by Wayne, Jimmy
Not long after that Seth and his family stopped attending the church within walking distance from our apartment, but I continued going to services nearly every Sunday and Wednesday. Church was the only place where I felt safe.
After each sermon the pastor encouraged the congregation, “If you want to give your life to God, come down to the altar area at the front of the church.” As the preacher implored, a woman softly played the piano, enhancing the mood.
I stepped out of the pew, walked down the aisle, got on my knees, and bowed my head almost every time the preacher extended an invitation. Sometimes I’d be the only person kneeling at the altar, but I didn’t care. I felt a strong connection with God, despite my disillusionment with people who claimed to know Him, and going down to the altar and praying was my way of staying connected.
NEITHER ROBERT NOR MAMA HELD A JOB THE ENTIRE TIME they were married to each other. They depended on the government to provide food for the family and pay all the bills. At the beginning of each month, Mama received a welfare check along with food stamps, so the whole family walked to the grocery store in downtown Stanley to stock up on a month’s supply of groceries.
There we were: an able-bodied family of four, slowly following a shopping cart up and down each crowded aisle, staring at the name-brand foods but having to choose the generic brands because they were cheaper. Finally Mama eased the cart up to the checkout lane and unloaded the mountain of free groceries onto the conveyer belt. The cashier scanned each item, and the bag boy placed our groceries in brown paper bags. I watched intently, carefully checking that the cereal got into the bag, knowing that for Patricia and me, the two large boxes of cornflakes and powdered milk would be the staples of our meals for the next month.
Sometimes I finished my box of cereal before the month was over and another stash of food stamps arrived. When I did, Patricia shared the remainder of her cereal with me.
The cashier rang up the total, and Mama counted out the food stamps while Robert, Patricia, and I grabbed the bags of groceries and prepared for the long walk home. Rainy days and winter evenings were the worst times to go grocery shopping, but the wet, brown paper grocery bags were the least of my worries. My biggest concern was how fast we could get out of town before another bully from Kiser Elementary, where I attended, saw me carrying groceries down the sidewalk.
Grocery shopping was the hardest work Mama and Robert did the entire month. Occasionally Robert chopped a load of firewood, but once he learned I could chop wood, he laid down the ax.
When a new load of firewood arrived in the backyard—apparently, someone from the church had donated the wood along with more groceries—Mama yelled to me, “Get out there and chop some wood.”
I lifted the heavy ax in the air and brought it down hard, driving that blade through the heart, splitting a block of wood in half. I then split the halves the same way. Once the block of wood was cut into quarters, I loaded Patricia’s arms with each piece of fresh pine, and she carried the wood inside the apartment, where she let the wood roll off her arms onto the floor beside the wood heater, and returned for another load of kindling that I had chopped. Meanwhile, Robert and Mama remained in bed.
I LOOKED FORWARD TO GOING TO KISER ELEMENTARY EACH morning for two main reasons: free lunch and Nicole Lindsay, the prettiest girl in the world. Nicole had big blue eyes and long black hair, just like Wonder Woman. From the very moment I saw Nicole, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I was too bashful to express my feelings for her, but wherever Nicole went, I went, too, following her around like a puppy follows its owner. Surprisingly, Nicole never said a negative or rude word to me. She didn’t encourage my affections, but she tolerated me. She just pretended I wasn’t there, in a nice way.
Shadowing Nicole as closely as I did, I naturally heard her conversations with her friends, many of which centered on a new Steven Spielberg movie about an extraterrestrial. It would be many years later before I finally saw E.T. and understood why Nicole and her friends were so enamored by the movie; by then it had already become a classic.
Extra money for movies was not available in our household. I did, however, earn two dollars once by doing an odd job while we were living in Stanley. Instead of spending the two dollars on a movie, I decided to give it to the church. To spread out my joy of giving, I traded the two dollar bills for eight quarters. My plan was to take one quarter to church each week for eight weeks and drop the twenty-five cents in the offering plate.
