Coal to Diamonds Read Free Page A

was always discovering something more about Aunt Jannie. Just when I thought I had the whole of her figured out I’d learn a swearword or hear a new story. The day I learned about the tittie rock, I’d been balancing on a kitchen chair, hunting for a box of Teddy Grahams on top of the refrigerator.
    What’s this?
I asked, holding out a long, strange rock the size and weight of a roll of quarters, with grooves worn into it for fingers to clutch.
    Oh, you don’t know what that is?
Aunt Jannie grinned, teasing and proud. She waited for my answer.
    A rock?
I guessed stupidly.
    You’re half right
. She smiled. I clambered down from the chairwith the rock in one hand and a box of cookies in the other. Aunt Jannie took the rock and wrapped her hand around it. The rock disappeared in her hand, but Aunt Jannie’s fist looked heavy and strong.
    It’s a tittie rock!
she crowed.
It’s for punching girls in the titties
.
    Like Lara Croft with her giant gun or the goddess Athena with her sword, Aunt Jannie had a signature weapon. A tittie rock. Aunt Jannie fought a lot when she was younger. I couldn’t imagine she was still punching girls in the titties when I discovered her rock, and she was older and sick, but she kept the thing around just in case.
    As she got older things shifted a bit. Even though Aunt Jannie had a special weapon for women, she hated men the most. Aunt Jannie was the first man-hater I’d ever met, outwardly harshing on the whole bunch of them, not shy about it either. Cocksucker and motherfucker. She wasn’t spitting those insults about women. Aunt Jannie could size up a man in seconds, be it an arrogant brainiac on a game show or the family’s no-good man of the moment. I knew that Aunt Jannie’s radar for “cocksuckers” and “motherfuckers” had been honed through her lifetime. No one knew, exactly, what man or men had done what to Aunt Jannie. Women in Judsonia didn’t talk about such things. All that was certain was that something dropped a layer of cement over that heart of hers. Something made her hard and scary. My guess is if you did a lineup to see who was responsible, a whole mess of ghosts would emerge from the past. Even though I was young I already knew how to stay quiet about the things men and boys did to me, I knew how to get up and keep going in spite of it, but what I didn’t know was how to be sharp and mean, protective and fierce, full of fuck-yous and defiance. That was what Aunt Jannie taught me.

3
    With a Southern accent it’s hard to say anything in a single syllable. Speech is sort of lazy and luxurious, like the speaker needs to wring every possible bit of sound from a word and let it linger in the humid air. With a Southern accent a one-syllable word becomes two-syllabled. You can stick an “ay” in there somewhere, stretch that short, stumpy word into something melodic.
Jane
becomes
Jayayne
. Like the mouth can’t let go of the language, and the tongue just wants to hold on to the sound of it for a second longer.
    It’s hard to say one-syllable words with my accent; I have to avoid them entirely if I can. No abbreviations for me. A mic is always a microphone. A bike has to be a bicycle. Sorry if your name is Mike, ’cause I’m gonna have to call you Mikey. Maybe Michael if you make a fuss. Another way to deal with the problem of the single-syllable name is to just throw another name at the end of it. Lee becomes Lee Lee. Jane becomes Jane Ann. June becomes June Bug. And then there is the way the accent renders a name unrecognizable, or turns it into another name entirely. Take mymom’s name, Velmyra. Folks call her Myra, but for years my paternal granny thought her name was Maura. The woman was shocked when she saw my mother’s birth certificate. She’d been calling her daughter-in-law by the wrong name all those years, and no one else had picked up on it.
    Let me tell you about my mother, Velmyra Estel—Velmyra after her granny Velvie May (whose twin brother