Once in a while we took some chickens to town and sold them for cash, but mostly we just carried cream, which we separated from milk in a hand-cranked separator, and eggs, which the chickens laid in nests in the hen house without any help from us, we took the cream and eggs over to the country store in Walnut Grove and traded them for flour and sugar and other things we needed. The barter system—that’s the way business was done in Hackney Land, and I’m not complaining about that, for we ate good. Zeb Hackney put food on the table every day of the year, and he sent me to school and bought shoes for my rapidly growing feet every winter, and he let me go barefooted and run wild all summer long, so he did his part, everything required by law.
And the milk, we drank it just like it came out of the cow, rich in cream and natural goodness, real whole milk, not the fake whole milk you get in a super market today with most of the cream and other nutrients extracted for other moneymaking products so that what you get is mostly milk-colored water, we drank real milk right out of Old Bessie. That it was not Pasteurized and therefore filled with germs fortunately never occurred to us. I say fortunately because by drinking un-Pasteurized milk we became immune to every enteric bacteria known to man, including salmonella.
What does milk have to do with anything? Nothing. But if you’re thinking about going into hot checks as a criminal career you might ought to toughen up your immune system so you can eat a lot of rotten prison food.
I thought I’d just throw that in.
Anyway, when I was first taken to Hackney Land we stayed with some of Zeb Hackney’s relatives, because his house was not yet built. And we went to Detroit where both he and my mother worked in factories that had been geared up for the war effort. There I went to school and eventually learned how to play hooky. I did very well at that, playing hooky. With my little brother often in tow, I roamed the streets of Detroit looking for bandits and hidden treasure in abandoned buildings, every day a great adventure of discovery, of sights and sounds different from anything I’d ever imagined.
When I was supposed to be in school I was seldom there, and when I was there I still wasn’t there for my mind was elsewhere. One day it was raining so I went to school to get out of the rain, at least I had sense enough to do that. Well, it just so happened that on that day they had a school-wide spelling bee, and it was a big school with a lot of contestants. Me, I was prodded up on stage when it was my turn and they started giving me words to spell and I spelled them unconsciously, without a clue as to what I was doing. And I won.
I won the whole thing to the applause of many students and the bafflement of many teachers. And I received as a prize a new dictionary from the Detroit News with my name printed in gold on the front cover. And the next day after the spelling bee the skies cleared and I was gone again.
Eventually a teacher sent a dirty note to my mother wanting to know why I was never in school, but I was able to lie out of that because my mother had just received my new dictionary with my name printed in gold, along with a letter of congratulations from the powerful Detroit News for winning the spelling bee, which I had already forgotten about. It came just in time to save me. When I say save me I mean I wasn’t worried about my mother whipping me, for I was, like I said, off-limits to her, and that included whippings. But she sometimes, if my transgressions were serious enough, handed me over to a higher power, meaning my stepfather, Zeb Hackney, who was lethal with a belt or his big leather razor strop, whichever one was handiest. He had not yet learned to kick me with those clodhoppers, which he wore even in Detroit.
Anyway, I started running away from home when I was nine or ten. The first time was on the exact day that the big race riot started in Bell Isle Park and spread quickly to the whole city of Detroit. I planned to walk out into the countryside and camp like a cowboy. I said goodbye to my little brother, who cried when I left, but cowboys have to move on, so I took off down the street with a spring in my step on a brand new adventure. I stopped at a store and bought a box of matches, which I’d need to start a campfire with, and continued on my merry way—and continued and continued, for Detroit was a lot bigger than I had ever imagined. I stopped for a while to rest my horse, I mean a cowboy has to rest his horse once in a while, and feed it too. I bought enough candy for both me and my horse, but my horse wasn’t hungry so I ate his too.
