Coming of Age in Mississippi (27 page)

“Look like ain’t nobody here,” Mr. Leon said as he honked his car horn.

“It’s after ten o’clock. They’re probably in bed. Emma and Diddly both go to work pretty early, you know,” Miss Clara said, looking at her watch.

“Who is it?” a heavyset yellow woman asked, peeping out of the door.

At the first sight of her, I got angry. “So this is Emma, Daddy’s new wife,” I thought. “She is just like Florence—yellow, straight black hair and all.”

“Hey, Clara! Y’all get out and come on in,” she said. “Diddly and I were just gettin’ ready for bed. Who is that y’all got wit’ you?” she asked as we got out of the car.

“We thought you and Diddly needed some company over
here so we brought you some,” Mr. Leon said, going into the house.

“Well, we do get kinda lonesome. But who is the company?” Emma asked, looking at me curiously.

“That’s Diddly’s oldest child. Can’t you tell? That’s Essie Mae,” Miss Clara said.

“Aw! Y’all stop kidding me. It’s impossible for Diddly to make a child that pretty,” she said, looking at me like she didn’t really believe I was Essie Mae. “Y’all come on back in the kitchen. Diddly is back here soaking his corns,” she said, leading us to the kitchen.

Because the outside of the house was so broken down and the porch gave under our weight as we stepped on it, I expected to find old broken-down furniture inside. But as Emma led us through the house to the kitchen, I was surprised to see how comfortably the place was furnished. The little living room had a big reclining chair, a plush sofa, a nice set of lamps, and other new-looking things. As we walked through the bedroom, I noticed a big four-poster covered with a beautiful white spread.

Daddy was sitting by the gas range in the kitchen with his feet submerged in a tub of steaming hot water. I hadn’t seen him since I was in the eighth grade and hadn’t anything changed about him but his mustache which was thicker. He was still as slim as the day he left Mama and didn’t look a bit older.

“Diddly, guess who’s here?” Emma said to Daddy. “Clara, y’all sit down,” she said, motioning to the little dinette set in the corner of the kitchen.

“Essie Mae! What is the matter wit’ you?” Daddy demanded after studying me carefully.

Because he had demanded that I tell him what was wrong with me, I didn’t answer. I stood there looking at him as though he was a complete stranger who was nosing into my business. In thought, I had considered him my daddy even
after he left us. But now he didn’t seem like my daddy at all. Standing there, I hated myself for running to him.

“What’s wrong wit’ you?” he asked again angrily.

I still didn’t answer him. Then Mr. Leon spoke up and told him that I had had a fight with Raymond and left home. As I listened to him tell Daddy what had happened, it didn’t sound like he was talking about me. Daddy looked astonished when Mr. Leon said that I had gotten Sheriff Cassidy to get my clothes. Suddenly it struck me that I had gone to Cassidy to get help—Cassidy the quiet “nigger hater”!

“Did Raymond put his hands on you?” Daddy asked, cutting off Mr. Leon’s story.

“No,” I answered.

“Well, what did he do to you then?” he asked.

“Nothing! He just can’t stand me. Be running around the house cursing all the time,” I said.

Daddy didn’t say anything for a while and everybody in the kitchen was silent. I could tell he was angry when he suddenly looked at me and said, “I sho’ hate Toosweet get mixed up with them Davises. Ain’t none of them no good. How is Raymond treating Adline and Junior?” he asked.

“He don’t hate them like he hate me,” I answered.

During the course of my conversation with Daddy, I slowly began to feel warm toward him. He didn’t seem restless anymore and his old urge to gamble and play around with women seemed to have disappeared. He appeared to be having a good honest relationship with Emma. Noticing how much concern Emma showed toward me, I began to like her too. She didn’t seem snobbish about being yellow and having straight black hair like Florence did. In fact, she was the first high yellow Negro I had seen who didn’t think or act like she was any better than darker Negroes.

Emma and Daddy both seemed eager to have me live with them. They had an empty bedroom and said they were able to furnish it for me. But I had only six weeks left to finish the semester at Willis High so we agreed I would go back and live
with my Aunt Alberta. Even though there was a chance I would run into Raymond again, it was better for me to finish the semester in Centreville before transferring.

