THE WEEKEND READ

MY BROTHER AND I REMEMBER OUR STOUT AND STALWART AUNT LOLA. HER WARM WELCOME ANYTIME WE WALKED OVER TO VISIT HER WAS JUST ANOTHER PART OF HER PRACTICALITY. WE NEEDED TO BE A PART OF IT, TOO.

(Above: Aunt Lola. Drawing by Dr. J. Kim Sessums)

When my brother, Dr. J. Kim Sessums, had his first grandchild recently, his son Dr. Price Sessums, asked him if he would write down stories of his childhood and his later life as a doctor and a painter and sculptor so that Price could give them to his own son, Neal Tucker, to understand the narrative he had been born into. Yesterday, Kim sent me a lovely story he’d written about why his visits to our Aunt Lola, who lived just own the Mississippi country road from us, meant so much to him.

We had moved to that little spot in the Mississippi countryside when he and my sister and I were orphaned by the consecutive deaths of our parents. Our father was killed in a car accident in August of 1963. Our mother died of esophageal cancer in November of 1964. We were taken in by her parents. I was eight. Kim was six. Karole was four. We called our grandparents Mom and Pop. They were already in their 60s and had only just retired when we three small children arrived bringing with us our Southern gothic narratives of tragedy and lost innocence and the resilience being discovered to replace it. . All five of us tried to celebrate Christmas that next month.

I think our mother really had died of a broken heart. I was actually worried that Mom and Pop were going to die of their own deep sadness at the tragedies of our childhoods, a sadness so deep it seemed as much molecular as emotional. We learned to sit in rooms with them as they cried and never mention it. We’d just go on with what we were doing - watching TV or eating and reading or playing a board game. That noise that sadness makes - barely noticeable but maddening like a tap barely left on somewhere in the house - was the soundtrack of our childhood. Or maybe Mom and Pop were just exhausted and the only way they could rest was to have to sit down because they were crying.

It is only since I have been in my own 60’s that I have really comprehended the sacrifice they made to raise a second family after one of their three daughters from their first one had died; it was not only an act of love, but of service. The last time I saw them cry was when I drove off with a friend in a rented Ryder Truck when I was 19 to move to New York City to attend Juilliard’s Drama Division. It took a lot of love for them to say goodbye to me that day. I have only recently realized just how much. There was an element of escaping Mississippi and such a childhood, but I had been planning to move to New York City since I was 6 and my parents were still alive. So I wasn’t fleeing from tragedy even though I was silencing the soundtrack of sadness. I know it was brave of me to do that at 19 but I couldn’t have been that brave if Mom and Pop hadn’t instilled such bravery in me between their bouts of tears. I will always be grateful for their bravely taking us in and bravely letting me go.

A less drastic way of silencing the soundtrack of sadness was to walk down the Mississippi country road where we lived to visit Pop’s sister, Aunt Lola. Lola carried what femininity she had as if she were a locomotive and it were the cargo she was delivering to the man who wanted it, which I assumed was her husband, Uncle Benny. He was nothing but the depot, as far as she was concerned, where she had to slow down and chug to a scheduled stop. Lola had a raspy voice and her laugh was a continuation of that rasp as a chortle. She was usually wearing one of her beltless softly flower-patterned house dresses she whipped up herself. She never once put a rinse in her hair like Mom and all the other old gray-haired women who surrounded me in my childhood did, turning their permanents into preferred shades of periwinkle. Lola’s sensibly short-cropped hair - another aspect of her practicality - retained it natural color, a tawny combination of grays and browns and saffrons that decades of the Mississippi sun had woven together. It was something her son, Jim, insisted on. Jim was an interior decorator and I asked her after he had redone her living room if he had based the color scheme on the subtle shades of her hair. Her rasp chose to chortle and she said she didn’t think so but that he had once taken a clipping of her hair back to Dallas with him because he was getting a rug woven in those colors for a client.

