Like Venus Fading

I had been too young to understand anything during that first trip to Mississippi in 1925, but it was easy enough over the years to piece together the tragedy. I heard Mother’s version, Lil’s and, of course, Mamie McMichael’s, who eventually accompanied my sister and I when we sang as a duet. But not one of them could be counted on to tell the truth …

The story began with Mother meeting Mamie in Camden when Mother was pregnant with Lilian and Daddy’d started his long disappearing acts. Visiting a little storefront church for solace, Mother had met Mamie, who was fifteen years her senior and was the guest pianist, on a visiting exchange from Mississippi.

When Daddy discovered that Mamie had coaxed Mother to recite Bible tracts, he accused them both of being bull dykes and forbade Mother to attend any church that wasn’t Catholic.

Mother obeyed but happened to bump into Mamie five years later in ’25 when Daddy was gone again. Mamie’d warned, ‘Bad men get worse. Leave him and take them kids back to Mississippi.’

Mamie had such a soft spot for Mother she assured her that she could earn pocket money there, giving Bible recitations in small churches where Mamie and her brother Buster played. She even paid for Mother’s train journey and ours.

In the many versions of this story I’ve heard, I’ve never found out where Mamie was that day Buster collected us from the station. He arrived with the mule and cart they normally used to transport their piano and Lil, like any five-year-old, was over herself with excitement.

Buster was a handsome, young World-War-I veteran. Dark skinned like Mamie, but way better looking. He bragged about his army experience, but resented that the local reserve board had refused him a disability pension for the headaches he’d suffered from being gassed in France while digging latrines.

The ten acres he shared with Mamie were on the north side of a big cotton plantation, worked by tenants so poor they considered Buster and Mamie to be rich. But the farm was paltry – chickens, turkeys, guinea fowl and a few hogs and goats in pens. Yet Buster expected to impress Mother with the two-room house and outdoor toilet which he’d built to resemble a proper A-frame house.

With Lilian perched on his shoulder when he showed it to Mother who had me in her arms, he teased, ‘Y’all’s behind-the-chairs won’t set on no finer commode than that from here to Little Rock.’

It was a little shotgun house with the kitchen cluttered with pots, pans, sheet music and war mementoes, including a gas mask. Mother recalled how ashamed she was that we ate like we were starving, gobbling his peach preserves and government-surplus peanut butter after eating half of the fat back and greens which had been simmering on the stove. So when Buster promised Lil pancakes and sorghum syrup for breakfast, Mother said, ‘You better stop or I won’t never get her back up Jersey way.’

Next thing, Buster sat himself at the piano and created a song, a ragtime thing with some made-up lyrics about not letting Lil go back to Jersey.

Mother said everything in the kitchen was swinging and she got Lilian to dance, because Lil could always cut a shimmy.

We must have all been having a ball in that Delta heat until I strained to fill my diaper and Mother rushed me to the outhouse. While she held me over the toilet, a car rolled into the yard and backfired. Mother thought nothing about it, beyond wondering who Buster and Mamie knew who could afford an automobile. But it soon drove off again and next she heard Lilian calling. When Mother made her way to the front yard with me trailing behind, she found Lil standing over Buster who was sprawled motionless on the ground. His face and hair were covered in dust and blood and Lil was shooing the flies off him. Mother used to say, ‘What was I meant to do? I was young and stupid and there he was on the ground with his eyes swole like two baseballs and blood streaming from his nose and mouth. I thought he was dead.’

Of course she started bellowing, because she never could cope with the sight of blood, and when she bellowed, Lilian joined her and then I started.

She didn’t know if she’d walked into some kind of feud, but the whole scene petrified her, and there were no neighbours for miles. So grabbing us kids she ran in the house, shouting at my sister, ‘Did you see what happened? Who done it!’ But Lilian was crying hysterically by then and couldn’t get a word out.

No phones. No neighbours. No real knowledge of Mamie or her brother. She was in a completely strange place with two little children, and a man she’d just met was in a heap on the ground. Mother was frantic that the culprits would return while Buster was laying out in his front yard with his chin split open and flies settling on his bloodied face.

