All Over but the Shoutin' (9 page)
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.