It was well after midnight when Mr. Leon, Miss Clara, and I left Daddy’s. All the way to Alberta’s I was scared she wouldn’t let me stay with her. She and Mama got along well and I didn’t think she would get involved with me leaving home, especially if Mama didn’t want me to leave. Alberta and her husband were still up when we got to her house. When Mr. Leon honked, she ran out like she was expecting me. She had visited Mama that evening and knew all about my leaving home. She took me in without a single question and was careful not to mention Raymond. She just said Mama thought I would come and live with her and that she was hoping I would. I was furious that Mama had figured me out so well, but I decided to stay anyway.

The following morning I got up and went to school as usual. I went early because I had expected to be whispered about and pointed at around campus that day. Walking among the students before classes began I didn’t notice any whispering or pointing. Once I was in class, I could tell all of my classmates knew I had left home but didn’t any of them mention it to me. The whole morning passed without incident. But during the lunch hour I ran into Principal Willis. He was quick to ask me if what he heard was true. When I told him that it was he immediately offered me the use of his guest room. Looking at him as he stood there pretending he was so interested in me, I thought of Samuel O’Quinn and I hated his guts.

The next person I ran into was Adline and I felt worse after seeing her. She looked so sad and her eyes were all red as if she had cried a lot. I knew she had been crying about me. She hardly had anything to say. I told her that I was living with Alberta and asked her to come see me on Sundays. She smiled a little then.

When I got back to Alberta’s that evening, I discovered a note from Mama. The note read:

I didn’t know what to say. I just knew that it would be best in the long run if I didn’t go back there to live. So I didn’t answer the note.

A couple of days later, it rained and I found I had left my raincoat and umbrella at home. I sent Alberta’s little girl with a note and asked Mama to send them. She sent the raincoat and umbrella back with everything else I had forgotten and she also sent another note, saying that if she found anything else she would send it too because she didn’t want me to keep sending down there for stuff. I realized then that Mama wouldn’t let me see any peace as long as I was living with Alberta. She would always be sending me notes or something, trying to make me feel sorry for her and guilty about leaving home.

That evening after making arrangements with my teachers to take midterm exams, I moved my things to my Daddy’s.

Daddy was glad that I had come back. He didn’t know how to act around me. He went out of his way to be nice and treated me as though I was a child. I could tell it gave him pleasure just having me around. Sometimes I caught him looking at me with a grin on his face like he didn’t believe I was there. I knew he wanted me to call him Daddy. But I couldn’t. However, every time I called him Diddly he looked sad and I felt awful. I managed to choke out “Daddy” for a while. Finally I
stopped calling him either Daddy or Diddly. I just said “hey, look” or “you” whenever I wanted his attention.

Emma made the matter worse by bluntly asking me to call her Mama. She kept telling me about “my baby Lillian,” who was her only child and was now twenty-five years old, married, and living in Baton Rouge. “Lillian is crazy about Diddly,” Emma would say. “She hugs and kisses him and calls him Daddy and have no qualms about it. I don’t know why I should expect you to call me Mama when you don’t even call your own daddy Daddy.” But I didn’t stop calling her Emma and she got used to it.

Emma and Daddy both worked. Emma worked at a potato factory in a nearby town in Louisiana and Daddy as partner in a four-man independent timber business. The most enjoyable thing about living with them was the fact that I didn’t have to get a job. They passionately disliked most of the whites in Woodville and were against me working for them.

“I don’t want you working for these no-good ass white men around here,” Daddy said bitterly. “They don’t do nothing but mess over those Negro girls working in their houses.”

Knowing what I did about Negro maids and white men in Centreville, I had no argument for him. I just took his word and accepted their offer of ten dollars’ allowance a week to do the general housework and mow the lawn at home.

It was Thursday when I left Alberta’s to live with Daddy. That following Saturday before he went to work, he told me he had given Emma money for us to go into town and buy furniture for my room. He said he had given her enough for me to get whatever I wanted. I was all excited about buying furniture. It was the first time in my life that I would have a room to myself and I was seventeen years old. All that morning I was thinking about how I would fix my room up. I wanted to make it look just like the students’ rooms I had seen in magazines, with a single bed, a bookshelf filled with books, and a desk with a good lamp. I had planned to go to a secondhand store and get most of what I wanted, since I wanted to save
most of the money for books. But when we got into town, I discovered Emma had other ideas. She went straight to the most expensive furniture store in Woodville. I said, “Are we gonna buy stuff here? Don’t they have any secondhand stores in town?”

