IT WAS THE SUMMER of the Broad Jump Pit.
The Broad Jump Pit, how shall I describe it! It was a bright orange rectangle in the middle of a green pasture. It was three feet deep, filled with river sand and sawdust. A real cinder track led up to it, ending where tall poles for pole-vaulting rose forever in the still Delta air.
I am looking through the old binoculars. I am watching Bunky coming at a run down the cinder path, pausing expertly at the jump-off line, then rising into the air, heels stretched far out in front of him, landing in the sawdust. Before the dust has settled Saint John comes running with the tape, calling out measurements in his high, excitable voice.
Next comes my thirteen-year-old brother, Dudley, coming at a brisk jog down the track, the pole-vaulting pole held lightly in his delicate hands, then vaulting, high into the sky. His skinny tanned legs make a last, desperate surge, and he is clear and over.
Think how it looked from my lonely exile atop the chicken house. I was ten years old, the only girl in a house full of cousins. There were six of us, shipped to the Delta for the summer, dumped on my grandmother right in the middle of a world war.
They built this wonder in answer to a V-Mail letter from my father in Europe. The war was going well, my father wrote, within a year the Allies would triumph over the forces of evil, the world would be at peace, and the Olympic torch would again be brought down from its mountain and carried to Zurich or Amsterdam or London or Mexico City, wherever free men lived and worshiped sports. My father had been a participant in an Olympic event when he was young.
Therefore, the letter continued, Dudley and Bunky and Philip and Saint John and Oliver were to begin training. The United States would need athletes now, not soldiers.
They were to train for broad jumping and pole-vaulting and discus throwing, for fifty-, one-hundred-, and four-hundred-yard dashes, for high and low hurdles. The letter included instructions for building the pit, for making pole-vaulting poles out of cane, and for converting ordinary sawhorses into hurdles. It ended with a page of tips for proper eating and admonished Dudley to take good care of me as I was my father’s own dear sweet little girl.
The letter came one afternoon. Early the next morning they began construction. Around noon I wandered out to the pasture to see how they were coming along. I picked up a shovel.
“Put that down, Rhoda,” Dudley said. “Don’t bother us now. We’re working.”
“I know it,” I said. “I’m going to help.”
“No, you’re not,” Bunky said. “This is the Broad Jump Pit. We’re starting our training.”
“I’m going to do it too,” I said. “I’m going to be in training.”
“Get out of here now,” Dudley said. “This is only for boys, Rhoda. This isn’t a game.”
“I’m going to dig it if I want to,” I said, picking up a shovelful of dirt and throwing it on Philip. On second thought I picked up another shovelful and threw it on Bunky.
“Get out of here, Ratface,” Philip yelled at me. “You German spy.” He was referring to the initials on my Girl Scout uniform.
“You goddamn niggers,” I yelled. “You niggers. I’m digging this if I want to and you can’t stop me, you nasty niggers, you Japs, you Jews.” I was throwing dirt on everyone now. Dudley grabbed the shovel and wrestled me to the ground. He held my arms down in the coarse grass and peered into my face.
“Rhoda, you’re not having anything to do with this Broad Jump Pit. And if you set foot inside this pasture or come around here and touch anything we will break your legs and drown you in the bayou with a crowbar around your neck.” He was twisting my leg until it creaked at the joints. “Do you get it, Rhoda? Do you understand me?”
“Let me up,” I was screaming, my rage threatening to split open my skull. “Let me up, you goddamn nigger, you Jap, you spy. I’m telling Grannie and you’re going to get the worst whipping of your life. And you better quit digging this hole for the horses to fall in. Let me up, let me up. Let me go.”
“You’ve been ruining everything we’ve thought up all summer,” Dudley said, “and you’re not setting foot inside this pasture.”
In the end they dragged me back to the house, and I ran screaming into the kitchen where Grannie and Calvin, the black man who did the cooking, tried to comfort me, feeding me pound cake and offering to let me help with the mayonnaise.
