All Over but the Shoutin' Read online

  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 ga
rden 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.

  5

  When God blinks

  We were raised, my brothers and me, to believe God is watching over us. The day we left our grandma standing in the driveway for that massive, hateful house on a hill, I guess He had something in His eye. Maybe it was Vietnam. Maybe it was Selma. Either way, as my daddy’s Buick rumbled between the low mountain ridges and crossed into Cherokee County from Calhoun, we were on our own. I was six years old.

  I will forever remember my first look at that house. It stood like a monument on the hill, smack-dab in the middle of a little farming community called, idyllically, Spring Garden. It was high and white, a two-story farmhouse with big, square columns in front, too big to reach around. There was a massive gray barn, and a smokehouse, and off in the distance, a string of shacks. The house stood sentry over fields of cotton and corn, and was ringed with live oak trees, trees that had outlived generations of men. There was an apple orchard and a pasture and acres and acres of empty, lonely pines.

  He had told Momma he had a good job, but to rent this house, we thought, he would have to be a county commissioner, at least. For all our lives we had lived in tiny mill houses or in relatives’ homes, places so small that people sit with their knees touching and their arms tucked in tight at their sides, the way prisoners sit when they are fresh out of jail. This, we thought, as the car rolled toward it on the blacktop, was a mansion.

  But as the car pulled closer and turned up the long driveway, I saw that it was no mansion, only the corpse of one. I saw peeling paint and missing boards, and looking back on it now I know that my father must have rented it for a song, because it was a house no one else would have. We would have said it was straight out of Faulkner, if we had known who Faulkner was. The bathroom, like the one we had back at our grandma’s little house, was out back, down a dirt trail, bordered by ragweed.

  Inside, where the wallpaper hung like dead skin, a great mahogany staircase stretched up to a sinister, deserted second floor, a floor that we never used, one that remained covered in a fine gray powder of dust, like old graveyard dirt, the whole time we lived there. Even now, I can close my eyes and see the footprints in it, left by som
eone a week before, a month, years.

  The house was almost empty. There was a bed in one room where Sam and I slept with our little brother, Mark, who was still just a baby, and a bed in another room for them. I remember a couch and a chair in the living room and a kitchen table, and nothing else, just space. It had a fireplace and a wood heater, which is fine when you have something to burn, and electric lights that only worked in a few rooms. The floor had so many cracks that the wind reached up to tickle your ankles, like cold, invisible fingers reaching out of the ground. I jumped the first time I felt it, and my daddy laughed.

  I believe now that if I would have listened very carefully, I could have heard my mother’s heart break and tinkle down in pieces on the warped floor. She did not say anything, of course. She never said anything. It was just one more broken promise, one more sharp slap to her pride. But if that was all she had to endure, she could.

  I was afraid of that house. Sam was afraid. I think even she was afraid. For the first month I slept with my head covered up, but there was no hiding from the monster in that old house. It was quiet at first, but it was only resting. It was with us just as sure as if it had been locked into one of those closets in the abandoned second floor.

  For a little while, I believe, we were something very like a family. My momma cleaned up the ground floor of the old house, stuck our baby pictures on the wall with Scotch tape and put a few plastic flowers on the empty shelves. For weeks, our daddy woke up early and went off to work at Merrill’s body shop, carrying a lunch box full of bologna sandwiches and a Little Debbie snack cake. He came back home smelling of dust and paint, not whiskey, and on Fridays he cashed his check and put money in my momma’s hand for groceries before going to get drunk. We had not one bottle of milk in the refrigerator but two. One pure white—what we call “sweet” milk—and one chocolate. We could drink as much milk as we wanted. The milkman came back for the half-gallon bottles, and left more. I thought it was free.