF JEHOVAH! I’ve seen it happen. HALLELUJAH JESUS!”

  While his eyes were closed and his hands clasped toward heaven, I made my move and busted out of the room before he could say another “AMEN!!”

  I drove home so fast I barely closed the car door. When I got to Mama’s house, I ran into the living room, panting.

  “What in the hell . . . ?” she asked, looking up from her crossword puzzle.

  “EXACTLY!” I shouted. “Billy just tried to beat the demon of homosexuality out of me!”

  “WHAT? Why, I’m gonna kill that sonofabitch!” Mama may have found Jesus Christ as her Savior and Redeemer, tithing her 10 percent faithfully every month, but she sure as hellfire was not going to have anyone tell her what the Good Lord wants and doesn’t want for her own baby daughter.

  Before I knew what was happening, Mama was out of her chair and in her car, driving back to Billy’s office.

  When she got home, I asked her what she’d said to him.

  “I told him that if I ever hear of him telling you that he’s gonna beat the homosexual out of you again, I’ll be over THERE beatin’ the livin’ hell outta HIM!”

  Mama, my one-woman crusade. Her conservative Christian beliefs couldn’t hold a candle to the ferocious mother-lion in her, determined to never again let harm come to her baby. Even so, when I got back to college after that visit, I found a little piec
e of paper tucked into my suitcase. It wasn’t a love note. It was First Corinthians, chapter 6, verses 9–10: Or do you not know the wrongdoers will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men (she underlined this part just in case I missed her point), nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the Kingdom of God.

  She just couldn’t help herself, sending me back with a little hellfire and damnation.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  * * *

  On a hot and muggy Hattiesburg morning in June of 1976, I stood in the stuffy USM gymnasium awaiting my turn to walk across the stage, shake the dean’s hand, take my diploma, and get on the road.

  “TENA RIX CLARK.”

  Unlike many of my classmates around me, I didn’t feel any euphoric elation or swelling pride in having graduated college—after Penny, only the second one in my family to do so. All I felt was an itching desire to get out of there and to start my musical life.

  As I descended the metal stage, I found Daddy in the milling crowd of new graduates and their families and well-wishers. No one else besides Daddy and Shirley, his latest girlfriend, had come to see me graduate. In fairness, Mama and my sisters had wanted to come, but I told them not to bother, that it meant nothing to me and that I was going to hightail it out of there the minute the ceremony was over—no party, no fancy lunch in some expensive restaurant, nothing. But Daddy had come anyway. With Shirley.

  Shirley and I actually went way back—all the way to kindergarten. That’s right, she was a year behind me in school, right through senior year, although she never made much of an impression on me. That is, not until she hooked up with my father, a man thirty-seven years her senior. Her father owned the town’s stockyard, and she worked in the office as soon as she was old enough to help. Not exactly poor, but far from wealthy, hers had been a modest upbringing. Until Daddy.

  Soon after they had begun dating, she and I found ourselves alone and she couldn’t resist bringing up my recently revealed sexuality.

  “I don’t understand your choices. I just don’t git it,” she said, echoing Daddy to the letter.

  Taking a deep breath, I tried to answer without spitting the words in her simpering “bless your heart” face.

  “Shirley, it’s simple,” I began. “It’s just how I don’t understand your choice of dating a man almost forty years older than you. I find that kind of disgusting. But I accept that it’s your choice. So, I don’t judge you, and I ask that you don’t judge me.”

  That shut her up and we never discussed it again.

  And here she was, at my graduation.

  “This is for you, Daddy,” I said as I handed him my diploma. I hadn’t even looked at it.

  He might have said “Congratulations,” but he didn’t. I might have said “Thank you,” but I didn’t. It would be the last major thing he would buy me in my life. My life of independence from him and his money was finally going to start.

  For the next few years, I was on the road with my band, and we played the South, from Nashville to New Orleans, and although we were a biracial band, we only had one run-in with the dangerous reality of the Deep South.

  In order to save every penny we could, we’d all share one motel room, tossing a coin for the available beds and couches, the loser sleeping on the floor in a pile of blankets and pillows. One early morning after a gig in Montgomery, Alabama, we were awakened by a crowd gathering in the parking lot outside our window. Casey, our black pianist, climbed off the sofa and went to the window.

  “Holy shit!” he said, pulling the curtain shut so fast a few of the rings came off the end of the rod. “Don’t open the curtain!”

  The rest of us jumped out of our beds and peered through a crack in the curtain at the object of his terror. The parking lot was full of people in white hoods and robes. We all looked at each other in the early-morning light, our breath coming in rapid pants.

  “Do you think they’re here because of us?” I asked no one in particular.

  “Holy shit, I hope not,” said our lead singer.

  We looked at Casey, who stood crouched in the darkest, farthest corner of the room. My heart broke for him. Our sad, screwed-up world caused this wonderful man to stand trembling and cowering in the corner of a rat-nasty, fleabag motel in the middle of Alabama, scared for his life. Black as well as gay, he didn’t stand a chance if exposed to the goons outside. It turned out the motel parking lot was just the crowd’s gathering place before a march, and they never knew we were there. If they found us, the rest of us might get roughed up for being with Casey, even beaten up for sleeping in the same room with him, but chances were good we wouldn’t be lynched. Nothing gave him the same assurance.

