Diary of a Misfit, page 12
“Do you remember when grandma first told me about Roy?”
“I remember you were fascinated by it,” my mom said. “After that, it was every phone call from you. ‘Tell me a little bit more about Roy.’ I didn’t want Grandma to tell you, because I was afraid we’d be doing what we are now.”
She motioned toward the video cameras, then she swung her arm around as if to implicate the entire town. “I was afraid because your hair was really short. There was no makeup.”
A motorcycle zipped through the parking lot, then three or four pickup trucks rambled by. Every engine was loud, and eventually Aubree suggested we cut and find somewhere quieter to film. I exhaled in relief. I wanted to learn about Roy, but I did not want to talk about my short hair or lack of makeup. That wasn’t the point of the story, I thought. We got back into the car, and I drove around, looking for a spot to film. I turned right on Highway 17, and my mom pointed to a boarded-up storefront. “Grandpa’s shop was right here.”
She sighed and leaned her head against the window. I’d forgotten that her father ran a store in Delhi after they moved back from Germany. She was quiet for a moment or two, then she began to talk in a voice more wistful than the one she usually used when telling stories.
“In this town, things were a certain way. If you weren’t, like, born-and-bred Delhi, with deep roots in the community, they could close ranks on you very quickly. Unfortunately, when we came back here from Germany, we all dressed differently. We didn’t have a lot of money, and he couldn’t find a job, so he opened a little antique store right there on the corner.”
Initially, my mom said, her father only sold on weekdays. Then, one day in 1977, a man came from out of town and asked my grandpa to host an antique auction that Sunday. My mom’s dad wasn’t religious, but he did understand that most people in town were, so he told the man they’d have to wait until church let out if they wanted any customers.
When Sunday arrived, my grandpa stood in the street, waiting until people in sundresses and three-piece suits spilled out of the sanctuaries. At 12:05, he started the auction.
“The next Sunday,” my mom said, “the pastor of First Baptist got in the pulpit and said my dad was an infidel.”
She closed her eyes. She didn’t say, but I assumed the pastor had been angry that my grandfather had worked on the sabbath. We had never been particularly strict about that rule when I was growing up, but I knew some denominations were. I stopped at a red light, and my mom started talking again. After the auction, she said, customers stopped visiting, and my grandpa had to close the shop. He left Delhi to try to sell life insurance on the road, and girls who’d invited my mom to their birthday parties told her they needed the invitations back.
“They weren’t allowed to have anything to do with me because of my family.”
My mom went quiet, and I drove around in circles. I knew the kind of horrible power some pastors can wield. When I was young, I thought preachers were as good as angels, holy emissaries sent to do God’s work, but I’d changed my mind since then. I’d experienced too many bad pastors, too many holy men willing to destroy a person’s time on earth under the guise of delivering them to Heaven.
Eventually, I pulled over to search my notes for ideas about who else we could interview. I flipped through the legal-sized yellow notebook where I’d kept all my reporting from previous trips. I read off names people had suggested, and my mom shook her head no after every one.
“Ki Allen?”
“Not with me in the car,” my mom said.
“Why not? Do you have a problem with her?”
“I’d rather not talk about it,” she said.
I rolled my eyes, then kept flipping through my notebook. I stopped on a page that mentioned the old woman who’d given me Roy’s song lyrics the first time my mom and I visited Delhi.
“What if we go see Mary Rundell again?” I asked.
My mom didn’t protest, so I dialed the number I’d written down in my notebook. An old lady with a high-pitched voice and an almost incomprehensible accent answered.
“Miss Mary?” I asked. “My name is Casey. I met you probably a year and a half ago. I’ve been working on a memorial for Roy Hudgins. You had some old poems, or songs, that Roy had written. Would you be okay if—”
Mary must have cut me off, because in video footage of that day, I go quiet and listen to the phone for a while. My mom leans in and whispers to me, “Tell Miss Mary I worked with her at Jitney Jungle.” In the video, I hold my right hand up to shush my mom. She keeps talking anyway about people she knows who might know Mary. After three or four minutes, Miss Mary must have told me to come on, because I got off the phone smiling, then told my mom and the crew that we were heading to an interview.
