Catfish Read online

  He looked directly into my eyes when he spoke. I’d never seen eyes so dark, like a never-ending dark hole, and I thought of how Mama said if we dug a hole deep enough we would reach China. I wondered whether the depths of his eyes reached somewhere across the ocean.

  “After I gets the meat out the shell, I’m gonna cut her in little squares. Then I’m gonna dip them squares in corn meal and fry them in some boiling hot lard.”

  I looked down and saw him slide his outstretched hand under the handle of the bucket. The pinkness glared up at me. My mouth opened in surprise. How could one side of his hand be so dark and the other so light?

  I loosened my grip and the handle fell into his palm.

  It was as if he had two hands on each arm, one so dark it could have been dipped in chocolate, the other, pinkish white, the same color as mine. I let my arms drop to my sides and I lifted my eyes to look at him.

  “Is your name really Catfish?” I asked.

  “Sure is.” He laughed.

  “That’s not a real name,” I said.

  “It’s my nickname. You got a nickname?”

  “No. My name is Susie.”

  “Is Susie short for Susanna?” he asked.

  “How did you know that?”

  “Well, if it is, then Susie’s a nickname,” he said.

  I thought about that a moment.

  “Well, then, is Catfish short for Cadillac?”

  He set the bucket on the road, held his belly, and bent forward. He laughed and laughed and, finally, I started to laugh, too. I wasn’t aware of anyone else in the world. It was just me and Catfish.

  Finally, when we got hold of ourselves, he picked up the bucket.

  “Me and my family going to have us a good supper tonight, us,” he said. “We shore will!” Smooth, creamy, dripping in syrup.

  Oh, I thought. He has a family. Does he have children, grandchildren? I wondered how his touch might feel to a child, like me. Was it tender and loving like Tootsie’s or was it harsh and rough like Daddy’s? For some reason, I had to know the answer. I reached my hand up in a gesture that meant I wanted to shake his. I think he was shocked. He looked from side to side, as if to see if someone might be watching. He shifted the bucket from his right hand to his left and reached forward to fold my tiny hand into his. I looked at the long, dark hand folded around the end of my arm. It felt soft and gentle and kind. I didn’t want him to let go. I wondered, when he washed his hands, whether they got lighter on the tops, or whether they stayed dark no matter how hard he scrubbed.

  To a seven-year-old white girl in 1958 a decade before integration, in a small town in the Deep South, Catfish was an oddity. His eyes were as deep as the ocean, his voice, soothing as molasses; his touch like a gentle breeze; and his laugh, as hearty as gumbo. If that wasn’t enough, his hands! Chocolate on one side, cotton candy on the other.

  I watched Catfish march down South Jefferson Street towards the Quarters, legs lifted high, knees bent as he sang, “When the Saints Go Marching In.” He swung his arms, the heavy bucket in one hand as light to his touch as if it was filled with air. I stood in the street until long after he crossed Gravier Road and disappeared into the unknown.

  My brothers were speechless as they stood in our front yard on the other side of the deep ditch and I was planted to the pavement watching Catfish march off.

  *

  Tootsie didn’t come to work on Tuesday, the day after the Klan visit. When she got to work Wednesday, I told her what happened at our house. That’s when I found out the Klan went to the Quarters, too.

  “We spent all day yesterday scrubbing the black paint off the front of our house,” I told Tootsie. “It said, ‘N____r Lovers.’” Tootsie didn’t react, she seemed not to hear me, like her mind was far, far away.

  Our lawn was still torn up—tire tracks and hoof prints rutted the ground and most of the St. Augustine grass was gone. The atmosphere was overcast with a smoky residue that seemed to sit in the air, unmoving. No birds or butterflies, not even a bumble bee, flitted through my mother’s prized camellia bushes and rose garden in front of the high front porch.

  But Tootsie said it was nothing like the mess in the Quarters where the outhouse and one of the cabins was burned to the ground and her sister, Jesse’s house was scorched with holes in the roof and all along one side. She said that her daughter, Marianne, was home from school with stitches across her pretty face, black eyes and a broken nose.

