Diary of a Misfit, page 8
Her scowl told me all I needed to know. Whatever it was that made my mom and grandma feel like outcasts must have started fifty years ago on Hell Street. The senator reappeared and told his wife they had to go. The governor was waiting. The senator scribbled down Dorothy Bradley’s phone number on the back of an AARP magazine. He told me he hoped my reporting went well. When we climbed back into the rental car, I told Aubree and Aaron that I had to see the street that shaped me in ways I didn’t yet understand. I had to see Hell.
I edged north out of the Thompsons’ driveway, back toward the main drag, and I imagined my grandma riding the bale of cotton. The wagon must have traveled the same route, up and over toward Chatham. I knew my grandma’s old clapboard bungalow was gone, but maybe, I thought, we’d see Miss Mattie Smith’s mansion or one of the lesser, look-alike shotguns my grandma had described. I turned left, then right. I rolled slow down the block. The street was a single lane without sidewalks, but people stood talking up and down the span. Men sat in lawn chairs, and women waved from stoops. Kids clustered around a basketball that seemed at least half-flat. Most of the homes weren’t houses; they were trailers, and each was painted a different color, though they all seemed to be built with aluminum that had weathered decades ago. The two wood houses that remained both looked abandoned. One was blue and boarded up, the other white and rotted out.
I waved but felt voyeuristic. Every single person on the street was Black, and I, a white person, worried I appeared slow and lurking. The rental-car plates said Indiana, and I suspected everyone could tell this street wasn’t mine. I tried to look like I knew where I was going, but my grandmother had never told me which intersection she’d lived closest to. I grabbed my notebook and searched for Mark King’s address. Roy had lived next to Mark, Ann McVay had told me. And my grandmother had lived across from Roy. If I found Mark’s, I could find my grandma’s.
We eased up until we saw Mark’s home, a red single-wide flanked by vacant lots. I parked a few trailers down, then took stock of the street as Aubree and Aaron unloaded their camera equipment. I’d lived in trailers twice growing up. One was a double-wide with a Jacuzzi tub, the nicest place we ever lived. The other looked just like Chatham’s single-wides, old and dented with rickety steps we’d pushed against the base. Ours was an off-white tube stuck between pines on a plot way out in the country west of Monroe. The walls were made of warped, wood veneer paneling, and the carpet was green shag. I hadn’t lived in that trailer since 1997, my freshman year of high school, but standing on Chatham that afternoon, the years crumpled away. The trailer had had only two small bedrooms, I remembered. My parents took the larger one, a 9 x 6 space that fit their queen-sized bed and nothing else. I refused to share the other. I was a teenager, I’d argued, a high schooler who needed privacy to talk on the phone at night. I couldn’t sleep so close to my twelve-year-old brother. I don’t know why my parents didn’t force us to bunk together, but my brother carved himself a bedroom out of the kitchen using empty boxes as a wall. The first night we moved in, a stray Catahoula cur gave birth to a litter of puppies under the trailer, and we stayed up late listening through the floor as the puppies cried. By the end of the school year, my parents had separated. My mom was heavy on the nose spray then, so I didn’t want to live with her when our family split. Instead, my dad and I moved to an apartment, a two-bedroom behind a Sonic Drive-In close to West Monroe High School, and my mom and brother went to Delhi to stay with my grandma. We lived apart for two years, until my junior year, when my parents reunited in a town ninety miles south. By then, whatever had held us close listening to the puppies had been too damaged to recapture.
I lingered on Chatham, and I prayed nobody invited me inside. I didn’t want to think about the trailer’s vinyl flooring or the pathetic “room” I’d forced my brother to accept. I recalled, suddenly, that my best friend and I had taken baths together in the single-wide, even though we were in high school, and arguably too old. I stared at her body with what I told myself was innocent curiosity, but maybe my gay feelings started there. When we first moved in, I’d covered the fake wood walls with posters of Joey Lawrence and Jonathan Taylor Thomas, but when we left, I threw them all away.