  * * *

  After a couple of years in the club scene, playing from 9 P.M. to 3 A.M. in a fog of cigarette smoke, drinking one too many free beers from the audience, and being asked to play Boz Scaggs’s “Lowdown” for the zillionth time, I was exhausted and looking for “what’s next.” It came in the form of a letter from the Campus Crusade for Christ folks in California, once again urging that I join them for an intensive, three-month Bible study in the hills above San Bernardino, followed by a possible world tour with their band. With a shrug of my shoulders, I thought, What the hell. Might as well play my drums for the Lord for a few months. Besides, won’t Mama be thrilled?

  She was, and so was I, at least until I was asked in a final interview before hitting the road with the CCC band if I’d ever had “any homosexual tendencies.” Refusing to lie, and heartbroken that these good Christian folks were demanding that I do so in order to stay in their band, I left California and headed back to Mississippi.

  When I got there, I had a whole new world of worry. Once again, it was Mama.

  * * *

  Thirty years of consuming upward of two to three fifths of bourbon a day, Mama’s laundry list of complaints became real illnesses, and my sisters and I found ourselves huddled around her as she lay in yet another hospital bed. She had a tumor the size of a cantaloupe in her abdominal cavity, most likely too large and entwined with veins and arteries to simply remove, but they had to at least try. Chances of her surviving the surgery were fifty-fifty, at best.

  As my sisters and I paced the waiting room, I looked out the window and saw snow filtering down through the magnolia trees. Snow. While not unheard of in Mississippi, it was rare enough to be special, and special enough to give me just a measure of happiness on that awful day. We stood mesmerized, watching the almost magical flurries, and then another miracle occurred: the arrival of a dozen red roses.

  “Get Well Soon, Lamar,” the card read.

  Holy shit.

  Hell was freezing over outside and in.

  Turned out the tumor was benign, but the doctor’s warning was not.

  “Vivian, enough is enough. If you drink so much as one more drop of alcohol, it will kill you. I mean that. It will kill you. The drinking ends. Today. Do you understand me?”

  She did. And bless her iron-will heart, she quit cold turkey. After decades of hard drinking, it was as if she simply turned off the spigot. She not only quit, but she formed Waynesboro’s first Alcoholics Anonymous, which gathered in the basement of her Methodist Church. It was composed entirely of white men, because white women would sooner die than go “public” with their drinking and black folks kept pretty much to themselves, especially where their addictions and abuses were concerned. The last thing a black person needed to add to his already heavy burden of oppression was being known as a drunk.

  For about a year, everything was great with her. And then, once again, it wasn’t. My sisters and I started noticing she was slurring her words and seemed loopy, groggy, but we knew it wasn’t booze because you can smell booze from across the room. It was something else, and when we went looking for it, we found it: Percodan. Lots of it. Bottle after bottle, from a variety of pharmacies and doctors.
Granted, the pain from her pancreatitis was no mild headache, but she was an addict nonetheless, and Percodan was just another form of substance abuse. Major league.

  “Mama, you can’t be doing this shit,” we told her as we flushed the pills down the toilet. She promised she’d quit.

  As addictive as alcohol is, for Mama Percodan was worse. She tried and failed to quit for months, and time after time we’d see the droopy eyelids and slack mouth, search around, and find more bottles hidden in her linen closet or bra drawer or hatboxes. It didn’t stop until we had gone to each of the three pharmacists in town and begged, then threatened, them not to give her any more pills. They finally stopped, and she was once and for all clean of addiction.

  It had only taken thirty years.

  Feeling like Mama was finally safe, I refocused on my music and my life. My musical career soon developed into a musical business, and I found myself in Nashville, the world’s unofficial music-writing capital. Soon, I was not only writing, but writing and producing for other artists. Things were going great, but personally, I was still pillar to post, as I had been since I was a teenager when I shuttled between Mama’s, Daddy’s, and my sisters’ houses.

  One day Daddy called. He was uncharacteristically anxious.

  “T-T-Tena Rix, I n-n-n-need to talk to you. I’m having M-M-Mayfield drive me up to Nashville this m-m-mornin’.”

  So I cleared my afternoon calendar and headed over to his hotel after he arrived. When I saw him, he was pacing the lobby and huffing and puffing on his cigarette, sounding as if he were stoking a fire with bellows.

  “Come on,” he said, taking my arm, “let’s g-g-go up to my room so we can t-t-talk in private.”

  “Daddy, what’s wrong with you? You’re a wreck,” I said, genuinely concerned at the state of this daddy I had never seen before. Even when Mama was packing her car and leaving him for good, he wasn’t this distraught.

  When we got to his room, he started in.

  “It’s Shirley, she’s left me,” he said, reaching for a cigarette with hands that actually shook. I stared as he struggled to steady the flame enough to light the cigarette. “Won’t even t-t-t-take my c-c-c-calls.”