My family, Mattie thought. My family.
Bo’s face creased and uncreased, as if the words he wasn’t saying were pushing up inside him. His long skinny body vibrated in his overalls. He kept quiet, though, and pushed himself up to go out to the porch to wash again. Tucker slapped his behind lightly as he went past. Mattie put her fork between her teeth, realizing in that moment how bad their father was looking. He wasn’t eating either. It didn’t seem as if he ever ate much anymore. All he did was drink lots of tea out of his special jar from under the pump.
He’s a drunk, Mattie thought, examining the broken veins in her father’s nose. He really is a drunk.
“What are you thinking about, Miss High and Mighty?” Shirley spooned butter beans onto another plate and pursed her lips at Mattie.
“Nothing.” Mattie filled her mouth with rice so she wouldn’t have to talk.
“You got a lot in that face for nothing to say. Mabel Moseley told me she saw you out behind the mill talking to that Gibson boy day before yesterday. She said you were shaking your ass and swinging your hair like some kind of harlot.”
Mattie scooped up more rice and stuffed her mouth so that her cheeks bulged out. She looked at her mother steadily, seeing for the first time not only the thin lips but also the corded neck muscles, and the high red spots on the cheeks. She is ugly, Mattie thought. Seriously ugly.
Shirley frowned. Something was going on, and she did not understand it.
Mattie let her eyes wander up to her mother’s pupils, the hard hazel color that reflected her own. You are ugly and old, she thought to herself. Her teeth went on chewing steadily. Her eyes did not blink.
“Now, now.” Tucker pushed his plate forward out of his way. “You know Mabel Moseley an’t quite right in her head. Mattie Lee’s a good girl.”
“She’s trash. She’s nothing but trash, and you know it.” Calmly, Shirley set the full plate in front of her youngest and started to fill another for herself. “Don’t matter what I do. I can’t make nothing out of these brats. Seems like they’re all bound to grow up to be trash.”
Tucker closed his eyes and sighed. “I’m tired,” he whispered. “I’m gonna lay me down for a while.”
“An’t no food gonna be kept warm for you.”
“Don’t want it no way.”
Mattie spooned more rice, and chewed slowly. She watched her mother watch her father as he walked away, shuffling his feet on the floorboards. There were wide gaps between most of the floorboards, and Shirley was always stuffing them with one thing or another. What would it be like, Mattie wondered, to live in a house with dirt floors?
“You know that union man?” she heard herself say, and her heart seemed to pause briefly in shock.
Her mama was looking at her again. Shirley’s mouth was hanging open. Past her shoulder, Bo had stopped in the doorway, wiping his hands on his shirtfront.
“Union?”
“Trade union.” Mattie filled her fork again and then looked right past her mama to Bo. “You think we ought to sign up?”
“You’ve gone crazy.” Shirley dropped the spoon into the beans. “You’ve gone absolutely white-eyed crazy. There an’t no union in the mill. There an’t gonna be no union in the mill. And I wouldn’t let you join one if some fool was to bring one in.”
“You couldn’t stop me.”
It felt to Mattie as if all the rice she had eaten was swelling inside her. There was a kind of heat in her belly that was spreading down her legs and tingling as it went. Once she had sipped at her daddy’s tea glass and felt the same thing. “You’re drunk, little girl.” Tucker had laughed at her, but she had kind of liked the feeling. This was like that, and she liked it even more now.
She watched Shirley’s hands flatten on the table. She watched the red spots on her mama’s face get bigger and hotter. She watched Bo’s eyes widen and a little gleam of light come on in them. There was a kind of laughter in her belly that wanted to roll out her mouth, but she held it inside. She imagined Bo’s chorus of when we grow up, and found herself thinking that when she had kids, she’d sit them all down on the dirt floor and tell ’em to sign with the union. Shirley’s chair made a hollow sound on the bare floor.
Now, Mattie thought. Now, she will get up and come over there, and she will slap me. What will I do then? She took another bite of rice and smiled.
