Sitting Up with the Dead, page 35
Had the presence that tortured the Bells been a kind of mirror reflecting the family troubles of the South, or a warning that went unheeded? When, in 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was found guilty of murdering NAACP field secretary Medger Evers in 1963, Evers’s widow employed language that summoned the Spirit in order to dismiss her. “I recall this feeling of release that was very spiritual… it was as though all of the demons in my body exited through every pore of my being … For the first time in all those years, I became free, my children became free and I felt that Mississippi became freer, as did all of America.”
“Freer,” emphasized Ms. Evers-Williams. Exorcism, unfortunately, is not an event but a process.
Annie’s Tale
THE PREVIOUS OCCUPANT of the guestroom in Mike LaRosa’s Memphis bungalow was a Peruvian artist named Nicario. To show his gratitude, Nicario had painted the fieldstones of Mike’s fireplace oxblood-red; he then divided the wall above the mantle into an arched triptych with painted columns, and placed an image of St. Michael spearing a smarmy red devil in the middle.
“See?” said Mike excitedly. “It represents the imposition of Christianity on indigenous Inca culture. Can you tell?”
My gift, a tea towel, suddenly seemed somewhat inadequate, so I retired to the guestroom to check my e-mail. There was a message from Karen Vuranch. “How much money would it take to describe me something like this?” she asked: “Her svelte figure is the envy of runway models, and her slow, modulated speech was easy to understand.” I wrote her back telling her how to make a direct deposit into my bank account.
There was also another message from Vickie — still no sign of her stories — that mentioned an African-American friend of Granny Griffin’s named Ol’ Rennie. “Where Granny was a tough ol’ bird from a white woman perspective,” wrote Vickie, “Rennie was her equal according to her race. She’d seen some hard times, Pam — different from Granny’s. As I told you … the South was a hard place to survive during the Depression and up until now for that matter, but particularly [for] women … And black people had an added measure of severity because of their color. My heart winces and stammers at the thought.. She added that it would take her hours to find the words to bring OF Rennie to life in a sentence. She’d have to “describe and describe to get the dusty picture accurate.”
I wrote back and begged her to do exactly that. At least it made a nice change from hounding her about sending Granny’s stories. Then, disastrously, I relaxed and spent a serene, twilit hour doing nothing but rocking on Mike’s porch swing. Afterwards, having lost the traveler’s slightly paranoid edge that I had been honing for weeks (which manifested itself in obsessively gathering directions to storytellers’ houses and fretting about running out of gas), I called a teller named Wanda Johnson to arrange a meeting. She lived in Pritchard. I related the good news that I was nearby, in Memphis. Well, that’s good, she said uncertainly, and gave me directions that involved many sightings of water. I said how nice it would be to see the Mississippi, and later recounted the route to Mike.
He screwed up his face in a pained smile as if dismissing my intellect wholesale. “Where are you going?”
“Pritchard.”
“Pritchard, where?”
“Pritchard, Mississippi. See?” I got out the map and showed him a town near Memphis, on the Mississippi River.
“Why then, Pamela dear, do her directions lead you to Pritchard, Alabama? See?” He flipped the page and showed me a town on the Gulf of Mexico.
After I phoned my regrets, Mike tried to cheer me up by taking me to see a different Wanda. It was “Wanda Appreciation Night” at the nearby P&H Café, a dive I had been introduced to on a previous visit to Mike’s, that was part frat-boy den, part family hamburger joint, and part tourist attraction for slumming college professors, like Mike. The last time we were there, we had sat next to a table of witches.
Wanda was the proprietress. The many caricatures of her lining the walls might as well have been photographs: exaggeration was her body’s natural asset. On that first visit Wanda had told me she’d worked in bars all her life, but didn’t drink. “That’s the trick to makin’ money, honey,” she’d said. She looked about fifty. A Neolithic Venus figure dressed up as Stevie Nicks, with long, curly hair and tight, yet oddly wispy, clothing. Tonight was a P&H anniversary — P&H means “Poor and Hungry, darlin,’ ” as Wanda told me, not Pneumonia and Hepatitis, as Mike suggested — which featured mud wrestling (it was actually chocolate pudding) between women in patent leather hip boots and hot pants, and the Wanda Booth, which breathlessly advertised Kiss Actual Woman!
