Books connect me to a larger world: the Civil War, Mount Everest, Indians in the Wild West, knights and castles in Europe, the scary animals in Africa and the bizarre ones in Australia. Whenever I have to accompany Mother to a gathering of adults, I make sure I bring a book along. Adults sit around discussing the same old things; books, like a flying carpet of the mind, transport me to new places.
So does music. At the grocery store, Mother has accumulated enough points to earn boxed sets of Long Playing records from the Longines Symphonette Society. I carefully remove an LP from its paper sleeve, making sure not to touch the grooves with my fingers, and place it on the spinning turntable. It hisses for a few seconds as I lower the needle, and then the machine produces sounds that I never knew existed. For a moment I am suspended in pure beauty, a state utterly unlike the shabby surroundings of my life.
The problem is, I live in a home with Marshall. In elementary school his band and orchestra teachers raved, “We’ve never seen a child with such musical gifts. He’s extraordinary.” I would pick up a reed instrument, such as a saxophone or clarinet, and struggle to make a sound, any sound. Within a few minutes Marshall would be playing scales and melodies. How did his lips know to do that?
In his sixth-grade year, the marching-band director needed horn players, so he quickly taught Marshall to play the tuba, which required a new set of mouth skills, “buzzing” the lips in a large cupped mouthpiece. Later that year the school’s orchestra conductor recruited my brother to play the sousaphone, the largest of all brass instruments. The contraption wrapped around him like a python with a giant mouth yawning open just above his head. For a time, I had to share my bedroom not only with Marshall but with this loud monstrosity. I protested every time he removed the mouthpiece and shook out the spit onto our bedroom floor.
Hearing about Marshall’s natural ability, a generous woman at Mother’s church in Philadelphia offered to pay for his music lessons, and my brother narrowed his interests to trumpet and piano. This set up a running conflict with our mother: “People are sacrificing to pay for your lessons, and you’re too lazy to practice! You’re wasting their hard-earned money.”
Fortunately, Marshall has already downsized to the trumpet by the time we move into the trailer. Right away he earns a chair in the high school orchestra, as an eighth grader. I attend the opening concert, which calls for the performers to wear black pants or skirt and a white shirt. Marshall’s pants have a hole in the right knee, which he thinks he can hide by folding the program over it. No such luck. The first-chair trumpeter asks him, “Why in hell are you wearing pants with a hole in them?”
He may be lazy and wear ragged clothes, but Marshall has musical talent that makes my jaw drop. His fingers hover over the piano keyboard like hummingbirds, darting down to bring forth just the right sound. “You can only control two things on a piano,” he lectures me: “volume and tempo. The pitch is built-in. So it’s important to apply precisely the right pressure to each individual finger.”
He plays a short piece, taking turns to emphasize each finger—now the thumb, then the little finger, then the others. No matter how hard I try, my playing sounds clunky compared to his. I’m happy just to hit the right notes.
* * *
—
Partly in self-defense, I turn to the violin. With a gift from the Philadelphia benefactor and the last of my saved-up silver dollars, Mother and I visit a music shop in downtown Atlanta. Among the gleaming trumpets and flutes, the string instruments look sedate and serious—more my style. The violin, an elegant figure eight of an instrument carved from a tree, seems both natural and classy. I plunk down $167 for a German-made violin. “You’ll be pleased,” the salesman says. “It comes from a famous violin-making town.”
I chose the violin thinking it would be easy to learn since it has only four strings compared to eighty-eight keys on a piano. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The violin has twelve different positions up and down the fingerboard, all unmarked. How do I know exactly where my fingers should come down on, say, position eight? “Practice, practice, practice,” says my teacher, Mr. Lortz, who plays in the Atlanta Symphony.
Mr. Lortz only takes students on Saturdays, when I could be exploring the woods or working on a curve ball. Instead I stand in a windowless practice room, with a violin chin rest irritating my neck and sweat pouring down my back, listening as Mr. Lortz informs me what I am doing wrong—namely, everything. I can tell by my teacher’s pained expression that his sensitive ears hurt worse than anything I am feeling.
