The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat

by Edward Kelsey Moore

There was a pitcher of water in the Frigidaire

Now that Jimmy, Eric, and Denise were all grown and out of the house, the early hours of the day were no longer linked to slow-passing minutes listening for coughs or cries or, later, teenage

james and jimmy eric denise...their children all grown

That morning, when the daylight came it brought along a visitor, Dora Jackson. I clapped my hand over my mouth to stifle a squeak of surprise

Odetts mother...dora jackson

People used to call us “the twins,” Mama and me. The two of us are round women—big in the chest, thick around the waist, and wide across the hips. We share what has often been charitably called an “interesting” face—narrow eyes, jowly cheeks, broad forehead, big but perfect teeth. I grew to be a few inches taller, five foot three. But if you were to look at pictures of us,

Physical description of odette and her mother dora

My mother loved the way she looked. She would strut through town on her uneven legs with her big breasts pointing the way forward, and you knew from looking at her that she figured she was just about the hottest thing going. I never came to love my tube-shaped body the way Mama loved hers, but learning to imitate that confident stride of hers was probably the single smartest thing I ever did. Mama wore her best dress

“What brings you by, Mama?” “I just thought I’d come tell you about the fun I had with Earl and Thelma McIntyre. We was up all night goin’ over old times and just laughin’ up a storm. I had forgot just how funny Thelma was. Lord, that was a good time. And that Thelma can roll a joint like nobody’s business, tight little sticks with just enough slack in the roach. I told her—”

mother had been a dedicated marijuana smoker all of her adult life. She said it was for her glaucoma. And if you reminded her that she’d never had glaucoma, she would bend your ear about the virtues of her preventative vision care regimen. Other than being against the law, the problem with Mama’s habit, and the reason I automatically glanced over my shoulder when she started talking about that mess, was that James had worked for the Indiana State Police for thirty-five years. Mama got caught twenty years back

Dora worked with marijuana..james worked for the state police of indiana

dope on the state university campus on the north end of town, and as a favor to James, the head of campus security brought her home instead of arresting her. The campus security chief swore he’d keep it under wraps, but things like that never stay quiet in a little town like Plainview. Everybody knew about it by the next morning. It tickled Mama to no end when her getting busted became a sermon topic at church a week later. But James didn’t see the humor in it when it happened, and he never would. I was eager for Mama to get back on track with the story of her evening with the McIntyres, skipping any

illegal parts, because foremost among my mother’s many peculiarities was the fact that, for many years, the vast majority of her conversations had been with dead people. Thelma McIntyre, the excellent joint roller, had been dead for twenty-some years. Big Earl, on the other hand, had been just fine one day earlier when I’d seen him at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat buffet. If he had indeed been visiting with Mama, it was not good news for Big Earl. “So, Big Earl’s dead, is he?” I asked. “I imagine so,” she said. I sat there for a while, not saying anything, just thinking about Big Earl gone from the earth. Mama gazed at

Thelma amd earl are dead?

We found out about Mama seeing ghosts at a Thanksgiving supper back in the 1970s. Mama, Daddy, my big brother Rudy, James, Jimmy, Eric, and me—I was pregnant with Denise that fall—were all gathered around the table. In keeping with tradition, I had done all of the cooking. Flowers Mama understood. She had the best garden in town, even before she devoted a plot to her prized marijuana plants. Food Mama never quite got the hang of. The last time Mama attempted to cook a holiday meal, we ended up feeding her

black-and-gray glazed ham to the dog and dining on hardboiled eggs. The dog took one bite of Mama’s ham and howled for six hours straight. The poor animal never quite recovered. So I became the family chef at age ten and we ended up with the only

vegetarian dog in southern Indiana. That Thanksgiving supper had started off real nice. I had cooked my best feast ever and everybody loved it. We joked and ate and celebrated having Rudy at home. My brother had run off to Indianapolis as soon as he graduated high school, so we didn’t see much of him and my boys barely knew their uncle. Everyone

Rudy...oxdette's btother

good time, except for Mama, who was testy and distracted all afternoon. She got more agitated as the meal went on, mumbling to herself and snapping at anyone who asked her what was wrong. Finally she stood up from the table and hurled the butter dish at an empty corner of the dining room. She shouted, “Goddammit to hell!”—my mother can cuss a blue streak when the inspiration hits her—“Goddammit to hell! I have had just about all I can take from you, Eleanor Roosevelt. Nobody invited you here and it’s time for you to go.” She shook an accusatory index finger at the corner of the room where the stick of butter, avocado-green plastic

butter dish still adhered to it, slid down the wall, leaving a shiny trail like the path of a rectangular snail. Mama looked at the astonished faces around the table and said, “Don’t give me that look. She may have been the perfect little lady when she was in the White House—all lace doilies and finger bowls—but since she died, she ain’t done nothin’ but show up here drunk as a skunk, try...

