MUSIC AND MAMA COMPOSE ONE OF MY FIRST VIVID MEMORIES of life in the Carolinas. Unfortunately, it isn’t a good memory.
I was three years old and standing in the street, watching the taxi roll away. My mom sat in the backseat of the cab, yelling at me through the window to get back in the yard. I heard Glen Campbell singing “Rhinestone Cowboy” on the taxi’s dashboard radio as I stepped back on the grass and the car pulled out of the trailer park where we lived. I stood there alone, silently calling out for Mama to come back. It wasn’t the first time she had left, and it would not be the last time I would experience a similar scenario during my early childhood. Indeed, it was the type of good-bye that set the stage for the rest of my life.
Although I was born in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, a little more than a year after my sister, Patricia, the three of us moved to Johnsonville when Mama met a handsome, dark-haired, blue-eyed gentleman named Carroll Collins. Patricia’s and my real daddy had abandoned us and was long gone before I could say my first word, but Mama was never without a man for long. A petite, hazel-eyed beauty, Mama was a bona fide man magnet. She and Carroll met and married the same year Elvis Presley died, and shortly after that, we moved out to the country and settled in a small but picturesque two-bedroom, white farmhouse nestled in the middle of a tall, green cornfield. At five years of age, I could not imagine what was in store for me beyond those straight lines of cornstalks or where the two-lane road in front of our house might lead. I just sensed that Mama and Patricia seemed happy, so I was too.
That’s why I couldn’t understand why Mama always wanted to leave. Anytime a man treated her well, she’d get antsy and feel suffocated. She’d bolt, sometimes with Patricia and me and at other times leaving us to fend for ourselves.
But Carroll was a good man—a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy—and he sincerely loved Mama, so he always took her back.
When Mama wasn’t suffering from what later came to be called bipolar disorder—whatever that was—ours was an idyllic life, almost like a scene out of one of those black-and-white sitcom television shows. A chicken coop and tool shed stood behind the farmhouse in the backyard. One day I decided to crawl under the shed, where I found a batch of hen eggs along with an old, dirty army helmet. I filled the helmet with eggs then scooted back out to take them inside and give them to Mama. She was thrilled with my gift. “Oh, Jimmy, I love you,” she said as she pushed me away.
Out in the country we made our own entertainment. For instance, Carroll stretched a clothesline across the backyard and clamped empty milk jugs to the line with wooden clothespins. He and Mama enjoyed target shooting at the milk jugs—and with a shotgun, Mama couldn’t miss.
This was where I first caught lightning bugs in a jar and where the sound of the cicadas filled the air, creating their own music. It was where I caught and held a fish for the first time and where I picked a watermelon, along with peanuts and green beans, from the garden Mama tended. This was where my hands first shelled corn on an antique, cast-iron corn-sheller that sat in the corner of Carroll’s welding shop.
This was the place where Carroll taught me to use a hammer and saw and later how to steer a go-cart and ride my bike without training wheels on our horseshoe-shaped sand driveway. This was also the place where I fell chin-first on a huge rock in the front yard while waiting for the bus to arrive and take me to the private Christian school that Carroll paid for Patricia and me to attend.
Oh, sure, there were those few weeks in the hospital inside an oxygen tent, recovering from pneumonia, and the time I had my tonsils removed. There was the time Mama accidentally closed the door on my left-hand ring finger—an important appendage for a future guitar player—and we had to race to the doctor so he could sew my fingertip back on. Some bad things happened during those years, but they never overshadowed the warmth of love that filled our farmhouse.
Always smiling, Carroll was a fantastic stepdad; he spent nearly every weekend with the family. He took us boating on Saturdays and to church every Sunday and every Wednesday night. Patricia and I participated in the church Christmas plays, and there were lots of gifts for all of us on Christmas morning.
This was life with Carroll, a safe, secure existence—a place where dreams could come true. Love and happiness flowed consistently, like a calm Carolina river. Even at five years old, I could tell the difference between the life we had left behind in Dixie Village Trailer Park and the new one we had in the middle of that cornfield in Johnsonville. To this day, I don’t know why Mama never figured it out.
It was the calm before the storm.
PATRICIA STARTLED ME AWAKE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE night by shaking my arm. “Mama wants us in the car,” she whispered.
“Wha . . .” I mumbled, rubbing my eyes and trying to blink the sleep out of them.
“Just hurry.” Patricia repeated orders I recognized as coming directly from Mama.
In the darkness I crawled down from the top bunk bed and headed toward the front door. Even though I was barely awake, as I passed by Mama and Carroll’s bedroom, I noticed that Carroll was still asleep in the bed. I crept silently past the doorway and outside to the car, where Patricia already had the door open for me.
For what felt like a long time, Patricia and I waited quietly in the car, wondering what happened, where we were going, why we were leaving, and why Carroll wasn’t coming with us. Mama offered no answers. Instead she ran out of the house, carrying an armful of clothes. She threw them in the trunk and climbed behind the wheel.
Mama drove nonstop through the night, heading toward Crowders Mountain, North Carolina, to Grandpa’s place. She wasn’t in the mood for talking, and Patricia and I knew better than to ask questions. We simply shut our mouths and our eyes and tried to sleep. By midmorning we arrived at an old house sitting on a hill. When we walked in, it was impossible not to notice that the dark house reeked something awful—a combination of foul smells from pipe smoke, a waste chamber, and a musky basement.
I grappled with what was happening, unable to comprehend it, but it was obvious that this wasn’t a pleasure trip to see Grandpa. I wanted to ask Mama, but she was acting strange. Her facial expressions were different; her demeanor was different. I couldn’t figure out why. We stayed there for a week or two before Mama decided to go back home to the farmhouse and to Carroll.
After the seventh or eighth time this happened, Carroll stopped taking Mama and the rest of us back. He simply said, “I’ve had enough,” and he banned us from ever returning to that farmhouse in the middle of the cornfield, the place where dreams lived and thrived.
I never understood why Mama left the wonderful man who treated her like a queen. But I slowly came to understand why he didn’t take her back anymore.
Something wasn’t right in Mama, and even a good man like Carroll could not cure her. Only God could do that—and back then He seemed a million miles away.
TODAY, A BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTO OF MAMA SITS ON MY dresser. I keep it there because it explains a lot of things in her life and mine, and it helps me, all these years later, empathize with Mama and maybe understand some of the erratic things she did. She’s approximately three years old in the tattered photo. Her eyes are sad, and she’s frowning. Her hair looks as if the barber placed a bowl on her head and trimmed around it, leaving her sandy brown bangs a half-inch above her thin brows. She’s wearing a floral print dress and holding a hard plastic baby doll by the leg. She’s staring upward to the left of the camera lens, as though trying to please someone she must obey.
When I look at this photo, I see an innocent little girl who appears to be afraid of much more than a photographer. I would be an adult before I found out that during her childhood, Mama had been treated badly by a number of men. Maybe that’s why she had such a love-hate relationship with so many men—including me.