Stories Seen Through Screen Doors: The Roots and Branches of Black Southern Experience

By Dr. Wanda Macon

Stories Seen Through Screen Doors
The Roots and Branches of Black Southern Experience

A truth seldom recognized is that there are almost as many African American southern experiences as there are states and cities in the South. Our lives as southern black people intersect, but they also diverge into unique patterns of learning, growth, and discovery. The stories contained in this collection illustrate some of those similarities as well as the differences. Wanda Macon shares with millions of African Americans a southern soil that is rich in family, church, and racial repression, but she also highlights the spiritedness of a tomboyish young girl, too smart for her preschool age, formed by a variety of occurrences in her small southern community. "The Courts," a horseshoe shaped neighborhood and home to twenty-three families located in fictional Friarsdale, Mississippi, is the site for experience, memory, reflection, and locating one's self in the history of the geography as well as the history of family and community.

By Trudier Harris, University Distinguished Research Professor
Department of English, The University of Alabama
Tuscaloosa, Alabama

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665502085

Dr. Wanda Macon

Dr. Wanda C. Macon Born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Dr. Wanda Macon attended Jackson State University, where she received her undergraduate and graduate Liberal Arts degrees in Literature and Mass Communications. She taught at Lane College, The Ohio State University, Mississippi State University, University of Mississippi and her undergraduate alma mater, Jackson State University. She taught American Literature, African American Literature, Seminar Courses, Creative Writing, World Literature and Honors Composition. She has published in The Oxford Companion of African American Literature 1997 and 2000. Her creative work has been published in Black Magnolias, Volume 3, Number 1, March-May, 200 and the Literary Journal of Coahoma Community College. Presently she lives between Michigan and Nassau, Bahamas, where she continues to write about the rich culture of the Island.

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2020 Dr. Wanda Macon. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  07/29/2022

ISBN: 978-1-6655-0209-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-0207-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-0208-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020918992

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, Copyright © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation.

Dedication

to

Beverly Ann McCray-Ray

1956-1995

A Sister-Friend

A Spirit Filled With Stories

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To God Be The Glory For The Things He Has Done

To the kindred spirits who have crossed the River Jordan, I thank you for all the stories I have come to know. I want to thank you for nurturing and continuing to guide me through my life’s journey: my great-grandparents: Virgil and Vinella; my granddaddys: Thomas Jones and Tommie McNeal; my grandmamas: Ora and Cora; my mama: Odester; father, Bailey; great-aunts: Sally, Velma, Hattie and Olander, and aunts: Beatrice & Amelia, and uncles: Sam and Frank.

I extend thanks to my supportive and encouraging family members, without their love and inspiration, I would not have been able to conquer the mountains often placed in my path. My sisters: Jeanette, I thank for her wisdom and continued connection to our past; Claudette, for her mothering and guidance; Ella for her strength, and Doris for believing in me and encouraging me; my brother, Leon, whose unmarked grave was discovered in 1994 in Ulster County, New York. He passed on his creative genius to me, gave me my first book, Aristotle’s Poetics, taught me my ABC’s and passed his love of reading on to me; my youngest brother, Joseph, who lost our mama when he was a child; I want you to know that we embrace you and love you as intensely as Mama did. To my two in-laws, Wendell and Maria; I thank Wendell for giving Ella the space to always be a giving sister; Maria, I thank you for loving my brother unconditionally. To my Clarksdale Community, friends, extended family and teachers, I want to say something good is in all of us; we just have to dig deep sometimes to find it. I am grateful to my extended families: Mr. and Mrs. Hughes Clayton, who have continued to support my efforts financially, emotionally and spiritually, and the Pounds and Magees of Bassfield who fed me and made me a true member of their family. I also want to thank my Bahamian family, Carl and Yvonne Rolle, for making their home my home when I needed a place of refuge. During my tenure at Jackson State University, Jackson’s version of the Delaney sisters, Dr. Doris Ginn and Mrs. Mae Nell Smith, became my friends and kept me laughing. To my god-child, Lyneisha, who kept me grounded during my days of writing and editing.

