“Why couldn’t it have been me instead of my daddy?” Momma cried.
“You girls go on now and leave me be with your momma. Bring me a wet washcloth, Maggie. Hurry up.”
My numb legs couldn’t follow Livvie’s order to leave the room. I couldn’t believe what my mother had just said, that she wanted to be dead. We were too much for her and I knew it. Six children, a mean husband, a crazy momma, a dead daddy, and only a Gullah woman to piece her back together. My heart sank.
Maggie returned with the cloth, handed it to Livvie and left the room, not seeing me.
“Miss MC, you ’eah me and ’eah me good. The Lawd never sends us nothing we can’t handle. Every back fits the burden. You gots to buck up! ’Eah.” She ran the washcloth across my mother’s face. “‘Eah now. I knows you sad. We’s all sad. Gone miss Mr. Tipa. He was a fine man, but Gawd call him and it ain’t fitting for us to be asking Gawd why. No, ma’am, can’t quizzit Gawd. Come on, now, drink your coffee and I get you a dress to put on. People been bringing food since yesterday and you need to pull yourself together. This house been crawling with neighbors bring cake and such. And so many hams! Oh, do Lawd! We could feed the army!”
“How many hams?” my mother said.
“The better part of twenty by now!”
I watched my mother raise herself up to a sitting position and reach for the coffee. Like my daddy said, she looked like something from the House of Horrors. “When Carol’s daddy died, they got thirty,” she said. “Coffee’s cold.”
“Day ain’t over yet,” Livvie said. “I gone make another pot.”
“Susan! I didn’t even see you there! Come give your momma a kiss.”
She put her cup on the night table, extended her arms to me and sighed a sigh that sucked in the whole room and then blew it all away. Shakily, I leaned over her bed and kissed her on the cheek. She smelled like sweat and old perfume.
“Do you really wish you were dead, Momma?”
Livvie stopped moving and must have given her one of her famous looks because I saw my mother’s eyes dart in her direction.
“No, honey. I’m just upset,” she said.
I left the room and knew with every cell of my thirteen-and-one-half-year-old self that she was lying.
WHEN ANYBODY DIED on Sullivan’s Island, the immediate world went to the wake, viewed the body, kissed the family, waited for the Knights of Columbus honor guards to come do their thing and then said the rosary with the family priest.
I had never been to one but I’d heard the stories about them for years. Everybody said what a good job the funeral home did on the deceased and how he looked just like he or she could just sit right up and talk to you. They went to wakes to wake the dead. Very funny.
Around nine o’clock, all the grown-ups would start twitching for a cocktail, and they’d go back to the house of the person who died and party until the wee hours, eating, drinking and telling hilarious stories about the deceased.
At four o’clock on the day of Tipa’s wake, Livvie lined us up in the kitchen, fussed over our appearance and wet-combed Timmy’s and Henry’s cowlicks into obedience. She tucked in their shirts, pressed rosaries into their hands and straightened their neckties. Then she gave us all a good lecture on protocol.
“All right. ’Eah me good. I ain’t gone be hearing no stories about y’all carrying on at the funeral home, am I? Y’all be dignify and keep yourself straight! Remember, this is for y’all’s granddaddy, and every eye gone be on he grandchildren, watching to see iffin y’all behaving! Iffin y’all feels like crying, try to hold on till y’all get home. Then y’all come to me and we let it all go. Iffin y’all don’t want look, don’t do him. Just stare over the casket like Livvie showed y’all. Now, y’all ready?”
As far as the boys were concerned, she may as well have been talking to a pile of lumber, because within five minutes of arriving at the funeral home, they had their shirttails flying, and their sweaty faces were overheated and red. The boys ran the halls with the other children who were there. The poor man who ran the place, Mr. Wilbur, I think, kept asking them to quiet down, to respect the dead, but he didn’t know who he was dealing with. The boys never even came in the viewing room, which was freezing cold to keep Tipa from melting, I figured.
