More Than Rivals

by Ken Abraham

  As the sun peeked through Eddie’s bedroom curtains, the young boy’s eyelids fluttered. He rubbed his eyes with his fingertips and stretched, bumping his brother, Bo, who was still sound asleep in their shared bed. Across the room in bunk beds, Eddie’s two younger sisters, Delilah and Debbie, nine and seven, respectively, also slept soundly.

  Eddie bounded to his feet, still wearing the basketball shorts in which he fell asleep late the previous evening. He quietly moved around the room, locating his clothes without waking his slumbering siblings. He found his favorite worn-out Converse sneakers, donned some white athletic socks, and changed into a fresh, clean shirt. He picked up his dirty shirt from the floor and wadded it into a sphere. In perfect form he shot the balled-up clothing into the clothes hamper. Swish!

  Eddie slipped out of the bedroom and went out to the side of the house to shoot some hoops before breakfast. The makeshift banking board hanging from the post out back served Eddie well. Where grass had once grown, the ground in front of the basket was now well worn, pounded into a firm surface from Eddie’s feet and the myriad bounces of a basketball.

  Before long, Eddie had worked up a sweat, shooting baskets from every angle on the “court,” careful to avoid getting too near the bushes inhabited by unfriendly red wasps. Eddie had received more than a few nasty bee stings when his rebounds veered too close to those vicious bees.

  He continued shooting as the world around him came to life with the hum of cars carrying adults to work, the occasional roar of a school bus barreling down the street, and, of course, the consistently on-time clickety-clack of the morning freight train churning past the backyard.

  Concentrating on his outside set shots, Eddie paid no attention to the buzz of activity in the neighborhood. His mind was focused on the rim. Nevertheless, he knew the rest of the family was getting up and around because he could hear the radio playing in the kitchen.

  “It’s 8 a.m. here on WHIN radio in Gallatin,” the morning show announcer droned. “The weather today . . .”

  Eddie tuned out the man’s voice and dribbled toward the basket, whirling around on the clay as though an invisible man stood in front of him attempting to block his shot. Bouncing the ball off the clay surface had caused his fingertips to develop an almost innate sense for where the ball was. He didn’t have to see it; he could feel it.

  “Ed-die!” his mom called as she peeked her head out the door. “Breakfast is ready. Hurry up now, or you will be late for school.”

  “Be right there, Mom.” Eddie picked up the ball and slid over to the periphery of the lot, dangerously close to the bees’ nests. He lofted a fifteen-footer, with a perfect arc, toward the rim. The ball barely touched the net as it slipped through. Eddie jogged under the rim and caught the ball before it hit the ground. He moved to the opposite corner and fired in another perfect fifteen-footer. Now totally disregarding his mom’s call, Eddie bounded from one corner shot to another.

  In the kitchen, thirty-seven-year-old Betty Sherlin, dressed in a raggedy blue bathrobe, hummed a gospel song as she stirred a pot of oatmeal large enough to satisfy the appetites of her growing kids. On the Sherlins’ tight budget, oatmeal and a few slices of toast were the only breakfast foods they could afford.

  Delilah and Debbie, still rubbing sleep from their eyes, slipped into the tiny kitchen and climbed onto their usual chairs at the Formica and chrome kitchen table.

  “Morning, Mama,” Delilah said.

  Despite her unusual name, Delilah was one of the most delightful children any parent could imagine—sweet, innocent, always upbeat and positive no matter what the circumstances, with a smile that lit up every room she entered.

  Debbie was also a sweetheart, but she often deferred to Delilah and let her lead the way.

  Betty looked up briefly from the pot of oatmeal. “Good morning, baby. Sit up straight at the table now. You too, Debbie. I’ll have your breakfast in a minute.” She glanced out the window just as Bo bounded into the kitchen, ready for school with his hair neatly combed. “Bo, tell your brother to get in here. Now.”

  “Good morning, Mom,” Bo replied, stepping over to the door. “Eddie! Give it a break. It’s oatmeal time.”

