Yard War (7 page)

“Your mother tells me that Dee played football with you and the gang yesterday.”

What was sad about that?

“You oughta see him throw a pass, Daddy. He's real fast, too.”

“Well, I think it's great that you included Willie Jane's boy in your game, but it's just that sometimes there are, well, larger issues involved, and—”

“We've gotten some phone calls,” Mama said.

“About what?” I asked.

“There are concerns among the neighbors,” said Daddy. “They are concerned that—”

“Listen, honey, this is all my fault,” Mama said. “I told you it was okay for Dee to play with y'all, but…he really doesn't need to be out there in the front yard like that. It upsets people.”

“What? He was playing football! He wasn't hurting anybody!”

“We know, pal,” Daddy said.

“Well, what are people all concerned about? Who called, anyway?”

They just looked at me. Then Mama said, “Mrs. Sitwell, Mr. Bethune—”

“Mr. Bethune? Mr. Bethune parked his truck and watched us play! Why would he stop and watch us if he—”

“It doesn't matter who it was, Trip. They are our
neighbors and a whole bunch of people around here, not just Pete Bethune, but a
whole
bunch of people are upset about having to integrate schools—”

“And neighborhoods,” said Mama.

“The Civil Rights Act,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Miss Hooper told us all about it in history.”

“Then you can understand why people are upset.”

“But I don't understand. I hear people at school saying bad stuff about colored people—they're lazy, you can't trust 'em—and I want to say, ‘When did you ever hang out with colored people to know anything about them?' I wouldn't say those things about Willie Jane and Dee. Would you?”

“Of course not, honey,” Mama said. “Your father and I—”

“So what would be so bad if some of the kids at school were colored?”

Daddy was thinking. Mama leaned over and put her hand on mine and smiled that smile that says “We both know how right I am.”

“It's not that anything is wrong with colored people, honey,” she said. “It's just that they are different. And we can't have them going to our schools and living in our neighborhoods, can we? When you're older, you'll understand.”

I pulled my hand away. “I don't see why not.” Maybe
I sounded kind of crazy, but it was said, so I looked hard at both of them. “I don't see what everybody's so worried about.” I looked at Daddy. “Are
you
worried?”

He stretched his lips like it was something he didn't know how to talk about. “It's a complicated issue, pal. I see colored patients every day and listen to their problems. I know things need to change.”

Daddy cares about his patients. They come up to me in the grocery store and say I must be Dr. Westbrook's son because I look just like him, and he delivered all their babies, and they love him so much. One lady told me how he saved her life and started crying right there in the cereal aisle.

“So do the colored ladies still have to sit in a different waiting room?” I asked.

“Don't be disrespectful,” Mama said.

“I'm just asking.”

Daddy took a deep breath. “I'm working on the waiting room issue. I have a couple of people on my side up there.”

“But Dee playing ball with us is simple. You used to play ball with colored kids in New Orleans. That's all I was doing.”

“That was a different time and place,” Daddy said. “Look, your mother and I are not like these people who have been calling and complaining, and I would never want you to think we are.”

“They're a bunch of mean, stupid people. Especially that old bag Mrs. Sitwell.”

“Trip Westbrook!” Mama made a shocked face.

“I'm sorry.”

“Some of them
are
stupid,” Daddy said. “Or at least ignorant.”

“And we're not giving in to them, right?” I said.

They looked at each other and didn't say anything. And it hit me: they had come in here to tell me something, and now they didn't agree on what to tell me. It felt strange. I knew they didn't always agree. Mama teased Daddy about being a “soft-hearted liberal.” But when it comes to us kids, they're always together. One voice makes the rules around here, the Mama-Daddy voice.

Mama finally said, “Honey, we simply cannot allow—”

“No, pal,” Daddy interrupted, “we are not giving in to them. Y'all go ahead and play with Dee. We just wanted you to know what was going on.”

He stood up like that was all that needed to be said. Mama looked at him like she was definitely not finished. Then she walked out real fast, and Daddy went after her.

