The Last Holiday (4 page)

My mother and uncle used to say they hated to go to the stores in Jackson with Lily because she would embarrass them. White cashiers at uptown stores always waited on white folks first; they
would never ask, “Who’s next?” If somebody white walked in they would go straight to the counter as if the Black people were invisible. But not with my grandmother. She was not in
sync with certain facts. There were signs indicating some of the rules—like in that Mississippi bus station, with its “Colored” waiting room. But my grandmother didn’t
consider it a rule for her if there was no sign. And white people had their own limits as to how far they could or would push that “us first” bullshit. So in line at the cash register
my grandmother would loudly say, “I was here before them” and hold out her money. It wasn’t her stature that kept people off her; somehow her attitude and bearing brought her
respect.

I would hear white folks whispering in stores in uptown Jackson when my grandmother would stand at their counters and say, quite distinctly, that she wanted to purchase something on credit. As a
rule, colored people couldn’t even ask for credit, but my grandmother did not follow rules like that. If she was speaking to a new employee, there would be a pause that hung in the air
between us like a condor, not needing to wave its wings and disturb the air. The clerks would look at her—she was obviously unafraid to make eye contact with them—and feel their throats
tighten. They would excuse themselves to go get their bosses to tell her no. But the boss would approve it, and the clerks would return with silly grins tearing their faces up while they wrote down
whatever it was she wanted to buy. I could imagine the bosses saying, “That’s Lily, she’s Bob Scott’s wife.”

There were regular gatherings on the front porch when the weather was warm. It could include any number of people from the neighborhood, but it always included Mrs. Cox, the school
janitor’s wife from across the street, and someone from the Cole family next door, as well as either cousin Lessie or Uncle Robert. And no matter where the conversations started, they would
end up speaking on race. What was happening here and there. What they had read in the papers. What information had come through from the men and women who worked on the trains and knew what was
going on from Miami to Chicago. I remember hearing about Emmett Till and Mack Parker on the front porch. A twelve-year-old and a truck driver, both murdered by white people. Mack Parker was lynched
and Emmett Till was beaten to death. Inevitably, someone would bring up possible solutions, something that could stop folks from getting killed that way. The most frequent conclusion was that some
organization, perhaps the NAACP, needed to do something. My grandmother was rarely too talkative on those occasions. She would talk when she had something to say and laugh a lot at the things the
excitable Mrs. Cox would say.

What directed Blacks in Jackson was their belief in the Baptist church. We attended Berean Baptist church every Sunday. My grandmother did not like a lot of people. She wasn’t one to be
doing a lot of laughing it up with strangers. She was friendly with the church people and participated in all of their various to-dos. When she was in Russellville with Uncle Counsel or when her
children were home for a while, she was visibly happy. But Lily Scott did not like people for no reason. She was not stuck up or snooty or snobbish. She was not narrow-minded, naive, neurotic,
nosy, or negative. She was not combative, complaining, compulsive, or complacent. You could count on her. She was predictable, patient, perceptive, persistent, proud, private, and practical. She
had a healthy respect for hard work and was not afraid to put in her time. She was a sane, sensible, settled, serious, solid, single-minded survivor. And she was a religious and God-fearing woman
with high ideals, strong principles, and most of all, a belief in the power of learning. Though she did not have a lot of formal book learning herself, she had insisted that her children be
educated. And she had scrapped, scrimped, scrambled, scrunched, scrubbed, scratched, scuffled, slaved, and saved until somehow all four of her children had graduated from college with honors.

She read to me and taught me to read very early. At four years old we were reading the funny papers on Sunday and a few chapters from the Bible each night. On Thursdays there was a man who
delivered
The Chicago Defender
, the Black weekly paper. It was in the
Defender
that I first read columns by Jesse B. Semple, including his conversations with Langston Hughes. His
column became the first thing I would look for. I cannot remember too many Bible specifics after Exodus, but I do know the Old Testament had a lot of long names to pronounce and that taught me
phonetics.

The front porches of the Black folks in Jackson were where everyone sat in the cool of the early evening, and people always threw invitations our way if we walked by. But my grandmother rarely
stopped. We would wave to folks we knew, naturally, and I would often hear, “That’s Bob Scott’s boy and Lily. Good man, Bob Scott.” I never understood how they always
skipped over my father to attach me to my grandfather, but I didn’t mind or say anything because I knew my grandmother could hear them and she never turned around.

My grandmother would sometimes talk about her life back in Russellville, Alabama, before she moved to Jackson. She had several brothers and sisters, though I remember only two
of her brothers; she would take me to see them in Alabama. She always noted the steady consistency of her brothers, how dependable they were, and how well they served as the decision makers for her
generation. We stayed with Uncle Buddy, whose name was Morgan, after their father. He was the oldest and head of the family, a sober elder statesman who never said four words when three would get
it said. There was also Uncle Counsel, a short, wiry, fast-talking man with a quick wit and dozens of new stories to tell.

The Hamiltons, my grandmother’s family, were almost white people. The father of my grandmother and her brothers had been a white man who evidently could not marry their black mother
because they were in Alabama. Apparently he spent most of his day in the large house at the front of the property, where Uncle Buddy now lived, and then came to join his family at the back in the
evening. I don’t remember ever seeing a picture of him, or them, from what would have been the early 1900s, but they were all named Hamilton and collectively made decisions about how the farm
and livestock would be handled.

The Hamiltons came in two distinctive sizes. There was the small, economy size of my grandmother, with her energetic work ethic that carried her around the house and the yard from “can
see” to “can’t see,” sweeping, dusting, digging around the flowers and the pomegranate bush; Uncle Counsel was her size and had the same type of irrepressible energy. Uncle
Buddy represented the other size, extra large, and was always a comfort when he was near, this huge person in faded overalls and a sun-shielding hat. He represented stability, reliability, and
security, and his size implied strength of both physique and character. It was darker than a thousand midnights just outside the bedroom window at Uncle Buddy’s place in Russellville, but I
knew he was around and I never had any trouble sleeping there.

