Coming of Age in Mississippi Read online

  When school started again things were still pretty rough, so Mrs. Johnson got one of her friends, Mrs. Claiborne, to give me a job. Mrs. Claiborne taught Home Economics at the white school. I worked for her every evening after school and all day Saturdays. I really liked this job because I made almost as much as Mama. Mrs. Claiborne paid me three dollars a week and the work was easy compared to what I had been doing for seventy-five cents. Now I could pay our way to the movies every Saturday and then give Mama two dollars to buy bread and peanut butter for our lunch. Besides that I was learning a lot from Mrs. Claiborne. She taught me what a balanced meal was and how to set a table and how to cook foods we never ate at home. I’d never known anything about having meat, vegetables, and a salad. I enjoyed learning these things, not that they were helpful at our house. For instance, we never set a table because we never had but one fork or spoon each; we didn’t have knives and didn’t need them because we never had meat.

  Mrs. Claiborne was in charge of selling candy, peanuts, and hot dogs during the Friday night football and basketball games at her school. On Saturdays when I went to work she would give me the leftover wieners and some of the peanuts and candy. Now, when I got off work on Saturdays, I’d run all the way home with what she had given me. Adline and Junior would be sitting out in the street waiting on me. I’d give them some of the peanuts and candy and take the wieners to Mama. On Sunday she’d make them for us. The wieners and the three dollars a week that I earned kept us from being hungry at school and at home.

  Mrs. Claiborne’s husband was a businessman. The only thing I knew about businessmen at the time was that they carried briefcases, smoked cigars, and wore suits every day. Mr. Claiborne was nice, so I thought all businessmen were nice. One Saturday I was setting the table for them and he asked me to set up a place for myself. I sat down with them—the first white people I had ever eaten at the same table with. I was so nervous. We sat in silence eating. Dessert was served and then they started talking to me.

  “Essie, how do you like school?” Mr. Claiborne asked.

  “Oh, it’s all right,” I answered.

  “What kind of grades you make?” he asked.

  “I make A’s in everything but arithmetic and I make B’s in that,” I said.

  “See, I told you she’s very smart,” Mrs. Claiborne said.

  “What would you like to do after you finish school, Essie?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Mama say I could be a teacher like Mrs. Claiborne and Mrs. Johnson,” I said. Mr. Claiborne just nodded his head.

  When I was doing the dishes Mrs. Claiborne came to help me and she told me that Mr. Claiborne thought that I was very smart. She said that she didn’t know many ten-year-old girls who worked to keep herself and her sister and brother in school. After that Saturday, I ate with them every time I was there for a meal. They started treating me like I was their own child. They would correct me when I spoke wrong, and Mrs. Claiborne would tell me about places she had traveled and people she met while traveling. I was learning so much from them. Sick or well, I went to work. I was afraid if I stayed home I would miss out on something.

  I came home from work one day and it seemed as though Mama’s belly had gotten big overnight. I knew she was going to have another baby. And I also knew it was for Raymond. Now that she had gotten fat he wasn’t coming by anymore. He hadn’t been to the house in almost a month. Again Mama started crying every night, like she did when Junior was a baby and my daddy was staying with Florence all the time. Then I thought Raymond had left her for that yellow woman his people wanted him to marry. When I heard Mama crying at night, I felt so bad. She wouldn’t cry until we were all in bed and she thought we were sleeping. Every night I would lie awake for hours listening to her sobbing quietly in her pillow. The bigger she got the more she cried, and I did too. I cried because I thought she would make me quit school and work full time for Mrs. Claiborne to take care of all of us. It seemed as though any day she would have to quit work.

  I had worked late for Mrs. Claiborne one evening and when I got off work, it was raining. I didn’t have an umbrella or anything. By the time I got home, I was soaking wet. I was so mad because I had on my first new dress in almost two years. Mama had bought five yards of beautiful pink flowered material for a dollar at the bargain store. She had a lady make dresses for me and Adline. We had both worn our dresses to school that day. Now mine was all wet and had lost its newness. All the way home, I was thinking about my wet sagging dress and Adline’s new dress hanging against the wall still looking new.