Night came and I was still walking. On and on I went. Later and later it got. I noticed a lot of black men running around turning over cars and setting fires. It was a colorful sight and I stopped to watch for a bit, then I moved on down the sidewalk. Some of the blacks noticed me but they didn’t bother me and I continued on until it was time to water my horse, so I walked into a bar to ask for water, but the bartender got real excited about me walking around the streets in the middle of a race riot—that’s what he called it, a race riot—and when I told him I was headed to the country to camp out and just needed some water, he called the police.
The police took me to a big jail somewhere, and when I wouldn’t give them my name or address they put me in a cell, the first jail cell I’d ever been in, and I went straight to sleep. The trail takes a toll on a cowboy.
I guess my mother notified the police that I’d run away because sometime during the night she came and got me, my mother did. As far as I was concerned she could have let me sleep.
That wasn’t the last time I ran away. Once I got the taste of the wild blue yonder, I took off every time the urge struck me, staying at home just long enough to fill my belly a few times and catch up on my sleep. Once I even made it to Chicago. But the folks of that city didn’t appreciate a ten-year-old kid running around stealing jugs of milk off back porches or fresh-baked pies set to cool in open windows. Nor did they appreciate me sleeping in the back seat of a car and then playing dead when the young driver came out of the house and reached into the back of that car in the dark for something he had forgotten and felt my shoe and then my leg and then my knee, groping in the dark to identify the strange object he had encountered. He identified it. He let out a scream and took off running.
Me, I came out of that car and took off running in the opposite direction, just as scared as he was, I think. The police found me hiding in a garage and took me to jail, where I remained until my mother came after me and took me back to Detroit on a bus. She wasn’t too happy with me, nor was my step father who welcomed me home with a razor strop to my backside. He wasn’t mad because I’d run away from home, he was mad because my mother had had to miss two days of work to go to Chicago to get me.
Sometime after that we moved back to Hackney Land and lived with some of Zeb’s folks while he built his house. He built it from the ground up with his own hands, I’ll give him credit for that. He cut down trees and dragged the logs behind a horse to an old one-man sawmill he’d bought from somebody, and sawed those logs into planks of all sizes and thicknesses and built that house from the ground up with his own hands—well mostly his own hands, I helped some.
He introduced me to Work. I didn’t like that a lot. So he introduced me to his clodhoppers up my ass. I liked that even less. So I Worked.
When he finished building his house, we moved in, me and my brother in one bedroom and he and my mother in the other. The house had a living room with a fire place and a picture window, and it had a kitchen. Zeb established himself on a chair in the living room in front of the fireplace and from there he ruled Hackney Land, and rule it he did. My mother wilted into a submissive housewife under his dominant will, for that was the way of women in Hackney Land, all women, the part they played in the lives of men in that time and place. And my mother accepted that role willingly and peacefully, even happily. She cooked the food, cleaned the house, and worked in the garden. In her spare time she read romance stories and dreamed of the time when my father, Garnet Baker, would come riding in to rescue her. Her favorite country song was Chained to a Memory of You by somebody, I don’t remember who, and she sometimes went about her housework humming that song.
Zeb worked a lot, either on the farm or on construction jobs here and there, so he was gone a lot during the day. I liked that, him being gone. But when he came home he cast a gray shadow over the whole house that nobody noticed except me. Jack didn’t notice it. My mother didn’t notice it. But I did. I stayed out of the house most of the time he was there.
It wasn’t my house anyway, no part of it, and it certainly wasn’t my home. If I was making a movie about that time in my life I’d name it Homeless in Hackney Land. And there’d be sad violins playing in the background, but maybe a fiddle, too, frolicking faintly from somewhere, for it would be a soap opera and a comedy too and would bring tears and laughter at the same time—if I was making a movie.
I started running away again, and not because anybody mistreated me, I just had a taste for adventure and I found that on the road. I hitchhiked all over Kentucky, stopping at a relative’s house for a meal or a night’s sleep now and then. I had relatives on the Baker’s side all over the state and other states as well. A ride was easy to come by in those days, those days when people picked up hitchhikers, those days before cigarettes caused cancer or asbestos caused a name I can’t pronounce, those days when a drink of water was free in all gas stations and there were no tornadoes or hurricanes or earthquakes unless one smacked into you personally, for they had no televisions in those days to tell you about them so vividly and persistently, therefore they didn’t exist.
