Magnolia and Josephine

I’m reading The Help by Katherine Stockett, A New York Times best-seller which depicts white society in early 1960’s Jackson, Mississippi from the perspective of the African-American women who worked in those white homes. Those black women helped raise white children and manage white households; all while being treated as if they were an inferior but required appendage to the effort.

If you have not yet read the book, capturing southern life at the dawn of the civil rights era, you should. Ms. Stockett tells a moving story which awakens within me echoes of my own past. My boyhood spanned the late 1950’s and 1960’s and I well remember “The Help” we had in our own home during those years. There were a steady progression of quiet, stalwart African American women ever-present within my own family of origin and, as I close my eyes, I can remember them all: Lena…Lucille…Marjorie…Leatrice…Marva…and then, ultimately, Magnolia.

Redoubtable, tough-as-nails, Magnolia.

She was “tough,” sure --- but Mag could also loose the most infectious laugh when something tickled her. Quiet in a dignified way, Magnolia would seamlessly engage you in conversation at any time. But, you had to start it. Once you did, you would invariably find her insightful and supportive. Even now, she is that way as she still works for my Dad.

I see her differently now, of course. “Sweet Magnolia,” I call her.

Back in the day, however, she would come and go on a schedule dependent on “her ride,” as ---to my knowledge--- Mag never got behind the wheel of any vehicle to drive. She had people who handled that part of her life. Arriving at our home with a handbag about the size of a respectable fireplace, she would enter with no notice or fanfare, hang up her bag and coat and go to work addressing whatever evolving calamity was underway. In a home where we raised 3 boys and a little sister, SOMETHING was always afoot. Whatever it was, she would step into it with poise, like a fearless shortstop.

Dark as a briquette, Mag’s eyes were bright and brown. Never a tall lady, she carried her weight in a stolid but graceful way – like Gleason. And pal, when she locked those brown eyes on you and moved her hands slowly to her hips, whatever situation had advanced to a point where ---in Mag’s silent opinion--- a halt was warranted, you halted.

She and Momma saw eye-to-eye on everything. They seemed in symbiotic partnership on issues big and small. I cannot count the times Momma would ruminate on some change she was contemplating within our home. She would say: “Magnolia comes on Tuesday. She and I will see about it.”

Mag was the same way about Momma. When the kids would float an idea in Mag’s presence about anything, she would counter: “Now, what Miss Sally gone think about that?” We would allow as how we didn’t know what Momma might think…..which was why we were sorta tryin’ to sneak one over the plate on Mag. We knew if we could get Magnolia to approve of the course being pitched, then we were in like Flynn with Mom. “Ummm-hmmmm,” Mag would say, slow and drawn out. “I’ll see what Miss Sally say.”

And that would end that.

We knew then that a summit meeting above our pay grade would be convened outside of our presence. There, Momma and Mag would decide on policy.

The policy would be revealed in due course.

And, ever true to my mother, Mag was The Enforcer of Policy. The thing about Magnolia’s “enforcing” style was interesting, though. I have never figured out how she engendered it, but I do know this: You wanted Magnolia to be pleased with you. Thus, if Mag indicated that a certain course of conduct was unacceptable, you did not do it. With a few regrettable exceptions to be expected in a tumultuous house, this understanding was not violated. It still is not violated. If you asked my brothers or my kid sister, they would tell you the same thing.

All of this happened as a routine matter in our home, day in and day out.

I knew my mother had her own deep bonding experience when she was a child in Opelousas, Louisiana. The “help” they had in their home back in the 1930’s and ‘40’s was a lady named Josephine Davis. Momma called her “Jo.” As a small boy, I was taught to call her “Aunt Jo,” which I did. This was important because, on every visit we would make from Baton Rouge to Opelousas to see our grandparents, who still lived there---and I mean EVERY SINGLE visit---a certain moment would come when my mother would say: “I want to go see Jo. Come on, James Ronald, we’re gonna go see Aunt Jo.”

