“No telling what causes this kind of thing,” the doctor told Tucker. “But she’s had her last child, that’s for sure.”
“You’ve had your last poke at me,” Shirley whispered to Tucker when she could talk again. “I never wanted it, and if you come to me for it again, I’ll cut your thing off and feed it to these damn brats you pulled out of me.”
Tucker said nothing. The doctor had told him he’d have to be very gentle with Shirley for a while, that she was gonna be weak for a good long time.
“You don’t know Shirley,” Tucker told him. “She might be sick, but she an’t never gonna be weak.”
It was October when the baby was born dead. Shirley Boatwright would not go back to work till May. The pennies saved up over the summer were gone by then, as were the canned goods Tucker’s sisters had sent over in the fall. By February, half the Boatwright children were wearing strips of sacking tied around their broken shoes. Every morning they’d stand still while Shirley directed Mattie in tying the sacking correctly. It was Bo’s birthday, the eleventh of that month, when she caught hold of Mattie’s sleeve as she headed for the door with the other children.
“No,” Shirley said. “You’re thirteen now, no need to waste your time in school. You either, Bo.”
All the children stood still for a moment, and then Mattie and Bo stepped back and let the others go. It took Shirley half an hour to get herself dressed, shaking off Mattie’s hand when she came to help. It took them all another hour to walk the eight blocks together to the mill. Neither Bo nor Mattie spoke. Both of them just kept looking up to their mother with swollen frightened eyes.
Mattie had small quick hands and a terror of the speeding shuttles. She kept her lower lip clenched in her teeth while she worked to untangle the bunched and knotted threads. Bo was clumsy and spent most of his time crawling underneath frames to grease the wheels that turned the bobbin belts. Sometimes he would crawl right up under Mattie’s hands and hiss up at her to get her attention. Both of them avoided their father. When their mother came to work in May, they avoided her too, but that was easier. Shirley had been transferred from the carding room to finishing. Safely separated from the rest of the mill by a wire-and-glass wall, Shirley and twelve other women ran up towels, aprons, and simple skirts from the end runs of same-fabric bolts.
“You see what I mean?” Shirley’s mouth had grown so tight she seemed to have no lips at all. “Quality always shows, always finds its place. That foreman knows who I am.”
Mattie sucked her gums and thought of the women at the mill who stepped aside when her mama passed. Everybody said Shirley Boatwright believed her piss was wine. Everybody said she repeated whatever she heard to the foreman on the second shift. And if Shirley Boatwright pissed wine, then there was no doubt that nasty son of a bitch pissed store-bought whiskey.
“When we grow up . . .” Bo started whispering every night, and each child would finish the line in turn.
“I’m gonna move to Texas.”
“I an’t never gonna eat tripe no more.”
“I’m gonna have six little babies and buy them anything they want.”
“Gonna treat them good.”
“Gonna tell them how pretty they are.”
“Gonna love them, love them.”
Sometimes, Mattie would let the youngest, Billy, climb up onto her lap. She’d hug and stroke him and quietly sing some gospel song for him, making up the words she couldn’t remember. “When we grow up,” Bo kept whispering. “When we grow up . . .” That too could have been a song.
None of them knew what they might not do. Only Mattie had an idea that it was possible to do anything at all. Walking to work every morning, she passed the freight siding where James Gibson pulled barrels off his father’s wagon. The Gibsons ran a lumber business and most of the cane syrup shipped out of Greenville went out in their barrels. If he was there, James stopped and watched her walk by. Every time he saw her pass, he smiled.
“I’ve got nine brothers,” he told her one morning. “But not one sister. Lord, I do love to look at pretty girls.”
It was the first time anyone had ever suggested Mattie might be pretty. She started leaving home earlier so she could walk slower past the railway siding. On the mornings when one of the other Gibson boys was there, she felt disappointed. They tended to giggle when they saw her, which always made her wonder what James said about her to them.
“I told them to keep an eye on you.” James smiled wide when she asked him. “I told them to keep their hands off and their eyes open. What you think about that?”
“I think you talking a lot for nothing having been said between us.”
“What do we need to say?”
But Mattie could not answer that. She didn’t know what she wanted to say to anybody. She only knew she wanted to start finding things out. She felt as if her eyes were coming open, as if light were sneaking into a dark place inside her. At the dinner table Mattie watched how her mama spooned rice out of the bowl, all the while talking about how only trash served food out of a cooking pot.