“What’s the address?” my mom asked.
I looked down at my notes. “I forgot to ask.”
I was too embarrassed to call back, so I told my mom I was sure we could find Mary’s house without an address. I remembered that it was somewhere west of the high school, and I figured if I drove in that general direction, I’d recognize it as we passed. My mom shook her head as if that was the dumbest idea she’d ever heard. I started the engine anyway. I drove for a while, but none of the houses looked familiar. My mom eventually grew annoyed, took my phone, and pressed redial. Mary’s sister answered.
“This is Rhonda Parks,” my mom said in her sweetest, most syrupy tone. “She’s expecting us to come over. My daughter just talked with her, and we’re on Edgar Street, but I can’t for the life of me remember what house number she lives at.”
My mom listened for a few seconds longer, then she held her phone out, puzzled.
“She hung up on me,” she said.
I pulled the car forward a few blocks, rolled down my window, and asked a group of kids playing basketball if they knew where Mary lived. They stared at me, slack-jawed and silent, as if I were an alien there to steal their brains. I rolled the window up, and my mom said she was done.
“I’m not going to somebody’s house after they just hung up on me,” she said.
I was nervous, too, but I didn’t want my mom to know that, so I told her that was stupid, then I got out of the car and knocked on a random door. No one answered, but eventually I spotted Mary down the road, standing in a dry ditch, waving and waiting for us to arrive. I got back in the car, shot my mom a look, then eased down the block. Mary was standing in front of a white house with faded plastic flamingos in the yard. She looked hunched in half by age and a lifetime of service jobs, and her hair was so white it was pink. She directed us toward a fenced-in area, a kind of makeshift porch created out of the driveway. She’d arranged six green plastic chairs into a circle around a wooden spool she was using as an outdoor coffee table. We sat, and Mary’s face lit up as she recognized my mom.
“We go back a ways,” Mary said in surprised delight.
“We do,” my mom said. “We used to work at Jitney Jungle in the deli.”
Mary said she was “proud” we’d come to visit her. She recounted every dish she and my mom had made in the deli—doughnuts and roast chickens, spaghetti and fried potatoes. Mary said she’d been out of a job for a few years, and she’d give anything to be back working again. I could tell by the way she talked that she didn’t remember that we’d come to see her before. She tried to calculate the last time she’d seen my mother, and she figured it had been at least thirty years. My mom shook her head in affirmation. “I left Delhi in 1982. Cam Milton and I were really good friends, and after he committed suicide, I couldn’t stand it.”
Mary nodded, as if she understood. She said her husband had passed away years ago. “I just get dull thinking,” she said. “I get in the house, and I just sit there. I used to keep the road hot. I like to have my feet in the road, but I don’t have nobody to put the feet in the road with me now.”
She looked at me, and I didn’t have any loss to talk about, so I asked about Roy.
“Oh, Roy was real nice,” Mary said. “She was real nice. Her mama said the only reason she put her in pants was she couldn’t afford dresses. I went with her to the Church of Christ once. What amazed me is, there they have no instruments. Roy loved music, but there, they don’t allow it.”
She clasped her hands together, then raised both eyebrows in a way that suggested Roy’s churchgoing seemed suspicious. I nodded. It did seem odd that Roy would spend Sundays in a sanctuary without music. Mary’s twin sister and a daughter came out onto the porch, and they listened as we talked. Eventually, Mary’s daughter interrupted and asked if we’d talked to Mark King. I told her I’d tried, but he’d turned me down.
“Mark took care of Roy the last few years she was living,” Mary’s daughter said. “He has all that music she wrote and everything.”
Mary nodded, as if to confirm that what her daughter said was true.
