Mississippi Sissy (24 page)

“Suit yourself,” said Matty as I plopped down on the sack next to her. “What'ch yo' Mom make you to eat? Bet she can't make no sandwich as good as Matty. ‘Member them musdadine and peanut butter'uns I'd make us both on Sunbeam, us both fightin' for d'heel bread on d'loaf ‘cause we both crust folks, like our bread to chew right back,
you and me. Mmmmm, tell you what, wish I had one them now instead of this nasty wang. And—ah-woe!—when we'd put that peanut butter on some Ritz crackers—'member that?—and stick a marshmallow on ‘em and put ‘em in Miz Jake's little toaster oven till them marshmallows was golden brown. Almost brings tears to my eyes thinkin' of them toasted Ritzes sittin' up under them marshmallows like that.” I showed her my baloney sandwich. She hated baloney and made a face at it. I shared my Fritos with her. We passed my Tang back and forth. “So. You got enough of this cotton pickin' yet? Can't figure how nobody would want to pick no cotton ifen they didn't have to,” she said, eating my last Frito.

“I come to see you, M-Matty,” I said. “That's why I come today. Cotton ain't got nothing to do with it. M-Mom told me to tell you hi.”

“Hmmph,” Matty huffed.

“I m-miss you, Matty M-May. M-Mom misses you, too. She d-don't say it but she does.”

“Hmmph.”

“How come you left us? W-was it because of Halloween? Was it b-because the voodoo d-done took a'holt of me? D-devil ain't got me in his teeth no m-more. I'm a good b-boy now. D-devil ain't got no taste for m-me. He d-done spit me out. Is it because you wasn't invited to my m-mama's w-wake? Was it M-mom and Pop saying n-n-n-nig . . . you, know . . . that w-w-word all the time? Why d-d-did you leave?”

Matty crunched the last bit of Frito in her old black jaw. She deeply sighed. “It weren't none of that, child. It weren't none of that,” she said, and wiped her mouth with her greasy napkin. “You got any more Tang in there? Matty do miss that Tang in yo' house,” she said. The baloney and my share of the Fritos, combined with the heat and work I'd done that morning, caused me to suffer from a thirst I had never known before, but I made yet another choice: I gave Matty that last sip I had in my thermos. I licked my parched lips
and watched the Tang ripple down her skinny throat. She smoothed out some of the cotton stuffed into the sack between us. “I was snappin' beans with Miz Jake oncet in the carport when you and Kim and Karole and them filthy Derrick boys—big eaters them nasty two thangs—was about t'play hide'n'seek out in d'yard. Ya'll was doin' that eeny-meeny-miny-mo nonsense, tryin' to come up with who was a'goin' to be d'one t'do the lookin'. Miz Jake went inside to answer the phone and left me a'sittin' there with nothing t'do but listen to you chirren play. I heard you bein' d'boss out there and doin' that eeny-meeny-miny-mo. I hear you go: eeny-meeny-miny-mo-catch-a-nigger-by-his-toe-if-he-hollers-make-him-pay-fifty-dollars-every-day-my-mama-told-me-to-pick-this-little-nigger-but-I-pick-this-very-best-one. That did it. Child, you d'one that made Matty leave. Wasn't no Miz Jake or Mr. Lyle. Wasn't no Halloween. No wake. Wasn't no devil. You d'one that done it. You, child. I'll pick cotton out there—a soul's gotta eat better from time to time than what I can scare up in my own patch of earth, plus it's June's sixtieth soon and he wants hisself some of that Old Spice Mr. Lyle let him slap on oncet when he come to pick me up from work. But I don't have to sit in no poor white folks' carport and pretend I can't hear what I can hear. Miz Jake and Mr. Lyle sayin' nigger don't bother me so much. They don't know no better. They's the way they is. They ain't like Mr. Benny up yonder gettin' out of his pickup, that mean lunch almost over. Mr. Benny's niggerin' gets him mo' money. Miz Jake and Mr. Lyle ain't much better'n a couple of niggers theyselves. They know it too and that's why they use d'word so much. Nigger from they mouth almost like nigger from mine. But outta yo' mouth—hmmph,” she said, finding one last bite of chicken on her wing before throwing it over in the bushes. “Little sissy thang like you, child, is smarter than most folks in these parts. You know better. God put some kind of—Lawd be—Yankee sense in you. We both know that. Nigger out of yo' mouth cut Matty to d'quick. I told you that when you called Sidney
Poitier a nigger that mornin' in your room and I be d'one—ah-woe!—that give d'Tang to you. Tables turn, don't they now. Tables turn.” She smoothed the cotton in her sack. I could not look at her. Again, we fell silent. “Matty wouldn't have her heart broke no more by the likes of you,” she finally said. “When listenin' breaks yo' heart, time sho'nuff t'stop listenin'.”

