by Barry Moser
One day in 1918 or 1919, my mother, who was always called Billie, and little Verneta were playing together at the store as they often did. Mother’s older sisters, Velma and Annie Lee, came slapping in through those two big screen doors and announced that they were going downtown to see a moving picture show. They wanted to know if little Billie wanted to come along.
Well, of course little Billie wanted to go along—and so did little Verneta. They both got all excited about it, and in my imagination I see them jumping up and down and squealing. But then one of the older girls reminded Verneta that she couldn’t go. I can hear Annie Lee saying something like,
“V’nita, don’t you go bein’ silly now. You know you caint go. Why, you know better than to even ask.”
Verneta commenced to cry. But then, with a sudden jolt of inspiration, she ran to the back storage room. She pulled the cord and turned on the light. She threw the lid off the flour barrel, climbed up on a chair, bent over as far as she could, and stuck her little face into the flour. Then she ran back out to the front of the store and took Billie by the hand. The white dust made her little black eyes seem all that much blacker. I see motes of flour in the air and a trail of it on the floor. And I hear her hopeful question,
“Now can I go? Now can I go?”
It would have been like my mother to put her arms around Verneta and to try to wipe away the caked-on tears when she was told, once again, no, she couldn’t go. Would have been like my mother to hold her friend and console her, because even though both of them had been taught what their proper and correct places were, it didn’t mean that they couldn’t love and comfort each other, as Verneta loved and comforted my mother when Arthur Boyd died and she helped take care of Billie’s two baby boys.
Will Haggard’s grocery store, c. 1930
AS I SAID, Tommy and I adored Verneta. She was in our lives nearly every day. She changed our diapers and made sugar tits for us to suck on. She took us to the park, and up the side of Lookout Mountain on the Incline, one of the steepest incline railroads in the world. But even so, Tommy and I grew up deeply racist. Why, I wonder, with such a woman in our early lives, a woman we spoke well of, and for whom we had deep affections, did we feel the way we did toward black people? Three black families, all kin to Verneta, lived right across the street from us, and no harm ever came to anybody in our family or theirs. There was never an unpleasant confrontation of any kind. There was no enmity. No animosity. Nevertheless, Tommy and I were taught that black folks were not—check, make that never—as good as we were. Not even the black dentist who lived in a fine stone house on the West Brow of Missionary Ridge that overlooked the city.
One day I was visiting Velma when she and a friend were drinking coffee in Velma’s spacious kitchen. I was sitting at the table, too, just listening. They were talking about that dentist and I heard Velma say,
“Law, I’d never let that nigger put his hands in my mouth.”
“Hmmph. He could buy and sell you, Velma.”
“I don’t give a damn. I still wouldn’t let him put his fingers in my mouth.”
“Yeah, but you let niggers cook for you.”
“Well, that’s what they’re supposed to do.”
“Your sister lets one of ’em take care of her babies.”
“That’s different.”
“How’s it different?”
“It just is.”
This was the sort of exchange that we grew up hearing from our family and from friends of our family. “Nigress” was the kindest word I ever heard applied to a black woman, and that only came from Mother when she referred to Verneta. Occasionally I would hear the more polite term, “colored,” but more common was “coon,” or “jigaboo.” I don’t think I heard the word “Negro,” pronounced properly, until I was in high school. I certainly never used the word, nor did anybody else in our family. I remember one time referring to a black woman as a “lady,” it could have been Verneta, and was soundly rebuked.
“There aint no such thing as a nigger lady, Barry. Don’t ever forget that.”
The word nigger was used as casually as the word butter in our family. Brazil nuts were “nigger toes.” Black-eyed Susans were “nigger heads.” A hard storm rained “cats, dogs, and little nigger babies.”
Despite this environment, Tommy and I were brought up to respect, even like, an individual black person. But as far as our family was concerned the black race was slow, shiftless, and ignorant.