“That is not what we—” Mama whispered.

Daddy whispered something.

Then Mama said, “We have to live here, Sam!”

—

I heard Mama say at a party once that she said she was “bound and determined” to get out of Mississippi and go to college in New Orleans, which was where she fell in love with Daddy. And it was hard to bring home this “exotic” older man as her fiancé. I looked that word up, “exotic.” It means “unusual.”

It didn't matter to her parents that Daddy was almost a doctor; what mattered was that he was from the Marigny district of New Orleans, where a lot of poor people lived. They expected her to marry somebody from a rich family no farther away than the Delta. Daddy was just part of a rebellious phase, they said, which had started when she picked Sophie Newcomb over Ole Miss, where all the Jackson debutantes went.

It took forever to get their approval of her marriage, and she wasn't sure she had it yet. But if they ever cut her off, she said, she had her degree and would enjoy using it. It was hard to hear her say “my parents” and put that together with Meemaw and Papaw. I don't think I wanted to put it together.

Mama and Daddy were having one of their serious talks at the dinner table, and the rule when that happens is that children must temporarily lose their hearing. They started out on Martin Luther King and his marches and speeches. Daddy was all for him,
Mama was undecided. Then Daddy talked about when Governor Barnett tried to keep James Meredith from going to Ole Miss, and the military police came. “People died because a colored man wanted to go to school with white people,” Daddy said, like he dared anybody to believe it.

Mama said she did not agree with Ross Barnett about everything, but some of her lifelong friends had been his strongest supporters, and the new reservoir was named after him, for goodness' sake. Daddy said Barnett was a buffoon. Mama cut her eyes at us to remind Daddy who else was at the table, even if we had temporarily lost our hearing.

But that made Daddy talk even louder about all kinds of stuff, like he would rather get his information from the national news on TV than from that racist rag of a newspaper we have here in Jackson, and he would cancel our subscription if Mama would let him; and if we expect Negro men to go fight in a war with white men, it's “high time they had the same chances in life when they got back”; and he's worn out from trying to get the other doctors at his OB-GYN clinic to open the waiting room to colored patients, instead of making them sit somewhere else, and the other doctors won't do it because they're a pack of self-interested, nearsighted racists.

Mama raised her eyebrows at Daddy and said, “Well,
I
am not a racist.”

Daddy raised his eyebrows and didn't say anything.

“I say ‘colored person' or ‘Negro,' ” Mama said. “Never that other word that starts with
n,
or any other ugly term. Unlike a lot of people around here.”

The other day when we were taking Willie Jane home because her Buick wouldn't start, Mama said she wanted me to go too, because Daddy was still working at the hospital and she wanted a man in the car. I felt good being the man in the car, but kind of bad that Willie Jane has been my other mama my whole life and I didn't have any idea where she lived. I never pictured her in any house but mine.

Farish and Ginny Lynn sat in the back with Willie Jane, and I sat up front with Mama. We drove way out on Woodrow Wilson Boulevard across a couple of bridges before we turned onto her street. She still lives in a shotgun shack, like the one she told me about living in when she was a girl, all crowded up with others just like it. The only fences are chicken wire, and the yards are either all dirt or all weeds. It's like even the trees don't want to be there. I knew colored people don't have as much as we do, but I guess I never knew how much they don't have.

I met Mama's eyes, and I knew we were both thinking how run-down and sad everything looked. Then Ginny Lynn piped up: “Uh-oh, we're in colored-town!”

I slunk down as far as I could go. Mama sat up and
looked like she was ready to yank some hair out of somebody's head.

“Where in the world did Ginny Lynn hear that name?” She was using her trying-to-be-calm voice, but her eyes had gone black.

“She didn't hear it from me!” Farish said.

“Me neither!” I said.

“Well, somebody taught it to her,” Mama said. “Ginny Lynn, honey, we don't say that. Now tell Willie Jane you're sorry.”