My violin lessons come to a merciful end when a thief breaks into our home and steals the instrument. By then I’ve noticed that the violin itself is probably fake. The label inside reads “Made in Mittenwald, West Germany, 1944.” Even I know there was no West Germany in 1944.
That leaves the piano. Somehow we manage to squeeze a clanky old upright into the living room of our crowded trailer. It had served well beyond its time in a church, where some Sunday School cherubs painted it lime green and decorated it with Donald Duck decals. It’s missing some keys, and the sustaining pedal works but not the soft pedal on the left—unfortunate, as a soft pedal would be welcome in our close quarters.
On this instrument my talented brother performs. Marshall tells me that concert pianists are at a disadvantage compared to other soloists, because they usually play on unfamiliar instruments. I glance over at our abused piano decorated with cartoon characters. “And the familiar instrument is an advantage?” I say.
Using the gifts from Philadelphia, Mother hires an advanced piano teacher for Marshall and consigns me to Mrs. Wiggins, a jolly, white-haired woman who sits on the bench beside me and sings along in a quavery soprano as I play. Every time I reach for a low bass note I bump her ample bosom with my elbow. Embarrassed, I pause and blushingly start the piece over, but she never moves out of the way.
At home, Marshall practices Brahms and Tchaikovsky, while I work on “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” and “Shine, Little Glow-Worm.” He laughs at my clumsy attempts at trills and mordents. “C’mon, it’s easy. Here, watch this…”
I never do master the piano. Mainly, I remember the hours of sitting in a sweltering trailer, fumbling with the slick keys as sweat dribbles from my armpits, my knees, my elbows, my face. If I shift positions, the wooden bench grabs my sweaty legs. If I turn on a fan, the pages flop around and I have to reposition them behind hymnbooks. My efforts disprove the theory that practice makes perfect. I practice diligently and barely progress; Marshall rarely practices and can play anything from memory.
I have only one recital, a humbling affair in which I, Mrs. Wiggins’s star pupil, royally flub my piece. I play it at double the normal speed, mechanically, without luster, and with an obvious memory gap in the middle. “You played brilliantly,” says my always-cheerful though not-always-truthful teacher as she hugs me after the recital. “You just had a little letdown in the middle. That happens to the best of pianists.”
Mother says very little. Marshall says nothing, though his facial expression betrays what he’s thinking.
* * *
—
The trailer gives us no privacy, and we seem to displease Mother more with every year that passes. Marshall still doesn’t take school seriously, and I hang around with dodgy kids she disapproves of. We each find a private world to recede into.
When Marshall faces a school exam or fights with Mother, he retreats to the piano, the one place he can express emotion without getting punished for it. I learn to read his moods by the music he chooses—from soothing Chopin or Mozart to stormy Rachmaninoff—and watch his face as he plays. He enters a world that only he inhabits, no one else, and listens to a language that speaks to him alone.
I find solace in the woods. When I feel harassed at school, or when tension mounts inside the trailer, I head into the forest, with Mother’s cry—“How ma
ny times do I have to tell you not to slam the door!”—fading away. Unlike my family, the wilderness cannot talk back. When I leave the cramped trailer and its noisy surroundings, I cross the threshold into another, calmer world, one that asks of me nothing but attention.
Something inside me comes to life on these walks. My uncle Winston has given me a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera, and I take it with me on forays into the woods. The camera fits my preferred role as an observer. Life goes on around me; I’ll just record it. Hunched over the small viewfinder, I feel safe, in control.
I walk through the dense undergrowth until I find a decaying log, where I rest in the shade and breathe in the moist green smell. Soon the forest grows accustomed to my presence. The longer I sit still, the more birds I hear. I listen to those named for their sounds: bob-white, whip-poor-will, chick-a-dee-dee-dee. I relish the sense of being alone with nature, knowing that of all people in the world only I am hearing these sounds in this place. The tranquil mood feels vaguely religious, what I should be feeling in church but rarely do.
