The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat Read Free Page A

my sycamore tree entrance seem less astonishing. I only mention the tree because I have been told all of my life that it explains how I ended up the way I am—brave and strong according to those who like me, mannish and pigheaded to those who don’t. Also, it probably explains why, after the initial jolt passed, I wasn’t much troubled when my dead mother showed up for a chat.
    I started out life in that sycamore because my mother went to see a witch. Mama was smart and tough. She worked hard every day of her life right up until she dropped dead from a stroke while she was winding up to throw a rock at a squirrel that was digging up bulbs in her showplace of a garden. All of Mama’s toughness had evaporated, though, when she found herself halfway through the tenth month of her pregnancy, wondering if it would ever end. Seven years earlier, Rudy had been born right on schedule. But three lost babies followed my brother, none of them managing to remain inside my mother’s womb for longer than a few months. Now I had come along and refused to leave.
    Before she went to see the witch, Mama tried all kinds of things her country relatives told her to do to get the baby to come. My grandmother advised her to eat hot peppers with every meal, claiming that the heat would drive the baby out. Mama did it for three days and ended up with indigestion so severe that she was fooled twice into thinking she was in labor. Two times, she and Daddy went to thecolored hospital in Evansville, and both times she came home with no baby.
    My mother’s sister whispered to her that the only way to get the baby out was to have sex. Aunt Marjorie said, “That’s how it got there, Dora. And that’s the only sure way to get it out.”
    Mama liked the sex idea, if only just to pass the time while waiting, but Daddy was less than enthusiastic. She was twice his weight even before her pregnancy, and when she straddled him in his sleep one night demanding satisfaction, the terrified look in his eyes as she hovered over him made her back down from the sex solution and look to sorcery instead.
    Like I said, that was 1950, and back then a fair number of people in Plainview, black and white, consulted a witch from time to time. Some still do, but nowadays it’s only the poorest and most superstitious of folks, mostly the ones who live in the little Appalachian clusters outside of town, who will admit to it.
    Mama went to the witch expecting a potion or a poultice—poultices were big among witches—but what she got instead were instructions. The witch told her that if she climbed up into the branches of a sycamore tree at straight-up noon and sang her favorite hymn, the baby would come.
    Witches were like that. They almost always mixed in a touch of something approved by the Baptist church—a prayer, a spiritual, or a chant warning about the godlessness of Lutherans—so people could go to a witch and not have to worry that they’d pay for it down the line with their immortal souls. It absolved the clients’ guilt and kept the preachers off the witches’ backs.
    So, on a windy afternoon, my mother hauled a rickety old ladder out to a sycamore tree by the woods behind the house. Mama propped her ladder against the tree and climbed up. Then she nestled herself in the crook of two branches as comfortably as was possible considering her condition and began to sing.
    Mama used to joke that if she had chosen something more sedate, something along the lines of “Mary, Don’t You Weep” or “Calvary,” she might not have given birth to such a peculiar daughter. But shedug her teeth into “Jesus Is a Rock” and swayed and kicked her feet with that good gospel spirit until she knocked over the ladder and couldn’t get back down. I was born at one o’clock and spent the rest of the afternoon in the sycamore tree until my father rescued us when he got home from his shop at six. They named me Odette Breeze Jackson, in honor of my being born in the open