  When I walked in the door, Mama was singing. I forgot about my wet dress. Instead of looking depressed and sick as usual, she seemed so happy. Dripping wet, I stood in the door a long time just looking at her. I didn’t know why she was happy and I didn’t really care. I was just glad to see her like this. She was walking around carrying her big belly like it was as light as a feather.

  “Take that wet dress off before you git a cold!” she said as she noticed me standing in the door. Any other time she would have said something like, “Look how wet you is. Why didn’t you wait till it stopped raining!” That night I listened to see if she would cry and she didn’t. So I didn’t have anything to cry for that night, either.

  She walked around in that spell of happiness for three or four days. Then one evening I came home after work and found Raymond there. When I walked in the door he was rubbing her belly and she was blushing down. I got so mad standing in that door, I started trembling with anger. I felt like going up to him and slapping his hand off her belly. Mama was laughing now, I thought, but I knew she would be crying again as soon as her belly went down and he made it big again. When they noticed me standing in the door looking at him disapprovingly he jerked his hand away. Mama stopped blushing. They both could tell that I didn’t like it at all. In fact when he left, I didn’t say anything to Mama. I just went about the house doing anything I could find to do to keep from talking to her. Raymond had brought some candy for us. Adline and Junior were eating theirs and grinning, but I didn’t touch the candy Mama had left for me. If Adline and Junior knew Raymond had made Mama cry every night like I did they wouldn’t be eating that candy either, I thought.

  Later that evening when I was taking my bath in the tin tub, Mama came in the kitchen. Without saying a word, she got down on her knees with her belly touching the tub and washed my back. She was still happy, but she knew I wasn’t. She was putting lots of soap on my back and scratching it and rubbing it good. Usually she fussed at us for using so much soap.

  “We gonna be moving pretty soon,” she said.

  I sat there stiff and didn’t say anything. “The Johnsons probably is asking her to move because she is too big to work,” I thought. She kept rubbing my back.

  “Ray done built us a new house,” she said.

  “What!” I yelled, almost jumping out of the tub.

  “And you can quit working for Mrs. Claiborne as soon as we move,” she said.

  “Mrs. Claiborne treat me good and I don’t want to stop working for her,” I said.

  “O.K., you can go on working for her if you want to. But Ray will be able to take care of us now,” she said.

  I cried that night because I was so happy. I no longer hated Raymond for feeling Mama’s belly. All night I lay awake thinking of how Mama must be feeling to have someone build a house for her after she had been killing herself for more than seven years working on one job after another trying to feed us and keep us in school and all. We had moved six times since she and Daddy separated. Now she would have a place of her own. And we were going to be moving off white people’s places probably for good.

  Chapter

  FOUR

  We stayed at the Johnsons’ until the end of the summer. Then one day we moved. Raymond had built the house at the bottom of the Ash Quarters right off Highway 24. We were now living next door to Raymond’s mother, Miss Pearl, and all the rest of Raymond’s people. Somehow, by hook or by crook, Raymond and h
is entire family had bought land there, along the gravel road that formed the main street. On the very first day we moved there Mama already showed signs of nervousness.

  Raymond, with help from his brothers, had built the house for us with his own hands. It was a green frame house with a gray front porch. There were five rooms, more than we had ever lived in—a living room, three bedrooms, and a kitchen. The only thing wrong was that we still had an outdoor toilet. Raymond and his brothers had also built Miss Pearl’s house and she had a bathroom. Raymond said that later on he would build a bathroom for our house too. We didn’t have running water in the house either but the water line had been run to our house and a water faucet had been put up in the front yard. At least we had plenty of water to fill that tin tub.

