Goodlife, Mississippi

By Eileen Saint Lauren

"Goodlife, Mississippi" chronicles the first twelve years--1950 to 1962--of Mary "Myra" Boone, a questionably biracial young Southern girl of the sixties. The setting of the novel begins in Meridian, Mississippi, and then moves onto the fictional city of Goodlife. Eileen Saint Lauren captures the experience of growing up in "pockets" of a regres

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eileen Saint Lauren Books
• Release date: Jun 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986196329

Eileen Saint Lauren

Eileen Saint Lauren was born in Hattiesburg and raised in the once two red-light town, Petal, Mississippi. She is an award winning photojournalist, news, and feature writer who worked early in her career as a commentator for Nebraska Public Radio and at Smith College Museum. After graduating from Jones College in Ellisville, Mississippi, with an Associate of Arts degree majoring in Journalism, she continued her education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree majoring in English. She then continued on with her education in Creative Writing at The Washington Center, Duke University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She divides her writing time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Madison, Mississippi.Author of "Southern Light, Oxford, Mississippi" A Novel Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction Author of "Goodlife, Mississippi"-a Finalist, 14th Annual International Book Award 2023, "Goodlife, Mississippi" was sold in 10 countries.

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MYRA

Chapter 1

IN SPRING OF 1961, we were living in Meridian, Mississippi, in a little plank house that Daddy had made and painted white with his own two hands because he was a carpenter and all. He got the wood at the sawmill and from left over carpentering jobs. It had a tin roof that when it rained, you could count the raindrops until you fell sound, sound asleep. It was as fine as you can imagine with not only the usual two bedrooms, but we were blessed enough to have three. Momma was as proud as any North Carolina Cherokee Indian chief who had won out and had been given his own land back sitting on our front porch in her store-bought rocker fanning the Southern heat and believing that the Boone family had been blessed with the joy of the Lord.

I tried to make myself satisfied. That was for sure. But the embarrassing facts remained; my daddy was a deaf drunk who, for all my life, shared a love-hate affair with moonshine whiskey. And to cope with Daddy’s drinking infidelity, Momma began her own love affair with the Lord Jesus Christ. There was nothing I could do but watch and pray that we’d all be saved, mainly from each other.

Listening to the voice of Momma’s words is how I learned the rhythms of reading and writing. Then, amid my Meridian Piney Woods of solitude and the long hellish days of summer, I took to copying entire books from the Bible, word for word, to keep from going insane amid the Mississippi heat and the isolation that came with living in the Piney Woods. My other means of escape was reading mail-order catalogs that came once a month by way of the United States Post Office postmarked New York City. I found myself torn been two cities, Heaven and New York, that to me were one and the same, though I never dared speak of the latter.

Like many God-fearing Southerners, rich or poor, black, or white, I was taught to live to die, and only then would I have a good life—in heaven not hell, that is.

Death doesn’t scare me none, but life sure does. I don’t know why I’m still here.

MARIGOLD DAVIS WAS my momma’s given name. She grew up at Magnolia Sunday in Goodlife, Mississippi, where her folks grew cantaloupes, watermelons, and raised hogs. All she ever did with her life in Goodlife was teach children Sunday School at the Union Community Church in the neighboring town of Soso. In Meridian, she took care of her family—us. And though she was told she was of the Jefferson Davis blood line, the day she married my daddy, Virgil Boone, was the last day on God’s green earth that her folks ever spoke to her for everyone thought that Daddy would never amount to a hill of beans. After declaring their love and marrying in a private wedding ceremony the good Lord only knows where and shaking the Davis family along with the entire city of Goodlife to their cores, my folks moved to Meridian to get away from the dead silence and careless whispers that surrounded them. But living in Meridian wasn’t any better than living in Goodlife.

