Authors: Kiese Laymon
Grandma told me that we had to stop by Walmart before we went home. She said Walmart had a sale on her new favorite brand of wig, Wigs4Blax, and that she might as well get the wig today since this was her half-day off.
My grandma had three jobs. She worked as a housekeeper at the Island View Casino. She washed and ironed clothes for three white families in town. And she sold pound cake and fruit salad every other Saturday afternoon.
When we pulled into the lot of the Walmart, a green pickup truck flew past us and damn near knocked the front end off the Bonneville. Grandma stuck out her arm and secured my chest while slamming on the brakes. “Jesus give me strength,” she said. “What in the world is wrong with your children?”
It was the middle of the day, so most folks who worked hard and sweated for a living were still at work. Grandma was getting ready to park next to this orange and gray Cadillac sitting on 22-inch rims.
“Young folks ain’t got nothing better to spend that money on except long cars and crazy tags?”
“What?”
“What a nigga do in the dark will damn sure come to the light somehow.”
“Grandma?”
“Yes, baby.”
“I appreciate how it sounds when you say ‘nigga’ and I’m sorry about acting a fool at the contest.”
“Shhhh,” Grandma said and parked the car. “And leave your little brush in the car. Folks in here likely to steal everything that ain’t nailed down.”
The Melahatchie Walmart was always packed. Always. I never had anything stolen the hundreds of times I’d been in there and folks always looked so happy walking around, especially in the electronics section. I walked with Grandma to the wig section of the store and this old white woman with wrinkly skin, a maroon scarf around her pudgy neck, and her hair in a ball came up on us.
The woman’s nametag said “Louise Ellsington.” She had gold for days draped on the outside of her scarf, and on her fingers were the shiniest rings I’d seen in real life. She walked up onto us lightweight fast, with one hand on her hip and the other on her chin.
“Hey. Hello’ew there!” she said. “We want y’all to know’ew that today, we’ve got a special on our Wigs4Blax brand.” She pointed to the raggedy looking wigs on the sale rack. “We sure do’ew.”
I could tell that the lady was from Jackson and had probably worked in the outside malls in Jackson before taking a job at the Melahatchie Walmart. At the outside Jackson malls, all the older white ladies with hair in a ball and penny loafers always said “o” sounding words like “o’ew” sounding words, but in Melahatchie the “o” sounded like “o” no matter who said it.
“So’ew,” she said, “if you buy one of those Gary curl wigs, y’all get a free year subscription to the new
Ebony
magazine…” she trailed off, and just looked at me. I tried to look away, then look back, but she was still watching. “Y’all got a talkative little devil there, don’t y’all?” she said to Grandma. “Were you the one doing all that talking on TV yesterday?”
“Yes ma’am,” Grandma said. “My baby does love to talk. Don’t pay him no attention.” She patted me on the back. “Now how much did you say the Gary curl wig was?”
I couldn’t believe Grandma was talking like that in front of that lady. Her voice, her body, everything shrunk. It was like she wasn’t even Grandma anymore. I never heard Grandma say “ma’am” to someone who was younger than her. The rumor was that Grandma actually brought the Jheri (not “Gary”) curl to Melahatchie from Milwaukee back in the early ’80s. Now she was acting like she couldn’t even pronounce it right, all because she was talking in front of a weird-looking white woman who couldn’t even pronounce “so” and “do.”
Grandma and I held hands as we walked back to the Bonneville.
“If Tom Henry coulda seen you raising hell on TV, he woulda swore up and down that he was looking through his red eyes at himself.”
“Why?” I asked her.
Grandma started getting comfortable in the driver’s seat chair. I could tell she was about to go into one of her Granddaddy stories. The stories always started different, but every one of them, except the one that ended with him disappearing in Lake Marathon, ended with Granddaddy acting like a demon and destroying something before Grandma intervened.