She didn’t even know where the water pump was to get water to clean his wounds, so she tied me to a chair with an apron she’d spotted and grabbed the pot of greens. Lilian followed her back outside where one of the roosters was pecking at Buster’s trouser leg. Using the pot liquor and one of my diapers to wipe some of the blood from his face, all Mother could do was cry and say, ‘You’ll be all right. Just tell me what happened.’ He never spoke.

Lil was just learning to count that summer and wasn’t able to say whether Buster had been attacked by three or four, men or boys. All she knew is that while Mother had me in the outhouse, some white men had driven up and called Buster to the porch. He had told her to stay in the house so she’d watched from the door.

What had she seen? Did Buster resist being beaten and kicked to the ground? Who did what? Were words exchanged? At five years old Lil had no clear answers. ‘One hit him with the stick and the others were kicking him,’ she’d cried. The tyre mark across his shirt suggested that the car may have driven over him.

Mother couldn’t move him so she placed an apron she found in the house over his face to keep the flies off it and made a promise to Lil: ‘Let the Good Lord get us back to Jersey and we’ll never come to Mississippi again.’

When Mamie arrived in the late afternoon to find her brother unconscious in the yard, she hardly seemed surprised. ‘He pestered them bosses over at the reserve board for his disability pension and when they turned him down, he started putting it around that he was gonna write to Washington.’ Mamie was a big woman, tall, broad and heavy hipped. Not the sort to back off a fight, but she sat on the porch and removed her hat and earrings and slung them on the ground.

Mother said Mamie had then pumped Lilian with questions that no child of five could have managed, like what kind of car had come and what ages were the men.

In later years, whenever my sister wanted sympathy, she used to tell the Buster McMichael story. But she was thin on facts.

When he died that evening, without regaining consciousness, Mamie’d said, ‘I hope his uniform still fits, cause he’d want to be buried in it.’

Five years later in our room above Mack’s, Mother said, ‘You’re going to Sippy, Lil, like it or not.’

So that’s where we headed with the proceeds from the sale of Miss Hortense’s furniture. May 1, 1930. And my sister thought our lives were ending. In some ways they were.

We took the bus south and although Mother tried to look happy and tell us that living with Mamie was going to be good for us, I faced the prospect with as much dread as my sister, because she was the leader then. Lilian was going to turn ten that June and kept reminding me that I was going to miss my Holy Communion.

‘Can’t I take it in “Sippy”?’ I asked Mother when we settled on the bus.

But Lilian pinched me to be quiet.

On the bus one woman talked about President Hoover as though he were God or a magician, but nobody could fix what had taken years to happen.

Our driver between North and South Carolina was one of those men born heartless or else his generosity had been stretched to the limit.

It was getting dark when he tried to get rid of a dirty, blond, sunburnt woman who boarded the bus at a deserted stop with four children and no tickets. He expected some of his passengers to help him, but everybody just sat there tight lipped. The grown ups were watchful, knowing they could be in her shoes.

The woman, whose old-fashioned straw sun bonnet shadowed her sunken cheeks, pleaded in a flat, southern drawl. ‘We gotta get to Knoxville.’

With one arm, she cradled a baby on her hip, while her bow-legged toddler clung to the frayed hem of her floral dress. His dirty diaper was around his knees, and mucus streamed from his nose. Her two eldest boys, probably younger than I was, had struggled to climb on board with a burlap sack the size of a pillow case. The small cardboard suitcase in her free hand was more worn out looking than Mother’s big carpet bag which had a piece of clothesline for a handle.

When a pot fell out of their burlap, making a racket as it clanged down the bus steps, the driver threatened to push the five of them off. Though I didn’t know where or how it would come, my every muscle was braced, anticipating violence.

Mother poked Lilian in the side and mouthed, ‘White trash,’ which made my sister and I smile for the first time in two days.

We were one of only three coloured families uneasily parked at the back of the bus. Scared to even whisper, because to remain invisible was the nearest thing we had to self-defence. Mother admitted years later that she’d been afraid that the driver was going to tell the woman that she could have our seats and that we’d be the ones turfed off.

During that journey I got my first glimpse of the way that twilight gradually blackens green hills. I still had the childish audacity to feel occasional pangs of joy at the sight of a baby lamb with its mother. I saw the silhouettes of herds of horses and cows as darkness fell. What I couldn’t see was that my childhood was nearing its end.

