Excerpt

Warmup

Up until the summer of 1948, when I was twelve, probably the worst thing I ever did was hum in church. I started out humming quiet songs like “Beautiful Dreamer,” letting the notes ease out in a slow, whispery voice. I would glance sideways and check over my shoulder for any “Ears” who might have slipped into the congregation. Then, if everybody else around me kept staring straight ahead, with their hands folded neatly over their pocketbooks and prayer books, caught up in another one of Daddy’s sermons, I would try humming louder. My little sister, Nell, sat beside me with no more than a tiny smile playing along the corners of her perfect red lips. I knew she would never tattle. Nell and I were only fifteen months apart, and we had an unspoken rule: the sister who tattled would endure weeks of shame and loneliness.

After a few Sundays without getting caught, I started humming louder and livelier songs—“I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover” or “Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pandowdy.” Seeing my lips pressed together tight and a sweet, blank expression locked on my face, no one at Saint Jude’s Church for the Deaf had any idea I was holding a private humming concert.

I knew I was probably going too far the day I decided to perform all four verses of “Dixie” right through Holy Communion. But I couldn’t seem to stop myself. Nothing else exciting was happening that summer. And it felt heavenly to burst out with noise in Daddy’s silent, sweltering church, where the only other sounds were flies buzzing against the windowpanes and the streetcar rumbling along Jefferson Avenue.

I kept humming even when we all started down the aisle toward the altar. Unfortunately, my sixteen-year-old sister, Margaret, had had her fill of my humming. From her usual spot in the back row of the choir, she glared at me as if she could shoot poisoned darts from her eyes. When that didn’t work, she threw herself into a small coughing fit to try to get me to hush up. But nobody in the choir noticed her sputtering—not even Mother, who was the unofficial director of the group. She and the other choir ladies were too busy signing the words to the Communion hymn, working to keep their graceful hands in unison.

When Daddy reached my spot at the altar railing, he smiled at me and placed a dry Communion wafer in my cupped palm. I paused “Dixie” only long enough to swallow it, wash down the postage-stamp taste with a sip of wine, and make the sign for Amen. Then, with the most powerful hum I could muster, I started into the refrain—the “Away, away, awaaaaaay down sooooooouth in Dixie” part. I winked at Margaret on the way back to my seat. Ha! There was nothing she could do right in the middle of the service—right in the middle of Saint Jude’s, smack dap in the middle of a sanctuary packed full of deaf people who worshiped their deaf minister, Reverend Davis, as well as his dear deaf wife, Olivia, and their three lovely hearing daughters, Margaret, Nell, and in the middle, me—Gussie, secret humming goddess of the South.

Of course, my unusual performance of “Dixie” in church should have been my grand finale that summer, the ultimate test of what I could do without getting caught. But it wasn’t. Humming was just the warmup.