Mississippi’s gift to the world presented in brown wrapping paper

 

He would be introduced to the deceptively sweet drink while working in Virginia and going to the southern dance clubs and singles bars. He relished these places and sense of freedom they seemed to provide.
 
The abundant space, people and alcohol provided plenty of cover.
 
During one of his first experiences with the southern clubs he came across a table full of women eating plates of down home soul food. He immediately thought of his mother.
 
As he sat at the bar drinking long islands and washing them down with beer he rehearsed in his mind how he would tell his mother the story of the southern women packing food to take to the club. There’s an art to storytelling and the timing of punch lines and Jimmie wanted every line to be perfect.
 
He liked to use his new southern experiences to create inside jokes between himself and his mother. He knew she would appreciate this story because she was notorious for packing food when going places to save money.
 
Come to find out the food was being cooked and sold in the back. The story would have to be amended to include the surprise ending of how he bought a plate of the southern cooking and joined the women at their table! It would not be lost on Jimmie how the food doubled as a special bond.
 
Jimmie would also find a place that sold barbeque snoots. The snoot is the nose of a pig; it’s an acquired taste, like a delicacy.
 
Jimmie’s mother was raised in Mississippi during the depression and had acquired such a taste. The origin of soul food comes from slavery. Anything that no one else wanted to eat, or was plentiful enough that there was a surplus, become available for the slaves to feed themselves.
 
Using all that they had, generation after generation learned to make what was available to them taste good for their families.
 
The depression, as with a lot of people, would mold his mother’s lifestyle until the day she died. On rare occasion she would present a ten dollar bill and send Jimmy out for two snoots from their favorite barbeque restaurant.
 
As an adult Jimmy would treasure these moments as special between the two of them since no one else in the family ate snoots.
 
She would tell him the story of how she had to leave the south because as she hit puberty it became increasingly harder to fight off the old men and their even older ways of living.
 
She understood the realities of the south during that period of time and accepted that some things were beyond her control. She wanted a better life for herself so her mother helped her move up north. She was too young to work in the surging factories like many migrating from the south. She was “sent for” after gaining employment as a maid for a lady whom conducted “white glove” inspections.
 
His mother would joke that she was so naive when arriving up north she thought the indoor train station was the city itself. 
 
The young woman with the fourth grade education would continue migrating north until reaching the house where she would plant Jimmie’s favorite tree. She would work as a social worker and then as a teacher’s aide.
 
Jimmie’s father was sixty two when he was born and spent the first six years of Jimmies life shuffling him from place to place trying to find a home for him before his death.
 
It would take Jimmy years to outgrow out the stuttering problem he developed during those years.
 
As they ate snoots his mother would think of how she wouldn’t know where Jimmy would be today if she hadn’t adopted him at age six. As an adult Jimmie knew exactly where he would be if she hadn’t adopted him.
 
He would be dead or in prison.
 
With pretty brown skin and an even prettier smile she loved to laugh and say how she was Mississippi’s gift to the world presented in brown wrapping paper.
 
While in Virginia he would realize how he was away from her for the longest periods of time in his life. Before his father passed, he went to visit him after spending a week in Boy Scout camp. The same thing about being away from her occurred to him then and he shared it with his father, whom began to cry.
 
Jimmie’s father was the biggest cry baby. He would start crying while watching television all the time. He still had the same floor model television Jimmie would sit directly in front of while watching Felix the Cat cartoons. The speakers eventually went out in that television so his father sat a small black and white on top of it. He would use one for the picture and the other for sound.
 
Jimmie wiped his eyes with the bottom of his shirt, through blurry eyes he looked up the street. He saw a woman pushing a thin man down the middle of the street in a wheel chair…….

Author's Note

A tribute to all mothers.