And if you couldn’t find a gas station for a drink of water all you had to do was plop on your belly at any small stream and drink till your belly was full, those days when the water was clear and clean.
But they had jails in those days, too, and that’s where I often wound up.
Finally, when I was about eleven or twelve years old, I wound up in a jail in my hometown of Princeton and Zeb Hackney had had enough. He told my mother to have me committed to a reform school, which she obligingly did. And early the next morning after the papers were signed they whisked me off to the Greendale Reformatory outside of Frankfort, Kentucky.
I stayed there for thirteen long months, during which time I learned to smoke cigarettes, fight, and dislike the sorry reform school guards.
When I got there they had just outlawed the blacksnake whip because a young kid had died from a brutal whipping by a reform school guard. It happened though that the kid’s relatives had a little money, enough to pay a lawyer and as a result of a public hearing there was a big stink, so—no more blacksnake whips. They were replaced by paddles. The paddles were about three feet long and four inches wide and a half inch thick with five or six half-inch holes bored through the paddle end to produce more sting. And for punishment you had to bend over a bench and take five or ten or twenty whacks across your ass, sometimes delivered by a guard and sometimes an older inmate who had been promoted to house boy in the absence of a guard. It was the inmate house boys who delivered the most vicious blows.
If you could bend over and “ride” ten whacks without a whimper you were a man and most of us could do that though it hurt like hell. I remember, though, that there was one young blond boy about ten-years old who had real fair and tender skin who squalled like a baby and raised up after every whack. He was sentenced by a houseboy to ten whacks, but because he couldn’t hold his mud his whacks were doubled to twenty, and when they were through with him and he took off bawling into the bathroom, his butt was a bloody mess. I mean when he pulled his pants down bloody skin was hanging off his backside like freshly ground hamburger, with blood running down his legs turning his white sox red as—blood. He sat on a toilet seat all night crying. Some of the boys teased him and called him a sissy and other names. And when the guard came in the next morning he sent the kid to the hospital but he didn’t do anything to the houseboys who did it. They were in charge and therefore justified.
Another time I saw a guard make a kid eat his own vomit. In the mess hall for breakfast they often fed us a brown mush that tasted terrible, and the rule was that whatever you took on your plate you had to eat. So this kid ate some of it but couldn’t finish it, so the guard, an old skinny redneck guard typical of the guards they hired for the low-paying jobs at the reformatory, he stood over the kid and made the kid finish eating his mush. But the kid ate a few more bites and then he vomited right in his plate, right in his mush.
Well the guard made him eat that too, mush, vomit and all, and nobody was allowed to leave the mess hall until his plate was clean.
And they made us take showers, too, which I’d never done before. They were all right, the showers, but I still preferred a good dip in the creek. Besides, I was twelve-years-old and just naturally clean.
My mother came to visit me once while I was there, her and Zeb. They brought me a half-gallon jug of molasses and a jar of peanut butter, which I had requested when she wrote me a letter and asked what she could bring. That’s what most kids got from their people, those that had people, molasses and peanut butter, which they mixed together and ate till they dropped. Whatever was in molasses and peanut butter must have been what was missing from our diet. Me, I mixed mine together and ate till my belly ached and then I ate some more—and then I ate some more. Man it felt good. Unable to eat another bite, I shared the little that was left in my jug with my buddies when I got back to the dorm. Big hearted me.
There were black kids in Greendale too, but they lived in different dormitories and had their own chow hall and everything. I saw a bunch of them marching down the road to work one day. We had shoes, they didn’t. So I guess we had it better than they did, but, still, I’d just as soon go barefooted as not.