The first week, I took one quarter to church, but I foolishly left the other seven quarters in a Band-Aid can sitting on the stereo in the living room. When I returned from church, the can was gone, along with my seven quarters.
Robert didn’t go to church that morning, but he swore he didn’t take the quarters. I looked all over the house, but I never found the quarters or the can.
I was devastated. I felt as though I had let God down. I cried for several days.
Mama had borrowed a small black-and-white television from the preacher so Patricia and I could watch The Wizard of Oz. She promised to return the television right after the movie aired, but she didn’t. About a month later the preacher came to our apartment in search of his television. Mama answered the door, but before he got a sentence out of his mouth, Mama cussed him out and threatened to fight him in the front yard.
The kindhearted preacher was stunned. So was I, along with being embarrassed. The preacher didn’t get his television, and Mama never took us back to his church. Instead, Mama tried to remain “in the Word” by watching Jimmy Swaggart, an evangelist she had discovered while watching that little black-and-white television. She made Patricia and me watch Jimmy, too, every time he was on. The fellow playing the white grand piano seemed like a rascal to me, but I enjoyed his music, and Jimmy could sure preach up a storm.
Mama still demanded that my sister and I read Scripture to her at night by her bedside, as she’d pray and cry and then pray again. These prayers went on for what seemed like a half an hour, as did the beatings when we mispronounced words.
I believed in God, and I had embraced the message of Jesus, but as I encountered the cussing preacher, the soon-to-be public scandals surrounding televangelists, and Mama’s confusing combination of faith and foolishness, I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with religion. If God really loves me, I thought, He sure has some strange ways of showing it. Unfortunately, staying away from church was not the answer and resulted only in a total spiritual decline for my entire family.
We stayed only a short time in Stanley; then we moved a few miles away, back to Dallas, North Carolina, where Mama found us a house with no electricity. We lived there for two weeks before moving back to Gastonia. Again. I was thankful that Mama didn’t try to take us back to Vance Street; instead, she found some people vacating a house on Walnut Avenue, right behind R.O.’s Bar-B-Que restaurant.
I should have known we were in trouble when I noticed the cockroaches carrying out the furniture!
Ten
HUNGRY
HUNGER WAS THE WORST PAIN I EVER ENDURED AS A CHILD. Mama’s beatings were abusive, and I took some shots from the bullies I met along the way, but no physical pain I encountered affected me quite so deeply as our lack of food and the perpetual gnawing I felt in my stomach. I grew accustomed to the abuse and the bullies, but I never got used to being hungry. Nor could I understand why there were so many cockroaches in our house, when there was hardly ever any food for them to eat.
Of course we had food for the first week of each month, when the food stamps arrived in the mail. But after that there’d be no food for the next three weeks because there’d be no food stamps left.
Going to bed hungry became a familiar way of life. Sometimes I tried to stay in bed as long as possible in the morning so I wouldn’t feel the emptiness in my stomach quite as severely.
But one Sunday morning I noticed something different. The night before, Mama had dragged a mattress out in the yard; because the roaches were so bad, we co
uldn’t sleep in the house, so Patricia, Mama, and I had slept outside. Her husband was passed out in some sort of stupor and probably didn’t even notice the roaches crawling over his face.
As usual, when I woke up, my stomach was aching from not having eaten since school on Friday, when Patricia and I last received a free lunch. I sat up on the mattress and sniffed the morning air. A distinct aroma of bacon wafted through the air. And it sure smelled good! Bacon? Surely not. Mama’s not making bacon for us, is she? I sniffed the air again. It was bacon, all right, but it wasn’t coming from our kitchen. It seemed to be drifting in my direction from the neighbors’ house next door—the same neighbors who didn’t like us much. Those neighbors rarely spoke to my family, and they never opened their back door, the one that faced our house.