“Quality people use serving dishes.” Shirley slapped Bo’s hand. “Quality people don’t come to the table with grease under their nails.”
“I washed.”
Mattie watched rice grains fall off her fork. She hated butter beans with rice. White on white didn’t suit her. Black-eyed peas with pork and greens—that was better. Red tomatoes on the side of the plate almost spoke out loud. Best of all was pinto beans cooked soft and thick with little green bits sprinkled on at the last and chopped collards laid round the sides of the plate. Color. When she had her own kitchen, there would be lots of color.
“If you’d really washed, you would be clean,” Shirley was saying. “Nobody in my family ever came to the table with dirt under their nails. You go wash again.”
My family, Mattie thought. My family.
Bo’s face creased and uncreased, as if the words he wasn’t saying were pushing up inside him. His long skinny body vibrated in his overalls. He kept quiet, though, and pushed himself up to go out to the porch to wash again. Tucker slapped his behind lightly as he went past. Mattie put her fork between her teeth, realizing in that moment how bad their father was looking. He wasn’t eating either. It didn’t seem as if he ever ate much anymore. All he did was drink lots of tea out of his special jar from under the pump.
He’s a drunk, Mattie thought, examining the broken veins in her father’s nose. He really is a drunk.
“What are you thinking about, Miss High and Mighty?” Shirley spooned butter beans onto another plate and pursed her lips at Mattie.
“Nothing.” Mattie filled her mouth with rice so she wouldn’t have to talk.
“You got a lot in that face for nothing to say. Mabel Moseley told me she saw you out behind the mill talking to that Gibson boy day before yesterday. She said you were shaking your ass and swinging your hair like some kind of harlot.”
Mattie scooped up more rice and stuffed her mouth so that her cheeks bulged out. She looked at her mother steadily, seeing for the first time not only the thin lips but also the corded neck muscles, and the high red spots on the cheeks. She is ugly, Mattie thought. Seriously ugly.
Shirley frowned. Something was going on, and she did not understand it.
Mattie let her eyes wander up to her mother’s pupils, the hard hazel color that reflected her own. You are ugly and old, she thought to herself. Her teeth went on chewing steadily. Her eyes did not blink.
“Now, now.” Tucker pushed his plate forward out of his way. “You know Mabel Moseley an’t quite right in her head. Mattie Lee’s a good girl.”
“She’s trash. She’s nothing but trash, and you know it.” Calmly, Shirley set the full plate in front of her youngest and started to fill another for herself. “Don’t matter what I do. I can’t make nothing out of these brats. Seems like they’re all bound to grow up to be trash.”
Tucker closed his eyes and sighed. “I’m tired,” he whispered. “I’m gonna lay me down for a while.”
“An’t no food gonna be kept warm for you.”
“Don’t want it no way.”
Mattie spooned more rice, and chewed slowly. She watched her mother watch her father as he walked away, shuffling his feet on the floorboards. There were wide gaps between most of the floorboards, and Shirley was always stuffing them with one thing or another. What would it be like, Mattie wondered, to live in a house with dirt floors?
“You know that union man?” she heard herself say, and her heart seemed to pause briefly in shock.
Her mama was looking at her again. Shirley’s mouth was hanging open. Past her shoulder, Bo had stopped in the doorway, wiping his hands on his shirtfront.
“Union?”
“Trade union.” Mattie filled her fork again and then looked right past her mama to Bo. “You think we ought to sign up?”
“You’ve gone crazy.” Shirley dropped the spoon into the beans. “You’ve gone absolutely white-eyed crazy. There an’t no union in the mill. There an’t gonna be no union in the mill. And I wouldn’t let you join one if some fool was to bring one in.”
“You couldn’t stop me.”
It felt to Mattie as if all the rice she had eaten was swelling inside her. There was a kind of heat in her belly that was spreading down her legs and tingling as it went. Once she had sipped at her daddy’s tea glass and felt the same thing. “You’re drunk, little girl.” Tucker had laughed at her, but she had kind of liked the feeling. This was like that, and she liked it even more now.
