Southern Discomfort Read online

  “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry. I have to go.”

  I swallowed the urge to say, You’re not sorry at all! You don’t HAVE to go anywhere! You just want to go drinking with Aunt Jean! But I didn’t because I wondered if maybe it was all my fault, if maybe I had done something. Surely I must have done something if she was leaving me, leaving me on my birthday.

  “Why? Where are you going? Can I come with you?”

  “No, honey. You stay with your daddy.”

  “But I want to go with you!” By now I was the one screaming and crying, and I flung myself at her and clung to her, my arms around her waist and my face buried in the front of her blouse. I was desperate to hold her and keep her from leaving, leaving me. I felt her stiffen against me.

  “Virgie, please . . .” she said. “Can you take her? Please . . .”

  I felt Virgie’s hands pull me away and hold me tight, her fingers softly kneading my shoulders. I looked up at Mama through my tears.

  “Why, Mama, why can’t I go with you?” I begged, trying one last time.

  Mama looked over at Daddy and slowly shook her head.

  “I have to go. If I don’t go now, I never will.”

  She looked at me with such utter calm that I knew with an awful surety that she meant it. She was done. This was it. This time she was really and truly going to leave and not come back.

  She opened the car door.

  “N-n-n-now wait one minute, V-V-V-Vivian,” Daddy sputtered. “W-w-w-what the hell are all them girls’ mamas gonna say when they git here and you’re not here? Gotta have a w-w-woman in the house.” He saw her look toward Virgie, and added, “Her mama, Vivian. Her mama should be here.”

  Mama turned from where she stood by the open car door. Hope surged through me that he had stopped her from leaving, at least for today, and that it was all going to be okay. My friends would come over and Mama would be there and everything would be all right. Nobody would ever have to know any of this happened.

  “Virgie,” Mama said, “go call Georgia. She’ll come and help you with the party.” She looked down at me. “I’m sorry, baby. I love you. You know I love you.”

  “No! You don’t love me if you are leaving me! ON MY BIRTHDAY!” I screamed as she turned away from me and got in the car. “MAMA!” Now it was my scream that sounded like a wild animal’s. I reached my arms out toward her in the car, but Virgie held me tight.

  Mama put her head down briefly, as if in surrender, but then I saw her take a deep breath and square her shoulders. She reached down to push in the cigarette lighter and then started the car. She looked at me through the window.

  “Aloha, baby,” she said. My mother never said “goodbye.” Always “aloha.” I have no idea when this started or why, it just always was. Lord knows she never stepped foot in Hawaii. Aloha.

  She put the car in gear and drove away, her eyes looking straight ahead. Plumes of red dust swirled behind the car, making it disappear from view long before it turned onto the main road.

  Then she was gone.

  I searched through the dust, praying that I’d see the yellow Cadillac reemerge and make its way back up the road. When the dust finally settled, the road was empty and the air was still and silent.

  I waited and prayed, but I knew she wasn’t coming back. I reached over to take my daddy’s hand but discovered he’d already returned to the house, leaving me standing in the driveway. But I wasn’t alone. Virgie took my hand and gently folded it in hers. We stood together in that semicircle driveway holding hands and saying nothing for several minutes, me trying not to cry and willing Mama to come back, and Virgie looking straight ahead down the empty road. Finally, she gave my hand two soft squeezes and turned me back toward the house.

  “She be back fo’ you, baby girl,” she whispered, “sho will.” She kissed the top of my head.

  I stiffened under her touch, as sad and confused and just plain mad as I’d ever been.

  “She doesn’t love me at all,” I said.

  Virgie smoothed my hair with her fingers and bent to kiss my head again. “My po’ lil’ baby girl,” she murmured into my hair. After a few moments, she straightened up and gave my arm a little tug.

  “We bes’ go inside,” she said. “We’s got a party to put on.”

  She began to hum “Amazing Grace,” a hymn she knew I loved, and we walked back to the house holding hands as she hummed and I quietly sang the words:

  Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound

  That saved a wretch like me.

  I once was lost, but now am found,

  Was blind, but now I see.

  As we walked up the porch stairs, I looked over at Virgie and saw her brush a tear from her cheek. It was the second and last time I would ever see Virgie cry.

