* * *
—
I feel torn inside, torn between the gentle mother who hovers by my bedside when I get sick and the mother who punishes me when I least expect it. Sometimes her anger bursts without warning, like a summer thunderstorm. I can’t run to her without first checking her mood signs. At night when she tucks me in, is she cuddling, or clinging? Am I?
From the neighborhood kids I hang around, I discover that our family is different. Other kids talk about Mom and Mommy; our mother doesn’t like those informal words. I never had a blanket to drag around or a stuffed animal. I never had a pacifier, and if I tried sucking my thumb as a toddler, Mother put cayenne pepper on it. “Are you sucking your thumb again?” she would say. “Little babies do that. Are you a little baby?”
I want to be noticed. I stand on top of the sliding board and shout, “Look at me! See how high I am, Mother!” But it seems she mostly notices the bad things. She tells other parents what a stinker I am, how I spit out tomatoes, and cringe when I see a needle. Often she brings up one particular incident that makes me look stupid.
It happened during one of the afternoon Bible clubs Mother teaches in people’s homes. A couple dozen squirmy kids pile into a living room for an hour or so, sitting on furniture and the floor to sing songs and listen to her lessons, which she illustrates with colored flannelgraph figures on a fuzzy board. A good storyteller, my mother can make the Bible come alive.
Mother teaches with great energy and maintains order. If a kid acts up, she threatens, “I’m gonna talk to your mama,” or maybe, “The Lord wants you to be quiet—he told me so!” Bible clubs always end with treats of vanilla wafers and Kool-Aid, as well as prizes for Bible memorization, and a surprise “hot seat” with candy taped under it. I’m not eligible for the hot seat or the prizes, but I take pride in being the teacher’s kid.
Her reputation spreads. Soon she joins a group called Bible Club Movement and teaches these Bible clubs four or five afternoons a week. Because she can’t afford a babysitter, I end up attending every one of them as a preschooler. Bored by the repetition, I look for ways to entertain myself.
One lazy afternoon during snack time I decide to stick a raisin up my nose. It is much easier to get a raisin up your nose than to get it out, I discover. The dried raisin absorbs moisture and swells, blocking the nostril. I pinch the other nostril closed and blow. Nothing. I dig at it with my finger, which only pushes it farther up. In the end, I have to confess.
“What are you doing with a raisin up your nose?!” Mother demands.
I freeze, caught misbehaving again. “I don’t know. It just got there.”
The helpful hostess fetches an array of tools—toothpicks, tweezers, a spoon, a fork, a knife, a skewer—and Mother goes to work. The other kids stand around and smirk. Soon the inside of my right nostril is a pulpy, bloody mass, and all Mother can do is stuff it full of Kleenex and drive me to the emergency room. There, a friendly intern uses some kind of instrument that gets the raisin right out.
It seems I am always doing things like that, either out of boredom or on a double-dog dare. Almost always I get caught and punished.
Every kid I know gets spanked. Most of them live in fear of the threat “Wait till your father comes home!” Since we have no father, Mother fills in. “I’ll blister your behind,” she yells. When we protest, she tells us that she’s taking it easy on us. “I got it much worse from my own mother,” she says.
Marshall earns a sound thrashing for saying “son of a gun,” a phrase on the no-no list, and another for fidgeting in church. I get one for drawing on my Sunday School paper instead of listening to the sermon. Both punishments are carried out in the church hallway, where, to our embarrassment, everyone can hear. At home, whippings come for slamming the screen door, not cleaning up our room, lying, fighting each other, talking back—the normal crimes of boyhood.
Sometimes she chooses a BoLo paddle, a wooden toy shaped like a Ping-Pong paddle. To me, it seems wrong, using a toy as a weapon. She experiments with other things, too: belts, switches from the yard, a flyswatter. The flyswatter hurts the least, but leaves insect goo on my legs.
She talks as she hits. “How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t you talk back to me! I’ll make you sorry you were ever born.” The words fall like bricks.
