The supervisor collected the week’s subscription money from the customers on Saturday, twenty-five cents apiece, so I didn’t have to work extra hours that day and had time to continue my field excursions. I made thirteen dollars a week, from which I bought my Boy Scout paraphernalia, parts for my bike, and whatever candy, soft drinks, and movie tickets I wanted.
At the time it did not occur to me that my round-the-clock schedule was unusual. I felt fortunate to have a job and to be able to earn money. It was the kind of regimen I had learned to expect as normal from my brief experience at the Gulf Coast Military Academy. I still assumed, without any real evidence, that the same level of effort would be required of me as an adult. And what of my father and Pearl, asleep in their bed as I headed out in the predawn hours in all kinds of weather? Pearl, who came from a hardscrabble life in rural North Carolina, seemed well pleased that I showed the kind of spunk it takes to survive. And the feelings of my father, who never worked that hard in his life—who can say?
But the labor over long hours did not really matter; I had discovered the Boy Scouts of America. All that I had become by the age of twelve, all the biases and preconceptions I had acquired, all the dreams I had garnered and savored, fitted me like a finely milled ball into the socket of its machine when I discovered this wonderful organization. The Boy Scouts of America seemed invented just for me.
The 1940 Handbook for Boys, which I purchased for half a dollar, became my most cherished possession. Fifty years later, I still read my original annotated copy with remembered pleasure. Richly illustrated, with a cover by Norman Rockwell, it was packed with useful information on the subjects I liked the most. It stressed outdoor life and natural history: camping, hiking, swimming, hygiene, semaphore signaling, first aid, mapmaking, and, above all, zoology and botany, page after page of animals and plants wonderfully well illustrated, explaining where to find them, how to identify them. The public schools and church had offered nothing like this. The Boy Scouts legitimated Nature as the center of my life.
There were rules, uniforms, and a crystal-clear set of practical ethics to live by. If I jog my memory today by raising my right hand with the middle three fingers up, thumb and little finger down and crossed, I can still recite the Scout Oath:
On my honor I will do my best:
To do my duty to God and my country,
and to obey the Scout law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong,
mentally awake and morally straight.
And the Scout Law: A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, reverent. Finally, there was the Scout Motto, Be Prepared.
I drank in and accepted every word. Still do, as ridiculous as that may seem to my colleagues in the intellectual trade, to whom I can only reply, Let’s see you do better in fifty-four words or less.
The work ethic was celebrated from cover to cover. There was a clearly marked Boy Scout of America route to success through virtue and exceptional effort. In the chapter titled “Finding One’s Life Work,” I read: “A Scout looks ahead. He prepares for things before they happen. He therefore meets them easily.” Never be satisfied, the instructions warned. Just to wait and hope and accept whatever comes is the road to failure. Reach high, strive long and hard toward honorable goals, and keep ever in mind Longfellow’s invocation:
The heights by great men reached and kept, were not attained by sudden flight; but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.
I found something else the public schools never offered, a ladder of education to be taken at your own pace, better fast than slow, with each new step successively harder. I saw the whole challenge of scouting as a competition I would enjoy and surely win. The Scout program was my equivalent of the Bronx High School of Science.
I plunged into the new regimen. In three years I advanced to Eagle Scout with palm clusters, the highest rank, and was made junior assistant scoutmaster of my troop. I earned forty-six merit badges, almost half of those available in the organization. I happily crunched through the programs for subjects as diverse as Bird Study, Farm Records and Book-Keeping, Life Saving, Journalism, and Public Health. I pored over the requirements of all the badges at night to see which one I could best do next. My heart sang when I first read the prescription for Insect Life, beginning: “To obtain this Merit Badge, a Scout must: 1. Go into the country with the Examiner and show to him the natural surroundings in which certain specified insects live, and find and demonstrate living specimens of the insects, telling of their habits or of the nature of their fitness for life in their particular surroundings.”
All the time I attended to my schoolwork in an adequate but desultory manner. The subjects were relatively easy, and I maintained passing grades. But most of the curriculum seemed dull and pointless. My most memorable accomplishment in my freshman year at Murphy High School in Mobile was to capture twenty houseflies during one hour of class, a personal record, and lay them in rows for the next student to find. The teacher found these trophies instead, and had the grace to compliment me on my feat next day in front of the class. I had developed a new technique for catching flies, and I now pass it on to you. Let the fly alight, preferably on a level and unobstructed surface, such as a restaurant table or book cover. Move your open hand carefully until it rests twelve to eighteen inches in front of the sitting fly’s head. Bring the hand very slowly forward, in a straight line, taking care not to waggle it sideways; flies are very sensitive to lateral movement. When your hand is about nine inches away, sweep it toward the fly so that the edge of the palm passes approximately one or two inches above the spot where the fly is resting. Your target will dart upward at about the right trajectory to hit the middle of the palm, and as you close your fingers you will feel the satisfying buzz of the insect trapped inside your fist. Now, how to kill the fly? Clap your hands together—discreetly, if you are in a restaurant or lecture hall.
