Everybody seems to be here, everybody white. The city auditorium is packed with sweating, jostling bodies, and two little blond-haired boys try hard not to get stepped on as their momma, holding tight to their hands, steers them through the cheering crowd. A band is playing “Dixie” as the people clap their hands in time, and someone is waving a Confederate battle flag back and forth, back and forth. There are pipe shop workers still in their soot-covered, dark-blue work clothes, and big-haired ladies who work behind the counters of the Calhoun County Courthouse, and old, sun-scorched men in Liberty overalls and brown fedoras who drove all the way from Rabbit Town and Talladega and Knighten’s Crossroad, just to see the free show. Up on the big stage a beautiful woman in a lime green minidress, knee-high go-go boots and a Styrofoam boater hat with WALLACE on it prances out and starts to sing loud about the day “my momma socked it to the Harper Valley PTA,” and though it did not register at the time, I am certain a few of the church ladies swallowed their snuff.
Then, some time later, I see him.
He walks out onto the stage to a roar of welcome that seems to swell and swell until I finally put my hands over my ears. I catch only glimpses of him as the forest of grownups sway and shift in front of me, but I can make out the well-oiled, slicked-down, coal-black hair, and the pugnacious face, the wrinkled and baggy suit, the kind the men at the courthouse have on when you go beg the judge to let your daddy out of jail. I see him raise his balled fists above his head and bring one down hard, hammering at the air as if he is smashing the heads of those pointy-headed intellectuals and outside agitators, and the people roar again. He strokes their anger, their resentment, like a mean cat.
The look on those faces, on all those upturned, adoring faces, reminds me of the faces of people in church, the people who have been touched deep down by the preacher’s words, who raise their hands into the air, reaching out to Jesus, saved. They are in The Rapture. They are packed tight into this smoky auditorium in the pipe shop town of Anniston, Alabama, but that little man in the rumpled suit is taking them someplace higher.
Sam and I stand together, understanding only a little of what is being said. The governor talks about a lot of things but mostly he seems to be telling us we are better than the nigras.
We had not known we were better than anybody.
I grew up in a house where the word nigger was as much a part of the vocabulary as “hey,” or “pass the peas.” If I was rewriting my life, if I was using this story as a way to make my life slickly perfect, this is the part I would change. But it would be a lie. It is part of me, of who I was, and I guess who I am.
It does no good to try and qualify it, certainly not to the people whom that word slashes like a razor. It does no good to say we didn’t know any better or that it was part of our culture or that Yankees just don’t understand that, when a Southerner uses it now, he doesn’t “mean anything” by it.
But if you sit and talk to old black people, the people who recall the time of my childhood, that time in history, they will tell you that there are degrees of meanness in this world, degrees of hatred, degrees of ignorance, and calculating those degrees, over decades, was a means of survival. They will tell you that the depth of that meanness and hatred and ignorance varies from soul to soul, that white Southerners are not the same and symmetrical, like the boards in a white picket fence. They will tell you that the depth of that meanness often depends on what life has done to a person, on the impressions left by brushes with people different from you, on those rare times when the parallel universes came close enough to touch.
To find our own, to find what ultimately shaped and softened my own family, I have to reach back into the darkest and ugliest time of my childhood. To find the good in it we have to peel back layers of bad, the last few months we lived with our daddy, the year we went to sleep every night afraid.
It unfolded against a backdrop of a broader meanness, a racial one. It was a year of burning buses and Klan picnics, and looking down on it from up high was the man they called the “Fighting Judge.” Wallace had lost his first run for governor because he claimed he was “out-niggered,” and vowed never to lose another race because he seemed soft on segregation. The people and the governor fed off each other, until both grew full on their own doomed ideal. They thought it would last forever.
But in the midst of it, in the middle of the hating and fear, was a simple kindness from the most unexpected place, from people who had no reason, beyond their own common decency, to reach across that fence of hate that so many people worked so hard to build.
The closet door banged open in the fall of 1965, and the old monster was loose among us, again.
Someone had sold my daddy several bottles of aged moonshine of high quality, or so he believed. It was not in ceramic jugs or Mason or Bell jars, but in thin, dark brown bottles of about a half pint. One night, he drank one straight down, standing up in the kitchen, and another. I cannot remember exactly what happened next, but it ended with Momma slamming the door to our bedroom, to protect us.
The next day I came home from the first grade at Spring Garden Elementary to find her standing over the sink, slowly pouring bottle after bottle of it down the drain.
I was six years old. I was still trying to figure out what nine plus nine was, still trying to color between the lines. But as I watched her, I distinctly remember thinking: “He’s gonna kill you, Momma. He’s gonna kill you for that.”
That night, when he came home, Sam and I, pitiful in our inability to help her, to protect her, stood in the door of the kitchen and watched as he opened the cupboard and reached for his home brew. “Not all of it?” he asked, and she nodded. My momma did not run, did not hide. She stood there like a statue. Then, slowly she took off her glasses.
