Soody

Soody

My momma was white trash, and I was black and white trash, in the eyes of the world around us. Penchant, Alabama wasn’t much of a world, but I didn’t know that then. They might’ve been right about Momma, she didn’t seem fit for much. But I was nothing like her. She stayed late in bed on any day she could, when I was up with the larks. Her voice was high and thin, while mine was deep and strong, especially for a girl. That was from living with brothers, older and louder than me. Momma was messy, too. “God-amighty, Laurel, you can’t clean up for shit!” one of her fellas had said before he hit the road.

Me on the other hand, I wiped up every crumb, stacked the dishes in the sink, stood on a stool to wash them, kept my room just so. Momma said to me one night, “You’re neat as a pin, Soody.” She’d come to tuck me in. I looked up in surprise. It was one of her good nights. She wasn’t swaying a bit. She climbed into my little bed and told me my favorite story, The Three Billy Goats Gruff.Her breath smelled like Colgate instead of Lucky Strikes. When she finished the story, she hugged me tight as she could and fell asleep beside me.If there had been more of those nights, I wouldn’t have tried so hard not to be like Momma.

There was one in my family, though, I longed to be likened to. My big sister, Raney. “Ranella, not Raney,” she corrected me on one of her visits home. She was twenty then, a dozen years older than me. She came home every couple of months and spent the weekend with us. She had a place in Birmingham close to where she worked, at South Central Bell. This was a really big deal. I knew that was so because of the way my momma said South Central Bell whenever she said anything about my sister’s job.

“Ranella,” I repeated, like it was the name of a goddess.

“And you are Sue Ellen Denise, not Soody,” she told me.

“That’s a lot to say.”

She thought on that for a minute. “Let’s go with Sue Ellen, then. It’s pretty, don’t you think?” She smiled, then I smiled, so happy she was there. “I brought you some things,” she said. She always brought me things.

“I have you something, too! Stay right here!” I said. I hurried to my room, opened my treasure box and pulled out the necklace I’d crafted by stringing clovers together.

Raney gasped and exclaimed, “Soody, it’s beautiful!”She’d forgotten to call me Sue Ellen, which suited me just fine. I started to swell with pride, but when she went to slip on the necklace, it wouldn’t go over her head.

“I’ll make it longer,” I said, reaching up to take it. “Just needs a few more flowers.”

She left it on her head. “You can do that,” she said. “I’ll leave it with you when I go. But while I’m here this weekend, it can be my crown, okay?”

“Yes ma’am,” I smiled. The flowers looked so pretty resting there in her honey hair.

“Don’t say ma’am to me. I’m your big sister.” Ranella was the oldest, then two years later Danny, then three years later Boyd, and I came seven years after.

“Half-sister,” I said.

Her brows knit together. She knelt in front of me, so we were eye level. “Do you know what that means?”

I nodded. “You had a different daddy. The one in all the pictures. He died of the newmony.”

“Pneumonia,” she said, smiling just a little at the way I said the word.

“That’s why I don’t look like you. That’s what Momma said.”

“Look closer,” said Raney. Still kneeling down, she brought her face closer to mine and batted her lashes at me.

I didn’t understand. “I don’t have long eyelashes.”

“That’s mascara, silly. Look at my eye color.”

“O-o-o-h,” I said, only then noticing. Same hazel eyes.

“Yep, same as yours. And you do have long lashes, longer and darker than mine. Just wait ‘til you get older and we get you all dolled up. You’ll be a beauty queen.”

I giggled and shook my head, looking down at my skinny feet. The thought of such a thing. She took my chin in her hands. “It’s true,” she said. “But know what’s better than that? How pretty you are on the inside.” I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I knew it was something good.

“Raney,” I said, “what about my daddy? There ain’t no pictures of him.”

“Don’t say ain’t, Sue Ellen. Say, ‘there aren’t any pictures of him.’” I said it the way she told me. She nodded, pondering something. “There is a picture,” she said.“I’ll get it and show it to you, but not right now, okay?”

“Okay, when?” I asked.

“When Momma’s not around.”

“She don’t go nowhere.”

“Anywhere,” said Raney. “She doesn’t go anywhere.” Why was this such a big deal? I said it the way she told me. “Good,” she nodded. “Don’t worry, I’ll figure it out.”

That Sunday before she left, Raney brought me the picture. I was in my room trying on the shoes she’d bought for me at Sears. They were brown with buckles. She told me to save them for nice, not for running around outside. School was about to start. She’d brought me dresses, too, and told me how to wash them, careful in the sink, then hang them up to dry.

She sat on the bed beside me, then held out the picture for me. I reached and took it from her, then sat there looking at it. I’d known my daddy was black. I’d heard my brothers say it. Other people, too. They didn’t always say black, sometimes they said Negra, and sometimes they said worse.One time my brother, Boyd, had used that worse word and he had made the mistake of saying it in front of Raney.He was fuming at me that day. I’d played with his boomerang, knowing it was off limits, and gotten it stuck on the roof. “You little half-nigger!” he shouted. “Keep your hands off’a my stuff!”

Raney’s long legs took her from the porch to where Boyd stood in four long strides. She grabbed a fistful of his sandy hair and slapped the fire out of him.I’d never seen her so mad. “Don’t you ever say that again! Apologize!” she yelled, still holding onto his hair, baring her gritted teeth.

Boyd flailed and batted at her. “What are you so mad about?! She’s the reason you left!”

Raney tightened her grip. “What are you talking about?”

“That’s what Danny said. ‘Miss Homecoming Queen couldn’t let a mulatto sister mess up her reputation.’”

