Duke of Earl

“Lila Ruth, it looks like you been bobbin’ your foretop!” Daddy exclaimed, dropping the piece of corn bread he’d been using to sop up the last bits of steak gravy, Kentucky Wonder green beans, and fried corn from his supper plate. His blue eyes shot shame into my soul across the kitchen table. Oh no. He’d finally noticed. “Well, have you?” Oh boy. My face burned. Although I’d never heard the word “foretop” before, I knew exactly what he was talking about. “Well, uh, yes. I, uh, yes, I guess I have.” I wanted to dissolve and be poured onto the linoleum kitchen floor like dirty mop water. “Maybelle, you had her do that, didn’t you? Why’d you let her do that? Why?” Mama halted her fork halfway between her plate and her mouth. Time stood still. A Kentucky Wonder green bean fell off Mama’s fork onto the smiling face of one of the tablecloth’s dancing cherries. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gary, my six-year-old brother, take advantage of the moment by grabbing what was left of the melting stick of margarine and shoving it into his mouth. To escape the burning blue of Daddy’s eyes, I focused on a couple of flies walking across the café curtains. Wonder if they’ll ever find their way out, I thought, struggling for what to say, wondering if I could avoid implicating Mama yet not wanting take any of the blame onto myself. “Well, uh, Daddy, it was the perm …” Not the whole story, but I couldn’t just come out and say, “Mama and I decided to cut my bangs,” now could I? “Perm! What perm? What have y’all been up to?” His face turned red, angry. “Don’t tell me, Maybelle, that you paid good money for her to become a sinner?” Mama was pretty much the boss of our house, but it was Daddy who monitored our adherence to the straight-and-narrow Pentecostal path. And I had seriously veered off the path by cutting my hair. See, the Pentecostal Global Affiliation’s position was basically against just about anything anyone would ever want to do. Movies, television, dancing, sporting events, immodest dress (which ruled out swimming because of bathing suits), makeup, romantic involvements with worldly people, and—if you were female—cutting hair. When “they” were drawing up the rules of the Pentecostal Church, they had gotten all excited over 1 Corinthians 11:15 in the King James Version of the Bible. They had taken a low-key, vague statement, “But if [if!] a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering,” and turned it into a major must-do by ignoring the “if” part and adding in hellfire. And from that day on in the eyes of Pentecostals, women and girls who cut their hair were sinners. A snip to clean up split ends? Sinner! A full chop? Sinner! Sinners who would be left behind when the Rapture came, then sentenced to an eternity of hellfire and demons—not to mention all the unspeakable horrors of the Great Tribulation! Mama and I had crossed the line into evil, and we knew it. Now Daddy knew it too. The truth of the matter was that Mama had just wanted me to be happy. The Ry-Krisp diet we’d done together throughout the spring of my seventh-grade school year had been especially successful. Weeks of dry crackers and loads of grapefruit did the trick. No more pudge! But. I still had that never-cut flyaway hair, pulled straight back into a two-foot-long ponytail off a high, wide forehead, emphasizing my square jaw. Pimples and pale blue metallic glasses were the final flourishes on this sad picture. Mama and I figured that if I got a perm, it would perk up my look to match my new figure. Movies ran nightly in my head featuring two, maybe three, of my classmates at Gethsemane Christian School—or GCS as we called it—battling over the newly slender me, elbowing one another out of the way to touch the shining dark brown curls that would fool the eye of the beholder into seeing my boxy face as a more pleasing oval shape. According to Seventeen magazine, oval was the shape synonymous with beauty. We’d gone to Dorothy’s Cut ’n’ Curl, a small shop that was just Dorothy’s front room equipped with a shampoo sink and a barber chair. Because of that hair ruling in the Bible, we’d never gone to a beauty parlor, so Mama had to ask around. Turns out that one of the women she worked with at the G. C. Murphy & Company dime store was a Cut ’n’ Curl regular and was happy to recommend it. Dorothy had looked alarmed when we walked in with my stringy hair, slicked back into an endless ponytail, the split ends falling far below my waist. “Lordy, Miz Perdue, I’ve never cut hair that long before,” she said to Mama. “Oh, we’re not cutting it. We don’t believe in cutting our hair,” said Mama. Dorothy’s eyebrows shot up a good two inches. “Who don’t believe in cutting hair? Is that something from out of Tennessee?” Dorothy was good. Most people didn’t pick up on Mama’s slight accent. When talking to Hoosiers, she made her i’s especially long and was very careful to include the g for those words that ended with ing. I was pretty sure I’d lost my Tennessee accent too. When you think about it, it wasn’t really fair that I ever had one. After all, I was born in Indianapolis. But growing up with Tennessee-talking parents and Tennessee-talking grandparents right next door, I knew only one way of talking. Especially since I wasn’t allowed to play with neighbor children because Mama and Daddy were very afraid I’d be hit by a bus—or worse. So by the time I started school at age six, I was shocked to learn that I didn’t sound like any of my classmates. Sneering at me, they’d say things like “Ha ha, you’re a hillbilly. Ooh, listen—hear that sigh-reen? Look out! The poh-leese are coming! Poh-leese!” I struggled to adapt as quickly as I could, studying closely the way my classmates talked, trying to take it in stride when they mocked me. By the time I was in fourth grade, my “Indiana accent” was pretty good. I still had the occasional slipups, but at least I wasn’t constantly and instantly marked as being an outsider. “No, it’s a Pentecostal thing,” Mama replied to Dorothy. “We go to the Holy Word Church.” “Penny-costal? Ain’t that them Holy Rollers?”