Gone Crazy in Alabama

  “All right, all right. Let’s look at them inside.” Big Ma was anxious to not be seen. It was too late. Mr. Lucas’s house sat less than a half acre beyond the vegetable garden to our right side. He leaned against one of the white posts that ran from his porch to his roof, and he waved to us and called out to Big Ma. Big Ma waved her arms but only to tell her neighbor, “Stop that waving.”

  She said to Uncle Darnell, “Go drive that rig back over to him before he comes down here.”

  “Can’t,” he said. “I need to get to town.” Uncle D and Mr. Lucas had worked out an arrangement to share the truck even though Mr. Lucas hardly drove it.

  Big Ma scolded us. “See what you all started up?”

  Mr. Lucas didn’t have as much land as my great-grandmother, but he had a few fruit trees and pecan trees on his property. The last time we drove down south, he had planted a pecan tree in Ma Charles’s yard for shade. That pecan tree was hardly the same tree he’d planted a few years ago. The tree was full of pecans and its trunk and branches were now good for climbing. I couldn’t hide my smile. Between the tree’s height, sturdiness, and branches that formed a seat, I knew I’d found my hiding place.

  Ma Charles took her time to bend down to scratch Caleb’s ear. “That’s a good dog. Let ’em know across the creek that I have young’ns. Let them know my roots aren’t cursed. Sing, boy. Go sing! That’ll show her!” Caleb raised his throat and snout and did just that while Vonetta and Fern petted him.

  “Ma! Will you hush about a curse!”

  Ma Charles ignored her daughter. “That’s right! Sing, boy. Sing so she knows we have life on this side of the creek. Sing!”

  Uncle D dropped our bags on the porch and said, “I’m going to town for spark plugs. I’m taking Mr. Lucas with me.”

  “You take him into town,” Big Ma said. “But make sure you tell him tonight’s for family. Just family.”

  Ma Charles said, “Son, tell him no such unkindness.”

  And Uncle D, who was probably used to being between his mother and grandmother, was already in the truck.

  Fern hopped from her left foot to her right, doing her “Gotta, gotta” dance, and Vonetta hopped along with her. They both looked around for a dreaded but familiar sight. I did too.

  I asked what we all needed to know. “Ma Charles, where’s the moon house?” That’s what we called the small blue wooden shack with half-moons painted on its front door and sides.

  “The outhouse?” Ma Charles threw her head back and laughed. “The outhouse is gone,” she said.

  “Then where do we go?” Vonetta asked.

  Ma Charles said, “Go where you want.”

  “Don’t tell them that, Ma!” Big Ma scolded. “In spite of that no-mothering mother of theirs, they’re not savages.” Big Ma swatted Vonetta on the bottom, then Fern, which was as playful as Big Ma got. “Go on in the house. Use the bathroom.”

  Vonetta and Fern screamed for joy. They didn’t want to see that outhouse any more than I wanted to iron cotton sheets.

  “Nothing scarier than going to the outhouse in the spooky nighttime with the crickets chirping,” Vonetta said.

  “And a hoot owl going, ‘Whoo-whooo’ while you’re trying to make doo-doo.”

  “Last one waits!” Vonetta shouted. Then they raced each other into the house, leaving the bags for me to carry inside.

  Last time we were here Fern was five and too scared to go to the outhouse. She used a pot instead, and my job was to dump it all down the hole inside the little moon house. And for a long while Vonetta called Fern “Stinkpot.”

  When we went inside the house I asked Ma Charles, “What happened to it?”

  “Mr. Lucas came over one day a year ago, took down the outhouse, and put in all the pipes and pumps and such. Next thing you know, we have indoor plumbing through and through. Always had running water, but this was a welcome change.”

  “That was nice of him,” I said. It was more than nice. I was relieved to not have to go to the moon house, or walk Vonetta there and stand guard, or carry Fern’s pot there for dumping. Besides, I was a Brooklyn girl. But as sure as I couldn’t stop calling my father Pa, I knew I had a small bit of the South in me too. It was funny. You don’t know something bothers you until you no longer have to do it. Suddenly you’re both angry and glad. Angry you did it for all those years and glad you’ll never do it again.