By the time Mike and I arrived, the crowd was swaying as one with a tidelike drunkenness, cresting over the sidewalk into the gutter. Some kid offered to stamp our hands in exchange for the entrance fee. We looked at each other, grimaced, and went home to bed.
“Two Wandas down and counting,” called Mike as I fell asleep.
“There’s Graceland, if you care.” Mike pointed to Elvis’s white-columned brick mansion as we hurtled past, driving in the central, fifth lane, the abominable “chicken lane,” of a divided highway. All the commercial strips I had seen throughout the summer reached their collective zenith around Graceland, which is what, I imagined, attracted the high-fat, low-priced flotsam of the culture in the first place.
“Stop! Stop!” I yelled. “There’s the Days Inn.”
“But we’ll be late for church.”
“Just for a second,” I pleaded. Mike pulled in the parking lot and the smell of chlorine led us to the pool. My guidebook was right: it was built in the shape of a guitar, in homage to the King. A bright blue, shimmering guitar, decorated around the edges by a series of buttocks marks left by swimmers in wet bathing suits. We snapped photos then hurried on to A1 Green’s Full Gospel Tabernacle, two blocks down.
There is a vast body of apocrypha as to why the famous R&B singer A1 Green became an ordained minister. All stories seem to agree on one point: he was in the bathtub when his wife — either mentally ill or enraged at discovering him with another woman — poured either boiling water or hot grits on top of him. The important point is that afterward he founded a church, which we in turn found thanks to the electric marquee sign out front, advertising an upcoming revival. Mike pointed out that someone had put one of the s’s backwards and used a dollar sign for an ampersand. “Very Memphis,” he said dryly.
The church was modern, air-conditioned, and outfitted with a state-of-the-art sound system. We were asked to sign the visitor’s book. The addresses betrayed that Reverend Green had hit it big in the European guidebook market: Italy, France, England, Germany. Mike and I took our places in a pew next to a French couple (“Mais où est Al Green?” the man kept asking with increasing concern), in what were clearly the voyeur seats. The congregation on that Sunday in August was actually a pretty good microcosm of Memphis. A handful of white people — in this case all clones of Mike and me, youngish, liberal, and casually dressed, though Mike was the only one with a goatee and a Boston accent — trying to pretend we knew how to sing and dance as well as the overwhelming black majority. (Throughout the summer I had repeatedly received the impression that whites sense that blacks have a better time than they do, and want in on the secret.) Taking another cue from the city outside, blacks and whites sat in separate neighborhoods of the sanctuary.
The service was similar to that at Fouchena’s church in terms of kinetic enthusiasm, but the program was more freeform. In fact, the sermon and readings and responses were just a slight scaffolding built to house the music, which was so good it took over the beat of my heart. The choir had only ten members, but each one sang as if he or she were a headliner in Vegas. Whenever they began a new number, women in hats shaped like nineteenth-century bustles rose, held their arms aloft, and rotated their palms like the queen waving to her people. Reverend Green himself was an hour and a half late — stuck in the Atlanta airport, he explained with lingering irritation — but the service only really began with his arrival. I cannot remember what he said; I was too distracted by the medium to consider the message. A1 Greens speaking voice was the audible equivalent of mercury: a smooth, shiny, malleable, metallic sound that slipped sensually into the curves of the ear. It seemed not to issue from his mouth, or his chest or nose, but from his gills, those sensitive hollows right below the ears where the sweetest sensations register in a kind of exquisite, quivering pain.
