Next I join the debate team, which seems like another form of acting. You research a topic, passionately present arguments in favor of some plan, then switch sides and argue how ridiculous it is. In my second tournament, I end up with a better overall score than Marshall does, the first time I have ever beaten my brother at anything. When he sees that I rank higher on the team, Marshall drops out.
My junior year, I go on a weekend excursion with the school debate team to Athens, where the University of Georgia is hosting a state tournament. The school district pays for two nights in a motel, and we debaters make the most of it. We cannonball into the swimming pool, empty the vending machines, even smoke cigars. Late at night we drop quarters in the Vibro-massage beds just as our roommates are falling asleep.
The most memorable event of that trip takes place on the drive home, as we wind along the roads of eastern Georgia. I am riding in a car with the new sociology teacher, our chaperone, who has untrimmed hair and a bushy mustache, a rarity in those days. He owns only three ties and two sports coats, and sometimes wears the same clothes to school five days in a row. He also drives the ugliest car in the school parking lot.
In that rattletrap car packed with five eager young debaters, Mr. Bradford tells us why he lives so frugally. “Do you realize,” he says, “that one-fourth of the people in the world earn less money in a year than I spent on the watch I’m wearing right now?” His left arm moves across the steering wheel to display a gold watch worth about thirty dollars.
I have never thought of myself as rich. After all, I live in a trailer. But Mr. Bradford, fresh from an assignment with the Peace Corps, goes on to describe daily life in some of the world’s poorest countries. I am startled speechless.
He turns his head toward the back seat, his eyes locking on me. “And I bet you can’t guess what I did before the Peace Corps. I was a Southern Baptist evangelist.” We all laugh.
For a few minutes, Mr. Bradford says nothing. I concentrate on the scenery outside, still absorbing what he’s told us about his time abroad.
Finally I ask, “So, why’d you become a teacher instead of an evangelist?”
He responds energetically, as if he’s been waiting for the question. “Well, I’ll tell you why. When I got back to the United States, nobody in the church cared much about what I saw overseas. People were more concerned with chasing the American dream. I couldn’t get the Peace Corps scenes out of my mind, and one day I decided I could no longer live with the hypocrisy. The time had come to speak my mind.
“I happened to be the scheduled speaker at my church’s Wednesday night service. So, after a full day’s work on the farm, I marched down the aisle and took my seat on an upholstered chair on the platform. Thing is, I hadn’t changed clothes, and I was still wearing my smelly overalls. My work boots left a trail of mud and manure down the aisle. That sanctuary had a new odor in it, and members of the congregation began whispering to each other.
“My sermon took only five minutes to deliver, and went something like this:
You act shocked. You laugh as though I were a costumed clown. I tell you, you are wearing the costumes. Seventy-five percent of the world’s people are dressed like me. Half the world went to bed hungry tonight. You stuffed yourselves, fed the dogs—and still threw away a good meal.
Something is wrong with a country that lets grain rot in the silos while bodies rot away in other nations. And this church—no one dressed like me has been welcome here. No poor person has spoken from this platform. What’s more, you don’t care. When I leave tonight, I’ll be remembered as the oddball, the misfit, the clown. You won’t think of yourselves as the strange ones. But you are. The strangest thing of all is that you don’t even realize it.”
With that, our teacher proudly informs us, he walked out of the church. He had said his last prayer and read his last Scripture.
* * *
—
For three years I’ve thought a career in science would be my future. The final two years of high school, however, the power of words gradually overtakes me.
I felt its tug as a freshman, when the elegant principal, Mr. Craig, made stops at our introductory English class. The teacher always asked him to recite some Shakespeare. Mr. Craig would clear his throat and close his eyes, then rocking slowly back and forth quote line after line of the most beautiful language I had ever heard. The class always fell quiet, and not just because he was the principal.
Now I am studying Shakespeare in English literature classes. We read Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. Sometimes we joke about lines like “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears…” Every so often, though, the magic of the language sweeps us out of our petty little worlds and pulls us toward something grander.
In my advanced literature classes, other books wield a different power: 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Siddhartha. They draw me out of the church bubble I live in and—like Mr. Bradford’s Peace Corps stories—expose me to ideas and realms I haven’t known before. I feel like a virgin reader, and a subversive one, wondering if it’s sinful to read such books. I am encountering backgrounds wholly unlike mine, and it makes the blood buck in my veins.
When I read a good book, I have the almost mystical sense that all of it has happened to me. Or, rather, I want it to happen to me. I read Chaucer and wish I was one of those pilgrims swapping bawdy stories on the road with friends and strangers. I read Return of the Native and fall in love with love. I read Hemingway and want to enlist. I read Salinger and long for the courage to act out the insolence that simmers inside me.
For the first time I see my fundamentalist faith as it looks from the outside. Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” takes me back to Old Testament accounts of drawing lots and stoning deviants. One teacher reads aloud C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, and its fanciful version of Hell as a place of bleak loneliness sounds so much more believable than the brimstone sermons I hear at church. Lord of the Flies tells me all I need to know about depravity without using the word.