“The Lord let me write two songs once,” Mary said. “I try to play the piano, but people have to suffer when I play because I don’t know music. It might hurt your feelings to hear it.”
Aubree and I told Mary we didn’t believe her. We begged her to sing for us. After a few minutes, Mary cracked her fingers, then stood.
“If you can take it,” she said, “I might try to play a little for you.”
Mary opened the screen door, and we followed her into the living room. Every light in the house was turned off, and thick patterned curtains shaded the windows. It was so dark inside, I couldn’t make out anything but the white piano keys. Mary sat down and tried the first verse of “How Great Thou Art,” then she transitioned into one of the songs she’d written herself. It was a song about Jesus. The first verse started slow, then picked up momentum, and as Mary leaned into the chorus, my mother gasped. Mary played with all of her fingers moving. Her thumbs pounded hard notes, and the other fingers skipped and slipped across the keys. The chords seemed to shimmer. I’ve never studied music, so I don’t know if Mary was right, if the way she played was wrong, but the song sounded both rich and airy, like a whole choir singing in an open country church. A light breeze swished through the screen door, and my mom reached for my hand. I felt like I was young again. It was dark enough that I didn’t need to close my eyes, but I did, and I pictured myself back in Georgia at Live Oak, sitting next to my mom on a velvet pew, full of love and the Holy Spirit. I squeezed my mom’s hand.
Mary sang in a low alto that stretched for high notes in the chorus. Her voice cut through the twinkling melody, and I couldn’t remember a time when I’d ever been happier. Later that night, over Gchat, I told the girl in San Francisco that I’d felt like I was in the exact right place at the exact right time, like God or someone had just handed me all of my best memories to relive through one song. It had been years since I’d been to church, and I’d convinced myself that the music no longer belonged to me, but listening to Mary, I started to believe that it could again.
Mary finished with a high-C flourish, and we all clapped as she stood and asked for a hug. She held her hands out and looked at them in wonder. “I’m shaking.”
She turned on a light and told us she’d look for more of Roy’s songs that weekend. As we edged toward the door, Mary blew us two kisses and told us, again, that she hated spending all her life alone in the house. “I wish I could be in the road. Out of here.”
I stepped outside, and the sun hurt my eyes, so I tried to blink them into working as we climbed into the car. My mom pulled out her phone, then she did a little celebratory whoop. A woman named Lynda Best had responded to the Facebook post my mom had written that morning.
Roy attended some Bible studies with me for a few weeks. She said she was a man born with a woman’s body, that she had not worn a dress since she was a little girl and really didn’t remember wearing one at all. The only reason she confided these things to me was because I was a member of the United Pentecostal Church in Delhi, and our doctrine forbade women to wear pants. She knew the pastor in Delhi would never accept her as a true member as long as she refused to wear a dress. She said she just could not put one on; it was too hard mentally. However, she did testify that she had received the baptism of the Holy Ghost with the outward evidence of speaking in other tongues as the Spirit gave the utterance; and she did permit our pastor to baptize her in Jesus’ Name as the apostles did in the New Testament. She was definitely a Christian woman.
“Shall we go?” I asked.
My mom shook her head no, then pointed out the window. My dad had arrived, and he was waiting in the Buick.
“My knight in shining armor is here to take me away,” my mom said.
“What?” I asked. “You’re supposed to do the interview with us.”
“I did an interview with you. Now I want to go home.”
The rental car idled, and my dad’s car idled, and neither my mom nor I said a thing. Why did I keep getting my hopes up? Why had I let myself believe that this trip would be different? I watched the kids down the road play basketball, and I willed myself into needing less.
“Okay,” I said. “I guess I’ll see you at Grandma’s.”
My mom stepped out of the car and into my dad’s SUV. I waited until they drove off, then I checked her Facebook page again. She’d already updated it with a new status.