We watched Uncle Benny walk up and down the rows checking to see if all the bolls had been denuded to his satisfaction. “You miss yo' mama and daddy?” Matty asked, sensing she should change the subject.

“I m-miss Epiphany,” I said. I had been stunned by Matty May's soliloquy. What would have been Epiphany's response to it? What would be mine? I gathered the courage to look back over at Matty. Her tongue had started working away at the inside of her mouth. She stood, akimbo, and tilted her head to the side, watching Benny inspect her rows. “11-love you, M-M-Matty,” I said.

She sighed. “Child, love ain't enough in a place like Mississippi,” she said, her shoulders relaxing a bit once Benny had made his way, satisfied, through the rows she'd picked. She shooed me off her cotton sack. She made me lift it for her and restrap it to her stooped old body. Her shoulders sagged even lower from the sack's weight. “You'll see, the more growd you get, what Matty be talkin' ‘bout,” she said, and searched my eyes with her tired old yellowed ones. “Love ain't enough for the likes of us. We standin' on the same ground but we folks from different lands. Like them fools outta d'Bible, we is. Love? Hmmph. It ain't never ‘nuff in a crooked-letter state like this.”

I watched Matty drag that cotton sack back toward the field, but did not follow her with mine. I stayed right where I was in the shade. I would never pick another boll of cotton after that morning. I climbed the hill and told Uncle Benny I was tired, but he wouldn't take me home. He told me I had to stay till the weighing and get paid when everybody else did. I went back down under the oaks and
watched Matty pick the rest of her cotton. “Poi-ti-er Poi-ti-er Poi-ti-er,” I heard her muttering to herself when she'd get close enough to me. I thought about offering her the cotton I had picked to put in her sack, but decided I wanted some quarters for myself. I had earned them fair and square, I reasoned. At the weighing, Benny threw me four quarters when all I had picked was two pounds worth. The field hands stared at me with anger on their sweat-drenched faces when they saw I was getting paid more than I was entitled. Sister had finished early—she was the strongest and best cotton picker—and had gone into her shanty to make everybody some iced tea and lemonade. I skipped over to her and helped her hand it out to each person as soon as they got “weighed and paid,” as Uncle Benny liked to put it, so they wouldn't be so mad at me. Sister gave me a glass of iced tea for Matty and whispered to me to go give it to her where she had gone back down under the oaks to count her quarters. She had them all gathered together in the upturned skirt of her dress. I helped her empty them onto the ground and counted them out with her. She had picked twenty-five pounds' worth of cotton and there were twenty-five quarters. Benny hadn't cheated her. She stared down at the silver stacked in the dust. “How much is that now, child, ifen it was green?” she asked.

“Six d-dollars and twenty-five cents,” I said.

“That'll get me a right nice little bottle of Old Spice and a bit of pork at Paul Chambers,” she said. “That'll do.”

“I'm sorry I m-made you leave, M-m-matty,” I said, then abruptly changed my mind about keeping my four quarters. I offered them to her.

She studied the money in my outstretched hand. “I know you's sorry, child,” she finally said. “I know you is. You keep them quarters, though, they's yours. Go to the movies with them quarters. I know how much you love them movies up at the Town Theater. Save them quarters for a special Sat'dy-afternoon movie and you think about the
day Matty made you keep ‘em. When that Sat'dy-afternoon movie get real good you think about Matty May.”

I watched her walk away that day. June met her and put his arm around her as they disappeared over the hill. In the years to come my grandparents would have other maids—the dignified and beautiful Emma Dee who couldn't make a coconut pie if her life depended on it, the custard always tasting as if she'd put perfume in it instead of vanilla extract, and the belligerent and always terse Bell who bossed me around way too much—but none would change my life the way Matty did. I realize now, I never knew much about her. I only knew her within the parameters of my own life. To be honest, I wasn't sure back then if she had kids of her own. (She did: Flozell, Odell, and Ruby Nell.) Or what church she went to. Or what losses and sorrow she suffered. I knew her only from the perspective of a lonely boy from a crooked-letter state but I sure cried when she walked over that hill that day on Uncle Benny's farm, for I recognized something had ended yet again in my life.