I was in the back of the room with Maggie, talking to Mr. Struthers and half of the Island, just yakking my head off about school and things like that, enjoying the macabre celebrity that death brought, when I spotted Mrs. Alice Simpson signing the “Book of the Dead” at the door. She looked downright respectable, in a blazer and skirt, unlike anything I’d ever seen her in.
Every head turned when she came in, and she refused to make eye contact with anyone and she went directly to my mother’s side.
I could hear the old guard sucking their breath in. I knew that if somebody didn’t exhale soon every flower in the room would be wilted. I wasn’t about to miss one bit of this, so I followed on her heels.
Mrs. Simpson knelt by my mother.
“MC, your daddy was such a nice man,” she said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you, Alice. Thank you for coming.”
“My daddy died when I was sixteen. Suicide.”
Silence from Momma.
“You’ve been very lucky to have had your daddy for so long,” Alice said, her face starting to quiver.
“You’re right, yes, you’re right.”
“My momma left my little brother and me the next year and I never saw her again. Then my brother died in Vietnam last year.”
Finally, my mother looked at her square in the face.
“Alice! I never knew that. I’m so sorry.”
To the complete astonishment of the entire universe, Momma and Alice started hugging each other and the next thing you knew, Momma invited her over later for a drink. Holy moly, I thought, holy moly. Sullivan’s Island would be there in droves tonight when this got around. Poor Mrs. Simpson. Who knew?
Alice stood up, squeezed my mother’s hand, blotted the corners of her eyes with a tissue and walked out.
The din in the room gradually grew back to such a level that you’d have thought they would wake up Tipa. The Knights of Columbus honor guards had arrived. It was the parting of the Red Sea as the crowd allowed them in. Six men wearing solemn black tuxedos, chapeaux with enormous plumage (which looked to me like Napoleon’s hat), capes, gloves and swords approached the casket. I could almost hear my own heartbeat it was so quiet. I had worked my way to the back of the room. I wasn’t too thrilled about getting stuck next to the casket with Tipa in it and my mother acting like the leading actress from the Night of the Living Dead. Momma seemed to be luxuriating in her bath of tears, tremors and grief, her chair faced away from the casket, as she had adamantly refused to look at her father’s corpse.
I followed the lead of the others as they made the Sign of the Cross and began to say the rosary. It seemed like we said two thousand Hail Marys and then it was over. The honor guard filed out and people began saying good night to Momma and Grandma Sophie.
“Now, MC honey, if there’s anything we can do, just call me, okay?”
“Mrs. Asalit, I knew Tipa all my life. I’m gonna miss him. Such a lovely man.”
“Thank you. Thank you for coming.”
The crowd had dwindled down to the twenty or thirty diehards who would no doubt follow us home. I hoped there was a doctor or a bartender among them because Momma needed a shot of something.
“Time to go, MC,” my father said to my mother. Her face showed total bewilderment. “Do you want to say good-bye to your daddy? I’ll help you, MC, come on, I’ll stand with you.”
It was the single most decent thing I’d ever seen my father do. He knew that Momma couldn’t accept her father’s death, but if she’d see it, maybe it would help her come to terms with it.
He helped her to her feet and she was shaking all over. I held my breath as she turned. She knelt on the white leather prie-dieu and Daddy stoo
d behind her. My mother began to weep and wail like nothing I’d ever heard. I could see that Grandma Sophie was furious. Momma just kept going on and on, weeping like a baby. It was horrible and endless. Finally, she slowed to gulping sobs and I realized I was crying too. I looked around to find Maggie, Timmy and Henry, and all of them were crying. The remaining guests waited in sympathy at a distance.
Grandma Sophie stood up from her chair and went to Momma’s side. “It’s time to go now, Marie Catherine,” she said, not very nicely.
Daddy stepped to Momma’s other side and together they helped her get up. Momma leaned over the casket and kissed her father tenderly on the forehead.
“Good-bye, Daddy,” she said.
Daddy put his arm around her and led her out, with Grandma Sophie on his other arm. She’ll never get over this, I thought, never. I was getting plenty upset.
