It was there, sitting in the glow of that gigantic screen, that I saw Alan Ladd call Jack Palance a no-good Yankee liar, send him to his Maker in a haze of gunsmoke and then ride off into the sunset, bleeding, with a little boy frantically chasing him, crying, “Shane! Shane! Come back, Shane!”
There, I saw Robert Duvall call John Wayne a one-eyed fat man, saw Big John yell out, “Fill yer hand, you sonofabitch!” and charge down across a wide, beautiful valley, reins in his teeth, shooting a Winchester from one hand and a Peacemaker from the other.
There, I lusted after the unattainable Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, and, years later, lusted after others, oh so attainable. There, I tasted my first orange slush, my first beer, my first kiss, whispered “I will love you forever” to people whose faces and names I can hardly recall. I am sure they cannot remember mine.
The Midway Drive-In Theater is long gone now, as if, by providence, someone saw fit to remove the scene of so many lovely lies. The Midway, so named because it stood like a beacon midway between Jacksonville and Anniston, is now a lot where they sell mobile homes and prefabricated buildings. The screen is blank, the romance is dead. Sometimes on Friday and Saturday nights I drive past and I forget, and I glance over at the marquee to see what’s playing or glance up into the night sky to catch a fleeting glimpse of some B-movie heroine’s eight-feet-tall lips, and all there is, is dark. It is a shame, really. I have a kinship with the place that goes far beyond simple nostalgia.
I was almost born there, during the stirring closing moments of The Ten Commandments.
I am told it was a hot, damp night in late July 1959, one of those nights when the setting of the sun brings no relief. It might have been the heat, or something she ate—an orange slush and a Giant Dill Pickle—but about the time Charlton Heston laid eyes on that golden calf and disowned the Children of Israel as idol worshippers and heathen sons of lewd women, I elected to emerge.
Some births are marked by a notation in the family Bible, others are acknowledged with the hoisting of glasses. For me, it all began with wandering Hebrews, flying gravel and a dangling speaker.
The front seat of a 1951 Chevrolet, roomy as it is, is a damned inconvenient place for the miracle of birth, and as the car sped north on Highway 21, my momma gritted her teeth and prayed. It would have been closer to take her to Anniston, but it was cheaper to take her to Piedmont, where most of the country people in our part of the county went to have their babies and kidney stones delivered.
As it turned out it was hours before her ordeal was over, and during her pains she talked on and on in the emergency room about the parting of the Red Sea and staffs that turned into snakes, so that the doctor began to question his decision to give her painkillers.
“The main nurse told everybody, ‘Y’all come listen to this woman, she’s gone plumb crazy,’ ” said my momma, laughing.
Finally, about dawn on Sunday morning, she held her second son in her arms. He was kind of puny looking, actually, with pale blue eyes and hair the same color as her own, and because she had hoped for and believed strongly it would be a girl, she had to dress him in pink, including a pink hat with pink lace on it. She named him Ricky, after Ricky Ricardo. I guess I should be grateful she didn’t name me Lucy.
All this is the honest to God truth, every word. But for much of my lifetime, I had some of the important details all wrong. I asked her once, a long time ago, if my daddy had paced the waiting room, smoking Camels, worrying about her, about me. That was a father’s duty back then, to worry from a safe distance, protected from the actual birth by a thick sheet of glass and concrete. Men would have no more entered the delivery room to watch the birth than they would have insisted on going to a slaughterhouse to watch their sausage made—the result was what was important, not the process—but it was expected of them to wait outside with the nervous kinfolks. But my momma told me no, he had not been there at the hospital, so I just naturally assumed he had gone off somewhere to get drunk and await word, another acceptable tradition. But that was not true, either.
I had believed it was Momma and Daddy at the Drive-In that night, believed it was him who calmly steered that sedan along the dark highway to the hospital. But in fact it was my momma, my grandma, my aunt Gracie Juanita, my aunt Jo, my aunt Sue, my brother Sam, and probably a cousin or two they smuggled in inside the trunk. My daddy was nowhere around, had not been seen for months, and had nothing to do with my momma and me making it to the hospital in time. The hero was my aunt Gracie Juanita, and the route to the hospital was anything but a beeline. Because the kinfolks all started hollering at once, giving directions and advice and threatening to ruin her concentration—Aunt Gracie Juanita cannot navigate if she cannot concentrate—she had to make a ten-minute detour past her house to let ’em all out before heading for Piedmont Hospital. She has never been what you call a fast driver, but I understand that, feeling the urgency of the situation, she might have blistered down that highway at forty miles per hour. Looking back, it is a wonder I was not born in transit.
