by Tena Clark
“Surely you can think of something you want. Something that will make you feel better, Virgie. Please tell me. I’ll get you anything at all. Anything in the world.”
It took her a while, but she finally thought of something she had always wanted.
“Well, I’s never had chocolate, scrawberry, and ’nilla ice cream, all at the same time.”
“Do you mean, like Neapolitan?” I asked.
“I don’t know anything about that. All I knows is it be chocolate, scrawberry, and ’nilla, all in the same bowl.”
I raced to the store and bought two gallons of each flavor, six in all, and raced back to her house. Grabbing a big spoon for each of us from the kitchen drawer, I put a gallon of each on the table, and opened all the lids. We sat there, laughing and talking and eating spoonful after spoonful, Virgie as content as I’d seen her since our afternoons walking back from Ramey’s Rolling Store at the end of our driveway.
At the end of her life, the biggest extravagance she could think of was a bowl of Neapolitan ice cream. I was flooded with shame. After all she had done for my family, for me, there was nothing besides ice cream that I could give her. She had been, for over thirty years, my one steady source of acceptance, of unconditional love. Had I ever truly appreciated it? Had I thanked her enough for all she’d taught me, for all she’d done for me? Did she even know that she would forever occupy a permanent place in my soul? Did she even know how much I loved her? Yet here I was, only able to thank her with ice cream.
We sat and talked and laughed and ate ice cream until I could see exhaustion weight her eyes and sag her shoulders, and I knew it was time to leave.
“Goodbye, Virgie. I love you more than you’ll ever know, and I’m going to see you real soon. You take care of yourself until I come back. I love you, Virgie.”
“I loves you too, baby. I shaw do.”
I turned back from the doorway and watched her carefully lick the spoon clean.
It was the last time I saw her.
Virgie was buried next to Jack in the pig pasture behind the Hiwannee Baptist Church. In her obituary in the Jackson Daily News, I was listed among her many children.
Chapter Thirty-One
* * *
After Virgie died, I threw myself into work, hoping to avoid the pain. But the void she left had a terrible finality, unlike other deaths I’d had in my life. Even after I left Waynesboro, I knew she was always there when I needed her, even hundreds and thousands of miles away, ready to offer peace and security. With her absence, I felt an uneasy current run through me whenever I thought of her, rather than the tender warmth that being near her had always provided. And with a sinking heart, I knew, with losing Virgie, I had lost that tender warmth forever.
Soon, I forced myself to stop thinking about it entirely because I was in a total panic trying to start a new company, not just writing and producing music, but using music to brand companies and corporations. It was a bold idea, and I was petrified of losing everything in the process. But my gut told me to do it. After some fits and starts, I got the business up and running enough to justify an order of letterhead and business cards. It wasn’t much, but it was a beginning.
One day, when I was still struggling with the company’s growing pains, Daddy called to ask if I would meet him in Nashville because he needed to talk to me.
“We’ll go to dinner when you get in. I want you and me to sit and talk.”
This was not the father I knew. This person on the phone was a man requesting something, with almost hat-in-hand timidity, kind of like when Shirley had walked out on him. This time, I was the nervous wreck, imagining what could be wrong, what he would tell me. A few days later, I met him at the Opryland Hotel. By the time we were sitting together in the hotel’s indoor faux garden, a fountain splashing lazily behind plastic palm trees, my stomach was in knots.
“I ain’t been f-f-feeling well,” he began, his voice soft, if not a bit tremulous. Again, my heart sank, fearing the worst. “I want you to come b-b-back home,” he continued, “and take over my b-b-b-businesses.”
I didn’t say a word. I couldn’t. I was, for one of the only times in my life, truly speechless. He continued in the silence.
“I want to t-t-teach it to you while I still can, to r-r-run it. What you got g-g-going out there in Los Angeles? You got a mortgage? Credit card b-b-b-bills?”
“Well, sure I do,” I said, finally able to answer a simple question.