Daddy reacted to Mama’s ghosts by trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade her to see a do...

“You know that woman Earl was livin’ with?” “That woman” would be Big Earl’s second wife, Minnie. Mama

couldn’t stand Minnie, and she refused to utter her name or acknowledge

her marriage to Big Earl. “Thelma sa...

James loved Big Earl, too. Earl McIntyre was the closest thing to a father James ever had. James’s daddy

Thelma and earl...oddette's mom and dad...loved njames..odette's husband too

When the All-You-Can-Eat, the first black-owned business in downtown Plainview, opened in the mid-1950s and Big Earl couldn’t have been making a dime, he hired James’s mother as his first employee. And they kept her on the payroll long after emphysema had made it impossible for her to work. More important, the McIntyres kept an eye on James, so he wouldn’t end up like his daddy. I’ll be forever grateful to them for that.

Big earl opened the all u can eat in 1950s....only black owned business there at that time

All kinds of folks, and not just black, loved him. You could take a problem to Big Earl and he would sit there and listen to you spill out a lifetime’s worth of troubles. He’d nod patiently like it was all new to him, even though he was a man who had seen a lot in his life and had probably heard your particular kind of blues a hundred times over. After you were done, he’d rub his huge hands across the white stubble that stood out against the coal black of his skin and he’d say, “Here’s what we’re gonna do.” And if you had sense, you did

Now, if Mama’s word was to be trusted, Big Earl was dead. But that was a mighty big “if.” Mama said, “What was I talkin’ about? Oh yeah, the fountain. Thelma said the fountain in her front room was six feet tall, if it was an inch. And it was made up to look like a naked white girl pouring water out of a pitcher onto the head of another naked

The whole thing about Big Earl being dead could have been a prank played on Mama by a tipsy, belligerent Eleanor Roosevelt. I decided to put it out of my mind until later when we’d meet our friends for our standing after-church dinner date. We were gathering that Sunday, as we always did, at the All-You-Can-Eat. Little Earl and his wife, Erma Mae, had taken over running the restaurant

Little earl and his wife erma lou took over running the restaurant

“Hot flash? I thought you were done with the change.” “I thought so, too, but I guess I’m still changing.” “Well, you might wanna get that checked out. You don’t wanna change too much. Your aunt Marjorie started changin’ and kept it up till she changed into a man.” “Oh, she did not and you know it.” “Okay, maybe she didn’t switch all the way over to a man, but Marjorie

smiled whenever I recalled that visit and how sweet it had been for her to come by, looking all done up in that cute sky-blue dress I hadn’t seen in the six years since we buried her in it.

Good grief!!! the mom...dora...was already dead!!!!!

was born in a sycamore tree. That was fifty-five years ago, and it made me a bit of a local celebrity. My celebrity status was brief, though. Two baby girls, later my best friends, came along within months of me in ways that made my sycamore tree entrance seem less astonishing. I only mention the tree

because I have been told all of my life that it explains how I ended up the way I am—brave and strong according to those who like me, mannish and pigheaded to those who don’t. Also, it probably explains why, after the initial jolt passed, I wasn’t much troubled when my

dead mother showed up f...

started out life in that sycamore because my mother went to see a witch. Mama was smart and tough. She worked hard every day of her life right up until she dropped dead from a stroke while she was winding up to throw a rock a...

All of Mama’s toughness had evaporated, though, when she found herself halfway through the tenth month of her pregnancy, wondering if it would ever end. Seven years earlier, Rudy had been born right on schedule. But three lost babies followed my brother, none of them managing to remain inside my mother’s womb for longer than a few months. Now I had come along and refused to leave. Before she went to see the witch, Mama tried all kinds of things her country relatives told he...

drive the baby out. Mama did it for three days and ended up with indigestion so severe that she was fooled twice into thinking she was in labor. Two times, she and Daddy went to the colored hospital in Evansville, and both times she came home with no baby. My mother’s sister whispered to her that the only way to get the baby out was to have sex. Aunt Marjorie said, “That’s how it got there, Dora. And that’s the only sure way to get it out.” Mama liked the sex idea, if only just to pass the time while waiting, but Daddy was less than enthusiastic. She was twice his weight even before her

Ways dora was told to speed up delivery

pregnancy, and when she straddled him in his sleep one night demanding satisfaction, the terrified look in his eyes as she hovered over him made her back down from the sex solution and look to sorcery instead.

