“But I’m the one who’s got the job here. What would I tell Mr. Parkins?” It wasn’t my
nature not to go to work. If he’d let me, I’d have gone in on Christmas.
“Tell him we’n pay our tab if he’ll give you time off,” Meemaw said. “Gotta dangle the
carrot, the way the world works.” She had the coverlet up under her chin now and she yawned; I
knew she was fading. “And when you get up there, meet you some men. Only requirement is
they’re better off than us.” She chuckled, her eyes already closed. “And have a good back. And a
nicer truck too.”
“Do it for your family, please, Bird,” Mama said. I hated to see her worried like this. It
was making her sick.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, but I could tell it’d already been decided.
Chapter 5
I’d only ridden the train a few times, the longest was when I was sixteen, when Mama had taken
me to Jackson to let a doctor see to me after a bad fever. The train that day had been full of folks
dressed up for Christmastime, so it would’ve been exciting had it been for a different reason.
We’d ridden in the second-class with cloth seats, which Daddy’d claimed was practically good
as first. Today, I was riding third-class on a train folks called the Little J, behind the mail car and
the colored car, closer to the noisy engine. The porter wiped soot off my row of wooden seats
before I sat down. For a few seconds the train sat panting, while sweat ran down my temples.
Then the train rolled forward, slow and smooth as if we were sliding on ice. As we
picked up speed, the slatted seat under me started to sway, the growl of the engine growing to a
roar as we barreled past fallow fields, and when we turned a high-screeching bend, a fine grit of
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dirt blasted me through the open window. I stumbled up and grabbed hold of the stick propping
the window open and it banged down shut and I fell back into my seat. It was even hotter now.
But I figured it was better to show up at Frances’s only sweaty rather than battered in Delta dirt
too.
From the back row, I counted a dozen or so other people in this car, nearly all men,
except for a little girl in a red hat with her daddy and, up and across the aisle from me, a middle-
aged husband with his wife. I was the only woman traveling alone in the car.
“Get the taste that refreshes, ladies and gentlemen. Procure your dimes.” The porter came
through the door and it slammed shut behind him. He leaned down to offer me the contents of a
yellow box tied to his neck: Lucky Strike cigarettes, Doublemint gum, Co-Cola bottles, Bit-O-
Honey, potted ham with the red devil on it, marked for one, two, or three dimes and all
overpriced, which I knew from working at the store. I told him no thank you and he moved on
ahead, to the husband and wife.
The man glanced at his wife, asleep against the window. Softly he said to the porter,
“Thang else?” I watched the porter lift the top tray of the display, and like a thief, the man
palmed a flat thing from underneath. He tucked it quick inside his suit coat pocket and slipped
the porter some folding money. That man just bought some liquor. When the porter’d moved on,
I leaned back and closed my eyes and smiled. I wondered what would happen if I called the
porter back and said, Thang else? God, Frances would have a fit. It made me think of the spicy
taste of Red Hots in a man’s mouth.
I’d come across the mouth a few days after Mama’d told me and Frances, in a panic, we
were never to kiss a man “with tongue.” That was how she’d put it. She’d heard about a young
woman doing this somewhere in the world, in some remote time. I was barely sixteen, which
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made Frances fourteen, and she’d Gawd Mama-ed her, said she’d never do something so
disgusting anyhow, and I would put money on she still hadn’t. But then I did. Behind a barn with
someone’s older cousin, and I felt something I could only describe as relief. A gasp of oxygen
after being held underwater for too long—to feel another human being’s hot breath on mine, his
stubbly face. I’d set a bold hand on his cheek as if magnetized. I never saw the older man again
after that kiss, I’d fled, but I never forgot his taste—of cigarettes and a box of candy Red Hots.
Watching a little bit of wickedness one row up from me made me think of that relief, of stepping
outside my sheltered world at last.
Frances. I tucked her little pillow between my head and the window.
