by Howard Owen
“Justin?” Mom says. “Honey, please look out for your granddaddy, and do what he says. We’ll have a long talk when I get back, maybe go away to the beach for the weekend. And don’t do anything rash. Things’ll get better.”
We hang up, and I’m thinking, Jesus, are things that bad?
School’s a snap, and I am having a little bit of fun here, too. We play basketball after classes while I’m waiting for Kenny to get back from his death-defying day with the Future Drivers of America. Winfrey Geddie and his cousin Blue are okay. They call me Cousin Justin, and tell everybody I’m the white sheep of the family. They’re both on the Sandy Heath basketball team, and if they don’t make it out of summer school, next season is history. They’re both about six two already, so the three of us make a mean front line. I only play church league ball back home, but these guys would make anybody look great. They can both dunk, backwards. I can get two inches over the rim, so I could dunk like a marble. There’s a three-on-three summer league in Port Campbell, and we’re thinking about getting into it.
Mom’s always going on about what a waste sports are. She would only let me play soccer when I was little. They have this thing in Montclair called serendipity soccer, which everyone in town calls dip soccer, for good reason. They have leagues for everyone, five to eighty-five, is what they brag about, and the big thing about dip soccer is, like, they don’t keep score. Okay, I can see not keeping score in basketball. I mean, after a while, who knows if it’s 92–92 or 94–90? But most soccer games I ever played in, the score was either 0–0, 1–0, 1–1 or, if the goalies just didn’t show up, maybe 2–1. Now, how the shit are you not going to know whether you won or lost when only one goal is scored? Gee, Mom, I don’t know who won. We didn’t keep score. But we did kick the ball in their goal once, and they didn’t kick it in our goal at all. Every five-year-old in Montclair could tell you his team’s won-lost record, and I’ve seen better fights in adult dip soccer games than I’ve ever seen in football.
In Montclair, only blacks and poor whites play baseball or, God forbid, football. All the university brats, like me, play soccer. If we’re like real lucky, our parents let us play basketball between fall and spring soccer. Dad and I would throw the football around when he still lived with us, and the kids in the neighborhood would play tag football in the street. I tell you what: Maybe football’s the inhuman, brutalizing thing Mom says it is, but it’s about five times more fun than soccer.
The thing about Winfrey and Blue is, I don’t think these guys are ever going to be pestered by the Rhodes scholarship people, even if they never touch a basketball again. And if they can manage to stay in school for the next two years, maybe somebody will give them some kind of college scholarship to play. Maybe they won’t graduate, but they’ll be there, anyhow, and maybe something will seep through. I know this much: Winfrey and Blue will be making tires at Kelly-Springfield, or dealing drugs, in less than two years if they don’t have basketball. True fact.
I’m their tutor, sort of unofficially. They live over in Old Geddie, which used to be Geddie, according to Granddaddy, but I’ve never gotten that straight. Anyhow, that’s where most of the black people around here live now. Sometimes I go over there, and sometimes they come over here to Granddaddy’s and we study on the porch. There aren’t many blacks in Montclair. Mom’s always telling me how badly they were treated in what she calls “the real South,” which she says starts in Richmond, how our own family had had slaves and all, but we’ve never lived in a neighborhood with even one black family. I guess they just prefer those unpainted little houses over by the railroad tracks. Right.
Winfrey and Blue talk about “axing” questions and wonder if they’re ever going to “gradurate,” but that isn’t exactly the kind of thing you correct in someone else’s house, especially since everyone in both their families talks the same way. If everybody in my family said “ax” all the time, that’s probably what I’d say, too. It’d be almost disrespectful not to. But I can see where they aren’t exactly turning on to the stuff we’re reading now. I mean, Lord Jim? I can’t get into that too much myself. Mom says literature gets better in college, where they let you read things that have been written since the invention of fire. Blue and Winfrey, though, can lay down a line of rap about five minutes long. Too bad they don’t give grades on rap. They’d be tutoring me.
