FROM THE TIME I WAS A LITTLE BOY, VISUAL ART—SKETCHING, drawing with colored pencils, or painting with watercolors—had always been my way of escaping reality. Even when circumstances were horrible, living with Mama and Tim, with noise and nonsense swirling all around me, I often sat at the kitchen table and immersed myself in my artwork. Writing poems was a similar outlet for me. But now, with a guitar, I found another doorway into the artistic world. Although I was an awful guitar player, I enjoyed playing, and the music became a heartfelt means of expressing my inner thoughts and feelings.
My brother-in-law, Steven, was an amateur guitar player, too, but rather than being a point of connection between us, the guitar became a point of contention. I wasn’t good, but I learned everything he knew on guitar within the first week of having my own. That’s not saying much because Steven never excelled past “The House of the Rising Sun” and the introduction to “Smoke on the Water.”
When Steven heard me playing those songs, he walked from the living room into my bedroom and told me to stop strumming the guitar because it was too loud.
Okay, I thought, maybe I’m making too much noise. After all, trailer walls are mighty thin.
I strummed the guitar lightly so Steven wouldn’t hear me, but within minutes he was back in my room. “I told you to cut it out,” he said.
“Sorry,” I answered. “I didn’t mean to bug you.”
When Steven left the room again, I continued practicing but without strumming the guitar; I simply laid my fingers on the strings, forming various chords from songs. Steven must have been listening with supersonic, high-powered antennae or something because he heard even those muted sounds of my fingers on the strings and the occasional squeak of my hand changing chords. Within seconds he was back in my bedroom doorway; he stood there glaring at me angrily.
I stopped playing the guitar altogether whenever Steven was at home. It was strange. I sometimes stayed in my room and simply stared at the guitar lying on the bed beside me. I wanted so badly to pick it up, to touch it, to play it, but I knew that would just cause trouble.
We moved four times within eight months. During one of those moves, mostly done by pickup truck, my guitar fell off the back of the truck and was crushed. At least, that’s what Steven told me.
AS MUCH AS I HATED JUNIOR HIGH, IT WAS STILL BETTER than going home and being around Steven. In school my favorite class was art. One day, while working with watercolors, the teacher instructed the class to paint the picture he had displayed in front of us. Once I finished the painting, the teacher surprised me. “Now, turn the canvas upside down,” he said.
When I turned the canvas from top to bottom, I discovered that I had painted an awesome picture of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, complete with a beach with white sand dunes, blue water, and a clear blue sky. Although I couldn’t take any real credit for it—all I had done was follow my teacher’s instructions—the painting was beautiful.
That painting somehow gave me a glimmer of hope when so many things in my life were upside down. Maybe one day, I thought, it will all turn around and become a beautiful picture as well.
STEVEN WORKED AS A GRUNT ON A CONSTRUCTION JOB, AND Patricia worked in a textile mill on the other side of Gastonia. Home life was stressful with the limited space and resources. Adding to the tension, Patricia and I, like many teenage siblings, sometimes argued with each other or said things we didn’t really mean. We weathered most of those storms and laughed about them later. Conditions often got volatile when I saw or heard Steven mistreating my sister. “Leave her alone,” I would say, ready to fight.
“Look! She’s my wife. If you don’t like it, get out.”
“Don’t tell my brother to get out!” Patricia would jump between us.
“Yeah, if you don’t like it, you can get out too,” Steven would rail at her.
Then one day, while standing at the kitchen sink, Patricia looked at me pensively and said, “Jimmy, I’m pregnant.” She was seventeen, wise for her age, but not much more than a child herself.
I didn’t know whether to celebrate or to cry. I could tell she was nervous, and I was anxious for her as well. Her life with Steven was a living hell, and now she was about to bring a child into it.
During the next eight and a half months as she carried her baby, she continued working at the textile mill. I’d hear her vomiting in the bathroom every morning, then getting into an old, burgundy Ford truck she drove to Saunders Thread mill, where she stood on her feet all day long to earn $3.75 per hour. She came home late every evening, wrung out and exhausted. Steven still expected her to cook, do laundry, clean house, and keep up with all the other domestic chores, so I tried to pitch in even more to take any strain off her that I could. Still, there were many prenatal issues about which I knew nothing, and Mama never showed up to help Patricia through her pregnancy. But Patricia and I went through it all together.
When Patricia stopped working, the finances got even tighter. We moved back to Holland Memorial Church Road (known locally as Bell Road) in Bessemer City, where Steven’s mother, Ruth, a sweet woman, allowed us to live with her. Steven told me I had to get a full-time job and start paying rent, so I finished the ninth grade, but I had no intention of going back to school.
I probably would have dropped out of school immediately, had it not been for Cindy Ballard, a guidance counselor at Highland Junior High, where I was now attending. I walked into Ms. Ballard’s office, told her I was quitting school because I had to get a job, and I handed her my books.
“Oh, no, Jimmy, you can’t do that,” she said. I had known Ms. Ballard since I was thirteen, meeting her shortly after I had returned to North Carolina on the bus from Pensacola. She wasn’t about to let me quit school.
She marched me over to the office of Lee Dedmon, the principal. Mr. Dedmon was a giant of a man, six-foot-eleven inches tall, but he was no match for the godly, gutsy Ms. Ballard. She explained my circumstances to the principal and said, “Jimmy is not going to quit school, but he has to get a job, so he needs some special consideration and help with his homework.”
Although Ms. Ballard lived in Lincolnton, North Carolina, she drove forty-five minutes out of her way, all the way to Bessemer City, to pick me up and take me to school every morning. She knew that I could refuse to get on the bus, but if she came to get me, I couldn’t blow off going to school so easily—especially when I knew how far out of her way she drove to pick me up. If she could get me into class, I had a chance to learn. After school I rode the bus home, but the next morning Ms. Ballard was right back to pick me up again.
