Cold Drank

Ether.

I never expected to keep my job as a professor at Vassar, not even waaaaaay back in the day when money folded both ways and people still bought new cars. So of course, I don’t expect to keep my job in this recession.

But what fool does?

I’ve been on the tenure track at Vassar College for the last 5 years. And every night of those five years, I expect that tomorrow my Vassar apartment, my Vassar job, the Vassar part of my home will come tumbling down in the form of a cryptic email from the dean of faculty, a generous email my chairs or a knowing glance from the President. “Oh shit,” I’ll think, “How am I gonna break it to Grandma and them that these white folks done sent me fishing?”

When I actually lose my job, I’ll cry in the dark and whisper like a less husky voiced Bessie Smith, “Backwater Blues done called me to pack my things and go/My house fell down and I caint live there no mo’” until I fall asleep. Then I’ll wake up, laugh, find a new way to make monies, search for a new house and take that loss with me forever.

I heard the Bessie Smith verse the first time in Grandma’s Impala back in 1985. Then, of course, it was just interesting noise between WOAD and WJMI. Now, I think there’s this understated acceptance of disaster and reckoning with personal failure in Bessie Smith’s Back Water Blues. The song was written after a flood of the Cumberland River struck Nashville on Christmas morning in 1926. This acceptance and reckoning seem wholly absent from our nation’s and our institution’s current conversation about community, economics, fairness, race, gender, justice and charity. Bessie Smith was not only accepting disaster and moving on with that disaster forever a part of her; she was also reckoning with the truth that other people’s houses are falling down all around the world and that this particular flood has produced one of the many mounds of soggy debris on her path towards death.

I wish it was a strange feeling to, on one hand, accept a place as home, yet know with certainty that your complete safety and destruction in that home are illusory. But it’s not strange at all. Homes, like houses, like jobs, like relationships, baths, casinos and trips to the doctor are not wholly safe. And yet, homes, like houses, like jobs, like institutions, like relationships, baths, casinos and trips to the doctor shield us from total destruction.

Belated Disclaimer — I partially expect to lose my job because big mouth black folk, no matter how excellent we are, tend to lose jobs at a higher rate that other folks … or so I need to tell myself. But this recession has forced me to think and remember homes, diversity, charity and disaster a bit differently. Even worse than losing my job as a professor at Vassar would be keeping my job or getting promoted while others around me who were more deserving, more generous, more capable of excellence through work lost theirs. I don’t wanna be unemployed, but even more, we didn’t make it this far to be no one’s charity. Did we?

As a wobbly black boy growing up in Forest, Mississippi, I was warned about looking for homes in other people’s houses and lowering myself to immobile status of charity. I saw how treading in that Backwater Blues was something parents and grandparents spent years prepping their children for. But I did and didn’t understand. My mother, my aunts and most importantly, my Grandma were women who loved, shared and taught through touch. But like most kids, I took the touch and work of people who loved me for granted. 

While my Grandma worked full-time as buttonhole slicer at a chicken plant in Forest, Mississippi, one of her side-hustles was washing clothes for this family called the Mumfords. The first Thursday in August of 1985, when Grandma got off work at the Chicken Plant, we went to Mumfords because Grandma had grown-folks business to take care of. I had heard a lot about the Mumfords but had never been to their house except to pick up and drop off packages with Grandma.

The Mumfords lived right off Highway 35 and I was always amazed at how the houses off of 35 were the only houses in Forest that looked like the houses on Leave it to Beaver and or even What’s Happening. I was and always will be a fat black boy, so like most fat black boys, when I imagined the insides of rich folks’ houses, my senses locked in on the kitchen. I imagined gobbling up hands full of Crunch and Munch in their walk-in pantry and filling up my cup of cold drank with ice that came from the ice dispenser built into the outside of their tar black refrigerator.

Can we earn a shift to present …

Anyway, Grandma gets out of the Impala and tells me she’ll be back in about 20 minutes.  She leaves the key in the ignition and says, “Don’t say nothing to that bad ass Mumford boy if he come out here, you hear me?”

Sprawled out across entire front seat of the Impala, I hear Grandma. I roll up the window, wave bye and go on about my business of flipping from the moaning gospel of WOAD to pleading rhythm and blues of WJMI. Caught in between WOAD and WJMI is a blues station with the slightly less than husky voice of a woman singing, “My house done fell down and I caint live there no mo’.” As much as I like the sound of her voice, that song is something I can listen to with Grandma in the car so I decide not to waste my Grandma-free time on no blues.

I flip to WJMI and watch Grandma go in the door of the Mumfords house. In a second, out comes this boy who looks to be no more than 10 or 11. He opens the door of the driver’s side, and tells me to come out and play.  The boy smells like cut grass and cinnamon with just a pinch of dog shit. That’s how the Mumford’s clothes smell, too, before Grandma washes them.

I get out of the Impala, keep my hands in the pockets of my jean shorts and alternate looks between the cracks in the driveway and the curly hanging moss on the trees. I catch the boy checking out my forehead and then my shag. His look makes me feel like I have two smushed penises growing out of my eye sockets.

“So you Ms. Kat’s Grandson?” the boy says. Before I can say yes, this boy has my hand in his, dragging me to his neighbor’s house. There, he introduces me as “my friend.” He waits for the neighbor to say “for real?” before they both go to ask the parents if they can bring me in the house. I stay out in the driveway imagining pantries full of vanilla wafers, sugary cereal and cold dranks by the case.

