I
miss the taste of food, food like I used to eat as a kid.Really, I miss the longing for the taste of
that food, the food I used to have at Mammaw and Willie Lee’s house.
When
I think of that food, I think of chicken or catfish shaken in a wrinkled brown
bag filled with spiced cornmeal flour and dipped in hot grease in a hot iron
skillet by my grandfather who I called Willie Lee, said Willee all in a rush,
who sat on a yellow vinyl backed stool because his legs were bad.Willie Lee always had that stool around; he
was a cripple, no pc words in that house.And I would stand right there beside his yellow stool and wait for the
food hot off the stove, so hot you could barely stand it on your tongue but so
good you couldn’t wait, nevermind the burning.We didn’t bother with plates and forks much.
Same
thing with Mammaw, who was Willie Lee’s mother, my great-grandmother.In general, she left the cooking to her son;
this was their arrangement in that little red and white house for the five
decades that they shared it.But Mammaw
did breakfasts because Willie Lee didn’t do mornings.And Mammaw did special things like skillet
toast and homemade donuts, which is what I’m remembering now.Balls of fried dough taken from a vat of
popping grease then rolled in powdered sugar and handed down to my short, eager
kid self.
Country
food from country people.Food you’d
called tasty, nothing healthy or wholesome about it.I don’t remember a lot of side dishes and
square meals.Nearly everything was
fried and we partook of the various and sundry parts of the hog, the cow and
the fish.And there was iced tea by the
buckets with fresh mint grown out back for as long as Mammaw was able to stoop
down to pick it.
I
used to hate her backyard – hated the outdoors in general.Full of bugs, chiggers and mosquitoes, Texas
sized mosquitoes that had a special love for my skinny legs and arms and thin,
weak blood.I hated the smell of dirt,
hated sweat running down the back of my neck.So of course I hated working in the yard, rooting in the soil, pulling
up turnip greens.Hated especially the
tall, tall pecan tree with its interminable nuts.No end to them to pick up, to sort, to wash,
to shell – the misery of that pecan tree, that nut dust that gets under your
nails and up your nose.The old shed in
the backyard with its dark and horrible odor of generic brand insecticide, rat
poison, roach spray – poisons we were too ignorant to worry about back then.
Each
time it was ‘working in the yard’ day, I always found a way to creep into the
shade of the cement steps out back of Mammaw’s house.I’d pull out the book I was involved in – I
don’t know where I’d stashed it – and read.I was never brazen enough to actually go all the way back inside the
house.That would have been disobeying
outright.This was taking a break,
dragging my feet a bit.
Mammaw
took it as a sign of my great and inexorable retardedness that I chose a book
over the yard, that I in fact seemed only to want to read.She and Willie Lee used to call back and
forth to one another in that little house – Willie Lee rarely left his bedroom
and there were few closed doors in that house – and hold forth on the subject
of my retardedness.Willie Lee’s
exaggerated annoyance would answer Mammaw’s call.What Mae?I never heard him call her mother.
Mammaw
would ask her standard question.You think she could be retarded, staring at
them books all day long, just turning the pages.With a great gust of expelled breath, Willie
Lee would always answer her back, Naw,
Mae.Ain’t nothing wrong with that girl.
During
these debates, I’d be turning pages as Mammaw called it, not bothering to
listen to a conversation I knew by heart.Later, when I tested well above grade level in school, my reading skills
became a source of great pride to Mammaw.Once she knew for sure that I wasn’t just turning pages but actually
reading, she went out and bought me an illustrated children’s Bible.I had to stand and read long passages from
that anodyne translation for the entertainment and edification of Mammaw and
her friends – the old ladies who came to play dominoes at Mammaw’s house –
Effie Mae, Flossie, Opalean.But none of
this ever got me out of backyard duty, which always ended up with me sitting on
the back stoop.
