by Neil Sheehan
At Thanksgiving there was never a turkey. If the family was lucky, Myrtle might bake a cake at Thanksgiving or Christmas. She could bake delicious ones when she took a rare notion to buy the ingredients. She covered them with a thick chocolate icing. She baked no cakes for birthdays, because nobody’s birthday was celebrated. Dorothy Lee got the next-best thing to a cake on one birthday when she was sick with scarlet fever. Miss Landsladder came to see her and brought a chocolate cupcake and lit a candle on it.
Myrtle’s cruelty could also be sudden and physical. She slapped fast, across the face and hard up against the side of the head, at the slightest hesitation in response to one of her commands or at any back talk.
She was not fully conscious of her cruelty. Her selfishness was so consuming that it protected her from understanding what she did to others. Her vanity led her to buy a Kodak camera, one of the early box models, to have photographs taken of herself in her finery. She also took pictures of her children in their cast-off clothes, of the squalid houses in which they lived, of little Gene with his crooked legs, of Gene in the body cast he wore for a year after the second operation. She pasted all of the photographs into scrapbooks and displayed them freely during her lifetime. She had no awareness that what she recorded as souvenirs others might see as something else. Her ego similarly protected her from the disgrace of her trade. Being paid by men made her feel young and desirable. “Men tell me I’ve got the prettiest legs in the city of Norfolk,” she would say to her daughter in a sprightly voice.
The shame was often harder for the Vann children to bear than the deprivations. The white working-class sections of Norfolk in the 1930s were not like the urban slums that were to grow in the decayed cities of the North after World War II. They were not places of crime and moral filth, where many of the children were fatherless and had sisters and mothers who were part-time or full-time prostitutes. Many of the fathers were heavy drinkers. On Friday and Saturday nights the children would gather to watch the fistfights in front of the taverns. Some of the women also drank, battled noisily with their husbands, and strayed to other beds like their men. Nevertheless, these poor and grubby Norfolk neighborhoods were family neighborhoods. They were safe. Rape and mugging and other street crimes were rare. Hardly anyone locked a door at night. There was also a social stratum. A few middle-class families had chosen to stay behind rather than move to better sections. They were people to look up to and normally provided the leadership in church and civic affairs. Divorce was not uncommon. One or both parties then usually married someone else. Even the less respectable women tended to be wives and mothers in between drinking bouts, and the majority of the women took their roles seriously. They busied themselves running households and caring for their husbands and offspring. Myrtle was the exception. In the Norfolk of the 1930s the Southern term “white trash” was not applied to a family on the basis of poverty alone. The term connoted a way of living more than it did income. Myrtle made the Vanns white trash.
The weight of shame was double for Johnny because of his illegitimacy. As Myrtle did not hide the circumstances of his conception, he assumed that most people he was acquainted with knew about it. The working class of Norfolk had carried the values of rural Southern culture with them to the city. To be illegitimate was to have no family, to be nothing. His birth certificate said that he was John Paul LeGay. A French sailor named Victor LeGay had never had anything to do with him. He wanted to have a real name and be a member of a real family and have a daddy. Any family and any daddy were better than none. He wanted to be called John Paul Vann.
His mother would not let him escape the disgrace of his birth. She refused to allow Frank Vann to adopt him. Had she not prevented it, Frank Vann probably would have adopted the boy at the outset of the marriage when Johnny was four and a half. He treated Myrtle’s boy with the same gentleness he showed toward his own children. He referred to Johnny as his son, never as his stepson, and saw to it that Dorothy Lee, Frank Junior, and Gene called him their brother. Although rejection is one of love’s opposites, it evokes responses as powerful as those that love arouses. Spry’s rejection of Myrtle seems to have evoked in her a need to stop any other man from claiming her “love child” with his name, because the boy was all that she had retained of the affair. She would repeatedly warn Frank Vann that he was not to try to control or discipline her Johnny. “He doesn’t belong to you,” she would say. “He’s my son. He’s not your son.”