It didn’t help strengthen family relations or build earthly friendships that Daddy ran moonshine whiskey to make ends meet. And it didn’t help our reputation that behind our backs everyone called us n-lovers and me white trash either. For that time in Mississippi history, 1961, anyone who so as much as spoke a single word to a Negro or Colored, let alone broke bread with one, was instantly doomed and surrounded by white whispers that in the blink of an eye ruined his or her family name.

To make life even harder for me to understand, it was rumored that Daddy had some Negro blood in him, as much as one-tenth, possibly making him of mixed-race. However, it was never confirmed. Now one-tenth doesn’t sound like much, but even a drop of Negro blood in the once segregated South was equal to being given a death sentence in the electric chair in the Mississippi State Penitentiary or even worse, strung up by the neck to hang from a tree limb until your feet kicked the life right out of you. Momma said it was because he liked to keep company with the Negros day in and day out. Daddy did bring Coloreds like our best friends, Opal and Eddy, to the house to break bread and eat collard greens often. We even took them places with us. That much I know to be true. Still, I know nothing of the actual color of blood that flowed through his veins or mine.

Looking back, it could very well be true though. See, Daddy passed the time off by telling us stories of him and Ray Charles Robinson. He’d tell of riding the roads together back in Saint Augustine, Florida, when they were charity students in a state-supported boys’ school for the deaf and blind learning a trade on account of their shortcomings; Daddy was deaf, and Ray was blind.

Ray dropped Robinson, so folks wouldn’t confuse him with the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. It was Ray who in-full-force hit the pavement first to Seattle, Washington, before moving on to Hollywood, California. Daddy hit the moonshine whiskey bottle as fast, only to nowhere save for carpentering in Meridian.

I guess I knew about Ray Charles before I knew of any other musical performer. In the 50s and 60s, folks called him Colored instead of Negro or Black or African American like folks do today. Colored sounds like the racial remark it is, but the once-segregated South has come a long way from saying the N-word, that’s for sure. I never used that word because I was a God-fearing, church-going Believer who took the words seriously that we sang in the song Jesus loves the Little Children.

We would sing: Jesus loves the little children / All the children of the world / Red, brown, and yellow / Black and white / They are precious in His sight. / Jesus loves the little children / Of the world. So, it didn’t matter to me if Ray Charles was Colored or green or what, he was my hero. Some folks dreamed of meeting Elvis Presley one day. My dream was to meet Ray Charles. I had another dream too, to be a bonafide writer.

To keep our spirits high, we sang. And sing we did. When I was eleven-years-old my momma sang You Are My Sunshine to me right along with Ray Charles on the box radio. Having a song and sunshine in your heart makes life worth living.

MANY YEARS PASSED, eleven almost, twelve to be exact, without Momma seeing her folks, let alone them meeting me because of the consequences that came with the choices she had made in the name of love. Isolation in the Piney Woods had slowly chipped away at the Davis pride she once had in being a Sunday School teacher in Soso. It was the lack of love and the support of a family that had worn the high polish off her golden upbringing at Magnolia Sunday, leaving her with a defeated, tarnished look. That Christmas day in 1950 when I was born, Momma truly believed that I was an answer to prayer. She said I was her sunshine. And I was all that she had in the world to love and live for. In a sense, Momma said I was like baby Jesus and that I had an earthly mission to fulfill. Otherwise, I’d have died at birth beings as I was a breech baby and all. My mission was to pray for a miracle for Daddy to be healed of his deafness. Only then would all our sadness disappear and could we live a good life. See, when I came along, Momma latched on like a snapping turtle to the hope that came with me. She never let me go anywhere. Not even to school. That made my life hard—then and now.

Some said Daddy couldn’t help being deaf. I never knew if that was true or not. Daddy stayed home with us to drink his fill of moonshine whiskey and kept us awake for years. Only on holidays did he take to riding the roads in his truck that I named, The Rainbow. He would surprise everyone he knew with a handful of Hershey Kisses and an oyster jar of his best moonshine whiskey with a big red ribbon tied around its lid. He always hid some liquor in the dirty clothes box in our indoor bathroom. He hid his whiskey still deep in the Meridian Piney Woods. Once a year on his birthday, when he had an extra dollar in his pocket to burn, he’d treat himself to three pints of store-bought vodka and three packs of Pall Mall cigarettes. He said three was his lucky number—him, Momma, and me.

