by Fannie Flagg
Daddy has some great ideas about merchandise. He feels that we shouldn’t just limit ourselves to food, especially since most people bring their own. We took all the tables and chairs out of the middle of the room and left the booths. We built huge display shelves where we are going to have souvenirs, sunglasses, suntan lotion and everything you can think of.
We’ve ordered hats, beach balls, inner tubes, sand buckets and shovels for young children, cigars and cigarettes, Zippo see-through lighters that have fishing lures and dice right in them, and every kind of headache and stomachache remedy you can think of. We ordered magazines, and Kodak film, mosquito repellent, fishing equipment and candy. We even sell a joke. It is a jar that says “Old Indian Hemorrhoid Medicine.” When you open it up, a rubber finger pops out!
Daddy let me pick out the water floats. I think our biggest seller will be a Moby Dick or the Howdy Doody inner tube, but the things that will really sell are the shells stuck in pink plaster of paris, with a pink plastic flamingo or a cross on them. They also have a light and can be used as a lamp or a centerpiece, and there’s a gold decal on them that says “Shell Beach, Mississippi.”
We also ordered a lot of little antebellum women made out of shells. We’re going to get all the latest magazines and I can read them if I don’t get them dirty. Our jukebox has “Wheel of Fortune” by Kay Starr and “Too Young” by Nat King Cole and my favorite, “Come ona My House” by Rosemary Clooney. Momma loves to play “Blue Tango.” I wish I hadn’t told Rose Mary Salvage I was going to Russia so she could hear I had my own jukebox. Momma is going to be the hostess and cashier. Daddy is going to be the cook. I am the buying consultant.
We met some more people yesterday, Mr. and Mrs. Dudley Dot. They live at the beach. I don’t like him very much, but I like Mrs. Dot. She had on a big hat and never lets the sun hit her face. She said she would rather take poison than ruin her skin. She has a club that she wants me to join called the Jr. Debutantes’ Club. It meets in the back of the live bait store every week. She feels it is her duty as a southern woman to help bring culture to the young ladies of Shell Beach. Momma said I have to go.
Mrs. Dot writes a column for the Magnolia Springs paper and she put us in it. The column is called “Dashes from Dot.” It said: “Shell Beach has a new family, the William Harpers and their darling daughter, Daisy. They’ve moved from Jackson, Mississippi, and purchased the malt shop at the end of Highway 4. Mr. Harper was previously employed in the finest theaters in Jackson as a master projectionist. We wish them good luck!” Daddy said we would probably be in the paper a lot because there are only twenty people living here.
The closest town is Magnolia Springs, ten miles up the highway. Mrs. Dot said Shell Beach was ten miles to a loaf of bread and twenty-five miles to a spool of pink thread. I went to Magnolia Springs the other day and it has one street, and that’s it. But it has a movie. I saw Lash La Rue in Frontier Phantom. It’s funny to sit in the audience and not in the balcony.
The other morning I woke up about seven o’clock. I thought a war had started. Guns were going off and we heard an army marching up and down the beach and some man shouting orders. Daddy ran out the door in his underwear.
And guess what? There was a whole group of women in boots and uniforms doing maneuvers right in our backyard, charging along the sand dunes. Daddy went over to the man giving the orders and found out his name was Mr. Curtis Honeywell. He owns the Stars and Stripes Insurance Company in Magnolia Springs. His army is all the secretaries and the receptionist that work there.
He was in a uniform with a big hat with a feather on it from Australia. Mr. Honeywell swears the Communists are coming to take over and are going to land right on our beach. He’s getting his army ready to defend the Gulf Coast of Mississippi as his patriotic responsibility.
The girls are called the Mississippi Maidens for Freedom. If you are a secretary at his insurance company, you have to be in the army and train three times a week.
Daddy said he didn’t think Communists were interested in Shell Beach.
Mr. Honeywell asked Daddy if he knew that in the Second World War they found three Japanese submarines with dead Japanese soldiers still in them right up the road, in the Mississippi Sound.
Daddy said, “No, I didn’t know that and what in the world would the Japanese want in Mississippi?” and went back to bed.
