Southern Fried Child In Home Seeker's Paradise is about the experiences of a sometimes lonely, but ever independent only child growing up in Mississippi in the 40s and 50s. On one level, Southern Fried Child is a charming account of the unusual experiences of an unusual child. On another level, Moomaw's stories reflect profound and valuable insight into the stratified social, political and denominational milieu of a small southern town after World War II and before Brown v. Board of Education. Written in the first person narrative voice of a precocious child, Southern Fried Child is story telling at its best. The stories range in emotional tone from "slap dab" funny to heart wrenchingly poignant. It's as if Jimmie is sitting beside you telling you her stories: about the dog who loved her too much, a game she played called "the embalming room door" her first cuss word, the phobia she developed after seeing her Daddy terrified of a dead mouse, and the contrast between her immersion in the Baptismal pool behind the pulpit at the First Baptist Church and the "talkers in tongues" who marched around the walls of Jericho at her Uncle Wamon's "holy roller" church. Moomaw writes, "you might be tempted to believe that the Gothic characters you see in the movies with the bad, bad southern accents are the products of the alcohol induced dementia of failed novelists turned B-movie screenwriters, but the South I grew up in was peopled with characters like Lola in "An Epitaph for Lola and Fonnie" They walked into and out of my Daddy's little country grocery store and service station every day of the week. People like them were the stuff of Truman and Tennessee and Willie and Eudora's fiction. They were the stuff of my every day life and reality"

Southern Fried Child in Home Seeker's Paradise

By Jimmie Meese Moomaw

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2010 Jimmie Meese Moomaw
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4520-6405-5

Contents

Prologue........................................................TP1ξTP1TC1[Etta Maye and Ella May]TC1 1Like Demosthenes Said ..........................................5How My Daddy Really Said "I Love You"...........................8Half Yankee.....................................................11Crime and Punishment............................................14The Nun's Story.................................................23How I Know for Sure Why I'm Afraid of Mice......................32All God's Creatures – Great and Small.....................35The Dog Who Loved Me Too Much...................................41The Embalming Room Door.........................................44Miss Meese Meets Miss Manners...................................58Damn It, Daddy, It Got Away!....................................66Working Girl....................................................85Stinky Won!.....................................................107Friends and Family Album........................................117My Trip to "It".................................................132Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling............................146First Date......................................................151The Night Big Daddy Slept in the Little Bed.....................156Shooting Stars and Sunset Carson................................159Danger Zones: DDT, Stick Shifts and Fire........................172Slim............................................................187Elvis Presley Junior Smith and Poot.............................202Eulogies for Lola and Fonnie....................................214Southern Fried Greece...........................................224Epilogue........................................................229

Chapter One

Etta Maye and Ella May

The two most significant women in my life from the day I was brought home from the hospital until the day I left home to go to college were Etta Maye Crawford Meese and Ella May Winston. They were both nearly six feet tall and big women – not fat – just big. Both had small bones with well turned ankles and small wrists, and each carried a barrel of weight on her torso. Both smiled a lot, laughed easily, were naturally nurturing and overtly affectionate and both called me honey or darling or baby until they died.

Etta Maye was my Mama. Ella May was always with us. She never married and never had any children of her own, and I still don't know what to call her. Our maid? Cook? Housekeeper? Babysitter? Nanny? Hardly. She was, in fact, all those things. She helped Mama around the house with everything from putting away the winter clothes to canning fig preserves and muscadine jelly. But she was so much more than that. She was my very best friend and I loved her with all my heart.

Mama was married for twelve years and had to have some kind of operation to help her get pregnant. She had a couple of miscarriages along the way before she was finally able to conceive and carry me to term. While Mama carried me in her womb for nine months, it was Ella May who met Mama and Daddy in the driveway when they brought me home from the hospital and carried me into the house and put me in my crib. Maye and May shared duties in raising me from that moment on.

Ella May didn't live with us. She lived in the "colored quarters" in a two-room unpainted shotgun shack next door to her Mama, Melissa. She had a great chinaberry tree and one red rose bush in her front yard, a rag tag vegetable garden between her house and Melissa's, and from time to time she shared her place with her long time boyfriend, Walter B.

She also partied and drank bootleg whiskey every weekend and Daddy had to go down and get her out of jail more than once. One time one of Walter B's other girlfriends cut her badly with a broken beer bottle, severing a tendon in her left bicep that left her with a floppy wrist over which she had little or no control.

Many times my Mama failed me. Disappointed me. Because of her drinking. Ella May never did. When Mama and Daddy left me at home to go out drinking, it was Ella May who stayed with me and played with me and prayed with me. She loved me and I loved her – as they would say now – unconditionally. She fed me, she played games with me, told me stories, took me for walks, and comforted me. She was the only other human on earth who really knew what it was like then in my house or how much it hurt my heart. And when I cried, she held me and hugged me and made me feel loved. Until after I went off to college, I didn't – or couldn't talk to anyone about my parents' problem. Not to anyone except Ella May.

She also taught me how to fight.

Those who know me as a contentious, stubborn, ornery, and sometimes combative adult may find it hard to believe, but there was a time in my earliest childhood when I was a timid little pacifist. In the very first house we lived in, we had a next door neighbor with a little girl only a bit older than I was. Her name was Nancy. Just to look at her you would think she was the best-behaved little goodie girl in town. She was actually a bully extraordinaire.

There was a wire fence between our backyards, and she tormented me through that fence every chance she got. I was too inexperienced at war games to realize if I stayed away from the fence, she couldn't get me, so I stupidly kept going back to the fence again and again, and every time I did that little "bad seed" attacked me again and again. Her three favorite types of violence were biting, pinching and spitting and she was skilled at all three, especially pinching, which she did so hard that her little fingernails broke the skin.

One day, after Nancy pinched me so hard she drew blood on my cheek, I ran crying to Ella May. She usually soothed and comforted me, but that day she had had it with Nancy. She picked me up, put me on her lap and explained war to me in very simple and direct terms.

"Baby," she said, "this here is lesson number one."

"In this world," she said, "you either hit or git hit. If you want to keep her from hurting you, you gotta hit her first. Next time she starts after you, don't run from her. Don't run to me. Just haul off and hit her."

Nancy and I both stayed away from the fence for a few days. Then one day she came over to my house ostensibly to play, but really so she could launch a more direct attack on me. We were on an enclosed back porch and there was a window between the porch and the back bedroom. Back then our windows didn't have automatic spring sashes and counterweights and the only way to keep them up once you opened them was to prop them up with a window stick.

Ella May gave us some colors and coloring books, told us to play "nice," winked at me and went back in the kitchen. Nancy smiled and nodded like the goodie girl she pretended to be when any adult was around.

Ella May was barely out of sight when Nancy grabbed for the color I had in my hand and at the same time tried to rip out the page I was coloring. I held on tightly to the prized red color, and expecting that a frontal assault was imminent, stood up and put it behind my back. Enraged by my unexpected resistance, Nancy was by this time hell bent, not just on taking my red color, but on inflicting some real misery on me. She scrunched up her face into a nasty little...