I began this book with the gift of a writer’s box from a dear friend, Dr. Carol Quin, who I thank for her continued encouragement and support. To Jeff, who assisted me in carrying all the emotional baggage I brought with the stories to my college experience, I thank you. Thank you, Trudier Harris, for your presence at The Ohio State University that laid the foundation for a friendship that continues to propel me forward and for your reading and editing of this manuscript as well as the writing of the foreword, for you are a true sister-friend. I also wish to thank John Stewart, whose subtle guidance helped me listen to the inner spirits and exposed me to another world at The International Book Fair of London which introduced me to interested publishers and for his reading of the manuscript.

I thank the Folkhouse Group of Columbus, Ohio for providing me with a creative venue of expression. Thank all of the creative professors who helped give flight to my creative genius, and especially Dr. Robert Canzoneri, whose southern spirit reached out to mine. To my girlfriends: Margaret Smith, Angela Robinson and Monica Granderson, who kept me hoping and laughing during our girl talks. To my Sistuhs With Books, I want to thank you for continuing sharing the love of reading with me. During the final stages, I want to thank my homeboy, friend and colleague, C.Leigh McInnis and his beautiful wife, Monica for assisting me in preparing the text for publication.

In addition to the aforementioned, I want to thank Kyler and her mother, Delores for keeping me connected to Beverly, my best friend of thirty-four years. I also want to thank all of my friends whose names go unmentioned for accepting my absence when I was working and to all the students who never complained when it took me longer to return their papers. To Jackson State University and the Department of English, thank you for your workload which made me realize the importance of not losing sight of a dream.

Finally, I am grateful for the geniuses of Dr. Margaret Walker Alexander, whose words of wisdom that she so openly shared on our road trip to North Carolina in 1998 encouraged me to write and share my stories

FOREWORD

The Roots and Branches of Black Southern Experience

A truth seldom recognized is that there are almost as many African American southern experiences as there are states and cities in the South. Our lives as southern black people intersect, but they also diverge into unique patterns of learning, growth, and discovery. The stories contained in this collection illustrate some of those similarities as well as the differences. Wanda Macon shares with millions of African Americans a southern soil that is rich in family, church, and racial repression, but she also highlights the spiritedness of a tomboyish young girl, too smart for her pre-school age, formed by a variety of occurrences in her small southern community. The Courts, a horseshoe shaped neighborhood and home to twenty-three families located in fictional Friarsdale, Mississippi, is the site for experience, memory, reflection, and locating one’s self in the history of the geography as well as the history of family and community.

Home to attend her grandmother’s funeral, the narrator re-visits The Courts and, while roaming the house and looking through the screen door of her family’s old home, allows memories to flow as this looking out onto life and history offers up its reflections on the shaping forces that have led to her maturity and adulthood. Whether it is the adventure of climbing a large tree against her mother’s will (SeeMo), or shooting and winning marbles from a neighboring boy (Pots), or using a slingshot to zing chinaberries at the boys who have the privilege of attending school when she is too young to do so (Chinaberries), the young Omniella Delores (Omnie) Johnston is the impetus to the grown woman reviewing how she came to be who and what she is. Layers upon layers of memories converge with grief to illustrate that life constantly gives and takes. Survival is a matter of confronting, ordering, and accepting all of one’s experiences, allowing them to wash over one in a ritual that can be saddening but is ultimately triumphant.

We meet the young Omnie as a perennially disobedient pre-schooler whose repeated switchings are not sufficient to curtail her forbidden activities. Ever penitent, the young Omnie is also ever exploring and therefore ever learning. From her willingness to listen to her Aunt Frances share the family’s secrets surrounding its complicated-at times incestuous-relationship (Christmasville Road), to the perverse ways in which her young neighbors introduce her to the sexual potential of her body (Pots; Chinaberries), Omnie exhibits an individuality that holds our attention. The sassiness for which she suffers so much punishment is also the sassiness that defines creativity and learning. She is far ahead of the other children in school when she is allowed to enter, even though she is entering early. She is finally sent to school, a development for which she has desperately begged, because she has almost burned down the home of Mama Rosetta, the elderly neighbor who has agreed to keep her while Mrs. Johnston works (Chinaberries").