“Whatever you owe in California, I’ll p-p-p-pay it all off, everything. You come here debt f-f-f-free, and you’ll run my company. I’ll help you. I can’t rest in p-p-p-peace knowing you’re still out there”—he gestured wildly—“in G-G-G-GODdamn California.”
And then, as a final salvo, he delivered his coup de grâce, one my sisters and I had heard countless times through the years, depending on which of us was in favor at the time.
“I’m g-g-going to leave everything to you. My entire estate. It will all b-b-be yours. If you come home.” He finally stopped, satisfied he’d made a solid pitch, that he had convinced me to pack my bags, sell my house, fold up my company, and move back to Waynesboro.
I certainly ain’t Jesus and my daddy ain’t Satan, but in that moment I felt as if we were in the biblical scene where the Devil took Jesus up on the mountain, waved his great red arm at the vast lands below, and said, “If you follow me, all of this will be yours.”
But I had to admit I was also flattered by Daddy’s offer. I didn’t know why he saw me as his potential heir, but I loved that he did. As I pondered the offer and reveled in self-congratulations, he spoke, destroying the fantasy he had almost created.
“I need you to do this, fast,” he said, back to hard-nosed business. Lamar Clark was eager to seal the deal.
“Daddy, I’m speechless,” I said. “I’m so flattered and humbled you want to hand me your company. The very fact that you’re trusting me with what you’ve spent a lifetime building means the world to me and I am so grateful.”
He nodded and lit a cigarette. I continued.
“Does it sound awesome? To have my debt erased and to come back home and make tons of money? Yes, but”—I took a deep breath and continued—“I would die if I gave up everything I’ve created to move back to that tiny town. I’m successful. I make a good living in the music business. It’s all I’ve ever known or wanted.”
He started to fidget and frown, and I rushed on.
“And as far as your estate, I would never leave my sisters out of it. Ever. No matter what happens, it’s an even split between each of us.”
I shook my head, suddenly exhausted with this conversation and with my overbearing father, trying to test his daughters like some good-ole-boy version of King Lear.
“Daddy, it makes me feel like you don’t really know me, if you think . . .”
“Bullshit,” he said, the word coming out like a bullet. His face was bloodred and he was madder than a bull. He got up to leave, brushing the pleat on his pant leg. He was done.
“Oh come on, Daddy. Please don’t walk off mad,” I begged, reaching up for his sleeve. “Please listen. What you’ve offered me is an incredible opportunity, but you have to respect what’s important to me. I would wither and die on the vine in Waynesboro. You know that.”
He shrugged off my hand.
“I gotta g-g-get upstairs, I’m leavin’ soon,” he said, looking toward the lobby.
“But, I thought we were having dinner.”
“Nah, I gotta g-g-get back to work. I got a lot to do,” he said, lighting another cigarette and putting his hat on his head.
“You told me you’re not feeling well, tell me what’s going on.”
“Hell, I’m fine. I’m fine. Well, then, just call me sometime.”
“That’s it?” I asked, incredulous.
“That’s it,” he said. “Gotta go.”
And he walked away. I watched his back retreating through the fake ficus trees and bougainvillea bushes and thought I
could see steam rising from his shoulders.
I knew that something shifted between us that day, the same way that something had shifted the day I told him I was gay. There were now three strikes against me, his youngest daughter. I was gay. I chose a career in music. And then, the ultimate insult: I refused his offer to take over his business. The three things that defined who I was. And he all but despised me for each of them.
* * *
Even with the hurt he kept inflicting, I still returned to Waynesboro, and on each trip would always make sure to see Daddy. I’d either swing by his office or house, or sometimes meet him for breakfast or lunch at his Best Western motel on Azalea Drive.
On one of my visits in the early 1990s, my sisters joined us for breakfast at the motel. I got there first and saw Mayfield, Daddy’s long-suffering right-hand man who had driven me home from school years before, bent over a cleaning pole, vacuuming the pool. I went up behind him, wrapped my arms around his thin back, and told him how much I missed him. Mayfield shrank under my embrace and gently moved away.