She watched Shirley’s hands flatten on the table. She watched the red spots on her mama’s face get bigger and hotter. She watched Bo’s eyes widen and a little gleam of light come on in them. There was a kind of laughter in her belly that wanted to roll out her mouth, but she held it inside. She imagined Bo’s chorus of when we grow up, and found herself thinking that when she had kids, she’d sit them all down on the dirt floor and tell ’em to sign with the union. Shirley’s chair made a hollow sound on the bare floor.
Now, Mattie thought. Now, she will get up and come over there, and she will slap me. What will I do then? She took another bite of rice and smiled.
What will I do then?
Granny Mattie always said Great-grandma Shirley lived too long. “One hundred and fourteen when she died, and didn’t nobody want to wash her body for the burying. Had to hire an undertaker’s assistant to pick something to bury her in. She’d left instructions, but didn’t nobody want to read them. Bo had always sworn he would throw a party when she died, but shit, he didn’t live to see it. And his sons didn’t have the guts to do it for him. Only thing Bo ever managed to do to her was go piss on her porch steps the year before he died. The whole time, she sat up there staring over his head, pretending she didn’t see his dick or nothing. She lived too long, too long. She should have died when Bo was alive to throw his party. Every damn child out of her body would have come to party with him. Anybody ever tells you I’m mean, you tell them about your Great-grandma Shirley, the meanest woman ever left Tennessee.”
Mama
A
bove her left ankle my mother has an odd star-shaped scar. It blossoms like a violet above the arch, a purple pucker riding the muscle. When she was a little girl in South Carolina they still bled people in sickness, and they bled her there. I thought she was just telling a story, when she first told me, teasing me or covering up some embarrassing accident she didn’t want me to know about. But my aunt supported her.
“It’s a miracle she’s alive, girl. She was such a sickly child, still a child when she had you, and then there was the way you were born.”
“How’s that?”
“Assbackwards,” Aunt Alma was proud to be the first to tell me, and it showed in the excitement in her voice. “Your mama was unconscious for three days after you were born. She’d been fast asleep in the back of your Uncle Lucius’s car when they hit that Pontiac right outside the airbase. Your mama went right through the windshield and bounced off the other car. When she woke up three days later, you were already out and named, and all she had was a little scar on her forehead to show what had happened. It was a miracle like they talk about in Bible school, and I know there’s something your mama’s meant to do because of it.”
“Oh yeah.” Mama shrugged when I asked her about it. “An’t no doubt I’m meant for greater things—bigger biscuits, thicker gravy. What else could God want for someone like me, huh?” She pulled her mouth so tight I could see her teeth pushing her upper lip, but then she looked into my face and let her air out slowly.
“Your aunt is always laying things to God’s hand that he wouldn’t have interest in doing anyway. What’s true is that there was a car accident and you got named before I could say much about it. Ask your aunt why you’re named after her, why don’t you?”
On my stepfather’s birthday I always think of my mother. She sits with her coffee and cigarettes, watches the sun come up before she must leave for work. My mama lives with my stepfather still, though she spent most of my childhood swearing that as soon as she had us up and grown, she’d leave him flat. Instead, we left, my sister and I, and on my stepfather’s birthday we neither send presents nor visit. The thing we do—as my sister has told me and as I have told her—is think about Mama. At any moment of the day we know what she will be doing, where she will be, and what she will probably be talking about. We know, not only because her days are as set and predictable as the schedule by which she does the laundry, we know in our bodies. Our mother’s body is with us in its details. She is recreated in each of us; strength of bone and the skin curling over the thick flesh the women of our family have always worn.
When I visit Mama, I always look first to her hands and feet to reassure myself. The skin of her hands is transparent—large-veined, wrinkled, and bruised—while her feet are soft with the lotions I rubbed into them every other night of my childhood. That was a special thing between my mother and me, the way she’d give herself the care of my hands, lying across the daybed, telling me stories of what she’d served down at the truck stop, who had complained and who tipped specially well, and most important, who had said what and what she’d said back. I would sit at her feet, laughing and nodding and stroking away the tightness in her muscles, watching the way her mouth would pull taut while under her pale eyelids the pulse of her eyes moved like kittens behind a blanket. Sometimes my love for her would choke me, and I would ache to have her open her eyes and see me there, to see how much I loved her. But mostly I kept my eyes on her skin, the fine traceries of the veins and the knotted cords of ligaments, seeing where she was not beautiful and hiding how scared it made me to see her close up, looking so fragile, and too often, so old.