That other need that made her attack the masculinity of her men by taunting them with her promiscuity also led her to sense how vulnerable her son was about his birth. She used it as an additional weapon with which to wound him. He gave her lots of opportunities, because he would not let the argument rest, constantly begging her to permit Frank Vann to adopt him. “He’s the only daddy I’ve ever had and Vann’s the only name I’ve ever wanted,” he would say.
Myrtle would point a finger at her husband and sneer. “He’s not your daddy,” she would say. “Your name ain’t Vann. You don’t have a daddy.”
He didn’t have a daddy. Myrtle was right. He liked Frank Vann, despite his weakness, because Frank Vann was never mean to him, but Frank Vann couldn’t ever be a real daddy. If Frank Vann were capable of being a real daddy he would have somehow found them food and clothes and paid the rent and tamed Myrtle or thrown her out of the house. The boy’s ambivalence toward Frank Vann was reflected in the way he spoke of him. Within the family the boy addressed him as Daddy. To cousins and other outsiders the boy called him Vann. There was no one to whom he could turn for the kind of help that a father is supposed to give.
Spry was still in Norfolk, but he was of little comfort. The boy called him Johnny. Spry had abandoned trolley-car driving toward the end of the 1920s for the big money to be made in the Prohibition era distilling “white lightning” for bootleggers. He had also divorced his first wife. After his whiskey still was raided and he spent six months in jail, Spry decided that bootlegging was not for him. He married another young woman he had fallen in love with and curbed his wenching and gambling sufficiently so that they did not ruin his second marriage. By the latter half of the 1930s he had a steady job driving a bakery truck and was raising a new family of three boys. He was a good father to them. The requirements of this second family and what wenching and gambling he still allowed himself left him scant time or money for the two sons of his first marriage or for this other John Paul. When the boy came to him once in a while for money to buy food, he gave it to him. Spry was also occasionally able to let him earn a little by working as a helper on the bakery van. Otherwise he left the boy to survive with Frank Vann and Myrtle.
Something in the son did not let Myrtle destroy him. He told his grammar school teachers so often and so insistently that his name was John Vann, not John LeGay, that they came up with the compromise under which he was registered at school: John LeGay Vann. His high spirits showed in his enthusiasm for basketball and track and tumbling, the last another talent he seems to have acquired from Spry, who was so strong and limber he could chin himself with one arm and walk on his hands. Johnny would amuse his sister and brothers by rolling cartwheels along the dirt paths and also by walking on his hands up and down the stairs. He would amaze visiting cousins by tossing himself off the porch roof in a backflip somersault to the ground.
He turned to anyone who offered a temporary escape from the prison of his family life. One man who did was an eccentric Salvation Army captain, a former bandmaster in the Navy, who was well liked by the youngsters in the area. He preferred not to dress in the blue-and-maroon uniform of his new religious ranks. Instead he wore a spiffy suit and a wide-brimmed soft hat of the sort favored by the Chicago gangster Al Capone. He organized and coached a basketball club to give poor boys some fun and keep them out of trouble. His best team won the championship in the Norfolk Central YMCA Junior League with five straight victories. The Virginian-Pilot published a photograph of the winners. The shortest member of the team was a blondish-h
aired boy who looked straight into the camera. His sweater had “SA” for Salvation Army lettered crudely on the front. The buckle of the man’s belt that held up his pants was so big it stuck out askew from under the sweater.
The Boy Scouts offered more hours of escape. He joined a troop that met at his grammar school in the Lamberts Point neighborhood where the family was living when he was twelve. Within four months he had climbed to assistant patrol leader, and the scoutmaster arranged for him to be given a secondhand uniform. He posed for Myrtle’s scrapbook in front of a furniture repair shop next to the house, pushing the pancake-brim campaign hat the Scouts wore back over the clipped hair above his forehead for a jaunty look. His happy eyes and smile indicate he was too proud of his uniform to think that there was anything inappropriate about the khaki shirt and flared riding breeches that enveloped his slip of a body, seventy-one pounds and four feet seven inches tall according to his Scout identification card, issued in the name of John Paul Vann.
