Mississippi Sissy Read Online Free Page A

would diligently explain. (Venomous Mae was the name I ended up giving her when I was about eleven—a little fuzz on my upper lip—with a wit that had just as shockingly reached its pubescence.) My grandmother was the youngest of nine children—seven girls and two boys—and Vena Mae was the older sister nearest to her in age. They had grown up in the earliest part of the twentieth century (my grandmother was born in 1904) without indoor plumbing. “When nature called we always had to head to the outhouse in pairs so that one sister could shoo away the chickens and roosters in case a bantam got inside the outhouse and pecked at our boodies or other little private areas,” my grandmother had once told me. “Vena Mae and me always made them bathroom runs together. You ain’t never seen nobody that could shoo a chicken like Vena Mae. I don’t know, there’s just a
bond
more’n blood when you grow up with somebody that saves your little private parts from being pecked to death on a December morning.”
    I sure felt like one of those turn-of-the-century chickens as I stood there waiting for Aunt Vena Mae to shoo me away with one of her meanspirited remarks. I readied myself. My hands flew to my hips. “You would’ve thought that both Howard Jean and Nancy Carolyn dying would have straightened you out some,” she finally said, calling my parents rather creepily by their given names while reaching up with her Carnationed hand to make sure her freshly rinsed, tightlyteased curls were staying in place. “You want some of this?” she asked, waving the Carnation evaporated milk at me. “Here you go. Tastes like candy,” she said, handing me the little tin container of the syrupy white stuff. She grabbed my face too tightly in her freed grip, bracelets jingling under my chin. She moved in closer. “You’re pretty as a girl,” she said, taunting me with the compliment, then letting go of my face as quickly as she had grabbed it. “Joycie Otis!” she called to my grandmother, keeping up her litany of given names. “Anything I can do to help? Want me to cut up some more cake? I’d have brought my nigger gal down with me from Neshoba County if I’d have known it was going to be this busy.”
    I frowned at the latest use of the N-word in front of me, although as far as I could tell it was uttered as often around these parts as the phrases “Jesus is your Lord and Savior” and “Would you please pass that plate of biscuits. They buttered?” But I knew better, knew it ever since I’d used the word in Matty May’s presence months earlier on the morning after Sidney Poitier won Best Actor for
Lilies of the Field.
Matty May, our maid, was an old friend of my grandmother’s. How I wished my grandmother would have let her help out today like she had asked to do when Matty showed up to hug her neck and weep like a wet baby at the news of my mother’s death. “Naw, sugar, we’ll just cry too much if you’re around,” my grandmother told her. “Come on over the next day and help me clean up all the mess. You can take home some leftovers.”
But if Matty May were here,
I kept thinking,
I’d have somebody to talk to.
Her name became my mantra—
Matty May Matty May Matty May
—as I tried to remain cool and collected because, truth be told, all I wanted to do was turn over all the tables of food. Pick a fight. Do something more than pout.
Matty May Matty May Matty May.
I gripped the rabbit’s foot and felt its yellowed intact claws dig into my palm as I surveyed the clacking throng that had gathered in my grandparents’ tan-bricked, flat-roofed, surprisingly modernist house way out here in the piney woods on a Mississippidirt road. Its bright red front door perfectly matched the red berries that clung to the bushes in the flower beds that surrounded it. I took a swig of