Aubree and Aaron were waiting in one of the vacant yards, so I shut the rental car door and moved toward Mark’s. This was the walk my grandmother must have made, I thought, the night she first heard Roy play music. These must be the oak trees that shaded her house. This must be the way the air smelled. I was lost in her world, stepping one foot at a time, so I didn’t notice the police car speeding north until it cut me off from Mark’s driveway. A cop rolled down the passenger-side window and leaned over to ask what we were doing with the cameras. My heart beat loud and quick. The officer was young and Black, and I felt, again, like I was trespassing in a neighborhood that didn’t belong to me. I wished my mother were there.
“Dispatch got calls,” the officer said.
“Um,” I answered. “My grandma lived here. I’m making a documentary for her. Rufus, I mean Chief Carter, said it was okay.”
I tried to come up with a story, something to tell the officer if he asked what the documentary was about. I didn’t want to say it was about Roy. If I tell him, I thought, he’ll know about me.
“Really?” the officer asked. “Which house was your grandma’s?”
I scanned Chatham, still unsure of where my grandma must have lived. I didn’t want to point to anyone’s trailer, so I motioned toward one of the vacant patches. “She lived there in the fifties. She hasn’t been back in a long time, so I’m filming to show her the old neighborhood.”
“Well,” the cop said. “Don’t look nothing like it did back when she was here, but all right.”
He told me not to film anyone’s front door, then he rushed off with his lights on. I told Aubree and Aaron we should leave. They insisted on getting at least a bit of footage, but I hung back while they filmed the empty lots. It had only been four months since Mark’s wife had told me no, and I thought I should give the Kings more time before I asked again. Next trip, I promised myself, I would ask Mark and Cheryl to let me see Roy’s journals. I nodded as people walked past me, and eventually I got back in the car. I wrote a list of questions on a yellow legal-sized notebook. Did Roy ever lose his temper? Is Delhi a welcoming place? I wondered what Roy thought of Hell Street. Did he ever mow the perfect lawns on the other side of town?
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING WAS my mom’s birthday, and I called her before we started reporting. She sounded the same as she had a few days earlier, hollowed out and weak with medicine. It had been years since I’d seen her on her birthday, so I had forgotten how much she hated it. As she talked, I remembered that she’d spent her birthday on pain pills every April since 1996, the year she turned thirty-two.
It was the spring before we moved to the single-wide trailer. I was a month shy of thirteen. We lived in a white house that sat crooked on a lot close to the levee, a house where rats and cockroaches skulked through the cupboards. My mom was using the nose spray then, and when I begged her to take me to a Christian pop concert at the civic center, she’d been too drugged to say yes. Her eyes were vacant, and her hair stuck up, wild and unbrushed. She was wearing a nightgown, even though it was daylight, even though it was her birthday. It was a Saturday, and I cried that afternoon until my dad agreed to take me and my brother to the concert. My dad’s best friend was staying with us, I remember. When we left, the man was reading a book in my room, and my mother was watching Oprah in hers. We stayed out late because I wanted to meet the band, a quartet of beautiful women called Point of Grace. By the time we made it home, my dad’s best friend was gone. I was still buzzing from the concert, so I called out to my mom in a voice I’m sure she found too loud and happy. A few minutes later, she teetered into the kitchen, empty-eyed. All my joy sank into anger when I saw her, and I told her one day she’d regret not spending time with me. She punched me in the stomach.
My parents were the kind of Southerners who believed the Bible condones spanking, and they whipped us a few times a week. My dad used a belt on my bare butt, and my mom slapped my face every time I said “yeah” instead of “yes ma’am.” But that night was different. I collapsed against the refrigerator, but she kept punching. My mom was unrestrained, flailing and full of hatred. I know I fell down, and I know she kept punching. She hit my legs, my back, my jaw. I could hear my brother screaming from somewhere. My dad pulled my mom off, and I stayed on the ground while he dragged her somewhere else. My brother bent down and asked if I was okay. I don’t remember the rest of the night. I don’t remember when or how my mom broke the news that my dad’s friend had raped her while we were gone, but I remember she told me he’d shoved a knife inside her, that he’d said if she didn’t take it, he’d find me instead. I’d just gotten my period a few months earlier, and I remember I didn’t sleep that night because I was worried he’d come after me. I was old enough to get pregnant, my mother had taught me, and I knew, because she’d told me, that nothing ruined your life like getting pregnant too young.
