by Paula Deen
I remember going over to Momma’s, and her holding Bobby and rocking him, tears rolling down her face, which was so sad because I knew she was thinking maybe she wouldn’t be here to watch him grow. I couldn’t believe it. Inside, I felt she’d get better with the cobalt treatments and all.
One day, I took her to the hospital for her cobalt, and I was standing waiting right outside the door when I heard this bloodcurdling scream; she’d turned over on the table to take cobalt on the back, and her leg had broke because the tumor had got so big. They wheeled her out into the hall, and she said, “I want them to amputate my leg.” That was my momma. So brave.
“Okay, Momma,” I said, “whatever you want. You lived with a man for twenty years who only had one leg, and you saw him survive beautifully. And you can too. You were taught by the best.”
She had that leg amputated—the same leg taken off in the same identical spot as my daddy’s.
Well, still, we thought it was wonderful that the pain was removed from her. We took her home, and Grandmomma Paul moved in to take care of her child, and they slept in the same bed. Grandmomma had to do it because I had the two little babies under three years old, but she would have done it no matter what.
Then there was Bubba. He was sixteen at the time and no one was taking care of him—such a young boy and just eaten up by all the pain and fear around him. He wouldn’t talk about anything to anyone, just ran wild.
Then, one day, Grandmomma Paul called me and said I needed to get over to the house because now Momma had found a knot on her chest. I started sweatin’ like Mike Tyson at a spelling bee.
“Grandmomma, I can’t go into her room,” I moaned when I got there. “I’m gonna need a nerve pill.” Grandmomma gave me a nerve pill, and I took it and went into another bedroom trying to calm myself down, and finally I got the courage to go in to see my momma. She showed me this lump right there on her chest. It was like a goose egg, and it had popped up just like that. We called her chiropractor, Dr. McDaniel, who came to the house immediately to check it out; he thought it was nothin’.
I remember crawlin’ up in the bed right next to Momma, and all of a sudden I just burst into tears; that’s how relieved I felt that it was nothin’. Momma put her arms around me and asked, “What’s the matter, honey?”
“I just was scared so bad, Momma,” I told her, and she held me in her arms and said everything was gonna be all right. She was always comforting me like that.
Everything was not all right. The cancer had spread. We were in big trouble.
Egg knots had started popping up all over Momma. She hadn’t been home long after her leg was amputated when she began to have constant, unrelenting pain. At the end of August, I called the ambulance to come pick her up and take her back to the hospital. She never again left that hospital. I remember that Momma was screaming so bad when the nurses came in to change her sheets, I had to walk away. I’ll never ever forget those screams.
Her leg surgery was in August, her birthday in the hospital was October 9, and she died exactly one month after her forty-fourth birthday, on November 9, 1970.
I was twenty-three years old, I had two babies under three, a sour marriage, a sixteen-year-old brother, and our momma and poppa were both dead. My spirit was broken. My mind wasn’t doing too good either. I felt increasingly fearful when I had to leave my house. So mostly, I stayed in.
And then my husband gave me the perfect gift, one for which I’ll always be grateful. As much as he didn’t hear me when I tried to talk to him, Jimmy was so good about certain other things. I felt overwhelming sorrow at the death of my parents, but the pain I felt for my little brother’s grief was unbearable. Jimmy took my orphaned, heartbroken sixteen-year-old brother into our home and loved him just as though Bubba was his child. Afterward, even when our marriage was so shaky, he never once came to me to say, “This ain’t fair; we can’t afford to keep Bubba.” He did nothing but love my brother and Bubba loved him back. They’d go hunting and fishing together and Jimmy was the best stand-in father. Jimmy had many good qualities, and kindness was one of them. I will always be thankful that he passed that kind of sweetness on to our children.
But I was in pretty poor shape. I felt my mental growth had been frozen when I was only nineteen from the pure shock of everything. Now, at about twenty-three, an impending sense of doom really hung over me, as if I’d be living in a dark valley forever. Every day I thought I’d die, or, even worse, someone I loved would die. The blackness still didn’t have a name. The days dragged by. I hated to leave my home, my comfort zone, but my kids were so small, they were totally dependent on my shopping for them and getting them some fresh air. I got out a little, a very little—and then hurried back home as though something was chasing me.