She was two years younger than me and the petite, prissier, cry-her-way-out-of-the-crime
sister, while I was the taller, plainer one, but funnier and therefore, least in my opinion, more
interesting. Frances got Mama’s light brown curls and hazel eyes and a more feminine figure,
though she did have a peculiarly long neck. My eyes were dark brown like our daddy’s, and I
had very vertical brown hair that lost a croquignole wave in the time it took to get from my
dressing table to the front door. I also had a flatter chest and an underserved chin, which I was
very conscious of because Frances had pointed it out so many times. “And o-pin-ions,” Mama’d
sing from another room. “Might find life a little easier if you had fewer of those.” To which I
would answer that in my o-pin-ion I was as entitled to mine as much as any human being with a
yearly Delta Dispatch newspaper subscription.
I feared Frances wouldn’t be happy to see me. Especially after what Meemaw’d said
about showing up uninvited. Suddenly I was so hot, I had to prop the window open again.
As girls, we were close, least for a while, though we were very different. I liked to tend to
my guinea hens and a pair of peacocks I’d ordered through the mail, while all Frances wanted to
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do was brush her hair and look at herself in the mirror. She could be right scrappy if pressed,
though—and a biter if cornered. The tiny arc of her top teeth was still carved, faintly, into my
forearm. Our closeness, I realized later, was more about proximity than friendship—who else
was there to torture within ten square miles? Daddy, a quiet but brilliant man, was gone three
days a week trying to keep the Mississippi River from flooding. Mama was busy cooking,
washing, worrying over the price of canned peaches. Meemaw’d zap us with her electric prod
pole if we harassed her too much (she kept it on low, so it was more threat than sting). But I
pushed the torture too far, at least according to Frances. Once, after she’d teased me for my lack
of chin, I drew a picture of her as a goose and hung it up at school—Lord, the thing looked just
like her. It was Frances but with a beak and a long neck that stretched down one, two, three
sheets of paper, ending with the tiny body of a goose. Unfortunately the name Goose stuck
longer than anybody expected. I mean for years people called her that.
My motto’d always been: You are important to me, therefore I will work to take my
revenge in new and interesting ways. It took enormous time to think up a perfect retaliation. I
thought it kept us close. And we were, until Mathilda Tate came along.
Our little school down the road ended at sixth grade. Even though Daddy made a fair
living with the corps, he didn’t crave money. Daddy didn’t even believe in colored help in the
kitchen, and Mama went along with him on that. He was sort of a freethinker, leaning toward
socialist if you really got down to it, and he disdained that so few had so much when so many
were poor. But he believed in education, so he asked Mama to make a caramel cake and, leaving
his values at home, drove it over to the big Tate house to ask could we ride with their daughter,
Mathilda, the thirty miles to the good Warren County school, which went up to eleventh grade.
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Whereas most folks had farms, the Tates had a “plantation.” The Tates had maids; the
Calhouns had a meemaw. Pockets of wealth like theirs were scattered all across the Delta, even if
the radio liked to brag that Mississippi had the highest incidence of malnutrition and the lowest
incidence of money. Mathilda Tate and Frances were the same age, and Mathilda wore long silk
ribbons in her long golden hair that, to somebody gullible, probably made her look sweet. Her
nose turned up similar to that of a Pekingese dog, except it was cuter. She’d failed out of some
fancy boarding school out east. I heard her say once that being around poor people made her
want “to take a bath.” Well, Frances was rapt. Riding to school, I’d never seen somebody as
disagreeable as Frances nod in agreement that much.
Pretty soon all Frances could talk about was “MathildaTate.” “MathildaTate has herself a
real silver hairbrush with her name inscribed on it” and “MathildaTate’s icebox plugs right in the
wall.” Mathilda’s parents paid Frances to help dum-dum Mathilda with her schoolwork, though
Frances would’ve done it for free. “MathildaTate says when she’s eighteen, they’re taking her on
a boat trip to Europe.” “Why wait?” I said. “Take her now.” Again, I wasn’t jealous, exactly, but
I was watching my sister grow pettier and more popular with every motorcar ride to school. I
was older and already had my own friends, I was head of the Tomato Club and the Math Club,
and I sang in the school choir. Though that all got interrupted.
When I was sixteen, me and Frances both came down with a case of the mumps. Our
necks swelled so fat we looked bovine, funnier on her since her neck was so long. A few weeks
later, Frances got better but my fever still burned and a warm trickle of blood had started running
between my legs. It didn’t stop for weeks, and the cold, uncaring doctor in Jackson, in a hurry to
get home for his wife’s birthday told my mother out in the hall it’d turned into a case of
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encephalitis. I finished eleventh grade, which was all the school offered, from my side of our
bedroom.
