Mississippi Sissy Read Free

Hamilton or Susan Oliver. I had just seen the two starring in
Your Cheatin’ Heart
at a Saturday matinee back at the Town Theater in Forest and fallenmadly—confusingly—in love with both of them. “Yo’ mama and daddy could fight with the best of ‘em. But they were devoted to each other ever since second grade in Harperville, where we all grew up as best we could,” Aunt Gladys said, kicking off her waitressing shoes. I stared at her corn pads. I pouted at the very mention of my dead parents and pretended I could not smell her feet. “Never let nobody tell you different. Not even me,” she said. “Sometimes I wonder though, what would have become of ‘em if they had lived a little longer. Love’s a funny thing.” She yawned, drifting toward sleep. “So funny I forgot to laugh.”
    Dorothy Manners mentioned neither George nor Susan. I stood and watched from the window as my little brother and little sister now raced in circles around the magnolia sapling that Aunt Gladys had planted at the front of her house on the very morning of my father’s accident, her hands still dirty with the freshly dug-up soil when my grandfather telephoned to let her know the awful news. Kim and Karole competed now with Gladys’s gathering snores, lacing the steady stream of her snorts with their bursts of sturdy laughter. Even encumbered with our brief and tragic history, my brother and sister had not forgotten how to summon such a sound. I was jealous of the ease with which the very hum of their happiness always hovered about me. As they hit the ground felled by the hilarity of their nascent dizziness, I too dropped back down on the floor. I opened up a
Photoplay.
I searched again for George Hamilton. Searched for Susan Oliver. Searched for that feeling I had the Saturday before when I slumped in the darkened movie theater and let the tingling I felt for them, a nascent dizziness all my own, alleviate my loneliness.
    My father succumbed to my mother’s challenge of a more grownup, pussy-yearning kind of loneliness and returned home to Mississippi from New York City. He got a job coaching basketball at a high school in a friendly hick-filled hamlet in the middle of the state called Pelahatchie. Almost immediately—legendarily—he took theeight-member team to the state championship. I’ve often wondered if the look of sad disdain he always delivered my way was the professional remorse of which my very presence reminded him. I am certain this was his recurring silent plaint:
If only she had not been pregnant with you.
Yet it was more than that. Much more. My father and I were like two magnets with their identical poles pressing against each other. It is my most vivid memory of him: that magnetic force field that brought us always to the brink of closeness. As we got to know each other in the first seven years of my life, the last seven years of his, I came to realize it was less a look of disdain than one of perplexed fear that flitted across his face whenever I came into view.
What kind of creature is this? This is a part of me? Flesh of my flesh? Why don’t you want to go out and play with the rest of the boys? Shit—go shoot some hoops, son. Get into some trouble. Why do you want to sit inside laughing with the women all the time? Must you laugh with the women?
    My father was a little over six feet tall. His flattop set off the chiseled features of his face. His eyes were the color of Kentucky bourbon and his ears were a tad too big. Swarthy and smooth-skinned, he appeared to have a bit of Native American heritage hidden away somewhere. Soon after he arrived at the small high school, he decided to change the team’s name from the Demons to the Chiefs in accordance with Pelahatchie’s own Native American heritage. “You’ll be the only little demon left around here,” he had told me, shaking his head as he watched me run up and down the