“You be a sweet girl, Rhoda,” my grandmother said, “and this afternoon we’ll go over to Eisenglas Plantation to play with Miss Ann Wentzel.”
“I don’t want to play with Miss Ann Wentzel,” I screamed. “I hate Miss Ann Wentzel. She’s fat and she calls me a Yankee. She said my socks were ugly.”
“Why, Rhoda,” my grandmother said. “I’m surprised at you. Miss Ann Wentzel is your own sweet friend. Her momma was your momma’s roommate at All Saint’s. How can you talk like that?”
“She’s a nigger,” I screamed. “She’s a goddamned nigger German spy.”
“Now it’s coming. Here comes the temper,” Calvin said, rolling his eyes back in their sockets to make me madder. I threw my second fit of the morning, beating my fists into a door frame. My grandmother seized me in soft arms. She led me to a bedroom where I sobbed myself to sleep in a sea of down pillows.
The construction went on for several weeks. As soon as they finished breakfast every morning they started out for the pasture. Wood had to be burned to make cinders, sawdust brought from the sawmill, sand hauled up from the riverbank by wheelbarrow.
When the pit was finished the savage training began. From my several vantage points I watched them. Up and down, up and down they ran, dove, flew, sprinted. Drenched with sweat they wrestled each other to the ground in bitter feuds over distances and times and fractions of inches.
Dudley was their self-appointed leader. He drove them like a demon. They began each morning by running around the edge of the pasture several times, then practicing their hurdles and dashes, then on to discus throwing and calisthenics. Then on to the Broad Jump Pit with its endless challenges.
They even pressed the old mare into service. Saint John was from New Orleans and knew the British ambassador and was thinking of being a polo player. Up and down the pasture he drove the poor old creature, leaning far out of the saddle, swatting a basketball with my grandaddy’s cane.
I spied on them from the swing that went out over the bayou, and from the roof of the chicken house, and sometimes from the pasture fence itself, calling out insults or attempts to make them jealous.
“Guess what,” I would yell, “I’m going to town to the Chinaman’s store.” “Guess what, I’m getting to go to the beauty parlor.” “Doctor Biggs says you’re adopted.”
They ignored me. At meals they sat together at one end of the table, making jokes about my temper and my red hair, opening their mouths so I could see their half-chewed food, burping loudly in my direction.
At night they pulled their cots together on the sleeping porch, plotting against me while I slept beneath my grandmother’s window, listening to the soft assurance of her snoring.
I began to pray the Japs would win the war, would come marching into Issaquena County and take them prisoners, starving and torturing them, sticking bamboo splinters under their fingernails. I saw myself in the Japanese colonel’s office, turning them in, writing their names down, myself being treated like an honored guest, drinking tea from tiny blue cups like the ones the Chinaman had in his store.
They would be outside, tied up with wire. There would be Dudley, begging for mercy. What good to him now his loyal gang, his photographic memory, his trick magnet dogs, his perfect pitch, his camp shorts, his Baby Brownie camera.
I prayed they would get polio, would be consigned forever to iron lungs. I put myself to sleep at night imagining their labored breathing, their five little wheelchairs lined up by the store as I drove by in my father’s Packard, my arm around the jacket of his blue uniform, on my way to Hollywood for my screen test.
Meanwhile, I practiced dancing. My grandmother had a black housekeeper named Baby Doll who was a wonderful dancer. In the mornings I followed her around while she dusted, begging for dancing lessons. She was a big woman, as tall as a man, and gave off a dark rich smell, an unforgettable incense, a combination of Evening in Paris and the sweet perfume of the cabins.
Baby Doll wore bright skirts and on her blouses a pin that said REMEMBER, then a real pearl, then HARBOR. She was engaged to a sailor and was going to California to be rich as soon as the war was over.
I would put a stack of heavy, scratched records on the record player, and Baby Doll and I would dance through the parlors to the music of Glenn Miller or Guy Lombardo or Tommy Dorsey.
Sometimes I stood on a stool in front of the fireplace and made up lyrics while Baby Doll acted them out, moving lightly across the old dark rugs, turning and swooping and shaking and gliding.