Momma never understood Daddy any more than he understood himself. It wasn’t until after they married that she learned the truth about his weaknesses. The eyes of her heart opened to Daddy when she saw him at the soda counter of Woolworth’s in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, sipping on a Frostie Root Beer float with not one but three brightly colored party straws. He was with four other workers all carpenters and window washers in Hattiesburg when they weren’t picking cotton from sunrise to sunset in the fields of Jones County in the Union Community to make ends meet. Momma then worked the vanilla ice cream machine. She’d put square blocks of ice in the top of it along with rock salt then add the necessary eggs, sugar, cream, condensed milk, and vanilla flavoring to make it all sugar sweet. She wore a pink and white pinstriped skirt and blouse and navy shoes with crisp white shoelaces. No socks though. Momma despised anything made of cotton to touch her bare feet. She said socks reminded her of the Coloreds working in the hot Mississippi fields. On Saturdays, she changed her shoelaces to yellow because yellow was a happy color.

Beings Sunday was the Lord’s Day, she was off. Sunday was also when everyone from Goodlife to Soso to Glossolalia to Goshen either rested or visited the sick and shut-ins, the heathens, the jailbirds, or the mentally retarded folks at the Ellisville State School. Folks were taught to spread any extra love they had in their hearts around to those who needed it. In Mississippi, a lot of people needed love, then and now. People everywhere need love.

At the five-and-dime soda fountain, Daddy paid with dollar bills. Right away Momma was attracted to him. She said it was his laugh that made her take a second look, not George Washington’s face laying on top of the soda fountain stool he’d left behind for her as a tip one Saturday. Then, she noticed how his smooth, tanned skin framed his face under his navy company cap that had a shoot of cotton embroidered in its center like a dogwood blossom. Once, he had showed up at Magnolia Sunday along with the other folks in the Union Community who came to listen and dance to the Grand Ole Opry on the box radio in the cool of a Saturday evening. That’s when they began to court. They hid behind Magnolia Sunday and danced to the music of the night air.

While Daddy’s first smile took him straight to your heart, he was a handsome man as well. He was courteous, generous, and compassionate with everyone who crossed his path beings he had no living family that he knew of. It was told to him that his folks got shed of him on account of his deafness, believing him to be mentally retarded. Folks used to think that if you had a birth defect like deafness, you needed to be institutionalized. A retard is what they called Daddy.

Daddy was made fun of and beat down all his life for the way he spoke on account of his deafness. He stuttered bad. And sometimes, he slobbered on himself, especially if he got excited. Yet from my daddy’s first smile and Th-aaa-nk y-ooo-u, k-iii-nd-ly, his spirit entered Momma’s heart. Drunk as a skunk or sober as a preacher man, mean as a Sweetwater, Texas, rattlesnake, happy like a hobo tan-faced clown or white or black or Mulatto, deaf of sound and hearing, no matter what he was, Momma loved him. And I loved him too.

Daddy’s overall feeling about himself in society was a total and sure emptiness. I write with certainty because he transferred that empty feeling to me. He never felt like he would be able to dig himself, let alone the Boone family, out of the poor house he’d provided for us with carpentering, window-washing, and running moonshine whiskey in The Rainbow. The careless white whispers we endured that he was a Nobody and a good-for-nothing drunk added to our sense of emptiness.

As hard as it was for us and as lonely as we often found ourselves, Daddy believed the peace found in the tender grass of one’s soul was a miracle for anyone. He told me it didn’t matter if a man had a shiny new dime or a crisp green dollar in his pocket. If he had peace in his soul, he was as rich as cream.