One
of the odd features of Mammaw’s house, which I didn’t think was odd at the
time, was that it had two back doors – one off Mammaw’s bedroom and the other
off Willie Lee’s.Mammaw never used her
backdoor, even to get to the backyard and Willie Lee never used the front door
that I ever saw.Mostly late at night or
early, early in the morning, depending on how you tell time, Willie Lee came
and went through that back door on his twisted legs, on crutches, able to drive
but not stand.
I
never thought to ask how his legs came to be that way after the first childish Why Willie Lee’s legs all twisted up?
He had a bad accident baby.
Even
at that age, I had enough sense of the secret language of adults spoken in the
drift of a shoulder, the lift of an eyebrow, the set of a lip, not to press any
further.Maybe it had been an accident.Maybe it had been an almost lynching.Maybe it had been a car wreck.Maybe it had been an awful day down at the
saw mill/cotton gin/lawnmower part factory.Maybe it had been a birth defect.Maybe it had been polio.Maybe it
had been a doctor come too late, too little, or not at all.What I do know is that it was a well-worn
chapter in the long, long story of a black man’s life.A story they thought I was too young to be
told.A story not to be spoken aloud at
any age but known by all the kind of people I knew then.Country people.Colored people.
Mammaw,
with her son Willie Lee in tow, had followed her husband Brady from the tenant
farms of east Texas’ piney woods to the Big D, Dallas and the bright lights.
Back when I was a little girl in the early seventies, Mammaw’s south Dallas
neighborhood was just showing the cracks and strains of urban blight.But it still held a web of neighbors,
kinfolk, friends and enemies who had made the migration from farm to town
too.I remember sitting on Mammaw’s
front porch every afternoon after she’d returned from her work cleaning houses.Mammaw, my little sister and myself would sit
on her rusty, punched metal porch swing taking swigs of minted iced tea out of
big plastic tumblers in the shaded Texas heat.
As
neighbors ambled by on foot or by car, they’d call out to us or honk the horn.
Mammaw would shake out the pages of her newspaper - she loved the obituary
section and the woebegone tales of five alarm apartment fires, drugged or
drunken sons robbing their mothers while they slept – and give a nod or wave
back.There goes your Cousin Joe Joe as he passed in his burnt orange
Volvo.I remember how Cousin Joe Joe
would stop sometimes and take my sister and I for a ride to the store and let
us pick out lemonade flavored Popsicles and eat them in the orange plaid
shabbiness of his backseat.It was a
true treat since Mammaw believed in feeding a child well but didn’t necessarily
hold with or even know about newfangled things like lemonade Popsicles.
On
some afternoons, we’d all stroll down a couple of blocks, waving and nodding to
neighbors ourselves, until we got to Aunt Josie’s house, Mammaw’s sister and
Joe Joe’s mother.We would have minted
iced tea, same as at home, the only difference being that Aunt Josie’s porch on
her little gray and white house was screened.Otherwise, the ritual was the same.Sometimes, our Cousin Michael, Aunt Josie’s other son, would come
through – he lived in the house but was seldom around.His would become a story of the kind Mammaw
liked to read aloud from her afternoon paper, shaking the pages and shaking her
head in time, muttering Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm.My husband and friends say I make the same
sound, especially when I’m on the phone getting bad news or commiserating with
a friend over some everyday misfortune.
When
I think of how Willie Lee died, in the back bedroom, dank, close, stale, I
imagine it stank.He hadn’t gotten out
of bed for weeks, months.No more
midnight rides with his blues singing, beer loving buddies.He was feeling poorly.No, he did not want
a doctor.Country people didn’t consult
doctors for every little ache and pain or bump in the night.Aches and pains and bumps in the night were
to be expected.Life.But I knew none of this.I was away at school.This time getting a law degree in yet another
cold, white, distant state.I was busy
learning to eat sushi and cannoli, to read case law, to be angst ridden.I was on spring break in Europe, maybe Paris,
when Willie Lee died.So all of this I
got secondhand.