Outside the summer sun beat down on the Delta, beating down a million volts a minute, feeding the soybeans and cotton and clover, sucking Steele’s Bayou up into the clouds, beating down on the road and the store, on the pecans and elms and magnolias, on the men at work in the fields, on the athletes at work in the pasture.
Inside Baby Doll and I would be dancing. Or Guy Lombardo would be playing “Begin the Beguine” and I would be belting out lyrics.
“Oh, let them begin… we don’t care,
America all… ways does its share,
We’ll be there with plenty of ammo,
Allies… don’t ever despair…”
Baby Doll thought I was a genius. If I was having an especially creative morning she would go running out to the kitchen and bring anyone she could find to hear me.
“Oh, let them begin any warrr…” I would be singing, tapping one foot against the fireplace tiles, waving my arms around like a conductor.
“Uncle Sam will fight
for the underrr… doggg.
Never fear, Allies, never fear.”
A new record would drop. Baby Doll would swoop me into her fragrant arms, and we would break into an improvisation on Tommy Dorsey’s “Boogie-Woogie.”
But the Broad Jump Pit would not go away. It loomed in my dreams. If I walked to the store I had to pass the pasture. If I stood on the porch or looked out my grandmother’s window, there it was, shimmering in the sunlight, constantly guarded by one of the Olympians.
Things went from bad to worse between me and Dudley. If we so much as passed each other in the hall a fight began. He would hold up his fists and dance around, trying to look like a fighter. When I came flailing at him he would reach underneath my arms and punch me in the stomach.
I considered poisoning him. There was a box of white powder in the toolshed with a skull and crossbones above the label. Several times I took it down and held it in my hands, shuddering at the power it gave me. Only the thought of the electric chair kept me from using it.
Every day Dudley gathered his troops and headed out for the pasture. Every day my hatred grew and festered. Then, just about the time I could stand it no longer, a diversion occurred.
One afternoon about four o’clock an official-looking sedan clattered across the bridge and came roaring down the road to the house.
It was my cousin, Lauralee Manning, wearing her WAVE uniform and smoking Camels in an ivory holder. Lauralee had been widowed at the beginning of the war when her young husband crashed his Navy training plane into the Pacific.
Lauralee dried her tears, joined the WAVES, and went off to avenge his death. I had not seen this paragon since I was a small child, but I had memorized the photograph Miss Onnie Maud, who was Lauralee’s mother, kept on her dresser. It was a photograph of Lauralee leaning against the rail of a destroyer.
Not that Lauralee ever went to sea on a destroyer. She was spending the war in Pensacola, Florida, being secretary to an admiral.
Now, out of a clear blue sky, here was Lauralee, home on leave with a two-carat diamond ring and the news that she was getting married.
“You might have called and given some warning,” Miss Onnie Maud said, turning Lauralee into a mass of wrinkles with her embraces. “You could have softened the blow with a letter.”
“Who’s the groom,” my grandmother said. “I only hope he’s not a pilot.”
“Is he an admiral?” I said, “or a colonel or a major or a commander?”
“My fiancé’s not in uniform, Honey,” Lauralee said. “He’s in real estate. He runs the war-bond effort for the whole state of Florida. Last year he collected half a million dollars.”
“In real estate!” Miss Onnie Maud said, gasping. “What religion is he?”
“He’s Unitarian,” she said. “His name is Donald Marcus. He’s best friends with Admiral Semmes, that’s how I met him. And he’s coming a week from Saturday, and that’s all the time we have to get ready for the wedding.”
“Unitarian!” Miss Onnie Maud said. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a Unitarian.”
“Why isn’t he in uniform?” I insisted.
“He has flat feet,” Lauralee said gaily. “But you’ll love him when you see him.”
Later that afternoon Lauralee took me off by myself for a ride in the sedan.
“Your mother is my favorite cousin,” she said, touching my face with gentle fingers. “You’ll look just like her when you grow up and get your figure.”