  Chapter Two

  * * *

  As hard as it was for me to believe, given all the lunacy I’d witnessed between my parents for as long as I could remember, they were once very much in love. This was long before I was born, but I like to imagine them back then, two strivers with dreams beyond the world they knew. Unlike almost everybody else around them, they both wanted to be somebody. In many ways, they were meant for each other.

  * * *

  My mother, Vivian Crumble Atkinson, had been one of the prettiest girls in Wayne County, Mississippi. She was the seventh daughter of Roy Clifton Atkinson and Vinidray (pronounced vin-EYE-drah) Crumble Weaver, who all told had eight girls and one boy over the span of twenty years. Folks in Waynesboro would snicker that “those Atkinsons never had a television so they made a lot of babies instead.” By the time Vivian turned fourteen in 1935 she had already been crowned the Charleston dance champion of Wayne County and was six feet of a wild kind of beauty.

  Mama didn’t much resemble the rest of her many sisters. Unlike their fair complexions and blue eyes, she had flawless olive skin, a thick mane of jet-black hair, and eyes the color of dark chocolate. She liked to say she was an “Indian Princess”—she truly believed she was descended from Native American blood. Her sisters all laughed at that, but she was dead serious, and perhaps she was right. Mama was headstrong and fiercely independent; right from the start she seemed to be cut from a different cloth than her sisters. She also had high cheekbones and full, pouty lips that were always painted bright red. To top it all off, she had a voluptuous figure, with long, shapely legs and dainty ankles.

  Her only physical flaw, as far as I could tell, was the mangled scar of what remained of her left ear, which had been nearly shorn off in a school bus accident when she was a young girl. Her older sister Clifford, in one of those Herculean rushes of adrenaline you read about, had saved her sister’s life after the bus slid out of control on a rain-slicked back road and overturned into a swampy ditch. Clifford managed to crawl to safety, but then she saw Mama’s legs kicking furiously from beneath the bus. Seeing that Mama was trapped and drowning facedown in the mud, Clifford ran over and, with her adrenaline pumping, lifted up the bus just enough for Mama to wriggle free, saving her life. In her efforts to breathe while trapped in the muck, Mama had twisted her head side to side, and in the process ripped her ear until it hung by a thin piece of skin. After the doctor cut off the mangled ear and closed up the wound, her mother, Big Mama Atkinson, put the ear in a Ball jar and gave it a formal burial in the backyard. Years later, one of the sisters decided to dig it up. When they brushed the dirt off the jar, they saw that the ear was in perfect condition, but when they unscrewed the lid, the ear immediately turned black and shriveled to the size of a walnut.

  I suspect every big family has a black sheep or two and for whatever reason, Mama was the black sheep of the Atkinson clan. She dreamed of making something of her life, besides being a wife and mother. Most of all, she had fantasies of becoming a famous songwriter and performing with a big band in New Orleans, ideas that her mother and sisters ridiculed to no end.

  Maybe thinking of herself as the black sheep was easier for her than admitting the truth: Her own mother seemed t
o despise her, treating her viciously when she wasn’t ignoring her altogether. Another family rumor had it that Mama, and perhaps her younger sister, Jean, were not actually Big Mama’s daughters. Roy Clifton had a reputation for sleeping with a lot of women, including his own maids; it’s possible Mama and Jean were products of an affair and Big Mama had agreed, albeit resentfully, to raise them as her own. Whatever the real reasons for her cruelty, Vinidray Atkinson relentlessly taunted and punished my mother, often beating her with a belt after her sisters blamed her for something she didn’t do.

  Things didn’t get much better for Mama when she fell in love with Lamar Clark.

