Modern American Memoirs (20 page)

Mr. Ostrowski looked surprised, I remember, and leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. He kind of half-smiled and said, “Malcolm, one of life's first needs is for us to be realistic. Don't misunderstand me, now. We all here like you, you know that. But you've got to be realistic about being a nigger. A
lawyer—that's no realistic goal for a nigger. You need to think about something you
can
be. You're good with your hands—making things. Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. Why don't you plan on carpentry? People like you as a person—you'd get all kinds of work.”

The more I thought afterwards about what he said, the more uneasy it made me. It just kept treading around in my mind.

What made it really begin to disturb me was Mr. Ostrowski's advice to others in my class—all of them white. Most of them had told him they were planning to become farmers, like their parents—to one day take over their family farms. But those who wanted to strike out on their own, to try something new, he had encouraged. Some, mostly girls, wanted to be teachers. A few wanted other professions, such as one boy who wanted to become a county agent; another, a veterinarian; and one girl wanted to be a nurse. They all reported that Mr. Ostrowski had encouraged whatever they had wanted. Yet nearly none of them had earned marks equal to mine.

It was a surprising thing that I had never thought of it that way before, but I realized that whatever I wasn't, I
was
smarter than nearly all of those white kids. But apparently I was still not intelligent enough, in their eyes, to become whatever
I
wanted to be.

It was then that I began to change—inside.

I drew away from white people. I came to class, and I answered when called upon. It became a physical strain simply to sit in Mr. Ostrowski's class.

Where “nigger” had slipped off my back before, wherever I heard it now, I stopped and looked at whoever said it. And they looked surprised that I did.

I quit hearing so much “nigger” and “What's wrong?”—which was the way I wanted it. Nobody, including the teachers, could decide what had come over me. I knew I was being discussed.

In a few more weeks, it was that way, too, at the restaurant where I worked washing dishes, and at the Swerlins'.

 

One day soon after, Mrs. Swerlin called me into the living room, and there was the state man, Maynard Allen. I knew from their faces that something was about to happen. She told me that none of them
could understand why—after I had done so well in school, and on my job, and living with them, and after everyone in Mason had come to like me—I had lately begun to make them all feel that I wasn't happy there anymore.

She said she felt there was no need for me to stay at the detention home any longer, and that arrangements had been made for me to go and live with the Lyons family, who liked me so much.

She stood up and put out her hand. “I guess I've asked you a hundred times, Malcolm—do you want to tell me what's wrong?”

I shook her hand, and said, “Nothing, Mrs. Swerlin.” Then I went and got my things, and came back down. At the living room door I saw her wiping her eyes. I felt very bad. I thanked her and went out in front to Mr. Allen, who took me over to the Lyons'.

Mr. and Mrs. Lyons, and their children, during the two months I lived with them—while finishing eighth grade—also tried to get me to tell them what was wrong. But somehow I couldn't tell them, either.

I went every Saturday to see my brothers and sisters in Lansing, and almost every other day I wrote to Ella in Boston. Not saying why, I told Ella that I wanted to come there and live.

I don't know how she did it, but she arranged for official custody of me to be transferred from Michigan to Massachusetts, and the very week I finished the eighth grade, I again boarded the Greyhound bus for Boston.

I've thought about that time a lot since then. No physical move in my life has been more pivotal or profound in its repercussions.

If I had stayed on in Michigan, I would probably have married one of those Negro girls I knew and liked in Lansing. I might have become one of those state capitol building shoeshine boys, or a Lansing Country Club waiter, or gotten one of the other menial jobs which, in those days, among Lansing Negroes, would have been considered “successful”—or even become a carpenter.

Whatever I have done since then, I have driven myself to become a success at it. I've often thought that if Mr. Ostrowski had encouraged me to become a lawyer, I would today probably be among some city's professional black bourgeoisie, sipping cocktails and palming myself off as a community spokesman for and leader
of the suffering black masses, while my primary concern would be to grab a few more crumbs from the groaning board of the two-faced whites with whom they're begging to “integrate.”

All praise is due to Allah that I went to Boston when I did. If I hadn't, I'd probably still be a brainwashed black Christian.