Momma would scoop me up and we’d pile into our car, drive north on Union Street past the train tracks and into a section of town that looked different to me, although I could not then put my finger on exactly why. On the way, Momma would stop and buy some groceries and a few packs of Camels. Then, we’d turn east along the train tracks, where a certain weathered, wooden house was located alongside others which looked similar.

Unloading the car, we weren’t 3 steps toward Jo’s house when an old voice would come through the screen door on the front of the porch: “Lawd God, is that Sally? Come in here child and see Old Jo.”

Momma would fairly trot up those concrete steps into Josephine Davis’ home, with me in tow, and she would embrace Jo as she sat. Apparently age had made it difficult for Josephine to rise. What I remember about those meetings was that, once to her side, Momma and Jo’s hands never came apart. Holding and patting each other’s hand, they would fall to chatting immediately and effortlessly, as I stood and watched. Shortly sensing I was somehow “out-of-the-loop,” Josephine would say to me: “James Ronald, come here, honey. Come give Aunt Jo a hug.”

I would dutifully advance and she would envelope me in those big arms. I never recall wondering how she knew me. I just recall that she did.

I also recall that, as she and Momma talked and laughed, black kids my own age would congregate near Josephine’s screen porch door. Soon, Jo would yell through the door: “Y’all take James Ronald outside and play now.” And, the door would creak open as screen doors do and I would zip outside to tag along with the troops, the door banging shut behind us. I’ve forgotten the names of my periodic friends after all these years, but I remember where I learned how to put a penny on a track and get it mashed just so by the passing trains. I remember where I learned that you can’t walk comfortably on the crossties of a train track – they aren’t spaced for that. I remember where I learned that if people treat other folks like people, color or race never really comes up. I learned that with those kids at Aunt Jo’s house.

After an hour or so, Momma would come out and we would head to the car, all while she and Aunt Jo held an ongoing, extended conversation through the screen door – as if neither wanted to shut it down. With a final good-bye, Momma would make sure I was standing properly on the front seat (that’s the way we did things back then), close the car door and we would head back south on Union Street. Maybe it’s just my memory after all these years, but I recollect Momma as being quiet and reflective during that drive home, a drive that took us back toward the gentrified suburbs.

Until the day my mother died, there was a picture of Josephine Davis on her dresser.

Which brings me back to Sweet Magnolia.

Momma died of lymphoma on October 9, 1996. She had wanted to stay at home, but a scary inability to catch her breath impelled us to the hospital, where IV morphine could be given to make her comfortable and to aid her breathing. We celebrated my birthday at home on the 6th and Magnolia was there, of course. That was the day my mother asked to see me at her bedside and, after a lifetime of making ever sure in 100 different ways that I knew she loved me, Sally Clary told me the last thing she wanted me to know before she left this world. Holding my hands in hers she smiled and said to me: “James Ronald, I just want you to know...you were never any trouble to me as a baby.”

The day after, we went to the hospital and shortly thereafter Momma became harder and harder to rouse. Within a day or so, she was basically comatose. Although Dad and I would try and talk with her, by the late morning of the 9th, she was unresponsive. Soon, the only sound in the room was the pings, shushes and beeps of the medical machinery. Amid those sounds, the immediate family waited in the room, not knowing what to do – each of us facing the prospect of Momma’s death and hoping that some miracle might yet intervene.

When we spoke at all, we communicated in hushed tones.

It was at that moment we saw Magnolia standing at the hospital room door, quietly waiting, her handbag before her like a centurion’s shield. Daddy immediately went to her and hugged her into the room, where she asked: “How Miss Sally doin’?”

Dad and I explained in very quiet voices that she was not doing well. We whispered to Mag that the die seemed to be cast and that we expected the worst at any moment. We further related quietly that she had been unconscious since early morning and, although we had tried, we could no longer get her to speak with us.