What will I do then?
Granny Mattie always said Great-grandma Shirley lived too long. “One hundred and fourteen when she died, and didn’t nobody want to wash her body for the burying. Had to hire an undertaker’s assistant to pick something to bury her in. She’d left instructions, but didn’t nobody want to read them. Bo had always sworn he would throw a party when she died, but shit, he didn’t live to see it. And his sons didn’t have the guts to do it for him. Only thing Bo ever managed to do to her was go piss on her porch steps the year before he died. The whole time, she sat up there staring over his head, pretending she didn’t see his dick or nothing. She lived too long, too long. She should have died when Bo was alive to throw his party. Every damn child out of her body would have come to party with him. Anybody ever tells you I’m mean, you tell them about your Great-grandma Shirley, the meanest woman ever left Tennessee.”
Mama
Above her left ankle my mother has an odd star-shaped scar. It blossoms like a violet above the arch, a purple pucker riding the muscle. When she was a little girl in South Carolina they still bled people in sickness, and they bled her there. I thought she was just telling a story, when she first told me, teasing me or covering up some embarrassing accident she didn’t want me to know about. But my aunt supported her.
“It’s a miracle she’s alive, girl. She was such a sickly child, still a child when she had you, and then there was the way you were born.”
“How’s that?”
“Assbackwards,” Aunt Alma was proud to be the first to tell me, and it showed in the excitement in her voice. “Your mama was unconscious for three days after you were born. She’d been fast asleep in the back of your Uncle Lucius’s car when they hit that Pontiac right outside the airbase. Your mama went right through the windshield and bounced off the other car. When she woke up three days later, you were already out and named, and all she had was a little scar on her forehead to show what had happened. It was a miracle like they talk about in Bible school, and I know there’s something your mama’s meant to do because of it.”
“Oh yeah.” Mama shrugged when I asked her about it. “An’t no doubt I’m meant for greater things—bigger biscuits, thicker gravy. What else could God want for someone like me, huh?” She pulled her mouth so tight I could see her teeth pushing her upper lip, but then she looked into my face and let her air out slowly.
“Your aunt is always laying things to God’s hand that he wouldn’t have interest in doing anyway. What’s true is that there was a car accident and you got named before I could say much about it. Ask your aunt why you’re named after her, why don’t you?”
On my stepfather’s birthday I always think of my mother. She sits with her coffee and cigarettes, watches the sun come up before she must leave for work. My mama lives with my stepfather still, though she spent most of my childhood swearing that as soon as she had us up and grown, she’d leave him flat. Instead, we left, my sister and I, and on my stepfather’s birthday we neither send presents nor visit. The thing we do—as my sister has told me and as I have told her—is think about Mama. At any moment of the day we know what she will be doing, where she will be, and what she will probably be talking about. We know, not only because her days are as set and predictable as the schedule by which she does the laundry, we know in our bodies. Our mother’s body is with us in its details. She is recreated in each of us; strength of bone and the skin curling over the thick flesh the women of our family have always worn.
When I visit Mama, I always look first to her hands and feet to reassure myself. The skin of her hands is transparent—large-veined, wrinkled, and bruised?
??while her feet are soft with the lotions I rubbed into them every other night of my childhood. That was a special thing between my mother and me, the way she’d give herself the care of my hands, lying across the daybed, telling me stories of what she’d served down at the truck stop, who had complained and who tipped specially well, and most important, who had said what and what she’d said back. I would sit at her feet, laughing and nodding and stroking away the tightness in her muscles, watching the way her mouth would pull taut while under her pale eyelids the pulse of her eyes moved like kittens behind a blanket. Sometimes my love for her would choke me, and I would ache to have her open her eyes and see me there, to see how much I loved her. But mostly I kept my eyes on her skin, the fine traceries of the veins and the knotted cords of ligaments, seeing where she was not beautiful and hiding how scared it made me to see her close up, looking so fragile, and too often, so old.
