Marsha Hunt - Like Venus Fading

‘We can’t set ’round here waitin’ to die!’ Mother snarled, rushing to lower the open window so our voices wouldn’t peal into the streets. ‘Do y’all know how tired I am. Holes in my shoes, my pockets. Next there’ll be a hole in my head!’ She was twenty-five and had lost so much weight from our hominy grits diet that her dress hung inches too long and was practically touching the floor.

My sister screamed again, ‘But you promised we’d never go back. And I won’t! Not ever!’

I had been too young to understand anything during that first trip to Mississippi in 1925, but it was easy enough over the years to piece together the tragedy. I heard Mother’s version, Lil’s and, of course, Mamie McMichael’s, who eventually accompanied my sister and I when we sang as a duet. But not one of them could be counted on to tell the truth …

The story began with Mother meeting Mamie in Camden when Mother was pregnant with Lilian and Daddy’d started his long disappearing acts. Visiting a little storefront church for solace, Mother had met Mamie, who was fifteen years her senior and was the guest pianist, on a visiting exchange from Mississippi.

When Daddy discovered that Mamie had coaxed Mother to recite Bible tracts, he accused them both of being bull dykes and forbade Mother to attend any church that wasn’t Catholic.

Mother obeyed but happened to bump into Mamie five years later in ’25 when Daddy was gone again. Mamie’d warned, ‘Bad men get worse. Leave him and take them kids back to Mississippi.’

Mamie had such a soft spot for Mother she assured her that she could earn pocket money there, giving Bible recitations in small churches where Mamie and her brother Buster played. She even paid for Mother’s train journey and ours.

In the many versions of this story I’ve heard, I’ve never found out where Mamie was that day Buster collected us from the station. He arrived with the mule and cart they normally used to transport their piano and Lil, like any five-year-old, was over herself with excitement.

Buster was a handsome, young World-War-I veteran. Dark skinned like Mamie, but way better looking. He bragged about his army experience, but resented that the local reserve board had refused him a disability pension for the headaches he’d suffered from being gassed in France while digging latrines.

The ten acres he shared with Mamie were on the north side of a big cotton plantation, worked by tenants so poor they considered Buster and Mamie to be rich. But the farm was paltry – chickens, turkeys, guinea fowl and a few hogs and goats in pens. Yet Buster expected to impress Mother with the two-room house and outdoor toilet which he’d built to resemble a proper A-frame house.

With Lilian perched on his shoulder when he showed it to Mother who had me in her arms, he teased, ‘Y’all’s behind-the-chairs won’t set on no finer commode than that from here to Little Rock.’

It was a little shotgun house with the kitchen cluttered with pots, pans, sheet music and war mementoes, including a gas mask. Mother recalled how ashamed she was that we ate like we were starving, gobbling his peach preserves and government-surplus peanut butter after eating half of the fat back and greens which had been simmering on the stove. So when Buster promised Lil pancakes and sorghum syrup for breakfast, Mother said, ‘You better stop or I won’t never get her back up Jersey way.’

Next thing, Buster sat himself at the piano and created a song, a ragtime thing with some made-up lyrics about not letting Lil go back to Jersey.

Mother said everything in the kitchen was swinging and she got Lilian to dance, because Lil could always cut a shimmy.

We must have all been having a ball in that Delta heat until I strained to fill my diaper and Mother rushed me to the outhouse. While she held me over the toilet, a car rolled into the yard and backfired. Mother thought nothing about it, beyond wondering who Buster and Mamie knew who could afford an automobile. But it soon drove off again and next she heard Lilian calling. When Mother made her way to the front yard with me trailing behind, she found Lil standing over Buster who was sprawled motionless on the ground. His face and hair were covered in dust and blood and Lil was shooing the flies off him. Mother used to say, ‘What was I meant to do? I was young and stupid and there he was on the ground with his eyes swole like two baseballs and blood streaming from his nose and mouth. I thought he was dead.’

Of course she started bellowing, because she never could cope with the sight of blood, and when she bellowed, Lilian joined her and then I started.

She didn’t know if she’d walked into some kind of feud, but the whole scene petrified her, and there were no neighbours for miles. So grabbing us kids she ran in the house, shouting at my sister, ‘Did you see what happened? Who done it!’ But Lilian was crying hysterically by then and couldn’t get a word out.

No phones. No neighbours. No real knowledge of Mamie or her brother. She was in a completely strange place with two little children, and a man she’d just met was in a heap on the ground. Mother was frantic that the culprits would return while Buster was laying out in his front yard with his chin split open and flies settling on his bloodied face.

She didn’t even know where the water pump was to get water to clean his wounds, so she tied me to a chair with an apron she’d spotted and grabbed the pot of greens. Lilian followed her back outside where one of the roosters was pecking at Buster’s trouser leg. Using the pot liquor and one of my diapers to wipe some of the blood from his face, all Mother could do was cry and say, ‘You’ll be all right. Just tell me what happened.’ He never spoke.

Lil was just learning to count that summer and wasn’t able to say whether Buster had been attacked by three or four, men or boys. All she knew is that while Mother had me in the outhouse, some white men had driven up and called Buster to the porch. He had told her to stay in the house so she’d watched from the door.

What had she seen? Did Buster resist being beaten and kicked to the ground? Who did what? Were words exchanged? At five years old Lil had no clear answers. ‘One hit him with the stick and the others were kicking him,’ she’d cried. The tyre mark across his shirt suggested that the car may have driven over him.

Mother couldn’t move him so she placed an apron she found in the house over his face to keep the flies off it and made a promise to Lil: ‘Let the Good Lord get us back to Jersey and we’ll never come to Mississippi again.’

When Mamie arrived in the late afternoon to find her brother unconscious in the yard, she hardly seemed surprised. ‘He pestered them bosses over at the reserve board for his disability pension and when they turned him down, he started putting it around that he was gonna write to Washington.’ Mamie was a big woman, tall, broad and heavy hipped. Not the sort to back off a fight, but she sat on the porch and removed her hat and earrings and slung them on the ground.

Mother said Mamie had then pumped Lilian with questions that no child of five could have managed, like what kind of car had come and what ages were the men.

In later years, whenever my sister wanted sympathy, she used to tell the Buster McMichael story. But she was thin on facts.

When he died that evening, without regaining consciousness, Mamie’d said, ‘I hope his uniform still fits, cause he’d want to be buried in it.’

Five years later in our room above Mack’s, Mother said, ‘You’re going to Sippy, Lil, like it or not.’

So that’s where we headed with the proceeds from the sale of Miss Hortense’s furniture. May 1, 1930. And my sister thought our lives were ending. In some ways they were.