The first six years of my life followed a ragged pattern. There were brief periods when my mother and father were together, longer ones of separation, her family growing ever larger even as he became less and less a father.
I was born in one of those many periods in which my father had either abandoned my momma or driven her away, and she was living in my grandmother’s little house, picking cotton, taking in ironing. It was weeks, maybe months before word finally reached him that he had a son, and if he gave a damn he never showed it. My first birthday passed without word from him. On the second birthday, he came bearing gifts. I was walking. I was talking. My brother, Sam, was five, and he had forgotten what his daddy looked like.
I have little firsthand information about that time, since I was still not trusted with anything more dangerous than a sharp spoon, but I know he eventually talked my momma into coming back home with him, and kept her, this time, just long enough to leave her with another child, my baby brother, Mark. Then he disappeared again, leaving her with a six-year-old, a three-year-old, and the infant, but with no money, no car, not one damn thing. So she just swallowed her pride and went home again, to the fields and the manual labor that slowly turned her from a beautiful young woman into one old before her time, until the next time he snatched us up and moved us to places in and around Piedmont, Possum Trot, Spring Garden, Jacksonville. Once, we followed him to Dallas, but that didn’t last, either.
I guess it is hard for some people to understand why this was, why she kept going back to him when he treated her so badly. I guess trying to explain it is futile, since it would be like trying to explain starving to someone who thinks hungry is being late for dinner. Her life had slipped into a dull routine of sacrifice and loneliness, and these times with him offered at least a sliver of hope, a promise of what other people had. She kept going back, even after she realized he might never change, not because she loved him in that pitiful way some women love bad men, but because there were whole months at a time when he did pay the electric bill, when he did give her money for groceries. There were long months when he held his children with something very close to love, when he was sober, mostly, and kind. There were nights at the table when he sat with a baby on his lap and spoon-fed him, and laughed when one of us daubed food in his face. It never lasted. It was a dream sandwiched by pain.
There would always come a night when she put our clothes in paper sacks and buttoned our coats, begging us not to cry, to shush, baby, we’re goin’ to see Grandma. He never bought her presents, never bought her anything, so there was nothing for her to pack of her own, nothing precious. Sometimes we left in the still dark hours of morning, when he was passed out, and walked fast down the dark roads for miles, just getting away. We walked until she could find a phone and call for help, and we would wait for the headlights of an uncle or aunt’s car to appear, and then we knew we were safe.
She did what she could to support us with her own work, her own sweat, but sometimes it was just too hard. I know it killed her deep inside to go begging, but it would have destroyed her to watch her three sons do without. She stood in line at the welfare office, stood in line for government cheese. She fawned over the church people, year after year, who showed up at Christmas with a turkey or a ham. I saw her follow them back to their big cars, thanking them, a hundred times, and walk back to the house pale and tight-lipped.
I did not know then, like I know now, that my momma never ate until we were done, or maybe I did know but was too young to understand why. I did not know then that she picked all the meat out of the soup and stew and put it on our plates. I did not hear her scraping pots, pans and skillets to make her own plate, after her three little pigs ate most of what we had. But I can still see her sliding the bones off plates and gnawing them clean, after we were done, saying how she liked that meat close to the bone, that we just didn’t know what we were missing. It is not that we were starving, just that the quality of life for her children inched up a little, if she did without.
She stood in line at the checkout counter at the Goodwill, ten-cent dresses draped across her sunburned arms. I can remember walking the aisles of that store, remember trying on other people’s clothes. Mostly, as I grew from a toddler into a boy of five or six, I wore Sam’s hand-me-downs, which was fine except I am longer from my shoulders to my belly button than he is, and so spent the first five or six years of my life with my navel showing. His legs are longer than mine, so my momma had to hem my pants, or tried to. She may be a saint but she has no depth perception, and always left one leg shorter than the other. I am easy to find in our old black-and-white photos taken by my aunts and uncles. Just look for the little boy with the shining navel, who, even when he is standing on flat ground, looks like he is walking around the side of a hill.
