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

of the yard. She grabbled in the dirt with her bare nails, digging fast like a dog. Odd: Her legs were orange as a heron’s.
    Willie Bell went in the kitchen to make pork gravy and corn bread for supper. Shucking corn, snapping beans, clanging the black skillet she called “spider.” Willie Bell paid no mind to Tat, her everyday background music. They lived side by side in small wood houses. Willie Bell, a one-person domestic industry, all action. Willie Bell, biding her time. Tat raving to the stars and trees, crazed, her brain on fire.
    Sometimes she’d look up and in a suddenly sane voice call “Frankie!” as though someone were stepping over the ditch toward her, someone wonderful from a long time ago just alighting from a convertible. No one was there, but the startled wonder and joy in her voice made me look and look again. Who was Frankie? That’s my mother’s name, but Tat didn’t mean her—didn’t even know her.
    To tat was something I was supposed to learn, the tiny edging on tea towels. My mother liked piecework. She trimmed my dolls’ panties and gowns. That takes patience. My hands wouldn’t. I snapped the balled-up thread. She monogrammed hand towels. Fussbox Tat didn’t decorate anything. I could see inside her bare shack: silvered boards, wallpaper made from Sunday comics, calendar Jesus looking straight through the room and out at corn stubble fields and a big sky.

    Tat’s shifts were sudden, like streak lightning, or St. Elmo’s fire in the swamp. She cut loose. I was attracted. She shouted all the bad words, a thrill. I wished my aunt Hazel could hear; she’d turn to butter. My grandmother who only seemed to say the same nice sentences over and over—she would croak if she knew what I heard. Turkeyfucker. Shitass. Fuckface. I did not even let my lips form the words—felt that if they passed into sound I would be ruined. But her other language she really let rip. (Was it a long holdover from Fante or Bantu, taught by a slave grandmother?) Was it God’s own? Sometimes in a dream I expect to hear that language again: Tat’s whooping o’s and l’s, rising and falling to a growling whisper. Tat’s voice rolled and sped, seemed to catch me later in the dark when I couldn’t sleep. She gave herself to the small scorpion roaming her brain. At night in bed, her face zoomed close to mine then pulled back fast, crying. I never imagined terrible haints and night monsters since I knew one so plainly by daylight.
    Finally evening cooled. She sat on the stump, dipped a little snuff, pulled the rag off her head, and cursed to the ground. “Sons of bitches, bastards, motherfuckers, all of them motherfuckers. Jesus knows you. He DIED for you. YOOUUUU.”
    Where was my mother? Not that I wanted to go home, but I didn’t want to stay at Willie Bell’s either. When my mother was mad she could start to rant. Not like Tat but closer to Tat than to her usual self. Tat was what happened if you let yourself look in a certain direction. Had my mother looked? At Bible schoolthey said the smallest seed, placed under a dead man’s tongue, could grow into the tree that made the cross. Here’s Tat in a dirt yard baying like a bird dog. What words should be spoken? What should never be said?
    Was Tat always that way? Willie Bell said so. “Long gone,” she said, rotating her finger beside her temple. “Lun-a-tic.” Tat spit and foamed, never noticed me hanging on the wire fence getting rust on my smocked blouse. She drew X’s in the dirt. All she had was an old hinny tied to a bush. He looked as if I could push him over. Mule or donkey I didn’t know, but I licked my thumb, pressed it to my palm, then stamped my palm with my fist for good luck. When it whickered and whinnied, she stared at the sky. Anger bolted her to the ground. “The wicked gonna perish from the earth. The wicked KNOW who they are.” Her words almost sparked. Then she’d get the gift of tongues and shout in her own secret language.