Like I said, that was 1950, and back then a fair number of people in Plainview, black and white, consulted a witch from time to time. Some still do, but nowadays it’s only the poorest and most superstitious of folks, mostly the ones who live in the little Appalachian clusters outside of town, who will ad...

big among witches—but what she got instead were instructions. The witch told her that if she climbed up into the branches of a sycamore tree at straight-up noon and sang her favorite hymn, the baby would come. Witches were like that. They almost always mixed in a touch of something approved by the Baptist church—a prayer, a spiritual, or a chant warning about the godlessness of Lutherans—so people could go to a witch and not have to worry that they’d pay for it down the line with their immortal souls. It absolved the clients’ guilt and kept the preachers off the witches’ backs.

The witch's suggestions of making a baby come sooner

Mama used to joke that if she had chosen something more sedate, something along the lines of “Mary, Don’t You Weep” or “Calvary,” she might not have given birth to such a peculiar daughter. But she dug her teeth into “Jesus Is a Rock” and swayed and kicked her feet with that good gospel

was born at one o’clock and spent the rest of the afternoon in the sycamore tree until my father rescued us when he got home from his shop at six. They named me Odette Breeze Jackson, in honor of my being born in the open air.

She was born in a syvamote tree and named odette breeze jackson

when a child was born under unusual circumstances, old folks who claimed that they’d been schooled in the wisdom of the ancestors felt called upon to use the occasion to issue dire warnings. My grandma led the chorus in forecasting a dreary future for me. The way she explained it, if a baby was born

off of the ground, that child was born without its first natural fear, the fear of falling. That set off a horrible chain reaction resulting in the child’s being cursed with a life of fearlessness. She said a fearless boy had some hope of growing up to be a hero, but a fearless girl would more than likely be a reckless fool. My mother also accepted this as fact, although she leaned more toward the notion that I might become a hero. It should be remembered, of course, that Mama was a grown wom...

People never said, “Congratulations on managing to deliver a healthy baby while you were stuck in that rowboat in the middle of the lake.” They just shook their heads and whispered to each other that the child would surely drown one day. No one ever said, “Aren’t you a brave little thing, having your baby all alone in a chicken coop.” They just said that the child would turn out to have bird shit for brains and then went on to treat the child that way even if the kid was clearly a tiny

Not knowing any better, I listened to what I was told about myself and grew up convinced I was a little brown warrior. I stomped my way through life like I was the Queen of the Amazons. I got in fights with grown men who were twice as big as and ten times meaner than me. I did things that got me talked about pretty bad and

And that morning I first saw my dead mother in my kitchen, I accepted that I had inherited

Clarice and Richmond Baker claimed seats at opposite ends of the window table at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat and waited for their four friends to arrive. The restaurant was an easy walk from Calvary Baptist and they were always first to show up for after-church supper. Odette and James Henry’s little

country church, Holy Family Baptist, was farthest from the All-You-Can-Eat, but James was a fast driver and, being a cop, unafraid of getting speeding tickets. So they usually arrived next. Barbara Jean and Lester Maxberry were members of grand First Baptist, the rich people’s church. It looked down on Plainview from its perch on Main Street and was closest to the restaurant, but Lester was twenty-five years older than the rest of the group and he often moved slowly. Clarice caught her reflection in the window glass and imagined that she and Richmond must resemble a luminous peacock and his drab mate.

Clarice often pictured that loose, powerful way he walked back then before the surgeries stiffened him. It was as if he were constructed entirely of lean muscle strung together with taut rubber bands.

Young Richmond had a handsome, almost pretty face with a small, well-shaped mouth and long eyelashes. He had a football scholarship waiting for him at the university across town. He was a preacher’s son, his father having been the pastor of their church before moving on to a larger congregation just across the state line in Louisville. And he had those beautiful hands.

She had been in awe of his hands long before they brought him glory for palming a football in high school, college, and a professional career that had lasted only one season. By the time he was eleven years

Years later, she often thought it was fitting that her earliest recollection of the boy who would become her husband was a memory of him lobbing time bombs in her direction. Lit by the afternoon sun from the window at the All-You-Can-Eat, Richmond Baker still looked like a square-jawed young football hero. But Clarice was doing her best not to look his way at all. Every time she glanced at her husband, she thought back to the hours she had sat up worrying until he finally staggered in at 3:57 that morning. The sight of him brought to mind those horrible, slow-passing minutes of waiting

and then the time spent lying in bed beside him after he finally got home, pretending to sleep and wondering whether she possessed sufficient upper-body strength to smother him with his pillow.

At breakfast, he had dragged himself into the kitchen, scratched his private parts, and told her a tale that she knew was a lie. It was the old reliable story of having to work late and finding that every phone within a ten-mile radius was broken. For the new millennium, he had updated his excuse to include cellular phones mys...

Before church that morning, Clarice had mulled over her situation and decided that her problem was that she had gotten out of the habit of ignoring Richmond’s little lapses; he had been on such good behavior for the past couple of years. She figured that if she just avoided looking at Richmond through breakfast, morning service,