The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat

Chapter 2





I was born in a sycamore tree. That was fifty-five years ago, and it made me a bit of a local celebrity. My celebrity status was

brief, though. Two baby girls, later my best friends, came along within months of me in ways that made my sycamore tree entrance

seem less astonishing. I only mention the tree because I have been told all of my life that it explains how I ended up the way I

am—brave and strong according to those who like me, mannish and pigheaded to those who don’t. Also, it probably explains why,

after the initial jolt passed, I wasn’t much troubled when my dead mother showed up for a chat.

I started out life in that sycamore because my mother went to see a witch. Mama was smart and tough. She worked hard every day of

her life right up until she dropped dead from a stroke while she was winding up to throw a rock at a squirrel that was digging up

bulbs in her showplace of a garden. All of Mama’s toughness had evaporated, though, when she found herself halfway through the

tenth month of her pregnancy, wondering if it would ever end. Seven years earlier, Rudy had been born right on schedule. But three

lost babies followed my brother, none of them managing to remain inside my mother’s womb for longer than a few months. Now I had

come along and refused to leave.

Before she went to see the witch, Mama tried all kinds of things her country relatives told her to do to get the baby to come. My

grandmother advised her to eat hot peppers with every meal, claiming that the heat would drive the baby out. Mama did it for three

days and ended up with indigestion so severe that she was fooled twice into thinking she was in labor. Two times, she and Daddy

went to the colored hospital in Evansville, and both times she came home with no baby.

My mother’s sister whispered to her that the only way to get the baby out was to have sex. Aunt Marjorie said, “That’s how it

got there, Dora. And that’s the only sure way to get it out.”

Mama liked the sex idea, if only just to pass the time while waiting, but Daddy was less than enthusiastic. She was twice his

weight even before her pregnancy, and when she straddled him in his sleep one night demanding satisfaction, the terrified look in

his eyes as she hovered over him made her back down from the sex solution and look to sorcery instead.

Like I said, that was 1950, and back then a fair number of people in Plainview, black and white, consulted a witch from time to

time. Some still do, but nowadays it’s only the poorest and most superstitious of folks, mostly the ones who live in the little

Appalachian clusters outside of town, who will admit to it.

Mama went to the witch expecting a potion or a poultice—poultices were big among witches—but what she got instead were

instructions. The witch told her that if she climbed up into the branches of a sycamore tree at straight-up noon and sang her

favorite hymn, the baby would come.

Witches were like that. They almost always mixed in a touch of something approved by the Baptist church—a prayer, a spiritual, or

a chant warning about the godlessness of Lutherans—so people could go to a witch and not have to worry that they’d pay for it

down the line with their immortal souls. It absolved the clients’ guilt and kept the preachers off the witches’ backs.

So, on a windy afternoon, my mother hauled a rickety old ladder out to a sycamore tree by the woods behind the house. Mama propped

her ladder against the tree and climbed up. Then she nestled herself in the crook of two branches as comfortably as was possible

considering her condition and began to sing.

Mama used to joke that if she had chosen something more sedate, something along the lines of “Mary, Don’t You Weep” or

“Calvary,” she might not have given birth to such a peculiar daughter. But she dug her teeth into “Jesus Is a Rock” and swayed

and kicked her feet with that good gospel spirit until she knocked over the ladder and couldn’t get back down. I was born at one

o’clock and spent the rest of the afternoon in the sycamore tree until my father rescued us when he got home from his shop at

six. They named me Odette Breeze Jackson, in honor of my being born in the open air.

As it often happened when a child was born under unusual circumstances, old folks who claimed that they’d been schooled in the

wisdom of the ancestors felt called upon to use the occasion to issue dire warnings. My grandma led the chorus in forecasting a

dreary future for me. The way she explained it, if a baby was born off of the ground, that child was born without its first

natural fear, the fear of falling. That set off a horrible chain reaction resulting in the child’s being cursed with a life of

fearlessness. She said a fearless boy had some hope of growing up to be a hero, but a fearless girl would more than likely be a

reckless fool. My mother also accepted this as fact, although she leaned more toward the notion that I might become a hero. It

should be remembered, of course, that Mama was a grown woman who thought climbing a tree in her tenth month of pregnancy was a

good idea. Her judgment had to be looked at with suspicion.

Nearly everyone, it seemed to me, believed that coming into the world in any manner that could be seen as out of the ordinary was

a bad omen. People never said, “Congratulations on managing to deliver a healthy baby while you were stuck in that rowboat in the

middle of the lake.” They just shook their heads and whispered to each other that the child would surely drown one day. No one

ever said, “Aren’t you a brave little thing, having your baby all alone in a chicken coop.” They just said that the child would

turn out to have bird shit for brains and then went on to treat the child that way even if the kid was clearly a tiny genius. Like

the doomed child born on the water and the dummy arriving among fowl, I was born in a sycamore tree and would never have the good

sense to know when to run scared.

Not knowing any better, I listened to what I was told about myself and grew up convinced I was a little brown warrior. I stomped

my way through life like I was the Queen of the Amazons. I got in fights with grown men who were twice as big as and ten times

meaner than me. I did things that got me talked about pretty bad and then went back and did them again. And that morning I first

saw my dead mother in my kitchen, I accepted that I had inherited a strange legacy and visited with her over a bowl of grapes

instead of screaming and heading for the hills.

I know the truth about myself, though. I have never been fearless. If I ever believed such a thing, motherhood banished that myth

but quick. Still, whenever logic told me it was time to run, a little voice whispered in my ear, “You were born in a sycamore

tree.” And, for good or ill, the sound of that voice always made me stand my ground.