Not Without My Father: One Woman's 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace by Andra Watkins

Author:Andra Watkins
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Best 2015 Nonfiction, NBA, Retail, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780990859314
Publisher: Word Hermit Press LLC
Published: 2015-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

GREEN ONIONS

Booker T & the MGs

I remember the first time I messed my pants. I mean, not the very first time, you understand. But the first time I did it in front of other people.

I was a six-year-old boy, riding the bus home from school, and I got this powerful gas. Musta been something my mother put in my lunch, or the consequences of dipping into her snuff. Whatever it was, it needed to get out.

I looked around that bus and figured we was a bunch of kids. All kids stink. I never climbed on that bus without getting my nostrils full of smells. All stale sweat and dirty bodies and rotten food.

So I thought I could pass a little wind, and nobody’d know the difference. It’d just blend with the other stuff.

Only it wasn’t just air that came out.

Well, I didn’t know what to do.

Them kids started pinching their noses together, and looking around, and climbing all over the seats, “Who tooted? Where’s the baby who messed their pants? We don’t got no diapers in elementary school, baby. Here, tootie-tootie-tootie.”

And I was right there with ’em. It was only a little bit. I couldn’t see no stain. I figured it’d be all right to pretend, ’til I could get off that bus and run home to my momma.

Everything changed at the end of our dirt road. I stepped into sunshine, and them kids all figured out it was me. I run off, with them screaming, “Hey, Tootie! Better bring your diapers to school tomorrow! You sure do stink!”

Andra had the same problem, all through elementary school, especially around the time she started that womanly business. I sat in the den and listened to Linda in the bathroom, telling Andra how to wash right, to make sure she used soap. I wanted to go in there and tell ’em both, “She gets this from me. She’ll figure it out eventually.”

Because I did. Until my old body gave out. On that bus, I never thought I’d have the same problem seventy-some years later. When we’re young, we can’t imagine being old. But then, sometime in our forties or fifties, when our bodies break down, we get scared. When am I gonna keel over from a heart attack? Golly molly, if I have a stroke, I hope it’s massive enough to kill me. Is this bump cancer?

It’s only when we start to fag out that we realize the things we took for granted are the ones we don’t want to live without. A full set of teeth. Hair that grows where it’s supposed to. The bulge that wakes a fella up in the middle of the night. A body that can make it to a toilet before the crap starts coming.

Guess folks can start calling me Tootie again.

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