The reception was bad at the cabin, so my mom and I talked in staticky clips, then she made an excuse to get off the phone. I felt embarrassed that I hadn’t remembered what her birthday meant when I’d first suggested the trip, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her I was sorry. I worried if I did, I’d just remind her that I’d abandoned her that night in 1996. Her lows had lasted longer since that night. Every birthday, she became that person I’d seen in the kitchen, teetering and gone.
I walked out to the lake and wished I knew how to be close to her. The only time we’d spent together since I went away to college was that first trip to Delhi, and that was just a day trip, abbreviated time that hadn’t brought us together in the way I’d imagined it might. I told myself I would return to Louisiana in a few months, maybe in the summer when my mom was feeling buoyant and clean. I wandered back into the cabin, grateful lightning hadn’t burned it down, and I asked Aubree and Aaron if they were ready to do one last interview.
* * *
—
THE SOUTH SIDE’S curvy streets didn’t surprise me the way they had earlier in the week, but I grimaced, again, seeing how segregated Delhi was. How could neighborhoods so close look so different? The south side didn’t have a single trailer, only homes with yards and covered porches. Dorothy Bradley’s house was nestled in a bend, and as we rounded the curve, I saw that her lawn was as beautiful as the senator’s wife had promised. The grass was edged in straight lines, the bushes pruned into perfect circles. I stopped counting trees when I reached a dozen. We parked in the shade under a towering oak, but when Aubree and Aaron reached for their cameras, I suddenly felt scared. I told them to wait. I’d called Dorothy the day before, and she’d said that we could come by her house, but I thought she sounded suspicious of me. She’d asked if I planned to “tape” her, and I’d mumbled something like “We’ll see.” Aubree and Aaron didn’t film that conversation, so the only record I have is my own memory, and the conversation has grown dim with time. All I remember is that I told Aubree and Aaron that we should take in only one camera, the smallest one they’d brought, instead of our usual fleet.
We walked up to the house, a one-story ranch with a brick facade and brick-paved walkways. Dorothy’s assistant led us through a parlor. I was almost twenty-seven then, and Aubree and Aaron were a few years older, but when we stepped down into the living room, Dorothy’s assistant announced that we were teenagers interested in learning about Delhi’s past. I half wanted to go along with the ruse. If Dorothy assumed we were young, I thought, maybe she’d be open to letting us film her, but I knew I couldn’t lie my way into bravery.
“Actually,” I said, “I’m twenty-six.”
Dorothy seemed to survey me for half a minute, then she nodded her head.
“By golly, you’re not a teenager, are you?”
She told me she was ninety-six and a half, and as I eased around the couch, I looked at her and thought she looked at least a decade or two younger. She’d dried and curled her white hair, painted on red lips and brown eyebrows. Her eyes and shawl-collared sweater were the same shade of turquoise. She was healthy, she told me, though her body had been crimped by polio when she was two.
I don’t know if I asked her if we could film her or if Aubree just turned on the camera, but in the footage of that day, I can see that I asked Dorothy to introduce herself. She spoke to me at an angle, her head turned and trained on the air just left of me. “I’m Dorothy Phillips Bradley, and the Phillips name has just about disappeared because we were girls who married men. Now we have other names.”
She talked another ten minutes without interruption. She told us she still owned forty of the six hundred acres her ancestors acquired through a land grant during the Louisiana Purchase. They’d handed it down, generation to generation, she said. Dorothy assumed she, too, would leave the land to her children, but both her son and her daughter had left Delhi years ago, and as far as she could tell, they had no plans of coming back. Dorothy talked about the Siege of Vicksburg, and she explained to us how the railroad had turned the dirt around the Bayou Macon into a town. When she was young, Delhi was just a boat ramp, but then trains brought people, and the people built Delhi up. In the early days, Dorothy said, Chatham was a good street. The town’s only school was there, as were two churches, but then, in 1927, the Mississippi River flooded and ruined most of the low-lying communities outside of Delhi. People moved inland, out of the Delta and onto Chatham, and when they arrived they brought a brand of rowdy that hadn’t existed in town before.