They come back out and we walk to another neighbor’s house.

At the new neighbor’s house, the first neighbor, not Johnny Mumford, introduces me to this neighbor as his “new friend.” They all go inside. I don’t want to have to decide whether or not I enter if their parents and grandparents allow me in the house. I know that a decision of yes leads to many backlashes from Grandma, and a decision of no leaves me feeling lonely and lessthan.

They come back out and we walk to another neighbor’s house.

This continues for 2 more houses. In a stupid book, after school special or some desperate academic’s talk, I’d be traumatized by not being allowed to make the decision to enter into these white folk houses on Highway 35, but this is Forest, Mississippi, a place that smells and tastes unlike any stupid book, after school special or pandering academic’s talk I’ve ever experienced. The place tastes like the husky voiced verse from the blues song in the Impala. Even at ten years old, Forest teaches you not to expect white folks’ to do all the way right by you. It also teaches you that the bended notes sneaking under the door of Concord Baptist church or  the sight of too much powder on your Grandma’s chest every morning before she takes the insides out of chickens or the crumbs of fried catfish left after a night of watching Dukes of Hazzard or 5:59 a.m. Christmas morning make you the luckiest people and place in the world.

And/But with all that said, you still wonder what it’s like to walk into a pantry.

After about 15 minutes, all of these kids I’ve never met are back in the driveway of the Mumfords and a kid with a slight harelip asks Johnny Mumford, “So, we can go inside and play Atari after,”  – he points to me –   “… you know?”

Johnny Mumford and his friends ignore the harelip boy’s question. Johnny asks me to take my hands out of my pockets so they can see the lines on my palms. They kept telling me how cool and “balled up” my hair is.

Without saying a word, I walk to back my Grandma’s Impala and get in while Johnny Mumfords and his friends all go in the house to, I imagine, wrestle in a ring lightly coated in cinnamon and turnbuckles dipped in decayed dog shit. Less than a minute after the door closes, Johhny comes back out and opens the Impala’s driver side door again.

“You wanna come in and play?”

“Naw. I’m good,” I think I tell him.

“We want you to use the good controller,” Johnny says and waits for my response. “And you can eat whatever you want. Mama said so. Please.”

Though the “eat whatever you want” part is even more tempting than his strange insistence, I think about what my Grandma will do if I go in that house. “I’m serious,” he keeps talking. “You can even borrow my old Intelevision if you want it.”

Right then, my Grandma comes out. Johnny Mumford asks her if I can come in for a few minutes. In her fakest accent ever, Grandma says, “No Johhny. I sure don’t think Kie can come in this time. Maybe next time, baby.”

When Grandma gets back in the Impala, her eyes are humming bird wings. She tells me that she is never was letting me come back to the damn Mumfords’ again.

“Why?” I ask Grandma. “The boy was nice, even though … do you think white folks smell funny?”

Grandma laughs but ignores my question so I keep pushing. I tell her how no one would let me in their house at first, but how Johnny offered me the best stuff in the house and was even gonna let me use his video game system.

“Why would they keep you out the house,” Grandma asked, “then turn around try to give you everything in the house that ain’t nailed down?”

Grandma and Mama aren’t really alike but they were absolutely the same when it came to the question of why. Unlike most folks, they really wanted to know why and they would wait literally until Christ came strutting back before letting you talk about something that wasn’t why-related.

I honestly can’t remember what I said. I do remember that Grandma interrupted my goofy attempt at exploring why with,  “I don’t care whether it’s a dollar, a house or a job. Don’t ever take nothing from white folks that you ain’t earned.”

“Why?”

“Because you and some nigga down the line is gonna have to pay for what you think you got for free and there ain’t enough money, ain’t enough work in the world to pay for that.”

I didn’t understand much of what Grandma, especially considering how she was all in the Mumford’s house, and spent a number of hours a month washing their dirty clothes and complaining when they didn’t give her extra money around Christmas, but I did understand that she only said white folks, so I asked her if it was okay to take something I didn’t work for from folks who weren’t white.

“You too worried about the color, but I’m worried about the work,” Grandma tells me. “Don’t never be no one’s charity. I’d rather stay in my burnt up house that I worked to burn up than a house somebody give me an’ day of the week. That first house is mines …”

“What about the second one?” I asked her.

“It’s mines too, they’ll tell me, until they think it’s time to pay up. That means it was never mines in the first place. And I can’t work it in like I want to. And they trying to get heaven on my back.”

Can we earn a shift to past …

My Grandma was an American genius, but honestly, at that time I didn’t know it. I knew she was effective (which was way more meaningful than being an American genius) and I knew she talked in the black Southern version of fortune cookies, which confused me even more when what she said and what she did didn’t line up. I kept looking at Grandma as we drove home in the Impala trying to decide whether I would ask her about why she seemed to live a different story than the lesson she was trying to teach me. But I didn’t say anything. I just looked at her face and saw deeper frown lines and shinier eyes than I’d ever seen.

As we got out of the Impala and walked on our porch, Grandma, who was walking behind me, said, “I do what I do so you can know why you make choices you gotta make, Kie.”

“I know,” I said to my Grandma, or to myself. 

Either way, I was lying.

24 years later, in Poughkeepsie, New York, at Vassar College, in midst of a recession where almost everyone I know who hasn’t been fired is worrying about whether they’ll be kicked out of the house tomorrow, I wonder if I finally understand the Back Water Blues …