“Don’t hurt my teeth,” she said.
I guess the angels were with her. He looked at her, hard, and she nodded her head, slowly. Then he just went over to the Formica table and sat down.
“Margaret,” he said, “you couldn’t have hurt me no worse if you shot me dead.” He got up, after a while, and walked out the door, to find a bottle somewhere else. I didn’t know then, like I do now, of the devils that rode his back, flogging him, didn’t know that he was free of them sometimes, for weeks, for months, and he lived upright, then, mostly sober. But that when they descended shrieking on him the only place to hide was in the bottom of a bottle. But instead of freeing him, it only fed them.
She never moved until the door banged, and then she just walked kind of stiff-like into her bedroom, and shut the door.
He quit work. He stayed drunk most of the time, instead of weekends, and he yelled at her and told her how sorry he was that he ever married her, what a mistake it was when she brought a passel of brats into his life, cluttering it up. Once, drunk, he tried to cut my hair. My momma stopped him, and he hit her.
And there was nothing, nothing we could do. I would stand beside Sam, a little behind him, because like her he always seemed to be between him and me. Once, I guess because I couldn’t stand it anymore, I screamed at him to leave our momma alone, and he got up out of his chair and reached for me, but what might have happened I will never know. Sam launched himself at our daddy like a wildcat, and in my mind’s eye I can see him swinging his little balled-up fists into that grown man, again and again. My daddy grabbed his hands, and then Sam commenced to kicking his shins, or trying to, as my daddy swung him wildly around the room.
I remember that my own fear seemed to break then, and I ran in and grabbed one of his legs above the thigh, and bit him hard, behind the leg in the bend of his knee, and heard him howl. I do not remember him hitting us, only that my momma, one more time, somehow got between us, saving us. Mostly I remember how helpless and weak and useless I was.
It was a cold winter that year, and it seemed that with each passing day of December the temperatures dropped a little more. Once it got so cold that the small pond near our house froze, which is no big deal to Yankees but was amazing to us. We skidded rocks over it, and gingerly stepped out on it, never more than a few inches. But my little brother, Mark, was fearless at age three.
He was wearing two coats and two pairs of pants, so trussed-up his arms stuck almost straight out at his sides. As my daddy stood with his hands in his pockets, smoking, lost in thought, Mark decided to go skating in his baby shoes.
He walked straight out to the edge of the pond and was fine, laughing, too light to even break the ice, but then one of us, Sam or me, made the ice crack with a rock or a footfall, and the next thing I saw was my daddy running, wild-eyed, crazy-looking, snatching up my little brother and running with him to the house. That night, for no reason at all beyond the fact he was drunk, he went mean again. Momma, as always, tried to fend him off even as she herded us out of harm’s way, back into the bedroom. We hid not in the bed but under it, and whispered to each other of how you reckon you can kill a grown man.
A few days later he left us, with no money, no car, nothing. I remember my momma sitting at the table, crying. At the time I thought it was because she missed him, but now I know that had nothing to do with it.
I remember how the meals got smaller and smaller, plainer and plainer. The welfare checks, the government cheese and peanut butter and grits and meal had quit when she went back to our daddy, so there was not even that. Once a week she would bundle us up in our coats and we would walk the mile or so to the old, gray, unpainted store, where an elderly man sold us groceries on credit, and then we would pull them home again in Sam’s wagon. She carried Mark, to keep him from running out into the road, and Sam I took turns pulling the wagon. People rode by us and stared, because no one—no one—walks in the Deep South. You ride, and if you don’t have something to ride in, you must be trash. I remember how the driver of a pulpwood truck made a regular run up and down the road, and when he would see us he would throw sticks of chewing gum out the window, sometimes a whole pack.
Eventually the credit ran out. The milkman came by one day to get his empties and left nothing for us. Weeks went by and we ate what was in the house, until finally I remember nothing but hoecakes. Usually, her sisters would have come to our rescue, but her decision to go back to my father had caused hurt, and bad feelings. Out of pride, she wanted to wait as long as she could.
Then she got sick. She lay for days in her bed, dragging herself out just long enough to fix us something to eat, then she would struggle down the path to the outside bathroom, hunched over, and stay out there too long, in the cold. Finally she would struggle back into her bed, and sleep like the dead. We did not know it then, but she was going to have another baby.
We were at rock bottom.
Then one day there was a knock at the door. It was a little boy, the color of bourbon, one of the children who lived down the road. He said his momma had some corn left over and please, ma’am, would we like it.
They must have seen us, walking that road. They must have heard how our daddy ran off. They knew. They were poor, very poor, living in unpainted houses that leaned like a drunk on a Saturday night, but for a window in time they had more than us.