  My daddy, James Lamar Clark, had been born a skinny, penniless runt to Mary Annanett “Nettie” Mauldin and Thomas Lee Clark, subsistence farmers who had six children and buried two others, a set of twins, hours after they were born. Theirs was a life of hard labor. As soon as the Clark children could walk, they worked, from sunup to sundown, either in the fields with the black farmhands, or in Lee (as he was always called) Clark’s small sawmill. While they struggled throughout their lives to keep a roof over their heads, Nettie and Lee were able to keep their family fed and always stretched what they had to welcome guests at their table. Known throughout Waynesboro as a kind man, Lee Clark was also known as a generous and trusting one, perhaps to a fault, often loaning his last dime. He worked himself half to death his entire life while never quite gaining a foothold of security. During the Depression, Nettie and Lee lost the family house and were forced to move in with Nettie’s father, but then they lost that house as well and ended up on a swampy lot of land by the river that nobody else wanted. As a boy, Lamar watched all of this with a growing resolve: One day he would be rich. Really rich.

  Though barely reaching five feet six inches, my daddy grew into a strutting rooster of a man with chiseled good looks and steely blue eyes that reminded his many female admirers of Gary Cooper. But his face also held a streak of ferocity. I can picture him as a boy, bent over the cotton or struggling to see over the steering wheel of the lumber truck he drove as soon as he could touch the pedals, determined that he would never, ever again live hand-to-mouth or work that physically hard, particularly for somebody else, even his own kin. He would make the kind of money that allowed him to hire his labor, rather than be the laborer. He would, in short, make “rich man’s” money, not merely enough to put food on the table and a secure roof over his head. In photograph after photograph, his icy blue eyes are squinted narrow with an uncompromising will. As he aged, he held his mouth in an ever-thinning line, and his brow grew more and more furrowed. Truth of the matter is, I don’t have a single photograph in which he’s smiling. Not one.

  Daddy was born in 1917, the same year as John F. Kennedy. But he didn’t serve in World War II, having been classified 4F because he was nearly crushed to death by a load of lumber that broke free while he was driving the truck. The doctors who treated him told him he’d be a “cripple” his whole life. While the accident didn’t leave him bent or crooked, it did fuel his lifelong hatred for hospitals and doctors. Instead, he found a chiropractor who made a few adjustments, enabling him to live a normal life. Daddy went to him every month for the rest of his life.

  Even before he made his real money, my father dressed meticulously: dress shirt and cuff links, pressed trousers—never jeans—tailored sports coat, alligator or Italian leather shoes and belt, and a fedora, always—felt in the winter, straw in the summer. He drove around town like he was the mayor, stopping and glad-handing various merchants and other folks richer than he, making deals. He was always making deals.

  It was really no surprise that a man like Lamar would fall in love with a woman like my mother. Mama always had an air of mystery about her that most people, particularly men, found irresistible. Her eyes would sparkle with delight, but her face would remain calm, placid even, the corners of her mouth just barely lifting into an impish smile like she was hiding the world’s best secret. Daddy fell hard for those eyes and that grin and didn’t know what hit him.

  * * *

  When my parents began their courtship, Mama was only fourteen. Daddy was eighteen with barely an eighth-grade education and an old Ford pickup truck with a windshield cracked like a spiderweb. Family rumor has it that he fancied Mama’s older sister Helen first, but as Vivian matured and became taller and more beautiful, his eyes soon wandered to the younger Atkinson sister.

  After he traded in Helen for Vivian, the Atkinson girls would hover around as Mama waited for him to pick her up for a date, calling him “that stuttering runt.” If Vivian tried to counter their attack or offer a defense of her boyfriend, they’d give her a dismissive sniff, a nonverbal “Says you!”—a gesture for which they all became famous. Soon, Mama’d had enough, and when she was just past her fifteenth birthday, barely of legal age, even for Mississippi in 1936, she quit school, ran off with Lamar, and eloped.

  The newlyweds didn’t make it too far out of town before Mama’s parents were in hot pursuit. Neither Big Mama nor Big Papa Atkinson was the type to let Lamar Clark get away with such bold-faced disrespect.

  Like his wife’s, Big Papa’s nickname suited him. He was massive and mean. He’d sit on the front porch in his rocking chair with a loaded shotgun propped against the house, smoking his pipe and wearing nothing but his boxer shorts. Nothing. He’d call out a “Howdy!” to a passing car and Big Mama’d storm onto the porch demanding, “Roy Clifton! Put on some britches right now!” But he never would. He measured almost six feet seven inches tall and must have weighed in at close to 270 pounds. He was the kind of big that could drag the trees out of the woodlot if the oxen were lame or the tractor ran out of gas, the kind of big that could put his shoulder against a stuck truck and with one shove get it out of a foot of mud.

