I used to stand amazed and watch the redbirds fight. They would flash and flutter like scraps of burning rags through a sky unbelievably blue, swirling, soaring, plummeting. On the ground they were a blur of feathers, stabbing for each other’s eyes. I have seen grown men stop what they were doing, stop pulling corn or lift their head out from under the hood of a broken-down car, to watch it. Once, when I was little, I watched one of the birds attack its own reflection in the side mirror of a truck. It hurled its body again and again against that unyielding image, until it pecked a crack in the glass, until the whole mirror was smeared with blood. It was as if the bird hated what it saw there, and discovered too late that all it was seeing was itself. I asked an old man who worked for my uncle Ed, a snuff-dipping man named Charlie Bivens, why he reckoned that bird did that. He told me it was just its nature.
This is not an important book. It is only the story of a strong woman, a tortured man and three sons who lived hemmed in by thin cotton and ragged history in northeastern Alabama, in a time when blacks and whites found reason to hate each other and a whole lot of people could not stand themselves. Anyone could tell it, anyone with a daddy who let his finer nature slip away from him during an icebound war in Korea, who allowed the devil inside him to come grinnin’ out every time a sip of whiskey trickled in, who finally just abandoned his young wife and sons to the pity of their kin and to the well-meaning neighbors who came bearing boxes of throwaway clothes.
Anyone could tell it, anyone who had a momma who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have school clothes, who picked cotton in other people’s fields and ironed other people’s clothes and cleaned the mess in other people’s houses, so that her children didn’t have to live on welfare alone, so that one of them could climb up her backbone and escape the poverty and hopelessness that ringed them, free and clean.
Anyone could tell it, and that’s the shame of it. A lot of women stood with babies on their hips in line for commodity cheese and peanut butter. A lot of men were damaged deep inside by the killing and dying of wars, then tried to heal themselves with a snake oil elixir of sour mash and self-loathing. A lot of families just came to pieces in that time and place and condition, like paper lace in a summer rain. You can walk the main street in any small town, in any big one, and you will hear this story being told behind cigarette-scarred bars, before altars, over fresh-dug ground in a thousand cemeteries. You hear it from the sixty-five-year-old woman with the blank eyes who wipes the tables at the Waffle House, and by the used-up men with Winstons dangling from their lips who absently, rhythmically swing their swingblades at the tall weeds out behind the city jail.
This story is important only to me and a few people who lived it, people with my last name. I tell it because there should be a record of my momma’s sacrifice even if it means unleashing ghosts, because it is one of the few ways I can think of—beyond financing her new false teeth and making sure the rest of her life is without the deprivations of her past—to repay her for all the suffering and indignity she absorbed for us, for me. And I tell it because I can, because it is how I earn my paycheck, now at the New York Times, before at so many other places, telling stories. It is easy to tell a stranger’s story; I didn’t know if I had the guts to tell my own.
This is no sob story. While you will read words laced with bitterness and killing anger and vicious envy, words of violence and sadness and, hopefully, dark humor, you will not read much whining. Not on her part, certainly, because she does not know how.
I have been putting this off for ten years, because it was personal, because dreaming backwards can carry a man through some dark rooms where the walls seem lined with razor blades. I put it off and put it off until finally something happened to scare me, to hurry me, to make me grit my teeth and remember.
It was death that made me hurry, but not my father’s. He died twenty years ago, tubercular, his insides pickled by whiskey and beer. Being of long memory, my momma, my brothers and I did not go to the cemetery to sing hymns or see him remanded to the red clay. We placed no flowers on his grave. Our momma went alone to the funeral home one night, when it was just him and her.
No, the death that made me finally sit down to write was that of my grandmother, my mother’s mother, Ava, whom we all called by her pet name, Abigail. Miss Ab, who after enduring eighty-six years of this life and a second childhood that I truly believed would last forever, died of pneumonia two days before Thanksgiving, 1994. The night her grown children gathered around her bed in the small community hospital in Calhoun County, Alabama, I was in New Orleans, writing about the deaths of strangers.