When my mama was twenty-five she already had an old woman’s hands, and I feared them. I did not know then what it was that scared me so. I’ve come to understand since that it was the thought of her growing old, of her dying and leaving me alone. I feared those brown spots, those wrinkles and cracks that lined her wrists, ankles, and the soft shadowed sides of her eyes. I was too young to imagine my own death with anything but an adolescent’s high romantic enjoyment; I pretended often enough that I was dying of a wasting disease that would give lots of time for my aunts, uncles, and stepfather to mourn me. But the idea that anything could touch my mother, that anything would dare to hurt her, was impossible to bear, and I woke up screaming the one night I dreamed of her death—a dream in which I tried bodily to climb to the throne of a Baptist god and demand her return to me. I thought of my mama like a mountain or a cave, a force of nature, a woman who had saved her own life and mine, and would surely save us both over and over again. The wrinkles in her hands made me think of earthquakes and the lines under her eyes hummed of tidal waves in the night. If she was fragile, if she was human, then so was I, and anything might happen. If she were not the backbone of creation itself, then fear would overtake me. I could not allow that, would not. My child’s solution was to try to cure my mother of wrinkles in the hope of saving her from death itself.
Once, when I was about eight and there was no Jergens lotion to be had, I spooned some mayonnaise out to use instead. Mama leaned forward, sniffed, lay back, and laughed into her hand.
“If that worked,” she told me, still grinning, “I wouldn’t have dried up to begin with—all the mayonnaise I’ve eaten in my life.”
“All the mayonnaise you’ve spread—like the butter of your smile, out there for everybody,” my stepfather grumbled. He wanted his evening glass of tea, wanted his feet put up, and maybe his neck rubbed. At a look from Mama, I’d run one errand after another until he was settled with nothing left to complain about. Then I’d go back to Mama. But by that time we’d have to start on dinner, and I wouldn’t have any more quiet time with her till a day or two later when I’d rub her feet again.
I never hated my stepfather half as much for the beatings he gave me as for those stolen moments when I could have been holding Mama’s feet in my hands. Pulled away from Mama’s side to run get him a pillow or change the television channel and forced to stand and wait until he was sure there was nothing else he wanted me to do, I entertained myself with visions of his sudden death. Motorcycle outlaws would come to the door, mistaking him for a Drug Enforcement Officer, and blow his head off with a sawed-off shotgun just like the one my Uncle Bo kept under the front seat in his truck. The lawn mower would explode, cutting him into scattered separate pieces the emergency squad would have to collect in plastic bags. Standing and waiting for his orders while staring at the thin black hairs on his balding head, I would imagine his scalp seen through bloodstained plastic, and smile wide and happy while I thought out how I would tell that one to my sister in our dark room at night, when she would whisper back to me her own version of our private morality play.
When my stepfather beat me I did not think, did not imagine stories of either escape or revenge. When my stepfather beat me I pulled so deeply into myself I lived only in my eyes, my eyes that watched the shower sweat on the bathroom walls, the pipes under the sink, my blood on the porcelain toilet seat, and the buckle of his belt as it moved through the air. My ears were disconnected so I could understand nothing—neither his shouts, my own hoarse shameful strangled pleas, nor my mother’s screams from the other side of the door he locked. I would not come back to myself until the beating was ended and the door was opened and I saw my mother’s face, her hands shaking as she reached for me. Even then, I would not be able to understand what she was yelling at him, or he was yelling at both of us. Mama would take me into the bedroom and wash my face with a cold rag, wipe my legs and, using the same lotion I had rubbed into her feet, try to soothe my pain. Only when she had stopped crying would my hearing come back, and I would lie still and listen to her voice saying my name—soft and tender, like her hand on my back. There were no stories in my head then, no hatred, only an enormous gratitude to be lying still with her hand on me and, for once, the door locked against him.
