Buttermilk

by

Barbara Taylor Martin

When I was seven, Grandmama sent me to Miss Wilhelmina’s to get fresh buttermilk that Miss Wilhelmina sold in the nice glass gallon jugs that Grandmama liked. Miss Wilhelmina lived on the far end of Alaska Street from Mr. Charles’ Dew Drop Inn café, so I had to walk eight blocks past the cafe to get the buttermilk. Even though it cost fifty cents, it was better than the seventy-five cents buttermilk we got from the store two blocks from our house. Grandmama said she’d rather give Miss Wilhelmina the fifty cents instead of that crazy old white man, Mr. Gerber, down our street. He always put the cost by Grandmama’s name in his little account book. Mr. Gerber secretly increased the price on all his accounts by the end of the month when payment was due. That just meant I had to walk clear across town and lug back a gallon of buttermilk from Miss Wilhelmina’s. At least Miss Wilhelmina would let me get a taste before I started back home. It wasn’t bitter and watery like today’s buttermilk or Mr. Gerber’s. Miss Wilhelmina’s buttermilk was smooth and creamy with just a hint of sweetness.

I became accustomed to walking all over our little town by the time I was six years old. The major roads were paved, but side streets were mostly dry sandy stretches that muddied over when it rained. The town kept side roads clear of debris and it was a good thing because my friends and I were barefoot except in winter. We could walk barefoot so that we didn’t mess up our school and Sunday shoes.

I was familiar with walking along paved Alaska Street because it was the short cut on the way to our church, Bethel Baptist, and it had a side walk. I could cut across Catawba Street past the Casino, with its wooden leaning walls, and turn left onto unpaved Taylor Street where Mr. Charles lived. From there, I walked over to the sidewalks of Alaska Street. That route was more interesting than going on Fronie Street, the long way around in back of our house. On Fronie Street there were only houses and vacant lots – vacant lots that might have snakes.

The Casino was not a place of slot machines and roulette tables. It was a large unpainted wooden warehouse-like building that could be used for community activities.  In the 1930’s and 1940’s, the Casino hosted several big bands like Count Basie who came through town on their way to the big cities. Before we got the gymnasium at the high school, our schools used it for sports and holiday celebrations. By the 1950’s, the Casino was not just past its prime, it was a safety hazard. But it was the only place that the Black community could come together and play.

The Dew Drop Inn, on the corner of Taylor and Alaska streets, wasn’t an Inn either. It was more like a bar and grill on the weekends and a fish fry and sandwich place during the week. Mr. Charles owned an operated the Dew Drop Inn on Alaska Street and lived in the house behind the Dew Drop Inn. He lived with his wife, Alice, and their two girls. His sister Bertha and her three kids, two boys and a girl, lived there too. Grandmama said they weren’t really respectable because they sold liquor. God knows, according to Grandmama, anybody who touched liquor, even if it was beer, was going straight to hell on a train. She knew that Mr. Charles family didn’t even go to church on a regular basis. When they did, they went to Olivet Baptist. Grandmama said there were a few suspicious things about the pastor at Olivet. Somebody saw him coming out of the Dew Drop Inn in the middle of the week. They couldn’t get close enough, but Grandmama was sure he must have had beer on his breath.

It’s a good thing I got a taste of buttermilk at Miss Wilhelmina’s house, because it was on the way home that I realized I should have gone the long way around on Fronie Street. Just as I was passing Mr. Charles house, his nephews, Lorenzo and Theopolus, the one they called Gator, ran up to me in the street and demanded I give them the buttermilk. I said no. They insisted. I said no and kept walking. That’s when they set their two barking dogs at me and I dropped the buttermilk. There it lay in the middle of the dirt that was Taylor Street. I watched beautiful, white, tasty buttermilk slowly seeping into the thick black earth as I stood stark-still crying. Crying because I dropped my grandmother’s fifty cents buttermilk (a sure fire whipping was in store for me), dogs snarling and barking at me (Oh Lord let me die) and two mean little boys almost falling over themselves laughing at my fear and sorrow (Where is God’s lighting bolt when you need it?)

I got the deluxe whipping. The one with the “don’t-bring-me-no-dried-peach-switch-cause-I-want-the-green-one-that-won’t-break” twig. Of course, the whipping was more for example than torture. Grandmama’s point was that she didn’t have the buttermilk, the glass jug or the fifty cents. Fifty cents was a lot of money to her and the buttermilk and the glass jug were luxuries. And it took a long time for Grandmama to trust me with anything of substance.

I remember when the high school gymnasium was built a block from Grandmama’s house. I was a teenager, and it became a focal point for community activity, replacing the Casino as a gathering place. The gym brings back memories of high school days, my class mates and how our lives continue to connect.