Scouting also proved to be the ideal socializing environment for an undersized and introverted only child. Our gangs were the Scout patrols, groups about the size of an army squad, several of which made up the larger troop. We automatically became members of one when we joined the Scouts, and we were esteemed or criticized on our own merits according to Scout rules. I never met a bully in the Scouts, and relatively few braggarts. The questions before each boy were: Can you walk twenty miles, tie a tourniquet, save a swimmer in Red Cross lifeguard exercises, build a sturdy sapling bridge with nothing but ax and rope? For me the answers were yes, yes, yes!
Scouting added another dimension to my expanding niche. I became a teacher. In the summer of 1943 I was asked to be the nature counselor at Camp Pushmataha, the Boy Scout summer camp near Citronelle used by the Mobile Area District. At fourteen, I was the youngest counselor, with no experience at instruction, but I quickly figured out what interested other boys, what would get them talking about natural history and make them respect the subject: snakes. Several volunteers and I built cages and searched the surrounding woods for as many different kinds of snakes as we could find. Somehow in the process I learned how to capture a poisonous snake. Pin its body with a staff as close to the head as you can manage, then roll the staff forward until the head is pressed firmly to the ground and the neck clear, grasp the neck closely behind the posterior jaw angles, and lift the whole body up. Few boys would touch a snake of any kind, so when one was discovered the word was brought to me by yelling messengers: “Snake! Snake!” And off I would go to perform my derring-do, which I followed with a brief lecture on the species discovered. In a short time we had a row of cages filled with a partial representation of the rich fauna that inhabits the Gulf states. I worked like a zoo director, talking to visitors about the diversity of species. I could then segue into discourses about the insects and plants of Greater Pushmataha. I had become a successful natural history instructor.
But before long my
inexperience and reckless pride did me in. It happened one afternoon when I was cleaning a cage containing several pygmy rattlesnakes, my star attractions. The adults of this cryptically colored species (Sistrurus miliarius) grow to no more than fifty centimeters in length. They are less deadly than their larger cousins found in the same region, the diamondback and canebrake rattlesnakes, but they are still poisonous and moderately dangerous. In a moment of carelessness I moved my left hand too close to one of the coiled rattlers. Like a quarrel sprung from a crossbow, it uncoiled and struck the tip of my index finger. The two fang punctures felt like a bee sting. I knew I was in trouble. Off I went with an adult counselor to a nearby doctor in town, who administered the old-fashioned first-aid treatment as quickly as he could: deep X-shaped scalpel incisions centered on each of the fang punctures, followed by suction of the blood with a rubber cup. I knew the drill; I had learned it when I earned the merit badge for Reptile Life. I didn’t cry during the operation, which was performed without anesthesia. I held my hand steady and cursed loudly nonstop with four-letter words, at myself for my stupidity and not at the innocent doctor or the snake, in order to keep my mind off the procedure. I knew a great deal of off-color language at fourteen and must have surprised the adults helping me. The next morning I was sent home for convalescence. I lay gloomily on a couch for a week, holding my swollen left arm as still as possible.
It was a bad time for herpetology at Camp Pushmataha. When I returned to resume my duties, I found that the camp supervisor had wisely disposed of the pygmy rattlesnakes. I was forbidden to touch any more poisonous species, and nothing more was said to me about the matter.
Contrary to the impression this account may have created, the Boy Scouts of America in southern Alabama in the early 1940s was not an ideal organization in all respects. It retreated helplessly from the Gorgons of sex and race.
Sex education was not on the agenda of the Boy Scouts of America, or of any school or other youth organization for that matter. The 1940 Handbook for Boys went no further than to caution that boys of a certain age have nocturnal seminal emissions once or twice a week. Scouts were not, it said, to worry about these episodes, which were normal. They were not to “excite” themselves to produce the emissions; the practice was “a bad habit.” If urges became too troublesome to handle, one should try a cool hip bath, 55° to 60°F. If more help on this or related matters was required, “Seek advice from wise, clean, strong men.” No warnings were given about pederasts. They surely lurked somewhere in the ranks of the adult leaders. I heard rumors of one, but never met him personally.
Then where did I learn all my filthy language? From other boys, who spiced their conversation whenever they were beyond adult earshot. Because sex was taboo and bizarre enough to be conceptually exciting, boys of Scout age talked about it all the time. We approached the subject obliquely, with Rabelaisian humor. A substantial fraction of campfire and trailside conversation consisted of raucous jokes that dwelled on every imaginable sexual perversion and grotesquerie: homosexuals trying to have babies, necrophiliac undertakers carrying the severed genitalia of female corpses as trophies, sex with animals, impossibly large sexual equipment on both men and women, insatiable appetites and marathon infidelities, and so on through a fantastical Psychopathia Sexualis. Every teenage Alabamian male, it seemed, was a budding Krafft-Ebing. But of normal heterosexual relations scant was known and nothing spoken. We could not cross the barrier to what we guessed our parents and married sisters did each night, or what we ourselves hoped to experience with girls. To discuss such matters would be a shocking invasion of privacy. So we left orthodoxy alone, and sketched the vague outline of acceptable behavior by circumscribing it with everything that was explicitly forbidden. Normalcy was like the image in a photograph created in silhouette by developing its chromatically sensitive background.