I pretend-wail, trying to get her to stop. “I’ll give you something to cry about,” she says, not stopping. Then comes the confusing opposite: “I’ll keep hitting until you quit crying.”
I try arguing. I tell her I want to die, ’cause then I’d go to Heaven and tell Daddy how mean she is. She shoots right back: “I wish I would die, too. I’d go to Heaven and tell him what you did wrong.”
Her favorite line is “I hope when you grow up that you’ll have ten just like you. Then you’ll know, then you’ll see.”
* * *
—
Sometimes Marshall and I join as allies, and sometimes we turn on each other. As the elder, Marshall usually has the advantage. “You’re in trouble! You better get home right now. She’s MAD!” he announces with a Ha ha you’re in for it look.
My worst betrayal of Marshall involves a book that both Aunt Kay and Mother have made us solemnly promise not to read. It tells the story of the Shakers, a religious cult of people whose members don’t marry or have sex. Every time I pass the bookcase, that book hisses at me like a cobra. At night Marshall and I discuss what kind of juicy stuff must lurk between its covers.
One day I catch Marshall slumped down behind Mother’s bed, not just sampling but devouring the book. I nurse the secret for several weeks until he does something outrageously unfair. Then I tattle. Mother exchanges a look with Aunt Kay, and they both praise me for doing the right thing.
Inside, I know I have slid to a new level of disloyalty to my brother. I have a bad taste in my mouth and a sick feeling in my gut. For a while Marshall no longer trusts me, and shuts me out. I feel all alone, like no one’s on my side. I promise him I’ll never squeal on him again. As far as I know, he never does get punished for reading the book, and I keep my promise not to betray him like that again.
We get labels slapped on us. Marshall is lazy, the curse of the gifted child. In the second grade, before I enter school, he confides to me that he walks to school terrified every single day, because he hasn’t done his homework. “My scalp tingles, my head hurts, I sweat. I just know the teacher will call on me.”
“Why don’t you do the homework?” I ask.
“I don’t see the point,” he says. Sure enough, he crams the night before a test and still gets the best grade in the class. He accepts the lazy label and does not change.
I have a label, too. I learn it one day while sitting with a storybook in my favorite corner as Mother irons clothes in the next room. I can smell the heat coming off the iron and the sour smell as it hits an old cotton shirt. She is talking on our telephone with its long, twisted cord, her neck bent sideways to hold the phone against her shoulder. “Oh, you must mean Philip…” she says to the person on the other end. “He’s the slow one. It’s his brother who’s quick and smart.”
When she sees the hurt expression on my face after the phone call, she tries to explain. “You took your time at everything,” she says. “Walking, talking, tying your shoes. Even being born. You were almost a month late before you decided to make your grand entrance.”
I have a different reaction to her judgment than Marshall does. I determine to prove her label wrong. I know the tales about people such as Cinderella—or Joseph in the Bible—who get picked on, yet one day come out on top. Stick it out, Philip. You’ll find somebody to notice you. You’ll beat Marshall in something someday.
* * *
—
Marshall is at once my hero and my rival. Because he spends most of his time reading books, he rarely gets into trouble. At the age of seven he announces that he
wants to grow up to be a missionary, just like his father, and from then on Mother treats him specially. She thinks of him as her “good son.” That makes me want to throw up. I know that he’s sloppier around the house, that he doesn’t do his homework, that he once forged her name on a paper from school. He’s just too smart to get caught.
“It’s not fair!” I complain. “You let him stay up later, and last week he went to Frank’s house and watched TV! I never get to do anything fun.”
“You’ll have your chance,” she replies. “He’s older”—as if that explains anything.
When Marshall does something, I want to copy him. After seeing him ride a bicycle without training wheels, I spend the next few weeks begging Mother to take the training wheels off my bike, too, so I can ride like Marshall. With much huffing and muttering she fumbles with the pliers and rusted nuts until she works them off. After about five minutes on a wildly swerving bike, I realize I have made a mistake and plead with her to put them back on. Sensing trouble, Aunt Kay volunteers to replace the training wheels.