But today the back door was open, except for a screen door, through which the tantalizing scents were flowing. I sat there for a few moments, breathing deeply and looking longingly at the neighbors’ door, and then, like a zombie drawn to the cemetery, I stood up and slowly walked toward their back door.
I stopped short of their steps, dawdling as though I were looking for something but, every so often, peeking toward their screen door. No one was in the kitchen or sitting at the table, so I gingerly walked up the steps, put my face against their screen and got a closer look. With my nose pressed against the black screen, I could see the food they had left on their table, and the smell of bacon was even stronger now.
I slowly pulled open the screen door, making sure the spring didn’t squeak. It didn’t, so I slipped carefully into the neighbors’ kitchen. I could hear voices in the next room; it sounded as if the family was getting ready to go to church.
I tiptoed over to where it appeared they had just finished eating breakfast but hadn’t yet cleared the table. For a moment, I stood still, listening intently to make certain no one was coming. I sure didn’t want the neighbors to catch me inside their house. But then I saw it. Just an arm’s length away from me was a plate with some scraps of bacon. A short distance away was another plate with more breakfast scraps; a little farther away was yet another plate half-filled with leftovers. I smacked my lips, and I could feel my mouth salivating. I reached over with my right hand and grabbed the bacon someone had left on the plate. At the same time I used my left hand to hold up the bottom of my shirt, forming a pocket where I could stash the leftovers and partly eaten food. I quickly began filling up the front of my shirt with the table scraps I retrieved off the food-smeared plates. I was so excited! My eyes were as big as silver dollars; I couldn’t wait to dig in to this feast.
That’s when I heard a man’s voice, yelling, “Hey!”
I didn’t take time to look or to figure out who was yelling at me.
“Hey, who are you? What are you doing here? Why you . . . get out of here!”
I didn’t answer; I turned and ran through the kitchen and out their back screen door, clutching the front of my shirt to my chest, trying desperately not to jostle too much and lose my stolen scraps. The screen door smacked the doorframe loudly behind me as I leaped off the porch, raced across the yard, and hid behind our house.
When I was certain that I had not been followed, I sat down on some wooden steps and ate every piece of scrap stuck to my shirt, leaving behind nothing but a big greasy circle. I hate to admit it, but I didn’t even share the table scraps with Patricia; I ate every morsel myself.
BEING HUNGRY SOMETIMES EMBOLDENED ME TO DO THINGS I wouldn’t ordinarily do. On one occasion, I walked across Walnut Avenue to where an elderly lady was standing in her yard. “Excuse me, ma’am,” I said, trying to be polite. “Do you have any bread I could eat?”
The elderly woman looked at me pathetically and said, “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
I waited at the bottom of her steps. She returned with a half loaf of bread and a pack of ham.
“Oh, thank you, ma’am,” I said. “Thank you!” I ran up the steps and took the bread out of her hand and then raced back toward my house.
The woman called out, “But I brought you some ham too . . .”
I stopped in the middle of the street, turned around, and said, “That’s okay. I have mustard.”
Say what? Mustard?
The dear woman watched me as I ran all the way home. I charged into the house, carrying the bread like a football and immediately began making mustard sandwiches for Patricia and me. I was so hungry that it never occurred to me that the bread and mustard might have tasted better with a bit of ham. But I didn’t mind; after all, I was grateful the woman gave me what I had asked for—some bread.
MAMA KNEW WE WERE HUNGRY MOST OF THE TIME, AND every so often she would take some special steps to help. No, she didn’t get a job. Instead, one night Mama woke Patricia and me around one o’clock in the morning. She had gone down the hill, sneaked into the preacher’s garden, and stolen a few ears of corn. No doubt the preacher would have given Mama the corn had she asked nicely for it. But begging wasn’t in Mama’s nature. Stealing? That was okay. Using men to get what she wanted? Oh, yes, that was acceptable too. In fact, almost any means of obtaining what she wanted was legitimate to her—anything but hard work and common decency.