One thing we had that was good was running water and bathrooms, which we didn’t have in Hackney Land. And when I got back to the Land of Hackney I was aware of that shortcoming.
Zeb had never built an outhouse. And it was something that was never mentioned by anybody. He built a new barn for the animals. He built a smokehouse and a chicken house and in time a back porch and a front porch. But he never built an outhouse. And it was something you didn’t talk about. Not that it made a lot of difference, we had a hundred and twenty acres of outhouse.
When I got back to Hackney Land I never ran away again, and since we had plenty to eat I never stole again since there was no need to. Greendale Reform School had slowed me down a bit. The only transgressions I committed for the next few years were of the domestic variety, like the time I was down in the woods thinking about Kathleen Vinson. Zeb Hackney caught me cold turkey with the evidence in my hand. He kicked my ass all the way back to the house and told my mother all about it in roundabout words while I stood there squirming with embarrassment. When he was done my mother gave me a stern warning not to teach my brother, Jackie, how to do That.
I felt like screaming at her that her precious son had been doing That ever since he was ten-years old, that you didn’t have to teach a red-blooded American boy how to do That, especially if he had Baker blood in his veins. But I didn’t say any of that, I just stood there struck by lightning with embarrassment that this strange woman who was my mother was talking about it in front of Zeb Hackney, God, and all of Creation.
Zeb brought a dog home one day, a little mongrel with short hair, white with brownish yellow spots. I don’t know where he got it or why he brought it home but the minute I laid eyes on that dog I had a partner for life. I named him Lucky. He wasn’t very big, maybe twenty pounds or so, but he wasn’t no sissy. He could kill a coon all by himself, which was a job for a dog three times his size. And once he determined the boundaries of his territory he defended all that was within against all creatures big or small.
Me and that dog were close. I loved him and he loved me.
I remember one time out in the barnyard when Zeb was kicking my ass, Lucky wasn’t going to stand for that. He snarled and went after Zeb’s big clodhoppers, all twenty pounds of him. So Zeb kicked his ass too.
However all things weren’t bad for me in Hackney Land. I ran wild on those hundred and twenty acres and ma
ybe another thousand on every side, exploring every hill and valley. I learned the name of every tree by both its bark and leaves, and I climbed them like a monkey all the way to the top. And I learned that if I climbed to the top of a slim young sapling I could grab ahold of the top and swing out and ride it all the way to the ground, bending it in half. Sometimes that worked and sometimes it didn’t and I didn’t have a parachute, so—it’s a good thing I was made out of rubber.
And I learned the name of every bird that flew and when I learned how to make a slingshot out of a hickory fork and strips from an old inner-tube I shot rocks at birds until I accidently hit one, and when it hit the ground, dead as hell, I ran and picked it up and tried to revive it, took it to the creek and dunked it in the water; I did everything in my guilt to save it, but it was dead. From then on I didn’t shoot at birds.
And Zeb didn’t always cast a gray shadow. In the living room before a warm fireplace during the long winter evenings he sometimes soft-talked my mother into reading a book to us, for he couldn’t read or write. He’d call her mama and butter her up and we’d all gather around the fireplace, me and Jackie and Zeb, three little kids, while she read the whole book out loud, every word, and during those times we were almost family.
Jackie, my tag-along little brother was growing up fast. When I turned sixteen he was thirteen, and already he looked a lot like Garnet Baker, our long-gone father. I had never seen my father in person but one day my mother showed me a picture of him, a picture she had kept hidden in a secret place all these years. In the picture he wore a sparkling white sailor’s uniform, with a sailor’s cap cocked at a jaunty angle on his head. He was a handsome man. My mother told me with misty eyes that he was the most charmingly handsome man she had ever seen, but he had left her pregnant with Jackie in the middle of the big depression, and she’d had no choice as soon as Jackie was born but to leave me with my grandmother and take off to Detroit with my newborn brother in her arms to find a job.
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