I
came back from spring break to my studio in the miserable Ann Arbor cold from
the somehow not miserable cold of Paris.I still can’t wrap my mind around spring in a place that is still so
cold.I hadn’t factored that into my
uninformed anticipation of seasons.I
thought winter would be a magical, snowy Frosty-come-to-life affair, not the
six, seven month drawn out slush, ice, sleet dirty misery that it was.
I
came back to this missing hot grease and hot sun so badly but not aware enough,
not honest enough, not adult enough to say so.Laughing with my friends around my studio sized kitchen table, hitting
play on my answering machine – blah, blah, blah, erase, erase, erase and then
my mother’s voice everywhere in the room, a voice I hadn’t expected to hear,
had never heard on my answering machine, had never heard on my phone:
I don’t
know where you are –
Funny.I could say the same thing about you.
–or how to
reach you –
See
above.
–I just don’t
know what else to do.Willie Lee is
dead.The funeral is Wednesday.I don’t know if this will reach you where you
are. Oh what to do!
Always
the flair for the dramatic.At least
something’s the same in a world I thought would always have a Willie Lee and a
Mammaw in a little red and white house, bickering, loving, cooking hot food in
hot grease on a hot stove.Of course, I
knew it couldn’t be.They were old when
I was born.Had always been old in that
way you take for granted as the ways things are.But to me they were frozen.We didn’t celebrate birthdays for them – as
country, colored folk, they weren’t in the habit of cakes and candles every
time another year passed.I don’t think
I even knew Willie Lee’s birth date until I saw it on his death
certificate.And Mammaw, well her
birthday was easy, New Year’s Day, but she’d never give up how old she was,
which birthday exactly it was (and she kept her hair dyed jet black up until
the last five years of her life).
All
of a sudden, I was dead serious, not laughing with my friends anymore.My mother’s voice always had a way of doing
that to me – freezing me up – whenever, wherever, whatever.Shhh!
I said.My grandfather is dead.Well
that can kill a good time like nothing else can.My friends scattered to the four winds.I was left alone to deal with my mother’s
voice on my answering machine.
She
was in fine form.The dutiful daughter
taking charge, making arrangements, calm yet poignant.It was the role of a lifetime.She deserved an Oscar for this performance.
All
the way back on the plane and then back to school and through the years, I’ve
carried the thought of Willie Lee dying slowly in that dark (he never pulled up
the shades and after fifty years, they didn’t work anymore) back room.No more hot grease catfish.He also made a mean pimiento cheese sandwich
on white bread or saltines, which is to this day my all time
buck-up-the-sky-is-falling food.
By
the time Willie Lee agreed to go to the hospital, or was too weak to protest
anymore, cancer had spread to almost every part of his body.All of this told to me in full histrionic by
my mother-when-it-suited-her.I listened
in numb horror. It was like that time in seventh grade after reading about Anne
Frank.They made us go to a Holocaust
exhibit and then crammed our entire class inside a real Nazi freight car and
then made us look at the awful photos of the camp victims.Poor, poor Anne.So terrible you couldn’t even feel it,
couldn’t even feel sorry for them, the terribleness and your sorry-ness for
them passed over into something like dread, then distaste, then disdain and
finally disinterest.This is the truth
if anyone will bother to tell it to you.It’s the only way we have of remaining not crazy as hell.Otherwise, you’d lose your mind at how the
world is.All I wanted was to get out of
that car, away from the bodies of my classmates, away from those pictures.
But
how do you feel when it’s your own flesh and blood?I wanted to shake my mother and scream at
her: But you were here.You were here.How could you let him suffer like he must
have?How could you stand by and do
nothing for him?But then the next
thought was – how could I?Where was
I?How could I let him suffer like
that?Willie Lee died slow, rotting from
the inside out as the cancer spread through his always lean frame that was
Auschwitz skinny by the end.His death
certificate reads “metastastic cancer, unknown origin”.The official sounding words are empty.What they mean to say is that we don’t know
exactly what killed him, when it started or where, how long it took, just that
the cancer is everywhere and he’s dead now.Next, please.