“I remember one Saturday we got to fighting ’bout money or something like that,” she started. “He was tired of me working all these jobs, you know? Anyway, Tom Henry claimed he was going for a walk to get his mind right. I knew that meant he was ’bout to get that damn stuffed monkey and walk off in them woods across the road from the house.
“Anyway, while he was gone, his friends Cherry and Shank come over here looking for him to go fishing. All three of us, we out there on that porch, you know? ’Course I ain’t tell Cherry or Shank he was over in them woods with no fake monkey, so I just said he wasn’t nowhere to be found. Soon as I said that, here comes your granddaddy prancing out them woods with that monkey in his hands and one of those shit-eating grins on his face. Tom Henry walks up on the porch and tries to hide the monkey behind his back.
“Cherry says, ‘Tom, what the hell you doing holding on to a ugly little fake monkey off in them woods, man? Ain’t you done outgrown dolls and hide-and-seek?’ Like I told you before, I reckon your granddaddy reacts like a demon when somebody stands on his own porch and calls him crazy. So Tom Henry commenced to beat the clothes off of Cherry and Shank. Off! You hear me?” Grandma was laughing hard as she could and smiling ear to ear. “And when the police came, Tom Henry was still beating both of them to the white meat until I calmed him down. He spent two nights in jail for that.”
Grandma got busy when it came to her sentences. With Grandma’s at-home sentences, it was like there was no screen between her mind and your ears. You got all of her, all of her voice. She could destroy anyone in the region in a sentence contest, including LaVander Peeler and me, as long as the judges were fair. I realized then, though, that Grandma’s at-home sentences and her in-the-car sentences were completely opposite of her at-the-mall-sentences.
“Hey Grandma,” I said. “Would you tell that story at the mall in front of that white lady, with the same dynamic sentences?”
“First of all, that wasn’t no story. And I don’t know nothing about no dynamic sentences,” she told me. “That’s the truth. And the truth ain’t got a thing to do with that damn white woman, City.”
“Oh. Okay,” I said, knowing she was lying through her teeth.
Grandma and I walked up on the porch of her house. Hurricane Katrina tore up Grandma’s old shotgun house eight years earlier, but within a year, she’d gotten a new shotgun house built in the same spot. The house was raised off the ground about a foot and a half by some cinder blocks. The porch led to the front door, which opened to the living room, and from there, depending on what angle you looked in the house, you could see through the bedroom, the dining room, and the kitchen.
Grandma didn’t have a hall, either, like the houses on TV and in books. Grandma’s house had a living room with an old floor-model big-screen TV,
a glass table with some Bibles and photo albums on it, a played-out stereo that only ever played Mahalia Jackson, and my Uncle Relle’s sleeping bag right in the middle of the floor. Uncle Relle stayed with Grandma probably four times a week. Anyway, pictures of our family, the ones live and dead, were all over the living room. Walk ten more feet, there was a dining room with a plastic chandelier over a round wooden table. On one side of the table were two big deep freezers full of dead animal parts and food from her garden. On the other side of the table were a washing machine and a basket filled with the white folks’ clothes Grandma washed to make a little more money. Fifteen more feet and there was a tiny kitchen. Four more feet and you were out the back door, under a clothesline, where there was a scary work shed I was never allowed to go in and a chinaberry tree.
I kept looking at Relle’s sleeping bag, wondering when he was coming home. I wanted to know what he thought of what I’d done at the contest the night before. I figured he was going to be the only person in my family who was actually proud of me.
“Grandma, do you get wireless yet?”
“Wireless? Wireless what?”
“Internet!”
“Naw, we ain’t got none of that mess, and you ain’t gonna be hooking up no wireless to my TV.”
“It ain’t got nothing to do with the TV,” I told her. “It’s so people can check their email. What does Uncle Relle do if he wants to check his email?”
“He heads up the road to the library like everybody else, I reckon.”