Granddaddy gets along with Blue and Winfrey. Blue’s father worked at the plywood plant that used to be in Geddie, he said. He refers to them as “colored folks” when they’re not around. At least he doesn’t call them “niggers” like about everybody else around here seems to. We go to church every Sunday morning, and last week we were out front afterward. That’s where people seem to do most of their socializing around here. And I’m standing next to Granddaddy, who’s talking with two old guys who are also elders in the church. They’re talking about this “nigger” who used to play for North Carolina, and it’s “nigger” this and “nigger” that, except that Granddaddy uses “colored” instead. Around here, I guess that makes him a liberal. He doesn’t say “colored” in front of Blue and Winfrey, although I guess they’re probably used to worse.
CHAPTER SIX
August 8
Not too long ago, Miss Effie Horne come to my house one afternoon. Miss Effie left East Geddie in 1937, when she was about twenty years old. She didn’t have much family, and what she had didn’t give her much showing. I think she lived with an aunt she didn’t get along with. I used to buy her Cokes at the store when she was a young-un, because she seemed so pitiful.
So when she got a chance to go to California to live with some relatives out there, she left and never came back. But here she was, fifty years later, with one of her daughters driving her. Said she’d got the daughter to fly across the country with her, to Raleigh, so they could come down here and see the place where she growed up before she got too old to travel. And I reckon I’m one of the few folks still around that she remembered from back then.
I made them some iced tea and we sat on the back porch under the ceiling fan. Miss Effie and me, we talked about old times, and her daughter would look at her watch every ten minutes or so. I offered to put them up for the night, but the daughter said they already had reservations at the Motel 6 out by the Raleigh-Durham airport.
I never have been much of a talker, and when Miss Effie and her daughter got to arguing about how far it was from where they lived to the Pacific Ocean, I picked up the paper without thinking, pulled out the sports section and turned to page three to see how the Minnesota Twins had done last night. I had read the three or four paragraphs the Post saw fit to grace me with when I looked up to see Miss Effie staring at me, and her daughter staring at her.
“Why, Littlejohn McCain,” Miss Effie said. “You can read!”
The first thing I remember is Momma’s clock. Daddy bought it for her for Christmas in 1897 with the money he made selling a couple of hogs. It sat on the mantelpiece over the fireplace for near-bout sixty years, until Momma died in 1955 and Lex took it down and toted it up to the attic. We just brought it back down again three years ago.
When I wasn’t more than four years old, maybe three, I can remember just sitting there on the floor, looking at that big old clock with all the wooden curlicues and that big gold pendulum swinging back and forth, back and forth. Momma used to say that if I was being contrary, all she had to do was put me in front of that old clock, and I’d hush right up. She said sometimes she’d leave me and come back in a hour, and I’d still be perched right there, watching the minute hand catch the hour hand. The funny thing is, after we got it fixed and running and put back on the mantel, behind the oil heater, I’d catch myself doing the same thing. I reckon babies and old folks are all that’s allowed to just sit and watch time fly.
Daddy would work all day in the field during good weather. He’d come back in for dinner at noon. Even without a watch, Momma said he never missed by more than five minutes. He’d be hot and tired, and she
’d have biscuits and ham and butter beans and rice and gravy. And you had better not of started eating until Daddy got there. When I was four, Lex was fifteen, probably just starting to be a lot of help in the fields. Gruff was twelve and was mainly supposed to fetch water and such. Connie was fifteen, too, of course, and she did as much around the house as Momma did. Century was ten. It was her job to fix the beds and shell peas and beans.
Lafe was seven then. He was already in school, and he would show me the little red reader that the first graders used. They only went to school from late fall until planting time back then, and only Lafe and Century finished all eleven years. I’d look at that reader and see all the letters, and I couldn’t wait until somebody showed me the secret that would make all them lines and circles and squirls mean something.
It didn’t take but thirty-six more years for that to happen.