Push it down. Don’t show it. Don’t tell anyone what is really going on. We are not safe, I learned from my mama. There are people in the world who are, but they are not us. Don’t show your stuff to anyone. Tell no one that your stepfather beats you. The things that would happen are too terrible to name.
Mama quit working honkytonks to try the mill as soon as she could after her marriage. But a year in the mill was all she could take; the dust in the air got to her too fast. After that there was no choice but to find work in a diner. The tips made all the difference, though she could have made more money if she’d stayed with the honkytonks or managed a slot as a cocktail waitress. There was always more money serving people beer and wine, more still in hard liquor, but she’d have had to go outside Greenville County to do that. Neither she nor her new husband could imagine going that far.
The diner was a good choice anyway, one of the few respectable ones downtown, a place where men took their families on Sunday afternoon. The work left her tired, but not sick to death like the mill, and she liked the people she met there, the tips and the conversation.
“You got a way about you,” the manager told her.
“Oh yeah, I’m known for my ways,” she laughed, and no one would have known she didn’t mean it. Truckers or judges, they all liked my mama. And when they weren’t slipping quarters in her pocket, they were bringing her things, souvenirs or friendship cards, once or twice a ring. Mama smiled, joked, slapped ass, and firmly passed back anything that looked like a down payment on something she didn’t want to sell. She started taking me to work with her when I was still too short to see over the counter, letting me sit up there to watch her some, and tucking me away in the car when I got cold or sleepy.
“That’s my girl,” she’d brag. “Four years old and reads the funny papers to me every Sunday morning. She’s something, an’t she?”
“Something.” The men would nod, mostly not even looking at me, but agreeing with anything just to win Mama’s smile. I’d watch them closely, the wallets they pulled out of their back pockets, the rough patches on their forearms and scratches on their chins. Poor men, they didn’t have much more than we did, but they could buy my mama’s time with a cup of coffee and a nickel slipped under the saucer. I hated them, each and every one.
My stepfather was a truck driver—a little man with a big rig and a bigger rage. He kept losing jobs when he lost his temper. Somebody would say something, some joke, some little thing, and my little stepfather would pick up something half again his weight and try to murder whoever had dared to say that thing. “Don’t make him angry,” people always said about him. “Don’t make him angry,” my mama was always saying to us.
I tried not to make him angry. I ran his errands. I listened to him talk, standing still on one leg and then the other, keeping my face empty, imparti
al. He always wanted me to wait on him. When we heard him yell, my sister’s face would break like a pool of water struck with a handful of stones. Her glance would fly to mine. I would stare at her, hate her, hate myself. She would stare at me, hate me, and hate herself. After a moment, I would sigh—five, six, seven, eight years old, sighing like an old old lady—tell her to stay there, get up and go to him. Go to stand still for him, his hands, his big hands on his little body. I would imagine those hands cut off by marauders sweeping down on great black horses, swords like lightning bolts in the hands of armored women who wouldn’t even know my name but would kill him anyway. Imagine boils and blisters and wasting diseases; sudden overturned cars and spreading gasoline. Imagine vengeance. Imagine justice. What is the difference anyway when both are only stories in your head? In the everyday reality you stand still. I stood still. Bent over. Lay down.
“Yes, Daddy.”
“No, Daddy.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy.”
“Don’t do that, Daddy.”
“Please, Daddy.”
Push it down. Don’t show it. Don’t tell anyone what is really going on. We are not safe. There are people in the world who are, but they are not us. Don’t show your fear to anyone. The things that would happen are too terrible to name.
Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night to the call of my name shouted in my mama’s voice, rising from silence like an echo caught in the folds of my brain. It is her hard voice I hear, not the soft one she used when she held me tight, the hard voice she used on bill collectors and process servers. Sometimes her laugh comes too, that sad laugh, thin and foreshadowing a cough, with her angry laugh following. I hate that laugh; hate the sound of it in the night following on my name like shame. When I hear myself laugh like that, I always start to curse; to echo what I know was the stronger force in my mama’s life.