Tina McElroy Ansa - Stars On The Ceiling 

 

 

When I was growing up in Macon, Georgia, my family lived in Pleasant Hill at the foot of Forest Avenue and a great big old beautiful old brick two-storey house that was set way back from the street. The neighborhood of Pleasant Hill is now a historic district. But when I was growing up, it was just a good solid neighborhood. And our house was a good solid house. It had six bedrooms, a music room, my mama's sewing room, a great big old attic that was musty and hot all year long and for some reason smelled like Christmas candy all year long. [audience chuckle] And that's where my brothers and my sisters and I would play for hours with our friends from the neighborhood. It even had a long narrow linen closet that smelled like fresh laundry that I would escape to and hide in.

 

Our house was the house that all the kids in the neighborhood wanted to visit. We even had in the basement a standard size pool hall pool table. That of course, made us very popular with the boys in the neighborhood until my father would just run them off. My father, you know, "Get your asses on out of here. You don't have to go home, but you're going to have to get out of here." [audience chuckle] That was my daddy.

 

My daddy was very handsome, very charismatic and very-- very complicated. My father was a man of his times, but he really didn't think the rules applied to him. He owned juke joints and liquor stores in and around Macon, Georgia, when I was growing up, my whole life.  They know that's not really what you call a sure business, not mortuaries or insurance or something like that, and you had to take big risks sometime. And my father took the big risk. And sometimes the risk paid off and sometimes it didn't.

 

So, when I was growing up, sometimes we had lots of money, sometimes we didn't. But, oh, when we had money, my dad didn't know how to pamper himself and his family. He knew how to spend it. He loved good food. This was in the 50s. And so, regularly he would take the five kids and my mother and the whole family on these car trips up north to Cincinnati and Washington so we could eat at fine restaurants, something we couldn't do in the south at that time.

 

My father was like the master of the grand gesture. On my parents' wedding anniversary every year, my father would order 100 live Maine lobsters to be shipped down on rail cars. I remember the first time they came, I was a little girl. They came packed in the seaweed. I'd never seen seaweed before. When we had money, my mother also would take us to a nearby white neighborhood, to a store called Jory's. It was a little upscale children's dress store, and we loved to go to Jory's. Jory's was special because every time you went there, no matter what you bought, they would fold it nicely, and then they would wrap it in this lightly scented tissue paper, and then they would put it in this great big, shiny white box. It was just special. And my mother loved special.

 

My mother was also very beautiful. And she had a knack for just making everything around her beautiful. She was into the smallest detail. Cloth napkins at every meal, fresh flowers in the house. For the times when things were up and down, with the risk my father took, she was the one who kept the whole house sort of in balance. Usually, my father's risk would pay off, and sometimes they didn't. And when they didn't, he, in the past, would always scramble and find some money to save the day. He loved taking risks. He thrived on it. My mother made her crazy. It didn't matter to us kids one way or the other. And to me, especially as the baby of the family, until the day we lost our house.

 

My father just announced at dinner one night that we were going to be moving. As a baby, nobody told me anything more than that. I had to eavesdrop and listen around corners and listen to what my brothers and sisters were saying. And I thought this was really a momentous event. I thought I was prepared for it. But when the day of the move came, my little world was shaken to its core. I felt unglued. I remember every detail. It was late summer, still hot in Middle Georgia, and I was eight years old. And my mother was orchestrating everything. She was wrangling the movers. Five kids, ages 8 to 18. All that furniture, that pool table, all our possessions. And she was on point. She was just telling everybody what to do, making sure that they did it right. Not a crack in her façade, even with the sheriff standing there with his arms folded over us. I wasn't expecting to do much more as the baby just stayed out of the way. So, I spent the whole day just sort of wandering around, saying goodbye to my beloved home.

 

At some point in the afternoon, it was late. I wandered around to the back of the house to say goodbye to my little beloved woods and the little stream where I made my first little sand pies. And I came upon my mother. She was sitting at the top of the steps that led from-- the cement steps that led from the kitchen all the way down into the yard and on into the woods outside. And she was sitting by herself and she was crying. And I don't mean she was, like, weeping. My mother had her hands, head in her face, and she was sobbing. Okay? I mean, these deep, gut-wrenching sobs. I had never heard sounds like that before, especially from my lovely mother. And she was sobbing up there by herself. And I just stood frozen.

 

I don't know whether I knew intuitively not to just intrude upon her or whether my little legs wouldn't move and allow me to. A couple of seconds before I come upon my mother, I had seen my father leave the house through the front door, jump in the car and just speed off, kicking up pine straw in his wake. Over my shoulder, I could see he hadn't gotten very far. He didn't even make it to Forest Avenue. In the middle of the driveway, he slammed on the brakes and turned that car around and came back. I could see him when he went through the house, going from room to room looking for my mother. My mother couldn't see or hear him. But at that point she stopped the sobbing, just, I mean, cut it off. Okay? She stood up and she wiped her face and she straightened her back. She literally straightened her back like that. She turned around and went back inside for what she had to finish doing. Through the kitchen window, I saw when my mother and my father found each other, there was no conversation, no touching. They just looked at each other for a long time, and then they went back to doing what they had to do.

 

Well, the movers, who were really men from my father's now-defunct business downtown juke joint, moved us, packed us up and moved our home across town to Dove Street, which was near the Tyndall Heights housing projects. When we first drove up, the first time I saw the house, I couldn't believe we were going to have to live here. The house didn't look very sturdy, and it was just one storey, and it was tiny and it was sort of rickety and it was made out of wood. And I remember thinking, “Oh, heck, the three little pigs and a big bad wolf and everything.” And so, I got a little afraid.

