Catfish Alley (6 page)

"And
after that," I say, as I finish the last bite of my apple pie,
"everyone started calling him Zero. Except for Mama and Miss Wilson, of
course. It just sort of stuck. And Zero was different after that day. He
started talking about making something of himself, getting out of Clarksville, maybe
even becoming a lawyer or a doctor."

"And
did he?" Roxanne asks.

"Well,
now, that's a story for another day." I suddenly realize my old heart
can't take any more memories today. "I reckon you'd better get me home.
I'll be needing my nap soon."

Roxanne
looks a little taken aback, but she gathers her things and looks around the
cafe again while she's helping me up. I'm thinking she's remembered how strange
this is, and she's wondering if folks have been watching us. On the way out I
stop to speak to another one of my students, who's come in while we were
talking, and Roxanne stands patiently behind me waiting. I wonder again how
this is going to work out. I can already tell she likes a good story, but how
quickly will she tire of mine?

Roxanne

I
turn into the long driveway leading to Pecan Cottage. It is already Tuesday
again. The week has flown by. I'm not sure why, but I have felt uneasy all
week. Maybe it's because I have so much work to do and here I am, taking
another day to meet with Grace Clark. Last week certainly got us nowhere. Del
Tanner was just about as rude as a man can be.

Would
it have been so difficult for Del to let us take a quick look at his warehouse?
You'd think he would be happy to be involved in the pilgrimage. It's not going to
hurt him any. All it involves is a historical marker and a few brochures. But
he sure doesn't see it that way. He acts like if people know the first black
school was on his property, he'll lose business.

I
wonder what it must have been like for a six-year-old girl to walk all the way
from
Pecan
Cottage to Clarksville every day. I know she and her brother went through the
woods, but I clocked the distance on my odometer from my house in town and it
came to a little over six miles. Amazing. A lot of those children had even
farther to go, and without shoes. I remember getting on the school bus in the
bayou before the sun was up and riding for an hour each way, but at least I
didn't have to walk.

Grace has coffee waiting for me again.

"Where are we going today?" I ask.

"I have something special planned for us. We're
going to visit my old friend Adelle Jackson. Adelle lives downtown on Fifth
Avenue North. Her father was the first black doctor in town, Dr. Albert
Jackson."

Good. Now we're getting somewhere. This has got to be
better than some warehouse full of lumber. People might actually want to see a
house. I try to remember the location. It seems like I dropped Ola Mae off at
her cousin's in that area a few times.

"Let's see now ... Fifth Avenue North ... I know
that street. Isn't there a church on that street, too?"

"Yes, the Missionary Union Baptist Church."

Our drive into Clarksville is quiet, as usual. Grace
always seems to be lost in her
own thoughts. I
wonder if that's the case for most people her age. My mama didn't live much
past sixty and I never knew my grandmother, so I don't have much experience
with the elderly. Well, except for Mrs. Stanley, but that was so long ago. And
then there's delivering the church food boxes. But most of those people are on
death's doorstep. Grace Clark's memories always seem as fresh as today's bread.
I'm surprised by the number of details she can remember. I decide to break the
silence with a question.

"Was this man your doctor when you were a
child?"

"You might say that, although I don't remember
needing a doctor much as a child. Dr. Jackson and his wife, Anna Lee, lived in
the back of his mother's house on Catfish Alley for years. During that time he
and one helper built the house you'll see today. Then he opened up his medical
practice there." She pauses and stares out the window. "Gracious, the
black folks were proud of that man."

Following Grace's directions, I turn on Fifth Avenue
North. We drive past an old clapboard church, several nondescript cottages, and
finally pull up in front of a redbrick Queen Anne-style house with white
gingerbread trim.
Wide brick steps lead to a deep front porch that runs the entire width of the
house. The porch extends out around a large bay window and three baskets
stuffed full of trailing pink petunias hang overhead. The front door is wide
and I think it's probably mahogany. It looks hand-hewn.

The
house seems a little neglected. The shutters are loose in some places and the
paint is chipping. The shrubs are overgrown and the flower beds need weeding.
But I am pleased with the potential. With a little care, this place could be
beautiful. Funny, in all of my years in Clarksville, I have never noticed this
house before.

As
I get out of the car, I see two black women and several children watching me
from the porch of the house across the street. They are probably curious about
why I'm visiting in this part of town. It still feels odd to me to be
chauffeuring a black woman around. Whites and blacks don't mix socially in
Clarksville. I remember when my school in the bayou was integrated. I was in
the sixth grade. Even then, I had goals for myself and I knew better than to
mix with blacks. By then I had been going to the Stanleys' during the summers
with Mama for a couple of years. Mama would pile us into the old blue truck and
we'd rattle down
the
River Road before sunup when everything was still misted over with fog from the
river. We never drove in the main driveway of the plantation. We took the back
road and parked behind the barn with the rest of the help.

Everyone except Mama was black. Mama chatted and
gossiped with the maid and the gardener like they were old friends. I guess
they were, since they'd all been working for the family for years. The black
people didn't get to bring their kids, though. I remember one time I asked Mama
why. She said the lady of the house was not about to have a bunch of
pickaninnies running around the place looking like the Stanleys were still
keeping slaves. I was different. I had manners and I needed to learn how to
cook.

When I asked Mama why, she was shocked. "Why,
because every woman needs to know how to cook, Chere! How a girl gone catch a
man if she can't cook?"