In the spring, spontaneous beauty arrives in my own backyard. Flowering vines cover the abandoned cars and refrigerators and junk piles, and our dingy trailer park now shimmers with color. Wildflowers sprout alongside the cracked asphalt roads. Wild azaleas grow underneath the trees, and wisteria blossoms drape the green pines with a waterfall of lavender. I pity my friends who prefer sitting indoors watching a grainy picture on television.
One day while hiking in the woods, I hear sounds coming from an abandoned shed. I find the shed now carpeted with hay, and before me stands a creature as magical as a unicorn. My eyes are dazzled. It’s some kind of tiny horse, with a golden coat and a long white mane that spills over its eyes and across its back. It has stubby legs and a short neck, and barely reaches my knees.
A sound startles me, a cracked and raspy voice such as I have never heard. “Looking for something?” it says.
A man wearing leather boots, jeans, a plaid shirt, and a cowboy hat comes into view. Each time he speaks he lifts his hand to a scarf around his neck and hisses like a bellows. “Are you…ssss…from…ssss…around here?” I must look alarmed, because he holds out his free hand and says, “Hi…. ssss…I’m Gus.”
Gus explains that after a throat operation he has to speak through a device that plugs the hole in his neck and picks up vibrations from his vocal cords. “And this here’s Tiny. She’s my miniature Shetland pony.”
I tell him I live nearby and I like to explore in the woods. Gus hisses, “Well, then, let’s just keep this secret between us, OK, pardner?” He gives me a sugar cube and Tiny licks it from my hand with her rough, warm tongue.
From then on, I keep a carrot or an apple in my pocket, and as soon as school lets out, I head for the shed. I comb Tiny, walk her around on a leash, and never tell a soul about her. Like a faithful dog, Tiny watches me with her dark eyes, and listens to whatever I say, cocking her ears and nuzzling my pockets. Inside, I feel a kind of tenderness almost like joy.
I head back to the trailer. Drawing near, I can already hear Marshall and Mother arguing about music lessons.
PART THREE
ROOTS
In order to be prepared to hope in what does not deceive, we must first lose hope in everything that deceives.
—Georges Bernanos (in Reason for Being by Jacques Ellul)
CHAPTER 10
SOUTH
The year I’m attending seventh grade, 1961, the National Book Award goes to Walker Percy, a novelist from Mississippi. When a reporter asks him why the South has produced so many great writers, he replies, “Because we lost the War.” His answer applies to a lot of questions about the South. Winners may forget. Losers don’t.
Atlanta has reminders everywhere. Marching bands play “Dixie” at high school football games. State buildings fly a Georgia flag that incorporates Robert E. Lee’s battle flag. Historical plaques about the Battle of Atlanta dot the city, and I often ask Mother to pull over and let me read them. To the east hulks the granite bulge called Stone Mountain, with its massive carving of three Confederate heroes.
A loyal Southern boy, I devour books about the Civil War. About as many soldiers died in it, I learn, as in all the other wars in which the United States has fought combined. The Confederacy began the war outnumbered four to one and ended it with one-third of its soldiers dead. The North’s strategy of draining Southern blood, regardless of the cost, ultimately worked.
With only ten thousand residents, Atlanta was not even the capital of the state in the 1860s; Milledgeville had that honor. But key railroad lines converged in Atlanta, and General Sherman knew that if he cut those supply routes, he would strangle the Confederate armies. Sherman wrote to his wife, “I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash.” He torched the city, reducing stately homes to the charred chimneys his men called “Sherman’s sentinels.” Then began his March to the Sea, which cut a wide swath of devastation across Georgia.
I remember reading the bitter eyewitness account of an elderly woman who was five years old when Sherman’s army came through her family’s farm in Georgia. The soldiers ordered everyone out of the house, helped themselves to supplies, then killed all the animals and burned the storage barns and house, leaving the family with nothing but the clothes on their backs. “You never forget an experience like that,” she said.
