Not On My TV

They fought like Archie and Edith Bunker, my Mamaw and Papaw did, and even had the matching armchairs with a little wooden table separating them that held their whisky and 7-ups at night, and his Kent cigarettes and the TV Guide. I never understood how two people who fought and cussed the way they did could be discovered by me, at 7 or 8 years old in my Strawberry Shortcake nightie as the coffee brewed and the morning still hung heavy and gray, to be dancing together in the early morning hours to George Jones or Freddy Fender, his hand on her back, hers at his collar, each gazing off over one another’s shoulders. Watching them gave me feelings of confusion, sadness, hopefulness, security, ending. I would peek around the edge of the utility room doorway and smell the combined odors of his cigarette smoke and hair pomade, and her Ponds cold cream and Tussy deodorant, and make sure that they couldn’t see me watching them dance. I don’t know why it seemed forbidden, but it did, and after a time I’d back away slowly and duck back into the still warm covers of the back bedroom and drift back into sleep, to awaken later when the sun was up and the smell of the Boise Southern Cascade paper mill high in the air outside. They lived in town in those days, while we dwelt in the country of a tiny town named DeRidder, in the proud Southern state of Louisiana. We had followed them from Galveston, Texas in 1976 where Papaw, as we called my grandfather, had lived about 10 other lives before I was born, among them a soldier in the US Navy, a politician, a shopkeeper and later a school crossing guard. I came into his life during the shopkeeper phase, and I couldn’t tell you the name of the store he ran but I could tell you that it was one of my favorite places in the world and that my earliest memories are the gumball machines that sat at the screen door entrance that had a little string of bells that tinkled whenever someone came in or went out. I was small enough to sit under the bank of machines and and play like they were a car and the nearly empty glass jars my windshield. I drove around the interstates and country roads of the only place I’d ever been and saw people and places and creatures that existed only in my limited imagination. I shared this small space behind the wheel with dead roaches, dust bunnies and the occasional mouse. From my seat and through my windshield, I could see Papaw at the wooden counter that ran the length of the store reading the newspaper and dealing with the occasional customer that came in for the .50 cent packs of Marlboros and a free book of matches. I always was a little in awe of these tall and scruffy types that bought Marlboros because everyone knew that the Marlboro Man on the billboard was a Man’s Man, tough as nails and a little bit scary. Sometimes these men disappeared into the black, smoky confines of a small bar that was attached to the store that I was strictly forbidden to get within 10 feet of, its darkly ominous doorway that hid a mysterious and otherworldly place secured behind two swinging doors just like in the old west movies that Papaw liked to watch. I’d creep past that doorway, hunched over and tiptoeing, afraid of what might emerge from that forbidden room, and cringe at the occasional breaking of glass and odd drunken shouts that would sometimes drift out into the store. Most of the time all was quiet, except for Papaw reading out loud the sports scores of his favorite football and baseball teams and him pounding his fist on the counter, muttering under his breath about the n***** and how they had caused his team to lose (again) and how they had somehow not only done that but were also the cause of everything that was wrong in the good ol’ US of A. He would work himself up from a mutter to a bellow especially when he got to the parts about the prices of things, the state of the Armed Forces and the fact that if they had only stayed in their place the world wouldn’t be going to hell in a hand-basket. I was never quite sure what a hand-basket was (but I imagined mama’s wicker picnic basket with the red gingham lining and couldn’t for the life of me figure out how the world would fit in one and how it would get to hell. Would somebody take it there?) More confusing to me was exactly what a n***** was and why did they want to cause my Papaw to be so unhappy. I pictured them in my mind as the little one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eaters that I had a 12-inch Tom T. Hall record about, and as having qualities similar to the Tasmanian Devil, slobbering and talking a gibberish language that nobody could understand. I certainly never wanted to meet one and prayed fervently that one never came into my Papaw’s store because that would have meant it was a Cold Day in Hell, or that they would be stepping Over His Dead Body, or that Pigs Would be Flying, none of which I was eager to experience. It was not until a shameful amount of time later that I would learn that a n***** was simply a black man, or a colored as my Mamaw more politely termed it. Only then did things really get confusing. I knew some colored kids at church and their parents and I looked but I never saw them doing anything but breathing and laughing and minding their own business just like everyone else did. They talked a little different than us, and their hair was different and sometimes they smelled a little different but other than that I couldn’t for the life of me understand how they messed up the Cowboys game, or made prices higher or took all the jobs or caused soldiers to die. Most of the black people I knew didn’t even have jobs, didn’t play football and weren’t soldiers at all and I felt sorry for them having my Papaw so mad at them all the time when I couldn’t see where they’d done a thing wrong. They had funner games than we did, and their food tasted better and they had music that made you want to jump around and clap your hands and stomp your feet and move your hips. They laughed more and they had funnier TV shows than we did, and