“Can you believe Mrs. Simpson showed up?” Maggie whispered to me on the way home in Aunt Carol and Uncle Louis’s car. “Everybody said she had some nerve coming in there like she belonged with decent people.”
“Shut up, Maggie,” I said, loud enough for the grown-ups to hear me, “you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
No one said a word after that. We rode over the bridge in silence.
MORNING LIGHT BROUGHT the sound of Livvie’ s voice raised in yet another song I’d never heard. From down in the yard the deep velvety sound grew like the glow of a warm fire as she approached the house.
“Free at last! Free at last!
Thank Gawd I free at last!
Way down yonder in the graveyard walk, gone meet my Jesus and we gone talk,
On my knees when the light pass by,
thought my soul would rise and fly!”
I hurried out of bed, grabbed a robe and checked the alarm clock. Seven-thirty. She was very early. When I got to the kitchen I found her decked out in what I imagined to be her Sunday best, including a felt hat with a feather on the side.
“Morning, Miss Susan. Everybody still sleeping?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Gosh, Livvie, you look so nice! You’re so early!”
“Yeah, chile. What you think, that I ain’t got no nice clothes? Humph.”
“No, I didn’t mean that.”
“Good thing I slice up all that ham yesterday,” she said. “Now we all organized for after the cemetery. Had my nephew drive me today. Figure this family gone need all the hands they can get today.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking in the cabinet for the corn flakes. I dumped some in a bowl and listened to her go on.
“Yeah, Gawd, Mr. Tipa done rise and fly. You know, I figure it ain’t so bad to die. When I go I get to be with my Nelson and be with Jesus, my king. Humph, someday this old woman gone get she reward for all the dishes she wash for the white people. Shuh, so many dish!”
I was crunching away at spoonfuls of banana and cereal. God only knew what the day would bring. This was my first funeral.
“No, sir, got to put on my good church clothes and help this family,” Livvie continued. “They got trouble today. I think, everybody in this house might be crazy but I sure do love y’all children.”
“I love you too, Livvie. This whole family would go to hell in a handbasket if it weren’t for you.”
“True enough. When I think back on the wake yesterday I says to myself, Livvie? There ain’t nothing wrong with them children, it’s them grown-ups. Did you see your grandmomma all dressed up and talking like she ain’t got nothing wrong with her? Well, I tells you a little something, she ain’t got nothing wrong. We can’t be catering to her iffin we want her to get back to living. Your momma either. Shuh! No, sir, no more catering.”
“You’re right,” I said.
“Yeah, Gawd, old Mr. Tipa done rise up and fly!”
Over the next few minutes, the Island Gamble came alive with people coming downstairs. Livvie was scrambling a dozen eggs with chopped ham and onions. She had the apron on over her dress and her hat was still on too. Coffee was perking, dishes rattled and the day began.
Daddy, Timmy and Henry each took a plate from her and went to the porch to eat. The kitchen table and the dining room table were still covered in cakes and platters. Uncle Louis and Aunt Carol showed up like they had a reservation for two and Livvie turned to greet them.
“Morning!” she said. “Y’all want some coffee?”
Aunt Carol sized up Livvie in her dress and hat and said, “Why, Livvie. Are you going somewhere?”
“Sure enough, I figure that Miss MC gone be needing a hand with them twins in the church so I put on my best dress for Mr. Tipa,” she said. “I stay at home with the babies last night, but today I gone pay my respect.”
“Really?” Aunt Carol said, as though the word had five syllables.
“I’m sure my sister will appreciate it,” Uncle Louis said, and tried to change the subject. “Where’s my brother-in-law?”
“He gone to the porch with the boys to eat. Y’all want some eggs?”
“No, thanks, come on, Carol,” he said and left the room with her in tow.
“I’m going to get dressed,” Maggie said.
Silence.
“Aunt Carol stuffs her bra,” I said to Livvie.
Another silence.
“She does. And you should see how she acts around Mr. Struthers. She talks to him like they’re naked.” It was the best I had to offer.
I saw Livvie’s shoulders shaking and thought she was crying. To my complete surprise, she turned to me laughing, slapping her thighs. The most dignified woman I knew dissolved into an old country girl when she laughed.