  The inside of the house had not been finished when we moved in. Raymond and his brothers worked on it daily, sealing it with sheet rock. When all the sheet rock was up, Mama and I went to town and bought some beautiful flowered wallpaper for each room, except the kitchen. Then it was time to buy the new furniture. Mama always took me with her to buy things for the house.

  “Mama, let’s get the beds first,” I said as we walked in to the only furniture store in Centreville.

  “O.K.,” she said, “but don’t let me forget the icebox.” I think Mama was a little scared, because this was the first time she had ever bought furniture. Before, we had always been given old discarded furniture by other people. We looked over all the beds and Mama picked her bed in no time. She selected one with a solid mahogany headboard that was part of a mahogany bedroom set. But I still didn’t see my bed, the one I wanted for my room.

  “Have you got a bed with big tall brown posts?” I asked the saleslady.

  “Yes, we have one with posts,” she said. “Here, don’t you like this one?” she asked, pointing to a little mahogany bed with little straight posts.

  “That’s not what I want,” I told her. “I want one with big tall posts and a cover over the top.”

  “Where did you see that kind of bed?” she asked, looking at me as if I were crazy.

  “The lady I used to work for had a bed like that,” Mama answered quickly.

  “You got one like that?” I asked the saleslady again.

  “No, we don’t carry them and it would cost too much for you. How old are you?” she asked me coldly.

  “Eleven. I’ll be twelve next week,” I answered.

  The saleslady acted as if she was mad and so did Mama. So I took the bed with the little brown posts. Then Mama picked out a green three-piece sofa set for the living room. Mama asked for an icebox and they didn’t have one. I was glad because then I hoped she would buy one of those nice big refrigerators like the Johnsons and the Claibornes had. But she didn’t. She gave the lady a down payment on the furniture and we left. On the way home she kept telling me I shouldn’t want everything white folks had. She said that Miss Ola’s bed cost more money than our house had cost. “Miss Claiborne and Miss Ola done ruined you,” she said. I often got the feeling that Mama didn’t like Mrs. Claiborne acting like I was her daughter. The way she said they had “ruined me” I knew for a fact that she didn’t like them treating me like their equal. I remember once I had told her that I ate at the same table with the Claibornes and she asked me, “What they say to you when y’all be eatin’?” So I told her, “We just eat and talk!” “Eat and talk!” she said. “What you gotta talk about with them white folks?”

  After the furniture was delivered, we settled down. There were only a few things that kept us from being middle class—the outdoor toilet, the wood stove, and the tin bathtub. However, we did have mahogany furniture and Raymond had a small bank account from the service and a car.

  Now that we had moved into Raymond’s house, he brought James to live with us. James was now four years old. He had gotten used to living with Miss Pearl, and he wouldn’t stay with us in the beginning. Every night he would cry until Mama and Raymond sent him over to Miss Pearl’s to spend the night.

  When we went back to old Willis High that September, I was twelve years old and in sixth grade. Adline was in third grade and Junior in second. We no longer carried one sandwich apiece to school, we were now able to carry two, and they weren’t always peanut butter either. Sometimes we had bologna. Everything at school seemed to take on a different look. I got a big kick out of showing off my bologna sandwich and drinking the cola I bought from the snack bar each day.

  But my new happiness didn’t last very long. We had been living in the midst of Raymond’s people for about three months and none of them had befriended Mama. Adline, Junior, and I had been accepted, at least by the children. All of us had become friends in school. Raymond’s sister Darlene was my age and in the same grade and his sister Cherie was the same age and grade as Adline; then Raymond had five or six little nephews that Junior played with. But the adults hardly spoke to Mama. Miss Pearl and Raymond’s older sisters would pass right by her without saying anything, and Mama would be so hurt. Sometimes she would sit on the porch and stare over at their house as if she wished she could just go over there and talk to them. I think Mama thought she could somehow make the adults accept her through us. So she began to make us study our lessons at home twice as hard as before. I was still doing my homework alone, but every night now Raymond would drill Adline and Junior again and again over the same lessons. “Little man, where is your book?” he would say to Junior, or “Come on, Junior, you ain’t got time to be playing.” After he had finished with Junior, he was often too disgusted with him to go on to Adline and he would tell me to help Adline with her lesson before I started mine. Within a month I was helping both of them, because no matter how Raymond drilled Junior he just didn’t learn anything. Now I had very little time for my own homework. But I still managed to keep my grades among the highest in my class.

