The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat (2 page)

“So, Big Earl’s dead, is he?” I asked.

“I imagine so,” she said.

I sat there for a while, not saying anything, just thinking about Big Earl gone from the earth. Mama gazed at me like she was reading my mind and said, “It’s all right, baby. Really. He couldn’t be happier.”

We found out about Mama seeing ghosts at a Thanksgiving supper back in the 1970s. Mama, Daddy, my big brother Rudy, James, Jimmy, Eric, and me—I was pregnant with Denise that fall—were all gathered around the table. In keeping with tradition, I had done
all of the cooking. Flowers Mama understood. She had the best garden in town, even before she devoted a plot to her prized marijuana plants. Food Mama never quite got the hang of. The last time Mama attempted to cook a holiday meal, we ended up feeding her black-and-gray glazed ham to the dog and dining on hardboiled eggs. The dog took one bite of Mama’s ham and howled for six hours straight. The poor animal never quite recovered. So I became the family chef at age ten and we ended up with the only vegetarian dog in southern Indiana.

That Thanksgiving supper had started off real nice. I had cooked my best feast ever and everybody loved it. We joked and ate and celebrated having Rudy at home. My brother had run off to Indianapolis as soon as he graduated high school, so we didn’t see much of him and my boys barely knew their uncle. Everyone was having a good time, except for Mama, who was testy and distracted all afternoon. She got more agitated as the meal went on, mumbling to herself and snapping at anyone who asked her what was wrong. Finally she stood up from the table and hurled the butter dish at an empty corner of the dining room. She shouted, “Goddammit to hell!”—my mother can cuss a blue streak when the inspiration hits her—“Goddammit to hell! I have had just about all I can take from you, Eleanor Roosevelt. Nobody invited you here and it’s time for you to go.” She shook an accusatory index finger at the corner of the room where the stick of butter, avocado-green plastic butter dish still adhered to it, slid down the wall, leaving a shiny trail like the path of a rectangular snail. Mama looked at the astonished faces around the table and said, “Don’t give me that look. She may have been the perfect little lady when she was in the White House—all lace doilies and finger bowls—but since she died, she ain’t done nothin’ but show up here drunk as a skunk, tryin’ to start some shit.”

Later, Jackie Onassis came to see Mama, too, but she was much better behaved.

Daddy reacted to Mama’s ghosts by trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade her to see a doctor. James and I worried about her in private, but pretended in front of the kids that there was nothing odd about
their grandma. Rudy decided that Indianapolis wasn’t nearly far enough from the craziness of his family, and he moved to California a month later. He has lived there ever since.

Mama reached across the kitchen table and poked at my arm. “You’re gonna get a kick out of this,” she said. “You know that woman Earl was livin’ with?” “That woman” would be Big Earl’s second wife, Minnie. Mama couldn’t stand Minnie, and she refused to utter her name or acknowledge her marriage to Big Earl.

“Thelma says that woman set up a fountain in the front room where Thelma and Earl used to have the hi-fi. Can you imagine that? Do you remember how nice that hi-fi was? Best I ever heard. And they saved up for a year to get it. We sure had us some parties to remember in that house.”

Mama watched me eat a few more grapes and then said, “Earl said the nicest things about you. He was always so crazy about you, you know. And I don’t need to tell you how much he loved James.”

James loved Big Earl, too. Earl McIntyre was the closest thing to a father James ever had. James’s daddy was a low-down, dirty son of a bitch who ran out on him and his mother when James was barely more than a toddler. James’s father stuck around just long enough to leave a few nasty scars and then hightailed it out of town a few steps ahead of the law to inflict more damage somewhere else. The visible scar on James was a half-moon-shaped raised leathery line along his jaw made by a razor slash intended for James’s mother. The deeper, invisible scars he left on James, only I saw. Only me and Big Earl.

After James’s father ran off, Big Earl and Miss Thelma took it upon themselves to see that James’s mother always had food on the table. When the All-You-Can-Eat, the first black-owned business in downtown Plainview, opened in the mid-1950s and Big Earl couldn’t have been making a dime, he hired James’s mother as his first employee. And they kept her on the payroll long after emphysema had made it impossible for her to work. More important, the McIntyres kept an eye on James, so he wouldn’t end up like his daddy. I’ll be forever grateful to them for that.

