All Hail the Sweet Potato Queens

I love The Sweet Potato Queens Book of Love and find myself laughing consistently throughout it. It's the kind of book that I think to read about once a year, usually around St. Patrick's Day, and still laugh as hard as the first time that I read it.

(The Sweet Potato Queens are a group of women, headed up by Browne, who have proclaimed themselves Queens and annually participate in the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Jackson, Mississippi aboard their float where they are dressed in *enhanced* sequined outfits and dance and gyrate provocatively to the enjoyment of thousands. MoonPie is the ex.)

From The Sweet Potato Queens' Book of Love by Jill Conner Browne, Men Who May Need Killing chapter.

"I spent a splendid weekend in Pittsburg with a man who seemed too good to be true, and as it turned out, he was - but I get ahead of myself. I'll spare you the details of the fabulous weekend, as you'd no doubt throw up from sheer envy. Things deteriorated somewhat rapidly upon my arrival home, which I guess is to be expected. Never, however, could I have anticipated the particular turn that events would take within a few short hours.

I was exhausted. Being adored just flat wears me out. You? Being waited on hand and foot for days is taxing. Got home to Mississippi by 9:30 P.M. In bed by ten, asleep by 10:03, with my daughter, BoPeep, beside me. I'd had about six hours' sleep the whole weekend, so being awakened at 2:30 A.M. was not exactly what I had in mind. Nonetheless, promptly at 2:30 A.M., I heard a noise. A very small noise: ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch... It sounded exactly like my mother shuffling down the hall. (She's been enjoying ill health for the last year or so and lives with me and 'Peep.) Poststroke, Mama never picks up her feet when she walks. It's like living with Tim Conway's little old man character. I hear her coming for ten minutes before she gets there - drives me up the wall. So it's 2:30 A.M., and I was getting this ch-ch-ch-ch business. There were no lights on. I thought, not only is she up wandering around the house, she's also completely lost her mind trying to navigate in total darkness when she can hardly do so in broad daylight.

"Mother?" I call out. Again, "Mother!" No answer. I fling off the covers and stomp out into the hall, turning on lights everywhere. The hall is empty, and there's no sign of Mother. Her bedroom door is shut, and not a sound emanates from within. I crawl back in bed, putting my glasses on the night table. Only I miss the night table and I hear them fall to the floor behind the table. I decide to worry about them later. I try to get back to sleep.

Again, the ch-ch-ch-ch noise. I'm livid, at what I don't know. I roll over to turn on the bedside lamp so I can begin the hunt for my glasses. On their own my eyeballs could be considered purely ornamental. I cannot see jack without major optical assistance. I'm not at all expecting to look down and see, sticking out from the side of my bed, no more than a foot and half from my very face, a long, hairless tail attached to a round, gray, furry behind. Having spent the last forty-five years trying to grow up in Mississippi, I know instantaneously and beyond any shadow of a doubt, that tail and behind belong to a full-grown possum. Geezloueez! There's a possum under my bed! All I could say out loud was, "Oh!" but I said it real loud and over and over, with profound feeling. I can tell you, I was completely surprised.

I briefly contemplated calling The Man in Pittsburg, thinking how interesting this would be to him at 2:30 A.M. since I bet this almost never happens in Pittsburg because (a) I don't think they have possums up there to begin with and (b) if they do, they probably call them opossums and even pronounce the o, which everybody knows is silent and so why bother putting it there? But I thought better of it and mustered the nerve to retrieve my glasses, which had landed approximately three inches from the nose of the possum. I sat there, on the edge of my bed, gazing at that possum butt and asking myself what in the samhill was I gonna do about this possum under my bed?

Everyone I've told this story to has butted in at this juncture, if not before, and wanted to know how the possum got in the house to begin with. I explained, as patiently as they deserved, that at 2:30 A.M. when you wake up and discover a full-grown possum under your bed, you aren't particularly interested in how he got in. You are, however, vitally interested in how he's going to get out.

Okay. I've got to have a plan. So I get up and go off in search of materials for constructing a possum trap. What would my daddy do? He would know, without the slightest hesitation, what to do when you wake up at 2:30 A.M. and find a possum under your bed. Daddy picked a fine time to bed dead for fifteen years. Well, I'm nothing if not his daughter, I say to myself. I'll instinctively know how to deal with this situation. And so I'm led by some intuition into the kitchen - to the garbage, to precise. (That possums love garbage is an irrefutable truth.) I select a suitably aged chicken package, containing some nicely ripened chicken skin and fat - manna from Heaven, if you happen to be a possum. I grab a large empty liquor box with a sturdy lid. Now hideously wide-awake, I return to my bedroom. I set the box in my bathroom, the delicate scent of the rotten chicken skin already permeating the air and, I hope, delighting my rodent roommate. I get back in bed and wait.

