Gone Crazy in Alabama

  Ma Charles thought it was all hilarious. “Go on, Rickets. That was a good prayer. Baaaaa.”

  Fern bowed her head low and grand over her plate of corn and string beans. “Afua,” she proclaimed. “My poet name is Afua.”

  Short for Onchetty

  “Look. Don’t touch,” JimmyTrotter warned. “You see this? See it?” He pointed to his airplane’s red painted tail. “That was flown by the Ninety-ninth Pursuit Squadron all over Italy and North Africa.”

  We were in JimmyTrotter’s room, pretending to love his model airplanes since there wasn’t anything new to do or see. He talked on and on about the models his grandfather had given him, pointing out every little detail of his prized World War II fighter jet and the ugly army-green one, a bomber. The fighter jets were his. The bombers sat on Auggie’s side of the room. Those, he wouldn’t let us breathe on. Nor could we sit on Auggie’s bed.

  I, myself, was tired of war and anything to do with it. Didn’t they show enough war stuff on the news between the protests here and the shooting, bombing, and dying in Vietnam? We were lucky to get our uncle back from there and luckier to have him almost back to his old self, although Uncle D had long ago stopped telling us make-believe stories. I certainly wouldn’t be keeping any model jeeps and choppers to remember the war going on, but JimmyTrotter thought his Red Tail war hawks and his brother’s bomber jets were just grand. I was relieved when Miss Trotter called to us for a snack. We all came running.

  Fern cheered when she saw that our snack was a slice of pie and warm milk and had nothing to do with animal meat. She sat right down and rubbed her hands together.

  “Aunt Miss Trotter . . .” Fern began. Our great-aunt accepted that this is what Fern would call her. She raised her chin.

  “Why don’t you have a television?”

  “Yeah, Great Miss Trotter.” Vonetta threw in the “Great” to get a smile of approval. Ever since she stopped running back and forth between the sisters, delivering their poison pen stories, Vonetta had to work hard for Miss Trotter’s attention. “Where’s the TV?”

  “Who says I don’t have one?”

  “They mean one that works, Great-grandma,” JimmyTrotter said.

  Miss Trotter swatted at JimmyTrotter’s head but he leaned a quick left, like he knew it was coming, and she missed. She and Ma Charles were so much alike I expected my great-aunt to turn to me and say, “Young’n, get me a switch.”

  “We have a television set,” JimmyTrotter sang to Fern, all the while smiling at Miss Trotter. “It hasn’t worked since George Wallace’s inauguration.”

  Miss Trotter’s face tightened and darkened. “Son, I told you about speaking that name in the house. Next time, go out to the manure pile and say it as free as you please.”

  JimmyTrotter laughed a good laugh, pie and milk in his open mouth. He collected himself and said, “Miss Trotter threw a pot at the TV just after the governor stood where Jefferson Davis had once stood, and shouted, ‘Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.’”

  “He said that out loud on television with the world watching?”

  “Don’t look so shocked, Brooklyn. You don’t get more southern than Alabama.”

  Miss Trotter shook her head. “Hard to believe he didn’t start out that way, but once he lost that first election he knew what he had to do, and old George’s been doing it ever since. Some folks so evil, they’ll sell their goodness to do bad.”

  “They just want power,” I said.

  “They don’t care about the people,” Vonetta added.

  “Surely don’t care about giving power to the people.”

  I enjoyed the sound of our voices following one another. Sounded like a favorite song from the radio they no longer play, so when you hear it, you remember how things were.

  JimmyTrotter’s grin became devilish. “Y’all want to see the TV? That pot busted the screen something nice. We never got another one to replace it.”

  In spite of Miss Trotter’s fussing and threatening to get a hickory switch, JimmyTrotter hopped up and went to the cabinet where the photograph of his great-great-grandparents rested. The yellowed doily that the framed photo sat upon draped slightly over the cabinet. The walnut cabinet made the television look like furniture that blended in with the living room set and reminded me of ours back in Brooklyn. That was, until Mrs. called the Salvation Army to haul it away. That was how we got our color TV and a plain television stand. No more wooden cabinet. That was also one of the biggest fights ever on Herkimer Street when Pa came home from work that evening.

