Mississippi was the crud between my toes from walking barefoot on the dry, crusty soil. And Mississippi was learning to stand back far enough when the man made soap by adding lye to the hog grease. ‘Stand back, gal,’ he’d say, ‘If this lye catches you, it’ll burn so bad you wish you was in hell.’ Mississippi was also Mother’s coy laughter when a ninety-year-old from Mamie’s church patted her behind and told her, ‘You’re the juiciest Lucy I seen outside Biloxi.’ And Mississippi was the wasted hope that Mother could make enough to feed us, by giving recitations up and down the Delta.
She had been gone too long to appreciate flattery from a hardworking cotton picker and she felt superior to the sharecroppers who raised their broken straw hats to her whenever she crossed their tenant farms. She had thought that she was back to stay, but when women at the small churches where she’d recite would complain about the white families they served, Mother would describe the Herzfelds as saints and brag about their mahogany highboy heavy with crystal and silver, like somebody homesick.
Once Mamie heard Mother say, ‘Jews. I’d work for ’em any day, rather than these Mississippi crackers.’ Mamie scoffed, ‘Ruthie, there ain’t no Jews ’round here. And nobody cares that you was Jew-rich up Jersey way. If you want coloured folk to give you a dime at prayer meetings, keep that Jew talk to yourself.’
Mamie McMichael was dangerous.
She talked a lot about God but she was more fixated by money and getting back what she thought she was owed by the local whites.
On moral grounds Lilian refused to eat the chicken that Mamie stole from the cotton planter near her farm. Mamie scolded after beating my sister, ‘That bastard owes me. Since I was a bitty thing, he been fixing the scales that weighs cotton that my folks bent over ’til they couldn’t stand up. But them ole nuns didn’t teach you ’bout that.’
Lilian still said her rosary every night, kneeling before her small altar set up in Mamie’s kitchen. Arranged with the same items that she’d had in our room above Mack’s, it made Mamie’s place more like home, although Mother had burned the novena candle down to nothing the night before we’d left Camden.
Had Mother not whispered to Mamie about ‘the landlord and his wife’, I might have forgotten about Mack altogether, because there was a lot to discover in Bofield, and Mamie’s home-made peanut brittle was as satisfying as caramels. Some mornings before the sun became a hot poker, I’d wander off alone to look for rabbits or search for grasshoppers in the tall, scorched crabgrass. Even lugging buckets of water from the pump to the kitchen seemed like fun as long as Mother didn’t make me do it. But during those three and a half months that Mamie’s ten acres became my wonderland, I was most awed by the way her fingers produced songs on the piano. She’d ask Mother to sing along. ‘Ruthie,’ she’d beg, ‘anybody that can recite like you, got to have some music in ’em. Let’s hear the chorus of “Gracious Lord”,’ she’d say and bang out a minor chord.
Mother found every excuse from ‘Woke up with a frog in my throat’ to ‘I can’t waste time singing when I’ve got passages to learn.’
Her recitations were more popular with me that Mississippi summer than anybody, apart from that ninety-year-old man whose name I never knew but who turned up to sniff around Mother in the yard like a mangy old Tom cat. Her figure was filling out again from Mamie’s fatback, beans and rice. Listening to my mother learn her Bible passages was better than radio, because she’d let me interrupt. She didn’t know the meaning of every verse she recited, but she chose the easiest pieces which she’d practise aloud on the porch while I fought back the blue flies and picked at the scabs I got from scratching my mosquito bites.
I heard Mother practising her pieces so often that I knew some and could mouth the words with her. My favourite was the story of Hannah asking the Lord for a son. First chapter of the Book of Samuel. Mother repeated it so often it hypnotized me like a Latin mass. Mother’s bible stories were easier for me to follow than the catechism at St Anthony’s.
If the sun wasn’t too high or the mosquitoes too hungry on Mamie’s porch, Mother would let me climb onto her lap and make requests. ‘Do the one about Hannah.’ If she hadn’t already, she’d clear her throat and swim fearlessly into the verse with a power that she displayed at no other time. It was like sitting on a mountain that speaks. ‘There was a certain man of Ramathaimzophim of the hill of the country of Ephraim whose name was Elkanah, the son of Jeroham, son of Elihu, son of Tohu, son of Zuph, an Ephramite …’ She could lower her voice until the syllables swayed back and forth with the ease of a porch glider; slow, so slowly the cadences would rise and fall. Forward then backward, high, then low, carving a road into my psyche like the radio jingles did. ‘Whose name was Elka-nah, the son of Jero-ham, son of Eli-hu, son of Tohu.’
Mother’s voice was as round as her belly, as soft as her lap, as smooth as her hair when greased and straightened with tongs. So I was often lulled to sleep by her reciting the story of Hannah as I had been in the days when Lilian was learning to recite Hail Holy Queen. Repeating the lines over and over, Lil would entrance me with the phrase ‘Poor banished children of Eve’.
During those mornings when I trekked through the open fields alone, I would often repeat Mother’s verses, and once Lilian heard and challenged me in Mamie’s front yard: we were to see who could say all the names in Hannah’s story, and the winner could tickle the loser to death. But we never got that far because Mamie, in the yard feeding the turkeys, heard us. She yelled, ‘C’mere, Reenie.’ I thought I was in trouble for making fun of the way Mother recited ‘Elka-nah, the son of Jero-ham’ and the rest. But Mamie said, ‘Come on in and do that again.’ When she grabbed my arm to pull me into the kitchen, I looked less frightened than Lilian who was terrified of her.
Mamie’s gruffness was straightforward, but unlike Mother she would slap us without warning. So when she sat at the kitchen table and told me to stand by the stove, I didn’t know what to expect. I hoped that my Mother would rescue me but suspected that she was out back picking runner beans.
I began meekly and Mamie snapped, ‘Speak up!’
‘There was a man of Ramathaimzophim of the hill of the country of Ephraim …’
‘Do it like your mama does … Go ’head … like you did in my yard.’
I knew where Mother paused for effect and recited as she did. And Mamie applauded and laughed until tears streamed down her dark cheeks and glistened on that black mole beside her nose. The more I recited, the more she laughed and her frolicking spilled into the yard until Lilian stuck her head in the screen door. ‘Set down,’ Mamie told her.
I was a show-off but everything I did my sister tried to do better, and that afternoon was no different. Competition was fierce but whereas Lilian knew the words, I knew Mother’s phrasing.
Mamie McMichael had an instinct for what would please a crowd. To her everyone, kids, grown-ups, old people, was a potential audience. I’ve seen her arrive at a church for the first time, ask some deacons to help bring her piano from the rig, and proceed to organize the service. Merely after eyeing a congregation, Mamie would whisper something like, ‘Ruthie, do “Punishment and Blasphemy” or “Hezekiah’s Prayer”.’ Once I heard her warn in a church, ‘Whatever you do, don’t do no Proverbs, ’cause this minister only knows Psalms and Proverbs, so these folks can’t take ’em from nobody else.’
When Mamie took Mother aside after hearing Lil and I do some of Mother’s verses, Mamie said, ‘Mark my words, them children could make us rich.’
The