Very smart individual black folks were an exception. They were relegated to a place of out-of-the-ordinary loathing: Booker T. Washington. George Washington Carver. Ralph Abernathy. We had never heard of Paul Laurence Dunbar or W. E. B. Du Bois, but if we had, they, too, would have been dismissed as uppity niggers who thought they were as good as white folks. Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson held special places of contempt in the Shallowford pantheon of negrophobia as did Jackie Robinson and Nat King Cole.
I walked in on Velma one time while she was watching TV. She and Bob had the first TV set on our block and she was watching some program where Nat King Cole was singing. She was standing, wringing her hands when I walked in. When she saw me she said,
“Law, honey, you caint even turn the tee-vee on anymore without there being some black nigger on it.”
I thought she was going to have a stroke when she spied a black family looking at a house that was for sale across the street from her backyard. Why that bothered her, and having Verneta and her family across the street in the other direction didn’t, I don’t know. Familiarity, perhaps. Or maybe because the Gholstons’ houses were farther away. But all she could say standing there peeking through the curtains was,
“What am I gonna do? Law, law, what am I gonna do?”
Verneta Gholston, c. 1955
MOST BLACK MUSICIANS, however, escaped our white reproval: Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton were particular favorites, as were the Ink Spots, Cab Calloway, Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, and our fellow Chattanoogan, Bessie Smith.
We approved of the movie actor Stepin Fetchit because he was shiftless, slow-witted, and knew how and when to hold his hat in his hand. That’s the way we liked our black men. He knew his place—on the screen. And my family liked him. A lot. Had they known how wealthy and influential he was offscreen they would have hated him, too.
As I look back with the perspective of a much older man, I see that my family’s loathing was not strictly reserved for black folks. All of us were sensitive (perhaps overly so) to percieved slights from strangers who we assumed thought that they were better than we were. Or who, indeed, did enjoy a higher social status. We assumed that they looked down their noses at us—as we looked down on the white folks who lived near us who were not as prosperous as we were. My brother carried that chip of inferiority on his shoulder most of his life. And struggle with it as I may, I sometimes find myself in restaurants and other public places sizing up strangers with those old senses of base inferiority and outward enmity.
CHESHER
MOTHER REMARRIED ON May 5, 1943, to Chesher Holmes. Tommy was five. I was two.
Chesher was a popular man in Chattanooga, especially in the sporting community. He was commodore of a couple of boating clubs on Lake Chickamauga, he refereed football and softball games, he judged diving competitions, and he organized youth basketball in Chattanooga in the 1950s. Even though he couldn’t swim himself, he taught Tommy and me how to. He had a weekly radio show on WAGC called The Sportsman’s Hour, where he interviewed people about hunting & fishing, guns & lures, and boats & motors. He mostly broadcast from a sound booth on the top floor of the Hotel Patten that stood at the corner of Ninth Street (now Martin Luther King Avenue) and Georgia Avenue. We sat and watched from the other side of the big glass window and were always tickled with delight when he told his listening audience that his two sons were with him in the studio that night.
Occasionally he did his broadcast from a federal courtroom on the second floor of the post office building with a l
ive audience. Tommy and I loved going with him on Sportsman’s Hour nights; we enjoyed the show but mostly loved going because we stopped for ice cream or milk shakes on the way home.
Chesher was a superb horseman, especially at jumping and playing polo. Tommy and I saw all his (mostly blue) ribbons one time at his mother’s house. We were there for the usual Christmas breakfast, and she brought out the large box full of ribbons for us to admire. If he had not been diabetic he would have been a cavalryman in the U.S. Army. Since he couldn’t join up he became an instructor of horsemanship for the Sixth Cavalry stationed at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, near the Chickamauga battlefields.
He and Mother met horseback riding in the woods on a Sunday morning. Chesher was a real sweet-talking charmer, so Mother invited him to come home with her for some breakfast and to meet her two little boys. According to Chesher, he accepted the invitation, came for biscuits and gravy, and never left.
When he came to live with us in our little house he came alone. He brought nothing with him other than his clothes and his horse, Tony.