My thoughts about race, which have been churning since my experiences at the CDC and at the Patriots’ Rally, come to a head when I read the new book Black Like Me, by journalist John Howard Griffin. A line on the cover describes the premise: “A white man learns what it is like to live the life of a Negro by becoming one!” Although that stretches the truth, Griffin indeed underwent a regimen of drugs and ultraviolet treatment in order to turn his skin black.
The book recounts his experiences during six weeks of traveling on buses through the Deep South, passing as a Black man. He tells of the “hate stares” that he gets in Mississippi when he asks for directions, applies for a job, or simply tries to buy a bus ticket. In his disguise, basic things I take for granted—a place to eat, somewhere to find a drink of water, a restroom, someplace to wash up—pose a major challenge.
When the pigmentation finally fades and Griffin scrubs his face from brown to pink, everything changes. Once more he’s a first-class citizen, with the doors into cafés, restrooms, libraries, movies, concerts, schools, and churches now open to him. “A sense of exultant liberation flooded through me. I crossed over to a restaurant and entered. I took a seat beside white men at the counter and the waitress smiled at me. It was a miracle.”
The book has a profound effect on me. At once, I grasp the absurdity of racism based on skin color. John Howard Griffin was the very same man, whether with white skin or temporarily brown skin. Yet sometimes he was treated like a normal human being and sometimes like a dirty animal.
My brain aches after reading his book, as does my conscience. I have mocked Blacks’ behavior—their music and dance, dialect, strange food, flashy clothes—without really knowing the persons underneath. Is that so different from the way the folks at the Piedmont Driving Club look on trailer dwellers like me as “white trash,” while I l
ook on them as effete snobs? Both of us judge people by externals only.
Unlike John Howard Griffin, I’ve never been treated—even temporarily—as if I were a Black person. What would that be like? Timidly at first, then greedily, I find books like Native Son by Richard Wright, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The racist stereotypes I have inherited take on a new cast. Maybe Black people “don’t keep up their neighborhoods” because they live in dilapidated housing owned by slumlords. Maybe they “have no sense of history” because of what that history represents.
Black people, it dawns on me, don’t want to have names like ours, use the same grammar and pronunciation, enjoy the same music, wear the same clothes, shake hands the same way, worship the same way. For Blacks, “She thinks she’s white” is an insult, not a compliment. Black culture has its own set of gifts.
As I step over the fence to the pony-farm field of the church where we live, I start viewing my own community of white-racist-paranoid-fundamentalism as its own kind of culture. I don’t like what I see.
Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,
And cry “Content” to that which grieves my heart,
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions.
—Shakespeare, Henry VI
CHAPTER 16
MAKEOVER
I spend my eleventh-grade year moody and confused. I know how to act out an identity: play a character onstage, give a soul-stirring testimony at church or camp, stand at a debate podium and argue convincingly for a point of view or its opposite. All the while, I feel vacant at my core. Who am I?
Then my bones start breaking. The first one occurs at a church softball game. I slide awkwardly into home plate, landing on my right arm, which snaps like a dry twig. At the emergency room, I experience a new level of pain as the doctor inserts a horse-sized hypodermic needle and runs the point along the bone until he finds the exact site of the break before injecting anesthetic and setting the fracture.
A month later, still wearing a cast, I trip while playing basketball and twist left to protect the broken arm as I fall. I land on my left elbow, causing another fracture.
My mother, normally sympathetic at such times, runs out of patience. “What were you thinking, playing ball with a broken arm?” she demands. “Don’t you have any common sense? From now on you’re paying the doctor bills out of your own money!”
Having both arms in casts complicates life. To get dressed, I hold my undershorts out in front of me with both plastered arms, aiming my feet through the holes and jumping off the upper bunk. Against all odds, I avoid further breaks—for a while.
After a few weeks, the doctor cuts apart the scribbled-upon cast on my right arm with a menacing saw that, he assures me, will stop spinning the second it touches soft skin. He pries apart the split cast and uncovers my quivering, atrophied arm, speckled with black sweat beads. The room fills with a rancid smell.
In the span of just over a year, I have six arm fractures, mostly from basketball and touch football. “You need to be more careful, son,” the doctor says, every time. Mother has sterner words. Meanwhile, I have taken on a paper route to pay the medical bills.
In addition to the broken arms, I suffer one more injury when my church friend David pays me a visit. We walk together to a public swimming pool, pay the thirty-five-cent fee, and change into our swimsuits. I make the mistake of telling David that I don’t know how to do a flip off the diving board. “I can do a straightforward head-first dive, but flips scare me.”
“There’s nothing to it,” he scoffs. “You’re probably thinking too much about ducking your head down toward the water. Focus on getting your knees up to your chin as fast as you can. When you do that, you’ll automatically roll forward in a somersault.”
Before even taking a dip in the water, I climb the ten steps to the diving board, walk to the very end, and give it a few tentative bounces. Knees to the chin, knees to the chin, I tell myself. Then I retrace my steps, make a running start, and bounce high off the board, bringing my knees to my chin as fast as I can.
