My momma wasn’t like anyone else’s momma.

She knew things, different things than most people. It was on account of her being born in the tropics.

Each year, when it got hot enough to sweat, momma’d put out a bolt of cotton gauze and shears with a funny jagged edge. She’d make tents for each of our beds and we’d spend the rest of the summer camping in doors.

The servant boy would be sent out to do the shopping, but only after momma was sure he’d rubbed a stinky salve on his skin, to keep the bugs away. I’m sure the men in their stores didn’t much like the way he smelled, but they probably forgave it for the custom he brought with him.

They’re magic, she told me when I asked about them, they keep the sickness away. And sure enough, none of our family never got sick. Least not the same ways everyone else did.

Sometimes it could be scary, watching the streets empty, smelling the smoke and quicklime on the wind, but momma kept us safe from the epidemic.

We stayed in that house year after year, all because my momma wasn’t like anyone else’s momma.

Memphis Note
Yellow Fever shares a lot of similarities to malaria; seasonality, method of transmission, even some symptoms. It also vulnerable to some of the same simple prevention methods, like a mosquito tent. If this had been widely known in the 1870s, Memphis might be a completely different city today.

It had been two months since they’d moved his mother into the assisted living home, and this was the first chance they’d gotten to work on clearing out her house.

He was having a hard time sorting through his mother’s things, so she suggested that they try something a little easier, less emotional, like the attic.

They worked opposite sides of the cramped space, her husband digging through a wall of boxes while she sorted a mound of seasonal decorations.

“Oh, wow.” She heard him say, shoulder deep into a cardboard box. “I didn’t know she kept any of this stuff.”

He popped out of the box holding a broad leather belt with over-sized, spray-painted medals stitched onto it.

“A wrestling belt?” She arched an eyebrow at him.

“Yeah, mom made it for me. I used to watch wrestling every Saturday. I was obsessed. I mean, it was stupid, but it was great. I’d jump around the house for hours afterwords.” A slight smile of remembrance danced across his face. “She broke me of that pretty quick, though.”

“Really? How’d she do that?”

“Threatened to make me take ballet lessons.”

She laughed. “I knew I liked your mother.”

Memphis Note
Most major cities had some kind of local wrestling, but few, if any, held a candle to what was going on in Memphis. Memphis wrestling first helped to break down segregation, then it helped to push the city back to the national stage after the death of Elvis. It wasn’t so much that there were more wrestling fans in Memphis, it was just that our fans were better than those anywhere else.

Bored, I kicked my short legs against the back of the passenger seat in front of me.

“Mooooom! Make him stop!” My sister whined.

“Short round, you may be outta reach, but I’m at home all day with your toys. Bad things can happen.”

This was one of her regular threats. I called her on it once, and came home to find all my Batman toys sequestered to the top of the fridge.

I hadn’t tested her since.

“Don’t see why we have to go to stupid school anyway. Bobby Miller said there’s gonna be an earthquake. So did the man on the TV last night.”

“Well, if Bobby Miller’s anything like the man on TV, he’s an utter moron.”

That took me aback. Had my mother really just called the most popular kid in my grade an utter moron? I decided to try a different approach.

“But, no one’s gonna be there.”

“Perfect. Time to ask really deep questions.”

She stopped at the pedestrian crossing next to school and let us out.

“Hey, kids,” she shouted after us. “Just in case Bobby Miller’s not an utter moron, don’t forget to duck and cover!”

My mother was a strange woman.

Memphis Note
In 1990, Iben Browning predicted that the New Madrid Fault, to which Memphis is uncomfortably close, would experience an earthquake of a magnitude of about 7.0 on a certain day. Despite the fact that Browning had no credentials or experience to make a prediction like this, international media lept on the story, and set off a wildfire of public worry. Of course nothing happened, but, it didn’t stop the city from turning into a ghost town the day he predicted the earthquake to hit.