Chesher became Daddy, the only Daddy we ever knew. He was good to Tommy and me. I think that he was afraid of being seen as the stereotypical mean stepfather, and thus he never struck either of us, other than the rare paddling with a harmless hairbrush. When he got really angry, he had a peculiar way of looking above and just to the right of our heads, avoiding direct eye contact. I asked him one time why he did that and he said that if he ever did look us in the eye when he was mad at us, he’d probably smack us.
Daddy took us to the movies. He took us to the Golden Gloves. He took us to see the Harlem Globetrotters when they came to Memorial Auditorium and played the black team from Howard High School. He took us fishing and taught us how to handle a rod and reel and how to pilot several kinds of boats, from flat-bottomed trolling boats to inboard cruisers and high-performance speedboats. He took us to the baseball games when the Chattanooga Lookouts played at home. He took us to softball games under the summer lights at Warner Park—women’s slow-pitch and men’s fast-pitch. He took us to the sulky races at the county fair, after which we climbed the steps to the top of the motordrome and watched motorcycles race up and around the cylindrical “Wall of Death.” He walked with us down the midway, holding our hands, as we gawked at the sideshows and listened to the barkers hawking their goods. On Sundays he took us on long boat rides down the Tennessee River or on long car rides down the length of Lookout Mountain.
One Sunday afternoon we took Daddy’s Chris-Craft runabout through the locks of Chickamauga Dam and rode all the way down to Williams Island, about fifteen miles downriver. Tommy was at the wheel when we passed an upriver cruiser that was throwing a heavy wake. Tommy crossed the wake at such an angle that we were momentarily airborne, and when we slammed down hard, I swallowed my wad of chewing tobacco. It wasn’t long before we turned around and headed back because I was sick. Daddy and Tommy were laughing their asses off as we passed the cruiser and left it in our wake. I haven’t chewed tobacco since.
Chesher Holmes, c. 1950
Another summer Sunday we were in Daddy’s car, a four-door 1948 Chevrolet Stylemaster, headed out in the general direction of Lake Chickamauga, taking a route we often took, though we were headed nowhere in particular. Tommy and I had been fighting, as usual, and when he thought he couldn’t be seen, he’d hit me. Not hard. Just aggravating me, was all. I hit him back because I knew that if Tommy got seriously mad at me and started hitting me really hard, Mother or Daddy was there to stop it before it got out of hand and I got hurt. We were still pestering each other when we turned off onto Lightfoot Mill Road, a little-used road that for a short way ran between Chickamauga Creek and a fertilizer plant that gave off a smell that registered somewhere between being oddly pleasant and sweetly nauseating. I had come down with a bad case of the hiccups right after we left home and Daddy was getting irritated with me, or so it seemed. We were right there between the creek and the fertilizer plant when he suddenly stopped the car. He got out, came around to my side, opened my door, and made me get out. He got back in and drove away. I could hear Mother yelling at him to stop. Tommy was yelling at him, too, I could tell, because I could see his anxious face mashed against the chrome-trimmed rear window.
Standing on the side of the hot road, smelling the repugnant odor of fertilizer, I started screaming and jumping up and down. One of my Buster Browns was untied and flew off. Tears were rolling down my dusty face. I yelled at the top of my little voice,
“Daddy! Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me! Please! PLEASE DADDY!”
He hadn’t gone ten yards when he stopped the car, kicking up a cloud of dust and gravel. He opened his door, ran back to me with a big smile on his face, picked me up, hugged me tight, and asked,
“Where’d your hiccups go, li’l buddy?”
They were gone.
Daddy kissed me—smooched me, actually—several times, put me down, and opened the back door. I snuffled my way back up onto the backseat behind Mother. Tommy wouldn’t look at me. He was crying. Daddy picked up my shoe and put it on my foot before he closed the door and drove on.
