Growing Up Mad in the South: Stories, Poems, and Other Aberrations

By Bonnie Henderson Schell

Growing Up Mad in the South is set in Atlanta, GA, during the 1950s and '60s, when racism, sexism, and personal salvation were lurking behind "Well bless your heart." Diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 17, the Mad narrator struggles with both her aberrant senses and righteous anger at a society that fails to value everyone. Fr

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bonnie Jo H Schell
• Release date: Dec 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986889818

Bonnie Henderson Schell

Returning home after 30 years in California, Bonnie Schell's memoirs of growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, are included in the anthologies, What Does It Mean to be White in America?: A Collection of Personal Narratives, The Unbroken Circle: Stories of Cultural Diversity in the South, and WNC Woman. Her poetry has been featured in Coastlines: Six Santa Cruz Poets and in Knut House Press: The Insanity Edition. Bonnie was co-editor of On Our Own Together: Peer Programs for People with Mental Illness. She lives in Asheville, NC, with her big Russian Blue cat, Smokie.

Book preview

Preface

In Growing Up Mad in the South, my characters drink buttermilk instead of mint juleps. They are small farmers, seamstresses, people who want to work for themselves, resilient, and eccentric survivors. In putting together this collection, I became aware of how the puzzlements of my childhood didn’t go away. They are like strong sinews that bound muscle to growing bone and fragile facts to the neurons in my adult brain. To understand my family history, you must be able, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, to suspend disbelief and to believe that something that isn’t true is true in order to be convinced of something you need to be true:

To believe that my grandfather was a Holy Man.

To believe that my father died on Christmas Eve putting a tricycle together for me when I was three.

To believe that I have schizophrenia, which explains everything I experience.

To believe that God and Jesus love me even if they’ve never met me.

To believe that we are all created by God and in the image of God even though we will not share a meal of fried catfish and hush puppies with one another.

To believe that everyone who says Bless Your Heart cares about me and understands what has happened to me.

You cannot stop tiptoeing around, forcing them to confront the truth, without uncovering profound sorrow.

You can laugh about a mistaken belief, regret it, redeploy it, cry over it, curse it, save it for the future but never destroy it, even as it can destroy you and your children. Unless. Unless you can write a fiction better than Bible stories, history lessons, and campaign promises, that does not explain or blame.

Willingness to believe something that isn’t true is necessary. To question it only brings about answers that fail to make anything better. The old questions, I found, have not and did not resolve, dissolve, or evolve. You have to live with them like hundreds of fireflies in the dark, spinning around your head, bobbing at your neck and arms, and making it hard to see what is ahead. Or coming from behind.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Words

Bad

Glory, Glory

Bite Your Tongue

Bugs

Here We Go Loop de Loop

House

Chocolate Dreams

Bang, Bang, You’re Dead

You May Not Know It

Decomposed

The Empty Cross

Honor

The Age of Accountability

Justice

The Grand Finale

Flood in Louisiana

’Twixt and ’Tween

There She Is, Miss America

Well-Rounded

What We Did at Elaine Bauman’s House

Under the Bell Curve

Monster:

When the Roll Is Called up Yonder

Class Reunion

Laying the Pattern

Walking on Water

Infirmed

The Family Physician

Psychiatric Interview with Spiders

Bitch, There’s Something Wrong with You

Blocking

Aurora

Give Me Oil in My Lamp, Keep It Burning

Melodies, Methodists, and Morons

Milk of Paradise

Another Incomplete

The Best People

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Foreword

You have in your hands a rare and magical incantation of a book. I first met Bonnie in Asheville in 2016, when she signed up for my writing classes. Bonnie already had a long and varied background as a writer. For 30 years as a resident of California, she had published over twenty short stories, essays, and poetry, two newsletters, and Voices & Visions chapbooks presenting the voices of those who experienced madness and homelessness.

Although Bonnie was raised in the South, she had never written about the South until she moved back to North Carolina, or in other words, came home. Her voice is brave, ready, shocking, hilarious, poetic, and astute. Her writing shows a willingness for deep self-inquiry and casts a critical eye on society. She crawls into the taboo, the monstrous, and lifts up the tiniest detail we would have missed. Our mouths drop open and we gasp at the mastery it takes to bring alive these words and worlds.