  “And those white men, well they did things to her she most likely never forget,” Tootsie whispered to me. “I wish it could have been me, instead.”

  Mama was stomping mad that day and cursed Daddy under her breath. Tootsie just listened, as usual.

  “I told him not to be friends with that Negro who owns the Esso station,” Mama said. “Bob says that colored man is a savvy business person. I can’t believe we let those people own businesses. Why, do you know Bob even has a charge account with that man and told me to go there for gas and charge it?”

  Mama didn’t expect an answer. She spouted off like that from time-to-time knowing Tootsie wouldn’t dare repeat what she said. In fact, Tootsie knew Mama didn’t want or expect a comment—she was a non-person, like a statue Mama could shout at and take her frustrations against. All the white ladies in Jean Ville did that, talked to their help about their problems and let their anger out on them. They had to have someone. Tootsie washed dishes while Mama paced behind her, shouting and complaining.

  “I won’t do it. If he wants my car filled up there, he’ll have to take it himself.”

  When Tootsie arrived at work that morning she asked Mama for an advance on her pay, only the two dollars for the two days she’d worked so far that week.

  “No,” Mama yelled. “I will not loan you money. As soon as I start to loan you money and you don’t pay it back, we’ll have problems.”

  “But, Miss Anne,” Tootsie said. There were tears in her eyes. “It’s my baby’s 13th birthday. I got nothing to give her, and she been through so much.”

  “You should have thought of that ahead of time and saved up. I said, ‘No!’ Now don’t ask again.”

  When I got home from school that afternoon Tootsie was still upset. I knew she would try to pull my dad aside when he got back from work and ask him for money, but all hell would break loose, because Mama was bound to overhear or find out some way.

  Tootsie was doing the ironing. She took the wet sheets from the washer after the spin cycle and, one at a time, slowly lowered them into the vat of starch and warm water on the back porch. She rung them out with her strong, brown hands and hung them over the line she stretched across the opening under the low roof. She set a dirty sheet under the line to catch the drippings that seeped down, no matter how hard she squeezed and pressed her hands to get all the moisture out. The ironing board was on the porch and it was hot outside as she pushed the electric iron over the damp sheets. The warm breeze did not dry the beads of perspiration that gathered on Tootsie’s forehead before they could drain into her eyes.

  Tootsie liked to iron. It was the one time of day when she had relative peace. Mama would lie down for a nap with the baby and the rest of us older ones were either playing outside or still at school. She said when she ironed at her house she watched a black and white television set my Daddy had given her. I wasn’t supposed to know about the TV but I found out when I overheard her thanking Daddy for it.

  At our house, she daydreamed when she ironed, or she just stood with her thoughts.

  “I wants to make this day special for my girl,” she whispered to me when I climbed the steps onto the back porch, trying to escape the heat and humidity that had chased me all day. “She been through so much. She be thirteen today.”

  I followed Tootsie to the linen closet where she stacked the fresh-ironed sheets and pillow cases and mumbled about how she wanted to have ice cream and a chocolate cake and lots of presents all wrapped up in shiny paper so Marian
ne’s special day could be long—long enough to unwrap every trinket she would buy at Mack’s Five and Dime after work, if only she had a few dollars. She knew Mama was right, she should have saved and shopped and baked before today, but the Klan had messed up everything.

  I thought about my own birthdays. I couldn’t remember ever having a birthday party with friends and cake and lots of presents to unwrap. When my grandmother came to visit she brought a cake and everyone would sing happy birthday to me at the supper table and we’d have cake for dessert. Most years, when Grandy wasn’t visiting, I didn’t have a celebration because Mama said my October birthday was too close to Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas—I could celebrate on one of those holidays. Anyway, I never liked cake or ice cream and that became Mama’s excuse.

  “How can I give you a party without cake and ice cream. It just doesn’t work, Susanna Christine.” She also said she had too many kids to remember everyone’s birthday. But the boys had parties and there had been a big bash on Sissy’s second birthday, the previous year. Mama’s friends came with their children for cake and games and little bags of trinkets and bubble gum to take home with them.

