PATRICIA WAS NINE, AND I WAS EIGHT WHEN MAMA informed us that we were moving out of Pine Manor and into a small, yellow house on Second Street in Kings Mountain. Although at the time I could not have imagined myself ever meeting her, much less singing with her on an album, country music legend Patty Loveless once lived in the brown trailer on the opposite end of Second Street. Patty had been singing with the Wilburn Brothers when she married the group’s drummer, Terry Lovelace; but to avoid confusion with porn star Linda Lovelace, Patty had changed the spelling of her last name. When she and Terry divorced, she kept her stage name.
The Second Street neighborhood was filled with kids, and there was always something exciting going on—a baseball game, hide-and-seek, skateboarding, or building clubhouses from cardboard boxes or scrap lumber we scavenged from discarded factory pallets.
I experienced a number of firsts on Second Street. It was where I first heard a curse word on public television and where I first tried Beech-Nut chewing tobacco. I nearly gagged on the stuff, so I glued the pack closed and returned it to the store.
Most significantly, it was while living on Second Street that I first met my biological father. I had seen him before, but I was too young to understand who the stranger was and why he was reading a book to me. But I guess at nine years old, Mama considered me “of age.”
She was driving down Second Street one day when she pointed at a man sitting on a porch swing. “Jimmy,” she said matter-of-factly, “that’s your daddy.”
What? My daddy? Really?
I scooted up to the edge of the backseat and looked out the window to see the man Mama was talking about. He was wearing a white T-shirt and faded blue jeans. His hair was combed back neatly, like James Dean’s. His arms were spread out resting on the back of the porch swing, and he looked as though he was relaxing without a care in the world.
Mama continued on to our home, only a few blocks away. The moment she pulled into our driveway and parked the car, I jumped out and ran as fast as I could back down Second Street. I found the house with the man on the front porch, raced across his yard, and bounded up the steps onto the porch. Apparently surprised at the intrusion, he stopped swinging and simply stared at me.
I was out of breath, but I was so excited to let him know who I was. I could hardly contain myself as the words tumbled out of my mouth: “Mama said you’re my daddy!”
He peered at me intently, then smiled and said, “Well, how ya doing there, buddy? It’s nice meeting ya.” He leaned over and patted my head with his right hand. Then before I had a chance to say another word, he stood up, pulled at the waist of his jeans, and said, “Well, you take care of ya self, all right?” He walked inside the house and closed the door behind him.
No! Wait! I screamed silently. Don’t go. Please don’t go; don’t leave me again!
But he was gone. I stood on the porch, peering through the windows on the door, waiting . . . waiting . . . and waiting for him to come back out. But he never did.
After a while I turned around and dragged myself back down the steps, then down Second Street to the small, yellow house, only three blocks away.
There’s an old saying: “You don’t miss something you’ve never had.”
That’s just not true.
MY DAD’S MOTHER, MARY JANE STEWART, HAD DESPISED Mama even before I was born. Maybe she knew Mama’s reputation because when Mama became pregnant with me, Mary Jane refused to believe I was her grandson. “My son will not be responsible for another man’s baby,” she declared.
I can remember seeing my paternal grandmother only once in my entire life. It was Halloween, and Mama dressed Patricia and me to go trick-or-treating. She must have been thinking about how my dad treated me that day on the front porch because our first stop was at Mary Jane’s house.
With no hint of a warning, Mama pulled her car in front of my grandmother’s house and said, “Go to the front door.”
Patricia and I excitedly headed to the house, carrying our empty trick-or-treat bags. Just as we got to the front porch, Mary Jane flung open the door and called out whimsically, “Trick or treat?”
But as soon as she said it, she looked over our heads and saw Mama sitting in the car. Patricia and I stood there with our trick-or-treat bags open, looking up expectantly at Mary Jane. But Mary Jane didn’t budge, and she offered us no candy. Instead, she stood there in the doorway, holding a handful of candy, looking back and forth, first at us, then at Mama, then back at us. When she realized Patricia’s and my identity, she yelled a few mean words to Mama. Not to be outdone, Mama returned fire and sent a blistering litany of expletives and other nasty words right back at Mary Jane.
My grandmother quickly stepped back inside her house, slammed the front door, and turned off the front porch light. She never gave us the candy. Patricia and I stood there at the bottom of Mary Jane’s steps in the dark until Mama yelled, “Come on, git in the car.”