Bonnie is one of my oldest students. Yet, while others may tire out, she persists. She possesses the courage to write into the nuances of psychic pain. Then, surprise! We find ourselves laughing. Bonnie’s stories are rooted in simple things like small libraries, 3 by 5 cards, and potlikker. She captures the curiosity of a child searching for true and honest words, while running into withheld information and unexpressed family feelings. The result is a collection of work that is both grounded and utterly transcendent.

A rare and magical book indeed. May the whole world read it.

Nina Hart

Nina Hart is the founder of Writing from the Top of Your Head workshops and curriculum, and she is the author of Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere.

Words

Pale ladies with pink curlers hang over the top of the fence around our backyard, repeating nonsense syllables to me. They want me to stop crying.

Wa da ya say, baby? Got a boo-boo? Coochie-coo. Lose your paci? Got a boo-boo? Wa da ya want to say, baby? Bye-bye. Say Bye-bye.

I am alone in my splintery wicker carriage under the magnolia tree for three hours every day. When I scream, I am developing my lungs because I was born too early because my parents got my egg from the buzzard’s roost on top of Stone Mountain. Maybe it already had a crack in it. A lady baby doctor who prescribed my formula also ordered my abandonment in the backyard. It was important, she told my mother who told my Granny, not to pick me up if I cried.

Doctors and preachers give Mama a sad face as she tries to follow their orders. They are in charge of the words must and ought, should and have to. I see her going over instructions, repeating to herself what she must do. Then, she exclaims, For God’s sake! Do my Mama and I have a sake?

Once I crawl to the bathroom closet behind a door where I find a blue box of white cardboard tubes filled with cotton and strings. I tear the paper off all of them, swing them in the air with the strings, make a humming whistle, and look through the tubes at my navel. I put a white tube in the corner of my mouth the way my uncle holds his cigarette. I arrange all the tubes in a circle around me. I am making fun.

When the door parts, I make a noise so they will know I am here behind the door and not mash me against the wall. I try to make a sound, but my throat holds my breath backwards until I say, Bye-bye. My Aunt Willadeen holds my wrists too tight, yanks me off the floor, and throws me over the round Bendix washing machine. My mother gets the switches.

This is going to hurt me worse than it hurts you, Mama says.

The machine is running. The drum is turning, the hot water swirling against my stomach. It could swoosh me off onto the floor or into the tub like one of Noah’s animals fallen overboard, unnoticed for forty days and forty nights.

I am drowning, disappearing, but I can’t cry while something that hurts is happening.

Uncle Judson comes to the door and pleads for them to stop. She didn’t know what she was doing, he says.

She hid behind the door when the brains were passed out, Aunt Willadeen tells him.

When they stop, I slide my feet to the floor, my stinging legs wobbling, and I run away as fast as I can to curl up under my ABC quilt.

Granny teaches me the A, B, C’s, and I learn to sing them.

"ABCDEFG. HIJKLMNOP. QRS. TUV. WX. Y and Z. Now I know my A-B-C’s. Tell me what you think of me," but no one does.

After I am too loud in the house, a bad girl, they will not talk to me. When I walk across the floor, no one sees me.

My Granny doesn’t talk in front of them, but in our room, she tells me stories. She can read all the words in The Holy Bible. Starting at the beginning, she tells me about the first parents and their sons who fight until one is dead. I hear about David and Goliath, Jonah beating on the ribs of the whale when no one could hear him, Moses standing too close to the Burning Bush, and Joseph with his coat of many colors that his Granny made. I know the command that says, Suffer the little children. Those are some of the wonderful words of life parents sing in church.

Granny teaches me to spell. My daddy paints the beautiful letters of words on signs, but he is not home. This is my first spelling word:

"The B-i-b-l-e.

Yes, that’s the book for me.

I stand alone

on the word of God,

the B-i-b-l-e."