I was dressed because I sleep in my swim trunks, so I stayed out there with the Mississippi Maidens shooting their guns. Halting and coming to attention is what they do best. Mr. Honeywell said I could be the mascot. I told him I had a BB gun and would be happy to shoot with them. The girls were real nice.
Daddy asked Mr. Romeo about Curtis Honeywell. He said that he always had an all-woman army and he owns almost all of Harwin County.
Momma said he must be crazy as a loon. I think it is great and I feel very safe. If I were a Communist, I wouldn’t want to tangle with those girls.
The only bad thing is that I’m not getting to swim in the Gulf as much as I thought I was going to because Momma has to watch me. She is afraid the undertow will get me.
June 4, 1952
Jimmy Snow came down to see us the other day and said the place looked great. The reason he hasn’t been here sooner was he was busy crop-dusting. After he left, Daddy said that Jimmy was a great guy and got drunk one time and dusted crops in downtown Tupelo. Momma didn’t think that was funny. But I do.
I finally met Kay Bob Benson. I don’t think she likes me much. I had to go to her house and look at the dumb collection of dolls that she has in a glass cage. She is real impressed because she has some Madame Alexander dolls. Big dealt What good are dolls in a glass cage?
She is president of the Jr. Debutantes’ Club and gets to go to camp every summer. I don’t understand why she would want to leave the beach. She told me that she was such a pretty little girl that they used her picture on Sunshine bread as Little Miss Sunshine. I don’t believe it. Her mother is famous because she found a man’s leg that washed up on the beach. They knew it was a man’s leg because it had a golf shoe on it. Nobody knew who it belonged to. It could have come from Cuba even. Some people have all the luck.
Kay Bob Benson’s name is in Mrs. Dot’s column every week because her mother is Mrs. Dot’s best friend. I wish Momma would get friendly with Mrs. Dot. Also, Kay Bob said I could never be a model because I have a chipped tooth. Who cares?
We don’t open our store until next Saturday, but in the meantime. Daddy and I are exploring the territory and meeting people.
We drove six miles up the road to the Bon Secour River. It is surrounded by huge trees with Spanish moss hanging on them all the way to the ground. People call it the singing river because it is famous for a strange music that is heard coming from beneath the water. The Indians say the music is the ghost of dead Indians singing. Daddy likes to go there to fish and eat oysters. The Bon Secour is where the best oysters in the world come from and Daddy knows a man that sells him a croker sack full for a quarter. Daddy eats them raw. Ugh! I don’t know why he does it. He never finds any pearls. I row the boat while Daddy fishes. Momma says it looks bad for a little girl to be rowing a grown man up and down the river, but I’m a very good rower. The man who rents us our boat, Mr. Charles Wentzel, holds the record for catching a speckled trout that was one yard long.
Mr. Wentzel lives across the street from some people called the Caldwells. The Caldwells are what Daddy calls Bible thumpers, crazy over religion. We Harpers are not at all religious, a fact my daddy is proud of and brags about. He claims that he lost his faith behind the Rahoma Baptist Church when he was eleven. As far as Momma goes, she believes in God, but church is such a sore spot with Daddy that she doesn’t push it. I think I have some Methodist blood on my mother’s side. I asked Daddy about it, but he said I didn’t have to believe in God if I didn’t want to.
Daddy and I tried to avoid the Caldwells, but they have a daughter who is always sitting on the front porch and she looks so ha
ppy to see us that we wave at her. Their house is far back in the woods, so she never gets to meet many people. She must have asked Mr. Wentzel my name because one day when Daddy and I got there, she smiled right at me and said, “Hey, Fay, how are you today?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “Fine,” and kept walking.
Mr. Wentzel said, “I think she wants you to go over there and talk to her. She’s a crippled girl and can’t come over here.” I was scared to go up on that porch, but Daddy made me.
I was surprised at how pretty she was, up close. I had never talked to a crippled person before, so I stood behind Daddy, who answered all her questions about me—how old I was, what grade I was in and all that stuff. Daddy talked to her for a long time. Her name is Betty and she’s been crippled all her life. She is eighteen years old.
