At the end of my tenth year, my mother solemnly ushered me into a dark corner and explained the mechanics of procreation. His thing into her thing, that was sex education. Fortunately, there were more stimulating clues around me, portents like 69 on STOP signs, men waving bananas from cars, couples rubbing each other on escalators, news of banned films from Atlanta’s single art house, creased passages of books circulating at summer camp, and fornicating dogs, locked at an awkward juncture for a painfully long time. I studied these mysteries but remained baffled by their meaning. By the next year, bafflement had vanished. I received my first true lesson in sex education.
My informant was Lilly, the family maid, who spent five nights a week in a small room at the far end of our large dreary house. Lilly was beautiful, so beautiful it was painful to watch her sweep and iron. She should have been an African queen or movie star. At night, I would creep through the foreboding halls to her room.
“Lilly, can I come in?”
“Uh-huh,” she grunted.
Lilly was resting from the day’s work. She had removed her white uniform and folded it over the closet door. She lay immodestly in a slip and panties, stretched out on the narrow bed, curled in a beguiling repose, her straightened hair picturesquely arranged on the pillow, and her regard for me royally indifferent.
Tentatively, I took a worshipful seat at Lilly’s feet. She spoke to me about this and that: her children in South Carolina, her boyfriend who was an Atlanta cop, her parents in a remote part of the state. She spoke to my ignorance.
While I listened, I stared at the fur covering her long and shapely legs. She didn’t shave because her boyfriend preferred it otherwise.
“He loves feeling it,” she told me. That was the sort of revelation I had been waiting for.
Sometimes, she lifted her hair and let me touch the pair of crescent scars on either side of her neck where her husband had “poked” her. The knife went in right and came out left. Her sister removed it. “It slipped out clean like a butter knife,” Lilly said.
This too was evidence. Sex was tenderness of touch and terror of violence.
Lilly didn’t stay long. When she left, I hoped her beauty had catapulted her beyond such meager circumstances. Her presence was transient, but the albums of Hank Ballard and the Midnighters were a permanent fixture. A destination of nightly visitations. I had a turntable, a stash of records, and privacy where I played “Annie Had a Baby” and “Sexy Ways” over and over, attempting to learn the language and decipher the code.
Annie had a baby/can’t work no mor’
Annie had a baby/can’t work no mor’
Every time she starts to workin’
Has to stop and walk the baby cross the flo’r
Flo’r, flo’r, flo’r . . .
When I finally figured out that Annie had had a baby out of wedlock and worked as a prostitute, I thought I was a genius. These songs were thrilling, taboo at the least and likely criminal. I couldn’t believe people wrote such audacious music, and I had the clandestine privilege of listening. It dared me to dream of desperation unlike any I had imagined.
By fourteen, I often went to hear Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. He lived in Atlanta and by decent people’s standards, was considered a purveyor of “devil” music and an evil influence on children. My mother tried to forbid his records in our house, but it was way too late. I had memorized each lyric and unlocked the shibboleth of every song. More significant, the music now lived in my body.
Hank Ballard was the original Twist man. He wrote and recorded “The Twist” before Chubby Checkers turned it into an international craze. By then, Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts had invaded Atlanta and assumed supremacy in the universe of salacious music. They played all over the city, at downtown hotels and fraternity parties. Their personal popularity and record sales were generated exclusively by word of mouth because none of their songs ever made air-time. X-rated all the way, they were one of the most dynamic and ubiquitous dance bands of the era until they were banned from campuses and banished out of Dixie.
According to an homage to Doug Clark (who died in 2002), Richmond, Virginia passed a law in the early 1960s: NO HOT NUTS.
The chorus of their signature song was:
Hot nuts/hot nuts/get ’em from the peanut man
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Hot nuts/hot nuts/get ’em anyway you can.
“Get ’Em from the Peanut Man” is the title of an old blues song, but the Doug Clark version was simply called “Hot Nuts.” Each verse described the color of a woman’s dress and a sex act (something like the Kama Sutra of R&B).
See that girl dressed in black
She likes to do IT on her back.
IT was enough for me. IT was the ultimate. The Hot Nuts chorus yelled, “Yeah! yeah! yeah!” as we crowded around, growing wilder with each suggestion: red-bed, green-scream, pink-stink. For hours, dancing to “My Ding-a-Ling” and “Baby, Let Me Bang Your Box.”
Exhausted and ecstatic, we headed into the night. My well-mannered date opened and closed the car door so I could climb in. Then, he carefully drove me home where I waited for him to walk around and again open my car door. Then, he extended his hand to help me from the car and escorted me to the front steps where we stood a few moments under the porch light. I thanked him and delivered a chaste kiss, wondering if that counted.