  Big Papa didn’t like to spend money. He ran Waynesboro’s biggest sawmill, but he and Big Mama and their nine children lived in a small shotgun house, a style popularized in working-class Southern towns because it was less expensive to build and allowed for better airflow in the summer’s heat. Usually only twelve feet wide and three or four rooms long, shotguns got their name because it was said that if all the doors were open, someone could fire a shot from the front porch and it would pass cleanly through the house and out the back door. As their family grew, they built a second shotgun abutting the original, thus saving the expense of having to build a fourth wall. And while they had money to pay a maid, a black woman named Biss, they paid her in quarters.

  Quarters. It’s possible that Biss chose to get the solid, sturdier coins rather than bills: Paper money could quickly be turned into trash by rats or another war, like the worthless Confederate money that filled many an attic trunk in homes across the South. Regardless, she put just about every one of those quarters in a Ball jar and as soon as one was full she would take it out into the woods in the dead of night and bury it, and then start filling another. In those days it wasn’t possible for a black man or woman to have a bank account, so Biss created her own: The Bank of Biss, I called it. She died in the late 1950s and, as far as I know, never told anyone exactly where the jars were.

  Before I was born, Biss had a baby boy and family rumor had it that he was Big Papa’s son. Immediately after he was born, Biss was forced to send him to Detroit where her family raised him. I don’t think she ever saw her son again, but I fantasize that she told him exactly where the jars filled with quarters were buried and that at some point he came to Waynesboro and, under the cover of a moonless night, dug them all up. I sure hope so.

  I never knew if Biss was her full name, or whether it was shortened from something else, or maybe not even her name at all. It’s possible her name was Bess and mispronounced Biss by everyone around her. I just never knew. Still don’t. But whether or not anyone in Mama’s family knew Biss’s given name, she was in many ways their emotional center, giving each of the nine children the love and comfort in short supply from Big Mama and Big Papa. And when Biss died, my mama and he
r sisters raised all sorts of hell in white Waynesboro when they insisted that she be buried in the family plot alongside generations of Atkinsons.

  “She was family,” Mama explained, and I knew what she meant. I felt the same way about Virgie. Even though I was only five or six when Biss died, I have a clear-as-day vision of her and Big Mama in the shotgun house’s little kitchen, both of them with rolled-up sleeves, dropping the chicken into a pot of grease, pulling sheets of corn bread out of the oven, cutting slabs of butter into a pot of peas or turnip greens, wiping the sweat from their brows with their forearms, all the while talking the secret language women seem to have when they’re putting Sunday dinner on the table.

  When Big Mama and Big Papa pursued Lamar Clark’s truck out of town, they were not, as one might suspect, trying to get their fifteen-year-old daughter back. They were chasing the newlyweds to whup both their asses for daring to run off without Big Papa’s permission. When they caught up with Mama and Daddy on the outskirts of town, Big Papa dragged his daughter out of the front seat by her hair and threw her in the dirt. Then he looked right at my daddy.

  “You little sonofabitch,” he roared, spitting the last word like dust from his teeth. “You’ve got her now, boy.”

  Big Papa towered a good foot over his new son-in-law, his wide nostrils flaring, the hand that had held my mother’s hair still pumping. I imagine he would love to have punched the little bastard, but he was probably afraid he might kill him. Then again, maybe he already recognized something of himself in his new son-in-law: that he too was tough as iron and mean as a snake. The two men stood close enough to spit in each other’s eye, Big Papa panting while Daddy remained calm, staring coldly at his father-in-law.

  Big Mama stood by watching, her arms tightly crossed under her thick, shelf-like bosom, her eyes hard slits behind her gold-framed glasses. She too tipped the scales on the other side of two hundred pounds and was not somebody you ever wanted to cross. She was always sweet to me, baking my favorite sugar cookies whenever she knew I was coming by for a visit, but my other cousins remember her like Big Papa: as grim as she was solid. Watching her daughter get thrown in the dirt by her husband apparently didn’t faze her.