A month later I’m ready to give it another try. “Are you sure?” Mother asks, and I nod. Same humiliating result. Again Aunt Kay reattaches the training wheels.
The third time I bring up the subject, Mother warns me, “If these wheels come off, they’re not going back on. Do you hear me? We’re not doing this again.” For several days I try to master the balancing act, and each time I end up in the dirt with the bike on top of me. Screwing up my courage, I ask her to replace the training wheels. She dries her hands on her apron and marches me with my bike to the dirt road, stripping leaves off a freshly picked young branch as she goes. My stomach knots.
“I’ll teach you to ride a bike,” she says. “Now, get on that seat!” She hits me with the switch and I mount the seat and lurch forward. No matter how loud I yell, she keeps swinging the switch, even when I start to tilt sideways. My only escape is to pedal forward, and I do so, screaming, with tears and snot streaming down my face.
Years later I retrieve the memory and look at it, like an old scar. I describe to Mother the love-hate feelings for bicycles that I had to overcome. “It should have been a joyful time, a triumph of childhood,” I tell her. “But it was a dark joy. So often when I wanted to feel pleasure, I felt pain instead.” By then I’ve learned about her own harsh childhood and wonder if she’ll be sympathetic.
She stares at me as if perplexed. “Well, you learned to ride a bike, didn’t you?”
* * *
—
During Marshall’s first two years at school, I’m home in Ellenwood with two adults, so the odds are stacked against me. I always get caught. Then one day it dawns on me that Mother doesn’t really know everything and Aunt Kay doesn’t have eyes in the back of her head. There’s a part of me they don’t know. They can’t read my mind.
I work on the ability to keep a secret. As long as I keep my mouth shut, and don’t give anything away, a secret will remain hidden. Not telling things gives me a new kind of control. Nothing makes the adults madder than stonewalling, I find.
“What were you doing with those kids all afternoon?” Mother asks at dinner.
“Nothing, we were just playing,” I say.
Aunt Kay chimes in, “I can tell from your face that you’re hiding something.”
I think about something else, anything, to keep from telling them about the BB-gun competition. I hold their eyes, trying not to blink. They stare back, searching my face for some hint of what I might be concealing.
This tactic earns me another label. “You’re a sneak!” Mother says, a label I don’t mind as much.
When spanking doesn’t work, Mother and Aunt Kay make threats. Mother’s strongest threat goes like this: “If you don’t behave yourself, I’ll call the men in white coats from Milledgeville to come get you.” Milledgeville is the home of Georgia’s insane asylum. Sometimes she chuckles as she says it, though I can’t be sure. Can kids be “put away,” like you put away a bad dog?
My worst act of treachery comes after one of Aunt Kay’s threats. “If you don’t straighten up, I’m going to send you to an orphanage,” she says, echoing my mother’s warning. For a few days I weigh which is worse, the insane asylum at Milledgeville or an orphanage.
I tell Mother about Aunt Kay’s threat, in part to get her sympathy and in part to hear if it’s true. I get more than I bargained for. Mother says the best thing she has ever said to me. She puts her hand under my chin, looks straight at me, and says, “Honey, no matter what happens, I will never, ever send you to an orphanage.”
I believe her. I have located the bedrock. Bad as I am, I will never be put away.
What I don’t know at the time is that Aunt Kay has agreed never to use corporal punishment on us, leaving that to Mother. She reached for the orphanage threat in a moment of desperation. Later, Mother discusses the matter with her pastor, who advises her that Aunt Kay must leave.
Soon this good woman, my champion, who has given us several years of her life, starts making plans to move to Kentucky, all because of me.
Maybe I am a sneak. I can’t trust anyone—starting with myself.
It is easier to live in the world without being of the world than to live in the church without being of the church.