  JimmyTrotter opened the doors to the wooden cabinet with a fancy flourish so we could see what had been hidden inside. Our mouths were probably open and full of pie and milk when we saw it. The tube had been busted, all right, but like JimmyTrotter described it, there was something beautiful about it. I’d seen nothing like it. The surface seemed smooth and uncut, but the insides cracked in circles that went round and around.

  “Charlotte was here!” Fern cried.

  “Charlotte? I don’t see any Charlotte,” Vonetta said.

  “The TV glass! It’s round and cracked up like Charlotte’s web.” She skipped up to it and traced the glass.

  “Ugh! You’re such a believer in make-believe, baby.”

  “Stop it right now,” I told one. “And don’t touch that screen,” I told the other. “Before you get cut.”

  Miss Trotter ambled up to the cabinet and traced her hand along the wood and even the glass, which was dusty. Then she picked up the framed photograph of Slim Jim Trotter with Ella Pearl, one of his two wives. She dusted the glass to the photograph, and said, “Afternoon, Papa. Mama,” and set it back down on the television cabinet.

  “My grandson got me that black-and-white set for Christmas.” She said it full of pride, and then got a little sad. She was talking about JimmyTrotter’s father, who I’d never met. For that matter, I’d never met JimmyTrotter’s mother, his twin brother, or his grandmother, either.

  JimmyTrotter said real fast, “If I want to see television, I go to Aunt Naomi’s. She has a new set. Color and stereo.”

  “It’s not brand-new. It’s from Mr. Lucas,” Vonetta said. “I think he likes Big Ma.”

  “What was your first clue, Sherlock?” I asked.

  “Meanie,” Vonetta said under her breath.

  Miss Trotter told JimmyTrotter, “Go over the creek and stay if you like,” although it was clear to me she didn’t want him to go. “Just get the milking done, son. Poor Sophie. Getting onchee with age.”

  “Onchee?” we all asked.

  “Onchee. Short for onchetty.” All the while Miss Trotter spoke, JimmyTrotter shook his head no behind her back. He didn’t have to. I knew a made-up word when I heard one.

  “That old gal prefers your touch to mine,” Miss Trotter said.

  “You rush her, Miss Trotter.” He said it both teasing and respectful.

  “I don’t have all day to coax her to yield what she’s supposed to yield in the first place. She’s a milk cow. She’s supposed to milk.”

  “That’s right, Great Miss Trotter,” Vonetta said. “Lots of us need milk in the morning.”

  “That’s right, dear one,” Aunt Miss Trotter cooed.

  “She’d milk up a storm if her baby calf was here to drink it,” Fern said. “She surely would.”

  I took the plates and glasses from the table and left them to fuss about milk and milking. JimmyTrotter followed me.

  “Do you think it’s a good idea to leave Miss Trotter alone?”

  “I asked her if she wanted to come see the launch. I’d even drive my father’s car to bring her over—sheriff or no sheriff.” He rarely spoke about his father. And he never spoke up against the sheriff.

  “You can’t convince her? Not even for the moon launch?”

  He shrugged and laughed. “Thought you were catching on, cuz. It would take more than Apollo Eleven to get Miss Trotter to cross the creek.”

  “Try, cousin. At
least try.”

  “Pretty please won’t do it,” he said. “Talk about onchee.”

  “She’ll be all alone while we’ll all be together.” I stared him down but Jimmy stayed unchanged. “Onchee” ran on the Trotter side. I said, “If you won’t do it, I will. I’ll get Miss Trotter to come over to Ma Charles’s.”

  “My great-granny likes being left to herself. But I’ll pay money to see you get a woman who knows her mind to change it. Go on, Brooklyn. Let’s see you do it.”

  “Fine.” There was nothing better than a dare. I went marching up to Miss Trotter.

  “Aunt Miss Trotter,” I said. “Come with us and see the men land on the moon.”

  Aunt Miss Trotter chuckled. “Nothing wrong with my vision. I can see clear up to the moon from the porch. I can see all the comings and goings and shooting stars.”

  Good thing I didn’t have a mouth full of pie. I laughed out loud at the thought of her being able to see what was happening on the moon.

