Diary of a Misfit, page 7
“Okay,” Aubree said, picking up a camera and turning it toward me. “Should we start filming?”
Aubree asked questions, but most of my answers were mumbled fragments. I said “um” and “I don’t know.” I told Aubree I was too nervous to be interviewed. At work, I asked the questions.
“Just explain what we’re doing. We can edit it later.”
I looked back and forth between the road and the wide-angle lens a few times before answering.
“We’re going to Delhi,” I said finally. “My mom’s hometown.”
* * *
—
WHEN I TURNED ONTO Main Street a few hours later, the abandoned buildings felt like landmarks, souvenirs of the time I’d spent with my mom four months earlier. Hot Wings Heaven was still closed, and the old A-Mart, where we’d turned to meet Keith King, remained dark. A welcome to delhi, home of sign hung incomplete and rusted from a pole. The only new business I spotted was a shack whose unfinished front doors advertised pecans and locusts for sale. We had an hour of daylight left, so I drove along Delhi’s two highways, pointing out the cemetery, the nursing home, and the drugstore where my mom had worked as a teenager. I wasn’t ready to track down Mark King, so I steered away from his neighborhood, pressing past the barber shops and churches, until the highway ran through nothing but fields.
The sun sat low in the west. We planned to spend the week in a cabin on Poverty Point Reservoir, a man-made lake two miles north of town. Poverty Point is Delhi’s lone tourist attraction. It’s a national monument, home to what the cabin reservation website described as a prehistoric archaeological site with five mounds and six C-shaped ridges. Native Americans built the earthen structures between 1700 and 1100 BC, but I don’t know what those original inhabitants called the land. Most websites say the area’s former name is unknown, and all of the official documents I dug up started with the history of one very rich man.
Just before the Civil War, a farmer from Kentucky bought the land and started calling it Poverty Point Plantation. I don’t think he named it after his own circumstances. All the records I found showed that he had $120,000 cash by 1860—a purchasing power equal to nearly $3 million when we visited in 2010. I unearthed one newspaper article that said he named it after a place his wife loved in Kentucky, and another that said he’d chosen it because the people in North Louisiana were fairly destitute. I don’t know which is true, but by the time I pulled my rental car close to the site, the name felt disturbingly accurate. In 2010, forty percent of Delhi’s families earned less than $25,000 a year—half of what I made at the newspaper.
The name wasn’t new to me. When I was in middle school, my class took a trip to Poverty Point to look for arrowheads, and I remember we made fun of the name on the way home. Someone pointed to a boy who was wearing cheap-looking sweatpants, then asked if he’d bought them at Poverty Point. Everyone laughed, and I did, too, even though my own clothes were layaway specials paired with Adidas knockoffs my mom had bought half-off at Payless. I knew what poverty was. I even wrote a whole journal entry in seventh grade about how unfair it was that my family “lived in poverty.” But I don’t think the name fully hit me until I returned to work on the documentary. How long had this place been poor? Maybe that farmer had been wealthy, but I suspected most people who lived here never had.
I turned right at the reservoir, then followed the rim of the lake back toward our cabin. The lake hadn’t existed back when I came on the school trip. Lawmakers had voted in 2001 to dig it out and fill it up. They’d done so hoping a basin full of bass would bring fishermen to town, but when I looked out at the water, I saw only one canoe. Birds cut across the road, and a possum darted through the grass. Yellow signs warned of alligators and black bears. A dead snake baked on the shoulder. Ours was cabin 7, the second to last on the map, but the last one standing. I’d read online that cabin 8 had burned down in the middle of the night a few weeks before. Three of the four people staying there had managed to rush down the long boardwalk that connected the cabin to the parking lot, but one person had had to jump. All that remained was a few charred pegs. Aubree eyed the burnt remnants with trepidation, then turned to me.
“Do you think it was lightning?”