  Eddie waved his hand high in the air to let Bo know he had heard him. He took one last long shot. The ball swished through the net. Eddie retrieved it and dribbled to the porch. Because he couldn’t resist, he bounced it one more time before tucking it under his arm and entering the kitchen.

  “Wash your hands, Eddie,” his mother shot at him without turning away from the stove. “And please put down that ball!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Eddie responded. He put the ball under his chair at the kitchen table and strode over to the sink, where he ran some water over his hands and then dried them on his shirt. He sat down at his usual place at the table as Betty evenly distributed the hot oatmeal into four bowls, adding a bit extra to the one in front of Bo, her rapidly growing teenager.

  “Say the blessing,” Jim Sherlin said, as he stepped into the kitchen and went straight to the coffeepot, while still fumbling with a necktie that didn’t want to cooperate with his stark, dark suit.

  “Good morning, Daddy,” Delilah and Debbie chorused.

  “Mornin’, Dad,” Eddie said.

  “Hey, Dad,” Bo added.

  “I’ll pray!” Debbie offered. “Dear Lord, please bless this food to our bodies. Amen!”

  “Amen,” the other family members echoed.

  “Bo, what does it mean to bless the food to our bodies?” Debbie asked.

  Bo scowled at the usual mess of oatmeal in his bowl. “I’m not sure that even God can bless this stuff,” he said just above a whisper.

  Still in “shooting mode,” Eddie picked up a ball of used rolled-up duct tape and tossed it into a cardboard cutout of a basketball rim hanging on the kitchen door. Eddie shot anything and everything whenever he could, and his parents and siblings had long ago stopped paying attention. As long as he didn’t shoot in the direction of the kitchen table, Betty simply went about her business of getting breakfast for her family.

  Jim poured himself a cup of coffee and took a sip as he casually watched Eddie sink another shot. An avid baseball fan, Jim had coached Eddie early on by standing on one side of the house and tossing a baseball over the roof, forcing his son to quickly spot the ball and move into position to make a catch. Eddie rarely missed. He was a standout player in Little League, and if Jim could work with him, Eddie probably had a great future as a second baseman.

  Bo was an excellent baseball player too. Named James H. Sherlin Jr. at birth, Bo was just a toddler when Jim saw potential in his son and began calling his namesake “Bo,” after baseball star Bobo Newsome. The nickname stuck. Jim Sr. dreamed of helping his boys develop their athletic abilities. But these days, Jim was far too busy trying to make a living, eking out barely enough income to buy food and clothes for the kids. He didn’t have time to play catch with Eddie or Bo.

  Jim and the family had moved to the Nashville area from Cleveland, Tennessee, an industrial town near Chattanooga. At first they stayed with relatives who lived so far out in the country they had no indoor bathroom, and four or five of the children all slept in the same bed. Then they found a small home in the government-funded projects in East Nashville. Jim found work with a local casket company, and for years his claim to fame was that he had hand-built the casket in which Elvis Presley’s mother was buried. Although it made for an interesting line on his résumé, Jim’s casket-making provided insufficient income for his growing family.

  Before long, they moved to Gallatin, where Jim took a job with an insurance company collecting the monthly fees from policyholders. His work took him all over town (the poor, colored sections as well as the affluent, white sections), throughout the county, and often around the state, causing him to sometimes be away from home for days at a time. Although Jim was a good man with godly parents and devoutly Christian extended family members, his faith had been sorely tried as he strugg
led to make life work in Gallatin. He had come close to giving up or giving in to various temptations he’d met along his insurance route, but he was hanging on, hoping against hope that something good would happen soon—something that could turn things around for him and his family. Until then, he resigned himself to working the insurance collection route.

  Jim finished his coffee and planted a cursory kiss on Betty’s forehead as he headed toward the door. “I’ll probably be late tonight.”

  “So what’s new about that?” Betty replied.

  Jim stopped and turned to her. “Just letting you know not to hold dinner for me.”

  “No danger of that,” his wife said.

