It was a blinding January morning, the kind that happens rarely in New York, when the slow gray clouds of a winter storm finally lift and the sun comes out startling strong, composing the day into hard blue skies and white-capped lawns.
Even before her stroke, Mama would always wait for me to phone her, ever since I’d left Yazoo City twenty-two years earlier. I dutifully telephoned weekly, when I would talk to Mama and Daddy for ten minutes or so, long enough to find out that nothing much had changed with them, at least not for the better. Daddy also didn’t call much, though he had earlier this month.
The morning Mama called, we had just returned home after our Saturday errands and were fumbling with the keys at the back door when the sound of the phone ringing broke through the glass panes like jangling waves. Gerry pushed into the narrow vestibule leading to the kitchen, with its glass and oak cabinets, and set a sack of groceries on the tiled counter. As he reached over and answered the beige wall phone, I headed back to the car to get more groceries. But when I returned seconds later, I heard Gerry saying, “Mama? Mama?” into the receiver.
He turned to me with a worried look. “I’m pretty sure it’s your mother, but all she said was your name.”
“Mama, is that you?” I asked when he handed me the telephone. Then I recognized the familiar sound of my mother’s stammer. “I’m going to my bedroom,” I told her, giving the phone back to Gerry. “Take this while I run upstairs.” I needed quiet to concentrate on my mother’s faltering speech.
I quickly crossed the small butler’s pantry with its tiny, brass-fauceted sink, moved through the dining and living rooms, blurs of color and texture, antique furniture and hooked rugs. I rushed up the stairs and sat down on my brass bed, its Mississippi-made quilt with blue, yellow and red squares so dissimilar to the more formal furnishings in the rest of the house.
“Mama,” I said into the handset, “I’m here.” Still there was only silence. I could see her hunched in her La-Z-Boy, that ratty beige chair where she always sat, dwarfed by the run-down furniture Daddy had jammed into the living room of the duplex. Though he’d hung a vintage 1950 black wall phone in the hall and one circa 1960 in the kitchen, Mama kept a slim Touch-Tone under the recliner, with important numbers keyed into the memory, and would fish it up onto her lap when she absolutely had to make a call. I suspected—no, I knew—that something awful must have happened.
There was nothing for me to do but wait. The curvaceous receiver of my 1950s-style phone, raw from years of use, felt rough in my hand; its pyramidal body, cast of black metal, had a rotary dial with a Belzoni, Mississippi, number written in fading blue pen on a dirty white circle still pasted on the center. Daddy collected these old black telephones. That had been the reason for his call earlier this month—to tell me he’d just found this one, and it was on the way. The phone had arrived a week ago.
With it, Daddy had enclosed a rusted metal clipboard that fit over one side of the cradle, so you could fill it with notepaper and take down messages when people called. It said Andries Welding Supply, Jackson, Mississippi at the top, but you could hardly read it because most of the letters had rubbed off. He had included a note, written on a yellow index card, that said in his surprisingly precise handwriting: “This little clipboard was lying on my desk at the Yazoo Motor Co. for forty years, and I wanted you to have it, Teresa.” Of course I’d known that this piece of junk had lain on Daddy’s desk for forty years, because when we were children he’d made a point of showing it to us, turning it over slowly in his hand as if it were molded of precious metal.
I was surprised that Daddy had wanted me to have it. But at Christmas, when I was home for my annual visit, we’d fought, and I realized he was trying to make up to me in the only way he knew, first by calling, then by sending me the worn telephone and this favorite keepsake.
Finally Mama managed to say, “Treesa.”
“Mama, Mama, what is it?” I heard my voice echoing along the vacant line.
She could not be rushed, ever since two years ago when she’d suffered the stroke. It had occurred on the day that Brother underwent an angioplasty at St. Dominic’s in Jackson. She and Daddy were waiting at the hospital with Brother’s wife, Willie Belle. As they left the parking lot after the procedure, Mama passed out in the front seat of the Oldsmobile, her head lolling forward like a giant rag doll.
Many weeks afterward, when Mama finally began to speak again, she sounded like a Dadaist poet. Her doctors were “elephants,” a group of doctors a “herd of elephants.” She repeated, as if this explained everything, “I had the weight of the whole world on my shoulders, and I dared not knock it off, but y’all knocked it off.” After she came home from the hospital, her use of odd metaphors continued. Now when she spoke, it was a little like starting up an old engine.
“Mama, what is it?” I asked again, smoothing the top of the quilt. I listened closely. My parents lived alone, but in the background I could make out men with deep voices and strong southern accents. In particular I thought I heard Sol’s father-in-law, who had a thick, slow way of talking. But why would James be there? He rarely came to the house anymore.
