Free Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir by Frances Mayes Page A

Jack’s when he naps. Suddenly I have to go to the bathroom. I cross my legs to hold it. I reach out and put my hand on Auntie’s. She’s hard as a candle. I try to lift up the hand but it’s frozen like the frog I found in a bucket. Auntie sometimes stopped by to see Willie Bell. She’d pour her coffee into the saucer then pour it back into the cup. Then, she was just one of the maids who walked home down Lemon toward colored town every afternoon. Now she looks so important with purple crepe dress and lace collar. She had a soft cackle of a laugh; now her fingernails are the greenish color of old bruises and her hair liesin flat crimps around her face. Still, like a doll of herself. Someone behind me breathes fast and I turn, expecting the owner. It is a man with a hat in his hands. He looks at Auntie, not me. His lips begin working but I hear no sound. His eyes are popped out and cloudy like a dead catfish’s eyes. Swallowing down the sound my throat suddenly wants to make, I run back to the other room, hunch against the coats again.
    Willie Bell comes out walking fast. She reaches over me for her sweater. “You were good—you can be good when you try. Let’s go get you that drink.” I jump out into the hard winter light. Everything looks the same: the mean little stores and men in overalls leaning along the walls, pale sun that looks as if it shines through white tissue paper. I want to ask Willie Bell something. What? And Willie Bell has her shoulders hunched up, her big lips stuck out. I don’t ask anything. I turn two cartwheels on the sidewalk, not caring if my panties show, and wipe the mud on my skirt.
    In Lester’s, Willie Bell unknots her handkerchief and takes out the change Mother gave her for me. I open the drink box and look down at the bottles standing in the dark cold water. I fish out an orange Nehi from all the RC Colas. “Who’s that you got, Willie Bell, one of Cap’n Jack’s granbabies?” Lester had a wad of something in his jaw. “Just the spit of her old man, ain’t she?”
    “She’s like her Mama some, too.”
    “Yessir, I guess nobody will have to show the bobcat’s chil’ how to spring,” he says, laughing.
    “I’ll bring the bottle back tomorrow.” Willie Bell snaps her purse shut, cutting off further talk.

    “You play outside awhile. I got thangs I need to do.” Willie Bell gave me a big spoon and a pail. “Find some worms. We’re going fishing tomorrow.” I did not want to find worms. We’d been given tin compacts at school. We had to put our own “specimen” in it for hookworm tests. When the results came back, Arnold and Lucy were sent to the nurse and we all knew they had worms. Willie Bell said they didn’t need a nurse; worms will be driven out if you eat chinaberries.
    I run to the fence and look for Tat. There she is on the side of her house waving a stick. Willie Bell, changed into a wash dress, bangs the back door. She starts up the fire for boiling dirty clothes in an iron pot. Willie Bell told me that Tat plants sweet potatoes in the dark of the moon. Shame weed spreads out from her one-stump step to the edge of the corrugated clay road.
    Stabbing the forked stick against hard ground, she rises up on her dewclaws and douses for water, but the willow shakes wherever she points.
    Tat’s hair twists into a bulb and a red rag winds around her head. Thin as a hoe, she works herself around the packed dirt yard. Squawking mad or mouthing silent words to a few frizzle chickens. Then she walks backward, sweeping away her own footprints with a broom made of palmetto fronds. Tat’s feet: big as a man’s.
    Tat is dark as longleaf pine bark, dark as slash and burn fields. (My mother, white as Wonder bread. My mother has vanishing creams.)
    Tat never shut up. God must have grown tired of that harangue, though sometimes God shouted back through her own mouth then shook her by the teeth. She raised sand. She humped glory. She buried candles in the four corners