I was sitting in a cramped living room in a crumbling housing project, listening to a hollow-eyed and pitiful young woman tell how her little boy had been killed one morning by a stray bullet as he stood in the doorway, his book satchel in his hand, like a little man going to work. She told me how the Dr. Seuss and Winnie the Pooh just fell out on the stoop, how the boy looked up at her after the bullet hit, wide-eyed, wondering. And as she talked, her two surviving children rode tight circles around the couch on their bicycles, because she was afraid to let them play outside in the killing ground of the project courtyard. As I left, shaking her limp hand, she thanked me. I usually just nod my head politely and move on, struck anew every time by the graciousness of people in such a soul-killing time. But this time, I had to ask why. Why thank me for scribbling down her hopeless story for the benefit of people who live so far and safely away from this place where the gunfire twinkles like lightning bugs after dark? She answered by pulling out a scrapbook of her baby’s death, cut from the local newspaper. “People remembers it,” she said. “People forgets if it ain’t wrote down.”
I reckon so.
The next morning, one of those hotel mornings when it takes you a few uneasy seconds to remember where you are and what you are doing there, the phone shook me awake. You always look at it a second before you reach for it, because it is often the slingshot that sends you hurtling toward a place like Oklahoma City, where you walk quietly and respectfully among the rubble and blood and baby shoes scattered by a monster’s bomb, or to some obscure dateline like Union, South Carolina, and into the mind of a young mother who drowned her two sons in a dark lake. And the monstrous thing is that you secretly hope that it is something like that, not something dull.
But this time the summons, the death I was called to, was personal. My grandmother, who fried me whole boneyards of chicken, who got mildly drunk on her prescriptions, played “Boilin’ Cabbage Down” on the banjo and stomped so hard on the planks it sounded like Jehovah pounding at the door, was gone. All her songs and sayings, all the beautiful things that filled her, warmed her, were quiet.
I had known she was sick. But my kin, hopeful she would recover, told me not to come home yet, told me she would be there when I came home Thanksgiving. But I came home to a coldly modern funeral home, to the people of our community sitting quietly in their pews, white socks peeking out from under black dress pants. There were not a lot of people, but the ones who came would have been important to her. There were third-cousins who had not seen her in years but gave up half a day’s pay at the mill to be there; an old drunk who sobered up for her out of respect and sat pale and quietly shaking in the back pew; an ancient, hawk-nosed, hard-eyed man who had not seen her since he was young, but remembered she had once poured him a glass of buttermilk, or was it coffee? and old women who used to sit beside her on the porch, cutting okra, holding grandbabies, telling lies. These were people who remembered the weight of the cotton sack, people with grease under their fingernails that no amount of Octagon soap would ever scrub away, people who built redwood decks on their mobile homes and have no idea that smart-aleck Yankees think that is somehow funny. People of the pines. My people.
I came home to a pale and elegant body in an open coffin, her thin hands crossed on her breast. As I said, I have made my living in graveyards of spirit, in the blasted-out, crack-infested streets of Miami’s Liberty City, in the insane hallways of Manhattan’s welfare hotels, in the projects in Birmingham and the reeking oceanfront slums of Port-au-Prince and on death rows in three states. I have seen so many horrible things in so many horrible places that I have suspicions about God and doubts about heaven, but in that funeral home, I found myself wishing for it, envisioning it. I bet even God, unless He is an Episcopalian, likes a little fais-do-do every now and then, and I like to think of her Up There, blowing a hurricane on her harmonica and singing a little too loud.