  “I’ll see y’all tomorrow,” he said to the kids around the table.

  “’Bye, Daddy!” Delilah called after him.

  Betty reached for the radio dial, found a music station playing upbeat music, and turned up the volume. She busied herself cleaning the pot in which she had cooked the oatmeal. She had calls to make as well. She worked as a sales representative for World Book Encyclopedia, and as soon as the kids got off to school, she planned to make her rounds, offering the expensive set of books to any parents willing to invest in their children’s future. Betty didn’t make a lot of money from selling encyclopedias, but in addition to getting her out of the house, the commission-based sales job provided her with enough cash to purchase the few “luxuries” her family possessed, including Eddie’s basketball shoes and Bo’s baseball cleats and uniforms.

  “Let’s get this day hoppin’ with a blast from the past,” the bombastic local radio deejay thundered. “Sponsored by Randy’s Records right here in Gallatin, here’s Pat Boone on Dot Records with a remake of Little Richard’s hit ‘Tutti Frutti.’”

  The song’s introduction was already playing in the background, growing louder under the deejay’s ebullient banter. The deejay’s voice disappeared and the music filled the kitchen as the Sherlin kids hurriedly finished their oatmeal.

  Bo caught Eddie’s eye and gave him an inquisitive look, as though asking, “Are you going to school today?” Bo knew Eddie always went out the door with his siblings, but if their mom and dad had already left for work, he sometimes skipped school to stay home and shoot baskets in the backyard.

  Eddie nodded toward their mother and frowned. Betty was running behind schedule this morning, so it would be more difficult for Eddie to play hooky today.

  “Get dressed quickly, girls,” Betty instructed. “Bo, wait for your sisters. Eddie, please put that ball down! You are in the house, young man.”

  Eddie quickly put down the ball he had picked up only seconds earlier. “Yes, ma’am.” He hurried to his bedroom and changed into his school clothes. The girls also hurried off to change out of their pajamas and into their school clothes.

  “Aw, Mom,” Bo whined, slamming his school books on the kitchen table. “Why do I have to be the one to walk the girls to school? Eddie can do it. Nobody else walks their kid sisters to school. It’s embarrassing.”

  Betty bristled. “Bo Sherlin, don’t you give me no back talk. I said you wait for your sisters, and I mean it. Don’t you go running off on them, either. Especially when you go walkin’ near the coloreds. I don’t want to hear that you took off and left them for some colored boy to grab.”

  “Oh, Mom. Ain’t nobody gonna grab Delilah or Debbie.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that. You just listen to what I say, young man. And you stay near to your kin.”

  Bo recognized the fire in his mother’s eyes and, despite the growing rebellious streak running through him, knew better than to mess with Betty Sherlin when she was mad.

  “Aw, okay, Mom. I’ll stick with them all the way to school.”

  “That’s more like it.” Betty placed a pot in the cupboard a little more loudly than necessary, as though to emphasize her point.

  Bo hustled the girls out the door and escorted them up the road toward school, right through “black town.” Eddie followed closely behind, dribbling the basketball in a figure eight pattern and pausing every time he spotted a garbage can or anything that looked like a rim along the way, pretending to shoot. Then it was back to the figure eight, dribbling the basketball over the gravel on the side of the road, his fingertips adeptly controlling the ball regardless of the rough terrain on which he bounced it.

  At the corner crosswalk, Bo stretched out his arms, stopping the procession while a dilapidated pickup truck huffed by. The tobacco farmer driving the truck nodded at Bo in a cordial but meaningless greeting. Everyone in Gallatin said hello or acknowledged one another, especially if they had the same skin color.

  With his arms still extended, Bo looked to his left, then to his right. Meanwhile, Eddie dribbled incessantly behind his sisters and brother while standing on the corner waiting to cross. A 1953, beat-up Cadillac driven by a black man roared down the street. Bo shook his head. It was obvious that the old Caddie’s mufflers must have worn out a long time ago, because the enormous car sounded like a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. The driver had lowered the windows and the radio blared, ironically playing the original version of “Tutti Frutti” recorded by Little Richard.

