Mississippi Sissy by Kevin Sessums

Author:Kevin Sessums
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312341015
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

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I saw Matty May again only one other time. I had returned home from New York for a visit with my grandfather before we moved him into the convalescent home, as the senior-citizen living facility was called by the locals. The convalescent home remained a private institution, even while Pop resided there into the late 1980s, so that it could also remain whites-only. Medical facilities around Forest had always been the last to integrate. Even after our school system came up with an integration plan of its own the year I entered seventh grade, the doctors’ and dentists’ offices around town maintained their separate waiting rooms, each with the receptionists’ stations located in a closed-off middle area with a window for the white patients and one for the black ones. When I was taken in for a doctor’s visit, I would always look into the reception area and through the “colored” window, trying maybe to catch a glimpse of Matty. I never did.

My grandmother had died a year before my return home from New York to visit Pop, who had been left alone to ramble around our old house. Kim was attending the University of Mississippi Medical School after a brief sojourn at Tulane’s. Karole was about to attend nursing school there also after graduating from college. Both of them were living in Jackson, and Pop had gotten another Chihuahua to keep him company and named it Jingles. Lola helped him out with food. W. F. hadn’t yet pointed a gun to his head. Pop and I had always had a strained relationship resulting from what I had once found hidden in his closet. The first boy I had ever physically loved (Bobby Thompson would remain unattainable) was the son of a renowned liberal editor of a small-town newspaper in Mississippi. The boy had become my pen pal after our meeting at a high school drama festival at the University of Southern Mississippi at which I, a sophomore, had won the Best Actor Award for my performance in a one-act called Impromptu. The boy went on to volunteer for the Peace Corps and later to work in politics and serve in the State Department.

Everyone at that drama festival at Southern was commenting on how I had looked like a young Nureyev onstage—Frank Hains had not been the first to tell me that—and this boy, who had come with his own school as the photographer for his father’s paper as well as the school’s, asked to photograph me. We were at a party in a hotel room with others from our schools. We went into the bathroom and shut the door. He closed the toilet’s lid and told me to sit on it and look over at him. He pushed back the shower curtain and stood in the empty tub. When he looked at me through his lens he whispered rather matter-of-factly, “You’re beautiful.” He saw, through that lens, the look in my eyes and knew I had been waiting almost sixteen years to hear a boy say that with just such matter-of-fact normalcy.

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