That’s how Big Earl was, a good and strong man who helped other
people to get stronger, too. All kinds of folks, and not just black, loved him. You could take a problem to Big Earl and he would sit there and listen to you spill out a lifetime’s worth of troubles. He’d nod patiently like it was all new to him, even though he was a man who had seen a lot in his life and had probably heard your particular kind of blues a hundred times over. After you were done, he’d rub his huge hands across the white stubble that stood out against the coal black of his skin and he’d say, “Here’s what we’re gonna do.” And if you had sense, you did whatever it was he said. He was a smart man. Made a little money, kept his dignity, and still managed to live to be old—something a black man his age in southern Indiana shouldn’t have been able to do. Something many had tried to do, but failed at.

Now, if Mama’s word was to be trusted, Big Earl was dead. But that was a mighty big “if.”

Mama said, “What was I talkin’ about? Oh yeah, the fountain. Thelma said the fountain in her front room was six feet tall, if it was an inch. And it was made up to look like a naked white girl pouring water out of a pitcher onto the head of another naked white girl. Who comes up with that kind of stuff?”

I poured another glass of water, and thought. Mama was often wrong when it came to her perceptions of the world, physical or ghostly. And she’d said many times herself that ghosts could be tricksters. The whole thing about Big Earl being dead could have been a prank played on Mama by a tipsy, belligerent Eleanor Roosevelt. I decided to put it out of my mind until later when we’d meet our friends for our standing after-church dinner date. We were gathering that Sunday, as we always did, at the All-You-Can-Eat. Little Earl and his wife, Erma Mae, had taken over running the restaurant several years back, but Big Earl still came in nearly every day to help out his son and daughter-in-law. One way or another, I’d have my answer come evening.

Mama asked, “So why are you up drinkin’ all this water at this hour?”

“I woke up hot and needed to cool down,” I said, taking another swig. “Hot flash.”

“Hot flash? I thought you were done with the change.”

“I thought so, too, but I guess I’m still changing.”

“Well, you might wanna get that checked out. You don’t wanna change too much. Your aunt Marjorie started changin’ and kept it up till she changed into a man.”

“Oh, she did not and you know it.”

“Okay, maybe she didn’t switch all the way over to a man, but Marjorie grew a mustache, shaved her head, and took to wearin’ overalls to church. I’m not sayin’ the look didn’t suit her; I’m just sayin’ you can draw a straight line between her first hot flash and that bar fight she died in.”

I ate a grape and said, “Point taken.”

We sat in silence, me thinking about Big Earl in spite of telling myself I wouldn’t, and Mama thinking about God knows what. She stood up and walked to the window that looked out onto the side yard. She said, “It’s gonna be a truly beautiful Sunday morning. I love it hot. You should get some rest before you go to church.” She turned away from the window and said, talking to me like she used to when I was a kid, “Go on to bed now, git.”

I obeyed. I put my glass in the sink and replaced the half-empty bowl of grapes and the water pitcher in the fridge and headed back toward my bedroom. I turned around and said, “Say hi to Daddy for me.”

But Mama had already slipped out the back door. Through the window, I saw her slowly making her way through my sorry excuse for a garden. She stopped and shook her head with disapproval at the stunted stalks, insect-chewed vegetables, and pale blooms that made up my pitiful little plots. I knew what I would hear about on her next visit.

Back in the bedroom, I climbed into the bed and squeezed in close to my husband. I propped myself up on one elbow, leaned over James, and kissed the rough scar on his jaw. He grunted, but didn’t wake up. I lay back down and pressed myself against his back. Then I reached around and brought my hand to rest on James’s stomach. Squeezed against my man in the center of our king-size bed, I fell asleep listening to the rhythm of his breathing.

Throughout the year that followed, I thought about that Sunday
morning and how Mama’s visit had cooled me down and cheered me. Even during the worst of the troubles that came later, I smiled whenever I recalled that visit and how sweet it had been for her to come by, looking all done up in that cute sky-blue dress I hadn’t seen in the six years since we buried her in it.