“What’s the matter, Mayfield? You don’t want to give me a hug?” I asked, genuinely surprised and a little hurt.
“Now, Miss Tena, you knows if Mister Lamar sees you huggin’ on me, he’ll kilt me.”
I stepped back, shocked and ashamed. We were still in a place where a white woman couldn’t hug the hired black help. But worse, I had genuinely put the fear of God, and of Daddy, in this sweet man’s heart.
“I’m so sorry, Mayfield. I-I forgot. It’s not like that in California. I just wanted to say I love and miss you something fierce.”
“I knows you do, Miss Tena, and I sho do ’preciate it,” he said, his head down, his hands still on the pole.
As I turned to walk into the motel, I saw Daddy standing in the dining room, smoking a cigarette and watching us through the window. He turned and walked away, disappearing into the dark folds of the room.
After my sisters arrived, we all sat in the dining room and watched as our daddy’s face darkened. We turned to follow his gaze out the window and saw a black family—a mother, father, and two little kids—happily splashing in the pool. No one dared speak, but we all knew Daddy’s face meant trouble.
“GODdamn n-n-n-niggers,” he mumbled, crushing out his cigarette. “They are not going to swim in my pool!”
It took me a minute to register what he’d said.
“Daddy, come on, seriously,” I said.
But without another word, he stormed out.
I turned to Elizabeth and Georgia. “That’s ridiculous. How can he still be thinking that way?”
“Daddy’s never going to change, Tena. It’s just the way it is,” Georgia said.
“It’s almost the twenty-first century! My Lord, they can swim wherever they want to swim!” I said.
“Just drop it, get over it,” Elizabeth said, reaching for a roll and butter, apparently bored with the conversation.
Several days later, Cody and I were back to have lunch at the motel with Daddy and, as were digging into our food, I noted the pool had been drained. It was just a hollow cement rectangle.
“Is there a leak, Daddy?” He ignored my question.
Just then a cement truck backed up to the pool and began filling it. Daddy looked out the window at the truck, his eyes narrowing as he took a long drag on his cigarette.
“Daddy, what’s wrong with the pool?” I asked.
“I’m fillin’ the sonofabitch up. Buildin’ a g-g-g-gazebo.”
“What?!” I said, my eyes going back and forth between him and the slowly filling pool.
“I told you I’m not gonna have G-G-G-GODdamn niggers swimmin’ in my pool and runnin’ everybody else off.”
“Daddy, that’s horrible,” I said.
“My g-g-g-guests are not going to swim in the same pool with n-n-n-niggers. No way, not at my motel.” And that was the end of it. I looked over at Cody. Not quite four years old, her eyes were nonetheless wide with shock.
Through the window, I saw Mayfield standing by the pool, his head down, watching the cement fill the empty hole.
Chapter Thirty-Two
* * *
“Mama’s real sick, Tena.”
Once again, it was Georgia calling to deliver the bad news.
“Doctors want to do some tests to make sure, but it sure looks like cancer, what with all her smoking and drinking all those years.”
As awful as the news was, I wasn’t terribly worried. Mama was a hypochondriac with more than her share of ailments, but she was, at her core, one tough old broad. All of the Atkinson sisters were. Something in the genetic pool, I hoped. A few years earlier, when she was about eighty, my aunt Ivy had been out picking butter beans in her garden when she suffered a stroke. She lay between the rows all day, staring up at the sky watching the clouds roll by, until someone finally found her. The only side effect of the stroke was a bad sunburn.
Mama was equally tough, but still, Georgia’s news unsettled me. I thought Mama’d turned a corner. She’d finally gotten sober from alcohol and pills, found religion, and, a few years earlier, she had at last realized a lifelong dream of becoming a professional songwriter.
I had been working as a music supervisor on Police Academy 3. We needed a 1940s-era song for the diner scene, and I took one of Mama’s 78s to Paul Maslansky, the producer, and said, “Listen to this.”