I remember we scavenged the city dump at Jacksonville, and I was too little to be ashamed. We picked through the latest leavings, burrowed into mountains of trash, not for food, because it never got that bad, but for treasure. We came home with moldy, flat footballs, melted army men, radios that never made a sound. My momma looked for anything she could sell, copper wires, aluminum, Coke and Orange Crush and RC bottles, worth a penny. And I remember, with a clarity that I wish would fade, the smell of that stuff, that treasure. It is a sickly sweet smell laced with rot and smoke, because they burned trash back then, and often we had to race the flames to claim it. I have no doubt that this is what hell smells like.
It would be years before I was old enough to realize that the way we lived was somehow less than the way of other people, years before I began to chafe under it, until finally I was ashamed to bring friends into our house. It would be years before I had to duck my head when we went to the dump to burrow, and years before I knew that I was supposed to be ashamed that when a teacher called roll for lunch money, my name was never called. It was stamped “FREE.” Welfare lunches.
You lose a lot in your memory, over so many years. But I distinctly remember, before I was old enough to cover myself in what my mother called false pride, that there was also some happiness there. While I was often frightened and troubled by the drastic changes in our life, because of our father, I was too damn little and too damn stupid to be miserable.
The little wood-frame house seemed huge then, a place to run and jump and hide and climb, but now I can stand in the middle of the living room and touch one wall with my right hand and the other with my left. It had an Ashley wood heater, and the sink in the kitchen was the only indoor plumbing it had. There was no hot water unless you heated it in a pan, and the light came from naked bulbs that dangled from the ceiling. There was no basement, no attic, just a little wooden box that sat solid on four legs of concrete block, so that the dogs and children could find sanctuary underneath in the cool dirt. I played for hours under it, digging holes with an old spoon, until the wasps or the snakes or my momma ran me out. I buried treasures, balls of aluminum foil, a button, anything that had a shine, and went back the next day, the next month, the next year, to dig it up again.
The bathroom was fifty yards away, a plywood outhouse. I know it is a cliché, but it really did have a Sears, Roebuck catalog on the floor, and a sawn-off broom handle, to do in the five-inch centipedes and black widow spiders and the odd snake. A lot of people did have indoor plumbing on our road, of course. For many men it was the first thing they did, when they got a steady paycheck. They put in a bathroom for their family. My momma had to iron forty pounds of clothes to make four dollars, so we were probably the last family on Roy Webb Road to experience the joy of twentieth-century ablution.
I cannot say I am nostalgic for the outhouse, because anyone who has ever had to visit one at 2 A.M. in January with a flashlight and a rolled-up back issue of the Anniston Star will tell you that the first contact with that cold pine board is damned exhilarating. When I was five, as I was then, I had to get a running start from the willow tree to leap high enough to reach the seat, and then was left with the uncomfortable truth that there was no way to shut the door. Sometimes Momma would see me and, understanding, close the door for me, and she would not grin about it. Sam would not only leave the door open but would sneak around the corner of the house and throw rocks at me, once my britches were down, and once he locked a mean tomcat in there with me and just leaned against the door, laughing. It sounds, now, like a cartoon. I damn near died.
Once, I badly miscalculated my jump to the throne, and instead of landing to the side of the diamond-shaped hole, on solid plank, I jumped clean into the heart of darkness. I skinned my legs and scared myself, and thanked God that the hole was not quite big enough to swallow me. No one would have believed I didn’t do it on purpose, since I was in some ways a peculiar child.
I caught crawfish in the bright, clear waters of Germania Springs, and dammed streams with my brother until the water was neck deep and freezing cold. We built homemade boats and sailed them a good six or seven feet before they sank like stone and half-drowned us. I was a water baby, and when it rained I would run laughing through the big, hard drops, the red mud squishing between my toes. I would fling myself belly down into mud puddles, scattering tadpoles, squishing some. Yet I kicked and screamed when my momma tried to give me a bath, because there was just no sport in it, and was liable to run naked if she ever sat me down and let go the death grip she had on my skinny arms.