I have to do this in total darkness. Possums are nocturnal, and they don't like it when you turn the lights on. So I'm pretty happy. Just home from playing Queen for a Day all weekend. I'm trying to sleep a little so I can resume my real life as Mom to half the free world tomorrow, but instead of sleeping, I'm sitting bolt upright in the dark waiting for the possum under my bed to make a move on the chicken skin. Along about now I start to see the humor in all this. Now I'm sitting there, and I'm laughing fit to kill. This is too good, I'm thinking. I'm going to phone somebody. But who?

When it comes to calling somebody at 3 A.M., to report the presence of a possum under your bed, however, you are working from a very short list. I rule out The Man. I'm crazy about him but not certain that our relationship has progressed to the point that he's on my 3 A.M. Possum Report List. I think you probably have to be at least engaged for that. I decide that my sister, Judy, who lives in New Orleans, would probably want to hear about the possum situation.

I turn on the light momentarily to dial her number; then I perform a quick possum check. Still there, not a hair out of place. I get her voice mail. I'm talking really low to avoid awakening the slumbering BoPeep beside me, who is still blissfully ignorant of the fact that we have a possum under our bed. I swear, I barely spoke above a whisper, but somehow my voice reached into her sleeping brain. She catapulted straight up and began to shriek loudly, in staccato, "GET-IT-OUT-GET-IT-OUT-GET-IT-OUT!" And with that she fell back on her pillow, apparently still asleep. She lay still for a few moments and then sat up again, demanding to know if she had dreamed it, or was there in fact a possum under our bed? I've made a rigorous policy of honesty in her upbringing, and I could make no exceptions now. Sh demanded to know what I planned to do about it. I told her about the trap. She was dubious.

"Why don't you call Dad?" she asked. "Dad?" I can't convey to you the scathe in my tone as I repeated that word to her. "Dad? Darlin', Dad grew up in north Jackson, and I can just tell you, he doesn't know squat about a possum under the bed." MoonPie had lived practically forty years, all of them in Mississippi, before he accidentally stepped on a slug with his bare foot for the first time in his life. He let out a scream that was so loud, so piercing, and so prolonged that, hearing it from the back of the house as I did, I could only assume that a panther had bitten off his arm and was devouring it before his very eyes. He flew past me - if a large, grown man hopping on one foot and squealing could be said to fly - toward the shower. I fell onto the floor in helpless guffaws. Who, born and bred in the South, doesn't know that you cannot wash off a smashed slug? I'll tell you who: MoonPie, that's who. He wanted to go to the MinorMed and have his foot amputated. From this knowledge I judged, and I think accurately so, that he would be utterly worthless to us at this time.

'Peep announced that she couldn't remain long in a dark room with a possum, and so off she wen tot the kitchen. On her way there she made a discover. "There's possum poop on the dining room rug!" she shouted down the hall. Well, now, that mobilized me. I hadn't considered the possibility of possum poop. Being a lot more familiar than I'd care to be with the offal of kitty cats, I could only imagine what the effect would be if this possum had a full bladder. I would probably have to burn the house down to get rid of the smell. Action was called for, and I was the only one on call. As I've always told BoPeep in times of crisis, "I can handle this and I will handle this because I am the great and powerful mother!"

I turned on the light and checked out the possum. Sound asleep he was, sawing big ole possum logs, right under my bed. No the slightest bit hungry, it would seem. That did it. I sprang up and got my great-great-granddaddy's walking cane that he'd carved by hand from a sassafras tree. I poked that possum with it until he woke up. I proceeded to try to herd him into my bathroom, hoping he wouldn't move farther up under the bed. He ran under the bench at the foot of my bed. I was down on all fours, nose to nose with this thing, jabbing at it with my cane, cussing all the while. I don't know if he was scared of me, my stick, or my profanity, but he ran into the bathroom. I followed him and slammed the door. I was now sealed off, alone, with the possum. I sprang into the bathtub, where I could reach him with my stick and prod him out into my exercise room. This having succeeded, it was simple enough to climb over the NordicTrack and onto a ledge, push open the door to the outside, and secure freedom for the possum."