“Honey chile, when a body been colored as long as me, you get used to all kind of fool. I know I shouldn’t gossip with you, but what you think? Think she trying to set all the cock to crowing in the church today? Oh, Lawsy, chile, that woman ain’t nothing but goat-meat buckra! Buckra is low-class white folks, honey, and she don’t bother me! I gone to feed and dress them babies now. We gots to get a move on today.”
“I’ll come help you,” I said. I got two bottles from the refrigerator. “I’ll warm these up and be there in a minute.”
“Thanks, Susan.”
While I waited for the water to simmer in the pot, warming the formula for my little sisters, I thought about my aunt. What a sorry-ass excuse of a woman she was. I could tell she stuffed her bra by the way she moved. I tested the milk on my arm, decided it was warm enough and went to find Livvie. I followed the sound of her voice to Momma’s room and bumped smack-dab into them arguing.
“But Livvie! You’re…you’re not Catholic! You want to come to my church?”
“You mean I’m colored.”
“Well, yes. I mean, I don’t want you to be embarrassed, that’s all,” Momma said.
“You mean you don’t want to be embarrassed. You worry what people gone say, right?”
“Livvie!” Momma said.
“Well, they might say that Gawd made my skin and He knows what He’s doing, that’s what! Miss MC, I quit. I gone work for today, but that’s all. I sorry for you today, but I can’t be working no more for somebody who don’t welcome me in Gawd’s house. Jesus died for everyone, not just you.”
She pushed by me and almost ran to the twins’ room. I chased her to the stairs and passed Daddy at the front door.
“What’s up?” he said.
“Livvie quit,” I whispered.
“Oh, no!” he said and for the second time in two minutes, I almost got knocked off my feet by a grown-up. When I got to the twins’ room, Daddy closed the door in my face. I could hear Livvie’s angry tears and I wanted to kill my mother for making her cry like that. She sounded like her heart was breaking. I pressed my ear to the door and heard almost every word.
“That’s right,” I heard her say.
“Please, don’t…” Daddy said.
“Only if…” she said.
“How much?”
“That’s right,” she replied.
r /> Silence.
The door opened.
“Women!” Daddy said, shaking his head, passing me unnoticed.
I went into the room and Livvie had my twin sisters’ dresses standing up on the bed. She must’ve spent hours starching and ironing every ruffle.
“Ain’t they cute?” Livvie said, smiling at me.
“Yeah. What happened?” I asked.
“Just a little ‘come to Jesus’ meeting with your daddy, that’s all. Everything is fine. I gone go to the church with y’all and then we gone have a party for Mr. Tipa to beat the band!”
“But I thought you said that you were quitting.”
“Listen up to me, chile, your momma and your aunt might be narrow-minded old buckra bigots, but I am the richest housekeeper and nurse on this Island!”
“Another raise?”
“Yes, ma’am! Ten dollars a week! I make them pay for they sins!”
Twelve
Hank
1963
IT was a Sunday and Livvie’s day off, two weeks before Thanksgiving. There was a dance at the CYO club down the Island in the church hall and we all wanted to go—Maggie, Timmy and I. Henry was still too little. We asked Momma for permission and she answered through her haze of antidepressants that she guessed so. She practically lived in her bed, with frequent visits from Dose-’em and Stick-’em.
Maggie had washed her hair and I was covering my pimples with tiny dabs of makeup, which I was forbidden to wear. Maggie was meeting Lucius Pettigrew at the dance, her new boyfriend from Charleston, and she was out of her mind with excitement. I only hoped somebody would look at me. Maybe ask me to dance? I loved to dance and I’d dance with almost anybody, except my brothers, of course.
“Just what in the hell do you think you’re doing?” Daddy’s angry words bombed the house. He’d been in a foul mood all day, grumbling and complaining about everything. Spoiling for a fight. Maggie and I just looked at each other. We became very quiet and the next thing we heard was Timmy screaming in terror from the bathroom down the hall.
“Please, Daddy! Don’t beat me! Please, Daddy!”