Jamie was like a Mexican jumping bean. He would get so excited if company came over. He’d just run and make crazy dances and all these wild faces and go bananas. Once when he was about three, he tripped over a rock and yelled out with all the ferocity he had in him, “Damn wock!” He was such an animated kid, but Bobby just sat there, smiling. Once in a while, Jamie could get his baby brother cranked up, but Bobby was always so low-key. I remember him at eighteen months sitting way up in a high chair and if someone came in and said, “Hey, Bobby,” he’d look at them and, like a good Southern boy, answer, “Suh?” That would be it for the communication.
Those two boys were so close, they always kissed each other good night before they fell asleep. They’re still the most lovin’ brothers on the face of the earth. I remember their daddy had gotten them a big old white pit bull with one black and one sky-blue eye. We adored that dog despite the breed’s reputation for meanness. I remember one particular day when they were a little older, my two lazy kids were lying in bed with this dog named Blue between them, and I walked into the room, put my hands on my hips, and said sternly, “Y’all get your tails out of this bed right now and go help your daddy in the yard.” Well, they didn’t move an inch, but that pit bull slowly got himself out from between them, stepped over one boy’s body to face me, and then just growled—you know that kind of low, deep growl that shows their fangs, that growl that means business?
“Screw it,” I said. “Y’all just stay where you are. You too, Blue.”
Things were going to get a lot worse with my illness that had no name. When my babies were small, I became so overprotective. I was frightened of everything and so terrified something was going to happen to my boys. I watched them like a hawk and we lived in the doctor’s office; I was a true hypochondriac both for me and for my sons. Fear of death was beginning to take over my life, and worry about a panic attack coming was always in my mind, even though they were not yet coming on a regular basis. When they did happen, I learned to inhale and exhale into a paper bag; that would somehow make it better. I never went anywhere without a paper bag in my purse to blow into if the bad thing happened. Without that paper bag, I’d start to hyperventilate for sure, and just thinking about that would cause me to have a panic attack. I never told anyone about that paper bag, but one day Bobby saw me blowin’ in it, and he was terrified. He just didn’t know what was happening and he was too little for an explanation. Jamie remembers me havin’ an attack once in a store and me duckin’ down and drawing them both close so I could kind of hide behind them. Jamie tells me he doesn’t remember much about that time, thank God, because he thinks they were both pretty resilient kids and in his case it was, “Oh, my gosh, what is this?” and the next minute he was sayin’, “Hey, buy me a football!”
When I was twenty-five, I read a book called A Woman of Substance by a lady named Barbara Taylor Bradford. Oh, I just loved that book. I whispered to myself that when I really grew up, I would also be a woman of substance. I would have grandchildren and they would call me Grandlady—that’s what they called the grandmother in the book.
But so far I felt very insubstantial. I felt weak, flimsy, almost falling apart with fear.
Substance would have to wai
t.
Mississippi Mud Cake
Mississippi Mud Cake is serious comfort food, my friends. You can sink into that deep, chocolate-y mud, and those sweet and mushy marshmallows, and feel safe. I could eat a whole cake when I was hidin’ under my bed.
2 cups sugar
½ teaspoon salt
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 stick unsalted butter
½ cup vegetable oil
½ cup cocoa
2 eggs
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ cup buttermilk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 bag miniature marshmallows
ICING
1 stick unsalted butter, softened
3 tablespoons cocoa
6 tablespoons milk
One 1-pound box confectioners’ sugar
1 cup chopped pecans or walnuts
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease and flour a 13 by 9-inch baking pan.
Combine the sugar, salt, and flour in a large mixing bowl. Bring the butter, oil, cocoa, and ¼ cup water to a boil in a sauce pan. Add to the flour mixture.
Beat together the eggs, baking soda, buttermilk, and vanilla. Add to the chocolate mixture, mix well, and pour into the prepared pan. Bake for 25 minutes.