Because his father was a U.S. Army colonel, Harry Middleton was born in Frankfurt, Germany. He attended high school in Virginia and college in Louisiana; he earned an M.A. in American history at Louisiana State University
.

A journalist and writer, Middleton was a columnist for
Southern Living.
His books, all nonfiction, ran to trout fishing:
On the Spine of Time
(1991)
; The Bright Country
(1993)
; Rivers of Memory
(1993)
.

The Earth Is Enough: Growing Up in a World of Trout and Old Men
(1989) is Middleton's memoir. As a boy of fourteen, he went to live at his grandfather's farm in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. He got to know three contented, dignified, and rebellious old men: his grandfather Emerson, his great-uncle Albert, and their Sioux friend Elias Wonder, a World War I veteran
.

 

from T
HE
E
ARTH
I
S
E
NOUGH

L
ate spring had spread across the mountains before I found the courage to ask them one morning at the breakfast table. I spoke up just as they were piling their dishes in the sink, getting ready to head for the creek for an hour's fishing before the sun topped the hills—the sign for them to exchange fly rods for hoes and wheelbarrows.

“Could you show me?” I said weakly, my voice struggling to break the bonds of a whisper.

“Show you what, son?” Emerson asked, pulling the wide, flat brim of his Montana hat down over his eyes. The hat was the dull silver color of a trout's belly.

“You know, teach me—” I stopped short because I was shaking badly and I wanted to sound serious and mature, someone worthy of instruction.

Certain that something of consequence was at hand, Albert took off his hat, sat back down, and poured himself another cup of cof
fee. His hands trembled slightly, sending tiny waves of coffee over the lip of the cup onto the tablecloth. Albert looked at Emerson, his face a mixture of confusion and incredulity. Emerson returned a similar look, only his face was more distorted, as though he had just bitten into a sour grape.

“Teach you what, exactly?” said Emerson in a low voice, the same voice he fell into whenever he felt a catastrophe was at hand.

“Fly fishing,” I said.

Silence, for a long moment. Canyon deep and cave perfect. It was as if all of us had stopped breathing at the same instant.

Emerson took off the big Montana hat and scratched his head thoughtfully. His bright eyes fixed on me.

“Teach you fly fishing!” he roared, a thundering sound that caused Albert to fling what was left of his coffee straight up in the air. “Why—why, that's criminal. Tell him, Albert, for chrissakes. That's criminal. Why, I'd get a lighter sentence lacing your root beer with paregoric. Teach you fly fishing, for chrissakes. Better you should ask me how to pick up eighty-year-old women. Fly fishing!”

He sat back in his chair and the red drained slowly from his face. He and Albert were old washed-up mountain farmers, he told me. That and no more. Not teachers or scholars, and certainly not your typical old pipe-smoking, rocking-chair patriarchs, dispensing homespun wisdom to their kin, boring them with memories of the “good old days, which weren't all that damn good,” and old folkways that were as suspect as they might be virtuous.

Albert nodded. “Yeah, we're a couple of old farts who want to see the younger generations screw up all on their own, with no help from us. Though we probably could steer them to disaster a good deal faster.”

Emerson embraced a more serious tone. “We have nothing of lasting worth to teach you, son. That's what it comes down to,” he said earnestly. And he told me coldly that he and Albert were of the belief that an old man, and especially a relative, should never teach a child how to fish—unless, that is, the old man had something against the child and was out to get even.

Then Emerson leaned forward in his chair, so that his face was but inches from mine and I saw that there were endless flecks of blue in his gray eyes and that the lines that spread like dried-up
creek beds in his face were cut more deeply than I had realized. “Why, to anchor you with what paltry knowledge the two of us have of fly fishing would make as much sense as a second-rate con man trying to teach his kid the ropes, the same crap that put the old man in the slammer in the first place.” He sighed deeply, as if searching for the next turn of his argument.

Pools of sunlight began to fill the kitchen. Albert looked nervously out the back door toward the creek.

“I'm fumbling about for the words,” Emerson mused out loud. “We barely know anything about angling ourselves. That's it, that's what I'm struggling for. Why, we'd just saddle you with a cartload of bad habits. Trout fishing is worse than alcohol or women.”