I climbed trees and was prone to fall out of them. Sometimes in the summer I would climb into the big willow in the side yard and wedge myself into the limbs, and sleep. You have never slept until you have been rocked to sleep by a willow tree, the whole thing creaking as the wind pushes it back and forth. There was something about being up high, up in the green and the breeze, something safe about it. That is, unless you shifted out of the crook of the limb and came hurtling down like a sack of rocks.
I came close to dying only once, if you don’t count the time I was almost swallowed up by the outhouse, or the falling out of trees, or the tomcat, or the time Sam shot me with the bow and arrow. It involved a plastic poinsettia, and I was drawn to it like a gnat to butter pecan ice cream.
It is one of the peculiarities of poor white folks, and poor black folks, too, I reckon, that even though we lived surrounded by trees and flowers and the visual wealth of a very real and beautiful world, we were fascinated by anything fake or phony. With my family it was plastic flowers, and as a child I grew up with at least one vase of phony flowers on the table. I never asked where we got them, but some of them looked a lot like the ones people left at the graveyard. It is one of those things that I guess it is better not to think too hard about. Anyway, some of them, especially the poinsettias, had little plastic berries, and now and then I would pluck one of the berries and chew the plastic. One day, for reasons I cannot readily explain, I accidentally sucked one of the berries up my nose.
I was rushed to the hospital, screaming, until Dr. James R. (I think that stood for Roundtree) Kingery finally prized it out with what felt like a set of posthole diggers. He calmly asked my momma: “Reckon how that happened?” and said he believed I had made medical history. He said he could not remember a time when he had to pluck a plastic poinsettia berry out of any child’s nostril, or any orifice, for that matter. My momma just shrugged, muttered something about the boy not being quite normal, and gave him five dollars she could not spare. She held my hand as we walked out to the car, obviously afraid I would have some other form of mental breakdown and try to run in front of cars. Perhaps naked.
For the record, I should say here that one of the reasons I was able to enjoy that time at all is because my momma’s kin were kind to us, and helped make it so. In those years, the early 1960s, there was barely enough for their own families, yet they shared their lives with us. We enjoyed only two luxuries: the Midway Drive-In Theater, which charged two dollars a carload; and PeeWee Johnson’s Dixie Dip, where a foot-long hot dog cost fifty cents and my mother often cut hers in half, to share with the smallest child. I was ten or older by the time I realized that my aunts and their husbands usually just dumped the money she gave them for our food back into her hands, all of it, as change.
Even though it has been a quarter-century since PeeWee shut down his hot dog and hamburger joint, I can still taste them. During the week we lived on beans and cornbread, or buttermilk and cornbread, or poke salad (Yankees call it pokeweed) and cornbread, but on Saturday night someone would get a sack of footlongs from PeeWee’s, and the smell alone would make us start to grin. It was just a weiner of unknown origin, covered in a watery but spicy chili and yellow mustard, topped with a chopped, hot, Spanish onion. We could have gotten fries with it it for a quarter, but that was beyond our means. I guess I was thirty years old before, when a waiter asked me if wanted fries, I stopped saying: “Damn straight I want some fries.”
The one great meal of the day was breakfast, because breakfast is cheap. Every morning of my childhood I woke up to the smell of biscuits, and to the overpowering aroma and popping sound of frying fatback, which we called white meat. Momma fried eggs laid by our own chickens, and made gravy and grits. Sometimes there was nothing but biscuits and gravy made from yesterday’s bacon grease, which I would take right now in place of just about anything I usually eat. We always had a hog—not hogs, A hog—and at hog killin’ time we ate like kings until he had been reduced to snout and toenails. If I was late for the school bus she would shove a piece of fatback or bacon into a biscuit and I would eat it on the run. To this day I dream not of beautiful women and wealth and power as often as I dream of sausage gravy over biscuits with a sliced tomato on the side, and a small lake of real grits—not that bland, pale, watery restaurant stuff I would not serve on death row, but grits cooked with butter and plenty of salt and black pepper.