  Mama was a gracious hostess. She had lots of friends who loved her and competed for her attention. I couldn’t count the number of weekend dinner parties she and Daddy gave where Tootsie was hired to serve and clean until the wee hours of the mornings. Mama loved to entertain the Jean Ville doctors, lawyers and businessmen and their wives. All the women wore mink coats in the winter, even though Louisiana didn’t have much cold weather.

  Morehouse Samuels, the janitor at the bank where my daddy worked, would open the door and hang and fetch coats all evening, then he’d help Tootsie in the kitchen, because she couldn’t go home until everything was in order for the next day. I figured Morehouse was sweet on Tootsie and told her so, but Tootsie said she had no time for the likes of him.

  When Tootsie worked a party, Daddy paid her five dollars and there were often arguments the next day, Mama yelling that he paid Tootsie too much.

  “She’s going to expect that kind of pay every week,” Mama would scream. “I pay her a dollar a day, you can’t pay her five dollars for one night.”

  “I earn the money. I’ll decide how to spend it,” Daddy would always say, which made Mama fiery mad. Then he’d leave, slamming the back door behind him. I tried to stay out of Mama’s way on those days.

  Daddy was a CPA with aspirations of being mayor, then a senator. He struggled to build his practice until he ran for Louisiana Insurance Commissioner and got to know Governor Earl Long in the 1950’s and 60’s. Although Daddy was not on Long’s ticket, the governor took a liking to the smart, young, energetic investment banker and hired him as his personal accountant and investment counselor. That job, which took Daddy to Baton Rouge most weekdays, didn’t increase his income by much, but the connections he established catapulted his career. He became a lobbyist and a number of large oil companies and financial institutions began to invest with him and hired him to review their books and train their accounting departments. That’s when he started to accumulate wealth and was how we could afford to live in the biggest house in Jean Ville.

  That was also when he became interested in politics. He constantly preached to us kids about how his reputation was important and that we should all be careful what we said and did. Any mistakes we made could reflect negatively on him and cause him to lose votes.

  The afternoon of Tootsie’s daughter’s birthday I shut myself in my room and dug my piggy bank out of the bottom drawer of my dresser, from under my seldom worn sweaters. It wasn’t actually a pig, it looked like a treasure chest that didn’t open on top. It had a secret slot on the bottom that had to be opened with a tiny key that I kept in a sock in my underwear drawer.

  I counted five dollars in Quarters, nickels and pennies but saved the silver dimes as they were good-luck. I found an old, blue fuzzy sock and put the coins in it, pulled the top up and tied it in a knot, then walked down the hall towards the back door. Without so much as a glance or a word, I dropped the sock filled with coins into the big pocket on the front of Tootsie’s apron. She didn’t look at me but a private understanding passed between us.

  Tootsie would finger the weighty package and feel the wool sock and her plump fingers would massage what felt like dozens of coins of different sizes. I knew what she was thinking, now Marianne can have that birthday party.

  Chapter Two

  Catfish /Slave Auction

  1963

  TOOTSIE USED TO TELL me I had goodness in me, but she also accused me of being stubborn and not holding my tongue—which got me in a lot of trouble. And she took up for Will and Robby, my two younger brothers, because she said I was, bossy.

  My parents called me, Troublemaker. Maybe they were right. After all, I did cause a lot of trouble. What is it they say? “Small children, small problems—big children ...?” I guess that would describe me, beginning with my relationship with Catfish.

  After I gave him the turtle when I was little, Catfish would stop in front of our house in the afternoons on his way home from work if I was in the front yard. He would dance and whistle and, sometimes, play his harmonica. And we would talk across the ditch.

  When I was eleven, and we moved to the big house on the corner of South Jefferson and Marble Avenue we were now three long blocks from Gravier Road and the Quarters on the other side. My dream to visit Catfish someday seemed dashed by distance.