  When you get older and taller, everything else gets smaller. But not Ma Charles’s house. The house was actually bigger, inside and out. It wasn’t my imagination.

  “What happened to the house? How did it get bigger?”

  “What a dumb question,” Vonetta said. “Houses don’t grow.”

  “Not like daisies.”

  My rolling eyeballs spoke for me.

  Ma Charles said, “House grew some.” She turned to Big Ma and said, “No thanks to anyone under this roof.”

  Eyeball-rolling was catching. My grandmother rolled her eyes at her mother—something I’d never do to Cecile, and out of respect, not to Mrs., either.

  “What do I know about adding on rooms, Ma?” our grandmother said innocently. “I’m a woman, not a lumberjack.” Vonetta and Fern thought that was especially funny and cackled. Big Ma said, “If Elijah Lucas wants to put in plumbing and add a room or two onto your house, that’s his business.”

  Ma Charles was disgusted by her answer. “That’s not the point—whether you swing a hammer or not, daughter. The point is one day you’ll step out on that back porch and smell Elijah’s new wife’s pecan pie cooling from her windowsill.”

  “She can bake shoofly pies for all I care,” Big Ma said. “If Elijah wants to kill the memory of his wife and marry some woman, that’s between him, God, and that some woman.”

  Ma Charles waved her hand away like she had no use for Big Ma.

  I had once overheard Big Ma telling Pa he need not worry about her remarrying. She didn’t want two husbands in heaven. Only one. That’s why she didn’t remarry after Grandpa Louis died, and that was when Pa was twelve and Uncle Darnell had been just born. Grandpa Louis died four years after he’d come home from liberating Italy along with the all-black army, according to Big Ma. He gave his medal to Pa, and Pa had given it to Uncle D when he went to Vietnam. Although no one spoke of it, Uncle D had put the medal in the pawnshop when he was sick and moaning, rattling around like a ghost. The medal was more than twenty years old and Grandpa Louis had been gone for about twenty years.

  Big Ma didn’t seem to mind being alone for so long. She had us and a picture of Grandpa Louis. And when she wasn’t with us in Brooklyn she had Ma Charles, Uncle Darnell, and the Lord. She didn’t need another husband. “No sir,” she said. “One husband’s all the Lord and I know about.”

  JimmyTrotter, No Space in Between

  Who needed a rooster in the morning when the Alabama sun rose early and bright to ruin my plans of sleeping until noon? It wasn’t yet six o’clock but my eyes were fully open, my mind too far from dreaminess to be pulled back into sleep. Not that Big Ma would let me sleep late. Pa had told Big Ma over the phone to let us run around and have fun and to not work us half to death, even though I knew Big Ma had a special chore waiting for me. Sooner or later, I’d have to face it.

  I tried to lie around but neither my mind nor body would cooperate. I sat up.

  Vonetta and Fern slept at opposite ends of their twin bed, their mouths wide open as they snored into each other’s feet. They were still worn out from a day and a half of bumping along on the Greyhound. I couldn’t imagine that either of my sisters’ legs, backs, and rumps ached more than mine. They couldn’t have needed to stretch more than I did through those nine hundred miles—although Vonetta’s legs were growing longer. But not as long as mine.

  I tiptoed out of our room, and then past Big Ma and Ma Charles, who shared a bedroom, even though Mr. Lucas had added on a large bedroom in the back for Big Ma as well as the bathroom.

  There weren’t any coffee smells to fill the
morning air, which meant no one was awake to ask me to do things. Although Pa didn’t intend for me to work hard, Big Ma had been promising to hand down the task of ironing Ma Charles’s bedsheets to me since the last time we came south. Ma Charles had her own peculiarities and didn’t sleep on wrinkled sheets. My great-grandmother’s bedsheets had to be white, cotton, and lightly pressed with lavender-scented Argo starch. No matter how hot it got, Big Ma had to iron white cotton sheets with light starch. “Just you wait,” Big Ma said when I was nine, mopping her wet brow. “This will be your special job when you all come down here next.” I grew to hate the sight of white sheets.

  I unlocked and opened the screen door gently to step out onto the back porch without it creaking.