While the cake is baking, make the icing by melting the butter in the cocoa and milk over low heat. Bring the mixture to a boil, then remove from the heat. Stir in the confectioners’ sugar. Slowly mix in the nuts and the vanilla. Take the cake from the oven, and when it cools a bit cover it with miniature marshmallows. Pour the warm icing over the cake and the marshmallows. Cool the cake before serving.
Chapter 5
THE TERROR DID HAVE A NAME
Okay—I wasn’t a woman of substance, but I was still foggin’ the mirror, not all fallen apart, yet.
Look—when you wake up in the morning on the right side of the dirt, it’s a good day. I knew I had to try to remember that. If you’re on the right side of the dirt, you still have another chance to make bad things better.
After Momma and Daddy died, I was trying to keep my panic attacks a secret. Some days, though, it was so bad I wasn’t sure that I was still on the right side of the dirt. If I told anyone what was going on inside of me, I thought I’d sound like a loony; who would want to be my friend if they knew how crazy I was? I’d always been pretty, an all-together, popular girl, and I didn’t want to admit to anyone I might have a serious problem. If I didn’t go outside, I figured, if I didn’t really live my life, it would reduce my risk of being hurt.
But there were my boys. I felt so guilty. They didn’t have a whole, healthy momma; they’d been shortchanged.
In the late seventies, the panic progressed even deeper. Of course, we had no insurance to pay a real, live, licensed, grown-up psychiatrist, but I felt I was so depressed, I had to make myself save some money so I could go at least once. Well, I went once, but the one time sure didn’t help. The doctor charged like sixty dollars an hour, and we couldn’t come up with sixty dollars a year for anything that wasn’t food. That’s how close to starving we were.
I decided to go see a church leader, hoping he would know what in tarnation was wrong with me. I’d heard that my church, the First Baptist Church, had started a health service and hired a Southern minister who had a degree in psychology. Now, man, you turn one of them ministers who think they’re Freud loose, your ass is through. But I was having a real, real hard time. If I wanted to shop for groceries, Jimmy had to take me. If the boys had to go anywhere farther than they could walk, a neighbor or Jimmy had to take them. I was so embarrassed and I really wanted to get better, so I decided I’d try this minister with the degree. Jimmy had to come home from work and pick me up to go to the session because I couldn’t drive anywhere by myself.
Once we got to the church, I just walked in and started pouring my heart out to this man. Jimmy was just sittin’ there so quiet, and it came out that we were having problems about Jimmy’s drinking and him turning to stone and not hearing me as soon as he finished even one beer. I knew our marriage problems didn’t help my own problem, but here I was like a babbling idiot telling everything. I was that desperate.
Well, the minister man looked hard at me and, when I finished crying, when I finished talking, he stared into my eyes and said, “Your husband having a beer every day does not make him an alcoholic. And you are a spoiled brat.”
Jimmy only smiled. I was flabbergasted and so hurt, but Paula Deen was never so hurt she didn’t have words. I said to that powerfully mean man, “Well, you know what you can do? And that man over there—that husband? Y’all can kiss my ass and call me Shorty and go to hell.” And I never went back.
In a way, he was right; if being protected and cherished by my parents was being spoiled, then I guess I was. If being loved too much by my parents was giving me panic attacks when I wasn’t being loved at all by my husband, then I guess I was spoiled rotten.
My husband said nothing more than “This guy just told you I have no problem, so get off my ass because our troubles are not me, they’re you.”
Jimmy had gone to work for his brother, who was a very successful car dealer in Albany, but they had a disagreement, and his brother fired him. We were desperate, and our financial troubles were startin’ to smother us.
Then began a terrible period—I guess it was between 1977 and 1983—when I was really crippled by this fright I had. I couldn’t leave my house, no way, no how.
The one thing I could rely on was my stove. Backed against the wall, I cooked everything my granny taught me and then some. Fried chicken, collard greens, country fried steak—my family ate good.