In my adolescence, a hundred years after the war, feelings still run deep. “Those damn Yankees” has been shortened to one word known to every white Southerner: damnyankee. I’ve grown up under the Southern myth of the “War of Northern Aggression”: Honorable gentlemen fought valiantly against overwhelming odds and lost to brutes who invaded their land and left it charred and bloody. Southern armies were led by virtuous leaders such as Stonewall Jackson, who avoided fighting on Sunday, and Robert E. Lee, who set a record for the fewest demerits by any West Point graduate. Lee’s opponent, Ulysses S. Grant, set a record for the most demerits, and spent much of the war drunk.
Like every white schoolboy in those days, I have been taught the doctrine of the Lost Cause: that the South fought over the principle of states’ rights, not slavery. The right of states to make their own decisions was guaranteed by the Constitution, after all. As one of my teachers said: “Think about it—only thirteen percent of Southerners owned slaves. Would we fight a war over that? And Northerners were just as racist, and more hypocritical. They operated the slave ships and profited from the products of slave labor.”
I remember collecting a set of toy Civil War soldiers as a child. I threw away a few of the blue ones to give the grays an advantage. In my grandmother’s living room, I scrunched up the rug to create hills and valleys like the ones around Atlanta and talked my brother into taking the Northern side. Unlike history, my battle produced a resounding Rebel victory.
Every year or so I ask my mother to take me to the Cyclorama, “the world’s largest oil painting,” which re-creates the Battle of Atlanta with paintings and life-sized figures arranged in a circular building. The strains of “Dixie” and the sight of my city ablaze always bring me to tears.
Though our family rarely eats out, we hear from church friends about several of Atlanta’s most popular restaurants, which keep alive traditions of the Old South. Aunt Fanny’s Cabin features Black waitresses dressed as plantation slaves who sing gospel songs to the diners, while young boys in slave costumes display the menu on signboards hung around their necks. Nearby, white diners crowd into Johnny Reb’s Dixieland to hear a nightly performance of “The Battle of Atlanta,” in which the Black waiters and busboys celebrate the “final charge of the Confederacy” with a chorus of whoops and Rebel yells.
In school I write book reports and papers on the Civil War and its heroes. On our family trips to Philadelphia, I talk my mother into taking detours to battlefield sites. My most moving moment com
es at Cemetery Hill in Gettysburg, envisioning Pickett’s Charge. I’ve written a school paper on the battle, and now I’m standing at the very spot where the tide turned against the South. Up until then, the Rebels had been hounding the enemy, chasing them all the way into Pennsylvania. After Gettysburg, the high-water mark of the Confederacy, came a relentless grim decline.
The last Civil War site I visit is the room in Appomattox where Robert E. Lee finally surrendered. I listen to the guide tell the story as if it were a great triumph, the exact opposite of what I’ve learned in school. I feel a sudden cold-hot shock as he describes the scene that ended the war. A sliver of confusion about the Lost Cause enters my mind that day, and afterward I never want to visit another battlefield.
You have to live in the South to understand it, I decide.
* * *
—
Occasionally, Mother takes us on summer drives through the rural Georgia countryside. She knows some church people who have moved away from the big city of Atlanta, and on these visits I get a taste of the real South. My first view of a cotton field startles me: the crop looks exactly like clumps of snow caught on dry twigs. Sometimes we see the ruins of an old plantation chimney pointing skyward in the middle of a field, a stark reminder of how things used to be.
Every county seat we drive through looks the same: a square of mom-and-pop shops and diners surrounding a brick courthouse. Farmers in bib overalls loiter around the courthouse, talking and chewing tobacco while their wives shop for groceries and clothes. They lean back in cane-bottom chairs and complain about things they can’t control—family, weather, the economy, their ailments. They distrust politicians of any stripe. “They’s all crooked, ever’ one. They don’t care a possum’s tail about the people. They’re in it for the money. The gov’mint oughta jes’ get off our backs and leave us be.”
Where the Light Fell Page 10