There are three important books in the house−the telephone directory, the Sears catalog, and The Holy Bible. The Bible must always be on top so anyone can find it without searching. Granny sends me to get a book to stand on because she is making a dress for me and needs to mark and turn the hem. I bring The Holy Bible, put it in the seat of a chair, and climb up. Mama and my aunt come to the door.

My Lord, look at her! they say.

I think they see how I’m growing up so fast.

She’s standing on the promises of Christ the King. I am. Carefully, I have my feet placed perfectly side by side on the book that was written by a King named James. I stand as straight as a young pine tree. Where did my Granny go? I am alone. I know they have gone to get the switches, but I am not going to get down.

There are hundreds, thousands of words floating around the Earth, naming things. Everybody can catch the ones they need. But there is a rule about standing on the words that tell stories. You are not supposed to do it.

Bad

The house makes my throat choke. Aunt Willadeen collects straw flowers and stores them in brown plastic vases nailed to the facings of all the doors. My Granny and my Mama, who threw out the dry, dusty flowers when they were in our bedroom, never say anything to Aunt Willadeen because the house is hers. My dark, bitter, red asthma medicine is in the kitchen on the top shelf with a white prescription label on the bottle; it is the first place I saw my name typed – Bonnie Jo Henderson--as needed.

When the chicken man and his family from Hartwell, Georgia, come to see Uncle Judson and Aunt Willadeen, Mama doesn’t want me to stay in the living room near them. She tells them I’m allergic to their poultry, but Mama says their children have rickets and he can’t write his own name. His name is Hubert Hart, and he comes on Saturdays in a Ford truck and blows the horn in the driveway. My mother says this is rude. Uncle Judson spends Saturdays listening to The Red Silk Stockings and the Green Perfume with my dead daddy’s picture in his lap and a can of beer. But when Hubert Hart sounds his horn, Uncle Judson springs up and runs to the bottom of the driveway to help with the cocks.

The men stay out late on Saturday nights, and I know where they go because once, when my Aunt Willadeen and Mama had gone on a hospital visitation, Uncle Judson took me with him. We went outside of Smyrna to a tabernacle that had half-burned down in a baptizing service by candlelight. The enclosure was crowded with men in bright shirts with their hats pulled down low over their eyes and their money in little bags. Most had birds in small wire cages, but Mr. Hart carried his in a box.

If they fight for air inside, they’ll fight for blood outside, he told another farmer.

I remember the crowd backing out into a circle and cooing to the birds. I was on my uncle’s shoulders, and I held my fists over my eyes when a beak pummeled the eye of a red bird. The cocks would jump on each other’s backs and peck between the shoulder blades. Sometimes they would back away and display their feathers. Their combs were the color of raw liver. My uncle yelled at me to hold still just before the black cock squawked a broken cry and froze open-beaked, dying in the air. I never told my mother.

One particular Friday, the Harts come early to have lunch and buy their Easter clothes in Atlanta. My uncle is taking a nap. My mother is at work. I see Mr. Hart exit out the back door of the kitchen. Aunt Willadeen and Mrs. Hart are baking and I have nothing to do, so I follow the chicken man with my eyes but stay near the screened door at the top of the back stairs. He roams through an overgrown patch of black-eyed Susans at the end of the yard. He has long bones and big feet. His neck tilts out of his collar like a fishing pole with a round bobber on the end.

Turning his head with half-closed eyes, he sees me looking at him. Then he reaches out and snatches the black-eyed Susans off their stems. I do not move. When he turns his back to me, I close the screen door and slip back into the house.

Don’t you go out in the backyard when the chicken man is there, my Granny always says. You hear me, Bonnie?

Aunt Willadeen, Mrs. Hart, and the kids are grouping in the living room to leave. In the bedroom Granny is sitting up, adjusting her stomach in her corset. I wait for her to say something to me.

What have you been doing, Bonnie?

Nothing, Granny, I answer, twisting and tying the tails of my blouse.

Well, come here and get my soap from under the bed and wash yourself good. Your mama’s coming early to get you so you can meet her new man friend. She wants you to be clean and well behaved. Now you go wash. Granny leans back on the bed and folds her arms across her chest. When she sleeps, she keeps her mouth open with her upper dental plate resting on her tongue.

