My First Mississippi Wake

I really can't tell you much about it. I was not yet nine, when we were invited to our first wake. I don't even know who the lady who died was! As far as I know, I had never met her. I just know that she was lying inside that darkened house. I wasn't sure if she was dead or dying -- I thought she was dying.

But my eyes popped when I saw that yard! People milled about, not particularly sad or anything, but they seemed a little quiet -- like they had been expecting her to pass away, and perhaps they were at peace that it was "her time."

But the main thing I, the 8-year-old from Northern California, saw was the U of tables in the front yard of that tiny, unpainted, wooden home! There must have been at least nine tables, all of them laden down with more food than I had seen in my whole entire life!

I stood there, just looking in awe, when one kind lady told me to get a plate and fill it up. I did.

Now this was my normal time for breakfast! And they had all the breakfast foods: coffee, biscuits, sausage, ham, coffee, scrambled eggs, pancakes, waffles, coffee, syrup, butter, gravy, coffee, sweetrolls, molasses, hashbrowns, coffee, jams of every kind, . . .

Then I saw something I had never seen before for breakfast: fried chicken, roast beef, hot rolls, corn, fried chicken, potato salad, mashed potatoes, green beans (that most likely had been cooked all the previous day), fried chicken, loaves of homemade bread, mustard greens, turnip greens, jambalaya, okra, . . . and on and on it went!

So I ate. I avoided the foods I already knew I didn't like -- what we in the Northwest call "soul food" -- and ate my fill of many other things. Finished, I sought a place to put my plate and utensils, but the same lady came up behind me, leaned over me, and said, "Honey, you hardly ate a thing! If a wind comes up, it'll blow you away!" And she served me some warm blackberry cobbler and homemade ice cream, right out of the oak ice cream maker. I thought I would burst, but I had no desire to turn it down!

And when I finished, there she was again with her admonition about getting blown away, but I told her I was through. All the time I lived my 3.5 or so years in the South, I would hear the same admonition over and over, from other ladies' mouths, as though there was a script they all had read.

I will keep this post short. I just want to write that I had never before seen anything like that wake and have not again, since leaving the South.