A million sights and sounds rang through my head as I stared down at her. I thought about the times when I was still a little boy, no more than five, when she would let me sleep at the foot of her bed so we could listen to her Philco, how I drifted off to sleep with the tinny voices of Faron Young, Little Jimmy Dickens, Bill Monroe and Mother Maybelle Carter in chorus inside my head. It was one of the benefits of being old, she told me: “You can play your radio all damn night long if you want to, and no one can do a damn thing about it.” Like everyone in that part of the world, she had been enraptured by a young, thin man from Mount Olive, Alabama, who sang with a twisted spine and a tortured spirit, and she would whirl the dial, over and over, searching for his words.
I’ve never seen a night so long
When time goes crawling by
The moon just went behind the clouds
To hide his face and cry.
She told me she saw Hank Williams once, back before he died. But she was flying pretty high on her medicine that night and might have told a lie, since she felt that another benefit of old age was that it gave you license to lie like a Republican. But it was then, as that dead man’s poetry ran through my mind, as I stared down at that old woman I had seen for just a few hours a year on Thanksgiving and Christmas because I wrongly believed I was doing more important things, that I knew I should not wait any longer to write some of this down, whether anyone ever read it or not.
It is not something I can go look up in a book. Poor people in the South do not make many historical registers unless we knock some rich man off his horse. It is not something I can research standing over the silence of graves. My mother is only sixty, but I cannot take the chance of squandering the knowledge and the stories that she and my people hold inside them, even if—as in the case of my father—some of it is sad and dark as the darkest night.
I miss my grandma most when I drive the back roads of the Deep South, the radio tuned to fiddle music on the Cotton States Network down around Troy, or to some wall-rattling black choir on the AM dial outside Hattiesburg. It is when I have long hours to look, think, remember. I know that any time I want to hear the rest of that haunted song, all I have to do is put on the record. But I want her to sing it to me. After all the dying I have seen, I finally understand what death is: simple wanting. My grandma would have added some happiness to this book, and although her mind had clouded considerably in the past few years—she would ask me how my wife was, and I haven’t been married for ten years—she would have remembered for me, set me straight on some things. Maybe, if I tell it right, she will live again in these pages, that all the things she could have shared about who we are, who I am, will not be so badly missed. I like to believe that.
I already know a good bit about my history, stories that were seldom written down, only passed from one to another of us over cones of strawberry ice cream in the gravel parking lot of the tiny store owned by a one-legged man named Tillison. I heard them over the ring of guitar strings on the front porch, over the endless, beautiful, hateful rows of cotton that I still dream about even today, even though the fields lie in trash and weeds.
I know I was born during one of those periods when my father had abandoned my mother or driven her away, that—I still do not know whether to laugh or cry about this—he did not bother to come and see me until I was almost two years old. I know he brought a stuffed panda bear as big as God, and I dragged it around by one leg until he was one-eared and his cotton stuffing leaked out and his eyes fell off. And I remember running with it, too heavy, when I was a few years older, running down a road in the night, from him.
I know I grew up in the time when a young man in a baggy suit and slicked-down hair stood spraddle-legged in the crossroads of history and talked hot and mean about the colored, giving my poor and desperate people a reason to feel superior to somebody, to anybody. I know that even as the words of George Wallace rang through my Alabama, the black family who lived down the dirt road from our house sent fresh-picked corn and other food to the poor white lady and her three sons, because they knew their daddy had run off, because hungry does not have a color.
I know that a few weeks later he whirled through our house in a drunken rage, and as always our momma just absorbed it, placing herself like a wall between her husband and sons. I know that later my brother Sam and I lay in the dark safety of our bedroom and tried to figure out a way to kill a grown man, before he hurt her any more.
I know that I had a third brother, an infant who died because we were left alone and with no money for her to see a doctor, that he did not live long enough to have a name. I know his gravestone just reads Baby Bragg and my momma never mentioned him to us, for thirty years, but carried his memory around deep inside her, like a piece of broken glass.