But I didn't have much interest in cooking. I was too
busy taking in every possible detail I could about how wealthy people lived,
ate, moved, and talked. I made it my mission to be as visible as I could to
Mrs. Stanley. I wanted her to see that I could be different. Mama let me bring
her things like coffee and muffins in the morning. As I got older, Mrs. Stanley
started asking me to help her with her correspondence or to bring her things. I
copied the way she talked and her manners with other people. She was a lonely
person. Her sons had both died in World War II and so she never had any
grandchildren. I decided I would become the granddaughter she'd never had.

I refocus my thoughts on the present, go around to help
Grace out of the car, and we start up the steps. Before we reach the top, the
door opens and a tall black woman, who looks about the same age as Grace, comes
out onto the porch. She wipes her hands on her apron as she hurries to meet us.
It's surprising how agile she is for her age. When she reaches us she laughs
and throws her arms around Grace.

"Grade! It's so good to see you. This is quite a
treat, getting to visit with you twice in one week!"

Grace returns the hug and gives her a big kiss on the
cheek. These two old women act like girls with their hugging and chatter.

"Adelle, I would like you to meet my new friend,
Roxanne Reeves," Grace says as she gestures toward me. Adelle extends her
hand and I shake it. She has a powerful grip for an old lady.

"I'm happy to meet you, Mrs. Reeves,"
Adelle
says. "Y'all come on in the house."

As we follow Adelle, I notice that the wicker furniture
on the porch is antique, and in a style popular in the early 1900s. Other than
needing some minor recaning, it's in good shape. The windows that I can see as
we cross the porch still have their original wavy glass. Good. At least she
hasn't replaced them with those ghastly aluminum windows.

The entrance hall is wide with rooms on either side.
Adelle brings us into the room off to the left. "We'll sit in here for now
and y'all can tell me how I can help you," she says.

We sit at a small oak table laid with china in a
pattern I recognize as late-nineteenth- century Appalachian Rose from
Tennessee. I can't help but get excited. What other treasures does this woman
have in this house? She probably doesn't know what a gold mine of antiques
she's sitting on. People might actually want to see this. The room is a little
stuffy; those old gold velvet drapes are looking a little threadbare, but
they're passable.

"I don't use this room very often anymore, since I
don't have many visitors," Adelle says.
"Is this where
your father saw patients?" I ask.

"Oh,
no. This was where we received guests. Papa saw his patients in the room across
the hall. I'll show you when we've finished our coffee. Grace, I have a
surprise for you." Adelle removes the cover from a lovely cake plate —
probably made in the early 1900s — to reveal a delicious-looking cake.

"Oh,
Addie! My favorite." Grace turns to me. "Addie makes the best coconut
cake in Mississippi."

"Many
more of these Tuesday mornings and I'm going to be as big as the side of a
barn!" I say. "I've had more good food since I've been meeting with
you than I've had in years."

"Addie's
grandmother created this recipe. She worked for Mr. A. W. Spencer over there on
College Street. This was his favorite cake."

I
put my fork down. "Arvis Spencer, the bank president?"

"No,
his daddy, A. W. Spencer the First," Adelle says. "She was his cook
and housekeeper."

I
feel as though I've stepped back into Mama's world. I never imagined myself
having cake and coffee with black service people — or their relatives. Growing
up, they were Mama's only friends. I feel a pang of guilt again, remembering
her response when I asked her why she was so friendly with blacks.

"You
think you better than these people I work with? You think you better than me?
You just look out that you don't reach too far, Chere. You might think you can
be somebody else, leave behind your family and your roots, but you can't. You
as Cajun as your daddy and me and you might as well get proud of it."

But
I didn't get proud of it. I did everything in my power to erase it. I kept
going to the Stanleys' with Mama all through high school. When I was a junior,
we lost Daddy to emphysema. I still remember the rattle of his breathing coming
from their tiny bedroom in our house on the bayou. That's the way Mama and I
knew he was still alive at the end of the day when we'd come back home. We
could hear him waging his battle for oxygen when we walked in the back door.

One
day when we returned, the house was quiet. All we could hear was the regular
puff of his oxygen tank. We both froze. I followed Mama into the room and we
found him sitting there in their bed. He was wearing a cap and a camouflage
jacket. His boots were on and still wet. In spite of Mama's insistence that he
stay in bed, we knew he had been out on his pirogue for one last ride.

That
was the only time I remember Mama not going to work. Daddy died on Wednesday,
we buried him on Friday, and Mama was back to work by Saturday morning. And I
was there with her. By this point I had gotten close enough to Mrs. Stanley
that she had started to let me help her with her restoration projects. She had
done everything she could to Oak Grove, and now she and Mr. Stanley had bought
a second plantation home, also on the River Road, to restore.

Mrs.
Stanley helped me understand that it could undermine a woman's ambition to
reveal her poor background. Men could use childhood poverty to show how they
had risen out of their humble beginnings and made something of themselves, but
"Not so for a woman," said Mrs. Stanley, smoking her long thin
cigarette. "A woman can't afford to reveal her flaws. They will always be
held against her. She will always be classified as trying to be more than she
is. A woman should never expose her soft underbelly."

Mrs.
Stanley encouraged me to apply for a history scholarship based on my interest
in home restoration. I was shocked when I got a full ride to Mississippi
University for Women.

When
I left the bayou for Clarksville, to attend the W, I was determined to keep my
family background a secret. I kept a cool distance from the other girls and
made sure no one ever got to know me very well. I disappeared in the summers to
go back home and work as many hours for Mrs. Stanley as I could to save money
and help Mama. When Mama died my senior year in college, I went home for her
funeral, gave my brothers my key to the house, and turned my back on the bayou
for good. I got an apprenticeship with the Clarksville Historical Society
working on an antebellum home restoration and a Civil War museum and began to
create a history for myself based on Mr. and Mrs. Stanley. Before I realized
it, in my mind, they became my parents.