For us, trick-or-treating was over.
MAMA WAS A STRANGE MIXTURE OF THE HOLY AND THE profane. If Mama and Canadian Mist were a mixed drink, it would be called Intemperance. Mama drank too much, got drunk, and did stupid things, like driving her green Ford LTD around and around the yellow house at a very high speed.
She’d crank up her music to blaring levels as she listened to “Night Moves” in the comfort of her home. There was nothing unusual about that, but then she’d raise all the windows in the house, open the front and back doors, and turn “Hollywood Nights” up as loud as that stereo would go, so the whole neighborhood could hear it. Like a vinyl Bob Seger record, Mama had an A side and a B side. The only consistency in her life was her inconsistency.
She could be sitting Indian-style on the living room floor singing “Highway to Hell” on Saturday night, then come Sunday morning, she’d be at the Baptist church, front and center, singing “I’ll Fly Away.”
In a similar manner, after several months of late-night partying and early morning toilet-hugging, Mama would eventually crawl her way through the beer cans and liquor bottles strewn across our floor, back into the loving, forgiving arms of Jesus.
Mama got saved just about every other month, or whenever the rent money ran short. Patricia and I always knew when Mama had invited Jesus back in the house by the overwhelming smell of Pine-Sol. When Mama was off the bottle, she was in the Bible; and when she was in the Bible, she made Patricia and me clean the house all day long and read Scripture to her before bedtime. Mispronouncing a biblical term was our worst fear, but words such as propitiation or names like Melchizedek and Nebuchadnezzar were simply not in my nine-year-old vocabulary. When we couldn’t pronounce the words, Mama would yell at us, and then she’d whip us—sometimes severely.
Although Mama didn’t know how to pronounce all the words in the Bible either, to her, anyone who couldn’t read the Bible was either purposely insulting God or was demon possessed, and she was not about to allow her kids to be either.
I almost hated to hear Mama say, “Jimmy, read to me,” as she handed me the Bible. Mama made me afraid of Christians, Jesus, and Pine-Sol.
THAT SUMMER A GROUP FROM A CHURCH UP THE STREET came knocking on doors in our neighborhood, informing parents about their upcoming Vacation Bible School. It was a good deal for parents in our neighborhood—several hours of free babysitting, some snacks, and even some cute crafts, combined with some good moral teaching—what lazy parent wouldn’t want their kid to go to Vacation Bible School? Mama sure did.
I didn’t want to hang out with people like Mama, who hit kids when they mispronounced Scripture, but Mama made me go anyway. I arrived on Monday morning at the big, brick Baptist church, carrying with me a big, bad attitude. I knew I couldn’t buck Mama’s decision that I go, so my best alternative, I figured, was to misbehave and get kicked out as soon as possible.
I walked into the classroom, where all the other kids were already seated. The teacher was handing out beads and wire to be used in making a craft. “Hello!” she said, sounding genuinely happy to see me. “Just have a seat over there.” She pointed at an empty chair in the back left corner of the small room. I took my seat as the teacher walked around the room, handing out supplies.
Intent on getting kicked out, I made a few funny noises, trying to interrupt the class as she talked, but she pretended she didn’t hear me. She then walked back to the front of the class and told everyone to take the wire and begin threading it through one of the beads. As we followed her instructions, she began telling the story about Jesus and why He died on the cross. I made a few more noises but soon realized she wasn’t going to allow me to disrupt her or to control the class. After a while I gave up and listened to the story. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I was intrigued.
The class continued threading beads and twisting wire while the teacher explained how the nails were driven into the hands of Jesus and how a crown of thorns was cruelly forced onto His head. She emphasized that, by giving His life for us, Jesus paid the penalty for all the bad things we had done, and He did that because He loved us.
Mama had taken Patricia and me to church periodically throughout our lives, but I’d never heard the story told that way. Mama tended to emphasize the fear of God rather than the love of God. She knew she deserved to go to hell, and she was determined to keep us on the straight and narrow path by scaring the hell out of us. But as I listened to the teacher in Vacation Bible School, I was inspired to learn that Someone actually loved me, that Jesus loved Mama and my sister and me so much that He would die on a cross for us.
