Lucille said, after he couldn’t have lunch at Leb’s Restaurant downtown because of the sit-ins. Lucille stayed in the kitchen and refused to speak to anyone for three hours. She cursed those “pig-eyed juveniles” making trouble. Thomas called her a “house slave, who’d die with nothing in her hands but her white lies.” She took her lighter, flicked it on and chased him, flame glinting, out of the house and down Plymouth Road.
A few months later, I heard Lucille tell him: “I don’t want you round here, go on and get your fool self to Birmingham,” which for her meant dynamite, blood, and riots. But Thomas never kept quiet. “You can fall in a ditch and stay there till I go,” he said. He wanted me to know about South Georgia, where he used to make 25 cents a day at a sawmill in 1939. Before that, he worked as a sharecropper, but said he had decided not long after he’d been whipped, “cut till the blood stopped dripping,” that he’d never work on a farm again. “I wouldn’t tell a mule good morning,” he used to repeat. Years later, I understood that this was his response to the dubious gift to freed slaves of “40 acres and a mule.” At 82, not long after Lucille had died, he remembered: “You couldn’t tip your hat to a white woman. You’d get the chair. They’d break your neck. You wouldn’t raise your head. Did, you wouldn’t take it down.”
Lucille
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WHAT DO I REMEMBER of that thumping rhythm, the bulging eyes of the peg-legged man? A lonely Saturday afternoon in the kitchen with Lucille, breathing in her wet laughs as she flicked the TV dial. I must have been about eight years old. My choice was Popeye in his white navy uniform, but as usual she controlled the channels. Quick Draw McGraw and The Mickey Mouse Club lost out to Maverick and Rawhide. She dominated always. Humming, she adjusted things and the picture took shape.
Out onto the stage came a black man with one leg. One peg. It was “Peg Leg” Bates. Oh what, I wondered, happened to cause such a sight? As always, Lucille told me a story. Peg Leg, she said, “felt too deep, his heart was too good,” but the devil had him in his hands and bore down on him in a car on the road to Florida. Dang fool, I didn’t want to listen, but I did. I didn’t want to hear any more, but Lucille never stopped, never did stop. After the crash, no one came for hours to get Bates out from under the car. That was the story that she told me.
Years later I found out what really happened. The lights went out while he was working in a cotton gin mill in South Carolina. His leg got caught and mangled in the conveyor belt. Since white hospitals were segregated and there were no black hospitals nearby, the doctor cut off the leg on a kitchen table. Down South, nobody thought enough of a black man to send him to a hospital.
“Learned” me the devil, Lucille did: the white fingers of some woman hanging like gauze on to her car door on the road to Florida, bodies split into two in cotton mills. “I want to dance on this peg, and I want to be good at it,” the one-legged dancing man, filled with grace, was tough enough to say: “When I swing this peg around….You’ll think that I’m Fred Astaire.” No Bojangles shenanigans for Peg Leg Bates. Even if he had to wear black face to perform in a white theater on Broadway, he did what he had to do; and he did it well, tap-dancing with high-rising seriousness. The first black to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1950, he appeared 21 times, more than any other tap dancer. When he made his final appearance in 1955 — he must have been around 60 — Lucille and I were together watching. That’s how I remember him so well. He was another one of her heroes, and for a long time I could hear that tap-tap-tapping and remember him in his white suit with the white peg.
Lucille told me bedtime stories. My bedroom, with its twin beds and old mahogany dresser, painted an odd kind of ultramarine blue, with a cream-colored carpet, turned into my little cabinet of horrors. Lucille’s stories were not fairy tales. They scared me out of my wits. She always saved her favorite one for last, repeated but sometimes with a slight change in her warning. “Stay on your back,” she said, “or else that man in the closet will fall out straight down over you.” I knew I had to be ready. Surprise could kill me. I would die of the shock, she said, “You’ll wake up plumb dead, dead as a doornail. And don’t you go screaming out for me. Don’t yell. He’ll be flat over you before you can holler.” Just like the spiders under the bed, the moon outside the window, and the hand through the screen, the man in the closet was waiting for me to turn the wrong way, look over the wrong shoulder, or say the wrong thing.
Everybody was always dying around Lucille. A black widow spider bit her niece, and she died a few days later. Her name was Helen. Lucille’s first husband fell or was pushed off a truck and died. Another one was cutting Florida cane and the scythe slit his foot clean to the ankle. When she laughed and clapped her hands talking about the next husband, the only man she ever loved, I learned how terror could be jubilation. Like Peg Leg Bates, he got caught in a cotton mill, but he lost everything from the trunk on down. Cut just about clean in half. She was called in to identify him. There was nothing left but his chest and head.
Joe Moses was the last of Lucille’s five husbands. I figured she must have loved him, since she changed her last name from Nero to Moses. She told me that she never “took on no man’s name. Not until Joe.” I only met him once, but like so much else in my past, I don’t remember anything except what Lucille told me.
He drank too much, and Lucille finally decided that she would “fix” him once and for all. She was tired of the way he embarrassed her by yelling out the windows all hours of the night and bothering the neighbors. “Lord, I’m gone again,” he would shout. When he wasn’t hollering out the window, he used to jump up and down on the bed and hooted all the same. They had twin beds pushed together. So one night he jumped up, and she kicked his bed out from under him. “Lord, I done missed the bed that time,” Lucille remembered him saying. She told the story with a wistful smile on her face. “He hurt his self, bad. Real bad. Went to the hospital and died a couple weeks later.”
Sometimes when I walk down the hallway in my house, I catch myself moving like Lucille. Up and down I pump my shoulders. I hold my arms out, each hand clenched, dancing just the way she did out in the backyard, singing B.B. King’s “Why I Sing the Blues.” Lucille used to tell me that she was named after his guitar, though now I realize that couldn’t be right, since she’d been around quite a few years before he named it.
During my third year in college, my father and mother wrote me that Lucille was old, so they “let her go.” That’s how they put it when they wrote me. She moved to her sister Nellie’s house on Ponce de Leon Boulevard near Georgia Baptist Hospital, where I visited her my next time at home. Photos of me were on her night table and the living-room wall. She saw me looking at them, and said: “You’re my baby, always was and always will be.” We sat together for hours one afternoon in her room that smelled of soapsuds, honey, and the cod-liver oil that she swore by, taking it by the teaspoon whenever she felt her blood pressure rising. I thought then that I would remember everything about our talk. But memory fails me. All that remains is that smell and the feel of lanolin in her hair. Only in retrospect do I realize that I never asked her about her parents nor did I ever find out where she came from. No last words. Not a thing I can recall doing, ever, that might square with her love for me.
A few months later, I came home for her funeral. She had died of a heart attack, alone in the shower. Stubborn and tough as always, she didn’t listen to Nellie’s order that she shower or bathe only when someone else was in the house. Whoever embalmed her had the last say. That was a shame. Lucille never liked cosmetics and thought makeup was for “fool women.” She didn’t want anything unnatural touching her skin. But there she lay, in a suit, with a shiny black wig and her face caked with makeup. Even Thomas didn’t think she looked good and warned me when I said I wanted to see her: “You wouldn’t want to see her in the fashion she’d come back in. In the clothes she was put away in.” When the preacher asked for remembrances, I went up to the pulpit. I can’t recall what I said.