The family moved again in the fall of 1937, this time back to Atlantic City, the other working-class section where Frank Vann could find a house. Johnny was thirteen and about to enter the eighth grade in junior high school. The move brought him his first best friend. He seems to have been a loner before. The need to hide so much, to struggle against the want and the torment, and the frequent moves appear to have prevented him from forming close friendships with anyone except his brothers and visiting cousins. This first friend was a boy quite different in temperament and childhood experience. In adult life the friend was to content himself with a brief career on the Norfolk police force and then an air-conditioning business in Florida. His name was Edward Crutchfield, called Gene for his middle name of Eugene. He was six months younger than Vann and a grade behind. Crutchfield’s memory was that they somehow fell into conversation one day on the street. He suspected there were several reasons that they became friends: Crutch-field knew nothing of Vann and his family before they met, and Crutch-field’s home was a real one in contrast to Vann’s; they did not compete in sports (Crutchfield was huskier and played baseball) or clash in any other way; and Crutchfield was a good listener.
Crutchfield called him John rather than Johnny, because he had introduced himself as John Vann and seemed to prefer being addressed by his formal first name. As they saw more of each other, Crutchfield noticed that although John washed and was always clean, he wore virtually the same clothes day after day. He apparently did not have enough to change. His shoes were not the sort a boy would have chosen and looked like hand-me-downs. John also appeared thin for a boy so remarkably fit, Crutchfield thought. Crutchfield’s mother gave Gene two apples shortly after they met, and he passed one on to his new acquaintance. John thanked him and then wolfed down the apple as though it were going to disappear if he did not eat it instantly.
He ate politely if quickly when Crutchfield invited him home for supper. Crutchfield was proud of his home and especially of his mother, and he could tell that John was impressed. The Crutchfields were one of the few working-class families in Atlantic City who could afford to own a house rather than rent. Crutchfield’s father was the diesel engineer on a small vessel the Army Corps of Engineers operated out of Fort Norfolk for coastal surveys and related projects. He drank, but not enough to lose his job or deprive the family of groceries. Crutchfield’s mother compensated for her husband’s vice with a strength of character and the affection with which she practiced the art of motherhood. She tried to serve a particularly fine supper whenever one of her sons was going to bring home a chum, and she did not disappoint Gene the first evening he invited John.
The two boys developed a habit of playing at a lumberyard in Atlantic City when the place was deserted after working hours, because John could practice tumbling on a huge sawdust pile there. Crutchfield was fascinated by the intensity with which his friend drove himself to achieve perfection in backflips and other tumbling exercises for the competitions at school. John would climb to the top of the sawdust heap, fling his body into the air and spin end over end to land at the bottom, clamber up the sawdust slope and hurl himself into the air again, and do it again, and again.
Late one afternoon the boys spotted a car parked on a narrow road that ran through the lumberyard, hidden from the view of anyone outside by the work sheds and stacks of boards. The license plate displayed the MD letters of a doctor. The movements they could see inside the car from a distance indicated that a couple were making love. They sneaked up to watch the performance. As they slowly raised themselves alongside a door and peeked through a window, they were both surprised. Myrtle was entertaining a client her son had not known about. They crept away without disturbing the assignation. John did not attempt to hide how profoundly upset he was. His friend knew who the woman inside the car was, because John had taken Crutchfield to his house a few days before and introduced him to Myrtle. He had pretended that she was just like Crutchfield’s mother. He had also introduced Crutchfield to Frank Vann, making believe that Frank Vann stood in the same relationship to him as the natural father he had met at Crutchfield’s home. Crutchfield had observed how shabby the house was, but John had been careful not to give the game away by inviting Crutchfield to supper.
After his mortification in the lumberyard, John ceased to pretend and shared his pain. “Why couldn’t I have a nice mother like yours, Gene?” he asked.
“I’m sorry, John, I don’t know what to say,” Crutchfield replied.
