No Words
By Emily Simmons Key
November 15, 2024
November 15, 2024
My early memories were tinged with blacks and grays, prickly edges and cloudy insides. Out of sequence snapshots. A sense of sadness, not harsh or choking…vague…wrapped around me like an invisible coat. Unease floated in the air around me. A sense of something awry. I didn’t know the words for it and words were not offered to me.
My early childhood was lived in an early 1950s Mississippi Delta town sitting on the side of Highway 61. Now I realize how simple my life was. One day gently eased into another. Until the small world around me began to slowly shift and crack. Subtle at first. No one talked to me about these changes. Perhaps the silence that encircled me was to protect me from the problems of my parents. Perhaps they thought I hadn’t noticed, as I went about the business of being a child. But I wasn’t spared and I noticed. Voices from other places found their way to my ears as I covered my head and waited for sleep.
I sat very still in my small rocking chair, feet crossed, staring through the porch screen. The porch was small, at one end a swing too big for me. The narrow street lying in front of our shotgun house was deserted except for the large woman walking on the sidewalk holding a parasol against the sun’s glare. She mopped her face with a white cloth and never noticed me watching her. She shuffled slowly by, crossing the train track, over and out of sight. My hands curving over the ends of the small armrests, I turned my head back and continued my solitary gazing. I could see part of the sky through the trees. The sun was now hidden behind gray clouds. It wasn’t night, but it was getting darker. I felt a shadow of uneasiness without knowing the word. I got up and went inside, the screen door closing silently behind me.
I walked through the house and out the back door, forgoing the temptation to run through the sheets hanging on the line. I walked across the scrabbly yard and up Verline’s back steps. Through the tiny spotless kitchen which smelled faintly of something fried. This stooped middle-aged colored woman whose home was so open to me was not “colored” at all. Her skin was pale white and mottled with brownish spots Her head was covered with yellow fuzz, tightly braided in narrow threads.
“Dat you, Cee? Don’t be gettin’ on my clean sheets wif yo dirty feet. Come on up here.”
I found her on the porch. I stood by her chair and we silently watched dust sweep down the street. We never talked much. We didn’t need to.
I sat by my mother on our couch, as close to her warmth as I could get. I placed my small hand in her lap, my attempt at understanding what I did not. I knew this man-our preacher from the First Baptist Church. He spoke quiet words in our direction. Could I catch them so I could understand? Like butterflies, they eluded me. My mother was crying. I saw her face, the tissue in her hand. I didn’t like the crying. It unsettled me. I wanted her to stop.
Someone must be dead, I thought. Isn’t that why the preacher comes? Wouldn’t I know? Someone would be gone. And then I remembered. Someone was gone. But he wasn’t dead. My father had reluctantly left our narrow, neat home because my mother couldn’t bear the nearness of him anymore. The preacher left, with words of “prayer” and “help” trailing after him. Neither of us felt any better for his coming.
I sat cross-legged on the cool floor, turning the pages of a book with no pictures. Turning the pages, not knowing the words. I pushed it away. The fan made soothing noises and gently ruffled my wispy hair. The floor seemed to tremble slightly under Mary’s heavy steps as she moved toward the tapping on the screen door’s wooden frame.
A young woman with red hair stepped inside, looked around, and asked to use the telephone. She looked at me and smiled tightly in my direction. I knew her. I’d heard her name as it was wrung and ripped through my mother’s hands and flung against the wall. I’d heard her name as it fell to the floor, was scooped up by my father, and put in his pocket. I’d heard her name as he’d unwillingly and sadly left my mother and me that day. I was slightly unsettled by her alien presence as I watched her. Why is she here, I wondered. To steal what remained of my father? I was glad when she left with her own secrets for coming, a private mystery. I returned to the book with no pictures.
The sky was white. The air was heavy. In the distance heat waves rose from the road stretching out of town. My hand sweated in Mary’s as we turned and walked toward town. Most days we strolled our familiar path. Mary stopping to gossip and complain to friends along the way, with me impatient for a very cold Orange Crush. We would pass the courthouse with its attached jail, and I would always look up to see the shadows of men staring down through second-story bars. I would tightly grip the brown hand gently pulling me along and looked away. I had often felt a brush of sorrow for the shadows, but lately imagined myself as sad as they. But I remained silent…isolated in a world of grown-up grief. Alone- ness seemed to follow and nag me where, before, the everyday-ness of my life had been a security.
My mother opened the back door of the Ford and I climbed inside. The seat was itchy to my skin. I leaned back and dangled my legs nervously. Mama spoke to my uncle and slid into the front passenger seat, gently closing the door. As we pulled away from the house, I moved to the open window and put my arm out to catch the breeze. My mother glanced over her shoulder at me. Her eyes worried and dark. A small curve of her lips. I turned away, pulling myself up to look out the long back window at clouds that never moved.
We turned onto the highway, the town shrinking as the car gained speed. I pretended I could stretch my arms, grab it all, and pull it with me…but then my home was lost in the flat Delta distance, swallowed up by endless fields. I lay down and closed my eyes. The car was quiet with only the rhythmic clicks of tires on asphalt and the soft murmuring of Mama and her brother. The hollow space inside my chest grew bigger. Thoughts of my father and my longing for him danced in the space inside me…a slow dance…side to side…up and down, soundlessly. I’ll never see my daddy again, I worried. The thoughts filled me up, yet I was empty. I said nothing. I was a child, and I didn’t know the words.
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Emily Key is a native Mississippian now living in Savannah, Georgia. She is an educator and considers herself a lifelong learner. Emily sometimes paints, cooks against her will, and considers herself a writer of poems, flash fiction, and the occasional CNF. You can find her on Facebook (Emily Simmons Key) and on Twitter/X @EmilyKey47.
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Author’s Note:
This piece is based on memories of early childhood and the thoughts and feelings I experienced as the family that I had always known began dissolving into something broken.