“Ummm-hmmmm,” Mag said, slow and drawn out. And, with that, she walked past Dad and me to the foot of Momma’s hospital bed, put her handbag down and said in a voice that was her normal tone – a tone that could carry across seven subdivision yards on a windy day with no trouble whatsoever: “Miss Sally, how you doin’?”

Before we could even react to the question or its jarring presence in the room, we heard my mother reply from the depths of her coma the last words I would ever hear her say:

“I’m fine.”

Magnolia nodded, backed away a step and looked at Dad and me with those bright brown eyes welling with tears.

“She fine,” Mag told us.

After a pause, the room quiet again, Mag repeated, softer now…“She fine.”

----J.R.

The Bengal Group

I gathered again with my Bengal Group buddies last night.

The Bengal Group was formed in 1986 and consists of me and many of my old high school pals, along with other friends we’ve met along the way. As we emerged from college years ago and began concentrating on our families and professional careers, we noticed that we were seeing each other less frequently. An inexorable drift had commenced, distancing us from the close bonds of friendship which had sustained us throughout early formative adulthood. We shared what seemed at the time to be monumental trial and tribulations throughout high school and college, weathering those waters together – always having each others’ backs. By Reagan’s 2nd term, those ties were oddly strained by life and, without noticing how or why, we found ourselves seeing each other less and less frequently.

What could we do that would halt that drift, we found ourselves wondering?

We all remembered what it was like to be in college and broke – sometimes unsure of how we could see our education through to the end. Flitting around that memory, we decided that we would form a scholarship group that would fund annual cash grants to students at Louisiana State University. We would gather once per month, kick some dough into a collective “kitty” and then solicit applications from LSU students who could demonstrate financial need. Thereafter, we would select students from that application pool and award them the money we’d saved or raised over the previous year, gathering at a dinner banquet with the students and their families to confer the grants.

Maybe a common effort would halt or reverse the peculiar drift pulling us away from each other.

At first, the end-goal of our noble effort was eclipsed by the knowledge that---come what may---we would see always each other on the 3rd Friday of every month, as we met to guide The Bengal Group’s mission. We looked forward to the gathering each month, where old tales would be burnished, new stories fashioned and bonds of abiding friendship strengthened. As years went by, though, our Group coalesced into a more focused concentration upon our actual mission --- helping LSU students financially.

In the beginning, our meetings were about escaping from our homes for a “Guys’ Night Out.” Poker and beer and BBQ formed the lion’s share of the agenda. After the “business portion” of those early meetings was concluded, we would often wander from our meeting venue and patronize old college haunts and juke joints.

Over the years, though, we bought less beer and more ice cream.

We also gradually increased our contributions over those early years. We initiated and now maintain an annual golf tournament to raise additional funds. Last night, as I again gathered yet again with my old friends, I marveled at how, after almost 25 years, our focus was now comfortably resting upon both goals.

I’ve lost count over the years of the dough we have given away, but it’s hundreds of thousands of dollars now – far beyond what we ever thought we might accomplish when we sat down that fall evening so many years ago and hatched this plan over beer and memories.

Our regiment is “one short” this year, having lost Paul Jennings to cancer last July. Pursuant to Paul’s request, his obituary asked those attending his funeral to forego flowers and direct donations to The Bengal Group. At the service, there was not enough room in the First Presbyterian Church in downtown Baton Rouge to house the friends Paul had touched over the years, so many of whom responded with testimonial contributions in “P.J.’s” name. As the years will come and go, we are left as loving shepherds of Paul’s memory and the monetary gifts made to The Bengal Group, as “P.J.” had asked. It is an assignment all of us hold so close to our hearts that we cannot speak of it without emotion. Thus, we do not speak of it much.

And so anyway, there we all were last night – guys I’ve known since junior high school and some even before that---sitting together in the LSU condo one of the sons of our members, who is now himself a student at LSU and doing well. The drive to last evening’s university-area meeting venue took each of us by the dorms and apartments in which we used to live when we were students at LSU so many years ago. I drove past the old Morris Apartments on Janet Street, where Mitch Wall and I shared a one-bedroom apartment. Mitch had a steady girlfriend (Sweet Eileen, to whom he has been happily married now for a little over 100 years, it seems), so he got the bedroom. I lived on the fold-out sofa in the living room.

