God Save the Sweet Potato Queens by Jill Conner Browne Read Free Book Online Page B

move them, thinking the woman must be going back later to hide behind the door and furtively eat cookies, careful to pick up and consume every crumb off the floor. And, of course, everybody believes the maids. Tee-hee.
    I am certain I would be utterly devoted to anybody who came in and did anything around the house for me. I would want to be their best friend, and they surely would be mine. I don’t have a lot of experience in the area of domestic assistance or assistants, but I have witnessed some wonderful relationships in the homes of others. A good friend of Tammy’s lives in the Mississippi Delta. Tammy got Betty talking one day on the subject of child care, and Betty told the story of how she was raised by a murderess. It seems that Betty’s mother, Miss Idelle, had had in her employ one Miss Eddie Lee for as long as anybody could remember. One day, in a less-than-blissful moment of domesticity in Eddie Lee’s own home, well, Eddie Lee’s boyfriend somehow ended up dead, and Eddie Lee ended up in Parchman Penitentiary.
    This was a tragedy for Eddie Lee, of course, who was actually incarcerated, but imagine the despair, too, of Miss Idelle—that big house and all those children and no Eddie Lee to actually take care of everything. Now, Miss Idelle was no one to trifle with, and she took it just as long as she could. Then she just got in her car and drove up to Parchman, marched herself right in there, and demanded that they give her Eddie Lee. “You turn her loose right now, you hear me? Eddie Lee didn’t mean to kill that man; she just wanted to give him a good whop upside the head, and Lord knows, he needed it! She never even saw that nail in the two-by-four! It was a pure acci-dent! You give her to me right now!” And they did. That was a long time ago, and she was in a family full of judges and assorted politicians, and it
was
the Mississippi Delta, where things are, they say, different. But that’s how Betty ended up being raised by a murderess—and she turned out just fine, thank you very much.
    Yes, compassion exists even among the prissy. One of my favorite examples of this happened for years in the little town of Canton, Mississippi, which is about twenty miles north of my home in Jackson. There was an old woman who lived out from town in a run-down house without electricity. This didn’t seem to bother her; she managed to cook and to keep herself and her multitude of cats warm with the fireplace. She had access to utilities but chose not to avail herself of them, never missing them until she got a certain present. See, she was reputed to have the ability to charm warts off and perform other small, handy spells, and from time to time, the townspeople paid her visits. One time, in return for her service, somebody made her a gift of a very fine electric skillet, which she was quite taken with but could not use. It seemed like a great deal of trouble to get electricity and change the way she’d always lived just so she could use that very fine skillet. But, dang it, the thing was worthless without the juice.
    She was undaunted by this little detail, however. Soon a regular occurrence in the best neighborhoods in town was this: Mrs. Jones is in her kitchen making breakfast. Mr. Jones is sitting at the table in the breakfast room, reading the paper, waiting to be fed. He smells the heavenly scent of frying pork products but doesn’t see any. He does see an old woman in his garage, however, and asks Mrs. Jones who that might be. She replies without even looking up, “Oh, that’s just the Cat Woman; she’s cooking her bacon.” Every day or so, whenever she woke up feeling like a little bacon and eggs, the Cat Woman would simply walk into town, carrying her very fine skillet and a basket of food, pop into any one of the garages on the prissiest street in town, plug in, and happily fire up that very fine skillet. It became an accepted morning ritual in the neighborhood, and folks would get their feelings