Jim was gay. Most Christmases he brought home one or two of his gay friends. Mom and Lola would have conversations about Jim that began more and more to include me. “Thi'un has more Jim in him that Jim does,” Mom said one afternoon pointing at me where I sat at the dining table because I had been included in their coffee and cake afternoons since I had moved in and proved I could keep up with a conversation. In some ways my future as a writer specializing in profiles and cover stories had its precocious start asking questions - the right ones along with the impertinent ones - there at that dining table with Mom and Lola or inserting the right comment if the need were a serious one but also if a bit of levity were needed. I learned about the rhythm and flow of a conversation and how to conduct one without others being aware I was holding the baton. Lola and Mom could not have been more different in demeanor so sitting with them also taught me that differences are not a deterrent to conversation but is what often gives one depth. Sitting with them - it was one of the few things I looked forward to as a child - not only gave me the skills to put to use later as an interviewer but it also further began a lifetime of sitting inside and laughing with the ladies. Before my father was killed in his car accident, he had happened upon me sitting inside with my mother and her best friend, Patsy. I was being entertaining and making them laugh. I thought he was going to be proud of me for that. But all he said later was, “Must you sit inside and laugh with the ladies?” Yes. I must.

Visiting Aunt Lola when I was alone and at her house, wasn’t really about being around laughter. It was about not being around crying. It was about a kind of relief. Kim explains it better than I. Below is what he wrote about Aunt Lola for his grandson, Neal Tucker Sessums.

SANCTUARY

Aunt Lola was a good talker.  She was Pop’s younger sister by two years and her head and face moved in a rhythmic side to side swivel when she put words together. When she got to the good parts or expected some response, I noticed the cadence got quicker, almost like she was disagreeing with her own statements. It made me wonder.

During the hot summers, I sometimes walked across the road just to talk and hear her talk and escape the noise. Not actual noise, but the sound of grieving and despair that can fill a room. As I have aged, it makes more sense of course. That noise. But at the time, and as is true with most pre-teen kids, I just wanted to escape for a while. Mom and Pop were struggling.  And I could feel it and at times I felt like the cause though I know that is not true. I can still hear Aunt Lola’s head-wagging voice to this day, “You can come over here anytime you want to, Baby.”

In the winter months, I walked over often it seems. Over her fireplace hearth in the big room she had three bird pictures.  Nicely framed prints - a Brown Thrasher, a Robin Redbreast, and a Meadowlark. Those simple images would influence my aesthetic and fascination with art and imagery and composition for the rest of my life. She had these rocking chairs, thick and big boned, just like her I suppose, that were the perfect distance from the fire and from each other. Seems like I looked at  the meadowlark the most while I listened to Aunt Lola disagree with herself. I still think about the yellow and sienna combinations in that particular bird, the image strangely settling for me, like a combination  of colors can make you feel better somehow.

During the hotter summer months I would make the trip in a pair of cut off jeans.  Nothing else.  My early summer bare feet had not yet been toughened or callused by the summer’s pounding.  The tender soles made me hug the edge of the ditch, asphalt on one side and stickers on the other.  The tiny hard to see scattered patches in the grass pricked my feet without warning,  often paralyzing me to a piece of stone, kind of like a kid stuck in a game of Freeze-Tag, slung into the yard by the arm and flying uncontrolled to some balancing point and then freezing in that spot.   

I would stare down the front concrete walkway, steaming hot from the sun, and see the melting water-like pools that always disappeared half way to the house.  I had to do it, so I just jumped and made a mad dash for the shade of the front door porch, skipping across the mirages and avoiding the dreaded stickers in route.  

Aunt Lola watched from the kitchen window smiling at the performance.  

“It’s hottern’ all git out, ain’t it, Baby?  Now, git on in this house,”  is what she would always say and what I would always do. 

But by December, I just walk along the edge of the road and crossed over just before I got to the butane tank.  From there, I could walk across her winter yard to the front door.  

“Come on in, Honey,” I  would hear her shout from the kitchen.  I knocked anyway and pushed open the door, heavy enough to be in some church, and then felt the screen door spring shut against my backside.  “It’s open, Baby.”

She always seemed to be in the kitchen looking out the window towards the rural road passing by. And she could cook. The chocolate pie, not too dark or too light, was a work of art, a thing of pleasure, and she always said the same thing when I asked, “Oh, I don’t know, Baby, it’s jist the way I’ve always made’em.  Git you another piece. Benny can’t eat it anymore with his sugar and all.  It’s jist gonna waste.”

We would rock by the fireplace, me listening and Uncle Benny acting like he heard nothing.  She called it some kind of Old Timer’s disease. The retired contractor and farmer just sat there everyday like some preserved family member propped like a good eight-point hung on the wall for all to remember the experience. I found myself wanting to test him and find out if he was faking it all.  