In Atlanta, there were three Jewish social clubs with three improbable names: Progressive, Standard, and Mayfair. Although Jews were banned from clubs for Christians, they copied the same customs of exclusion, ranking the status of their membership by class and country of origin. Our grandfather was the first Ashkenazim invited to join the German-dominated Standard Club, a point of family pride for two generations.
On Sundays, our family usually dined at the club. Peggy and I grew accustomed to dressing up for dinner, sipping Shirley Temples at the bar, staining our fingers with the red shells of pistachios, and watching our grandmother play the slot machines. When we were older, we spent summers by the pool, either playing canasta or flirting with the attractive (gentile) lifeguards. I don’t recall anyone swimming.
Except for bridge and booze, my father had no interest in club life. Conversations about real estate and golf depressed him. He took no interest in clothes or automobiles. He drove only my grandmother’s discarded Cadillacs, and when he finally bought a new car, it was an unfashionable Rambler. His careless grooming and sloppy attire were a constant source of irritation to my mother who wanted him to look presentable.
“Is it so difficult to make an effort?”
Apparently, it was.
My father had been trained as a chemical engineer with a masters degree before the age of twenty. The smartest boy (poor) married to the most beautiful girl (rich) was the equation of our family legend. The household divided accordingly: intelligence signaled indifference to material things, and beauty narcissistically indulged in acquiring them.
Although daddy lacked business experience and ambition, he was asked after the war to join Puritan Mills. Club life and elegant home were part of the vice-presidential package along with dances in the ballroom on Saturday night and dinners on Sunday. He was a witty, garrulous man, but no one paid attention when he turned the conversation to foreign policy and the plight of Negroes.
“Relax and have a good time,” his pals said. Like him, they had fought in the war. One had lost a leg, another an eye. They had already sacrificed. Now, they wanted to forget and enjoy life. If only Eddie Breen would let them.
By tenth grade, Peggy’s prediction about me had come true. Overnight, I was a pretty girl. I went out as much as possible with any boy willing to drive to the edge of the city to pick me up. On weekends, I spent the night at Peggy’s house where we often engaged in late dating: coming home at midnight with one boy and sneaking out later with another. She groomed me on clothes, cigarettes, sex, and subterfuge.
Unfortunately, there was no place to go for late dates except the Standard Club golf course with its smooth, mowed rolling greens under a sky lit by fireflies and stars. While the course overflowed during the day with men cursing short drives and poor putts, at night it was a deserted, enchanted place.
Enchantment was forever demolished when Bruce Perry (a young lifeguard) and I were discovered by the police on the seventeenth hole, Peggy and Charlie on the eleventh, and another couple outside the clubhouse (which had initiated the call to the police). We were charged with trespassing. Everyone was a college student except Peggy and me. Quickly, she assessed the danger of our juvenile status. We lied about our age. Instead of hauling us to jail, the police issued tickets and a court date.
“What are we gonna do?” I cried.
“Look innocent,” Peggy said, sweeping my hair into a pony tail. “In baby-doll dresses, we can’t look more innocent than that.”
Our day in court arrived. Each of us (including Brenda, a sophomore at University of Georgia) was attired in a baby-doll dress with a square low-cut neckline, short puffed sleeves, a fitted bodice trimmed in rickrack, and a ballerina skirt to the knee. Any similarity among us ended at Brenda’s bustline where the upper hemispheres of her enticing breasts jiggled like vanilla pudding.
We sat nervously in the back of the hot courtroom. It was packed with black youth arrested for pickpocketing and shoplifting. During the three hours of procedures, dozens of cases were heard. The judge pronounced everyone guilty.
We were terrified.
Finally, our case was called. We stood before the judge who peered at us over his glasses. “Trespassing at the Standard Club at two in the morning, correct?”
“Yes, sir,” Peggy spoke up.
“Are your families members of the Standard Club?”
“Our grandfather, Morris Abelman, was invited to join in 1934,” Peggy spoke again.
The judge smiled indulgently and stared at Brenda. “I understand y’all go to college?”
“Yes, sir,” we said in unison.
“Duke,” Bruce Perry added.
“And you?” the judge asked Brenda.
“Athens, sir,” she responded, lifting the tip of her bosom so the jewels of her sorority pin could sparkle in the light.
“Dismissed,” the judge pounded the gavel.
Outside in the molten parking lot, Brenda wiped the beads of perspiration from her face, adjusted her baby-doll neckline, and fluffed her skirt.
We were in awe of Brenda. She had saved us.