Daddy had always felt stuck in the Deep South. The truth is we were all stuck in Mississippi. A lot of times folks, rich or poor, who have nowhere else to go or anyone to turn to for comfort will turn to the Lord, the church house, or the power of prayer. Or they fall by the wayside into a pit of sin where their weaknesses win out to Satan, the devil. That’s what my folks did in Meridian. Momma fell hard for Jesus Christ and became so religious that I wasn’t even allowed to go into the first grade for fear I’d get exposed to sin and become hell-bound. Daddy fell by the wayside into the nothingness that comes after the whiskey bottle is empty.

At the tender age of eleven, I began my journey into the spirit world—a world that can only be seen and moved about in with the eyes of the heart. A world that is never-ending, infinite. A deeper world within the world that we are living in where the supernatural power of God, the devil, and their angels never cease to exist. I heard voices and saw things outside myself that I’ve never shared with anyone until now.

I grew up surrounded by throwaways, the downtrodden, and the lonely. I loved them and they loved me. I wanted to be connected to someone, something, or somebody by way of hope that comes with brotherly unconditional Christian love, but all I saw growing up in the Bible Belt was twisted and conditional love until I began learning the secret things of God that I aim to share with you.

By the way, my given name is Mary Myra Boone, but everyone calls me Myra. This is my story. I hope you will read on.

THE GREETING CARD

Chapter 2

BABYDOLL, HAVE YOU got your greeting cards handy? Get a yellow one out and fix it up as nice as you can for your Great Aunt Annabelle before we head on out to Happy Acres old folks’ home to visit with her. Hear?" Momma asked me, pulling her slip over her head.

"Why in the world do you want a yellow one of all things?" I asked on my way to my bedroom to search for the box of greeting cards.

"When Aunt Annabelle was in the Mississippi State Mental Hospital back in 1946, she fell in love with the color yellow because one of the finest doctors in the state, Doc Jasper, brought her a yellow rose from Texas. And since he was the only real doctor who she had ever laid eyes on, and he had rode his mare out to her old home place in Eastern Tennessee nestled in the Great Smoky Mountains, old Doc Jasper impressed her far more than if President Harry Truman had come all the way from Washington, D.C., to personally ask for her vote. It was Doc Jasper who told her anything yellow would give her strength. And she believed him like he was preaching the gospel. That’s why."

Why did she go to the Mississippi State Mental Hospital if she was living in the Great Smoky Mountains? I asked, looking outside to see my cat Kitty Momma on the window ledge silent as snow falling in December, pondering no doubt to what we were getting all fixed up for.

Her old man, Uncle Andrew Stringer, had dropped dead right in the middle of tending his tobacco fields early one April morning. She didn’t have a soul in the world except her baby sister and my momma, your Grandma Reatha, and her husband, Spurgeon Davis, to go live with. She ended up at their home place, Magnolia Sunday, over in Goodlife for a spell, but as soon as she took sick with her mind, they rushed her straight to the Mississippi State Hospital simply because it was the finest in the South. Momma went on to tell me as she walked into the hall all dressed but a hat, And it still is.

I fumbled through the greeting cards I’d hidden under my bed. Daddy had a birthday just around the corner, and I was afraid he would see his card before time. And I certainly didn’t want that to happen. Despite his deafness, Daddy talked as best he could. We all learned the ABC’s of sign language so we could converse in our own family way.

I have a right fine card here, I told her, holding it up. Can I wear my Easter Rabbit hat? The pink hat with the rabbit ears we made yesterday. Momma, can I wear it, pleee-ase?

First, put it on and let me see how you look because we don’t want to scare any of those old folks at the Happy Acres half to death. Aunt Annabelle has only been living there since last fall. We don’t want them to kick her out of what is going to be her last home on our account.

I grabbed only the most wonderful Easter hat I had ever seen in my entire life. Although it was made of pink construction paper, I knew it would probably sell for at least a dollar or two in Meridian.

Any rabbit would be proud to wear this hat.

Ready to go? Momma asked.

I continued to straighten my rabbit