That evening I lay down in bed with A1 Green’s voice still stroking my inner ear, anticipating a fine night’s sleep. Just as I was drifting off I became aware of my feet. They itched. I scratched a bit, then turned over and waited for unconsciousness. My feet itched more. By two A.M. I was frantically pulling ice from Mike’s freezer to rub over the fourteen little red welts on my ankles, insteps, between my toes. When Mike woke at six, I borrowed a bottle of Caladryl that he had bought in Colombia — “Where bugs are big,” he said — and covered my pox marks in pink liquid. It helped for about three minutes.
“You’ve got chigger bites,” he pronounced.
“Your porch!” I cried. “It must’ve been sitting on your porch …”
“They lay little chigger eggs in there, that’s why it itches. See..
“Stop!” I shouted. “That’s disgusting. I don’t want to know. What are chiggers, anyway?”
A former student of Mike’s was visiting and had overheard my raised voice. “Nasty little bitin’ bugs. You want to put nail polish on those, if they are chigger bites,” he advised. “That way the eggs can’t breathe, and they die.” Mike and I looked at him with full-blown New England skepticism. “Really,” he said. Then he wished me luck, because I was heading to what he called “the redneck part of town.”
Annie McDaniel had been recommended to me by another Memphis storyteller as “the real thing,” whatever that meant. She lived in Frayser, a white neighborhood of modest, one-story homes not far from the city beltway. I spotted her way mark immediately, a camper parked in the driveway with a Day-Glo For Sale sign in the back window. A compact woman answered my knock. Although elderly, she was pretty, in an elfin way normally associated with the young and perky. Her home was stashed full of crafts and knickknacks and her husband’s sturdy handmade furniture; it was clearly a house in which people did things with their hands. In fact, a kind of stamina emanated from Annie. I thought of her as the proverbial early bird, a plump, busybody on restless stick legs, the latter covered in tight pink stretch pants.
She brought me a Coke and we sat down next to a triple-decker model steamboat displayed on the coffee table. An odd assortment of objects, including a button on a string, a model tent, and a metal leg trap lay beside it. “My father built that packet boat fifty-five years ago,” she said. “It was modeled after a real ship that ran between Memphis and St. Louis — the Robert E. Lee.”
Annie began to unpack her memory for me. Unlike anyone else I had met, except Minerva King, Annie’s story was, quite simply, her life. Her father, a strapping man who was part Cherokee, had lost an arm in a hunting accident in 1909; after that he couldn’t find work, and so became a fisherman, hunter and tracker on the banks of the Mississippi. His family, which eventually included ten children, moved onto the river year-round to be close to him.
“I was born in 19 and 14, in Vicksburg, Mississippi,” Annie announced, “and left the river in 1932.”
“My God, that makes you …” — it took a second to do the math, — “eighty-five!” I blurted out, astonished. I was surreptitiously pressing the Coke can against my burning feet.
Annie gave me an indulgent look. “I do pretty well for an old lady,” she said, and continued to deal out memories as from an orderly deck of cards. Like Orville Hicks, Annie had spent her childhood in a world no longer known to the young. Her stories, like his, had subsequently acquired the patina of much-handled icons. “We didn’t know this way of life would disappear,” she said, still a little surprised.
The family had lived on bargelike houseboats, unless someone took a liking to their then-current home, and her father sold it. In that case, they had camped out in tents along the riverbanks and on islands and sandbars. “We ate whatever Daddy caught. Coon, mink, muskrat, possum, rabbit, wild duck, turkey, fish, you name it. When you’re hungry, you’ll eat anythin’ that don’t bite you first. Have you ever had raccoon meat?” she asked, showing me how a steel leg trap worked by prodding it with a pencil, which it viciously snapped in two.
Not to my knowledge, I told her.
“It’s real tasty, but you got to get the kernels out from just underneath the front legs. It’s this bit of real dark meat — glands, maybe, I don’t know. If you don’t, it tastes just like wet dog smells.”