I get the soap out of her box and go to the bathroom. I draw a basin, letting the water pulse through my fingers into the sink. I take off my blouse and my shorts and dip the soap in the water and rub it on my face. If Mama gets married, she says I might have piano lessons. I smear the bar of Ivory all over my chest and arms until I look as white as a ghost. My uncle’s brown bar of Borax is in his soap dish. I wet it and glide it over the white soap on my face and stomach. While the soap is getting me clean, I brush my teeth and spit in the middle of the mound of foam in the sink. The last thing I do is take off my underpants, turn away from the mirror and wash my privates.

When Granny helps my sister and me take a bath, she washes our ears and necks, checks our elbows and knees, and then tells us to turn around with our backs to her to wash between our legs. If God had taken longer than a week to make us, I think, He might have redone our privates. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have to hide those parts. Once, I was in a hurry to print the alphabet for Granny, and she said, I’d be ashamed for people to see my work if it was that messy. Underwear is to keep God from being ashamed.

I splash water on all the soap and dry myself with a towel. Granny is asleep with her arms flung out flat on the bed, so I go in the closet where my family’s clothes hang in the dark.

Next to Granny’s coat is Mama’s best silk dress that makes Granny pray when Mama puts it on. It has a swag of pleats across one hip. I once nestled a bird’s fallen nest in the pouf to keep the baby birds safe, but mites got in the closet, ruined my Daddy’s Navy uniform, and I got spanked.

When I go to tell Granny I am clean, she rolls over on her side and raises her head.

Is that Hart man in the back yard? Don’t I hear him singing?

I don’t know, Granny.

Well, you stay in the house and put on your good dress so you’ll look like something.

Yes, Granny. Yes, Granny, I whisper. She falls back on the bed with her wide palms on her head.

I have a white dress that is the most special thing that my Granny has made. It is organdy with embroidered roses and lace tatting scalloped around the pinafore. She measured me every day for a week with a tape line to make sure that it would fit, and then put in growing tucks to be let out. My sister can’t stay still to get measured, but she doesn’t like dresses anyway.

I won’t be here to make your wedding dress, she told me, so I’ll make you a white organdy. There were matching white pants with lace around the leg-holes and a slip with embroidered buttonholes.

I pull the dress off the hanger and the slip and pants out from under two clothespins. I tie the sashes, leaving the dress and the slip for Granny to button. She is still asleep with her feet hanging off the end of Mama’s twin bed.

At the top of the back stairs, I hear the singing. Hubert Hart’s voice is high and thin, and it makes a fluttering whistle as it slips through his throat up the long neck to his mouth. He is standing with cocks under his arms; the side of their heads pressed to his ribs so that they seem to listen to him with two single glistening eyes.

Cock-a-bow, cock-a-bite, Cock-a-crow, cock-a-cite, he sings. Cock-a-low, cock-a-lie, Cock-a-do, cock-a-die.

He squats down and holds them by the necks, pretending to let them go and then holding them back again. When he stands up, he kicks them under their necks. With his head flung back and his right hand over his head, he turns and turns in the sun, singing his song to the cocks, and kicking them in the throat.

Cock-a-bow, cock-a-bite, cock-a-crow, cock-a-cite.

One cock darts at the other cock’s face. The iridescent feathers spring out, and the cocks fly in the air dragging their feet over each other’s backs. Mr. Hart’s mouth is open and the long veins in his neck bulge. He swings his hand over his head. From the back porch, his hand looks gray. It moves at a slower rhythm than his head and his legs.

As soon as the cocks begin to screech and fight, Mr. Hart separates them, stroking their beaks and rubbing their heads.

Cock-a-low, cock-a-lie, cock-a-do, cock-a-die.

He stuffs them in their boxes secured with a metal grating. His light brown hair hangs over his face and his long neck like the stringy tassels on an ear of corn. My father’s hair was black and smooth like a panther’s. Mr. Hart wears thick brown shoes. I wonder why he doesn’t wear heavy gloves.

I turn back inside the house and go in the kitchen.