  She turned to Vonetta. “Young’n. Go out to the tree . . .” She didn’t even finish her instructions. Vonetta was too happy to run out to the tree and scrap around among the twigs for a good licking stick. I heard her yell, “Ow!” Vonetta wanted me to get a taste so bad, she whacked herself with the twiggy candidates to get the one with the nastiest sting.

  She galloped over to Miss Trotter with her switch. “Here, Miss Trotter. Get her.”

  “Don’t you worry. I’m going to get her.”

  Unlike Vonetta, I knew my great-aunt was joking. She was so much like Ma Charles it hurt.

  I coaxed and begged her to ride with JimmyTrotter in the station wagon and come over to see the men take off for the moon. I must have begged her ten different ways.

  “Please, Miss Trotter.”

  “Please,” Fern sang.

  Vonetta only joined in because singing was involved and she had to make her voice louder than Fern’s.

  “Come with us tomorrow morning to watch the men land on the moon.”

  “There’s nothing over there I need to see. No, sir!”

  JimmyTrotter mouthed, “Told you so.”

  Miss Trotter chuckled and said, “What do you get if you poke a bear with a stick?”

  Fern raised her paws and growled.

  Vonetta said, “You get outta there fast!”

  “Mark my words, young’ns. You poke a hole past this earth, you get something back.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like that angry bear.” She pointed to Fern and Fern growled on cue. “The earth doesn’t take to being poked. Not its sky or beyond its sky. No, sir! The earth doesn’t like it.”

  JimmyTrotter rolled his eyes.

  Miss Trotter uttered a “Hmp.” “Boy, I won’t stop you from chasing your heart’s desire. No, no. I won’t deprive you of things that fly. It comes to you naturally.” She said to me, “But I won’t go marching across that creek to her mother’s house.” I was sure she meant our great-great-grandmother Livonia’s house. “She’ll have to walk to me. I won’t walk to her.”

  “But why, Miss Trotter? We’ll all be there,” I said. “All of us, together.”

  “Yes. All of you. All her generations. Daughter, grandson, great-grands.” She shook her head willfully. “I won’t go so she can talk to me as if I’m a beggar looking at her generations, when she knows I hunger for my own. No. I won’t go sit in her mother’s house.”

  Talk about onchetty. Those were her final words.

  When we left, she said like always, “Go on and good-bye, if you call that gone.”

  Jimmy Trotter said, “Pay up, Brooklyn.”

  As soon as we got home, I said to Ma Charles, just to see her reaction, “We asked Miss Trotter to come and watch the astronauts take off for the moon.”

  Ma Charles perked up like I knew she would, which told me I had to try harder to get Miss Trotter to cross over the creek or go around on the road.

  “Coming here? My sister?” She turned to Uncle Darnell and said, “Kill a chicken,” and to me she said, “And you pluck it and clean it. I know you know how.” To Big Ma she said, “I want her to be stuffed till she can’t walk, so start on a cobbler and drown it in sugar. Daughter, drown it good. I won’t let hers be the last hospitality offered, showing off with her barbecue venison. It’s a shame we don’t have a hog to kill and butcher. A crime and a shame.”

  “Hooray for Wilbur!” Fern cried. But no one paid her any mind.

  But now, seeing my great-grandmother excited, I felt bad and said, “She’s not coming.”

  Then Ma Charles felt bad about getting excited. “It makes me no never mind if she stays on her side of the creek.”

  Big Ma started to fan herself. “See what you done?” she scolded me.

  “Yeah,” Vonetta said. “See, meanie?”

  “See what?” Fern asked.

  Big Ma wagged her finger at me. “You can’t get my mother’s heart to racing. She’s an old woman.”

  Ma Charles rocked herself like a child on a hobby horse, wearing the mile-long pout I was used to seeing on my sisters. “I knew she wasn’t coming,” she said. “I knew it.”

  Like a Bird in the Sky

  “I don’t care what you say. Man has gone too far.” Big Ma whomped her black Bible against the arm of her easy chair and pulled herself up from its comfy cushions. “He should know his place.”

  “Amen, daughter!” Ma Charles raised her tambourine and gave it a good shake.

  “Forgive man his arrogance, Lord God.”

  “Forgive, Lord.”