Viewed as old before her time, touched in the head, and having been here before, Omnie possesses an awareness uncommon to three and four year olds. Her superior intellect and intuitive nature, however, cannot save her from the pain of racism. When her brother Edgar delivers her heart’s desire in the form of a German Shepherd puppy (Omnie), she must suffer through the consequences of the growing dog’s actions when a white man in the neighboring community believes that the dog has attacked his son. A child’s love for a pet transcends all communities, but its manifestations for a small black girl in Mississippi in the 1950’s resonate in ways far beyond the simplicity of owning an animal.

For all the experiences Macon captures in the stories here, none is more vivid than Omnie’s love for and relationship with her brother Edgar. Even as an adolescent, Edgar has a clear understanding of the gaps between blacks and whites in the South. His sharpened consciousness immediately marks him for trouble, which proceeds to find him. His transgressions against authority, combined with his treatment at the hands of the police, lead to his disappearance from the South (Rock of Ages; Mama’s Prayer). Omnie thereby loses the one person in her family to whom she truly seemed to be devoted and who reciprocated that affection by sharing life lessons with her that encouraged her to think outside the box of black people’s placement in southern race relations.

The institution that might be expected to sustain members of Omnie’s neighborhood against racism, that is, the church, appears for its rituals more than for its strengths. During a summer revival (Mourner’s Bench), Omnie undergoes the mourners’ bench experience that will lead to her baptism, but her focus is more on fear of the water than upon a love of Jesus. While Macon thus engages the tradition of the mourners’ bench, the result leans in a lighter direction than our knowledge of such experiences might lead us to anticipate.

Perhaps the most poignant story in the collection is Irises, which focuses on Omnie’s friend Maelene and her family. Having been neighbors in The Courts, then separated because Omnie’s mother was successful in moving them to a better neighborhood, Omnie and Maelene nonetheless remain friends. The scene in which Omnie is present, or at least on the porch of the house with Maelene, when Maelene’s mother gives birth to her eighth child and the father stands just inside the door bemoaning bitterly the fact that his wife has delivered yet another daughter, really tugs at the heartstrings. If all a woman can do in this environment is to please a man and have his babies, then what is she to do if the man is not pleased with her efforts? Maelene resolves to Omnie that she will never get married or have children. It is doubly troubling, therefore, to see the effects of environment upon Maelene when, at sixteen, she confesses to Omnie her sin and the place at which the sin occurs (The Blood-Stained Banner). Neither Irises nor- The Blood-Stained Banner is tied up as neatly as are some of the other stories, but they are particularly haunting in their exploration of husband/wife, male/female relationships in a community where women’s choices are limited severely.

Macon’s overall strength, however, is in her depiction of the adventures and conversations of children when they do not have adults standing over their shoulders. How the children in The Courts guide themselves through a maze of activities and discoveries when their parents are not immediately available, how they make choices-good moral ones and otherwise-provide quite a bit of food for thought in this collection. In spite of suggestions in Christmasville Road that adults are the great keepers of secrets, children keep secrets just as effectively as their parents and grandparents. Growing up with intense parental supervision on the one hand and an almost inexplicable lack of supervision on the other, Omnie and her playmates nonetheless find their way through the thicket of childhood. They engage with the land, its vegetation, their racist neighbors, their schools, and their churches in sustained looks at a few examples of the multifaceted diversity that exists among southern black Americans.

Wanda Macon’s south, then, is a south less of cotton fields, livestock, and vegetable gardens than a south of marginal urbanity, one that includes Catholic schools and the possibility of a good education for kids smart enough to pursue it. Omnie is one such smart kid, and her mother is anxious that her children acquire all the advantages that they can. Mrs. Johnston’s ambition inadvertently creates tension with the neighbors because they believe her too high-minded, too uppity for the level of poverty that she shares with her neighbors. Yet Mrs. Johnston persists, and Omnie reaps the benefits of that persistence.

