Free The Spyglass Tree by Albert Murray Page B

had to start warning me about getting girls in the family way. As for the contradiction between this version of the miracle of birth and the other, I am pretty sure that she just took it for granted that by that time I had found out enough about men and women to understand exactly what she was concerned about and the main point of it was to keep me from having to drop out of school to get married. In any case, she never revised her original version of the arrival of babies, just as she never revised her original version of Santa Claus.
    All I had ever heard about me and Miss Tee was that she was my auntie, and at first that was what I used to call her. Actually, what I used to say was Ann Tee. Then I changed it to Miss Tee. But what she called me was not her nephew but her Mister as in Mister Man, and I always knew that she was a very special kind of auntie, because everybody knew that she was not Mama’s flesh and blood sister, like Aunt Sue from Atmore and Aunt Sis from Greenville. In fact, she almost always acted as if Mama and Papa were really
her
aunt and uncle.
    For the most part, people in Gasoline Point in those days didn’t spend very much time puzzling over such relationships unless there was some special reason to do so. After all, just about everybody in town had aunts and uncles, not to mention cousins close and distant who included perhaps as many if not more self-elected kinfolks as blood relatives. But there were also always at least a few aunts- and uncles-at-large around. Like Aunt Classie Belsaw, for instance, and Uncle Jim Bob Ewing, to name only two, who for their part called everybody not Nephew or Niece but either Son or Daughter or Brother or Sister, meaning little brother and little sister.
    I don’t remember ever hearing anybody wondering aboutwhat all of that was about and certainly not about how it all came about. It was just the way things were and one day you realized that you already knew about it. In due time, you also came to realize that there were also aunts- and uncles-at-large who were called Mama and Papa and Daddy or even Papadaddy, as in Big Mama and Big Daddy and once again it was as if nobody had ever had to stop and define them because somehow you had already found out that old folks were who they were by virtue of being survivors-in-residence, who were there to tell the tale, who could give eyewitness testimony about bygone but ever-to-be-remembered times in which definitive events came to pass.
    Nor did anyone have to question the fact that such mamas (and hot mamas) as Ma Rainey the blues singer and vaudeville prima donna and such papas and daddies as even Papa Gumbo Willie McWorthy were neither older nor wiser than such venerable aunts- and uncles-at-large as Aunt Classie Belsaw and Uncle Jim Bob Ewing who after all were the very embodiment of endurance and wisdom. Hot mamas and papadaddies were who they were because they were not only experts in their line of work but also pros and past masters who were qualified by the unique richness of personal experience to exemplify for peers and juniors alike how things should be done. Thus, when a young man called himself Papa or Daddy, he was bragging that he was so much better than his competitors that he could turn any contest into a demonstration lesson in fundamentals.
    What made such youthful presumption acceptable to people in Gasoline Point in those days was the fact that it showed that you were not afraid to put yourself on the spot. If it turned out that you were only running off at the mouth and couldn’t perform on the level you had set up for yourself, you only brought public disgrace on yourself. Once you proved yourself, you could admit that you were the champion who must defend his title. That was okay. Butany further expression of gratuitous self-esteem was soundly condemned as the height of unforgivable arrogance.
    Miss Tee was the expert auntie who told me about fairy-tale beanstalks, and she also used to used to say