Free My Extraordinary Ordinary Life by Sissy Spacek, Maryanne Vollers Page A

thought to find out what time the movie started and would stumble down the aisle trying to find two empty seats in the dark. We would watch the end of the movie, then stay for the beginning of the next showing, leaving when we’d gotten to the part where we’d first come in. The challenge was to figure out what the movie was about. It was like solving a puzzle. Years later, when I got to New York, I learned how real film lovers watched movies, from beginning to end, and I thought, Gee, this is easy!

     
    The Select is where I saw some of the most influential films of my life: The Night of the Hunter , a noir classic with Robert Mitchum. The Miracle Worker , with Anne Bancroft—with whom I was thrilled to work once I became an actor myself. My favorite of all time, though, was To Kill a Mockingbird.
    There are so many reasons why I love that film, and the book on which it’s based, but what really pulled me in, I think, was the depiction of small town life in the South, a time and place where “somehow it was hotter then.... And people moved slowly.... A day was twenty-four hours long, but seemed longer.” The fictional town of Maycomb reminds me so much of the Quitman I knew in the 1950s and ’60s. And the way the story is observed through the eyes of a young girl resonates to my bones. I was a tomboy, like Scout, who climbed trees and spoke her mind and hated wearing dresses; who kept a box filled with private treasures stashed under her bed. Like her, I had a wise and capable father who loved me unconditionally and never tried to break my wild spirit. My dad was my Atticus Finch. But I was much luckier than Scout, because I had a mother.
    There were other similarities. While Quitman had never gone through a racially charged trial like the legal lynching of Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman—a scenario that drives the narrative of To Kill a Mockingbird —my hometown was just as much a part of the Jim Crow South as the fictional Maycomb. I’d heard whispers of a lynching by an angry mob on the courthouse square sometime back in the nineteenth century and rumors of a dark side to my otherwise sweet little town.
    The first time I noticed the segregation of races was at the Gem Theater, where African-Americans had to line up outside a separate side entrance and then sit in the balcony. I didn’t understand it. Pretty soon it dawned on me that whites and blacks had separate just about everything. The Wood County courthouse had separate bathrooms: I’ll never forget the signs, one for WHITE LADIES and the other for COLORED WOMEN . Even as a child, I knew that had to hurt someone’s feelings. During my days of snooping around the courthouse, I couldn’t resist walking into the colored restroom to see what it looked like. An African-American woman whirled around from the sink when she saw me. “You’d better get yourself on out of here, young lady,” she scolded. “You don’t belong in here.” Wide-eyed, I backed out the door. The courthouse also had separate drinking fountains labeled WHITE and COLORED . (My husband, Jack, grew up in Illinois, and the first time he saw a “colored” drinking fountain he thought that rainbow-colored water was supposed to come out of it.) The Jim Crow rules were perplexing, but segregation was all we ever knew. To white children, it was an abstract concept. So many white folks say, “There was never any trouble in our town,” but that’s only because it wasn’t trouble at all for them. So I don’t really know what race relations were like in Quitman, because it really didn’t touch my world. Except for one time.

     
    Like just about everywhere throughout the South, whites and blacks in Quitman had their own schools and lived in separate neighborhoods. Sometimes we’d be driving through the “colored” part of town, and my brothers and I would stare out of the car windows at families sitting on their front porches enjoying the evening;