Momma kept a garden, which sounds romantic to people who have never held a hoe. She grew corn and tomatoes and okra and squash, and spent hours a day on her knees, pulling ragweed and the Johnson grass that was sharp as razors. I remember once seeing the fat, four-foot body of a massive copperhead, one of the meanest, most aggressive snakes in the South, sunning himself between the rows. She killed him with a hoe, white-faced, because once you piss off a copperhead it is him or you. The Yankee biologists who say they won’t bother you if you don’t bother them have obviously never had to remove one from the pole beans with a stick with a dull blade on the end of it.
Sometimes, even though I know it is my own foolish romanticism, I think about having a garden again, to see if I retain any of the skills of my people, or if I have just become too citified to do anything real. I loved the way it smelled when it was fresh-tilled, loved the way the red tomatoes and the yellow squash looked against the green leaves, like candy. Sometimes my momma would quit working and pluck three big tomatoes, one for her, one for Sam, one for me, and salt them with a shaker she had brought from the kitchen, thinking ahead. And we would sit in the dirt and eat them there in the field, and I would get seeds all over me, and Sam would laugh at me and call me a baby until I bounced a dirt clod off his pumpkin head. She would sit the baby, Mark, down amongst us, and try to keep him from eating dirt.
Sometimes she would take the yellow squash and carve them into boats and submarines. We would take them to the creek and play and play until one of us figured out that, if you hold a squash just right, it looks a lot like a club. And someone almost always sneaked up behind someone else and clobbered them with it—usually Sam, because I was never violent until provoked—and we would hammer each other with them until they flew apart in yellow chunks and seeds.
She would pick May Pops for us, and show us how the tiny stem inside looked just like a woman dancing if you twirled it between your fingers. She taught us that the hooting of owls and the cries of night birds are bad luck, and showed us how to find the best worms for fishing by looking under rotten planks. She showed us how to bait a hook so that the worm did not go flying free but mortally wounded across the water when you flicked your wrist. She showed us how to make a stringer for fish out of a tree branch, showed us how to spit on the hook, for luck. If we passed a store, she bought us Golden Flake barbecue potato chips and Grapicolas while she pretended that “No, child, I ain’t hongry, I’ll just ask them if I can have some water.”
She tried to teach us how to throw a baseball and shoot a basketball and kick a football, but the fact is she was no damn good at it and spent most of her time running to get the balls she missed, till we finally said, that’s okay, Ma, we can take it from here. She built kites out of newspaper and twigs which never flew, but somehow that did not seem to matter. At Halloween we never had a costume, but our cousins would paint a black eye or some freckles on us with Maybelline and let us go with them, anyway. “What do we tell people when they ask what we are,” we asked her. She said: “Tell ’em you’re hongry.” (One year they put a pillowcase over my head with two eyeholes cut in it, and I was supposed to be a ghost but someone drew a cross on it with red lipstick so I looked like a midget Klansman.)
And all this mothering she did with a baby on her hip, my little brother, Mark, who had red-brown hair that she left long, because she had hoped for a girl that time, too. What she wound up with was three sorry boys, who ran her ragged, fought like cats in a sack and thought it was just plain damn hilarious to put snapping turtles in the outhouse when a grownup was inside, engrossed in the garden implements section.
To say we were rotten little children would be like saying John Brown was a little on the impetuous side, but I cannot remember her striking me, shaking me, screaming at me. Sam was older and needed constant beating, but he found a way out of it. It was brilliant, really, thinking back on it. When he did something heinous, like chunking a rock through the back window because he barely missed my ducking, weaving head, he would run like a Tennessee racehorse. But Momma, long and lean, could run, too, and as she bore down on him he would drop to his knees and raise his arms to heaven, asking God to deliver him from the sure-for-certain killing he was about to receive. Sometimes, if he had drawn blood and figured his whipping would be intense, he would prostrate himself flat on the ground and pray, and I think once he even tried to speak in tongues. I suppose it is hard to beat a child as he is getting right with God, and she would just turn around and walk off, muttering to herself, shaking her head. Sam would wait until she was safely away, then give God a wink and go about his business.
Grandma Ab, who was still spry in body and mind, watched it all from the front porch, grinning, her dentures wide and bright as the grill on a 1957 Cadillac.