As the bus bumped along, Mother’s head bobbed in sleep. She was leaving Camden behind, but Lilian and I took it with us. I worried from time to time whether Mack would somehow tell her about the caramels.

I kept thinking about the previous morning when I’d sat at my desk in St Anthony’s, fidgeting with the empty inkwell and a girl told Sister Elizabeth that she’d dreamt that Mack had cut off Sister Octavia’s head. Then the Italian boy who had arrived in the middle of the term from New York raised his hand to say that he had had a nightmare too. But none of them could have been as scared as I was, expecting each night to be strangled in my sleep by Mrs O’Brien’s ghost.

9

Mississippi was the crud between my toes from walking barefoot on the dry, crusty soil. And Mississippi was learning to stand back far enough when the man made soap by adding lye to the hog grease. ‘Stand back, gal,’ he’d say, ‘If this lye catches you, it’ll burn so bad you wish you was in hell.’ Mississippi was also Mother’s coy laughter when a ninety-year-old from Mamie’s church patted her behind and told her, ‘You’re the juiciest Lucy I seen outside Biloxi.’ And Mississippi was the wasted hope that Mother could make enough to feed us, by giving recitations up and down the Delta.

She had been gone too long to appreciate flattery from a hardworking cotton picker and she felt superior to the sharecroppers who raised their broken straw hats to her whenever she crossed their tenant farms. She had thought that she was back to stay, but when women at the small churches where she’d recite would complain about the white families they served, Mother would describe the Herzfelds as saints and brag about their mahogany highboy heavy with crystal and silver, like somebody homesick.

Once Mamie heard Mother say, ‘Jews. I’d work for ’em any day, rather than these Mississippi crackers.’ Mamie scoffed, ‘Ruthie, there ain’t no Jews ’round here. And nobody cares that you was Jew-rich up Jersey way. If you want coloured folk to give you a dime at prayer meetings, keep that Jew talk to yourself.’

Mamie McMichael was dangerous.

She talked a lot about God but she was more fixated by money and getting back what she thought she was owed by the local whites.

On moral grounds Lilian refused to eat the chicken that Mamie stole from the cotton planter near her farm. Mamie scolded after beating my sister, ‘That bastard owes me. Since I was a bitty thing, he been fixing the scales that weighs cotton that my folks bent over ’til they couldn’t stand up. But them ole nuns didn’t teach you ’bout that.’

Lilian still said her rosary every night, kneeling before her small altar set up in Mamie’s kitchen. Arranged with the same items that she’d had in our room above Mack’s, it made Mamie’s place more like home, although Mother had burned the novena candle down to nothing the night before we’d left Camden.

Had Mother not whispered to Mamie about ‘the landlord and his wife’, I might have forgotten about Mack altogether, because there was a lot to discover in Bofield, and Mamie’s home-made peanut brittle was as satisfying as caramels. Some mornings before the sun became a hot poker, I’d wander off alone to look for rabbits or search for grasshoppers in the tall, scorched crabgrass. Even lugging buckets of water from the pump to the kitchen seemed like fun as long as Mother didn’t make me do it. But during those three and a half months that Mamie’s ten acres became my wonderland, I was most awed by the way her fingers produced songs on the piano. She’d ask Mother to sing along. ‘Ruthie,’ she’d beg, ‘anybody that can recite like you, got to have some music in ’em. Let’s hear the chorus of “Gracious Lord”,’ she’d say and bang out a minor chord.

Mother found every excuse from ‘Woke up with a frog in my throat’ to ‘I can’t waste time singing when I’ve got passages to learn.’

Her recitations were more popular with me that Mississippi summer than anybody, apart from that ninety-year-old man whose name I never knew but who turned up to sniff around Mother in the yard like a mangy old Tom cat. Her figure was filling out again from Mamie’s fatback, beans and rice. Listening to my mother learn her Bible passages was better than radio, because she’d let me interrupt. She didn’t know the meaning of every verse she recited, but she chose the easiest pieces which she’d practise aloud on the porch while I fought back the blue flies and picked at the scabs I got from scratching my mosquito bites.