“I'm sorry,” Ginny Lynn said.

“That's okay, sweet girl.” Willie Jane laughed and tried to make Mama feel better, because who knows what a four-year-old white girl will say?

All the way back to our house, me and Farish had to convince Mama that we had never used that name in our lives and there were lots of other places Ginny Lynn could have picked it up besides from us. Mama admitted we were right, but her eyes were still black. When she says she's not a racist, she's telling the truth.

—

I didn't get up until after ten. Willie Jane was loading the dishwasher when I went into the kitchen.

“Mornin', Mr. Sleepyhead.”

“Mornin'. Where is everybody?”

“Farish is down the street. Ginny Lynn's watching
cartoons. Ya mama runnin' errands and ya daddy is trying to rest. You missed the pancakes.”

“Huh?”

“Buckwheats.”

“Aw, come on, Willie Jane.”

She knows buckwheats are my favorite.

“What you expect, you come in the kitchen so late? No more batter.”

“You can make some more.”

“Unh-unh, I got to vacuum. Ya mama want me to vacuum this whole house today.
And
finish the ironing
and
—”

“Ple-e-e-ease….”

“Can't do it.”

“Come o-o-o-o-n….”

She closed up the dishwasher and turned it on and turned around.

“I can show
you
how to make 'em,” she said.

“I don't feel like learning how to make 'em. I'm too sleepy.”

“Then I guess you gonna have to ask yourself, ‘Am I more hungry or am I more sleepy?' ”

“I'm sleepy
and
hungry and you're the maid.”

I wasn't trying to be mean, but dadgummit, I wanted some pancakes.

I knew she was mad, because she wouldn't say one more word. I kept sitting there and didn't say anything either. She got another big bowl out of the cabinet and
started mixing up some more batter, and when she had made them, she kept on not saying anything and handed me my buckwheat pancakes.

I buttered them real good and poured molasses all over them and ate on the couch in the den so I could be away from Willie Jane.

Dee was working out front. If he would hurry up and finish the yard, we could do something till the guys got here for the game. Meanwhile, I couldn't find much of anything to do by myself. The last time I told Willie Jane I was bored, she had said, “Bored? On the best day of your life?”

“Why is this the best day of my life?” It was just a Tuesday.

“ 'Cause it's the one you have.”

Now I find something to do.

I decided to finish my new Dracula model on the patio, where the paint fumes weren't so bad. The trick is to get that little speck of white in the eye. That's what makes them look alive. But even after I got my speck of white better than it's ever been, I had this feeling that making monster models wasn't as much fun as it used to be. I've been having that feeling a lot.

Mama took us to the fair last week. Everything smelled and tasted as good as ever. The midway was jam-packed with people, and the rides and games were all lit up as bright as ever. But the Ferris wheel seemed like the same old Ferris wheel, especially
riding it with my sister, and even the Wild Mouse was something I had done enough times. Like I had used it up. The man running the Tilt-A-Whirl had a face like a leather map, and he was real skinny and missing teeth and did not seem to like anybody. I had never really noticed the people who run the rides.

I remember thinking when I was a kid that those paintings advertising Lobster Boy and Alligator Woman were the coolest part of the whole fair, and I couldn't wait to be old enough to go in there and have a look. But this year, Mama told me about those paintings, and she said they were probably just a man and a woman with fake scales and painted skin, or some poor unfortunates with birth defects, and how could anybody gawk at that? She said it was cruel. So now I don't want to go see them. I don't even know if I care about going back to the fair next year, which is something I thought I'd never say. I might just tell Farish to bring me some taffy.

She was out on the patio with me, playing with an old Hula-Hoop I found in the storeroom. Farish took one look and grabbed it and started spinning it around her waist. You won't catch me doing that.

I finished my Dracula and told Farish to put that Hula-Hoop down and throw me some passes. She said no. Because I wanted her to.

“You couldn't throw wet macaroni at a wall anyway,” I told her.