A Halloween and Other Scary Mississippi Things

A HALLOWEEN AND OTHER SCARY MISSISSIPPI THINGS

By

M. J. Gravenmier

For Corinth, and all of her people, past and present, who I love.

… Judy

This is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2022 by M.J. Gravenmier

Cover art © Nancy Lowry Harrison, Muscle Shoals, Alabama

All rights reserved.  Published in the United States by

David's Mississippi Books, Corinth, Mississippi 38834

Imprint: Lulu.com

ISBN 978-1-387-40943-3 (EBook)

1 3 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

First Digital Edition

Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ONE

Before I was eight my life was completely unshadowed by fear.

I lived in a small Mississippi town.

----Tennessee Williams

It didn't matter that my pervert—the one I found inside the Mississippian Picture Show—turned out to be anything but.  Still, it was his fault that I became the first nine year old in all of Bishop, Mississippi to gain access to Lenoar Cole.  That was because I met him in the same September Lenoar came to live with Jolene Blasingame and because Margaret Summerall, my mother, only had to hear the word pervert and I wasn't allowed in the Mississippian anymore.  My Saturdays were instead given to Jolene Blasingame's Academy of Tap and Toe.

On the very next Saturday I found myself at Jolene's front gate, even though I'd spent the previous seven days making it perfectly clear that I had rather put my entire body into a gas chamber than my toe inside a dancing shoe.  Then Jolene creaked open her front door and sitting in a pool of September sunshine was who I suspected was a fellow student—one imported from Ripley or Blue Mountain, or some other place lucky enough not to have its own Academy of Tap and Toe.  But when I asked her Lenoar said she now lived with Jolene.

Tears filled her eyes then, this little Yankee sounding girl's, which didn't surprise me one bit.  Next to being torn from the Mississippian's bosom I could not imagine a worse disaster that living anywhere Jolene was.

There was something wrong with Jolene.  For one thing she was a Blasingame and in Bishop, Mississippi that was enough said.  In the case of her daddy he was a mighty Sioux chief with turkey feathers braided into his long dark hair.  That is until Mr. Tootie Jackson said to him, Harry Lee, you steal one more feather from my prize turkey-birds and I'm having Sausage Eubanks put you under the jail.

After that Mr. Harry Lee absolutely refused to be an Indian anymore.  He unbraided his hair, bought a bottle of peroxide, gave himself a Lilt home permanent, and went to his grave as George Armstrong Custer.

Jolene was just as bad when it came to suffering from delusions of grandeur.  In her case she was considered to be a shoo-in for 1942'S Miss America until she turned her reenactment of Scarlett O'Hara's garden scene into what she said was a Patriotic Tribute.

Mrs. Rachael Simon, Jolene's chaperon, later said that not even Jolene's blue-black hair, her azure eyes, or her magnolia skin were enough to overcome a voice that sounded like a buzz saw trying to rip green timber. Put together with a total ineptness for catching a flaming baton and even homely Miss Idaho got up her hopes.

But Miss Texas was 1942's Miss America.  Jolene Shuffled herself off to Buffalo right out of the top five.

Not that she seemed particularly bothered.  Jolene seemed satisfied to return to Bishop and take her place as beauty consultant at Follitt Longstreet's Drug Store and Confederate Museum.

Being happy to trade in Miss America for sometimes soda jerk  was the Blasingame in her Bishop, Mississippi thought.  Just like when she went to New York to visit her married sister Nora and forgot to come back.

We imagined she was attacking Broadway. But since Jolene was the last of the Bishop Blasingames we didn't really know. Nor did Jolene share her New York activities when almost five years later she abruptly returned and tacked fliers onto our utility poles inviting us to the Academy of Tap and Toe.

There weren't that many takers.  Perhaps because Jolene made her rounds in sequins and rhinestones before six, thus confirming in Bishop, Mississippi's mind that her dance repertoire included the hoochie cooch.