The newspaper promised a storm later that week, and I was sure Aubree was wondering whether we’d survive a stay in a place so full of beasts and bad weather. Our whole cabin looked like kindling. I said I didn’t know, but suggested we leave our suitcases packed by the front door. We lined up the camera equipment, then we stepped out onto the porch to survey the lake. Catfish circled what was left of cabin 8. Mosquitoes bit my legs.
I knew I had to find people for us to interview, but I was nervous to work the phones. One reason I worried I’d lose my job in the next round of layoffs was I never felt comfortable calling strangers. It felt so invasive, dialing someone’s private line and demanding to talk. But I knew Aubree and Aaron had flown down expecting to film people, so I whispered a pep talk to myself. “No one here knows you. If they hang up, don’t let it bother you. You’ll never see them again.”
I couldn’t bring myself to try anyone from the phone book, so I called relatives until I had a short list of names, people who knew Roy and might be willing to talk to three strangers with video cameras. One of my aunts told me she’d introduce me to people, but only if I promised never to tell anyone I thought Roy was a lesbian. I told her that I didn’t think Roy was a lesbian, that wearing men’s clothes didn’t mean he was attracted to women, and anyway, I couldn’t imagine myself saying the word “lesbian” out loud in Delhi. My aunt ignored me. “Promise me,” she said.
“Okay. I won’t tell people that I think Roy or anyone else is or was ever a lesbian.”
Satisfied, she gave me the number of a man named Teddy Rockett. He answered when I called, but apologized and said he couldn’t talk because he was working on an oil rig in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. I hung up without asking him what it was like to be out there. Two days before we flew down, the Deepwater Horizon rig had exploded off the coast of southeast Louisiana, and as I talked to Teddy, I could see Aubree and Aaron watching news reports on the cabin’s TV. Deepwater was still on fire, spewing thousands of gallons of oil and natural gas into the gulf, and somewhere out there, Teddy Rockett was answering my call.
I dialed disconnected numbers and reached other people who said they didn’t know enough to speak with me. I left messages in a voice twangier than my usual accent, hoping I sounded like I belonged in Louisiana. Finally, I found Ricky Ellis, a fifty-something who lived near Roy when Roy was older. Ricky said he’d never heard of Jewel Ellis, but he did know that Roy was “a morphodite.”
“What, what’s that, what’s a morphodite?” I asked. Ricky laughed uncomfortably, and neither of us said anything for a few seconds. Ricky laughed again to break the silence.
“Half man, half woman,” he said. “Roy had the top part of a woman. I mean, you know, breasts.”
Ricky didn’t describe Roy’s bottom half, and I didn’t dare ask. I changed the subject to Roy’s music, and we talked about the guitar and the Bible for a while. Ricky told me that his parents didn’t go to church, so Roy taught him how to decipher the Old Testament. I asked Ricky if he’d ever heard that Roy had been kidnapped. He said no. No one talked about Roy’s past. The only explanation Ricky had ever heard is that Roy’s was a body made up of mismatched parts.
“I thought he was a guy. Just a regular guy until my mother told me. He lived in a regular wood-frame house, nothing fancy. He always lived by hisself. Never had kids, and that’s the way he liked it.”
Ricky told me I’d learn more from older folks, people who’d lived in Delhi when Roy was young and Jewel Ellis was alive, but most of those people were dead or down with dementia in the town’s only nursing home. Ricky suggested we call Delhi’s state senator, a man who now lived on the good side of town but who grew up near Hell Street on a road named Race. When I called my grandma later that night to ask if she remembered the senator, I could almost hear her smirking over the phone. She and Francis Thompson were about the same age and had lived one street apart, she told me, so of course she knew him.
“We sat in the same classroom together,” she said. “In fact, he sat in front of me. And can I tell you something?”
She sounded hyped and angry, wily in the way she got when she wanted to make a point. She didn’t wait for me to ask “what” before she answered her own question.
“He is state representative, okay? I was nothing but a housewife.”
I could hear her sister, Shirley, talking in the background, badmouthing the senator and other people they thought had judged them for never accomplishing enough.
“He was no more intelligent than I was,” my grandma said. “He didn’t make any better grades than I did.”