I’ve only kept in contact with one of my old friends. All of us drifted away from that time and place. It was a time of bitter sweet circumstances. Last week, my friend NettieRuth (most of us had a first and middle name which was pronounced as one word), and I sat on her back patio with friends and relatives and reminisced about the school and how we challenged each other and our classmates to go downtown to integrate the only town ice cream parlor. NettieRuth’s nephew stared at us as if we had five heads and asked, “You mean you went to segregated schools?” We laughed at him because he looked as if we were dinosaurs come to life.

NetttieRuth and I became friends because of books. We both loved to read, but we could not go to the public library and check out books. That was strictly forbidden. We had to wait for our school librarian to petition the board of education for our school library books. NettieRuth and I watched the newspapers for best sellers or I’d ask relatives who lived in New York City to get titles that we wanted. Some works were banned. After Zora Neale Hurston wrote newspaper articles about the Ruby McCullum scandal (she was a black woman who shot a white doctor whose baby she had), all of Hurston’s books were banned. However, our high school library held enough books to keep us marginally occupied. As soon as a new book came in, NettieRuth and I were in a race to get it first. We were usually the only two students with an avid desire to read everything we could get our hands on. We still share books today.

Sitting on her patio, we talked about the days of fire drills from the third floor back room down a rickety fire escape that was probably held together by two or three steel bolts. NettieRuth believes that only God saved us from a collapse that would only have bothered our parents and their friends. The school board sure didn’t give a damn. We always got the obsolete text books, the ones with the front cover missing and pages torn out. Of course some of our classmates rejoiced in the used nature of the books. Every year, Leonard Clarence Wright, Jr., or J.R., wanted the books the white kids wrote in. He believed that they put the right answers in the math books. It took two years of getting C’s before he learned that they weren’t any smarter than he was.

Growing up in a small, rural southern segregated school probably had the same social dynamics as any other place. Even though NettieRuth and I were book worms, we did have diverse friends. NettieRuth lived on a farm and took the school bus so she knew all the farm kids. Her family came into town every weekend so she also knew many of the town kids. I lived two doors from school, but my grandmother was so protective I couldn’t really socialize with most other kids except my cousins Yvette and Patty. My one friend in town, Laverne, lived between my house and Yvette’s so I could visit her occasionally.

When Yvette was sent to boarding school and Patty’s parents moved them to another town, I didn’t see much of them any more. But Laverne was my life line to the social network. Although I had known most of the 75 kids in my class since kindergarten, I felt that the boys were too immature and silly to even think about dating, except for Tyrone Green. In my 15 year old eyes, he looked like a movie star – and he played football. It was football practice that opened my eyes. Laverne and I decided that we would go over to the field behind the gym and watch football practice. One of her cousins, a year ahead of us was on the team. But I went to look at Tyrone. It didn’t bother me that he was sweet on Teresa, one of my other classmates, whom I considered the prettiest girl in our class. She had a long slender body, a smooth coffee colored complexion and a long swooshing ponytail. I was short, round, wore glasses and didn’t have enough hair to style it even into a doggy tail. Also, my status as a book worm was well known. But I figured a cat can look at a king, so what’s the harm?

As it happened two of Laverne’s cousins were also watching practice. There was Theopolus, Gator- as he was called, who didn’t play football because he was strange. He was strange even before teen agers started acting strange. Gator could show up at school in various costumes (a loin cloth and buckskin shoes like a Native American or facial and body piercings and assorted hair cuts and colors – his most famous being an orange Mohawk.) Laverne’s other cousin, the one who played football, was Lorenzo. Most of the girls swooned over Lorenzo more than Tyrone, but I never noticed Lorenzo in that way. On the day of practice, Lorenzo had a cast on his left leg up to his thigh so Laverne and I stopped to find out when he could get back on the field. After he told us about being side lined for six weeks, he looked straight in my face and asked if I would go to the next game with him. Even though he was looking at me, I knew that he must be talking to one of the cheer leaders behind me.  This tall, lanky, gorgeous guy couldn’t be talking to me. A wide grin with the whitest teeth smiled from his smooth chocolate face. His rippling pectorals and abs popped against his T-shirt and actually grabbed my eyes. I suspected he must be joking when he wiggled his ears at the sight of my gaping mouth. After about five seconds, his question registered.

I remembered that a few years before Gator and Lorenzo got me into trouble about some buttermilk I dropped when they set their dogs out at me. Then they laughed. Now I was thinking, “Forgiveness is a virtue.” But would my grandmother let me go out on a date – with a boy? The thought of asking sent my heart into overdrive. But if I couldn’t have Tyrone, maybe second best would do. Somehow Grandmama let me go to the game with Lorenzo. Perhaps she let me go because he had on a cast and she reasoned, “What harm can he do?” All that mattered was that I had a date and it was special to me because my date was a popular boy who played football. Attila the Hun would have been acceptable, but Laughing Lorenzo would do.