How her mother’s stroke, a family house that no one wanted, fate, and figs brought author Teresa Nicholas and her aunt, Willie Belle, closer together.
Words by Teresa Nicholas | Photo by Amanda Greene
July 19, 2022
The summer my mother died, my 81-year-old aunt Willie Belle slipped on some fruit mush and fell underneath the two giant fig trees in her backyard. I was staying next door, at my mother’s house, and I happened to glance up from the book I was reading to see the old girl on her back, legs in the air, sneaker soles up, her white sugaring tub overturned. It was July, fig season in the Mississippi Delta.
“I just hope all my metal parts is OK,” she said as I stooped to pull her up.
She was referring to her hip and knee replacements — two knees, one hip. Willie Belle is the only person I know who can have a joint replaced and two weeks later be back in circulation — at “her” pew at the First Baptist Church and her desk at the Yazoo County Courthouse, in Yazoo City, where until a few years ago, she was one of the sheriff’s two secretaries.
“Don’t this just beat all,” she said, dabbing her bloody wrist with a Kleenex. Except for a nasty scrape on her forearm, she seemed OK, metal parts included.
***
I wasn’t always close to my aunt-by-marriage, who wed my mother’s twin brother, Lawrence, in 1949. Throughout my childhood, Willie Belle struck me as cold and mean — just like my own mother and all my Hood relatives, who were dirt farmers from way back. She and my mother were as close as sisters, who, when they got together with my half-dozen other Hood aunts, formed a quilt-top-sewing, catfish-frying, pole-bean-snapping, blackberry-jam-and-fig-preserving Southern Aunt Mafia. I didn’t much like these hard-bitten women who pinched a child to show affection, my own mother included.
Our aunt-niece rapport improved after my mother had her fourth stroke in 2008 and went into a nursing home. My husband, Gerry, and I started spending a third of the year in Yazoo City at my mother’s house, our visits spread out one month per season. After writing all day, we often ate takeout suppers with Willie Belle and chain-watched old movies in her comfy den. Hanging with my aunt became the mainstay of our social life in Yazoo.
Four years later, my mother developed pneumonia and entered hospice. On a sunny Sunday in June 2012, the day she appeared to be dying, Gerry and I sat with her in her room. At about 1 o’clock, Willie Belle entered, asking, “Is she cold yet?” She touched the back of my mother’s hands. “Not bad,” she pronounced and drew up a chair. She left an hour before my mother died. When I told Willie Belle how close she missed it, she replied, “Well, if I’d’ve known, I would’ve stayed longer.” At the time I’d wondered why she hadn’t.
A day later, as we waited in Willie Belle’s den for my sisters to arrive from out of town, straight-line winds sent branches and garbage-can tops flying past the sliding glass doors. I thought, My mother is leaving the earth. Despite the doomsday atmosphere, Willie Belle didn’t put her arm around me or kiss my cheek, though she did say, “I guess now I’ll have to be the mama to all y’all.”
I didn't know how to answer. Part of me would have liked Willie Belle to be my Other Mother, but I couldn’t consent. I couldn’t replace my mother with someone else, even my aunt, who was like her in so many ways. My disturbed insides registered a hard no at the thought of letting my aunt get into my heart that way. As long as my heart stayed closed, I kept my mother.
***
My mother, Florence Adele Hood Nicholas, never wanted to inconvenience anybody. She timed her death to occur two weeks before Gerry and I were scheduled to be in New York to help teach a book publishing workshop at Columbia University. Lindy Hess, the workshop’s director and a longtime friend, was solicitous and plied me with bottles of water and plates of sugar cookies. When needed, Lindy could come out with a truth, and what she said was: “The main thing I knew about your mother was how much you loved her.”
After the workshop, we flew back to Yazoo City to stay awhile, and I saw my mother everywhere — in the canary-yellow recliner, drawing her long legs under her; in front of her makeup mirror, smoothing lanolin on her broad face; in the green rocker on the porch, resting her chin on the palm of her hand. I had come late to accepting my mother and even to loving her, but she and I had gotten closer starting back in 2002 when she turned 78 and underwent heart surgery. I was living in New York, but I visited her often. We liked to take long rides, especially to the hill country in eastern Yazoo County, stopping often at remote cemeteries to visit her family’s graves. As we rode, she would stare out the window and mention a stray fact about her childhood, such as, “That there’s where Buddy George ate his lunch while waiting for the school bus.” On another occasion, she said, “When I was growing up, children had to eat last. All we got was the chicken feet!” Over time, I came to think about the Hood lack of sentiment differently, not as cruelty but as an emotional carapace that she (and the aunts) had needed to withstand their harsh upbringing.
***
Figs are the quintessential summer fruit in the Mississippi Delta. The province of backyard growers, the barrel-shaped trees can be spotted around most Delta towns. There are over 700 varieties of fig tree, which fall into four types: Smyrna, Caprifigs, San Pedro, and common figs. One of the most common fig varieties grown in the Delta is the Southern Brown Turkey, a large, tasty fig with few seeds. These trees don’t require pollination and are wildly prolific, with about three weeks of production.