Motoring across Nicholson Drive and over the parallel train tracks forming the entrance to Tigerland, there was Tiger Plaza apartments, still standing after 36 years. Dr. Bill Lovell and Ken Howard and I shared a two bedroom apartment in that large development for $375 per month, utilities paid. Billy had a steady girlfriend, so he got a bedroom alone, although I seem to recall we may have played a hand of poker for the privilege. I mean, of course, the privilege of the bedroom alone, not Billy’s girlfriend. In any event, I bunked with Howard in the other bedroom. (Does anyone else see a depressing continuity here?) As I motored by that large conglomeration of buildings, I wondered if they ever got all the sheetrock holes patched in Apartment # 222.

You know what’s cool? As President Joe Copus attempted to call our meeting to order last evening, after he’d fed us boiled shrimp, smoked sausage and exquisite baked tenderloin, I noticed that all of us old line Bengal Groupers were in the living room of his son’s condo, while Kevin Copus and his LSU pals and girlfriends migrated to another room…where they watched us conduct our formal business…interrupted by the sort of monkey business which erupts regularly among old friends about whom all is known. The circuity of that type of gathering is cool, although I wonder what the younger folks made of us and all our old, oft-told tales.

Here is one of the tales:

Allen Darden, now a brilliant partner at a respected law firm in Baton Rouge, used his voice to trump the ambient tumult. Apropos of nothing, really, he says to me, but addresses the Group:

“Hey, Clary……remember the time we went relic hunting? Guys, Clary calls me for lunch. (NOTE FROM MANAGEMENT: This happened almost 20 years ago, but Allen tells it as if it was yesterday.) We’re eating lunch and Clary asks me to identify something I’ve always wanted to do, but haven’t yet attempted. After a few false starts, I say to Jim that I’d always wanted to use a metal detector to find some Civil War bullets. Jim says to me: ‘OK, Allen. Then, a year from this lunch, you will be able to say you’ve done that because we’re gonna do it together.’ I agree and—within days—Jim calls me and says we’re the proud owners of 2 metal detectors and we’re gonna strike out and find Civil War relics. Man, I get books and maps about our area and where the troops had traveled and fought. Clary comes and gets me in his truck. We have an ice chest loaded with beer, right? We each pop us a brew and we have those between our legs as we head north from Baton Rouge, up towards the battlefields around Port Hudson. He’s got his .357 magnum pistol under the seat. We have 2 metal detectors slung in the truck bed. We’re drinkin’ beer and all fired up. So, we pass the Port Hudson Battlefield State Park and Clary says: “Hey, let’s go look in here, Allen.” I say OK and we swerve off of U.S. 61 and into the State Park. The FIRST thing we see is a HUGE sign that says: NO ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES --- NO FIREARMS --- NO METAL DETECTORS --- NO PETS. We cruise past that red-lettered sign in silence as we take in the words. Then, Jim takes a pull of his beer and looks at me and says: ‘Dude, we need us a DOG.’”

The lads cackle and hoot, although the story’s been told umpteen times over the years. The laughter serves as a catalyst for another story and then another and I begin to note that I figure prominently as dumbass-in-chief in most of these tales. No matter, I laugh with my old pals.

Copus gavels for order, but the tide is hard to stem.

Kevin and his young friends watch us from other rooms.

Gradually, we come back to order and tend to our business. We have almost $35,000 in our treasury and we must be solemn guardians of how we give it all away. But, soon we start to chuckle and meander away from the mission yet again. Story after old story effervesces throughout the meeting. Thus, it is only by the hardest that we are able to muscle through our agenda. But, we finally do.

This morning I feel happy.

------J.R.