mama ain’t sung me the song since i was probably four or five, and I didn’t hear it again for fourteen more years. i went to live with aunt ginny when i was 15, up in new jersey. in aunt ginny’s house i can’t say peep without getting that look, that mean look that says ain’t no one in this house come from trash, and they ain’t gonna act like it. we had this talk once, me and aunt ginny, that educated people don’t talk like that, don’t talk southern. and she’s right, too; none of the people in her office had an accent, and they were smart, successful people. none of the other kids at my grade school had it, either. but i had it. i couldn’t figure what was right. cause i seen my proud-to-be-southern mama fall apart in the south; and i seen how aunt ginny dries up when she’s reminded of where she comes from, how that makes her sour. even at fifteen i knew that a tree can’t just cut off his roots and expect grow up green and steady. but, cause aunt ginny was good enough to take me in when mama went into the hospital, i try to keep my opinions and accent to myself most times.

the library in aunt ginny’s town was a fire hazard. that’s the only way to explain it. shelves a thousand years old, books even older, and librarians older still. the way those resinous, leering shelves were arrayed out like a labyrinth, a specially excited sneeze would send the whole place up, and you’d never find your way out alive. this occurred to me on a particularly sullen Saturday while considering maybe writing up a senior history essay due monday. the essay was on martin luther. coulda been on martin luther king, jr., too; i didn’t know either way. i was flipping through vergil’s aeneid, flushed and irritated. i knew i oughta been working. i known it since i got to that library three hours before; but even so, i reached out my hand one more time for up a flimsy purple paperback, not more than 100 pages i guessed.

that book was the song! well, it was sort of the song, it was the song made into a play, but, by god it did have the song in it, well, printed, you know, on the first page. that book was the song, and i remembered the song when i first lifted the cover. i stole that book from the library. cause the song, well, it was different but it still made me remember my mama humming low to me in the back room when i couldn’t sleep at night, and singing to herself in the kitchen when the sun came slanty through the yellow canvas curtains.

i hoarded that book like the secret of life, and didn’t tell no one about it, not for two weeks. by then, school was out and i’d made up a plan.

“yes, aunt ginny, i know.”

“your mother isn’t well, hasn’t been well for a long time.”

“i know, aunt ginny. but i—”

“the doctors are the only ones who can tell us when she’s ready to see us again.”

“i’m only going to—”

“ellen, your mother is trying to get better. let’s let the doctors do their jobs. how else do i have to say it?”

“aunt ginny, listen. i’d only be there for a few days. she wouldn’t have to take care of me. i wouldn’t bother her.”

“ellen—”

“and i’d pay for a hotel room and bus ticket myself. i have money.”

“ellen—”

“i’m eighteen now.”

“ellen, what is all of this?”

“i told you, nothing, i just want to see her. please, aunt ginny, let me go, it will only be for a little while.”

“no, ellen. just no. i don’t know how to make you understand that what cathy needs is not something you have right now.”

“aunt ginny, listen to me—”

“not now. enough.”

“i ain’t seen my mama in three years—”

“go to bed. go!”

who am i? what should i do? there’s nothing to do...am i wrong? these are the thoughts that bloated my brain and burned my skin for two days. what am i thinking?am i in new jersey? i just wanted to see mama, and i didn’t know why. in all of three years i hadn’t hardly thought about her; and now, i couldn’t stop the rush of remembering, wanting. my mama. for eight years she’d only noted me when she stepped on me playing in the kitchen or had cause to slap me. pop’s union sent her checks every month for me, and she spent every dime on cable tv and cigarettes. i do honestly think she forgot i’d ever come out of her womb, most of the time. ever since my pop died she’d fallen into a deeper sort of sleep than the devil’s own. she’d get up on the couch and watch her tv without turning the channel for hours, without hardly moving even. just laying there, smoking a camel. one thing she did; she’d make me dinner, irregularly and without explanation. she’d set it down in front of me at the kitchen table where i was working. i figured out sure enough to finish it, too; cause the very first time i left a scrap on the plate, my mama just looked at me, crying and quiet; she was nauseatingly broken. what, mama? i’d said without meeting her eyes. she kept on looking like that, then she slapped my face just like you’d say amen. and she went to bed that way, strange and sick and looking witched. i didn’t cry, ever. not when aunt ginny came and took me out of thomasville, not when they took my mama away like a science experiment tagged “merritt, c.” and that was that.

and now i was thinking about crying. just on account of that song.

she used to sing it so pretty when i was a girl.

my mama: my mama was the right temperature all the time. summertime would come in, all throbbing and blisters; and my mama would make it rain. i remember now how cool and smooth she was—like what i figured butterfly wings oughta feel like. and when the cold rains came out of the mountains in december, there she was, a warmness like milk before bed. a silly mother who let her girl wander into the construction zones a few times through inattention, but even those mothers are okay when they got love. love keeps southern women together: when we ain’t got a thing for ourselves there’s other people who are in need. it’s our particular voodoo. that’s how come all our songs are about sorrow; how come my mama could sing me the ballad of barbara allen: we know the world is more like a graveyard than a garden. just gotta find the beauty in it, make sing. and that’s how come you always hear about a miss olla mae (or any two-word name) with her four (or five or six) mouths to feed and her man all gone, and she still go on til the young’uns all grown. that’s an exaggerated story, but it’s heavy with truth anyhow. southern strength, it’s no more than love that’s near to solid. the problem with women like my mama is that they married too well. too much in love with their husbands, they ain’t never learnt to extend that love so well to their children. that’s how come when my pa died, my mama began to rot.

i got up in the morning, as usual, and made me a bowl of cereal, then did the dishes from the night before. i went through school and thought of home. i thought i might try to go to the university in chapel hill. i thought of mama in dix and how, aunt ginny being her next of kin, i’d probably never get her out. it was a tragedy like barbara allen’s, a tragedy like we all go through sometime in the course of being women or southern or anything else we call ourselves. and this was my tragedy.

that song, like the rest of our lives, is something in your blood. it comes into you from the soil when you first spring up out of the green earth. i coulda tried to explain it to someone, a schoolmate or aunt ginny or anyone. but it’d never mean in words quite the same thing. so i kept it to myself.

and i sang that song to myself all through the afternoon, politely answering aunt ginny in standard english that it was only a song we learned in school.