—Henri J. M. Nouwen
CHAPTER 7
CHURCH
Church defines my life. Our family attends services every Sunday morning and evening and also on Wednesday nights for prayer meeting. Plus, I’m expected to show up for Vacation Bible School, youth activities, “revivals,” and whenever else the doors open. The church tells me what to believe, whom to trust and distrust, and how to behave.
My first church was a classic brick structure with a white steeple pointing skyward. “Your daddy sometimes preached there,” Mother would remind us, “and that’s where we had his funeral.” However, a few years after his death that church split over the issue of whether to paint the outside bricks white, so she found another Southern Baptist congregation to join.
“It’s much larger,” she tells us in advance. “Nearly a thousand members.” Colonial Hills Baptist occupies most of a block in a residential neighborhood in the town of East Point, not far from the Atlanta airport. On our first visit, I gawk at all the rows of theater-style seats lined up in the sanctuary. The separate Sunday School building looks bigger than Marshall’s elementary school. Here is where we will spend our formative years.
Every week I breathe in the church’s aroma, a mix of women’s perfume, floor wax, leather Bibles, sweat-stained wood, and a burnt smell from the heating registers. No candles or incense, of course—we’re Baptists. Tiny lights twinkle from a world map painted on the left wall, one for each missionary the church supports. From the right wall gleams a set of organ pipes, by far the showiest part of the sanctuary.
Our pastor, Paul Van Gorder, has a degree from Bob Jones University but no seminary training. A handsome man with dark wavy hair, he attracts a crowd despite being a Northerner, from Pennsylvania. We can tell he “ain’t from around here” by the way he pronounces certain words. He says Gahwd for “God,” Holy Spilit for “Holy Spirit,” and ah-men instead of “amen.” Sometimes he speaks in language just like the Bible’s: “We shall tarry a while longer until Jesus returns.”
I’m too young to follow his sermons, but they must be good, because the nationwide Radio Bible Class program has chosen him as one of their main speakers. We take pride in our pastor, famous enough to be on the radio and sometimes even television. Many people, including my mother, take notes as he speaks, and some mark up their Bibles with different-colored inks. When Brother Paul says “Open your Bibles to Haggai,” the sound of thin pages being turned rustles through the sanctuary. In our church, everyone knows how to find a minor prophet such as Haggai.
* * *
—
For Mother, Sunday
is the highlight of every week. Other women talk about what wonderful work she’s doing with her Bible clubs, and ask if she can possibly squeeze one more into her schedule. She introduces Marshall and me as her sons. “They can be a handful sometimes,” she says with a laugh, and humbly accepts the compliments that follow. “I just don’t know how you do it all, Mildred.”
Mother believes children should act like adults in church, so I have to find ways to kill time. I test mental telepathy by staring at the teenage girl two rows ahead of me. Can I get her to turn around and look? Or I study the members of the choir, who sit in rows behind the pulpit. The fat man with a birthmark is nodding off—in church! That woman in a beehive hairdo looks stupid with those cat’s-eye glasses. I daydream: If a Communist invades our church with a machine gun, who in the choir will he shoot first?
Marshall and I invent games during the hymns. The song leader has the ladies sing the second verse and the men the third: “Let’s hear it now, men. I want you to really belt it out!” Marshall pokes me with his elbow, hoping to trick me into singing at the wrong time—with the ladies. Or we alternate every other word: Marshall sings When, I sing the, his turn roll, my turn is, his turn called, my turn up, his turn yonder. We page through the hymnbook looking for weird names among the writers, such as Augustus Toplady. None, though, can top P. P. Bliss.
It’s funny, but all the talk about soul and spirit in church makes me more conscious of my body. In warmer months, when I wear a suit with short pants, splinters from the wood prickle my legs. I practice winking, popping my knuckles, anything that helps pass the time. I make tight fists, digging my fingernails into my palms. I hold my breath as long as I can, watching the clock’s second hand. I squeeze the armrest hard, trying to make the veins pop out on my arms, like a weight lifter’s.
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