I heard Mother practising her pieces so often that I knew some and could mouth the words with her. My favourite was the story of Hannah asking the Lord for a son. First chapter of the Book of Samuel. Mother repeated it so often it hypnotized me like a Latin mass. Mother’s bible stories were easier for me to follow than the catechism at St Anthony’s.

If the sun wasn’t too high or the mosquitoes too hungry on Mamie’s porch, Mother would let me climb onto her lap and make requests. ‘Do the one about Hannah.’ If she hadn’t already, she’d clear her throat and swim fearlessly into the verse with a power that she displayed at no other time. It was like sitting on a mountain that speaks. ‘There was a certain man of Ramathaimzophim of the hill of the country of Ephraim whose name was Elkanah, the son of Jeroham, son of Elihu, son of Tohu, son of Zuph, an Ephramite …’ She could lower her voice until the syllables swayed back and forth with the ease of a porch glider; slow, so slowly the cadences would rise and fall. Forward then backward, high, then low, carving a road into my psyche like the radio jingles did. ‘Whose name was Elka-nah, the son of Jero-ham, son of Eli-hu, son of Tohu.’

Mother’s voice was as round as her belly, as soft as her lap, as smooth as her hair when greased and straightened with tongs. So I was often lulled to sleep by her reciting the story of Hannah as I had been in the days when Lilian was learning to recite Hail Holy Queen. Repeating the lines over and over, Lil would entrance me with the phrase ‘Poor banished children of Eve’.

During those mornings when I trekked through the open fields alone, I would often repeat Mother’s verses, and once Lilian heard and challenged me in Mamie’s front yard: we were to see who could say all the names in Hannah’s story, and the winner could tickle the loser to death. But we never got that far because Mamie, in the yard feeding the turkeys, heard us. She yelled, ‘C’mere, Reenie.’ I thought I was in trouble for making fun of the way Mother recited ‘Elka-nah, the son of Jero-ham’ and the rest. But Mamie said, ‘Come on in and do that again.’ When she grabbed my arm to pull me into the kitchen, I looked less frightened than Lilian who was terrified of her.

Mamie’s gruffness was straightforward, but unlike Mother she would slap us without warning. So when she sat at the kitchen table and told me to stand by the stove, I didn’t know what to expect. I hoped that my Mother would rescue me but suspected that she was out back picking runner beans.

I began meekly and Mamie snapped, ‘Speak up!’

‘There was a man of Ramathaimzophim of the hill of the country of Ephraim …’

‘Do it like your mama does … Go ’head … like you did in my yard.’

I knew where Mother paused for effect and recited as she did. And Mamie applauded and laughed until tears streamed down her dark cheeks and glistened on that black mole beside her nose. The more I recited, the more she laughed and her frolicking spilled into the yard until Lilian stuck her head in the screen door. ‘Set down,’ Mamie told her.

I was a show-off but everything I did my sister tried to do better, and that afternoon was no different. Competition was fierce but whereas Lilian knew the words, I knew Mother’s phrasing.

Mamie McMichael had an instinct for what would please a crowd. To her everyone, kids, grown-ups, old people, was a potential audience. I’ve seen her arrive at a church for the first time, ask some deacons to help bring her piano from the rig, and proceed to organize the service. Merely after eyeing a congregation, Mamie would whisper something like, ‘Ruthie, do “Punishment and Blasphemy” or “Hezekiah’s Prayer”.’ Once I heard her warn in a church, ‘Whatever you do, don’t do no Proverbs, ’cause this minister only knows Psalms and Proverbs, so these folks can’t take ’em from nobody else.’

When Mamie took Mother aside after hearing Lil and I do some of Mother’s verses, Mamie said, ‘Mark my words, them children could make us rich.’

The nuns had trained us well to learn by rote and the radio had taught us to listen. Mamie was impressed that we learned Bible verses and the little hymns she taught us so quickly. We’d stand at her piano and try the odd harmony and she’d get excited. ‘Ruthie,’ she’d tell Mother, ‘folks will love these girls at church. All you have to do is press their hair and get some ribbons.’

Mother beamed like a natural-born stage mother but said, ‘They too young to hot-comb their hair.’