  Not only had Ma Charles’s house grown, but the henhouse and the chicken run had also expanded. For one thing, we had more chickens. A little more than a dozen. The henhouse wasn’t the small, red painted box I remembered, but was now large enough to enter standing fully upright. The new chicken run was made to give the chickens room to spread out. The house, the dog, the pecan tree, the henhouse, and the chicken run had all sprung up or spread outward. They didn’t seem bigger. They were bigger.

  I went to unlatch the lock to the henhouse but it was already undone, the door cracked ajar. The smell of straw, chicken feathers, and chicken droppings rose up to my nose. I peered through the opening without entering, although I knew that wiry scarecrow form, stooped over the row of hens squatting in small dresser drawer–like boxes. The hens didn’t even stir when he took their eggs. He had an easy way about him. His back was to me but he didn’t bother to turn around. He didn’t have to. I knew he heard me or felt my shadow in the door crack, just like I knew he was smiling. He placed an egg in his basket and straightened up.

  “Hey, Cousin Del.”

  I opened the door wide and he came to greet me. I was so happy to see him, I couldn’t stop grinning. JimmyTrotter was three years older than me but we’d always been the same height. Now, he’d shot past me and was as tall as Pa and Uncle Darnell.

  “It could have been Big Ma, Ma Charles, or Uncle D. How’d you know it was me?”

  “You’re a country girl at heart. Up with the sun.”

  “Not me,” I said. “I’d sleep all day long if I could.”

  He placed the basket of eggs down on the straw-covered ground and gave me a good and proper hug, and then he dug his knuckle on top of my head to show me he was taller, in case I hadn’t noticed. Then I knuckled him in the rib to show him I was from Brooklyn and didn’t take any mess from a country boy, older cousin or not.

  Cousin JimmyTrotter. At school and on paper his name was a properly spaced James Trotter. At home among family was another story altogether. For reasons that had more to do with his great-grandmother and mine, he answered to “JimmyTrotter.” No space in between.

  I couldn’t imagine dragging my last name with me from sunup to sundown, but JimmyTrotter and his great-grandmother wouldn’t have it any other way. I’d tried to give my cousin a shorter, tougher, Brooklyn-styled nickname, JT. He’d said firmly without his good-natured ease, “You can call me cuz or cousin. Whichever. But call me JimmyTrotter or don’t call me.” And he meant it.

  We pulled apart from each other, laughing.

  “Your grandmother said you and your sisters were coming down. It was all she talked about for weeks.”

  Good to know we were wanted! But to my cousin I said, “Well, we made it,” like the journey was nothing.

  “You sure did.” He looked me up and down and said, “How’d you get so pretty so fast, cuz? Thought it would take at least another five or six years.”

  I hated myself for blushing. That compliment made him seem much older, like he was giving a penny candy to an anxious little kid. I played it off by changing the subject. “Look at all these chickens! At least fourteen hens.” I went inside the small, dark room.

  “Sixteen,” he said. “The reds are Aunt Naomi’s. The light browns . . . well, they were Mr. Lucas’s.” It was always weird to hear him call Ma Charles “Aunt Naomi” and Big Ma “Aunt Ophelia” and even weirder to remember they had names of their own, although I never used them.

  “He sold them to Ma Charles?”

  “Sold. Gave. The girls all get along and the eggs keep coming. And if chicken is on the menu, Mr. Lucas makes a run to the chicken and feed store for replacements. All girls, of course.” He thumped me on the shoulder. “Pick up a basket and help me, unless you don’t know how.”

  “I know my way around a coop,” I said, although I didn’t really want to stick my hands beneath any feathered chicken butts.

  JimmyTrotter wouldn’t let me forget the eggs I dropped and cracked when I was nine. “If you crack ’em, they’re your breakfast eggs.”

  “Not hardly.”

  Maybe my hands were cold but the hen began to flap when I reached for her egg.

  “Easy, easy, cuz.” He shook his head, like, Sure, you know your way around a coop. JimmyTrotter reminded me of Pa, and he resembled the photograph of Grandpa Louis Gaither that Big Ma kept on her dresser too much to not be a Gaither. And he was both Hershey’s brown and clay red and too good-looking to be my cousin. I felt myself blushing.