She doesn’t look like what I thought a crippled girl would look like. Daddy is very upset over her and one time tried to talk to her mother and daddy about her. Her mother wears her gray hair in tiny waves and she has ugly gold-framed glasses and an old, ugly, flowered housedress. She never uses any makeup and looks like a prune. My mother wears Merle Norman makeup every day of her life, makeup base, rouge, powder, the whole thing, even when she’s staying home.
Mr. Caldwell always has on khaki work clothes and is the tallest man I’ve ever seen, and they are both real country. Daddy told Mr. Caldwell he should take Betty to see some good doctors to help her walk. Mr. Caldwell got real funny and started saying how it was evil to tamper with God’s will, that her affliction was a sign from the Lord. Mrs. Caldwell stayed behind the screen door, looking mean, telling her husband to come on back in the house and get away from us. He finally left, but I stuck my tongue out at Mrs. Caldwell before I went.
Afterwards Daddy said it was a damn shame that poor girl had to waste her life with those two rednecks. He told me that people like the Caldwells would shoot you in the head and swear that they had read somewhere in the Bible to do it.
One person on the river who is great is Mr. Wilbur Donnally, who has the most famous curio collection in Harwin County. He keeps it in his living room and it costs a quarter to see it. He has a baseball that in 1932, in Tallahassee, Florida, had bounced off a first baseman’s head and had been caught by a fielder and was counted as an out. He also owns the Mystery Sea Freak. Nobody knows if it’s a fish or a bird.
My favorite is the old bullet that had been shot through the face of a Choctaw Indian chief by an Indian enemy. After he found out he wasn’t killed, he spit the bullet out into his hand, loaded it into the muzzle of his gun and shot his enemy dead.
Daddy’s favorite curio is the stuffed chicken with ten toes. That’s what gave Daddy the idea to become a taxidermist. He figured after the summer months were over, it would be nice to have something to do. So he had a sign made up to go in the window that said “Bill Harper, Certified Public Taxidermist.” He is going to take a course by mail and collect things to stuff when the season is over. It’s lucky we have a big ice cream freezer to keep the dead animals in.
We need to hire help for the malt shop, so we went up to Beulah Heights, the colored quarters, to look for a dishwasher and found one named Mattie Mae.
According to Mattie Mae, there is a real live albino living in Beulah Heights. Her name is Ula Sour. She has pink eyes and never goes out in the daytime because she is spotted. Nobody knows where she lives and she’s so ugly she would scare you to death. Somebody saw her once in the night picking flowers. I would give anything to see her.
I love to go to Beulah Heights. Daddy buys me the best barbecue from the man on the corner, who makes it outside his house every day. I go into the Elite Nightspot for an Orange Crush. I love the Elite Nightspot. Little colored Christmas lights are all around and it has a jukebox and everything. I never heard any of the songs before because they are race music from Africa and Chicago.
The lady who runs it is named Peachy Wigham and has gold teeth and lives on a liquid diet. Peachy said I could come to see her anytime I wanted and gave me a dead chicken foot for good luck. I showed it to Momma and she said for me to throw it out right away, it might give me a chicken disease. I washed it real good and hid it in a Luden’s cough drop box.
We are now looking for a waiter. There is a sailor base up the road, and a lot of sailors have applied for the job. Oh, and I forgot to tell you the best thing. My picture is being used as an advertisement, just like Kay Bob Benson’s. Daddy took a photo of me looking real sad and pale. Then he made me up with Momma’s Merle Norman kit, mascara and all, and curled my hair and took another picture with me looking very happy. He put them both on a sign and under it printed “Which twin eats at Harper’s Malt Shop?” Momma says it is false advertising, but I think it will bring in the customers like crazy.
Daddy has been practicing his short-order cooking. I get all the cheeseburgers and chocolate malts I want. He is a wonderful cook. He and Momma are having a big fight because he wants to sell beer and Momma doesn’t want him to. She is afraid he will drink up the profits and that the beer will bring in a rough crowd. Daddy thinks beer is where the big money is. If he does win, I hope we get Miller High Life because it is my favorite. Daddy likes Budweiser a lot and Momma hates it all.
There is a real nightclub here called the Blue Gardenia Lounge that’s going to have live acts. Daddy and I went up to meet the owners, a man named Harold Pistal and his brother, Claude. We only met Harold and his wife, though, because Claude is in Detroit. They have a little girl named Angel, who is five.