“Jim’s comin’ Christmas, Honey,” Aunt Lola said.  “Be here on the 23rd, I believe. Comin’ by hisself this year, so I reckon Ducky’ll come with her boys, if they come.” 

Jim was the younger of her two boys and his sister-in-law never cared for him bringing his boy friends to Lola’s house on holidays.  His brother, John, was in public education and administration and they had two boys;  Britt became a pediatric dentist in Meridian and Bryan became an FBI agent in the Mississippi Bureau.  

“What’cha keep lookin’ at, Baby?”  Aunt Lola asked me one cold day from her spot by the fire. 

“Where’d you get those pictures?” I asked not looking at her or the nylon potholder on her portable loom.

“What’cha think?” she held up a pink and blue woven square.  “They’s Christmas happys for Jeannette an’em down at the beauty shop.”

“Nice.” My eyes stayed on the Meadowlark- that good yellow and sienna.  

“What pictures you talkin’ bout’, Hun?”

“Those over the fireplace.” I sat glaring up at the birds. 

“Baby, Jim put them old thangs up there I don’t know how long ago.  Reckon it was when he redone this big room. Jim is an interior decorator you know.  Why,  he changed them curtains yonder, too.  Gotta dress outta the same material.  Redone the couch there, too.  He even painted these walls.  Didn’t matter much to his daddy but it made me happy.  I reckon it was because he done it for me. Why, you like’em?”

“Yes, Maam.”

“How come?  Jist old birds you might even see out yonder behind the house.  They sho ain’t nothin’ fancy.”

“Guess maybe that’s it.  Don’t know, really, but I sure would like to draw’em sometime.”

“Why, you jist hep ya self, Baby.  You still drawin’ and paintin’ and such?” she kept weaving the nylon through the pattern like she was born to do it.

“Yes, Maam. I got something new too.”  I thought about the new sketch I had left by my chocolate pie plate in the kitchen.

She was great. I didn’t have to worry about her being mad or disappointed in me. That I knew of.  I could try just about anything and she would look for something good in it.  And besides that, I was away from the noise.  

It was a scantly clad female figure, an “anatomical study,” I was prepared to say if necessary.  She saw a boy’s natural desires – in my case to put images down on paper – but, as with most twelve year old boys, also to study the female figure.  

“Why, that’s mighty good.  If you don’t jist beat all.  Where’d ya come up with that?” She smiled a bit. 

“Mad Magazine, sorta, but I thought it could be any girl.”

“Not your girl, is it?” She rocked up to stoke the fire.

“Oh, I ain’t got a girl.”  I looked at my own drawing.  Teased.

“That picture reminds me of some of Jim’s work back yonder from when he was at that school in Florida,” she guided another loop of pink through the pattern.

“Boy, I’d love to see’em.”

“What with all the stuff he’s got stored back there no tellin’ where it’s at, but I bet I can find it,” she was already rocking back up to start the search.

“That would be great,” I took one more peak at the Meadowlark then followed.

She found some drawings in a manila folder in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet, stuffed in between old bank statements and school transcripts.  

“I believe Jim said these were done from live models with not a stitch on.  Can you imagine that?  His daddy said wudn’t no sense in it and wudn’t payin’ fer such garbage.  But he did and Jim said it was necessary and part of the requirements.  I wondered how riled Jim woulda been if’n it’uz him up there buck-naked, but knowing that boy like I do, I don’t reckon that woulda bothered him much either.  Anyway, you can look through’em if you have a mind to.”

“Have a mind to? I can’t wait!” I was embarrassed by my eager tone. Aunt Lola smiled. 

So there I sat on the kitchen stool looking at Jim’s school drawings and thinking about my own. I thought about Aunt Lola there at the sink, how she loved a good story and tried not to think bad of people. That’s when she turned to speak over her smocked shoulder.

“Kimbo, life’s tough on all God’s children, ain’t it, Hun?  It don’t pick favorites. I reckon we all come into this old world needin’ a little forgivin’ from the start, now don’t we?”

I was unsure what prompted her statement but I agreed with it.  She had a way of putting things. I looked up at her and back down to the drawings of the nude figures.  Then I  smiled and replied, “I guess so.”