By now Gerry had joined me upstairs, pausing in the doorway of the bedroom. We’d been married seventeen years, and we were close in the way that childless couples could be. We even shared the same profession, book publishing.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
I held up my hand to stop him from talking. But Mama was only burbling consonants. Then she came out with a complete sentence: “I wouldn’t have gone to the beauty shop.”
“Mama, what do you mean, you wouldn’t have gone to the beauty shop?”
But she only replied, “What will they think at the Jitney Jungle?”
Words began to trickle from her like molasses from a sticky bottle. “I thought he was just sleepin’ late, I thought he was just sleepin’ late. I wouldn’t have gone to the beauty shop, I wouldn’t have gone to the beauty shop. What will they think at the Jitney Jungle, what will they think at the Jitney Jungle?”
She followed this with such a long hiatus that I was afraid she was done talking for good. In the background, more voices, the sound of a door slamming.
Then Mama blurted out: “He’s dead.”
I knew she meant Daddy. Daddy was the only “he” left in our family since Sol had died of leukemia five years before.
“Daddy’s dead,” I repeated, and saw the expression drop on Gerry’s long, sweet face.
“They just took him away, they just took him away in the am-bu-lance.” Mama sang this last little song of keening, and I heard again the banging of the front screen door. Life gone, body gone, and all so quickly.
Solomon Thomas Nicholas Jr. Dead at sixty-eight, on January 29, 1994.
“I’m coming, Mama,” I said into the quiet telephone. “I’m coming home tonight.”
***
In the first few seconds after Mama’s phone call, Gerry and I looked at each other. Inside, quiet filled the house and outside expanded until it seemed not like silence but noise. Then from the backyard came the racket of a crow cawing in the barren branches of the sassafras, reminding me of a time when we were little and an owl had taken up residence in one of Grandma’s pecan trees. Each night we’d heard its mournful cry begin at dusk. My mother, full of country superstitions, had listened closely, repeating, “I don’t like no hoot owl.” To hear an owl meant death was coming, most likely to somebody close.
So Daddy was dead. I waited for that fall-to-the-floor, wailing grief to come upon me, so instinctive, so primitive it needs no explanation; that kind of grief had descended after I’d received the news that Sol had died. When Daddy called to tell me that cold October evening that my brother was gone, I sank to my knees on the blue carpet in front of our television. No, I certainly didn’t feel that for Daddy.
Then Gerry sat next to me, and I obliged by burying my face in his neck. “What happened?” he asked.
I raised my head and reached around to smooth out the quilt that I’d squirmed into a bunch and began to piece together the story as best I could. Mama had thought that Daddy was sleeping late, and as usual she’d gone to have her hair “pressed.” Every Saturday morning for thirty years, she’d visited Miz Pie’s beauty salon next to the post office on Main Street. She would sit in the waiting room, where the air was sticky with the sweet smell of shampoos and hairsprays, and when her turn was called, she would disappear behind louvered doors. She would emerge an hour later, her short hair pasted into a tidy half circle around her head.
After getting her hair done, she’d stopped by the Jitney, probably for a carton of milk. I knew it would be to buy something absolutely necessary, because grocery shopping was Daddy’s domain. Since the Nicholas Cash Gro. had closed twelve years ago, bargain hunting in the Jitney Jungle, Piggly Wiggly, and Sunflower had become his pastime. All the cashiers knew him, and the lady who’d waited on Mama that morning would have been surprised to see her and would undoubtedly have asked about Daddy. “Home sleepin’,” Mama would have replied in her spare way, and now she worried what the cashier would think when she found out what had really happened.
It would have been about eleven o’clock by the time Mama returned to the duplex. She probably stood in the living room and peered into his bedroom, only fifteen feet down the dark hallway. He slept with his door open—had to, because none of the duplex’s doors closed properly—and Mama could see right in. Sometimes he slept late, but eleven was unusual, so she must have decided to tiptoe to the threshold. No one except Mama ever went into Daddy’s bedroom, and she entered only to fix his covers every morning, pulling up the nubby white bedspread, creating a neat zone in his cluttered sanctuary. His bed took up most of the space in the small room, and all around it lay Daddy’s junk, a jumble of metal, plastic, fabric, color, and pattern spread out on the floor, crowded on the tops of his blanket box and bureaus.
As she stood at the entryway of his bedroom, she would have called his name. When he didn’t answer, she must have moved closer to the bed. Maybe she even poked him with a finger. I could see her standing next to him, the strong east light filtering through the tiny holes in the window shades, with the realization coming over her.
“I have to call Debbie and Lisa,” I told Gerry. Why Mama had decided to phone me I didn’t know. Lisa was her favorite; Debbie, a doctor. Either, I thought, would have been a more logical choice. When I finally got my sisters on the phone—Lisa in southern Mississippi and Debbie in South Carolina—they didn’t cry, either.