  After Raymond had given Adline and Junior up and told Mama, “They are the dumbest little things I ever saw,” Mama started in on me. She was always telling me things like, “Y’all gotta do good in school. Y’all can’t let Darlene and Cherie be smarter than y’all. They already think they is better than y’all ’cause they is yellow.” When she said this to me I knew she didn’t mean “y’all,” she meant me. She had given Adline and Junior up just as Raymond had.

  I was already making better grades than Darlene. However, now that I realized Mama was depending upon me to keep my grades higher, I tried even harder. Soon a visible strain of competition developed between us. I remember in class we would try to outdo each other in answering more questions, working more problems, and even trying to outread each other. Cherie and Adline got along well together. Neither one of them was the competing kind. But after a while Darlene and I didn’t get along very well at all. She worked twice as hard as me and she hated like hell that I still made better grades.

  Because my grades were going so well, I decided I could afford to go out for the junior high basketball team, the only extracurricular activity offered for sixth graders. Mrs. Willis, the principal’s wife and one of the most active teachers at Willis High, was my coach. She was the eighth grade homeroom teacher, she managed the snack bar at noon, and now she had organized a junior high basketball team. Because I was the tallest girl on the team, she worked with me more than with the others, drilling me mostly in jumping and rebounding. I would practice an extra hour each day after school plus the two evenings a week that I wasn’t working for Mrs. Claiborne. By the time we got ready for our first game, I was the best player on the team. I was also the most scared player because Mrs. Willis expected so much of me.

  Our first game was to be played on a Thursday in November at some little country school I had never heard of. I kept hoping it would be called off. It rained that Wednesday and on Thursday morning it was cold and cloudy—I remember I got out of bed and prayed that the outdoor court at the other school would be too wet for us to play. But it wasn’t. In fact, when Mrs. Willis called up to ask about the court, the coach told her that it was
in good shape and that he was still expecting us.

  We arrived late. The other team was already warming up. Once I looked at those girls out there, all the little courage I had managed to muster up was completely gone. These were the biggest girls I had ever seen. They were even larger than the girls that played on our high school team. They looked like grown women.

  “These are some mighty big girls,” Mrs. Willis commented to us as if we hadn’t already noticed them. And I felt my blood stop circulating. “What you all gotta do,” she advised us, “is guard them close and if possible get them to foul a lot. Try to keep them from that goal too.” Then she looked at me and started to say something but changed her mind when she saw how I was shaking.

  The referee blew his whistle, and the girls from both teams went to the center of the court and surrounded him. I found myself standing there too. “All you girls know the rules of the game?” he asked and we nodded yes. “Well, remember you have only five fouls and you are then taken out of the game and you can only bounce the ball three times before it’s passed on to the next girl.” When the game started, the referee blew his whistle again and passed the ball to one of the girls on my team. She passed the ball to the other forward opposite her and the forward passed it on to me. I was supposed to pass the ball back to her and fall back to play the pivot. But I didn’t. I just looked up at the big girl that was guarding me and froze. “Play that ball, Moody!” I heard Mrs. Willis yell. I held the ball up as though I was going to pass it. But again I froze. “If you don’t play that ball …” I heard Mrs. Willis say. I looked toward the goal and the only thing I could remember was that I was supposed to shoot. I didn’t bounce or pass. I ran straight to the goal with the ball held high above my head, and shot it. All the time I was running, the referee was blowing his whistle and the spectators standing around the court were laughing like crazy. Mrs. Willis took me out of the game in the first quarter. We lost. And everyone blamed me and made fun of me all the way back to school. I had enough embarrassment from that game to last me a year.