Daddy didn’t have much time for us until after all the crops was in. He’d lay down for a hour after dinner, then go right back out to the fields again, taking Lex and Gruff with him. He’d be covered from head to foot with old blue overalls and a brown long-sleeved shirt and a straw hat. He had great big hands, the only part of him that the sun got to, and they was covered with freckles and moles and skin cancers that Doc McNeil’d cut off once in a while.
At night after supper, Momma would read to us from the Bible. Sometimes, right after a specially good revival meeting, she’d decided that we ought to be better Christians, and we’d have this big prayer, while we was still at the table. Everybody would have to say something, and it had better of been good, or Momma would make you read the Bible to her for half an hour while she washed dishes. One time she caught me slipping collards back into the bowl during prayer, because I couldn’t stomach collards, and she like to of wore me out.
Daddy was old when I was born. I can remember him at seventy-five, still out there plowing, except by that time, Lex and Lafe and me was doing most of it, along with Rennie Lockamy’s family that had took over the old cabin where Aunt Mallie and them lived. Rennie’s folks claimed to be Lumbee Indians, and we was charitable enough to let them be what they said they was.
Gruff went off to World War I and never really did live here again. He come back long enough to help us paint the whole outside of the house in the summer of, I reckon, 1920, then headed south. He made a good life for him and his family in Atlanta, and he has lots of grandchildren living all around there today. Gruff was one of those folks that seem to be born in the wrong place and has to go out and look for the right one. I reckon he found it.
Daddy would tell us stories about the war, and I’ve heard Century say many’s the time that she wished to goodness she’d wrote down some of that stuff. ’Course, with Daddy, you didn’t want to take it as gospel just because he said it. Daddy could stretch things a little. There was no denying, though, that wooden stump from the knee down where he lost his left leg.
He said he was at Gettysburg, but Sara told me years later that if he come home wounded when he was supposed to of, that he must of commuted to Pennsylvania.
Sometimes, it seemed like to me that Daddy wasn’t sure himself where he was fighting during the time he was gone. The story he liked to tell the best, though, was about the Geddie boys spittin’ in old Sherman’s eye. At least, that’s the way Daddy saw it. The way he told it, we was always kind of hazy about what happened when the Yankees come to Geddie on their way back north. Sometimes, he’d say him and his daddy and the rest planned a ambush ahead of time. Other times, he’d say he just lifted his gun up and fired it and started all the trouble.
They come right by here on the way to the Blue Sandhills, the Yankees right behind them, and they hid there until the next morning, when they went north to try and ambush them on the Mingo Road, after the Yankees had burnt up everything. But they was too late. Probably just as good, anyways. There wasn’t many of them home guard boys left by then, and they was all either too old, too young or too lame. There wasn’t much to do but go home and rebuild.
“When we got to Geddie Station,” he’d say, talking about what’s Geddie itself now, “the smoke was hanging in the air, and we could see that they’d ruint the railroad and burnt down the station. Mr. Gib Carter was standing alongside the road. He was real old, maybe eighty-five. And he was crying, which was peculiar, because Mr. Gib was a tough old bastard, had to be dragged off his horse by his two daughters to keep him from riding with us. And Mr. Gib said, ‘Ain’t no need to go farther, boys. Geddie’s gone.’ We could see this real thick smoke rising to the east, and it turned out to be the sawdust pile, which caught fire when they burnt down our sawmill. And there wasn’t nothing left here. They even burnt down the washhouse and smokehouse and the two barns. One of them had hitched his horse to the grapevine that Momma planted in 1847 and pulled that down. Pa said he sure was glad she hadn’t lived to see that. We had it back up by next summer.”
He said it took all the summer just to build a kitchen and big room for everybody to sleep in, and that the house wasn’t like it was when I come along for at least six years.
Daddy told that story right many times, and while Century wished she had it all in writing, it didn’t bother me. They say that when somebody goes blind, that the other senses all double to make up for it, kind of God’s way of making allowances. Well, maybe that’s why I can remember things so good.
In primer and first grade, it hadn’t been much of a problem. We would see the letters on the board and recite them all together. Momma seemed concerned that I wasn’t picking it up as fast as Lafe and Century did, but she didn’t have much time to fret about it.