But I didn’t think about scolding Mama for stealing. Patricia and I hadn’t eaten all weekend, and we wouldn’t eat again till we got back to school on Monday, so when Mama boiled us some corn on the cob in the middle of the night, I certainly wasn’t going to complain.
FOR ALL HER VACILLATING VALUES, MAMA STILL TRIED TO instill within Patricia and me a sense of personal pride. Before we went out to wait for the bus one morning, Mama said, “Make sure your hair is combed; it’s picture day at school.”
Picture day! That was always exciting. We bought few of our school pictures, but it was fun to have our picture taken and look at the proofs. Sometimes the photographer even sent them home, though that was rare since we weren’t the only family with a less-than-100-percent return record. When the school sent home the thumbnail-sized proof stapled to the sales pitch, Mama peeled off the proof. That was our school picture for that year until it faded away.
I stood on the side of the auditorium stage that morning, along with my classmates, and waited for the teacher to call my name. Since my last name was Barber, I was one of the first to be called. I walked onto the stage and sat down in a wooden school desk the photographer was using as a prop. Right before he took my picture, I yelled out, “Wait a minute! Mama said I had to comb my hair.”
“Okay, fine, kid,” the exasperated photographer said. “Comb your hair. But hurry up. I have a lot of pictures to take today.”
I reached in my back pocket and pulled out a small black comb, the kind you could stick a piece of white paper in and form a makeshift harmonica by blowing on it.
But the white flecks on my comb were not from paper. And my teacher noticed. As I ran the comb through my hair, the teacher walked over to me and looked more closely. “What kind of comb is that?” she asked suspiciously.
“It’s the comb my mom gave to me,” I told the teacher. “It’s a lice comb we had to use a few days ago.”
The teacher said, “Go to the principal’s office.”
“But my picture . . .”
“Go! Now! And take that comb with you.”
All my classmates stared at me, some making hideous faces as I left the auditorium.
I didn’t get my picture taken that year.
Eleven
BAPTIZED
IT’S A WONDER THAT TODAY I DON’T HAVE A WARPED CONCEPT of God because so many of my early experiences with church folks—and more specifically with people who claimed to know God—were definitely out of the ordinary. Despite my disillusionment with religion, from the time I put my trust in Jesus at Vacation Bible School, I have maintained a simple, childlike faith. Despite all the craziness that was around me, I continued to believe even though I haven’t always lived the way the Bible teaches.
So when Mama and Preacher Davis said th
at I should be baptized if I really believed in Jesus, I said, “Absolutely. I want to be baptized.”
I’m not sure that at age ten I understood what baptism was all about, and nobody bothered to explain to me that it is supposed to be a significant statement that my way of life has come to an end, and a new life has begun. Preacher Davis simply said, “Boy, ya need to be baptized,” so that settled it in Mama’s mind.
PREACHER HARRY DAVIS WAS THE PASTOR AT MOUNTAIN View Agape Church, located right across the road from the front door of our trailer. The small, white brick building boasted ten blood-red steps leading up to the front entrance, with a cross hanging above the double doors and yet another cross on the steeple above. Three additional large white crosses lined the front yard to the left of the steps. Nobody doubted that Agape Church was all about the cross and the blood.
When Preacher Davis delivered the Word, his very demeanor evoked images of blood. His normally round, freckled white face grew increasingly tomato-red as he preached, screaming fire-and-brimstone messages at the top of his lungs, pacing up and down the aisles of the church, shaking, gesturing, and beating his Bible with his open hand as though he were trying to slam the Word into the minds of the small but enthusiastic group of devout listeners. With every “Amen!” “Hallelujah!” or “Glory!” shouted out by members of the congregation, Preacher Davis screamed louder, laboring on, his red face dripping with perspiration, his eyes flashing, his red hair disheveled as he preached us all right into hell. He looked like a heart attack waiting to happen. Preacher Davis didn’t present short sermons, but fortunately for us, he lost his voice during every message. That usually calmed him down for a while.