When my father’s grandparents arrived from Lebanon at the end of the 19th century, one of the reasons they settled in Yazoo City was that the climate could support a fig tree, and they could be reminded of the Old Country. “Some Lebanese came bearing cuttings of fig trees and grapevines and olive trees that they would share,” my cousin Dan Nicholas told me. For their part, my mother’s subsistence-farming, Mississippi-bred forebears added the fig to the repertoire of foods they’d procured via picking, canning, preserving, shooting, growing, smoking, or hanging up by the hooves to dry.
Figs are not merely trees. They are history. They are family.
***
Not long after Willie Belle’s hard fall on a soft fruit, she reminisced in her den about where she was born, in the Delta town of Indianola. When she was just a girl, while her mother worked in the fields, Willie Belle kept the younger children and cooked their lunch, stoking the fire in the woodstove. When she was 5, she fell into the fire under the laundry vat in the front yard. “I had on a short wool coat,” she said, “and that thing just went up. I ran. There was a real nice Black lady who helped Mama, and she had on a long dress. She caught me and rolled me over and used her dress to put out the flames.” Willie Belle’s family took her all the way to the Baptist hospital in Jackson, but the doctors couldn’t do anything. “My mama, she didn’t give up on me,” my aunt said. She nursed Willie Belle at home for a year, while she lay in bed on her stomach. When Willie Belle turned 13, her mama sewed her a long white dress for the Glee Club, with such fine stitches you couldn’t tell it wasn’t from a machine. “And I planned to keep that dress forever,” she said, “because she died that spring.” But she lent it to another girl and never got it back. She told these stories with such a flat voice and a blank face that she could have been discussing a stranger.
She also shared happier memories. She spent her teenage years in Louise, a seven-block town that rose from a vast cotton field and where her daddy was the sheriff at the one-room jailhouse. Of the two girls in her senior class of 1948, Willie Belle was voted “Miss Louise High.” And all these years later, she was still beautiful, with blue eyes and gray-blond hair. Because of her joint replacements, she now walked in a stiff way, unlike my mother, who’d slunk around the world like a giant, loose cat. I like to imagine the face on my uncle Lawrence the day Willie Belle rolled into downtown Yazoo City to buy a couple of gallons of gas. My uncle, a corporal in the Marines, was two years back from the war and working as a station attendant at Rose Oil. When they married in Louise’s quaint Methodist church on Ash Street, Willie Belle was just 19.
***
Is there anything more demanding than a ripening fig? Two weeks before my aunt’s fall, the culprits were still hard green globes shaped like miniature punching bags. But then the daytime temperature settled into the upper 90s, and the humidity hitched up high enough to curl even the straightest debutante hair. We received a few tiny rains, sufficient for the stubborn figs to mature. To eat the first ones, my aunt and I inched inside the bushy trees and gorged on the soft purple fruits.
“Eve could have tempted Adam faster with the fig than with the apple,” I said. I was joshing Willie Belle the same way I had once joshed my mother, and like my mother, she returned an easy laugh. But it wasn’t the same. Something came up missing in her eyes. With Willie Belle, I wasn’t the same person I’d been with my mother: not as pretty, not as clever, and worst of all, not as funny.
After we’d eaten our fill, all our efforts turned to obtaining enough fruit to make this year’s batch of preserves. I climbed the stepladder and picked high, while my aunt held the bucket. We followed my aunt’s way of preserving, without a recipe. “I can’t give you amounts,” she sniffed, her cook’s pride evident. “I don’t have any.” We added sugar and lemon to the simmering figs according to how the mixture looked and tasted, and we cooked until done. Fig preserving isn’t a simple summer activity. The ritual takes us back in time and gives us continuity in the present.
These were not the dog days, but the fig days, of summer.
***
Four years passed after my mother’s death and my aunt’s fall. The grief eased off, until one day I didn’t cry. Then I cried because I hadn’t. As for my mother’s house, I no longer felt her presence there. I began to disentangle myself from her belongings. But I kept my mother’s cast iron skillets, filmy and battered, looking like they’d been used by generations of Hood women. The old house sold, and we moved to Jackson, Mississippi.
Sometime after, age stopped Willie Belle from preserving figs. Now she walks with a four-pronged cane. She has grown forgetful. When I think about her feeble and forgetful, I feel sad. My mother’s stroke, a family house that nobody wanted, fate, and figs had cast us together. In ways that count, the softer ways of the heart, she has become my Other Mother.
Another thing about figs. Their season is swift, the pressure great. They end almost as soon as they’ve begun. Their season slides by, and those great, flat leaves turn brown and wither on the trunk. They hang for a while — “bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” as Shakespeare wrote — but in the end, they’re fodder for the earth, too. The next year, it’s figs all over again.
Teresa Nicholas’ most recent book, The Mama Chronicles: A Memoir, won the 2022 Life Writing Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. She lives in Jackson, Mississippi, with her husband, the writer Gerard Helferich.