SUNNYSIDE
TOMMY WAS DIAGNOSED with amblyopia long before he started school. It is a common condition and causes more childhood blindness than all other causes combined. Tommy’s specific ailment was strabismic amblyopia. His left eye turned in toward his nose. When that happens the vision becomes blurry and the brain shuts down that eye. Simply put, Tommy didn’t see well. Nor did he do well in school. His bad eyesight predisposed him to being academically challenged, particularly when it came to reading. He had done so poorly in his first year in school that he was made to repeat the first grade at Eastdale Elementary School, which was about half a mile from our house up toward Hoyt Street. He repeated first grade, passed, and went on into the second grade.
When he finished the second grade, the local Board of Education redistricted the school system and Tommy had to change schools. His new school, Sunnyside Elementary, was a mile from our house in the opposite direction. But they did not accept his second-grade credentials from Eastdale Elementary, so he had to repeat the second grade, too.
This made him two years older than his classmates, which put him in an unavoidable and socially awkward position, one that invited ridicule. He hated being called “crosseyes.” Or “dummy.” Or “moron.” From that point on, Tommy was hypersensitive to failures, humiliations, slights, and hurts—both real and perceived. It didn’t help that our aunts, uncles, and Daddy were always kidding him about his little brother.
“Better watch out, Tommy. Barry’s gonna catch up with you one of these days. You better be careful.”
I never corrected them. Never took Tommy’s side.
One day Mother got a call from the principal, Mrs. Wright, a Virginian who pronounced out and about oddly. The semester had just begun. I would start school the next fall, so I was home with Mother when the call came. Tommy had been too embarrassed to ask for permission to go to the bathroom to do a “number two,” so he held it. And he held it. Until finally he couldn’t hold it any longer and just let it go. And he did. In his pants.
Tommy and Barry modeling football helmets for a newspaper article about the new plastic helmets that their daddy was selling, c. 1950
Mother borrowed a car from Velma, put me in the front seat (there were no laws against that in 1945, nor were there any such things as seat belts), and we drove to the school to get Tommy. He was standing out on the sidewalk with Mrs. Wright. He was crying. She was holding his hand. When he got in the backseat, Mother told him not to sit down because Velma had told her that she didn’t want any shit getting on her upholstery. So he stood up all the time. And all the time he kept whimpering, more or less in my ear,
“It’s just a itty bit, Mamma, it’s just a itty bit.”
WHEN I STARTED SCHOOL in the fall of 1946, I went to Sunnyside, too. I was there from the first grade through the sixth. I did not go to kindergarten as T
ommy had.
Sunnyside’s main building was what, generously speaking, might be called Classic Revival, though not much of it was classic, except perhaps the odors associated with elementary schools of the time: glue, disinfectant, cafeteria, and the readily recognized, though hard to identify, odor of, well, elementary schools. It was a masonry building, with nine-over-one windows that peeled lead paint. The main structure was built during the 1920s or 1930s, and during the 1940s an addition was built to accommodate a new auditorium and a few new classrooms for the three lower grades.
I hated school just like Tommy did. It’s impossible to say who hated school more, but I hated it, shall I say, ardently—and that may be an understatement. Like my brother, I didn’t read well, though for different reasons. I was dyslexic. Or so I think I was, looking back. I was never diagnosed, even though the condition had been known since 1881. I’m not sure that anybody had been diagnosed with dyslexia in 1946 America. It really doesn’t matter. What matters is that I was inept at memorizing poems or Bible verses. I had trouble conjugating verbs correctly, or reciting my times tables accurately, especially if I had to do it out loud. Both Tommy and I were utterly incompetent at playing the little red-and-white plastic recorder called a flutophone.
There were very few activities, curricular or extracurricular, that either of us liked—other than leaving school and going home.
Unless looking at National Geographic counts as an extracurricular activity. They were shelved, strangely enough, in the hallway outside Mrs. Wright’s office, and I sat on the floor, sometimes with a friend or two, looking at them. When we were lucky, we found pictures of brown-skinned women with naked breasts, which always prompted little-boy giggles of embarrassment and titilation.