I was born in a sycamore tree. That was fifty-five years ago, and it made me a bit of a local celebrity. My celebrity status was brief, though. Two baby girls, later my best friends, came along within months of me in ways that made my sycamore tree entrance seem less astonishing. I only mention the tree because I have been told all of my life that it explains how I ended up the way I am—brave and strong according to those who like me, mannish and pigheaded to those who don’t. Also, it probably explains why, after the initial jolt passed, I wasn’t much troubled when my dead mother showed up for a chat.

I started out life in that sycamore because my mother went to see a witch. Mama was smart and tough. She worked hard every day of her life right up until she dropped dead from a stroke while she was winding up to throw a rock at a squirrel that was digging up bulbs in her showplace of a garden. All of Mama’s toughness had evaporated, though, when she found herself halfway through the tenth month of her pregnancy, wondering if it would ever end. Seven years earlier, Rudy had been born right on schedule. But three lost babies followed my brother, none of them managing to remain inside my mother’s womb for longer than a few months. Now I had come along and refused to leave.

Before she went to see the witch, Mama tried all kinds of things her country relatives told her to do to get the baby to come. My grandmother advised her to eat hot peppers with every meal, claiming that the heat would drive the baby out. Mama did it for three days and ended up with indigestion so severe that she was fooled twice into thinking she was in labor. Two times, she and Daddy went to the
colored hospital in Evansville, and both times she came home with no baby.

My mother’s sister whispered to her that the only way to get the baby out was to have sex. Aunt Marjorie said, “That’s how it got there, Dora. And that’s the only sure way to get it out.”

Mama liked the sex idea, if only just to pass the time while waiting, but Daddy was less than enthusiastic. She was twice his weight even before her pregnancy, and when she straddled him in his sleep one night demanding satisfaction, the terrified look in his eyes as she hovered over him made her back down from the sex solution and look to sorcery instead.

Like I said, that was 1950, and back then a fair number of people in Plainview, black and white, consulted a witch from time to time. Some still do, but nowadays it’s only the poorest and most superstitious of folks, mostly the ones who live in the little Appalachian clusters outside of town, who will admit to it.

Mama went to the witch expecting a potion or a poultice—poultices were big among witches—but what she got instead were instructions. The witch told her that if she climbed up into the branches of a sycamore tree at straight-up noon and sang her favorite hymn, the baby would come.

Witches were like that. They almost always mixed in a touch of something approved by the Baptist church—a prayer, a spiritual, or a chant warning about the godlessness of Lutherans—so people could go to a witch and not have to worry that they’d pay for it down the line with their immortal souls. It absolved the clients’ guilt and kept the preachers off the witches’ backs.

So, on a windy afternoon, my mother hauled a rickety old ladder out to a sycamore tree by the woods behind the house. Mama propped her ladder against the tree and climbed up. Then she nestled herself in the crook of two branches as comfortably as was possible considering her condition and began to sing.

Mama used to joke that if she had chosen something more sedate, something along the lines of “Mary, Don’t You Weep” or “Calvary,” she might not have given birth to such a peculiar daughter. But she
dug her teeth into “Jesus Is a Rock” and swayed and kicked her feet with that good gospel spirit until she knocked over the ladder and couldn’t get back down. I was born at one o’clock and spent the rest of the afternoon in the sycamore tree until my father rescued us when he got home from his shop at six. They named me Odette Breeze Jackson, in honor of my being born in the open air.

As it often happened when a child was born under unusual circumstances, old folks who claimed that they’d been schooled in the wisdom of the ancestors felt called upon to use the occasion to issue dire warnings. My grandma led the chorus in forecasting a dreary future for me. The way she explained it, if a baby was born off of the ground, that child was born without its first natural fear, the fear of falling. That set off a horrible chain reaction resulting in the child’s being cursed with a life of fearlessness. She said a fearless boy had some hope of growing up to be a hero, but a fearless girl would more than likely be a reckless fool. My mother also accepted this as fact, although she leaned more toward the notion that I might become a hero. It should be remembered, of course, that Mama was a grown woman who thought climbing a tree in her tenth month of pregnancy was a good idea. Her judgment had to be looked at with suspicion.