Of course most of this happened either before I was born or was old enough to form an opinion.  It was up to Bishop, Mississippi to tell me that when the once gregarious Jolene returned to her home she didn't receive nor did she call.  What she did do, even in one hundred degree Augusts, was live behind closed doors.

My classmate, Rose Louise Skinner, who I hated but who was lucky enough not to take tap and toe because the Skinners thought dancing was a sin, said the reason Jolene kept her door closed was because she lived on Jackson Street, one street up from the Gin, and anybody that close to the Gin ought to keep themselves shut in.  But when I asked Mother she said that was just silly, some of the best people in Bishop lived in the Gin.

When I thought about it I decided Mother was right.  At least in the Gin they had enough sense to spend one hundred Augusts behind screen doors, a couple with half-moons, a grass-bound flamingo adorned Albert and Etoile Dillingham's door, but mostly with wooden slats.

There didn't seem to be a single reason for Jolene to act like she did.  We had long since stopped calling on Sunday afternoons and in Bishop, Mississippi intentional meanness was so minimal we never thought to try to shut it out.

It was not until the Halloween after Lenoar Cole came to stay that Carl Ray Grisham drove his daddy's Studebaker truck into the Gin.  In so doing he taught us what meanness really was.

After that Halloween all I had to do was close my eyes to see mayhem and true terror and death.  It made me think I would never remember anything else about us, but Daddy said I would, in time.  Getting past hurt was what time was for.

Daddy was right.  Other Halloweens came and went and with them was the memory of spring dusks scented vanilla from Mr. Omar Atwell's honeysuckle vines, summer noon dinner calls.  Winter Saturdays when I was hand-delivered into the care of the Mississippian Picture Show's Claude Pink, placed there by Margaret Summerall as though instead of a nine year old perfectly capable of crossing a street unaided, I was slightly slow.

Such unfair treatment I once pointed out to Claude Pink.  He spent the next thirty minutes on my good fortune to be Margaret Summerall's only child.  Furthermore, in his opinion, I should fall to my knees in thanksgiving for coming from the bone structure I did.  While he continued to list her virtues I wondered if Claude Pink would be such a Margaret Summerall fan if he knew what Mother said about him—that his head looked like a pearl onion glued to the top of a bowling ball.

It was my better part of valor that made me instead begin my Mississippian Saturdays, Hey to you, Claude Pink.

In the Pink soprano he always came back, Hey to you, Kaye Harvey Summerall.

Even for North Mississippi where Precious Pattersons, Betty Grable Nashes and Venus Mays abounded, I thought Mother could have done better than Kaye Harvey and said so once speech was mine.  Mother said it was a perfectly fine name. Harvey came from Daddy's side, she was originally a South Mississippi Kaye.

She was born in Bay St. Louis, which Mother said was as different from Bishop as she imagined Earth was from Mars. Bay St. Louis was a beach-front town.  The only water around Longstreet County was a ditch of a river called the Little Falls.  According to Mother the Little Falls was not much solace when one yearned to see the Gulf of Mexico.

Thinking about Bay St. Louis seemed to make her almost sad, although why I didn't know.  Not when her father was William Lee Kaye, a South Mississippi aristocrat.  So said Mother, in South Mississippi there was no such thing as an aristocrat vulgar enough to have yet recovered from the War Between the States.

Aristocrats were artistic by nature, which was Bay St. Louis's name for the habitually unemployed.  William Lee Kaye's career consisted of drinking bourbon over ice with his fellow members of the Bay St. Louis Society of Mississippi Gentlemen, then retreating to his upstairs sun porch while my grandmother prepared three meals a day for not boarders but paying guests.

My grandfather's genteel behavior was one reason Mother chose James Harvey Summerall when he made application as a Kaye paying guest.  Early on Mother had a definite preference for big, dark-haired, blue-eyed men with a job.

Mother therefore overlooked the fact that James Harvey Summerall was not South Mississippi born but lured to the gulf coast to oversee the Craps game at the Surf 'n Turf Club.  Nor did she consider his occupation was why no permanent lodging was required.