A year later, I sat with Mama and watched her name come up on the big screen in Meridian’s biggest movie theater. Not only had she finally become a bona fide songwriter, she received the first paycheck of her life to prove it. She was sixty-five years old. When I asked her if she wanted to move to a nicer house in a better neighborhood, she shook her head, insisting she was just fine where she was. But when the first royalty check came later that year, she allowed that she had always wanted a carport and did I think that was too extravagant?
“Mama! It’s your money,” I told her. “As Elizabeth would say, ‘You can stick it up a gopher’s ass if you want to! It’s yours.’ ”
Pretty soon she had a little tin roof put on the front of her cinder block one-bedroom bungalow. A few days after that she called me again.
“Do you suppose people would think I was silly if I got a Police Academy 3 license plate for my car?”
Again, I didn’t. She ordered it, and THNK U PA-3 adorned her bumpers for the rest of her life.
Mama was a beloved figure around Waynesboro, which was kind of amazing given her years as its most infamous and visible alcoholic. It was the way she carried herself: confident, like royalty. She would enter a restaurant, store, or church, and every head would turn and every face would light up in greeting. And then there was her reputation for being trigger-happy—over the years, the story of her shooting out Daddy’s windshield had become legendary, and she still reached for a gun from time to time. For example, rather than buy a squirrel trap, she would stand on her back porch in her pink velvet housecoat and matching slippers and shoot “the little bastards” with her BB gun when they climbed up the clothesline pole.
But as adored as she was, I think she was also deeply lonely. Virgie’s grandsons who owned an auto repair shop in town once told me that she would bring her car in two or three times a week to have it cleaned and washed, whether it needed it or not, which it most often did not. While she waited, she would hold court in the garage office, telling her stories to the mechanics who gathered around her like children listening to a bedtime story. Her deep voice and side-splitting delivery would mesmerize even those who had heard the same stories time and again. One she loved telling, because it always got a huge guffaw, involved her stopping at a gas station in Laurel and asking the elderly attendant if he had a restroom she could use.
“No, ma’am, I don’t,” said the man, tipping his hat, “but if you’ll back it up, I’ll see if I can blow it out with an air hose.”
“You sonofabitch!” Mama yelled, slamming her foot on the gas and hightailing it out of the station,
leaving the attendant scratching his head in a cloud of dust.
Only in retelling the story later did she realize the man thought she asked if he had a whisk broom not a restroom.
And now, Waynesboro’s most celebrated and cherished Miss Vivian was very sick with cancer.
* * *
Once again, I was on the next plane to Waynesboro. I barely had time to wash my face after arriving at Georgia’s house before my sisters and I loaded Mama into the car and we all drove to Hattiesburg for her test results. Eerily, the five of us crammed into one car on a road trip reminded me of our drive to Whitfield nearly twenty-five years earlier. Again, I felt the guilt of that thirteen-year-old girl, unable to save Mama and yet still feeling as if I should have. I reached over and took Mama’s hand. She gave it a squeeze and we both watched the road ahead.
We drove the familiar highway south, through small towns without a traffic light and past countless barbeque and fried food joints. The smell of sweet barbeque pork, smoked ribs, and fried chicken livers and shrimp wafted through the car.
In Hattiesburg we got two rooms at the Holiday Inn near the hospital. The five of us sat up most of the night, spread between the two beds in Mama’s and my room, and tried to talk each other out of despair. And we told stories, laughing until we cried, our tears of laughter mingling with and disguising those of sorrow.
The next morning we traipsed into the doctor’s office, looking like a casting call for Steel Magnolias—five women of the South, as different as we could be and yet born of the same soil and blood, all thinking and praying in one silent voice: Please, God, not cancer.
“I’m sorry to have to tell y’all this, but it’s cancer. And it’s in both lungs,” the doctor said. He stood with his chart held tightly in his hands, a sympathetic look on his face.