“I appreciate your being the good friend to me that you are,” John said. “I really appreciate it.”
Crutchfield wanted to comfort him but didn’t know how.
On another day they were walking through the alley beside the house when John stopped in front of an empty whiskey bottle that Myrtle had discarded. He kicked it. “There’d be more food in the house if she didn’t spend the money on that,” he said. He explained how Frank Vann handed Myrtle almost all of his money. He cursed Frank Vann for his weakness. His face got angrier. He kicked the bottle again. “She never did want me anyway,” he said.
Each time that depression overcame John, Crutchfield would hear those words. Vann never admitted his illegitimacy to his friend. Crutchfield discovered it from one of his own cousins who knew of Spry. The discovery gave John’s words more meaning.
Crutchfield began to understand too why his friend practiced backflips with such intensity on the sawdust heap. He was releasing some of the rage that Myrtle built up in him. Other boys also felt the anger in him. They would snicker about Myrtle “messin’ around” with men—but not to John’s face. They were afraid to provoke him. He had a reputation as a fighter that said you couldn’t land a punch on Johnny Vann. The fistfights Crutchfield saw did not last long. Some boy who did not know John would decide to test his reputation. The other boy would swing and John would duck and hit him hard. John’s opponent would swing again and find more air and then panic and flail wildly as John’s fists kept flashing and striking. He also had a way of tripping his opponent after the other boy had swung and landing another punch as the opponent went down. Crutchfield was amazed at the speed of John’s reactions. He seemed to sense danger. Some of the boys who knew the family attributed his speed to practice at dodging Myrtle. In one fight John whipped a bigger boy who was a grudge-keeper. A few days later Crutchfield and John were walking around the corner of a building when the boy lunged out of a narrow indentation in the wall. John was on the inside, close to the wall, and the boy was well hidden until he leaped. It should have been impossible for him to miss, but John dodged and tripped him and punched him as the boy pitched to the ground. “You dumb son of a bitch, don’t you ever learn?” John shouted at the prostrate grudge-keeper.
John did not provoke fights, Crutchfield observed. While he was assertive, he wanted to be accepted by his contemporaries. He seemed to relish a challenge only if the other boy was bigger or was a bully who had picked on one of his brothers. He sought out any older boy who bothered Frank Junior, or Gen
e and beat them if a warning did not suffice. One bully whom he punished made friends with his brothers after the fight and became an additional protector. Crutchfield never saw him lose a fight and never knew him to lack confidence in the outcome beforehand. “He doesn’t worry me,” John would say of his opponent as a scrap threatened in the schoolyard or a neighborhood lot.
He played a game that frightened Crutchfield. He would run halfway across the street and jump right in front of an oncoming vehicle, bluffing the driver into slamming on the brakes to avoid hitting him. Before the startled driver could shout a curse, he would have dashed the rest of the way across.
“Stop it, John, you’re going to get killed,” Crutchfield yelled at him the first time he saw the game.
John laughed. “It’s lots of fun,” he called from the other side of the street. He leaped in front of a bus on the way back to Crutchfield. He liked trucks and buses best and would pick a big bus out of the traffic.
One evening in the fall of 1938 when they had been friends about a year, Crutchfield came by to pick up John. He was waiting on the porch. Crutchfield could hear Myrtle inside the house screaming obscenities at Frank Vann. “Let’s get out of here,” John said. “She’s raising hell.”
He told Crutchfield that he was in despair. He couldn’t stand living at home any longer. He didn’t know what to do. He was thinking of running away. It seemed to be the only alternative. Crutchfield had seen enough to be convinced that John would run away, and if he did there was no knowing what would happen to him. Even if he did not run away, Crutchfield thought, the anger that Myrtle kept building within him would sooner or later burst out in self-destructive acts that would get him into trouble with the law. A young minister had taken over the Methodist church to which Crutchfield and his family belonged. He was stirring the whole congregation with his energy and ideas. Crutchfield took John to see him.