It may seem like a little bitty thing, by 1990s reasoning. But this was a time when beatings were common, when it was routine, out of pure meanness, to take a young black man for a ride and leave him cut, broken or worse on the side of some pulpwood road. For sport. For fun. This was a time when townspeople in nearby Anniston clubbed riders and burned the buses of the Freedom Riders. This was a time of horrors, in Birmingham, in the backwoods of Mississippi. This was a time when the whole damn world seemed on fire.
That is why it mattered so.
We had seen our neighbors only from a distance. They drove junk cars and lived in the sharecroppers’ shacks, little houses of ancient pine boards, less than a mile from our own. Their children existed beside us in a parallel universe, climbing the same trees, stealing the same apples, swimming in the same creek, but, somehow, always upstream or downstream.
In the few contacts we had with them, as children, we had thrown rocks at them. I knew only one of them by name. He had some kind of brain condition that caused tremendous swelling in his head. The others called him Water Head, and he ran slower than the rest and I bounced a rock off his back. I heard him cry out.
I would like to say that we came together, after the little boy brought us that food, that we learned about and from each other, but that would be a lie. It was rural Alabama in 1965, two separate, distinct states. But at least, we didn’t throw no more rocks.
We stayed in that big house for a little while longer, until the trees were naked and black and the cold numbed our feet as we waited for the yellow school bus. Daddy would return from God knows where every now and then, but only to terrorize us, to drink and rage and, finally, sleep like he was dead. He would strike out at whoever was near, but again it always seemed that she was between him and us, absorbing his cruelty, accepting it. Then he would leave, without giving her a dime, without asking if we had food, without giving a damn.
She continued to be sick a lot of the time. For months, she had nothing healthy to eat or drink for her or the unborn child, unless you count cornbread. There was no money for a doctor and no way to get there.
Finally there was nothing. We packed our clothes for the last time on a February afternoon in 1966, as my daddy lay drunk. We moved silently through the house, packing, my momma shushing us when we would try to ask what we were doing. We loaded Sam’s wagon—he refused to leave without his wagon—and we walked down the railroad tracks to the store, to use the phone.
It must have been a pitiful sight. A tall, pale, blond woman carrying a brown suitcase, a three-year-old child stumbling along beside her, holding on to her hand, and two other little boys, one tugging a wagon, the other, me, holding tight a squirming, half-starved stray puppy that had just showed up there a few days before. I wish I could remember its name. I’m sure it had one.
Momma called a taxi from Piedmont. She had hidden seven dollars, just for this, but seven dollars was not nearly enough to carry us the twenty miles to our grandma Bundrum’s house. “I reckon the taxi man felt sorry for us,” my momma said. He took us there anyway.
A few months later my momma had her baby, another boy. He died in the hospital. Later, back in my grandma’s house, my brothers and I stood around the bed and wondered, for weeks, why she just lay there.
Thirty years later, I drove out to the big house myself one day, to look, to see what time had done to the place. The old store, built from brick during the Depression, was still standing, but the windows were broken out and the door had a rusty chain across it. I peeked in the windows and through the gloom I could see the counter, the empty shelves that should have been lined with tins of mackerel and sacks of beans and giant jars of pickled pigs’ feet. Someday, I believe, some Yankee photographer will drive past, see it as quaint, and put a picture of it in a coffee-table book. That is where a big part of the Old South is, on coffee tables in Greenwich Village.
The fields and apple orchards, where we stole green apples and ate them until we thought we would burst, are abandoned. The fields are waist high with weeds. It has not been profitable to grow cotton, corn and other big field crops for a long time, so the ground is worthless, at least until some developers decide the time is ripe for another pod of identical, vinyl-sided tract houses at $63,000 a shot.
The railroad tracks we walked as a shortcut to the store are overgrown with weeds, more a scar on the ground than a remnant of rails. When I was six I had lain awake at night and listened to the freight trains hurtle by in the dark, and it was a lullaby. There, I used to think, is my way out of here. If all else goes to hell, I can always sneak away in the middle of the night and flag down that train, and leave this place. I was six. I didn’t know any better. I thought it would stop for me.
Finally, I worked my courage up and drove to where the hateful old house used to sit. I expected to find it in sticks, falling down, abandoned. I believed it was in its death throes when we were there, so long ago. But as my own car crept closer and closer I could not believe my eyes. I do not believe in ghosts, I do not believe—now that I’m grown—in haunted houses. I have not been afraid to open the closet door for a long, long time. But this looked like magic.
The big house had been reborn. It was like new, covered in a new skin of gleaming white aluminum siding. Instead of finding any flaws and decay as the car crawled near, I noticed that it became more perfect, more precious. It was like a postcard for the gentility, framed by a canopy of massive trees and surrounded by manicured grass. I noticed a swing hanging from one of the huge oaks, and toys, in bright plastic, scattered around the yard.
I wanted to scream.