Angel has real big ears that stick way out. When the season starts, Mr. and Mrs. Pistal have promised to pay me twenty-five cents a night to come up and tape her ears back before she goes to sleep. They will be busy working in the lounge and can’t do it. I can see all the acts for free, too. Angel is OK for a small child, even if she does get confused about how old I am and says “Yes, ma’am” to me a lot.
All the beach balls, inner tubes and floats that we ordered have come. I have to go and blow them up.
June 6, 1952
Momma got scared and called the doctor again. I didn’t have polio, just hyperventilation from blowing up all those inner tubes. Daddy is going to buy a bicycle pump.
Mr. Romeo brought Michael over to meet me when I was sick, and he is great! I was sorry my face was so red. Michael is going to take me crabbing and fishing and everything. He is a junior lifeguard, which will come in handy since I can’t swim. He already has a suntan, but it might be his natural color.
Yesterday Connie, the Sunshine bread truck man, let Michael and me ride to Cotton Bayou to a grocery store where he had to deliver bread. Connie gives Michael all the day-old doughnuts and saves me some, too.
Cotton Bayou is way down in the swamps. The people there are Cajuns. That means French and something. The bayou is real beautiful, lots of pine trees and sand. There was someone Connie wanted us to meet. We drove up to an old white wooden grocery store that was falling down. It had a sign on it, “Cotton Bayou Grocery and P.O.” It didn’t look to me as if anybody lived there at all, but Connie told us there were a lot of people way back in the bayou that you never see. A mailman delivers their mail in a boat once a week. I would hate to be waiting on a letter for a week. What if the boat sank, or an alligator got the mailman?
The inside of that grocery store was so old it looked to me that those cans of peppers from Cuba and all kinds of funny foods had been there for a long time. Mrs. LeGore ran the place and was the postmistress. She must be a Cajun because she talked funny. I bought a strawberry drink from her and a Buddy bar. Michael had already eaten six day-old doughnuts, so he just had an RC.
Connie asked if we could see Jessie. Mrs. LeGore said for us to wait until she had cleaned him up a little. I wanted to know if Jessie was a person or an animal. Connie said that Jessie was a person about twenty-five years old who hadn’t been out of his room since he was fifteen because of elephantiasis. I had never seen anyone with elephantiasis, and neither ha
d Michael. I was willing to go back there only if I couldn’t catch it.
We waited a long time. Mrs. LeGore had over a dozen old calendars on the walls and she must have sold a lot of chewing tobacco because there was a bunch of it. She even sold tobacco in a bag with papers if you wanted to roll your own.
I didn’t finish my Buddy bar. It was too stale. Pretty soon Mrs. LeGore came back in. Connie picked out five loaves of bread and three day-old coconut cakes for Jessie. We went in the back of the store and there was Jessie, lying on a mattress on the floor, with one leg propped up. He must be the fattest man in the world. I couldn’t even see his eyes good. His momma had wet his hair and combed it down for him. He was wearing a flowered shirt without buttons that was fastened together with big safety pins, and he had on what looked to me like pajama bottoms. He was friendly and glad to get the cakes and ate them without a knife or fork. His room was little, and there was a collection of red and blue satin pillows that said “Mother” and “Sweetheart” on them with yellow silk braided fringe all around them and a pillow from Nashville, Tennessee, and one from Charleston, South Carolina.
Grapico, Dr Pepper, Orange Crush and Buffalo Rock signs were all over the walls along with a cross, a Goodyear tire and some Chesterfield and Kool ads from the store. A whole bunch of Christmas pictures of Santa Claus drinking Coca-Cola and a Last Supper picture were stuck right in the middle of them.
Jessie asked if we wanted to hear him sing. I said I would love to hear “Shrimp Boats Are a-Coming,” but he only knows patriotic and religious songs, so he sang something about Jesus. He had a pretty good voice, too.
He gets a wonderful program on his shortwave radio from Del Rio, Texas. They mentioned his name on the air once and sent him a fan with a picture of Jesus Christ dressed like a shepherd standing around with a staff and some sheep.