As it turned out, performing in those small churches was no different from standing before a cluster of parents at a St Anthony’s pageant. My sister and I wore enormous red bows in our hair but Lil made me refuse to wear her white Holy Communion dress. ‘Suppose it gets ruined,’ she’d whispered so that Mother couldn’t hear. ‘You’d have nothing for your Communion.’

Of course, I hadn’t forgotten that I’d missed mine. In fact it’s what troubled me most nights. That and Mother selling Hortense’s things …

If Lilian kept the torch of our Roman faith burning, Mamie McMichael kindled another flame. She kept us thinking about our presence before a crowd. How to smile and charm and to test our new-found skill, was like a fix. We learned to pick out eyes in the churches and work to them. We learned to modulate our voices and sell songs, even if they were only children’s hymns, and the buzz of getting ready for our performances was more fun than any game of chase or ‘Simon Says’. Performing is a vanity, but Mamie taught us that it was righteous. Being examined and admired and then getting paid by a ‘little collection from the congregation’ hit my sister like an addiction. Maybe that’s why she turned to drink after we split in ’42 and she couldn’t get a singing job.

Sure, Mamie gets some credit for my success, but it was the dollar signs rather than God that interested her. Yet tonight I’d give anything to hear her play that version of ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’ that she’d arranged for Lil and me. Nobody could play it like Mamie McMichael.

It was soon after Mamie’s mule had to be shot when Mother announced that we were moving to Los Angeles, and Lil and I were speechless, because California hadn’t been mentioned since it fell from Miss Hortense’s lips. But after our two short months of performing in churches, Mamie had devised a plan which meant moving west, and while the details were never shared with us, we were about to live them.

We were luckier to get out of Mississippi than I realized, because for decades to come what had happened to Buster would be nothing out of the ordinary. In fact when Mamie would down a glass of sweet Mogen David wine once in a while, she’d reminisce about old times and end up saying, ‘Least they didn’t slice off Buster’s dick, and they left his eyes.’

10

Mamie believed that I owed her everything for my success because I couldn’t credit the white men who made me bend over or lay down before they would provide a few yards of the sticky tarmac that led me to stardom. Acting schools should offer a course in how best to be degraded by the studio bigwigs. It would be way more useful than Shakespeare. But if Mamie were alive, she’d chastize me for suggesting that anything more than luck and talent helps girls get ahead. She’s owed, but less for her music than for lending Mother the fare that got us to California that August of 1930.

Our trip from Mississippi took days longer than Mother had expected, because we kept missing connections, and although I can’t recall our eight-day journey or name the states that we passed through, I’m positive it was in Texas Mother, Lil and me huddled together like three hobos waiting for a bus that didn’t come until dawn. When we finally reached Los Angle-less as Mamie pronounced it, it was a Saturday night and the slim crescent moon didn’t light our way from the bus station to downtown. Before the Koreans and the Mexicans took over that part of town, anybody not white was welcome. Mamie had warned Mother that the city was as segregated as any below the Mason-Dixon line, so we arrived fully aware that our ‘place’ in the scheme of things was going to be ‘no place’. When we couldn’t find a ‘Coloureds Only’ sign on any of the toilet doors in the train depot, Mother made us pee behind a bush outside.

My only memory of our evening arrival is that my sister and I were about to squat behind a bush with its dark leaves and pink flowers, and just as I untied the string on my bloomers to pull them down, a man’s voice suddenly boomed from nowhere, ‘What are you darkies doing over there?’ Mother and Lilian both deny this ever happened, but I will never forget that deep voice with its southern twist calling us darkies, which was half-way polite back then.

Darkies. The three of us had been scorched blue-black by the Mississippi sun, with grains of the Delta grime still caked between our toes. Of course, there would come a time when I would believe I was above toe jam, but those delusions were twenty years down the road. In fact, in 1930 I can’t claim that any of us bathed every week. We probably smelled, but then so did a lot of other people back then.

Only God can really explain why Mother had brought her two little coloured girls to the city that Miss Hortense had called ‘the palace of endless dreams’.

A heatwave was warming up for Sunday but that Saturday night a desert chill had settled in and Mother’s teeth were chattering by the time we found a rooming house which had a small women’s dormitory that was empty but for us.