  “Man pushes his arrogant self out, poking holes through the sky; God will sling His arrows back down on man through those holes in a mighty rain.”

  “Send your arrows, smite him down, Lord.”

  “But the Lord is merciful. Oh yes! He can surely grant man a mercy.”

  “A mercy, daughter!” Ma Charles shouted, happy that church was going on in her living room on Wednesday morning. “A mercy.”

  “A spacecraft is a man-made thing.”

  “Speak, daughter.”

  “It may go far, but it cannot reach heaven.”

  The tambourine shook and its metal disks rang out.

  “It cannot reach the Lord though it will trespass on his holy place!”

  Tambourine!

  Big Ma and Ma Charles asked all to repenteth: the astronauts, mission control in Houston for thinking they had control, and the TV station for cutting off the morning gospel hour to broadcast the space launch. And yet we all gathered in Ma Charles’s living room while I angled for a better picture of the crowds gathered outside the launch pad down in Florida. Pastor Curtis, who had on Sunday proclaimed the Apollo mission an ungodly endeavor, said he’d be taking Wednesday morning prayer service off so he wouldn’t miss the liftoff. Even golden-framed Jesus’s eyes were on the launch.

  “To the right. Yeah, Cousin Del. Now angle it toward the window. Yeah. Keep angling.”

  JimmyTrotter wouldn’t let us nickname him, but he called me “cuz,” “Del,” and “Brooklyn” every chance he got. I pulled out the left antenna rod as far as it could go and aimed it from one corner of the window to the other. I pointed the metal rod and froze as JimmyTrotter, my sisters, Uncle D, and Mr. Lucas hollered out, “Hot,” “Hotter,” “To the right,” “More,” “A little left,” and then “Aww!” Watching television in Autauga County, Alabama, wasn’t like watching TV in our house on Herkimer Street. At home in Brooklyn, you turned the dial six or seven times to see what was on the other channels. Then you fixed the antenna when you settled on a show. Down in this part of Alabama, one turn to the left and one turn back to the right were our only choices. And if there was an electrical storm, there was no television to watch, period. No radio. No lights. No nothing. During electrical storms Big Ma and Ma Charles allowed only the dark, a candle, and prayer, although my sisters and I played Old Maid and Go Fish.

  Finally, a glimpse of the giant rocket, JimmyTrotter’s precious Saturn V, m
aterialized out of snow, fuzz, and horizontal lines. We all cheered. The second I stepped away the picture snowed up and the sound crackled.

  “I’m not standing here holding this antenna,” I said.

  Vonetta seized her opportunity. “I will!” I stood aside and let Vonetta do what she did naturally: cause all attention to be pulled her way. She raised the antenna rods together to start over and arranged the rods in a leaning V.

  “That’s it! Bravo, cuz!” JimmyTrotter shouted to Vonetta. “We have a perfect picture!”

  Vonetta froze, then backed away from the antenna, carefully and dramatically, her arms outstretched in the leaning V shape of the left and right antennae until she sat down. I hated to admit it, but it worked. Furthermore, the picture stayed sharp.

  “See, Delphine? I can do things better than you.” She stuck her tongue out and I socked her in the arm. Not hard. Just enough to let her know I was still older.

  “Cut it out,” JimmyTrotter said firmly, like he was Pa or something. I rolled my eyes and Vonetta grinned. I’d get her later. JimmyTrotter considered the matter settled. He turned to Uncle Darnell. “Cousin, did you fly in any planes in the army?”

  “Don’t ask him any of that war business,” Big Ma said. “That’s over and done with.”

  “Yeah,” Vonetta said, “because he just might—”

  “Shut up, Vonetta.”

  “Now both of you, stop it,” Uncle Darnell said. “Y’hear?” Now that was Pa’s voice. Sharp and short. When we piped down he smiled at JimmyTrotter as if he hadn’t raised his voice at all. “I rode in ’em. Got evac’d by helo.”

  Jimmy thought that was cool although it sounded like spy code to me.

  “We flew in a big silver plane,” Fern said. “The ride was too bumpy.”

  JimmyTrotter patted her head until she wriggled away. “I don’t want to be a passenger in a plane,” he said. “I want to fly them. I’m saving for lessons.”