Only Daddy seemed aware that South Mississippians were infamous for having Craps games raided whenever they lost.  Information he kept to himself when twenty-year old Margaret Lee Kaye's green eyes, blonde hair and confusion of soft curves floated down the staircase amid what Mother later claimed was a cloud of peach chiffon.

That was when Daddy turned to my grandmother and amid a low bow shared the years his grandfather spent in the Alabama State Senate, then spoke of a gentleman farmer father who encouraged his son to pursue a God-given talent that told Jim Summerall when to raise, when to call, when to fold.  His mother was a Montgomery Harvey, who, in addition to her service as president of the Baptist League of Mothers, was an Eastern Star.

Six months later Margaret Kaye was Margaret Summerall.  As such she would come to often say, I could not believe anybody would be dumb enough to let your daddy bluff a pair of red aces over three perfectly good kings, or that because of it we were moving to Bishop, Mississippi.  And do you know how he talked me into it?

I certainly do, I wanted to answer.  I could recite the answer word-for-word but I had enough sense to instead say, What?

"'But, Sweetheart, we've won the whole place lock, stock, and barrel and it's got to be on water.  It's called the Silver Lake Casino and Supper Club.'

Lake, my foot! always came next.  Why that red clay wouldn't support a mud puddle dug with a baby spoon.  But how could I know that?

So here we came, I found this house and the next thing I knew you were on the way.  That's when your daddy went crazy.

Mother referred to the fact that before he could be stopped Daddy bought every stuffed toy in a hundred mile radius and this included Memphis.  In 1708 Washburn Street's backyard he had a jungle gym installed Charles Atlas would be proud to call his own.  He hired Ambrosia Dillingham.

Ambrosia Dillingham was maybe four-eleven.  She wore at least a size ten shoe.  Around her head a patina of fuzz tried but failed to shelter her scalp.  Her breasts and backside swooped both downward and out, moving when she walked as if they were somehow unattached to skin that was a darkness so complete it seeped from the irises into the whites of her eyes.  Ambrosia Dillingham was the meanest woman Bishop, Mississippi had.

As such she did not suffer her many grievances in silence.  She made it known early on that Mother's biscuits were heavy, that Mother could not, if her life depended on it, fry an edible egg.  That was why she arrived every morning by seven, she was forced to prepare her own breakfast.  It was the only breakfast she prepared.  Neither did she serve or lift anything heavy.

What she did do was treat dirt as if dirt was Egypt and she Moses.  Ambrosia Dillingham was the cleanest woman Bishop, Mississippi had.

That is unless Bishop counted Mother.  It was just that both women believed they alone possessed the only solution to tackling whatever task was at hand, neither was reticent in voicing her opinion, which meant it was not unusual for Ambrosia to be leaving and never coming back.  Either that or Mother was telling her to never again set her foot inside 1708 Washburn Street.  Not that it mattered.  Life at 1708 Washburn began each morning with the smell of seven o'clock bacon roaming throughout the house.

It was an aroma I soon came to associate with disaster.  For no matter what Mother said Ambrosia knew many babies more beautiful.  My hair was only marginally curly, plus it tended to go from platinum to yellow if she didn't wash it in lemon juice every day.  If I didn't quit sucking my fingers I would be able to eat corn through a picket fence.  I was entirely too thin, TB it looked like to her.  She very much doubted I'd live to start school.

It was her fault my fingers were continually quinine-soaked and I had more TB tests than they handed out at Memphis Tubercular Sanatorium.  Mother received each of Ambrosia Dillingham's pronouncements of doom as gospel, even when I lived to the age Mississippi required I attend Bishop Elementary and beyond, when I was hand-delivered to the Mississippian Picture Show.

An event I looked forward to so eagerly I was not bothered that the Mississippian had no lobby.  There was a hallway with two doors, one marked Ladies, the other Men, a like number of stairways, above one was hand-painted the word Colored.  Smoking labeled the second set of stairs.  There was also a popcorn machine, an eight-by-ten