“Secondhand stores! I wouldn’t have no shit in my house other people done slept on. We can afford furniture here!” Emma snapped as she looked around for a salesman.

“Well, Mr. Brooks, I’m back again,” she said to a tall, slim red-haired salesman who came running over to us as soon as he recognized Emma. “Have y’all got them Hollywood bedroom sets in yet?” she asked, grinning.

“Hollywood bedroom set! In that little raggly-ass house,” I thought to myself.

“Sho’,” said the salesman, leading us to the bedroom section. “So you finally talked Diddly into buying that set, huh? I thought you would, so I kept you in mind when we placed the order.”

Since I had come there to live I had gotten the feeling that Emma didn’t really want me around even though she had acted very friendly when I first met her. I had thought the way Daddy treated me made her a little jealous or something. Now I thought she was just using me to get furniture money out of Daddy.

I asked the salesman if he had any single beds. He pretended he didn’t even hear me. He was too busy pointing out a cream-white bedroom set that looked like it should belong to some movie star. The dresser looked longer than the room Emma was going to put it in. There was a big bed with a beautiful pink bedspread, a dresser, and another piece too. The whole thing nauseated me. When Emma said, “I’ll take it,” I felt like running back to Daddy’s and packing my suitcase again.

———

The morning after we went shopping for furniture, Emma woke me up early, knocking on the living room door and yelling, “Essie Mae! Essie Mae! Get up. We’re gonna spend the day with Mama them.”

I got mad with her because she didn’t ask me if I would
like
to spend the day with her parents. She just told me that I would, as if I didn’t have any choice. “Just like I didn’t have any say-so in buying the furniture for my room yesterday,” I thought.

I got up but took my time getting dressed and eating breakfast. I didn’t want to go out there to see her parents and relatives because I thought they were all high yellow and would treat me like Miss Pearl them.

All of Emma’s close relatives, except her sister Janie who lived next door to us with her husband Wilbert and their five children, lived off Highway 61 between Woodville and Natchez. Our first stop was at Emma’s sister Ola’s house. Ola had ten children. Before Daddy stopped the car they were swarming around it like bees. When Daddy got out, they swung around his neck, almost pulling him down to the ground. “Uncle Moody, we thought y’all wasn’t comin’. We was just about to go play,” a tall teak-colored teen-ager with light brown wavy hair hanging to her waist yelled as she clung to Daddy’s neck. Another teen-ager who looked just like her stood clinging to Emma’s arms. They were two of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen. They didn’t look Negroid, Caucasian, or anything, they just looked pretty. They were so outstandingly beautiful they overshadowed the other children to the point where one hardly noticed them.

After all the excitement died down, Emma introduced me, saying, “Mildred, I want y’all to meet Diddly’s oldest child, Essie Mae.”

Mildred looked at me startled for a moment, then said, “Uncle Diddly, I don’t believe it. Auntie, are you kidding?”

“Sho’ didn’t take after Diddly, huh?” Emma added.

“Uncle Diddly, how did you get a child that pretty?” one of
the teak-colored twins asked. Looking at her I felt so ugly. In comparison to her, Daddy and I both looked like monkeys.

We were at their house for about an hour when Emma suggested that I go with her to meet her mother and father who lived next door. When we walked in, her mother was sitting at the fireplace with a blanket wrapped around her feet. I was startled to see that she was even darker than I was. “Poppa,” as Emma called her father, was out in the woods in the back of the house. Because Emma looked like the product of a mixed marriage and her mother turned out to be so dark, I wondered about Poppa. I knew of cases in Centreville where white men lived openly in common-law marriage with Negro women. Even though they were not allowed to marry because of the state law against mixed marriages, the children bore the name of the father. In another case I’d heard of, a Negro preacher had performed the marriage ceremony and the white man was listed as Negro on the marriage license.