“Okay,” I said. “So, do you want me not to call him?”
I didn’t need to see her to know she was probably smiling smug, the way she always did when she wanted to see some drama play out. She told me to go right ahead.
“Now, Casey, did y’all see the news? Y’all need to be careful, baby. These are end times. The world is going up in flames.”
* * *
—
FRANCIS THOMPSON WAS IN Baton Rouge when I called him, but he said he’d be back Sunday afternoon. We hadn’t found anyone else to interview yet, so we drove around Saturday pasting flyers to abandoned store windows. I sent messages to everyone who’d subscribed to a Facebook group celebrating Delhi’s olden days, then we waited for Sunday to come. Wind whipped at the cabin Saturday night, and the news briefly interrupted the oil rig coverage to announce that one tornado had killed ten people in Mississippi and another had flattened homes and ripped metal from the ground in Tallulah, a Louisiana town less than twenty miles east of Delhi. Aubree and I looked at each other nervously.
“Should we put our suitcases in the car?” I asked.
The lake sloshed against our windows all night, but the sun was shining when we woke Sunday morning. Dead bugs covered the windshield of our rental car, so I drove toward the senator’s house with the wipers waving back and forth. Francis Thompson lived as far away from Hell Street as a person could within Delhi city limits. His house was on the south side, two miles from the railroad tracks, set back behind a maze of other roads. We wound around them, and I felt like I was in a different city altogether. The streets on the north side are straight sticks, thoroughfares with intersections but no curves. The south side seemed to be all cul-de-sacs and sharp joints tucked away from the main drag. A few roads in, we circled a pond and watched ducks waddle along the bank. Every block looked beautiful. Brick houses rose several stories into the sky, and the roads were named Little John and Robinhood—all paved new and smooth.
The senator’s street was particularly lovely. Every yard had at least three oaks, each thick with leaves and the kind of branches a kid could climb. The senator’s house wasn’t the biggest on the south side, but it wasn’t a home I’d call modest. It was built from good bricks, the light kind with bleached-white mortar. Two columns stood between a row of doors that led out to a perfect lawn. His driveway could have held half a dozen cars.
The man who opened the door looked years younger than my grandmother, even though they were both born around the start of World War II. Francis Thompson was handsome in a boyish way. His blond hair had barely grayed, and his blue eyes were clear bright circles. He moved easy through the living room as he ushered us inside. He wore a sport coat with a red tie and a pocket square that didn’t exactly match. I handed him two release forms, papers that gave us permission to film the interview, and the senator bragged that we were his second news crew of the day. He eyed the papers and said he’d better ask his wife before signing off the film rights to their house.
“Marilyn,” he called. “Do you agree they can film your house?”
We hadn’t met Marilyn on our way in, but I could hear her rustling around the kitchen. Her voice curled out in a soft twang I’d only heard among the gentry. She joked that we could film as long as our lenses weren’t good enough to show the dust, and when she said it, she made three syllables out of one-syllable words.
“You know,” the senator said, “Roy dressed like a boy, but it came out from later accounts that Roy was actually female but took on the lifestyle of a male.”
He widened his eyes in a way that suggested he was revealing something to me for the first time. I’d decided on the drive over that I wouldn’t tell anyone what my grandmother had told me. I wanted to see what people would offer up before I pushed them, so I widened my eyes, and Francis continued talking.
“I’m sure that he or she or, um…” he said, trailing off. The senator explained that he didn’t know which pronoun to use, but he could say with authority that no one in Delhi had ever thrown rocks at Roy. In fact, the senator said, he’d never even noticed anything unusual about Roy. Roy was just a hard worker who mowed lawns, and that made him a valuable community member. Marilyn was still in the kitchen, but she hollered an addendum: “I never saw him or her with anybody.”
Francis ignored his wife and waited for me to ask a question. Suddenly, I felt hesitant to probe deeper, even though I’d flown all the way down to learn about Roy. Something about the way the Thompsons called Roy “he or she” made me uneasy, so I stalled by asking the senator questions about the town he’d represented for nearly forty years. He said Delhi had been different when he was growing up.