I felt more at home with them in their little shotgun houses that were too warm in the wintertime and cool and breezy in the summer, than I ever did anywhere else. We would go visiting church friends sometimes and I lamented the fact that I couldn’t share with my grandparents the fun we had feeling each others hair and combing it and all us kids putting all our arms together to see who was blacker and who was whiter. I was always the whitest and it made me sad and ashamed. I wanted to tell him how Sister Johnson used fatback and ham to flavor her turnip greens and how Brother Jones said the pork roast tasted better with the chitlins on the side, but I tried that once and my Mamaw got tight-lipped and turned white(er) and Papaw turned such an alarming shade of reddish-purple that even I knew to run while I still could. My sisters and I were expressly forbidden, under threat of eternal Apostolic damnation and Southern ancestral vengeance (and the possibility of being called, God forbid, a “n***** lover”) to “watch any n***** shows on his goddamn TV” and we hated to have channel change duty as would be forced to flip past the insanely hilarious doings of George and Weezy Jefferson and Cliff and Claire Huxtable. We’d switch over to his boring old Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, or to the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw or another never-ending football game with an air of longing, pulled faces and watery sighs which did not escape his notice. Muttering under our breath about never getting to watch the funniest shows were met with a bellowed “Not on MY goddamn TV, little girl!” from no matter where he was in the house. “Ain’t no grandbaby of MINE watching NO N***** SHOWS ON MY TV!” And that was the end of that argument. It was just the way it was, a way that we accepted and only became an issue when I was grown and old enough to know that not everyone in the world felt the way my grandparents did. And my papaw was a paradoxical man - full of wrath and vengeance at my grandmother and at the world in general, but I loved him, I adored him as a matter of fact, and when he was dying I would be the last person he spoke to. He loved all animals and he loved all small children, strangely enough their color didn’t seem to matter to him. In his twilight years he worked as a school crossing guard assisting kindergartners off and onto the busses, and I used to wonder at what age the little “pickaninnies” (as he sometimes called them) “little ol’ black gal was the cutest little thang, I tell ya...” “that little n***** young’un was smarter’n a whip...” at what age they became a person in their own right in his mind that was no longer cute and smart but was capable of causing all the ills to a whole country. I never understood it. Papaw was a short little bandy legged man, shorter than my Mamaw, but he was the largest figure in my life for so much of my life. Mamaw was not an easy person to know, her reserved ways and nit-pickyness kept me distant from her for most of my life. But Papaw, it was him that taught me to waltz while swirling me around the living room with me standing on his toes, and he that snuck pieces of hard ribbon candy to me in his pockets and he that made me buttered bread with forbidden store bought butter and white bread that pulled apart under the knife. It was him that let me sip his Old Granddad whisky and 7-up and let me pick the sticky red maraschino cherries off the ham. I would stand at his shoulder as he carved the Sunday roast beef and he would let me pick little pieces out of the rich gravy, and tell me not to tell my Mamaw because she would tell me to stop haggling the ham (even if it was beef) He would call my best friend “Tara the Terrible” and make her laugh and every night I would call into town on 463-**** and he would act like he didn’t know who I was and only when I had collapsed into fits of giggles would he admit that yes, he did in fact have a favorite grand-daughter named Angela and was I sure I was her? And if so would I like him to read me the TV Guide shows that were coming on that night? I loved my Papaw. When I left the USA at the age of 12 for the caribbean I wouldn’t see him again until I was 18 years old. By that time I had avoided his calls for about 2 years as I was in a relationship with a black man, however when I got pregnant at 17 I knew I could avoid him no longer and would have to face him. MY biggest fear was that my favorite person in the world would not accept my mixed race baby, and it broke my heart to imagine what his reaction might be to me. It was disappointment and disgust I was afraid of seeing on his face, but the face that met me on the other side of his glass door when we went home for a visit was impassive and hard to read, and barely even looked at me, but rather studied the 6 month old chubby brown baby I carried in my arms. After what seemed an impossible length of time when I thought I would start bawling, he opened the door to us and met my tear-filled eyes with his rheumy ones. “Well now. I see you went and had ya-self a little n***** baby.” It was a statement of fact without judgment and all I could do was nod, as I didn’t trust myself to speak. He looked him over another good 2 or 3 minutes and finally his face split into an unimaginable grin. “Cute lil ol’ thing, ain’t he? I reckon he’ll do.” From that moment until they laid my Papaw to rest I never heard him say the N word again. At least not around me, he didn’t. That auspicious beginning was one of only two times he would meet my sweet boy Jared, but for that whole month I don’t think he put that baby down for more than a few minutes at a time. And Jared had an inexplicably close bond with his great-grandfather and never wanted to be far from him, either. He’s been dead now for 26 years but I can still smell the Ben-Gay, the Bryll Creme, the Old Spice aftershave, hear the tenor of his voice, and I can still see him with Jared on his shoulder in the heavy gray morning light, just the two of them, dancing to George Jones.