  “Now that we’re here I’ll bet you’re glad you don’t have to be up to bring the milk and collect the eggs.”

  “You’d be wrong about that, cuz.”

  I gave him Say what? eyebrows and he smiled, knowing what I didn’t know.

  “Stick around, cuz. It’s actually fun.”

  “Fun?”

  “Or funny,” he said. “Not the cows or the chickens. Miss Trotter and Aunt Naomi.”

  Our great-grandmothers, Ruth and Naomi Trotter.

  “Oh, really?”

  “Keep your ears open, cuz. You’ll catch on.”

  “Why not just tell me what’s going on?”

  “Gotta have my fun,” JimmyTrotter said. “There’s an art to doing it.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Giving them just enough of what they want but not too much.”

  “Enough what?” I asked.

  “I’ll give you a day or two. You’ll catch on.”

  Straight from Sophie

  Even though my cousin was bent on flaunting his age and height over me, I relished the time I spent with him apart from my sisters. What a difference three years made between us. We could barely stand each other at nine and twelve. Now he was practically a grown man. Sitting on the back porch yapping with my fifteen-year-old cousin made me feel like the teenager I’d soon be in October.

  We could both smell coffee brewing in the kitchen. The house was waking up. He gave my shoulder a light tap instead of a thump and said, “Let’s go inside.”

  Soon there would be noise and chores and a mountain of white sheets with my name on them to wash, hang dry, and iron. I wasn’t looking forward to it but I went in with him.

  Vonetta and Fern came alive at the table the minute they saw Cousin JimmyTrotter.

  “Straight from Sophie,” he said, placing a heavy quart bottle of milk on the kitchen table. I carried the basket full of small brown and white eggs.

  “Who’s Sophie?” Fern asked, but no one answered.

  “Cold milk!” Vonetta cried. “In time for cornflakes!”

  “Cornflakes?” Ma Charles said. “Cornflakes won’t put meat on those bony bones.” She turned to Big Ma and said, “Daughter, stir those grits up right. Extra hunk of butter—good butter from McDaniels’s farm,” she felt the need to add. “And bring out the ham and biscuits. These gals have been starving. See how they’ve wasted away.”

  Vonetta said, “I want cornflakes. Great-grandma Charles, I know you have them.”

  “And I don’t want ham,” Fern whined.

  Big Ma said, “That’s not how I raised you two—telling your elders what you want and don’t want. Just as unmannerly as a seal on strike at the circus.”

  “May I please have lots of milk with my cornflakes?
” It was too fake and sweet for Vonetta.

  “If that’s how you want to waste away, it’s all right with me,” Ma Charles said.

  “Yes, ma’am, thank you, ma’am.” Fern called up all the southern talk she knew. “I’ll waste away on milk and cornflakes too. But please, ma’am, more cornflakes than milk and no thank you, ma’am, to pig ham.”

  Big Ma said we would cause her slow and unmerciful death, but we knew she didn’t mean it.

  Vonetta took the thick bottle of milk with both hands. “Why is it so warm?” she asked. “Milk’s supposed to be cold.”

  “Like I said, cuz. It’s straight from Sophie,” JimmyTrotter said.

  “Who’s Sophie?” Fern asked again, but no one answered.

  Vonetta pruned up her face. “Straight from Sophie. That sounds nasty.”

  “Where do you think milk comes from?” I asked her.

  “The store. In a red and white carton.”

  “With a picture of a cow on a farm,” Fern said.

  “That farm’s across the creek,” JimmyTrotter said. “That cow is Sophie. And in a month, that milk’ll come from Butter.”

  “That makes no sense,” Vonetta said. “Everyone knows butter comes from milk, not the other way around.”

  “You tell him!” Ma Charles said.

  Vonetta went on. “As long as I can have my cornflakes, I’ll take the milk straight from the cow. Just get here sooner and stick the bottle in the freezer.”

  I was ready to kick Vonetta under the table but Big Ma told her to watch herself. JimmyTrotter laughed his head off and told her she was funny and cute.

  “As long as—” Fern started to follow Vonetta, but stopped herself. “Cousin JimmyTrotter. Is it all right with Sophie? Us drinking her milk?”

  “It sure is, cuz.” He answered so easily she had no choice but to believe him.