“People raised gardens in their backyards. They talked over the fence to their neighbors. When one suffered, all suffered.”
I looked around the living room and thought of the poem Roy had written, comparing his life to a dry well. I doubted the senator had suffered alongside Roy. The Thompsons had a fireplace, a piano, and, most important, each other. Roy had described his life in that poem as one of “nothing but heartaches, sorrow, and strife.”
Marilyn tiptoed in and took a seat. She wore the same short and sprayed hairstyle most of the women I knew in the South did, but she looked slightly stately in a boat-neck sweater and gold hoop earrings. I smiled, then turned back to her husband and asked what had happened to Delhi. The pool that opened the year my grandma arrived had closed decades before, and so, it seemed, had everything else.
“Delhi doesn’t have a large tax base,” the senator said. That was largely a function of geography, he thought. The parishes that line the Mississippi River in North Louisiana are among the poorest in the whole nation, and those parishes border Delhi. I waited, but the senator didn’t offer any other explanation for Delhi’s decline. He reminisced about the days when the train used to stop downtown, funneling visitors and traveling salesmen into the city’s core, then he lost track of what he was saying. He looked to his wife for help. Marilyn didn’t speculate about the town as a whole, but she said the north side had always been bad. “I didn’t live over there,” she said. “I mean, to me, that was—in my view—the worst area in town.”
Francis allowed that Marilyn was right. When he was growing up, the only community poorer than the one my grandmother had lived in was the Black neighborhood, a cluster of homes just a few blocks away from Hell Street on the lots that bordered Race. The senator kept both his legs and his hands crossed in a stance that seemed diplomatic. I knew he’d grown up on Race Street, but he didn’t describe his childhood the way my grandma did. In his memories, nothing was hard or painful, nothing was wholly lost or found. When I asked if he missed the oil-rich Delhi that used to be, the senator shook his head no.
“I’m very happy with my station in life right now. I’ve never had it so good.”
He told me Conagra planned to open a sweet potato factory later that summer, and Delhi would probably come up after people found jobs there. I was skeptical, but I could tell by the way the senator pawed at his wireless mic that the interview was over. I looked down at my notebook. I’d planned to ask if he knew what happened to Roy’s music career after my grandmother left, but I hadn’t asked that. I hadn’t really asked much of anything about Roy. The senator stood, so I closed my notebook. He said I should call Dorothy Bradley, a ninety-six-year-old woman who worked, unofficially and without pay, as the town’s historian. Marilyn said Dorothy lived within walking distance on a street that backed into undeveloped land.
“Of course she has a gorgeous yard,” Marilyn said. “She has a staff and somebody who lives with her.”
The senator motioned for Aaron to unclip his microphone, so I stood to say goodbye. Marilyn continued sitting.
“I have to say this,” she said. “Everybody knew Roy was different. He was definitely a novelty.”
“He was what?” the senator asked.
“A novelty,” Marilyn told her husband. “You said you didn’t notice. I mean, there wasn’t anyone who didn’t know that.”
She squinted in disbelief. I was sure Francis was just being senatorial, careful with his words. He mumbled and said he’d been a child when Roy was around, but Marilyn shook her head. She was three years younger than her husband, but she’d always known Roy was different.
“I grew up knowing he was a novelty,” she said. “People didn’t know if he was a boy or a girl or what.”
Marilyn said Roy was just one of the town oddities, a cast that included a woman who walked the street with a big goiter hanging from her neck, and another person they called Big Boy. Big Boy’s name was lost to time, but Marilyn remembered that he was so fat he couldn’t get into his own car. The senator walked off to take a phone call from the governor, who was in town to survey the tornado damage.
“And also,” Marilyn said, “Hell or whatever was a street unto itself. I went to school with two girls who lived on that street, nice girls, but I remember finding out they lived on that street and thinking, ‘Are they like me?’ ”