People have often asked me, when I talked of how I grew up, how awful it was that I did not have a solid male influence in my life, but the fact is that we had two, my uncles John and Ed, who were married to my aunts Jo and Nita. Every Friday night, without fail, my uncle John and aunt Jo came to visit. He rough-housed with us for hours, and while I didn’t know it then he was standing in for our daddy. They had no children, and it was John Couch, who worked hard for his money in the blast furnace heat of the pipe shop, who gave us an allowance of twenty-five and later fifty cents a week, and once, when I was older, a silver dollar. People say sometimes that it must have been hard, growing up without a father figure. But if I have ever met men who were more decent than my uncles, I cannot recall.
The small house we lived in with my grandma sat on land owned by my uncle Ed and aunt Gracie Juanita, and for most of my life they just let us live there, never asking anything in return. Ed Fair had been crippled as a boy when a car struck his legs, but he was the hardest-working man, except for my brother Sam, I ever knew. In the winter when the water pipes froze, it was Ed Fair who took the pick and hacked at the frozen clay until he found the leak, and patched it so we would have water to drink. It was him who brought us the coal, when he had some extra, so we could keep warm. It was him who paid the doctor bill when I slid into home and peeled all the skin off my legs.
No, by the time I was six years old, I had already witnessed what a man should be, how a man should act. I saw it in my own momma, who put on a man’s britches and worked in the field all day, then ironed mountains of clothes at night, for pocket change. Our father’s face, his voice, his character had faded to this wispy thing that needed only a soft wind to sweep him away forever, for good.
As hard as life was for my momma, I had come to expect certain things in my own. I expected to have homemade ice cream once every three months with my uncles and aunts, sometimes with a can of peaches added for flavoring. I expected to sit with my grandma Ab, singing “Uncloudy Day” at the limit of my lungs. I expected to wake up to the warmth of a woodstove, and drift off to sleep under piles of soft, frayed quilts stitched by hand generations ago.
I came to see the little house we lived in, surrounded on two sides by the cotton field, on one side by a vast green pasture and on the other by creek and swamp, as the place we belonged. I knew that if I ran outside at precisely 6:30 A.M., I could see the big yellow bus come and take my brother to Roy Webb Elementary School. I knew that most of the time he would throw a rock at me before he got on that bus but sometimes he would wave, and I thought that was the best thing in all the world.
I knew that the man who ran the Crow Drugstore would give me presents when my momma went in for cough syrup for the baby, and one year he even gave me an Easter basket. He had run out of the blue ones for boys, but he had a pink one left, and my momma told him, “He won’t know the difference,” and I didn’t. I expected to follow my momma to the cotton field, expected to climb on board that sack, expected to ride.
I knew that sooner or later my daddy would show up and we would live someplace else for a while, but never long enough to be thought of as home, as this little house was.
He came for us in the spring of 1965, for the last time.
I will never forget the sight of him that day. He had on dress pants and loafers and a pretty shirt unbuttoned at the neck, to show his tattoo, but I cannot remember if he was sober or just well groomed. He had always been a clean drunk, a well-dressed drunk, what people in that time called a pretty man. He might be cross-eyed drunk but his shoes were always shined, always the best-dressed man in jail. His children and wife might go without, but his shirts were always pressed. Some people had backbone to lean on. Daddy had starch.
He said he had a steady job working body and fender for Mr. Merrill, who ran a big auto body shop in rural Spring Garden in Cherokee County. He promised her that this time he would straighten up and fly right. That’s what he always said: straighten up and fly right. Three decades have whipped by since that day, but I remember, as the car pulled away, how the beer bottles clinked in the floorboards and my brother Sam sat still as stone, his hair slicked down with Rose Hair Oil, because my momma had wanted us to look nice. I remember I stood in the backseat and stared out the rear window, and saw my grandma Ab run up the walk from the house in that curious, jerking way that old people run. She had sat quiet in the kitchen as we packed our clothes, not talking, not even looking at us. But as the car pulled away she stood in the middle of the driveway, her dew rag on her head and her apron wadded in her hands, not waving, just staring and staring until we slipped over a rise in the blacktop, out of sight.