“I don’t mean they killed anybody,” Dorothy said. “But maybe they did.”
I asked if she remembered the days when Chatham was called Hell Street, and Dorothy laughed so hard she coughed. “It still is. I used that term just last week.”
She told me she didn’t mean anything derogatory. “Hell” is just what people called it. I couldn’t tell if she was snobby or a straight shooter. She said she didn’t know why Chatham had become Hell during the Great Depression, but the town had been very prejudiced back then, and Chatham very poor. The name change probably grew out of that.
“Did you, uh,” I said, stalling. “Did you know Roy Hudgins who lived on that street?”
Dorothy adjusted the shawl on her sweater, and I noticed, for the first time, that polio had reshaped her hands. Her fingers were bent in half, and her left palm seemed to be clutching an invisible tennis ball. She stared into space for a few seconds, then began talking without looking at me. “I did. I knew her for years and years. She was tied to Chatham, but she rode her bicycle all over town. She mowed yards and took care of herself. I don’t know where her family was.”
I could see Aubree zooming in closer on Dorothy’s face. I asked if it was unusual back then for someone to live without a family, and Dorothy said yes. That’s why people remembered Roy. Adults aren’t meant to live alone forever. Dorothy had been widowed in 1958, but she had kids and her assistant. I thought of my Portland apartment, of the girlfriend who’d dumped me and the friends who’d moved away. My brother would have his family, and I would live in that apartment, alone, like Roy.
“She kept her hair cut short, I know that,” Dorothy said.
I shifted in my seat, stupidly hoping that Dorothy hadn’t noticed that my hair was short, too. I wanted to leave, but I knew I couldn’t end another interview the cowardly way I had the senator’s. I’d spent the whole trip scared. I hadn’t asked Francis Thompson any real questions. I hadn’t gone to the Kings’ house. Now the trip was ending, and the only things I’d learned were the things I already knew: Roy rode a bicycle and mowed lawns. He lived alone. No one had confirmed my grandma’s kidnapping story or Ann’s report of the pink sweatsuit. No one had told me how Roy felt.
“Roy is a man’s name,” I said. My voice snagged and quivered. I hadn’t actually asked a question, I realized, just noted the disconnect between a name and Dorothy’s “she.”
“Yes,” Dorothy said, dragging out the s. “I didn’t know whether you wanted to talk about that or not. That’s fine. In my opinion, she was just a homosexual.”
The next few seconds felt like they lasted a million minutes. My ears rang with a noise that felt heavy. She knows, I thought. She knows about me.
“She wore men’s clothes,” Dorothy said. “Doesn’t mean a thing. You see, I have friends.”
Dorothy trailed off, then relaxed, just a bit, into her chair. She said she’d been a counselor before she was a volunteer historian, and she’d met lots of gay men working in the field. She’d gone out to eat pizza and drink beer with two gay cops, and she found them elegant and fun. They never bothered anyone, Dorothy said, and neither had Roy, but homosexuals kept to themselves for a reason.
“Nobody gets close to these people,” she said.
Dorothy wiggled her right hand when she said “these people.” I had no idea what that motion meant. I could feel sweat collecting underneath my arms. My heart beat so fast I worried Aaron’s professional microphone might pick up the sound. Dorothy turned her body so she was looking right at me for the first time. Roy, she said, stayed on the outskirts.
“And I never really knew where she belonged,” Dorothy said. “Did you ever know where she belonged?”
I thought of my apartment, so unlike that trailer or crooked white house. And I thought of my mom, wasting another birthday in a haze. I wished I could go back to 1996 and skip that Point of Grace concert. I wished I could give my mom everything I knew my brother would.
“No,” I told Dorothy. “I don’t know where Roy belonged.”