Annie’s parents had put an enormous amount of ingenuity into using raw materials of the river to replicate housebound life. Her mother had taught the children their ABCs by drawing in the sand with driftwood; she had made them dolls out of cornhusks, and had invented the button toy that lay on the coffee table. The object was to spin the string and make the button move from one end to the other. Annie and her husband Jesse were both masters of this art, but I failed miserably. Jesse took both my hands in his, and tried to override my hand-eye coordination with his own, but even this was unsuccessful. I finally had to wriggle free to scratch my bites.
“Oh you poor dear, are those chigger bites?” asked Annie. “You want to put some nail polish on those, it kills the larvae.” Not waiting for a response, she popped up and ran to the bedroom, returning with a bottle of clear polish. “Cover ’em right up,” she advised, which I did as she talked, successfully gluing several toes together in the process.
Annie’s mother had used willow trees along the riverbanks to make brooms and toothbrushes; she had sewn the girls’ dresses from flour sacks, and had baked holiday pies over campfires built on sandbars. She determined it was safe to drink Mississippi water if it sat for a day and the sediment filtered out, but not Wolf River water; she taught herself about medicinal herbs and barks, and made her children wear something called asafoetida — a stinky member of the carrot family — around their necks. “It supposedly kept germs away, but since it smelt like onion gone bad, it kept everythin’ away.”
While her mother was doing all that, to prevent Annie from wandering too deep into the river and drowning, she would draw charcoal rings around her legs. If Annie came home and the rings had washed away, she’d get a whack from a willow tree switch. “Once I went in too far and drew new rings on my own legs so Mama wouldn’t know. She did. I never found out how, but she knew.”
For a time the family lived on Mud Island, which hunkers in the Mississippi just off the Memphis shoreline. Mike pointed it out a few days ago: an urban cul-de-sac now silted to the eastern bank, bulging into the coffee-with-milk colored river. Today it houses a Legolike maze of expensive, waterview condominiums. Seventy years ago it had been a little wilderness with sandy edges. While the family camped there, a preacher came every other week and held services under a brush arbor that her father had rigged up. Other times, when they were living on houseboats or camping on sandbars, they had attended services at the black churches that huddled along the riverbanks. I doubted they had felt like holy tourists, as Mike and I did, perhaps because they were there to hear God rather than music.
“There weren’t many blacks on the river,” recalled Annie. “They were all working in the big plantations up on the banks. We traded with them for eggs, butter, and milk, and shared their religion.”
SHUG
Now I remember in 19 and 19 — the winter of 19 and 18 and 19 and 19 — it was a terrible winter. Papa could not keep the snow and ice off of the top of our tent. We lived on Mud Island then, and the tent fell in. So we moved off of Mud Island to the southeast corner of Front and Auction Streets, into a huge house. We didn’t know who owned the house or anything, but we moved into it. I guess Papa found out, because we stayed there that winter.
Now the ’flu epidemic — the influenza epidemic — was raging. My sister Grace and I both were in bed with the ’flu, and my grandma died in that house in January with the ’flu. It was terrible, terrible. I think it came from Germany during World War I …
And there was a black family that lived behind this house in a alley [pronounced halley]. And they had a little girl my same age, and her name was Shug … And Shug and I run around together. I thought Shug was so pretty. She had skin that looked like black satin, and her lips was nice and thick, and I just thought she was so pretty, and I just wished I had lips and all like Shug.
Well, everybody had cook stoves, and they burned wood or coal. And back in behind that cook stove there is a place that is about this wide — Annie indicated a foot or so — so you could open that cook box and get all of that soot outta there. Because if your pipe filled full of soot too much, it could catch a fire.
Now I had platinum blond curly hair. Both Shug and I — her mother was gone this day — and so Shug and I got in that soot box. And we blacked me with that soot. Every inch of me that stuck out of my clothes, we blacked it. Even my hair. And I was so proud of me, because I was like Shug, you know? And Shug and I went to my house to show Mama. Well, Mama wasn’t happy. Mama said, “When I get through with you, you’re going to be red like an Indian!” And I was. So I couldn’t be black … She like to never have got all that soot out of my hair!