The next thing I know, I’m underwater, dazed, with blood spilling out the side of my mouth and a searing sensation in my jaw. I must have slammed my right knee into my chin, in the process badly biting my cheek. I kick to the surface and paddle over to David. “Something’s wrong,” I sputter. “I think I’m hurt.”
David has little sympathy. “There’s no way we’re going to leave now, after just paying for admission,” he says. I float around on my back for half an hour, and the pain doesn’t subside. Eventually I talk him into walking back home. When I eat a Krispy Kreme doughnut, my face feels like it has caught fire.
Back at the doctor’s office, I learn the reason. After X-raying my jaw, the doctor says, “You’re a lucky young man. Your jawbone is split in two, with a jagged edge just beneath the surface of your right cheek. If you had eaten anything more solid than a doughnut, the bone probably would have popped right out through the skin.” I wince, and the pain shoots across my face.
He presents two options. I can go to the hospital and have the jaw wired shut for six weeks—“in which case you may lose your teeth since you can’t brush them very well,” he says—or I can let the jaw heal on its own, “but only if you swear on a stack of Bibles that you’ll not touch any solid food for six weeks.” I swear, and my fast begins.
The liquid diet gives me an excuse to drink a milkshake every day. In time I graduate to mashed potatoes and then master the art of swallowing peas and butterbeans whole. Sleeping poses the real challenge. If I lie on my back, my lower jaw slides downward, pressing the jagged end against my cheek. Sleeping on either side puts intolerable pressure on the fracture site. So I resort to sleeping on my stomach. I make a rectangle out of pillows and towels and rest my forehead on the top border, with my face hanging down in the empty space in the center. Although I get little sleep that summer, at least I escape having my jaw wired shut.
By now Mother has grown concerned. She’s been blaming me for the injuries, but what if there’s something medically amiss? We visit a specialist, who recommends a bone biopsy.
Before we can schedule the procedure, I contract mononucleosis, or glandular fever, and spend a month in bed. Every Saturday I go to a hospital for a blood test, as my high white-blood-cell count has raised the possibility of leukemia.
In self-pitying moments I fantasize about leukemia. Would anyone care if I died? I mentally compose farewell letters. One to my brother, willing him all my goods. One to Mother, asking her to take it easy on Marshall. Another to my pastor, telling him all the things I resented about his church and camp.
Death seems almost a comfort, a way to get postmortem revenge on anyone who has wronged me.
* * *
—
Mother locates a specialist in adolescent diseases, a gruff, elderly man who has a fleshy double chin and tired-looking eyes. He thumbs through my medical charts and X-rays as Mother describes my string of childhood illnesses and recent injuries. He peppers me with questions. Then he sits on his stool for a while, glancing up at me as I perch in my undershorts on the edge of the examining table. His mouth opens and closes a few times, as if he has something to say.
I wait for some exotic diagnosis that will explain everything. At last he says in a weary voice, “Son, I don’t think there’s a thing wrong with you. I think you’re weak. You have bad posture. Maybe you like being sick or hurt. It’s up to you to be well, to get strong. There’s nothing I can do for you.”
His words lodge, like a splinter under the skin. Over the next few weeks, as I reflect on my life, I realize he may be right. At home, I usually get Mother’s kind attention when I’m recovering from something. Marshall is the strong son, and they fight all the time.
A disturbing thought edges in: Do I some
how need physical suffering? I have heard of kids who inflict harm on purpose, by cutting, scratching, or burning themselves. Could I be one of them? I haven’t planned all those broken bones, yet neither have I made any effort to avoid them.
Marshall has confided in me that masturbation is the only thing in his life that feels authentic, his surest emotional connection to reality. Maybe for me pain is the link. It assures me I am alive, and gives me a reason to keep going: I can bear it; I can survive. It also provides a twisted kind of identity. When I show up with both arms in casts, teachers cut me slack. Classmates take notice of me and write messages on the plaster. I am somebody.
Maybe I am sicker than I know. Or, as the doctor said, maybe not sick at all.
* * *
—
I decide I should work at becoming more normal, whatever that means. For starters, I need to learn how to relate to adults.
Adults, I notice, tend to ask the same questions. What grade are you in? What’s your favorite subject? What do you want to be when you grow up? I practice some stock answers that satisfy the questioners. Women, especially, seem to have an allergic reaction to silence. If I remain quiet, they talk all the more. I merely have to nod and feign interest.
One of the books we study in literature class, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, describes a mute man who develops friendships simply by listening to others talk. People pour out their stories to him because they know he won’t repeat them. The book gives me an idea: I can act interested in what other people say, even when I’m not.
I practice asking some basic questions, such as “Do you have any kids?” and “Where did you go to high school?” A “second me” rides on my shoulders, evaluating my performance and taking mental notes for future reference. I am trying to become an authentic person—artificially.
Where the Light Fell Page 18