would have done her some good. She faked an interest in getting herself baptised whenever she bumped into Father Connolly, but Mother refused to study the catechism and saw no point in a Pope. However, she was proud that we were Catholics for some reason.
Lilian got her best grades in religion and loved going to confession. She even set up an altar in our room using an orange crate that Mack had given her which she draped with a yard of blue velvet donated by Miss Hortense and a replica of the Virgin Mary won in the third-grade spelling bee. Lil’s altar even had a red novena candle on it got from goodness knows where. It sat on a doily that Mother had crocheted, but since Mother was afraid of fires, the candle was never lit. Wanting to contribute something, I gave Lilian a tiny white feather I’d found in church. It had probably fallen off some lady’s hat. It lay upon the little white Spanish missal which Hortense had left behind.
Lilian’s eyes, as dark and round as mother’s, would study that altar until she looked mesmerized. Mother should have noticed that Lilian was going overboard. But maybe she couldn’t think beyond our next bowl of grits.
I used to blush when people back then confused my sister and me, because Lilian’s hair was longer and her skin was shades paler than mine so I considered her pretty.
We both got Daddy’s nose and Mother’s lips, but any fool would have envied my sister her hair, which reached below her shoulders. It irritated Lilian when I reached her size because people mistook us for twins, although looking alike was a bonus when we started singing together.
She’d say, ‘Irene, how come you’re as tall as me?’
But the truth is that I was never tall, Lilian was just short.
It was during our last six months in Camden that I seemed to shoot up. My skin itched like I was growing out of it and Mother would get vexed with me scratching and say, ‘Irene, can’t you set still? I don’t for the life of me know how you got like your Daddy.’ So I’d creep out to play, but downstairs, all I wanted to do was sit in the doorway of Mack’s store and watch the people passing. They rarely smiled back in ’30, because there was nothing to smile about.
The Depression was a snowfall in summer. It fell upon the rich and poor, and froze stout hearts overnight.
Mother said we were lucky to get hominy grits for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and she couldn’t afford an omnibus across town. We saw whole families out begging on Wells Avenue and I always went to bed thinking, ‘Will we be next?’
Lilian used to kneel before her altar and say the rosary with such intensity, believing that could save the world, and one night she told Mother that she wanted to become a Sister of Mercy so that she could help all the beggars. Mother laughed like Lil had told a joke. ‘Things gonna work out. You watch … one of these mornings you, me and Reenie gonna take off for Sippy. I’m thinking about heading for Mamie’s, if she’ll still have me.’
I was working in my copybook and was alarmed by my sister’s violent response. She yelled, ‘I’ll never go back to Sippy!’
Sippy was Mississippi and Lil had always avoided talking about it, but I gathered that something bad had happened there when Mother had taken us to visit her friend Mamie and Mamie’s brother Buster when I was two and a half and my sister was five.
Lil was normally a quiet child so it unnerved me to hear her scream, ‘You promised we’d never go back to Buster’s.’
Mother’s nostrils flared and I knew she was losing her patience. ‘It ain’t Buster’s no more. It’s Mamie’s, and you’ll go where I tell you to!’
That was the early spring of 1930 and I might have jumped to my sister’s defence had I known that this so called ‘aunt’ would try to build her nest in our lives.
While Lil and I were at school on the last day of April, Mother sold Miss Hortense’s things without warning us. To return home to find the sun lighting bare floorboards was shocking.
The place where we normally sat to do our homework, warmed by the afternoon light, was empty, and our voices echoing disturbed me more than my sister’s tears. Lilian drew the school books she was carrying to her chest as if to shield her heart from the bleakness. The room was empty apart from a trunk we’d never seen before and Lilian’s altar upon which Mother had lit the novena candle.
Despite the heavy rings under her eyes Mother looked self-satisfied, producing some dollars from her pocketbook, saying, ‘Good thing I kept Hortense’s dresser polished … It fetched way more than the bed, so I got enough for tickets and then some.’
‘Stealing,’ I said under my breath, staring in horror at the spot where Hortense’s bed had been.
‘We’re moving, huh?’ Lil asked, probably hoping that Mother had landed a job with Mrs Herzfeld’s cousin in Philadelphia.
‘Sippy,’ said Mother.
That nasal Jersey twang of Lilian’s bounced from wall to wall. ‘What about catechism? What about school!’
‘We can’t set ’round here waitin’ to die!’ Mother snarled, rushing to lower the open window so our voices wouldn’t peal into the streets. ‘Do y’all know how tired I am. Holes in my shoes, my pockets. Next there’ll be a hole in my head!’ She was twenty-five and had lost so much weight from our hominy grits diet that her dress hung inches too long and was practically touching the floor.
My sister screamed again, ‘But you promised we’d never go back. And I won’t! Not ever!’
I had been too young to understand anything during that first trip to Mississippi in 1925, but it was easy enough over the years to piece together the tragedy. I heard Mother’s version, Lil’s and, of course, Mamie McMichael’s, who eventually accompanied my sister and I when we sang as a duet. But not one of them could be counted on to tell the truth …
The story began with Mother meeting Mamie in Camden when Mother was pregnant with Lilian and Daddy’d started his long disappearing acts. Visiting a little storefront church for solace, Mother had met Mamie, who was fifteen years her senior and was the guest pianist, on a visiting exchange from Mississippi.
When Daddy discovered that Mamie had coaxed Mother to recite Bible tracts, he accused them both of being bull dykes and forbade Mother to attend any church that wasn’t Catholic.
Mother obeyed but happened to bump into Mamie five years later in ’25 when Daddy was gone again. Mamie’d warned, ‘Bad men get worse. Leave him and take them kids back to Mississippi.’
Mamie had such a soft spot for Mother she assured her that she could earn pocket money there, giving Bible recitations in small churches where Mamie and her brother Buster played. She even paid for Mother’s train journey and ours.
In the many versions of this story I’ve heard, I’ve never found out where Mamie was that day Buster collected us from the station. He arrived with the mule and cart they normally used to transport their piano and Lil, like any five-year-old, was over herself with excitement.
Buster was a handsome, young World-War-I veteran. Dark skinned like Mamie, but way better looking. He bragged about his army experience, but resented that the local reserve board had refused him a disability pension for the headaches he’d suffered from being gassed in France while digging latrines.
The ten acres he shared with Mamie were on the north side of a big cotton plantation, worked by tenants so poor they considered Buster and Mamie to be rich. But the farm was paltry – chickens, turkeys, guinea fowl and a few hogs and goats in pens. Yet Buster expected to impress Mother with the two-room house and outdoor toilet which he’d built to resemble a proper A-frame house.
With Lilian perched on his shoulder when he showed it to