________________

I saw Matty May again only one other time. I had returned home from New York for a visit with my grandfather before we moved him into the convalescent home, as the senior-citizen living facility was called by the locals. The convalescent home remained a private institution, even while Pop resided there into the late 1980s, so that it could also remain whites-only. Medical facilities around Forest had always been the last to integrate. Even after our school system came up with an integration plan of its own the year I entered seventh grade, the doctors' and dentists' offices around town maintained their separate waiting rooms, each with the receptionists' stations located in a closed-off middle area with a window for the white patients and one for the black ones. When I was taken in for
a doctor's visit, I would always look into the reception area and through the “colored” window, trying maybe to catch a glimpse of Matty. I never did.

My grandmother had died a year before my return home from New York to visit Pop, who had been left alone to ramble around our old house. Kim was attending the University of Mississippi Medical School after a brief sojourn at Tulane's. Karole was about to attend nursing school there also after graduating from college. Both of them were living in Jackson, and Pop had gotten another Chihuahua to keep him company and named it Jingles. Lola helped him out with food. W. F. hadn't yet pointed a gun to his head. Pop and I had always had a strained relationship resulting from what I had once found hidden in his closet. The first boy I had ever physically loved (Bobby Thompson would remain unattainable) was the son of a renowned liberal editor of a small-town newspaper in Mississippi. The boy had become my pen pal after our meeting at a high school drama festival at the University of Southern Mississippi at which I, a sophomore, had won the Best Actor Award for my performance in a one-act called
Impromptu.
The boy went on to volunteer for the Peace Corps and later to work in politics and serve in the State Department.

Everyone at that drama festival at Southern was commenting on how I had looked like a young Nureyev onstage—Frank Hains had not been the first to tell me that—and this boy, who had come with his own school as the photographer for his father's paper as well as the school's, asked to photograph me. We were at a party in a hotel room with others from our schools. We went into the bathroom and shut the door. He closed the toilet's lid and told me to sit on it and look over at him. He pushed back the shower curtain and stood in the empty tub. When he looked at me through his lens he whispered rather matter-of-factly, “You're beautiful.” He saw, through that lens, the look in my eyes and knew I had been waiting almost sixteen years
to hear a boy say that with just such matter-of-fact normalcy. He put the camera down. We kissed. My life changed.

When we returned to our respective little Mississippi towns we took turns calling each other long-distance every night. When the telephone bill came Pop hit the roof, not only because of the amount of the charges I had incurred, but also because it was a boy on the other end of the line. We fought loudly about it while my grandmother sat on a stool before his nasty diabetic feet and attempted to tend to his rotting toenails. Pop and I shouted back and forth above her head. “Please, stop, both of you,” she begged, digging into my grandfather's caked cuticles. After the fight, my friend and I began to correspond, many of the missives unabashed love letters. I would go to the letters after school each day—I had hidden them inside my old copy of
Valley of the Dolls
—and reread them before I'd watch
The Dating Game
and
The Newlywed Game
back-to-back while I ate some freshly made popcorn and drank some Tang poured over crushed ice. It had become my ritual: reading a love letter, downing the icy cold Tang, deciding which male contestant on
The Dating Game
was the cutest, and trying to see the outline of their penises as the contestants thrust their crotches toward the camera as they sat in their high stools and tried out double entendres on the giggling female who asked them questions. One day, after I had emptied the kernels and oil into the popcorn maker, I went to retrieve my favorite letter, in which the boy had written the word LOVE for the first time—right there in ink as indelible as the ink my mother had used when she sat up that night with me after my father's funeral and wrote her thank-you notes, handing them to me to put in each of the envelopes I had stamped for her. When I opened my copy of Jackie Susann, however, I discovered the whole stash of correspondence had disappeared. I knew instantly my grandfather had stolen it. He always looked on disdainfully whenever my grandmother handed me the latest letter I had received in the mail from the boy. He was out back, my grandfather,
tending to his garden when I went blazing into his bedroom. I rifled through his drawers and lifted his mattress trying to find the letters. I stared at the shotguns on the rack above his bed and for the first time since my mother's funeral willed Witch Boy into existence. The popcorn began to pop. My head was filled with that one word, no ink needed for its indelibility: Pop Pop Pop. Those letters would be found. I closed my eyes. I concentrated. I opened my eyes when the popcorn had stopped its popping and all I could hear was
Dating Game
host Jim Lange telling the giggler to make her decision. I walked over to the smaller of the closets in my grandfather's room. “Bachelor Number Two,” I heard the giggler say.
The Dating Game's
music started. The smell of the popcorn filled the house. I lifted the blankets folded on the top shelf. My Witch Boy powers were intact. The letters were right there beneath those blankets. I grabbed the stash, still wrapped up in the rubber band I had circled around them, and went back into my room.