  Instinctively, Bo backed up slightly as the car slowed to turn the corner in front of him. The black man behind the wheel looked at Bo then quickly looked away while Bo glared at him. Bo eyed the car suspiciously as the driver gunned the engine before driving up the street.

  “Nice car, eh?” Eddie said, dribbling up behind Bo.

  Bo spun around and gave Eddie a dirty look. The Sherlins lived only one street away from the coloreds, so it was not unusual for them to be there. Nevertheless, Eddie always grew anxious when he and his siblings were the only white faces to be seen anywhere in the neighborhood. Eddie’s fear motivated him to run from one place to another. He didn’t think so much about color as he ran; his fear stemmed from early childhood, when his family first moved to Nashville and he had been picked on by one of the other white boys who, like Eddie and his family, lived in government housing. Nobody else was aware of Eddie’s fear, but it was always there, just below the surface in his heart and his mind.

  “Come on, Debbie.” Eddie put one hand on his sister’s shoulder and dribbled the basketball across the street with his other hand. He gently nudged Debbie forward as Bo took Delilah’s hand and pulled her safely into the white side of town.

  5

  EDDIE SQUIRMED IN HIS SEAT in the middle of his all-white class of eleven- and twelve-year-olds at Guild School, part of the Gallatin elementary school system. Mrs. Lee, his strict but wonderfully kind teacher droned on, making some point about the American Revolution. Eddie had tuned out at least fifteen minutes before Washington crossed the Delaware. His focus was on a gray trash can located in the front corner of the classroom. Holding his hands behind his history book so his teacher couldn’t see them, Eddie caressed the invisible basketball in his palm. Unlike many coaches and players who insisted on keeping the basketball in their fingertips, Eddie was convinced he could get a much better sense of touch by cradling the ball in his hand. He subtly shifted his head, as though ducking a defender. Then when the teacher’s back was turned, Eddie pump faked and then shot his imaginary basketball toward the trash can.

  Swish! In his mind, he heard the glorious sound of the ball going through the net.

  Eddie’s teacher moved slightly to the left. He leaned far out of his seat to the right, trying to maintain eye contact with the trash can in the corner. The teacher was writing on the blackboard, her body blocking Eddie’s view of the metal basket. Eddie leaned even farther out of his seat, so far that the wooden desk and chair tipped and came off the floor several inches. Eddie quickly moved his body to the left in an attempt to regain his balance. Too late. The desk and chair slammed back down, hitting the hardwood flooring with a loud thud.

  Mrs. Lee whirled around and looked in the direction of the noise, just in time to see Eddie retrieving his history book from the floor.

  “Eddi
e, are you all right?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I was just leaning over too far,” he said truthfully, careful not to mention that his teacher had been blocking his shots.

  “Well, good posture is important, Eddie. Sit up straight, please. Class, backs pressed up against the back of your chair, feet on the floor.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Eddie said quietly.

  “Now, where was I?” Mrs. Lee said to herself more than to the students. “Oh, yes, Valley Forge.” Mrs. Lee stepped to the middle of the blackboard and picked up a piece of chalk, tossing it up and down in her Hand, momentarily capturing Eddie’s attention. “Washington’s troops were emaciated and freezing,” she began, turning toward the board. “And they were surrounded by the enemy.” She drew a large circle on the board.

  Eddie smiled. He’d found another rim. He was back in his game.

  School was not Eddie’s forte. He didn’t lack intelligence and probably could have made better grades had he applied himself, but he didn’t. In fact, if it weren’t for the physical education classes, Eddie might have skipped more school than he did.

  The dismissal bell had barely rung before Bo and Eddie were on their way to the whites-only park, with their sisters tagging along. There was no reason to go home yet, since both of their parents were working, so the park became the Sherlins’ after-school day care center. Delilah and Debbie ran to the teeter-totters, while Bo and Eddie opened the gate to the basketball court.