It was always Uncle Buddy, with his long calm face and thoughtful eyes, who met us at the bus station in Tuscumbia, or less often met the train at Red Bay, Alabama. There was no direct anything
to Russellville. My grandmother and I would crawl into the northwest corner of Alabama on a gas-choked, dusty Greyhound or a near lifeless locomotive. A trip of less than 150 miles took the better
part of a day before braking at this cluster of clapboards or solitary shacks as though we had arrived somewhere.

As always, Uncle Buddy would come shuffling up with a welcoming grin for his sister and a nod for me. That was one of his speeches, that nod. After a long description of something by Uncle
Counsel he would nod his head and smile. After an agreement was reached about things the family needed to have done, he would nod that it would be done. He could have been known as the
Nodfather.

One of the more interesting stories I heard about the type of stock I came from concerned Uncle Buddy. One day he was down the path in the backyard while the rest of the family was gathered on
the back porch. All of a sudden Buddy appeared holding his hand over his eye. When he got up close and moved his hand, the people on the porch could see that a bumblebee had stung him and left the
stinger in the white of his eye. My grandmother said that everybody was screaming except Buddy. They helped him sit down and Lily removed the stinger with a pair of tweezers. When she finally had
it, they gave him a damp cloth and he got up and said, “Thank you, I appreciate that.” Then he went on back to whatever he’d been doing in the yard.

I used to think that under the word stoic in the dictionary there should be a picture of Uncle Buddy. But stoic isn’t right, because it doesn’t incorporate Uncle Buddy’s smile
and kind eyes. And having a bee stinger in your eye and saying nothing until you thank the person who removes it goes beyond stoicism. It’s a wonder he didn’t just nod.

I always enjoyed myself at Uncle Counsel’s house, where we went for meals sometimes. He had children near my age and I could play with them. The meals were always great, with a lot of
family members around the table and recollections by Uncle Counsel that kept everyone laughing. The Hamilton family was close, and I never felt left out of anything because of my
grandmother’s love and the love they all felt for her was partly mine.

Back in Jackson we had family around, too. The Scott house on South Cumberland was the second from the corner of Tanyard Street. Make a left on Tanyard and the third house was where Miss
Emmaline Miles lived. I called Miss Emmaline “Aunt Sissy,” and while there were a lot of folks identified like relatives in the south, like Cousin Lessie or Uncle Robert next door to
us, Aunt Sissy was really my aunt; in fact, great aunt. She was Bob Scott’s sister. I didn’t always understand Aunt Sissy and the way she would hug me and call on African spirits. She
would surprise me on her porch with fierce, emotional, smothering embraces and would run her bony fingers up and down my spine as she held me. She was also a virtual river of information that I
could have used to find out more about the man I got half of my name from, Bob Scott. But I was too young to know to ask.

Everybody who talked about Bob Scott for any length of time brought up his love of sports. This alone was enough to make him my favorite relative, especially among the Scott men. My mother had a
photograph in an album, a posed black-and-white family portrait that was taken in the late 1930s or early 1940s. It was the entire Scott family, three teenaged girls in Sunday dresses, a
fresh-faced boy in a suit jacket and white shirt with no tie, and a short, fair-skinned lady with long dark hair. They were standing in a half circle around a well-dressed gentleman who sat at an
angle. It was the only picture I’d ever seen of the man, Bob Scott, who was obviously tense at the center of the semicircle, holding a cane with large, strong hands, searching for the camera
with sightless eyes.

I was struck by how tall Bob Scott was, reaching his wife’s shoulder level while seated. I could also see two things I was looking for in him right away. First, the athlete, Steel Arm Bob,
the pitcher who bested Satchel Paige. The second thing was Aunt Sissy. I was looking for the family resemblance between him and his sister, and it was right out front. The tall rawboned physique,
the African cheekbones, the bushy hair and eyebrows, the sad eyes. It was all there. Because of Aunt Sissy and the other older people in South Jackson, I was looking for myself in that old
portrait, too. I was looking for what they saw when I passed by and they said, “That’s Bob Scott’s boy. Good man, Bob Scott.” I was looking for what made Aunt Sissy hug me
and call me her only blood relative when I dropped in after running an errand for her, for what made her say we had royal African blood in our veins, why she would invent words for illnesses that
were allegedly attacking her, like “the epizootic,” something that afflicted only special people—people like us.

“He was a gentleman and a gentle man,” my grandmother told me about her husband. It was as nice a summary as I was likely to get. It told me something about the two of them that
corresponded to things I had been told and overheard.

“Daddy never whipped us,” my mother told me on a visit to Jackson. “But mama did. He would even try to talk her out of it.”

“He never whipped any of you?” I asked.

“No. You see, he said that no Scott man would hit a woman or a child, that having to resort to that would mean he had lost control of his home and he would have to leave.”

Maybe she sensed what I was wondering.

“Daddy was the insurance man,” she added, “during the
real
Depression, when everybody was depressed.”

I knew an insurance man in Jackson. His name was Mr. Fuller, and he came around once a week, though sometimes it seemed liked every day. He was a middle-aged balding gentleman who was always
sweating and wiping his face and head with a handkerchief. He stood in the living room thumbing through his receipt book, waiting for my grandmother and sweating. And as he wiped his face, he would
peek to see whether I was looking at him. I was. Mr. Fuller seemed ill at ease, but he was duty-bound to collect that little bit of change every week.