“That’s how much Danny knows. Soody ain’t the reason I left. She’s the reason I come back.” Raney had gotten so worked up she’d forgotten her good grammar. “Now I said apologize. And you better make it good.” She let him go with a shove.

Boyd shuffled and wiped his face. He looked over at me and I stared daggers at him.“Sorry, Soody,” he said.

“Who is sorry?” asked Raney.

“I am sorry,” said Boyd.

“And what are you sorry for?” She was relentless.

Boyd looked from her to me. “I shouldn’t a said what I did. You ain’t half black no way. Your daddy was,” he said. “That makes you just a quarter.”

“That’ll do,” said Raney. “We’ll talk more about this later. Now run get the ladder and we’ll get your toy from the roof.”

“It ain’t a toy,” he said, rubbing the back of his head as he turned to walk away.“Just forget about it.”

But the man in this black and white photo wasn’t what I had expected. I had pictured someone more like Boone at the Bait and Tackle, or Murphy who bagged the groceries down at the Piggly Wiggly. Those were the only black men I’d spent much time around.

“He looks so young,” I said. He was propped against the hood of a car, his arms crossed in front of him, legs crossed, too, looking right at the camera. His smile was pretty and white. And that one dimple... I reached to touch my cheek.

“Yep, that’s where you got it,” Raney said softly.

I felt like I’d seen him before. “Is he dead” I asked her.

“No, not that I know of.”

“Well, where is he then?”

Raney stood up from the bed where she had sat beside me. “Let’s go for a walk, okay?” I unbuckled my new shoes, slipped down off the bed, and we went out to walk. Raney held my hand. She told me it was time I knew about some things…

Momma had met my daddy when she was a young widow.She’d left Raney and Danny and Boyd with Mimi and Papaw on their daddy’s side, and she had gone to Atlanta to stay with her first cousin who was about to be married. The night before the nuptials, she and her cousin, Trudy, and the rest of the wedding party went out to paint the town. That’s when Momma met Bird Wilkins, the man in the photograph.He played the saxophone at Ruby Red’s Warehouse.

“Bird?” I asked Ranella.

“That’s what he went by. It was love at first sight. That’s what Momma said.”

“Then why didn’t they get married? Why don’t he live with us?”

Raney’s brow furrowed and she thought before she said, “I don’t have all the answers, Soody. Most of what I know I learned from Granny Dee.” That was Momma’s momma. “I know that he came here. I even saw him once.”

“You saw my daddy?” I asked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You weren’t born yet, silly.”

“Oh,” I nodded.

We had reached Ferris Pond, about half a mile from the house. “Wanna skip rocks?” asked Raney. That was one of my favorite things.

“Nah, not today.” We turned to start back home. “Wonder why he don’t come back?”

Raney stopped walking. “Let’s sit for a while,” she said, then found us a spot on the grass where we sat and crossed our legs. Raney cleared her throat. “You know about prejudice, Soody? When one kind of folks thinks they’re better than another?”

“I know some,” I said.

“Well, those folks are wrong, and one day they’ll know that, when they stand before their Maker. He made us all different, but He loves us all the same.” I nodded and Raney went on. “Those people, though, they made it hard for Momma when they learned about your daddy, and even harder for him.”

“How?” I asked.

“All kinds of ways,” she said. “Momma’s friends stopped talking to her. People in town were cruel. Her own daddy pushed her away.”

“Pawpaw Jack?” I asked. I had never met him, but my brothers talked about him. He sometimes took them fishing. Raney nodded. I looked at the picture again, then asked her if I could keep it.

“Yes, but put it up. It would upset Momma.”

“Because she loved him?”

“Yes and because of the hurt. Momma used to be different, Soody. Not like she is now.” She stood and gave me her hand, then pulled me up. The last thing she said about it was how glad she was that Momma had met Bird Wilkins, because otherwise she wouldn’t have me for a sister.

“I’m glad, too,” I said.

That Sunday evening, I sat on the front stoop, same as I always did after Raney left, feeling like a butterfly had blown in from a storm, sprinkling fairy dust, lighting up everything in its path, and then blown out again. But I felt something different, too. I knew more about myself. Something about my father. Something about my history.

Momma called me in for dinner. She was up and around that day, like she usually was when Raney came home to visit. But that would be different tomorrow. Momma didn’t have much to get up for. I wanted to change that, but I didn’t know how.

Instead of going inside, I ran when Momma called.Sprung up off the step and bolted into the woods, a sudden burst of fire coursing through my limbs, needing to be released. I ran ‘til I reached my hideout. It had belonged to my brothers. They’d built it from wooden planks and sheets of a tin roof from an old abandoned house out by Miller’s Pond when they were in grade school. I had inherited it.

I sat on my little stool and slipped my daddy’s picture out of my bib pocket, then held it in both hands. Bird, I said. Bird Wilkins. I lightly rubbed a finger over his smiling face. When had I seen him before?I stared with all my might and tried hard to remember. Maybe I’d only dreamed it. I had learned from Momma that I sometimes got confused ‘tween memories and dreams.That’s what she told me whenever I got to talking about some odd recollection, like the time when I was five and woke up from my nap to find Mr. Sellers, from Sellers Five and Dime, standing in the living room tucking his shirttail in.

“But, Momma,” I had argued, “it couldn’t a’been a dream. He gave me a butterscotch. And ever since then, he gives me a butterscotch every time I see him.”Momma had flashed me a look and said no more about it.

She called me again now, louder than before.I hopped up off my stool, tucked the photo into my pocket and hurried toward the house, stopping to pick a few flowers to add to Raney’s necklace. When she visited next, it would fit her perfect. And right then and there I decided I’d make one for Momma, too.