I moved closer, admiring the brass buttons on her starched uniform and the brisk way she shifted and braked and put in the clutch and accelerated.
We drove down the river road and out to the bootlegger’s shack where Lauralee bought a pint of Jack Daniel’s and two Cokes. She poured out half of her Coke, filled it with whiskey, and we roared off down the road with the radio playing.
We drove along in the lengthening day. Lauralee was chain-smoking, lighting one Camel after another, tossing the butts out the window, taking sips from her bourbon and Coke. I sat beside her, pretending to smoke a piece of rolled-up paper, making little noises into the mouth of my Coke bottle.
We drove up to a picnic spot on the levee and sat under a tree to look out at the river.
“I miss this old river,” she said. “When I’m sad I dream about it licking the tops of the levees.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. To tell the truth I was afraid to say much of anything to Lauralee. She seemed so splendid. It was enough to be allowed to sit by her on the levee.
“Now, Rhoda,” she said, “your mother was matron of honor in my wedding to Buddy, and I want you, her own little daughter, to be maid of honor in my second wedding.”
I could hardly believe my ears! While I was trying to think of something to say to this wonderful news I saw that Lauralee was crying, great tears were forming in her blue eyes.
“Under this very tree is where Buddy and I got engaged,” she said. Now the tears were really starting to roll, falling all over the front of her uniform. “He gave me my ring right where we’re sitting.”
“The maid of honor?” I said, patting her on the shoulder, trying to be of some comfort. “You really mean the maid of honor?”
“Now he’s gone from the world,” she continued, “and I’m marrying a wonderful man, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Oh, Rhoda, they never even found his body, never even found his body.”
I was patting her on the head now, afraid she would forget her offer in the midst of her sorrow.
“You mean I get to be the real maid of honor?”
“Oh, yes, Rhoda, Honey,” she said. “The maid of honor, my only attendant.” She blew her nose on a lace-trimmed handkerchief and sat up straighter, taking a drink from the Coke bottle.
“Not only that, but I have decided to let you pick out your own dress. We’ll go to Greenville and you can try on every dress at Nell’s and Blum’s and you can have the one you like the most.”
I threw my arms around her, burning with happiness, smelling her whiskey and Camels and the dark Tabu perfume that was her signature. Over her shoulder and through the low branches of the trees the afternoon sun was going down in an orgy of reds and blues and purples and violets, falling from sight, going all the way to China.
Let them keep their nasty Broad Jump Pit I thought. Wait till they hear about this. Wait till they find out I’m maid of honor in a military wedding.
Finding the dress was another matter. Early the next morning Miss Onnie Maud and my grandmother and Lauralee and I set out for Greenville.
As we passed the pasture I hung out the back window making faces at the athletes. This time they only pretended to ignore me. They couldn’t ignore this wedding. It was going to be in the parlor instead of the church so they wouldn’t even get to be altar boys. They wouldn’t get to light a candle.
“I don’t know why you care what’s going on in that pasture,” my grandmother said. “Even if they let you play with them all it would do is make you a lot of ugly muscles.”
“Then you’d have big old ugly arms like Weegie Toler,” Miss Onnie Maud said. “Lauralee, you remember Weegie Toler, that was a swimmer. Her arms got so big no one would take her to a dance, much less marry her.”
“Well, I don’t want to get married anyway,” I said. “I’m never getting married. I’m going to New York City and be a lawyer.”
“Where does she get those ideas?” Miss Onnie Maud said.
“When you get older you’ll want to get married,” Lauralee said. “Look at how much fun you’re having being in my wedding.”
“Well, I’m never getting married,” I said. “And I’m never having any children. I’m going to New York and be a lawyer and save people from the electric chair.”
“It’s the movies,” Miss Onnie Maud said. “They let her watch anything she likes in Indiana.”
We walked into Nell’s and Blum’s Department Store and took up the largest dressing room. My grandmother and Miss Onnie Maud were seated on brocade chairs and every saleslady in the store came crowding around trying to get in on the wedding.
I refused to even consider the dresses they brought from the “girls’ ” department.