I wanted to push it more but I didn’t want Grandma getting mad at me. I know Melahatchie was only a bus ride away, but it felt like a time warp. It always felt like it was behind whatever time we were in up in Jackson, but after Hurricane Katrina, it’s like time went fast in reverse instead of just slowing down.
“Why you sweating, City?” Grandma asked me. “Go in the bathroom and wipe your face off.” I turned to open the screen door and half-stepped in the door when Grandma finished her sentence: “…and go get my switch.”
“What!?”
I stared at Grandma’s face, not hardcore like I had the power to shoot liquid heat from my eyes, but more like I had X-ray vision and I was looking
at the raggedy spinal cord that held the skull, that held the mouth, that held the tongue that formed those terrible words,
go get my switch
.
“You remember where it is, don’t you? Go on and get my switch now,” Grandma said. “You can’t be acting a fool like that in front of them folks. You know we can’t have that.”
Man, she said it so calm. Like it was only a whupping. Grandma hadn’t whupped me in two and half years.
But what could I do?
Nothing except drop my head, walk through the front screen door, through the living room, through the kitchen, out the back screen door, around the side of the house, and under the chinaberry tree. I had just matured to a point where I could get nice with myself in places other than the shower and the bathroom at school, and here I was about to get a beating like a child.
I almost hated this part of the beating way more than the actual beating. The anticipation and fear of all those lashes builds and builds, and then you realize how shameful it is that you’re about to get your ass and back beaten by the same switch you’re about to pick. And the whole time you’re thinking that you don’t wanna mess up on purpose and pick a little thin switch. You also don’t wanna pick one that’s too big to leave welts, because that means Grandma is gonna take her fine ass out there to pick the switch herself. And it didn’t matter how deep in that bush the perfect switch was, Grandma would always find it.
I narrowed my choices to a slender one with a lot of leaves on it, or a big one that wouldn’t wrap around my fat back too well.
Now, I had to hand it to her.
Should I smile or cry?
Grandma was out on the porch scaling the nasty big fish we were going to eat for dinner when I finally made it back.
Should I smile or cry?
I opened the screen door and waited for her to extend her hand.
“Here you go, Grandma.” I acted like I was going to hand the switch to her, but when she reached for it, I dropped it on the ground and took off through the screen door, through the TV room, through the kitchen, and out the back screen door.
And Grandma came flying after me.
I ran on the other side of the clothesline and tried to use one of her yellow fitted sheets as protection. “Boy, put down my damn fitted sheet,” she yelled. “Put it down!”
I threw the yellow fitted sheet on the ground and ran and ran. And Grandma ran and ran, too. Then she stopped by my granddaddy’s work shed, right next to the chinaberry tree. She threw down that wack switch I gave her and then dove right in the bush and pulled out a switch that looked like a six-foot whip with a handle.
I understood right there that I wasn’t simply running away from the greatest whupper in our family. Hell, I was running away from the greatest whupper in the history of Mississippi whuppings.
Grandma started running after me again. When I reached the back of the house, she was in the switch’s reach, but she tried to turn the corner too sharp, and slid into a split.
Damn
.
I knew Grandma would no longer just beat me for acting a fool at the contest. In the fourteen years that I’d known Grandma, she’d whupped me about six times, and the crazy thing was how she never looked at me like she wanted to rip the spine out of my back when she was whupping. You could tell that it was just regretful work for her.
Five minutes later, I was sobbing and balled up on the ground like a greasy, burnt-brown cinnamon roll with good waves. To tell you the truth, I felt honored to be whupped by Grandma. And I felt proud that during the entire whupping I never let go of my new brush.
After the beating and bath, Grandma prayed for me while I sat on the bed. Then we ate. I got so full off of nasty-looking, good-tasting catfish and fries, sweet iced tea, and thick pound cake that I couldn’t breathe. I helped Grandma do the dishes, then we jumped in her bed to take a little nap before
The Bernie Mac Show
and
Meet the Browns
came on. I asked Grandma if it was okay for us to sleep on top of the sheet in our underwear with the fan directly on us.