By the end of the teacher’s story, we all had made crosses out of the beads and wire, and the craft was ours to take home with us that day. But I couldn’t have cared less about the handmade cross we had just made. I wanted to learn more about Jesus—the One who didn’t smell like Pine-Sol.
WHEN I GOT HOME, I GATHERED A FEW PIECES OF SCRAP wood left over from the tree house I had built several months earlier. I positioned the wood into crossbars and nailed them together. I dropped the bottom of the cross into a shallow hole in the backyard and tied a piece of rope to each end of the cross, forming a loop where I guessed that the nails would have been driven.
I backed up against the cross and slipped my hand through the rope on the right side of the cross and then my left hand through the other loop. I stood there, roped to the cross, thinking about what the teacher had said earlier. I had always thought that Jesus must have been angry at those who had hurt Him so severely, that He surely must have been bitter toward even the people for whom He was dying. After all, it was their sins that drove Him to that cross. But the way the teacher had told the story, it seemed to me that as Jesus was dying to make a way for us to go to heaven, He didn’t feel like hating anyone; He felt like forgiving everyone.
I stood against the cross for quite a while, thinking about what Jesus felt. After a while I tried pulling my hands out of the ropes, but my hands were stuck, the ropes like handcuffs around my wrists. I raised myself up on my tiptoes and lifted the bottom of the cross out of the hole and began dragging it to the front yard, calling for Mama to come outside and help me get my hands out of the ropes.
Mama had been standing in the kitchen, watching me through the window above the sink the entire time, and to my surprise she was already on her way out—but not to rescue me. Oh, no! In her hand she wielded a large leather belt.
The moment I saw the strap, I knew exactly what she was thinking. She thought I was mocking Jesus. But before I could explain why I was on the cross, Mama began hitting me with the belt. All I heard between every powerful swat was, “Don’t . . . you . . . ever . . . make . . . fun . . . of . . . Jesus . . . again!”
“I wasn’t making fun of Jesus, Mama!”
I tried to run from her with the cross on my back, but it was awkward moving, and I couldn’t get away. My feet must have gotten tangled up with the bottom of the cross because, suddenly, both the cross and my body tumbled backward toward the porch, landing hard against the steps.
Mama continued beating me with the belt, swinging it as though she were some kind of modern-day Roman soldier. She finally stopped, mumbled a few words I couldn’t understand, and then marched back inside the house, leaving me still attached to the cross. I was stuck, with my legs side-saddling the cross and my hands still trapped in the ropes. I squirmed every way possible but could not free myself from the cross. Then after a few more minutes, I looked up and saw that a car had stopped in front of our house. Thank God!
An elderly woman stared at me from inside the vehicle. She was crying, but she made no attempt to help me. Whether Mama saw the woman or not, I may never know, but for some reason, Mama came back outside and pulled my hands out of the ropes. I slumped down on the porch, glad to be free of the cross.
IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE MAMA STEPPED OFF HER JESUS soapbox and down to eye level with the devil. Soon the usual assortment of unusual men appeared back in our lives, followed by the debauched partying and violence.
Not surprisingly, Mama’s food stamps disappeared, along with the electricity. Mama was too broke to buy kerosene and too hungover to build a fire in the wood heater.
The bitter cold North Carolina mornings made getting ready for school without heat an enormous challenge. In an attempt to warm my school clothes for the morning, I placed them in the bed with me every night. Trying to stay warm as long as possible, I dressed under the covers in the morning.
I’d lie there until I heard the bus coming up the road, then I’d jump out of bed really fast and run out the front door down to the bus stop.
I WAS SO HAPPY TO SEE THE SPRING BUDS APPEARING ON the trees. Warmth would soon return to our home. But, unfortunately, with the coming of springtime Mama’s already erratic behavior grew worse. One spring afternoon I walked into the bathroom, where Mama was standing in front of the sink, washing her hands.
She looked back over her right shoulder and screamed at me, “Git outta here!”
I obediently started to turn and run away, but when I heard Mama crying, I turned back around and quietly eased up behind her. That’s when I saw Mama wasn’t washing her hands. She was drowning our newborn puppy in the bathroom sink.
“No, Mama! No!” I screamed and cried for her to stop, but she continued holding the pup under the water, yelling all the while, “He’s sick, Jimmy. He’s sick!”
I was old enough now to know that it wasn’t the puppy who was sick. It was Mama.