Race was also emphatically not on the official agenda. All the boys in the Handbook for Boys were white, and so were all the Scouts I knew. So were the students in the school I attended and the people in our church. I grew up mostly unconcerned about segregation and its dehumanizing effects. The impact of discrimination entered my mind only secondhand. But not entirely. In 1944 I was invited by a senior counselor to put on my Eagle Scout regalia and visit a troop of Boy Scouts just starting up in a black rural area near Brewton, Alabama. Standing in the front of the church meeting room I gave a short talk on the many advantages of Scouting. When we left I did not feel pride in the example I was supposed to have set; I felt shame. I was depressed for days. I knew in my heart that those boys, mostly two or three years younger than I, would have few real advantages no matter how gifted or how hard they tried. The doors open to me were shut to them.
Then I gradually forgot about the matter. What could I do? My mind was on other things. I was filled with ambition and anxiety and did not have a strong social conscience. Twenty years later the Old South came to an end. The civil rights activists who risked their lives to break segregation were heroes to my liking: singlemindedly true to a moral code, physically courageous, enduring. That was enough to make me look again at this part of my social heritage. And by then I had left Alabama. The world changed; I changed. But I cannot claim to have been a liberal as a boy and young man, certainly not one with any foresight or courage. The trajectory that took me into science would have been the same regardless; and I will not now be so presumptuous or hypocritical as to offer an extraneous apology for the proud and tortured culture through which I passed to the naturalist’s calling.
chapter six
ALABAMA DREAMING
IN AUGUST 1944 I WEIGHED 112 POUNDS. I KNOW THIS TO BE true because in that month I reported with my best friend, Philip Bradley, for football practice at Brewton High School, and we were put on the scales in the locker room. At fifteen years, I was probably the youngest, and certainly the smallest, of the players. Bradley was a bit heavier, at 116 pounds, every ounce of which I envied, while the largest member of the team came in at a hulking 160 pounds. I was allowed to strap on my ridiculously oversized uniform because the team needed every man (well, every boy) it could get. And I was there despite my obvious lack of qualifications because this was Alabama. In small towns across the state, football was what young males between the ages of fifteen and nineteen aspired to do when not in class or occupied with part-time jobs. At the other end of the statistical curve of athletic promise from me, boys with heavy shoulders and quick hands could hope for college athletic scholarships. There happened to be, however, none in our school well enough endowed for college play that year.
Brewton was and still is a town of about five thousand on the Alabama side of the border with Florida, forty miles north of Pensacola. It has changed very little since 1944. I have returned twice in middle age while on my way by automobile across the state, to drift like a phantom through the grid of residential streets down to the main commercial section that runs parallel to the railroad tracks, and to pause at the grounds of the high school, where I summoned the memory of boys hitting the worn tackle bag, grunting, and joking back and forth in reasonably close imitations of grown men. Once I stopped to ask a young fireman for directions, and when I mentioned that I had attended the high school in 1944, he said, “Boy, that was a l-o-o-ng time ago!” I replied that it didn’t seem very long to me, not in a pleasant little town that had conceded so little to the rush of the twentieth century. And not when I could close my eyes and summon uniforms caked with dried mud and turned aromatic by stale sweat.
There were twenty-three on the football squad that year, composing the first and second teams of eleven each, each member playing both offense and defense, plus me, the third-string left end and, by accident of numbers, the entire third string. I couldn’t catch the football half the time, I couldn’t even see a pass coming with my one good eye, and I was too light to block. About all I could manage was a shoestring tackle. If I dived to the ground and threw my arms around both ankles of the onrushing ball carrier, I could trip hi
m, hoping he wouldn’t fall onto me too hard. Somehow, perhaps because the opposing teams were even punier than our own, we managed to defeat every one of the other ten high schools we played except archrival Greenville. I was allowed on the field just once all season, in the fourth quarter of the final game, played at home, and this once because it was toward the end of the fourth quarter and the enemy had been crushed beyond all hope of recovery. How warmly I remember and cherish the command, “Wilson, take left end!” It was an act of charity on the part of the coach, whose name I have forgotten but toward whom I will always feel gratitude. Because of him I was thereafter authorized to say in that part of Alabama, “I played football for Brewton,” in the same way a New York corporate executive in a Century Club dining room says, “I rowed for Yale.”
Most of the players had nicknames such as Bubba (it was not a joke then; Bubbas were future good old boys and managers of Chevrolet dealerships; they were big, heavyset, and good-natured), J. C., Buddy, Skeeter, Scooter, and Shoe. Mine was Snake, not because of my body shape, which would have been apropos, and certainly not because I could weave magically through crowds of tacklers head down with the ball tucked hard on my waist, as in my dreams, but because I had maintained my enthusiasm for real snakes. After our sojourn in Mobile, my father had left me with Belle Raub in Pensacola and gone on the road with Pearl, to a destination I never knew. The three of us reunited in a small house in Brewton in the early spring of 1944. That summer I served as Boy Scout nature counselor at Camp Bigheart, on the shore of Pensacola Bay. Once again I relied on snakes to enliven accounts of natural history.
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