For a while, we were hopeful. When they died, my parents didn’t have much money to leave me—it was maybe fifteen thousand dollars—but whatever little it was, early in 1977 I’d given it all to Jimmy to invest in a Chrysler Dodge dealership franchise. Jimmy had made my twenty-three-year-old brother, Bubba, a partner in this dealership because we wanted Bubba to have something too. They opened it in a little suburb of Albany called Dawson, a farm town that depended on its agriculture. But, oh God, late in 1977, there was the worst drought ever and all the farmers were dead broke and the Chrysler dealerships were dropping like flies. Ours was one of them. In a while, Lee Iacocca was to come in and turn Chrysler around, but it wasn’t soon enough for us. Plus, I’m thinking that maybe Jimmy made a bunch of bad business decisions. That was when they repossessed our little house. Of course, Bubba also lost everything he’d been left.
It was awful. Bubba and Jimmy and the kids and I took a cheap apartment in Albany, but we didn’t even have a car to move our stuff from the repossessed house to the new apartment. One of the peanut farmers, a cute guy named Billy Martin, had become friends with Jimmy, and Billy offered to move us. He loaded our furniture in his peanut wagon and I was so scared on the way that I totally wrapped myself up in a blanket so I couldn’t see I wasn’t near home. There was a full-blown panic attack happening: I was just praying no one would notice I was wrapped in this blanket so I couldn’t see. We moved into this low-rent apartment complex called the Terra Villa. I never trusted the folks who lived there. I called it the Terrible Villa and I couldn’t stand it. Jimmy eventually was to move us about twenty times before I was forty. It was at the Terrible Villa that I stopped doing anything that required me to leave my four walls. Creditors would knock on the door, and I’d hide. The years to come would be the worst in my whole life.
Fear of death ruled me. Panic was the king of the road.
When you’re close to paralyzed, there isn’t that much you can do. I listened to the news on the radio—1977 was the year Legionnaires’ disease was brought to our attention. Now I could also worry about dying from the bad air that came from the radiator. Elvis Presley died that year and I felt bad about that: Elvis was the Mississippi Southerner who sang blues laced with country and gospel, and he was my secret idol—a real sexy, cool rebel. I wanted
to do something big, and I also wanted to be a sexy, cool rebel, but it was going to be hard if I couldn’t leave my house. Later, I heard on the radio that Jimmy Carter was elected president and I felt happy that a Southerner would be running our country. Little did I dream that Mr. Jimmy and I were to become friends … but that would be in my next life, the one I didn’t even dare to dream about. And I didn’t know it then, but a little baby named Orlando Bloom was born on January 13, 1977—the year my home was grabbed away by the bank, the year I carried a brown paper bag in my purse in case, God forbid, I’d suffer a panic attack and couldn’t breathe. Little did I know, one day little Orlando Bloom and I would be in a movie together. People would ask for my autograph.
There was one thing I could do while I was prisoner in my home, and that was to cook. I got real good at it. I particularly loved baking—and I baked every possible combination of pies, cookies, and cakes. Sometimes, my Grandmother Paul’s lessons were able to come tearing through my depression. I also made maybe thousands of pots of chicken and dumplings, the best soups on the planet, and tons of candy. The cooking didn’t give me wings to soar, but it gave me a grounding, a feeling of safety just in smellin’ the good aromas of my childhood. I was in my own home, I was cooking, I was feeding my family; I was almost like a real wife, I told myself.
And, I was definitely still a real sister. Living two doors down from me was a cute, cute woman with the most precious little six-year-old boy from a past marriage. I talked with Jill occasionally, and decided she’d be terrific for Bubba. Being Paula Deen, I couldn’t resist matchmaking even during the depths of my fear. Bubba listened to his big sister especially when she was playin’ Cupid, and on St. Patrick’s Day, 1980, Jill and Bubba were married. I remember my brother telling me that he fell as much in love with Jay as he did with Jill, and soon after the marriage, he adopted that adorable boy with the big dark eyes and the curly black hair as his very own child. On March 6, 1981, Jill and Bubba had a little girl whom they named Corrie who was to become the beloved daughter of my own heart.