“Well, maybe alcohol,” Albert said, smiling.

“It's a ruinous thing, an addiction more destructive than Albert's habitual need for I.B.C. root beer. Fly rodding will consume your life. You'll transform, become absolutely piscine. Look at Albert…” Emerson pointed his long, bony index finger at Albert, who dropped the smile and took on the grim aspect of a man about to be hanged. “…that salmonid smile, the cold, indifferent eyes, the constant pucker of the lips.”

“The indomitable spirit,” said Albert, coming to his own rescue.

“And he's only been at it sixty years,” concluded Emerson. “Imagine what kind of pisciform monster a lifetime with a fly rod might create! The thought is frightening, son. Frightening. The rod and reel. Don't ask me to damn my grandson to a life as a maladjusted piscator.” And he took a long pause, then added, “Anyway, your father did not send you here so that you might immerse yourself in fly fishing or quail, or mountain streams, or wild turkey, all of which are frivolous to him and to most of the civilized world. Save yourself some grief.”

As he talked, I was thinking. About trout. About how the morning was getting late and how we should have been on the creek an hour ago. From my chair I could look beyond Emerson, out the back door. Sunlight cut into the forest in great shafts like faults through stone. Albert, too, had his back to the sunlight and he became a shimmering silhouette with a pompadour of ungainly hair.

“Have you really thought this through?” Emerson asked, his words thick as though coated with molasses. “Again I say, look at
us.” This time the bony finger went to Albert and then into his own chest. Albert squirmed in his chair, a man unable to keep a tight grip on neutrality. “Look at the way we live. Take a good, long look. These are the rewards of the outdoor life, son, sad and paltry as they are. Take up the fly rod and the shotgun, and before you know it, you're an outcast, a social leper, rejected by your family, despised by your neighbors, mistrusted by your community. Unaware that your soul is quite safe, in the best of company, your church will pity you, pray mightily for your redemption from hideous sin. The final question is, should any man turn his back on ambition, profit, security, and a parking place in the city, just to pursue a fish!”

Albert jumped up, shook his fist at the ceiling. “And look at Elias Wonder. Yeah, take a gander at that buzzard. Forty years ago he was happy, generous, charitable, tall, dark, and handsome. Then he took up the fly rod. Now consider him. Uglier than a fresh road kill. Evil-eyed, cantankerous, sullen, mean. An antisocial misfit that causes a groundswell of spleen wherever he goes. Consider him well. Should a man abandon success just to pursue a fish?” Then he bolted for the door, yelling, “Yes, but only if it's trout!”

Emerson's face was turned away from me, but I could hear him chuckling under his breath. When he spoke again, it was only to say: “Amen. That's the spiel, son.”

I smiled at them both. Soon we were all on the hard-dirt path leading down to Starlight Creek and we were all laughing, sinners together.

We fished only a little while, because there were fields to tend. I thought I understood it now: even if the old men had no interest in being my angling mentors, they would not try to stop me from following my own interests, no matter how foolhardy, whether it be trout fishing or nuclear physics. If they had never actually invited me to go with them to the creek each day to fish, neither had they seemed to mind my company, the hours I spent watching them. Perhaps it was their way of testing my devotion to the trout of Starlight Creek, the depth and veracity of my new convictions.

“Better get things cleaned up,” Emerson told me after a dinner of venison steaks, fresh-baked bread, potatoes, tomatoes, field peas, and iced tea. “See to the feathered ladies out in the coop. Tuck them in cozy. Get your mind off trout, if you can. I know they've got you.
I can see it. Every fraternity of sufferers knows its brothers. Trout hook men; men don't hook trout. Better try and throw the hook while you can. By the time you're a grown man there probably won't be a pure trout healthy enough to fiddle with.”