“I told her she could wear whatever she wanted,” Lauralee said, “and I’m keeping my promise.”
“Well, she’s not wearing green satin or I’m not coming,” my grandmother said, indicating the dress I had found on a rack and was clutching against me.
“At least let her try it on,” Lauralee said. “Let her see for herself.” She zipped me into the green satin. It came down to my ankles and fit around my midsection like a girdle, making my waist seem smaller than my stomach. I admired myself in the mirror. It was almost perfect. I looked exactly like a nightclub singer.
“This one’s fine,” I said. “This is the one I want.”
“It looks marvelous, Rhoda,” Lauralee said, “but it’s the wrong color for the wedding. Remember I’m wearing blue.”
“I believe the child’s color-blind,” Miss Onnie Maud said. “It runs in her father’s family.”
“I am not color-blind,” I said, reaching behind me and unzipping the dress. “I have twenty-twenty vision.”
“Let her try on some more,” Lauralee said. “Let her try on everything in the store.”
I proceeded to do just that, with the salesladies getting grumpier and grumpier. I tried on a gold gabardine dress with a rhinestone-studded cummerbund. I tried on a pink ballerina-length formal and a lavender voile tea dress and several silk suits. Somehow nothing looked right.
“Maybe we’ll have to make her something,” my grandmother said.
“But there’s no time,” Miss Onnie Maud said. “Besides first we’d have to find out what she wants. Rhoda, please tell us what you’re looking for.”
Their faces all turned to mine, waiting for an answer. But I didn’t know the answer.
The dress I wanted was a secret. The dress I wanted was dark and tall and thin as a reed. There was a word for what I wanted, a word I had seen in magazines. But what was that word? I could not remember.
“I want something dark,” I said at last. “Something dark and silky.”
“Wait right there,” the saleslady said. “Wait just a minute.” Then, from out of a prewar storage closet she brought a black-watch plaid recital dress with spaghetti straps and a white piqué jacket. It was made of taffeta and rustled when I touched it. There was a label sewn into the collar of the jacket. Little Miss Sophisticate, it said. Sophisticate, that was the word I was seeking.
I put on the dress and stood triumphant in a sea of ladies and dresses and hangers.
“This is the dress,” I said. “This is the dress I’m wearing.”
“It’s perfect,” Lauralee said. “Start hemming it up. She’ll be the prettiest maid of honor in the whole world.”
All the way home I held the box on my lap thinking about how I would look in the dress. Wait till they see me like this, I was thinking. Wait till they see what I really look like.
I fell in love with the groom. The moment I laid eyes on him I forgot he was flat-footed. He arrived bearing gifts of music and perfume and candy, a warm dark-skinned man with eyes the color of walnuts.
He laughed out loud when he saw me, standing on the porch with my hands on my hips.
“This must be Rhoda,” he exclaimed, “the famous red-haired maid of honor.” He came running up the steps, gave me a slow, exciting hug, and presented me with a whole album of Xavier Cugat records. I had never owned a record of my own, much less an album.
Before the evening was over I put on a red formal I found in a trunk and did a South American dance for him to Xavier Cugat’s “Poinciana.” He said he had never seen anything like it in his whole life.
The wedding itself was a disappointment. No one came but the immediate family and there was no aisle to march down and the only music was Onnie Maud playing “Liebestraum.”
Dudley and Philip and Saint John and Oliver and Bunky were dressed in long pants and white shirts and ties. They had fresh military crew cuts and looked like a nest of new birds, huddled together on the blue velvet sofa, trying to keep their hands to themselves, trying to figure out how to act at a wedding.
The elderly Episcopal priest read out the ceremony in a gravelly smoker’s voice, ruining all the good parts by coughing. He was in a bad mood because Lauralee and Mr. Marcus hadn’t found time to come to him for marriage instruction.
Still, I got to hold the bride’s flowers while he gave her the ring and stood so close to her during the ceremony I could hear her breathing.