I know that my grandfather on my momma’s side, Abigail’s husband, was a strong and good man, who tried the last years of his life to protect her from him, and the fact I never knew my grandfather, never saw his face, is one of the great regrets of my life. I know he was a hardworking roofer who made a little whiskey now and then in a still that sent a perfume into the pines that could knock sparrows from the sky. I know he once was forced to shoot a big woman through both buzzoms with a .410 deer slug because she and her brothers came at him with butcher knives, and that when I inquired as to whether the woman died, my aunt Gracie Juanita only said: “Lord no, hon. Went clean through.”
I know that I was surrounded in the later part of my childhood by the love of aunts and uncles, that my aunt Gracie Juanita used to feed me tea cakes and tell me that the chicken cooking in her kitchen was buzzard, and then we would sit and eat and talk about how, mmmm-mmmm, that buzzard sure was tasty; that every Friday my aunt Mary Jo would haul us to PeeWee Johnson’s Dixie Dip for a foot-long hot dog that is still the best thing I have ever had, better’n anything in New York, crème brûlée or no crème brûlée. I know my aunt Edna fried crappie for us and picked the bones out so we would not choke. I know my aunt Sue rocked and walked me to sleep, but lost her grip on me once and I fell headfirst on the fireplace stones, which could explain a lot of things.
I know that my mother’s brother, Uncle Jimbo, once won a twenty-dollar bet by eating a bologna sandwich while sitting on a dead mule. I know he drove a Nash Rambler with a naked lady hood ornament, that my aunt Gracie Juanita was so mortified that she painted a bathing suit over the chromed body. I know that you never ever traded cars with my uncle Bill unless you wanted to walk home.
I know that my mother was not afraid of much—I watched her do in a four-foot rattlesnake with a broken-handled rake and a Red Ryder BB gun—and that she could have handled life with my father, if it had just been him and her, without the ghosts. They came for him in the winter, mostly. I could see them only in my father’s almost pathological fear of cold, in his hatred of ice. I saw them on a winter day in 1965, when my little brother stepped through the ice on a tiny, shallow pond, when my daddy snatched him up and ran all the way to the house, his face white as frost.
I know that my father had not always been the tortured man of my childhood, that when he started courting my momma, a tall, serenely beautiful woman who looked like a 1940s movie star, he had worn black penny loafers with dimes in them and pants with creases sharp enough to slice bologna. I know he had once been just a slight, dark, part Cherokee man who had a reputation for being a little too quick to pull his knife, who could not hold his liquor, but who consumed life in great gulps. I know he liked to hear his brother-in-law pick the guitar, that he liked to see dogs and chickens fight, and a pretty woman dance.
And I know that something happened to him in those years when he was a marine in Korea, something involving a bitter cold night in a place he could not spell or even pronounce. And I know that after that he was too often mean and cold, and kept a secret that he only talked about when he was either knee-walkin’ drunk or scared of dying, like he was at the end, when he called me to his side and told it.
I know a good bit. But one of the best men I have ever known told me once that to tell a story right you have to lean the words against each other so that they don’t all fall down, and I needed more words, more facts. I spent a year just talking to the people close to me, filling in the holes in my memory.
I would not have written it at all if my momma had said no. I asked if I should, and I warned her that for every smile it evoked it would bring an equal number of tears. She was quiet a minute, staring out the window of the car. “Write it,” she said. “I sat quiet, for fifty years.”
The biggest reason for writing this story is to set one thing straight from now on. My momma believes that she failed, that her three sons, being all she has ever had, did not get enough of the fine things in life because she was our mother. My older brother, Sam, has worked like a dog his whole life, in the coal yard and clay pits when he was eleven, with a pick and shovel and yard rake when he was a young man, and now in the cotton mill. If he has ever had a full day of rest in his life, I cannot remember when. She blames herself for that.
My younger brother, Mark, has known the inside of jails. He is a hard drinker and fighter who bears the long scars of knife wounds on his body and still carries a bullet in one arm, who seems to have somehow absorbed the spirit of the father he cannot even remember. She blames herself for that.