“I can’t get there until tomorrow,” Debbie said. “But I’m worried about Mama.” For years, we’d all worried about Mama, not just since her stroke; she was an insulin-dependent diabetic who also suffered from hypertension and a thyroid condition. Besides, she seemed not to know how to live in the world, and I was sure that she wouldn’t be able to handle the funeral arrangements, much less pay for them. It was for Mama that I was determined to get home by the end of the day.
I had to make more phone calls—to the airline for tickets and to my boss at the publisher where I worked to tell him that I wouldn’t be coming in for the next week. “Let me do that for you,” Gerry suggested, but I shook my head. My boss, Ed, was sympathetic; he had recently lost his father, who had lain in a Texas hospital for nearly a month, and he told me to take as much time as I needed.
Gerry was stretched out on the quilt with his feet crossed, listening to my conversations, watching. I knew he wanted me to stop and react, but I couldn’t. I rushed to the mahogany dresser and counted out underwear for a week, then ran to my closet, began riffling through my clothing, settled on a gray silk-and-linen pantsuit. These are the clothes that I will wear to Daddy’s funeral, I thought. Only then did I feel like crying, but I hung onto the arms of my suit and stifled the impulse.
But I couldn’t stop myself from remembering. I stood at the closet door, recalling the last time I’d seen Daddy. How appropriate that we’d argued. Two days after Christmas, on his sixty-eighth birthday, the four of us—Mama, Daddy, Gerry, and I—decided to go riding in the hills where Mama had grown up, to visit the cemetery at Midway Primitive Baptist Church. She got Daddy to take her there as often as he would so she could visit her parents’ graves.
Daddy had wanted Erin, Sol’s only child, to come with us. She was now eight years old and since Sol’s death had practically grown up in the house as my parents’ fifth child. I expressed my doubts.
We were standing in the living room in front of the TV, our old battleground. “You don’t want to play with Erin,” Daddy accused me.
“Play with” Erin? We were on our way to a cemetery. I looked at Daddy in astonishment. He and I were both six feet tall, so we stood eye to eye; I could see how his oversized glasses magnified his large brown eyes. But it was his nose, thick and hooked, that made him look foreign, as it did most of the men in Daddy’s Lebanese-Syrian family. He generally wore a hat inside the house, a tractor cap in summer and in winter a red watch cap. That day he looked like an angry Arab Santa.
Now he was working his mouth, yelling, “You don’t love Erin, Te-re-sa!”
From the dining room doorway, Gerry looked on in horror. Mama had retreated to her bedroom. Just as in the old days, I stood by, mute with anger, unable to meet his verbal assault, while he informed me of how I felt. How could I counter his insane thinking? I wanted to snatch the ridiculous cap off his head.
Ultimately, I gave in. But when we stopped to pick her up, Erin wasn’t home, so only the four of us drove to the cemetery after all. It was balmy for December, and the midafternoon sun streamed through the dry woods that grew close along the road. Daddy drove slowly, maddeningly slowly, looking to the left and right, never straight ahead. He was brooding over our fight, as was I.
He veered onto Chew Forks Road. Mama pointed out her aunt Lula’s house, its yard full of junked cars, but we didn’t stop to visit. Finally we came to the big curve, and Daddy turned onto the gravel road, past the little yellow-brick church and into the cemetery. He parked close to the headstone shared by Mama’s parents.
Nettie Gilmore Hood, Jan. 7, 1898–March 20, 1975
John Wesley Hood, Sept. 28, 1885–August 27, 1929
Behind these simple words lay the story of their hard lives and that of my mother, who preferred to sit in the car to remember. I didn’t know how she remembered, whether it was with sadness, hurt, anger, or nostalgia. I suspected she felt all of these, but I only knew that for her, to remember was important.
While Mama sat in the backseat, Gerry and I got out to stretch our legs. I wanted to walk up the little hill to the two old pecan trees beyond the graves to hunt for the sweet brown nuts, and in a conciliatory gesture, I leaned into the driver’s window and asked Daddy to join us. But he only shook his head.
Standing beneath those trees, I watched him get out of the car. On that warm December day, he was wearing a pair of cutoff shorts, and I saw his bald, white legs jerk as he moved toward Nettie’s and John Wesley’s graves. Though I hadn’t known it then, something was wrong with Daddy: He couldn’t even walk a short distance. But I hadn’t recognized the sign, because when he’d refused me, I hadn’t been able to see through my anger. I hadn’t been able to forgive him, not for our fight over Erin, not for any of our fights. We’d driven in silence back to Yazoo City, and the next day Gerry and I had left.
Now, barely a month later, I was going home for Daddy’s funeral.