What Omnie has reaped is clear from her narration of most of these linked stories (she relinquishes primary voice and allows friends to narrate a couple of stories). As the now adult Omnie stands in the family’s old duplex unit, looking out the screen door upon history and memory, she is as wise as her neighbors predicted she would become when she was three and four years old. She is a woman who understands that the pain of death lasts but a season, that one may take a memento such as a mantel from one’s childhood home, but that the true meanings of family, friendship, and life’s experiences are not carried in anything tangible; instead, they remain always alive and fresh in the heart as well as in the creative imagination.

Trudier Harris

University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, Alabama

SYCAMORE COURTS

Why go home after years of new friends, values, ideas and places?

Why feel lost in a once familiar surrounding and stare into faces and ask, who, where and when?

I wondered.

Time provides us with new perceptions to explore the old paths and roads once traveled as a child, to receive new views on life from opened and closed doors;

to share the distorted and clear visions through cracked and repaired panes; to feel safe on lighted and dark streets where consumed and taught values disappeared.

Death often brings us face to face to our past

A past that allowed discovered and concealed adventures to run free on dead-end streets;

Whose falls were cradled by the rich, dark Mississippi soil

A place whose flat-top duplexes resembled a scene from the Wild Wild West

I try to reconnect to a past lost to time and changes

a place I once called home with its cracks and crevices that gave and took from those who travelled along the shady narrows of Sycamore Courts

CONTENTS

Christmasville Road The Women Folk

The Courts Description of Place

‘See-Mo’ Healing Hands For Broken Limbs

Omnie A Story of Rex

Rock of Ages Coming of Age

Pots A Game of Marbles

Chinaberries Sister, Sister

Mourner’s Bench Omnie’s Revival

Mama’s Prayer Wrong Elements

The Move New Shoes

Irises Maelene’s Coming of Age

The Blood-Stained Banner The Unpardonable Sin

"Now she was no longer young and slender and lovely.

Her breasts were long and flabby; her belly always bloated,

whether she was big in family way or not..."

Margaret Walker’s Jubilee

CHRISTMASVILLE ROAD

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The Women Folk

P oppa gone, Mama Bloat gone, Mama gone, Grandaddy Jackson gone, and now, my grandmuh gone. Grandmuh died in a big hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, north of Friarsdale. I spent the last months of her life with her in the hospital. I hadn’t been to Friarsdale in years. While in Memphis, I stayed with my big sister, who had moved to Memphis after she married her high school boyfriend. Now, I was home to make arrangements for my grandmuh’s funeral. My Aunt Frances called me and asked me to come to Friarsdale, days after I returned home. She and Aunt Willie Mae wanted me to help go through Grandmuh’s personal items and plan her funeral. Over the phone, through sobs and long pauses, she managed to say, "Omnie, your grandmuh loved her grandchildren. You all spent more time with her than her own children.

It’s only right that you are a part of the planning. I couldn’t say no. Grandmuh’s spirit left her body as I sat next to her bed and read The 31st Psalm to her. By the time I read the 5th verse, she released a sigh. She was gone. Her last breath blew by me like a kiss upon the air. Finally, I pressed the nurse’s button and shortly, a nurse entered, What can I get you for your grandmother? All the nurses knew me because I was there everyday. I usually left for lunch and returned in the evening if it weren’t my turn to spend the night in hospital. My aunts and I took turns to sleep in the uncomfortable hospital lounge chair. The nurses were attentive to Grandmuh. Other patients said it was because a family member was always there with her. We just knew that they did their jobs well. I looked up from the Bible and shook my head, Nothing, I think she’s gone. She checked her pulse and heartbeat, and said, I have to get her doctor in here to pronounce her dead. I always thought that dead was such a finite meaning. The word, itself, hit me hard. Tears rolled down my face. I left to get my aunts, who were taking a cigarette break in the lounge. I walked in the lounge. They looked at me and rushed passed me without saying a word. I slowly walked down the hall that the smell of disinfectant and sickness permeated. I turned