Then there is me, the newspaperman who, through the leg-up that she gave him and a series of happy accidents, wound up at the temple of this profession, working under legends. I am no better, no worse than my brothers; in fact they are both smarter than me. But the truth is that I am proud of who and what I am, just as proud of being the son of a woman who picked cotton and took in ironing as I am of working for a place like the New York Times. I have always believed that one could not have been without the other. My job has carried me to see things seldom seen by a country boy, without a white-trash, first-pick draft notice, to the other side of the world and into the same columned mansions where my momma used to clean bathrooms. When I was a man of thirty-three they even let me into Harvard, and I was not holding a mop. When I was thirty-six, I won the highest honor our profession bestows.
I hope she blames herself for that, too.
I hope she sees some of her backbone in me, because without it I would have been more accepting of the words of others, of the editor who once looked me dead in the eye and told me I was not sophisticated enough to cover the Anniston, Alabama, city council, of one or two Yankee reporters who allowed that I was mildly talented in a quaint Southern way, of a high school teacher who said a boy like me ought to think about a good trade school. It was my momma who said, “Don’t never take nothin’ off nobody.” And while it was my daddy who taught me to fight dirty, she was the one who taught me not to give a damn when it hurt.
I hope she sees some of her gentleness and sensitivity in my words, because if there is any of that in me still, it came from her. In an important way, her sadness is in every story I write. I have written mostly about people whose lives came and went on tides of whim, apathy and cruelty. Some reporters know Washington. I know this. I have, heaven help me, a talent for it. I have never felt so at home as I did in Haiti, where little girls with dead eyes hold your hands and whisper about fathers who were shot in the back of the head by grinning soldiers. I walked through neighborhoods in my own country where the killing is done with laughter, acting like I was ten feet tall and bulletproof even as my legs trembled, because I believe that if we are going to write about life and death, we should not do it from the cheap seats.
I believe I was drawn to those stories because of her; because of all the lessons my mother tried to teach me, the most important was that every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it. The only time I ever made her truly ashamed of me was the day I made fun of a boy from a family that was even poorer than us. His daddy had shaved his head to cheat the lice, and I laughed at him, made fun of him, until I saw the look in my momma’s eyes.
So, this story is for her, as have been, in smaller ways, all the stories I have ever told and the method in which I told them. I would like to be able to say, with trite and silly melodrama, that I am sorry that my father did not live to see his son’s name on a book. But that would be a bigger lie than I can tell, sober. I will not track the muck of cheap sentimentality into this story by saying that it will be in any way an instrument for healing. I understand him better now, understand the pounding his character endured in that defining time overseas. But somewhere between understanding and forgiveness there is another wall, too wide to get around.
The errors in this book that I know of are omissions, not fabrications, intended to spare people who have enough pain in their lives, a little more.
After my grandmother’s funeral I strolled over to his tiny headstone in a corner of the cemetery in Jacksonville. I still wonder sometimes to whom the Marines handed the triangle of American flag that had draped his coffin. I do not want it. I only wonder. I noticed that someone had cared enough to come by and pluck the weeds and wild onions from the grave, to put a pink silk flower in a vase, and I wondered about that, too. But if there was any real regret in me, I could not find it. There was no pain to speak of, I think because the dead place inside me where my father resides is shiny and slick and perfectly symmetrical, polished by a lifetime. It is not pain so much as a sculpture of it. It is hard to the touch, but smooth.
No, this is not an important book. The people who know about books call it a memoir, but that is much too fancy a word for me, for her, for him. It is only a story of a handful of lives, in which one tall, blond woman, her back forever bent by the pull of that sack, comes off looking good and noble, and a dead man gets to answer for himself from deep in the ground. In these pages I will make the dead dance again with the living, not to get at any great truth, just a few little ones. It is still a damn hard thing to do, when you think about it.
God help me, Momma, if I am clumsy.