What an emotional day it was for me to be in a town where life was so hard, and yet it was such a good day…i was able to show off my daughter and show them that I didn’t turn out so bad after all.
Lynda lived north of the manmade lake, way out in the country on a narrow highway marked by signs that advertised an exotic zoo. Yellow-green grass rose high out of the marshy land around her house, and the blades must have concealed a bunch of bugs, because the birds were diving and chirping loud. I pulled up the gravel driveway and parked under an oak tree late afternoon. Lynda’s house was long and white with wood columns, but it was not fancy. It was a single-story with three brick steps leading up to it. The screen door looked old, and the rocking chairs out front were chipped. I knocked, and Lynda answered immediately.
“Well, y’all come in,” she said.
Lynda had a voice like Blanche Devereaux’s on The Golden Girls. She spoke low and slow, with a dragging hint of drama, and I could tell after a few sentences that she liked to talk. She led us through a dark living room decorated with a few dozen replicas of porcelain cowboy boots, then she settled into a plush brown recliner.
I asked how she knew Roy, and Lynda said they’d met through the Pentecostal church. It took a while for the Pentecost to make its way from Topeka to Delhi, Lynda told us. After William Joseph Seymour opened the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles, Pentecostal churches sprouted across the United States. A few opened in Louisiana in the 1920s, and Lynda visited one in a country town near Monroe in the 1950s, but Delhi didn’t get its own Pentecostal church until August 1967, when two men from nearby Epps opened one next to a butane plant off Highway 80. The first congregants drove in from all the surrounding towns to worship with Lavelle Hales, a big jowly preacher with a high forehead and a plain way of talking.
Lynda was in her thirties then. She was married and had two small kids, a boy and a girl, and she joined the United Pentecostal Church of Delhi almost as soon as Pastor Hales opened it. In his first sermon, the preacher told the group that this new denomination had stricter rules, and they’d be following every one. Women, he said, should wear long dresses and abstain from cutting their hair. They should defer to their husbands and stay silent in church. Lynda told me that she hadn’t minded back then that she couldn’t wear pants or jewelry or makeup in the new church. She’d loved the way the music filled the building, and she wanted to speak in tongues.
The church stayed packed until December, Lynda said. Then, late in the middle of the night a few days before Christmas, the butane plant caught fire. Crews from four cities tried to extinguish the flames, but by the next morning, the plant and the church had burned down.
“We got a tent and put it out there,” Lynda said. “Then a hurricane came and blew the tent down. We went through the fire, then we went through the water, as they said. Finally, we decided to build somewhere else.”
After the disasters, the congregation bought a building on Fifth Street, just a block from Roy’s house. The offering plate alone couldn’t refinance what the church had lost, so they started hosting revivals in the spring of 1970, hoping week-long services might attract new members and enough donations to finance a new organ. Pastor Hales brought in evangelists from Texas and gospel choirs from Mississippi. He took out ads in the paper, promising “special singing” and “a special move of God.” Lynda volunteered to knock on doors to drum up interest.
Lynda told us that she and a woman named Cookie set out one Saturday morning and made their way up and down the north side of Delhi. When they reached the wood-frame house just north of Cuthbert Street, they heard music playing inside. Lynda knocked on the screen door. After a minute, the music stopped, and Roy opened the door wide enough that Lynda could see inside his cluttered home. It was full of books. A guitar hung on the wall. Lynda’s heart skipped a half beat. She’d seen Roy riding a bike through town, but she’d never spoken to him before.
“Roy was a strange woman to us,” Lynda told me. “She was different, kind of an outcast. People in Delhi didn’t know who she was. They didn’t know what she was. They say she’s a man. They say she’s a she. They say she’s a morphodite.”
Roy stood in the doorway, waiting for the women to say something, and finally Lynda handed over a religious tract about speaking in tongues. She told Roy that a couple was coming up from Franklinton to preach and sing some “jam-up good music.” Roy was quiet, Lynda said, cordial but shy. He said he’d be there.