Albert yelled from the big room, where he was stretched out on the couch, “How's that for wise, soothing, elderly counsel, son? Words of succor from the ancient and learned. It must be humbling to eat at the same table with Emerson, the Exalted Sage of the Ozarks, and St. Albert. Ah, yes, a path lighted by guidance from the dim past, exhortations from the doomed! Now, if you two boys will excuse me, I'm off on a moonlit walk with Mr. Hemingway, who wishes to persuade me that when it comes to sports afield, it's quantity that counts rather than quality or experience. Forward, then, good brother Emerson. A double amen to your orations.”

And I heard the front door close and Albert's harmonica playing “Little Walter,” deep and mournful.

At breakfast the next morning Albert said brusquely, “I suggest we dismiss all piscatorial conversations this morning and get down to the creek. You know how the trout pout when they miss a day of humiliating us.”

Emerson looked at him hard. “Onward it is, then,” he said. “Son, you clean up the dishes, fetch the eggs.”

Albert was up and walking toward the back door when he turned and winked and I knew my incipient conspiracy had enlisted its first confederate. On that morning I had determined to baptize myself completely in the life of Starlight Creek….

 

On a May morning shrouded in darkening clouds and a constant drizzle, Albert stole into my room, came almost on tiptoe, silently, as though he were a man on the run. “How much money you got?” he whispered. Down the hall, Emerson lay naked on his bed reading Loren Eiseley. He was naked because he had gotten into a patch of poison ivy while trying to outsmart an old hermit gobbler down in the oak sloughs by Woollum's place. As always happened, the turkey got the best of things, leading the old man right into the tangle of poison ivy, and Emerson got the itch, which he deserved, he said, for fooling around with wild turkeys. Albert scrubbed him down with so much calamine lotion that Emerson
took on the aspect of a body freshly laid out at the mortician's, just waiting for something eternal to wear.

“Well, how much?” prodded Albert.

“About fifteen dollars,” I said. That included all my wages at $1.50 a week, plus what was left of the $25 my father had given me.

“Okay, that's plenty,” said Albert, his voice registering a hint of excitement and intrigue. “Get it and meet me by the truck. We're going to town.”

Albert said nothing as we drove. He had this sly grin on his face, the same grin he wore each time he outfoxed Emerson or got the best of the good Reverend Conrad Biddle of the Mount Hebron First Primitive Methodist Church, or each time Elias Wonder threatened to die and didn't. Between us on the seat was a thin piece of quilt, folded in half, rolled up and tied loosely at each end with a length of torn sheet.

In town, he parked across from Bates's, then gingerly carried the parcel into the dimly lit store. Mr. Bates looked startled, as if he'd never seen Albert in town on a weekday.

“What's up?” he asked with some urgency. “How's Emerson? Everything all right with you old fellas?”

“Emerson's down with the itch,” said Albert. “Just as cranky as ever, more temperamental than a two-legged dog.” As he spoke, Albert set the package on the counter, untied and unrolled it. It was the old Orvis cane rod and some nameless worn, dull gray-steel reel already packed with line. In the store's diluted light, the old rod took on the color of soft sunlight, pure, comb-fresh honey. A thing of beauty.

Albert coughed slightly, cleared his throat to get Bates's full attention. “You know, Bates, a man can use only so many rods. Really, any more than one is a wasteful luxury, seems to me. Any more would be too many dependents for a man of my years, so I'd like to sell this one. It's been a good rod, devoted, trustworthy, more dependable than most things a man hooks up with in life. I'd like to get what I gave for it, if possible. That would be five dollars. You think I could display it here in the store?”

Bates's face took on a suspicious and confused look. “Albert, you haven't sold a rod or reel or shotgun since this place has been here. Why now? Look, if it's credit you need…”

“No, no, Bates, thank you anyway. I'm still solvent. The simple life keeps a man away from many things, including debt. No, I just got a special urge for five dollars. Now, can I leave the rod with you?”

“Certainly,” said Bates. “I'll put it in the front window with a large white tag on it. Bet it sells in less than a week's time.”

“Good,” Albert said, smiling. “That's good. Many thanks to you, Bates. I appreciate it.” And the two men shook hands.

Throughout the entire transaction, Albert had not turned to me, looked at me, acknowledged me in any way. Now, he simply walked out the door. But I knew my part. My hands were already deep in my jeans pocket, fishing out one-dollar bills.