Chapter 3: Jim Frank's Statue

Dinner that Sunday was one of the family’s favorites: chicken-in-rice, heavily seasoned with black pepper, with succotash as the vegetable and freshly baked buttermilk biscuits. Conversation was largely chitchat, nothing unusual, until dessert was served. Dessert was homemade apple pie, courtesy of Hattie, who suddenly turned the conversation to local gossip.

“I heard the strangest thing about one of the waitresses who works at Cole’s,” she said.

Henry brightened. “Edna McElroy?”

Hattie shot an inquisitive glare his way. “Why, there must be a dozen waitresses out there at some time or another. Why did this Edna McElroy’s name come to you so quickly?” She recharged for a moment. “And why are you so familiar with the last names of waitresses out there? To my recollection they only have their first names on their name tags.”

“I was just guessing, just trying to take part in the conversation.”

“Not everything that goes on at Cole’s involves that McElroy woman and not every conversation needs your taking part in it.”

“Well, who was it about, then?” Seth said.

“Edna McElroy.” Hattie shot one more look at her husband. “I heard that you can hardly get around her trailer because she’s got these stacks and stacks of telephone books.”

“Where’d you hear that?” Grandmother Tillman said.

“From Betty Talmedge. Her husband went out there to unclog a sink for her. He has a maintenance contract with the trailer park. He told Betty that there must be phone books from about two-hundred different cities, all stacked up inside the trailer.”

“I wonder where she got them,” Gabriel’s wife, Mary, asked.

Nate wondered to himself why she had them.

“She has her truck driver friends pick them up for her,” Hattie said, with a slight sideways kick to her jaw and an arch to her eyebrows.

“Why would she collect telephone books?” Grandmother Tillman said.

Nate perked up, hoping the conversation would go in that direction.

“Think she has that many truck driver friends?” Nate’s mother said.

“Gracious,” Hattie said, “I’d think she’s the Teamsters’ calendar girl by this time.”

Everyone at the table laughed.

Grandmother Tillman said, “I’ve always believed that a life of too much partying somehow masks a broken heart. Instead of gossiping about the poor girl, we should feel sorry for her.”

Grandmother Tillman passed a sweeping glance across the entire table, lingering for a moment on her daughter Hattie. “I think the poor thing is pitiful.”

Halfway working on a bite of pie, Henry drawled, “Personally, I think she’s happier ‘n Jim Frank’s nigger.”

Everyone cringed. Hattie’s mouth dropped open.

“Henry Givens,” Grandmother Tillman’s voice was sharp and scolding. “Don’t you ever use that word in my house. There are two words I won’t abide under my roof and that one’s by far the worse.”

“It’s just a phrase. Everybody in the county says it,” Henry said.

That was nearly true. The phrase had been around Davis Corners for as long as that statue had been in Jim Frank’s front yard.

“No disrespect is intended to colored people.” Henry said.

“How can you say no disrespect is intended,” Grandmother Tillman said, “When the word itself is so horribly vulgar and that dreadful statue’s a disgraceful caricature meant to poke fun at a whole race?”

In spite of her fully Southern upbringing, Grandmother Tillman was Davis Corners’ resident liberal, especially on the issue of race. It was not so much a social issue with her as it was just about treating people right. Her husband had been killed in an accident when their children were still young, and Grandmother Tillman had made do as a single mother raising a family and managing a farm. She knew firsthand the hardships of being poor and fighting stereotypes.

“That’s not fair,” Henry said. “You know I don’t harbor a thing against colored people. It’s just an expressive phrase for certain things.”

Everyone at the table knew Henry was in a losing battle and wished he’d drop it before it got any worse. Anyone raised by Grandmother Tillman knew there would be no compromising on this issue. Henry had married into the family decades ago, but obviously hadn’t caught on yet.

“I assure you I don’t know what you mean,” Grandmother Tillman said.

“Well, it just calls to mind that boy so happy to be sitting there fishing in the dirt, without any chance of catching anything,” Henry said. “If you mean it in a nice way, it means someone is making the best out of a bad situation. In an ugly way, it means they’re too stupid to know any better.”