 

I had this rickety porch, and the first time I went on that porch, I remember thinking-- because Dove Street was at the top of the hill, a lot of the hills in Macon, Georgia. It’s top of the hill, I remember thinking I could stand on that rickety porch and look out and see everything. The housing projects nearby, the abandoned lots down the street, the other rickety houses, just as bad as our house, with front yards that were the color of red, dusty Georgia clay. And I remember thinking you could see everything from here and you could never, ever forget where you are, ever. The inside was even worse. When I went in, I almost burst into tears. I didn't know how we were going to live there.

 

None of our furniture fit, of course, and what fit just made it look like it was too big for the space. And it made it look sort of cartoonish. My brothers had to double up and sleep together in one room. The girls, my sisters and I had to triple up and sleep in one room. And that first night when I lay in bed with my sisters, I saw this little hole about this big in the ceiling. And it just wasn't in the ceiling. It went right up to the roof. There was a little hole in the roof. And it just went right up to the sky. And I said, "Oh my God." And I elbowed my sisters and said, "Hey, look at this. We can see the stars in the ceiling here." Well, I thought this was something magical and wonderful, but I knew it wasn't because my sisters just burst into tears and they threw-- they were teenagers and threw themselves into the pillow, and just sobbed themselves to sleep at night. And I started thinking, “Well, shoot, things may be a little worse than I even thought.” I still went to school over in Pleasant Hill at the private Catholic school.

 

But after about a week, I noticed none of my friends had visited me. So, I went to find my mother. I found her in the kitchen shucking the corn. And I asked, "What's going on here?" And she turned to me and said very gently, but very firmly, "Your friend's parents don't have the money or the time to be hauling their girls across town just to visit you. Shoot, we don't have the money to do that. I got that you're a big girl now speech. You're going to have to just deal with this the way that it is." And I did. I read more. I loved to read. And when my sisters got tired of me begging them to play, I even found a little friend right next door. A little red-faced, red-haired girl named Frankie, who was just like me, except she was a couple of years older, and she smelled. She smelled like her house, which had an odor to it. And she wore shabby dresses until my mama got ahold of her. And most amazingly, she dipped snuff. [audience chuckle] She was about 10 years old like an old woman. And she spit the snuff juice the packages off the side of the porch. Well, I was enthralled. Okay? [audience laughter] And what was so amazing is she was just as enthralled with me and my family and that we sat down and ate dinner together. And the things that we had even in our fallen state, she was just amazed. It still didn't feel right.

 

Then one day in November, my father came to pick me up from school in Pleasant Hill, which was a treat in itself because we hadn't seen much of my father, day or night, since we had moved into Dove Street. And when I got home, on the front porch, I saw all my family, not just my brothers and sisters and mother, I mean, my cousins, hanging off the front porch waiting for me. And my family grabbed me and threw me in the house. And my sisters and my mother took me by the hand and pushed me into the bedroom and said, "You got to change. You got to change your clothes." And I was like, "Oh, Okay. Okay" I didn't know what was going on. It was exciting. It was very exciting.

 

And so, I changed out of my little Catholic school uniform. And my mama took me and turned me around. And there on the bed was this big, white, shiny box. And inside it was this frilly blue and white dress wrapped in tissue paper that smelled faintly of my mother's Joy perfume. And I tried it on, and it fit. It was wonderful. And I still didn't know what was going on. And my mother brushed my hair and scooted me out. My sister dragged me into the backyard. And in the backyard, oh God, it was filled. It was filled with balloons and streamers, cake, and ice cream. But most of all, it was filled with kids screaming Happy Birthday. It was my first surprise birthday party. And it was a surprise. It wasn't even my birthday. It was on another date. [audience laughter] And my family had done it to trick me.

 

And the kids were in the backyard, kids from my school and from Pleasant Hill and kids from the neighborhood. Frankie was there in one of my sister's outgrown fancy dresses. And we were all screaming and hollering and running, all jacked up on ice cream and cake. And nobody noticed the peeling paint on the house or the patched roof, the fact that any of the kids were any different. We just all felt good and wonderful and protected and loved and special. And I started thinking, “Well, hey, special may not have any special kind of address.”

 

We stayed at Dove Street for a little over a year. And then one night, my father made another announcement at dinner. He loved making proclamations at dinner. He said, “You know, we were going to be moving again.” Well, I was a little wary of this move this time. I had been through this before. And then he dropped a bomb on us. Okay? We were moving back to Forest Avenue and Pleasant Hill in our own house. Oh my God. There were screams and yells and squeals and probably even tears, but there wasn't one thought in my head how my father, a black man in the 1950s, must have struggled and connived and hustled and managed to get his business back in one year and to get us back in our home in one year, but he did it.

 

And so, it was good times when we moved back. I remember the same way as when we left, but I was a little older, I was a year older, but I was older in here. I had learned a couple of things. I had learned how quickly life could change. I could learn how quickly things and people change and then change again and then change back. But I'd also learned, thank God, that there were some things in this world that never, ever changed. There were some people in this world that never, ever changed. And when I lay down for the first time again in my own little twin bed by myself in my little cotton candy pink bedroom, I lay on my back for what seemed like hours, just searching the ceiling for stars. Thanks.