“Jimmy, you must finish school,” Ms. Ballard continually emphasized to me. I wasn’t a good student, and worse than that, prior to Ms. Ballard’s taxi service, I skipped school so frequently I received several suspensions. Even when I showed up for school, I was a perpetual discipline problem for my teachers. But Cindy Ballard went to bat for me over and over again. When it became obvious that my grades were a disaster and my attendance and behavior at school were not pluses, Ms. Ballard arranged for me to take some classes and tests that summer to make up for my poor grades, and she drove me to the remedial classes. She simply refused to give up on me. Thanks to Ms. Ballard, I didn’t quit school.
As soon as school was out for the summer, I began working full-time at Hardee’s fast food restaurant as a cook. When I got paid, Steven demanded that I turn over my entire check to him. When I balked about giving him every penny I earned, he countered, “Either that or leave.” Later that summer I quit my job at Hardee’s and picked up another job sweeping floors at Walt Gilreath’s machine shop, near where Steven’s mother’s house was located.
PATRICIA GAVE BIRTH TO A BABY BOY ON JANUARY 15, 1989. They named my new nephew Brian. Patricia was elated, and even Steven was affected by the birth. When he came home from the hospital after seeing his newborn son, Steven said happily, “That will change your life.” Unfortunately, Steven’s upbeat attitude didn’t remain for long.
Despite doing my best to pay my way, Steven told me I had to leave. I understood and didn’t blame him. He and Patricia were struggling as it was, we were living with his mom, and having a teenager living with them boosted their expenses and imposed on their privacy. They received only thirty-nine dollars per week in assistance from the state toward my support, so I was an extra burden Steven didn’t want to carry.
I had been in contact with Mama occasionally over the past few months, and I had found out that she was living back in Reed’s Trailer Park, sharing a trailer with friends. In my naive sixteen-year-old mind, it made sense that since Steven had asked me to leave, the most logical location for me to live would be back with my mom. I knocked on the door of trailer number 5. Mama came to the door, and after a brief conversation I asked if I could move in with her.
Mama wasn’t too sure she liked that idea.
“I’ve got a job sweeping floors over at Walt’s machine shop,” I said, nodding toward the building across the way, right behind Ruth’s house, where Patricia, Steven, and the baby lived. “I can help out with the rent and groceries,” I offered.
That was the clincher. When Mama heard that I had money, she allowed me to move in with her and her friends.
I had “borrowed” a bicycle—I planned to return it . . . someday—and that was my means of getting back and forth to work. Walt came by every morning to pick me up at Mama’s, and I put my bicycle in the back of his truck so I could ride home by myself each evening. After work I could walk out the back door of the machine shop and go over to Ruth’s house to see Patricia and my nephew, Brian.
I loved playing with baby Brian and holding him close to my heart. Sometimes I’d run over during my breaks at the machine shop just to spend a few minutes with him. I helped Patricia care for him, cuddling him, feeding him, napping with him; I almost enjoyed changing Brian’s diapers! Something about seeing Brian and the miracle of new life touched me deeply. Being an uncle was the best gift I had ever received.
SUMMER WAS JUST GETTING STARTED. I WAS SIXTEEN AND had no clue where I was going to live that winter. I knew that living at Mama’s was temporary. It always was; something always caused her to blow up or get off track somehow. Sure enough, after about a month, I came home from work one early summer evening, walked into the bedroom, and noticed a letter from Mama lying on my bed.
I picked up the letter, dated June 28, 1989, and discovered that, as she so often did, Mama saw herself as a victim. She wrote:
Jimmy,
I know in my heart that you don’t care anything for me, and you know that you and I can’t get along. So just get your s*** and get out. I have been hearing the things you said about me and anyway, you can’t stay here if you ain’t going to help me out. And you told Bill you was not going to do anything else for me.
But that doesn’t matter to me. I can make it without you. So just do what you said, and get the h*** out. And I’m not mad. . . . I want you to know that I do thank you for what little you have done.
Get out!
Mama had allowed a man and a woman to move in with her. None of them had jobs; I was the youngest person living in the trailer and the only one of the four of us who was working. But the three adults shared the same bed, and on more than a few nights, I could hear the three of them having sex.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and confronted my mom. “Mama, please make them leave.”
“No, I’m not making them leave. They’re my friends.” The discussion grew more heated, and I probably said some things I shouldn’t have, but the situation was ridiculous.
“Well, Mama, I’m not going to pay any more rent if you are going to let your friends live here for free.”
The letter on the bed was Mama’s response.
Oddly enough, I didn’t even hurt when I read it. I was already numb from years of her neglect. Still, I was afraid. I had nowhere to go. I packed up my few belongings, including Mama’s letter, and left Mama’s trailer.
MAKING MATTERS WORSE, I GOT HURT AT THE MACHINE shop when a shaving of metal ricocheted off the milling machine and lodged in my eye. Walt took me to the hospital, and the doctors were able to remove the fragment, but afterward Walt was nervous that I might be a liability. “Jimmy, I don’t really need you here at the shop anymore.” He let me go.
Things were looking bleaker by the moment. I couldn’t go back to Patricia’s, Mama had thrown me out, and I had lost my job. I had no place to live, so I slept wherever I could at night, couch-surfing from one place to another, eating wherever I could find food, staying with anyone who would allow me to spend the night. During the day I canvassed the area, looking for work. I was a long-haired, dirty, scruffy, homeless kid, so employers were not exactly lining up to give me a job. I was desperate. I had to get some money—soon—and I needed something far more than an income. I needed a home.