“You can say something else,” Grandmother Tillman said. “You can say ‘happier than a pig in mud’.”

“But that statue of the boy fishing in the dirt is such a visual metaphor,” Henry said. He hoped the intellectual sound of ‘visual metaphor’ would add some legitimacy to his argument.

“If you must refer to that wretched statue, say ‘happier than Jim Frank’s lad’ or something like that.”

“It wouldn’t be as good.” Henry was almost pouting.

“I don’t see why not,” Grandmother Tillman said, in a tone that meant the subject was closed.

“It just doesn’t smack,” Nate said mostly to himself, just barely loud enough for anybody to hear. In the silence following Grandmother Tillman’s last remark, however, everybody did.

The whole family looked at him as if he were the deaf-mute child who had just spoken for the first time. Sylvia’s mouth dropped open this time. She was mortified by her son’s outspoken behavior.

“Excuse me?” Grandmother Tillman said.

Nate was as surprised as everyone else by his statement. He realized, though, that there was no turning back now, so he continued.

“Just doesn’t smack. The original phrase smacks of something. I don’t know how to explain it, but saying ‘happier than Jim Frank’s lad’ doesn’t smack. It’d be like taking the black pepper out of the chicken-in-rice, it just wouldn’t smack.”

“Fine,” Grandmother Tillman said. She was not used to having her language corrected by anyone, certainly not by a child. “What would you say?”

After a long pause, Nate shrugged and said, “I guess I’d just leave it at happier ‘n Jim Frank’s nigger.”

Grandmother Tillman’s face went white with rage. She reached out with the long serving spoon and rapped first Nate and then Henry on the knuckles. “There,” she said to Henry, “You’ve got the children saying it in my house.”

The rap caught Henry by surprise. “Shit!” he said.

That was the other word Grandmother Tillman wouldn’t abide. A general melee broke out that consisted of Grandmother Tillman beating her son-in-law with the spoon, while Sylvia grabbed Nate by his ear.

“I’ll give you something that smacks,” Sylvia kept saying to her son.

Meanwhile the other cousins were herded into their cars and taken home.

During the ride back to town, Sylvia Williams went on, asking Nate whatever had possessed him to talk like that to his grandmother, and did he have any idea how embarrassed she was. All the chewing-outs Nate ever got from his mother eventually came back to that one theme: how she’d been made to look bad in front of others. Nate’s father was characteristically silent.

Nate himself wondered what had gotten into him. Tonight was probably only the second time in his life he had ever said that word, and the first time had gotten him royally spanked. Grandmother Tillman had ingrained a revulsion for that word in her children and her grandchildren. Obviously, she had not been as effective with her son-in-law Henry. To Nate, though, it just didn’t seem so bad in the context of Jim Frank’s statue, and that’s why he had come to his Uncle Henry’s defense. The way he saw it, the phrase dealt only with Jim Frank’s statue, not with black people in general.

A duplicate version of the same conversation was occurring in the yellow Cadillac.

“I can’t believe you said that word in my mother’s house,” Hattie said.

“Which one?” Henry felt a bump rising on his head where Grandmother Tillman had landed a particularly hard knock with the spoon.

“Either. You can save that trash talk for when you go to the junkyard and smoke cigarettes and drink beer.” Hattie glared at Henry.

“It’s just a phrase. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“We heard your explanation at dinner. Maybe that waitress at Cole’s finds that kind of talk cute, but in my family, we find it rude and vulgar.”

Henry kept quiet. Not only was he in the doghouse, this one was split-level. On one level was the language, on another was Miss Edna. It was times like these that made him long for a dis-sanctuary.

Nate got home and retreated to his room. As he lay in bed, he thought about Grandmother Tillman pointing a gun at Ricky Thornton. Before witnessing her confrontation with his Uncle Henry at the dinner table, Nate would’ve said that Grandmother Tillman had obviously been bluffing with the gun that day. He had seen an anger and resolve in her eyes tonight, though, the same that Ricky Thornton must have seen, and was now willing to bet that she’d have shot him.

Chapter 4

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Copyright (C) 2009 Michael A. Hughes