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If It's Just One More Thing, Why Does It Feel Like the Last?
- Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction
- Michigan State University Press
- Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2004
- pp. 51-55
- 10.1353/fge.2004.0020
- Article
- Additional Information
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Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 6.1 (2004) 51-55
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If It's Just One More Thing, Why Does It Feel Like the Last?
Ellen Morris Prewitt
Mississippi. The word rolls off the tongue: Mis-si-ssip-pi. Except if you're from there, you say, "Mis'sippi." Short. Truncated. Lazy. And even if you've moved to Chicago or Detroit or Hollywood, you're still from Mississippi, and you say it like a Southerner. If and when you say it, which is usually when the conversation lags or no one in the group is paying attention to you, then you trot it out, "I'm from Mississippi. Mis'sippi, we call it." And you use the state so you can be watched for a minute. Listened to. Wondered about.
Mississippi. We go way back.
The day after the vote on Mississippi's state flag—to keep the Confederate emblem or adopt a new flag—I was scanning the radio when a slow-voiced man said, "A bright, sunny spring day. This tune just seems right for the day." Then, an old country tune played with a violin except it was a fiddle making waves of melody. And buried in the middle were three notes, four notes. Skipping, happy notes. Slowly, I realized it was "Dixie" they were playing—a soft, lightly-touched Dixie—and I remembered what I'd forgotten: you're supposed to stand up. Up off the cold concrete bleachers at the stadium, up into the night air with everyone creaking and rising beside you while your mother looked down at you sitting ignorant, appraising you like maybe you weren't her child, looking down and saying, "They're playing Dixie."
And with the memory, the tears started so quick. But as I cried, my brain was wondering why, for I knew what I was taught that night at the stadium was too far way, too many pickup trucks and belligerent flag waves later.
The tune on the radio played itself out.
It was over. [End Page 51]
Mis-si-ssip-pi. Not the flowing river that everyone loves and whose unknown currents we gaze upon to figure out the meaning of the word adventure, but the state. Hot. Wild. Full more of scraggly pine trees than moonlit magnolias, where the real earth isn't the mythical, loamy 50 feet of the Delta but the pale, dry dirt of the rest of the state, the dirt that bakes in the sun until it lifts and separates like sifted flour. The state where my father stood me up—one year old? two? chanting to teach me like he'd taught my sister before me, "Hotty Toddy, gosh-a-mighty, who in the hell are we? Hey! Flim flam, bim bam, Ole Miss, by damn!" and waving my little arms in the air—then dying before I turned four, killed by a train on his way home from work, dead and never coming home again, leaving my memories buried inside things I can't believe in, can't hold onto, can't celebrate.
Scanning the radio again, I came across a man asking, "How do we teach them morals, the way to act, how to behave?" And I thought, put a black woman in charge. So many—usually women who spend their mornings sitting on folding chairs waiting for the Junior League meeting to begin—say, "She raised me and I loved her better than my own mother," but not me. All of the black women in my childhood—stern nurses, demanding maids, relentless cooks—they scared the shit out of me.
All of them except Delores, who never worked for my family, never owed us rent, never needed for charity. Delores Bradford had her own job, stringing rackets at the tennis club. She loved my baby sister Bettie, who crawled in and out of her legs as she worked. One summer, Delores sent her boyfriend to the store to buy baby Bettie a swimsuit, the kind with the middle cut...