But then, in the second grade, I got Miss Beulah Bullard. Miss Bullard expected you to be able to read out of the book, and write. It looked simple enough when the other young-uns did it, but to me, all them letters might as well of been in Egyptian. I would watch her write letters in chalk up on the board, and then I’d try to do the same thing, but sometimes the “b” would come out “p” or the “m” would be a “w” or worse. Miss Bullard would take my hand in hers and lead my pencil along the right lines, but when she left me to do it myself, it’d get all turned around, and she’d get wrong with me.
It didn’t help any that Momma and my first-grade teacher had, between them, made me right-handed, sort of. Ever since I could first throw a rock at a cat, I had been left-handed, something Momma and Daddy hoped I’d grow out of. But when it come time to start school, and I was still using the wrong hand, they couldn’t ignore it anymore. Being left-handed, back then, was looked on as something between retarded and sinful. So Momma made me use my right hand at home and Miss Carter, my teacher, made me use it at school. Problem was, I wasn’t real good with my right hand. Walking down the swamp road that Daddy and them cut when they started to using the swamp for farmland, headed for the old school on the Ammon Road, I’d throw rocks left-handed at squirrels when we passed the little stand of woods by the Lockamy place, then throw dirt clods into the water at Lock’s Branch the same way, then go into the schoolhouse and pick up my pencil from my desk with my left hand and put it in my right. By the second grade, I had got used to it, but my writing was what Momma and Miss Bullard called chicken scratch. Sometimes, when I wasn’t sure which way the letters or numbers was supposed to go, I would make it as hard to read as I could, hoping Miss Bullard wouldn’t be able to tell if it was right or wrong.
The worst was my name. To me, all the letters looked just alike, and when I would see it wrote out for me, it was like everything was spinning and out of order. One day, I might write LILTTJNOH, and the next it might be LTTIJHN, or LITIEJON. Miss Bullard would make us write our names on the blackboard, just to torment me, I thought. Oh, how I wished I’d of been a Tom or a Ed, although I even spelled Tom “Tow” sometimes. But standing up there at that board, with them other young-uns sniggering behind me and me feeling the heat from Miss Bullard’s eyes on me from the side, my brain would just ache trying to see it right in my mind.
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��Littlejohn cain’t write his own name,” I heard my hateful cousin Flossie half whispering behind me more than once.
Miss Bullard sent a note home to Momma and Daddy, and Momma took extra time in the evening, when she might of been praying, to work with me. But Momma couldn’t read and write real good either, and when I would keep on getting it wrong, she would get mad at me, and I would cry. Finally, she turned me over to Century and Lafe. The worst, though, was when we’d have prayer together after supper and she would ask Jesus to please forgive me for being so willful and to show me the light so I might follow it and learn. Understand, East Geddie in 1913 wasn’t hardly a hotbed of learning. Most folks, like their mommas and daddies before them, would stick with it long enough to be able to read and write and cipher. Some went through all eleven grades, like Century and Lafe, but it was mostly the girls. The point was to get enough learning so that somebody else wouldn’t be able to cheat you.
Century and Lafe would take turns working with me, and they’d get right hot with me, too, when it looked like I wasn’t ever going to learn how to do the stuff that come easy to them. I failed the second grade, which wasn’t easy to do back then. The only thing I am thankful for, looking back on it, is that there wasn’t as much school to go to then as there is now, only about a hundred days a year.
It was Lafe that got me through the second grade second time around, and the third and fourth, for that matter. He’d teach me to memorize things. He might of been the only one in the family that didn’t think I wasn’t quite right, because he knew I could memorize whole pages of books. Since the same books got used from year to year, I could learn enough from what Lafe read to me to be able to stand up in class and, long as the teacher didn’t change anything, pretend to read. It got so, after a while, that I really thought I was reading. I learned the multiplication tables, and teachers got so they knew that something wasn’t quite right with me, but that if they asked me, “Littlejohn, what is six times seven?” instead of writing the problem on the board, I could get it.