Aunt Lizzie

 

by Gerald Perry

 

After Nani died, the family spent Christmas in my Aunt Nellie and Uncle Dom’s basement. That first year after Nani was tense, everyone still upset over my Uncle Fred’s decision to sell his and Nani’s houses on Vandervoort Street and move away from the Italian neighborhood.

My Uncle Fred, Aunt Bessie, Freddie and their other kids didn’t come that year to Christmas, and they never did again. They claimed hurt feelings over some things my Aunts Nellie and Teenie said about the reasons for the sale. Within months of that fight I was no longer welcome at Freddie’s, my Aunt Bessie having decided my Mom was in cahoots with Nellie. This despite my Mom’s efforts to stay out of it no matter what. From then on I only saw Freddie in the hall at school. We were never again the friends we were while Nani and Grandpa lived.

But that Christmas, the rest of the family sat in Aunt Nellie’s half-finished basement, along with Uncle Dom’s musical instruments, ukule­les and other stringed boxes, all brightly polished with little floral patterns skirting their edges.

Uncle Dom played the organ and piano. He always played really corny songs like “Alleycat,” the theme to the “Pink Panther,” or the strip-tease song.

That night, Uncle Dom played the upright in the corner next to a tapped keg while the adults sat around a fold-out table, eating cold fried cod, bitter escarole, and wands of fresh fennel dripping salad oil. Aunt Lizzie, the youngest and according to Grandpa the only one smart enough to stay in school, was getting ready to talk.

She was going to explain the reasons why white people shouldn’t trust Blacks, whom she called niggers. That past summer, while my sis­ter Kathy was helping set fire to ROTC buildings, there were race riots in Rochester and in downtown Buffalo, places my parents never went to after that. Aunt Lizzie said the niggers had burned their own homes, their own stores, their own churches. People who’d do that weren’t really people.

We kids, who were pulling things off Uncle Dom’s neat shelves and fiddling with the instruments, liked to listen to her because she was re­ally strange. The year before we’d heard the one about how she was the reincarnated pharaoh’s daughter, that she knew the secret of how the Egyptians built the pyramids, and how that secret was locked in one of the memories of her past lives. She was totally ridiculous, but we loved her fabulous imagination and, truth-to-tell, wanted to believe her.

Aunt Lizzie, with her long, weak feet resting on a cushioned ot­toman, began telling her story, waving a piece of fried smelt. She was speaking to no one in particular. She explained how a white woman had gone shopping in downtown Buffalo with her son, maybe a little younger than me. The boy had to pee, so she took him to the lady’s room and went in with him to a stall, only some lady in there got angry say­ing he was too old to be in there, to get out. So this woman sent her boy into the men’s room while she waited outside.

Well, the boy never came out. Instead, three nigger men in there stuffed his mouth with toilet paper and cut off his penis.

The rest of the night, Mom had a hard time keeping my hand out of my crotch. She told me Aunt Lizzie was a flake, that they were Blacks not niggers, and that what her sister said was bullshit meant to make people afraid. I knew Mom was right. Still, I was terrified.

When I went to bed that night, I pulled down my pajama bottoms and laid on top of the bed, the rough fibers of Dad’s army-issue blanket scratching my butt. I stared at my penis. Why would anyone want to cut you off?