It was after that doctor visit that Daddy started asking me to help him fix things around
the house. He was patient, with the mathematical mind of an engineer. He taught me how to
replace rotten porch boards and tighten a leaky sink, repair the clothes agitator, change the oil in
the truck; then came spark plugs, bulbs, and necessary fluids. Never turning into the expert he
was, I did learn my way around a Model T Ford carburetor.
I didn’t catch on right at first why he was teaching me these things. I thought it was
because he didn’t have any boys and somebody had to look after things while he was on the
river. “Gimme a hand, Bird,” he’d say, and an hour or two later I’d know how to change the tires
on the Ford. Frances was clearly not interested in any of these things, but of course she still
asked him why he was teaching me and not her. He smiled but didn’t say what I later learned he
was thinking: You won’t need to know, you’ll have a husband to do these things for you. A few
months later, Mama admitted, weeping, that the doctor’d told her I couldn’t bear children. I
simply don’t remember losing any sleep over this.
***
Just past Vicksburg, the train ran alongside a dusty yellow highway. I saw people, groups of
three or four at first, then ten, then dozens of them moving along on foot or in wagons stacked
with trunks and chairs and tables. They were colored folks mostly, though some were white and I
realized they must be sharecroppers who’d been run off the land, because of the government
program that was paying owners not to grow cotton. They stared straight ahead, moving along
the highway in what looked like dead silence. The children looked strangely old, like wrinkled
old men and women, and when the road pulled closer, I saw mud smeared up their arms and on
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their faces to keep the sun off. Where in the world were they all going? What would they do
when they got there? Then the road pulled away and I couldn’t see them anymore.
I was so grateful we had what we did. I’d gotten my sanguine outlook from my daddy. I
had a job, we had his annuity, everything’ll work out. But the thought of asking Frances for
money felt like groveling. It tasted bitter, like grounds in the bottom of a coffee cup. How I
wished I could prove her wrong for leaving us.
***
“MathildaTate says if you’re not engaged by the time you’re twenty, there’s a 99 percent chance
you’ll turn out an old maid.” I was eighteen and change by then. I’d graduated at seventeen, class
of 1926, and was taking a correspondence course called Basics of Bookkeeping. That was right
around the first time I heard Frances say, “One day, I’m gonna get out of this place for good.”
And God love her, she did. After Frances graduated, she talked Mama, and therefore
Daddy, into sending her to Miss Pickering’s Finishing School, two hundred fifty miles north of
us in Memphis, Tennessee. Frances nearly wet her ironed underpants, she was so excited to leave
Footely. She’d be taking courses entitled Etiquette of Courtship, Managing Marriage Proposals,
and something called Comportment. But two weeks before she was to leave, Daddy had a heart
attack on the river and died.
I cannot describe that week. Mama’s sobs sounded like vomiting. Purging pain sounds so
violent on some, but it shut me right up. A hot, thick thing lodged in my throat. Watching the
man you called Daddy go in a hole and get covered with dirt does not go down easy.
I thought Frances would put off going to finishing school, at least until after Christmas.
After all, it seemed like pretty poor etiquette to leave mere weeks after your daddy’d died of a
coronary. But when I mentioned it, Frances threw a flying fit. Said I was “selfish and jealous” of
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her, that just because I was “stuck here” didn’t mean she had to be. Mama intervened, telling me
to hush, that “of course you can still go, Frances, of course you can.” Frances must’ve graduated
with honors because hardly a month after she finished the course, she got married, and did I
mention she didn’t invite us to the durn wedding?
Whenever people asked me, “Why ain’t you married, Bird?” I thought about telling them
my fiancé died. That he’d been a traveling salesman—I’d call him Johnny—who sold carpet
cleaner and drove a Buick. He’d died a car crash over in Alabama, Buick and floor cleaner going
up in sunset-colored flames.
I jumped awake to the porter bellowing, “Arriving Oxford Depot! Approaching the
station!” The brakes screeched like catastrophe was imminent, and we jerked to a hard stop, the
passengers all nodding together at the same time. As if we’d discussed it and agreed on the same
thing: Yep, your sister left soon as she got the chance. Now you got to show up at her door
uninvited and ask for a handout.
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