The reception was better. People came from all over the Delta. There were tables with candles set up around the porches and sprays of greenery in every corner. There were gentlemen sweating in linen suits and the record player playing every minute. In the back hall Calvin had set up a real professional bar with tall, permanently frosted glasses and ice and mint and lemons and every kind of whiskey and liqueur in the world.
I stood in the receiving line getting compliments on my dress, then wandered around the rooms eating cake and letting people hug me. After a while I got bored with that and went out to the back hall and began to fix myself a drink at the bar.
I took one of the frosted glasses and began filling it from different bottles, tasting as I went along. I used plenty of crème de menthe and soon had something that tasted heavenly. I filled the glass with crushed ice, added three straws, and went out to sit on the back steps and cool off.
I was feeling wonderful. A full moon was caught like a kite in the pecan trees across the river. I sipped along on my drink. Then, without planning it, I did something I had never dreamed of doing. I left the porch alone at night. Usually I was in terror of the dark. My grandmother had told me that alligators come out of the bayou to eat children who wander alone at night.
I walked out across the yard, the huge moon giving so much light I almost cast a shadow. When I was nearly to the water’s edge I turned and looked back toward the house. It shimmered in the moonlight like a jukebox alive in a meadow, seemed to pulsate with music and laughter and people, beautiful and foreign, not a part of me.
I looked out at the water, then down the road to the pasture. The Broad Jump Pit! There it was, perfect and unguarded. Why had I never thought of doing this before?
I began to run toward the road. I ran as fast as my Mary Jane pumps would allow me. I pulled my dress up around my waist and climbed the fence in one motion, dropping lightly down on the other side. I was sweating heavily, alone with the moon and my wonderful courage.
I knew exactly what to do first. I picked up the pole and hoisted it over my head. It felt solid and balanced and alive. I hoisted it up and down a few times as I had seen Dudley do, getting the feel of it.
Then I laid it ceremoniously down on the ground, reached behind me, and unhooked the plaid formal. I left it lying in a heap on the ground. There I stood, in my cotton underpants, ready to take up pole-vaulting.
I lifted the pole and carried it back to the end of the cinder path. I ran slowly down the path, stuck the pole in the wooden cup, and attempted throwing my body into the air, using it as a lever.
Something was wrong. It was more difficult than it appeared from a distance. I tried again. Nothing happened. I sat down with the pole across my legs to think things over.
Then I remembered something I had watched Dudley doing through the binoculars. He measured down from the end of the pole with his fingers spread wide. That was it, I had to hold it closer to the end.
I tried it again. This time the pole lifted me several feet off the ground. My body sailed across the grass in a neat arc and I landed on my toes. I was a natural!
I do not know how long I was out there, running up and down the cinder path, thrusting my body further and further through space, tossing myself into the pit like a mussel shell thrown across the bayou.
At last I decided I was ready for the real test. I had to vault over a cane barrier. I examined the pegs on the wooden poles and chose one that came up to my shoulder.
I put the barrier pole in place, spit over my left shoulder, and marched back to the end of the path. Suck up your guts, I told myself. It’s only a pole. It won’t get stuck in your stomach and tear out your insides. It won’t kill you.
I stood at the end of the path eyeballing the barrier. Then, above the incessant racket of the crickets, I heard my name being called. Rhoda… the voices were calling. Rhoda… Rhoda… Rhoda… Rhoda.
I turned toward the house and saw them coming. Mr. Marcus and Dudley and Bunky and Calvin and Lauralee and what looked like half the wedding. They were climbing the fence, calling my name, and coming to get me. Rhoda… they called out. Where on earth have you been? What on earth are you doing?
I hoisted the pole up to my shoulders and began to run down the path, running into the light from the moon. I picked up speed, thrust the pole into the cup, and threw myself into the sky, into the still Delta night. I sailed up and was clear and over the barrier.
I let go of the pole and began my fall, which seemed to last a long, long time. It was like falling through clear water. I dropped into the sawdust and lay very still, waiting for them to reach me.
Sometimes I think whatever has happened since has been of no real interest to me.