  The first week after we moved, I stood at the corner, in the blazing South Louisiana heat and humidity, and waited for Catfish. I was afraid he wouldn’t find me at the new house, and I had come to depend on his visits. You could say I loved him like a grandfather but I’m not sure how it feels to love a grandfather, since I’d never had one—but I knew how it felt to love Catfish.

  I waved at him as he skipped on the hot pavement under the canopy of moss-draped live oaks.

  “Hey, Catfish,” I called out. “Here I am. We moved.”

  “Oh, Chere, you’re in the big house now. This the biggest house in Jean Ville.”

  “I know. It’s too big. And this yard is a ten-acre park. I was afraid you wouldn’t know where to find me.”

  We smiled at each other, his toothy grin caused his huge lips to spread across the entire bottom half of his face and made his whole expression light up.

  Most days I waited alone in the expansive front yard that met the pavement seamlessly with no ditch to divide it from the street like the old house. Mama didn’t know I talked with him. She thought he stopped to entertain the neighborhood children, which, to Mama, was what people like Catfish should do for white folks—act like clowns and make fools of themselves. Only I didn’t see him that way. And in the new house, set so far from the street, Mama couldn’t see his tall, dark figure deep in conversation with me.

  We chatted like old friends. He taught me how to listen for birds singing and tweeting to each other and to hear the buzzing of bees and butterflies that made harmonic music with other insects like crickets and fireflies. He explained how to inhale deeply to appreciate the wondrous smells of camellias and pecans and fresh-cut grass. He made me see the world as big and beautiful, filled with goodness, something I didn’t know much about inside the walls of the big house.

  “How you doin, Missy?” he always asked when he saw me. Or he called me, “Chere,” which sounded like, “Sha,” and meant, “Dear One,” in Cajun French.

  “I’m great, Catfish. I got an A in Algebra this week.”

  “You a smart girl, you.”

  “And you? How was work today?”

  “Oh, Missy, we kilt so many hogs at the slaughterhouse today I done loss count. An my ole back feel it, too.”

  As I got older and activities after school kept me from meeting Catfish every day, the visits became less frequent and I often wondered whether he would forget me. I tried to wait for him on Fridays, since I didn’t have band practice before the
seven o’clock football games in the fall or softball practice before weekend games in the spring.

  The fall I turned thirteen, about four months after the Klan visit, I realized I hadn’t seen Catfish in a month or more. I stood on the corner every afternoon after school for two weeks and waited, but Catfish didn’t skip by. I panicked and didn’t know who I could ask about him. I finally decided to ask Tootsie if she knew Catfish, and whether she could find out where he was, if he was alright. I pulled Tootsie aside one Friday afternoon.

  That’s when Tootsie told me that Catfish was her daddy. I was shocked.

  “Why, in all the years you knew I waited for Catfish and talked to him, you never told me you were his daughter?” I whispered. Tootsie looked down and twisted the bottom of her apron with both hands. Small beads of perspiration gathered on her forehead.

  “You know we not supposed to talk about our families on the job, Honey-Chile.” Tootsie whispered, a hint of a sob in her voice. What she meant was that she had to follow what the white women in Jean Ville called, help-code, a set of implied rules the help knew existed, but no one ever talked about. One of those rules was that the hired help didn’t discuss their personal lives with the white children in their care.

  I signaled for Tootsie to follow me. We walked down the long hall that divided the huge antebellum house right down the middle. Three enormous bedrooms and bathrooms were on the left side of the hall, the living, dining, kitchen, breakfast room and parlor on the other. A semi-circular staircase just inside the front door reached upward to a landing where a U-shaped gallery wrapped around three sides of the upstairs with doors on each side that led to more bedrooms, a study, a playroom, a nursery and several bathrooms. The boys’ bedrooms were upstairs, mine was downstairs all the way at the end of the hall near the front door.

  Mama was busy in the kitchen at the back of the house, on the other side of the hall. Tootsie and I went into my bedroom, shut the door and sat on the edge of my bed, side by side.