We Were Brothers

by Barry Moser

  And then he was gone.

  I have often wondered what that little boy was thinking when he walked along our stretch of Shallowford Road. I don’t know if he ever encountered Lady, who was rarely indoors or contained in any way, but if he did, he was apparently not afraid of her. Bob and Velma were proud of Lady, not only because she was a handsome dog, but also because she didn’t like black people—or so they said. Or so they thought. And apparently the black folks who had to walk past their house thought so, too, because when they approached the Cox house they crossed to the other side of the street and stepped lively.

  But if this little kid felt threatened by the dog he didn’t show it. He could have stayed at home where it was safe, but he didn’t. He could have taken the long way around our block, up and around on Haymore Street, but he didn’t. He chose to walk on the same side of the street as our houses and to risk Lady’s menace.

  And then one day he was there again, peering over the privet hedgerow. He ventured—cautiously—into our front yard and stood next to the forsythia bush for a few moments, watching, weighing his move. Then he hollered at us,

  “Hey! What y’all doin’ down there?”

  “Takin’ a shower bath. What’s it look like we doin’?”

  “Can I come play wit y’all?”

  Tommy and I looked at each other for a moment, not knowing what to say.

  “I dunno,” Tommy said. “Maybe. Lemme go ask Mother if it’s OK.”

  I just stood there looking at this little kid, and he just stood there looking at me. We were both six or seven years old. Maybe a little older. We said nothing to each other, just looked. Kicked a little at the grass. Spat. It wasn’t long before Tommy came out and told us that Mother said it would be OK, but that he couldn’t come in the house.

  So down to the side yard he came with us. Tommy and I had on bathing trunks but our new friend was fully dressed, so he took off his clothes, all except for his white underwear—a stunning contrast to his dark skin. He was not as sable skinned as Verneta, nor as light skinned as Arthur Boyd’s tailor, Nap Turner. I had never before seen a black person so close to being naked and I wanted to touch him, to feel the texture of his skin that looked soft and satin, like he had been powdered with cocoa, but I did not.

  We played until it was time for him to go home. As he was leaving Tommy hollered at him,

  “Say, what’s your name?”

  “Tommy. What’s yours.”

  “Tommy. He’s Barry.”

  Our new friend Tommy came back a few times that summer, and the summer to come. It wasn’t too long into that first summer when we had to make some distinction between the two Tommys. We all agreed that henceforth, little black Tommy would be called Nigger Tommy and that my brother would be just plain Tommy.

  Nigger Tommy was a very pleasant kid, happy and good looking, too. Mother liked him and was glad that he came to play. He was always clean and dressed as well as we did, maybe even better. Mother explained to us that his clothes must be hand-me-downs from white people, or else his mama or grandmama must make them for him.

  If Nigger Tommy was around at lunchtime, Mother made sandwiches and brought them out for the three of us to eat in the shade of the trees that bordered our little backyard. Mother would bring out a quilt or a chenille bedspread and smooth it out on the grass beneath her clotheslines. Sometimes she would set up a card table and bring out folding chairs for us. She brought us ice-cold Cokes or iced tea or sometimes freshly made lemonade. She made fried bologna sandwiches, or tuna salad, but usually it was peanut butter and jelly because my brother was such a picky eater, though I have to say that we were all pleased when she brought out Vienna sausages and saltine crackers.

  The other Tommy, c. 1947

  The three of us ate and laughed. Sometimes we laughed so hard that food and Coke spewed out our noses, and that just made us laugh all that much harder. We had fun, unaware that there were any differences between us other than the color of our skin and the fact that, as much as Mother liked the boy, he was the only one of our playmates who was never allowed in the house.

  Then one day in that second summer he went away and we never saw him again. There were no good-byes. No last waves. No information about where he was headed or with whom. He just disappeared from our lives as suddenly as he came into them.

  FAST-FORWARD TO DECEMBER 1962. Kay Richmond, a fellow student at the University of Chattanooga, and I were married. By the time we moved to New England in 1967, we had two small children, one of whom, Romy, was still in diapers and the older one, Cara, was barely out of hers. Our third daughter, Madeline, would come along a few years later.

  I was teaching school in Massachusetts and over Christmas break we drove back to Chattanooga to visit family, though my family had broken apart after Mother died in January 1964. Tommy was living outside Nashville with his young family. Daddy had remarried and was living on Lookout Mountain. Christmas get-togethers were now a thing of the past for our Shallowford Road family.

  In December 1969, Kay and I and the kids were home for Christmas and had a hankering for some honest-to-God barbeque, something that’s all but impossible to find in New England, so we drove over to the Sportsman’s Bar-B-Q Drive-In on Brainerd Road. I had been eating their sandwiches since I was a kid when their joint was out on Highway 58 just before you got to Lake Chickamauga.

  It was a warm evening despite being late December. The sun was going down as we pulled our Kombi bus in and found a parking spot. Kay was holding Romy, and Cara was playing in the back. I beeped the horn to get the attention of a carhop.

  A young black man about my age came over to the car to take our order. I recall that he looked a little like Cuba Gooding Jr.

  I don’t remember what Kay ordered, nor what we got the kids to eat, but I ordered what I almost always order: a pork sandwich with coleslaw and hot sauce, some beans on the side, and a tall glass of sweet tea with fresh lemon. As we waited for our food, we listened to Creedence Clearwater Revival, Neil Diamond, and Otis Redding playing on loud speakers. When the carhop brought our tray, it was balanced on one hand over his right shoulder and was overflowing with food and drinks—and a whole mess of napkins. I rolled the window up a few inches so he could anchor the tray over the glass.

  I parceled out the food and we ate.

  When we finished eating I beeped the horn and the carhop came to take away the tray. He hoisted it to his shoulder and turned to walk away. But then he stopped and turned back. He looked at me, adjusted the tray on his shoulder, and said, “You don’t remember me, do you, Mister Barry?”

  “No, I’m sorry. I don’t.” I answered.

  “I’m Nigger Tommy.”

  This is, in fact, the end of the story as I recall it. I’m certain that I didn’t just sit there like a knot on a log and say nothing, but I cannot imagine my responding with some kind of cordial inanity like,

  “Oh, hey, Tommy, how you been? What you been up to, buddy?”

  Given the way I feel about this story as I tell it today, I must have felt like I had just been punched in the gut. Tears well up every time I think about it, and I don’t think that I’m all that different today from who I was then. The primary reason I expatriated myself from the South in 1967 was to escape the racism around me. My family. My church. The private school where I taught. I didn’t have the personal, physical, or moral courage to go down to Alabama or Mississippi to help register voters, so I did the only thing I could. I left.

  I never saw Tommy again. Nor did my brother. Many years later we were talking on the phone and this story came up in our conversation. Tommy told me that he thought, or had heard, that our friend Tommy had gone to medical school somewhere and was now practicing medicine. I would like to believe this, and perhaps it is true. But my brother was an errant—and arrant—storyteller who made things up when he wasn’t privy to the facts or when the truth didn’t suit him. I can’t imagine why he would make up such a story, unless, as I came to find new layers
to my brother’s personality in our last years together, he was, like me, a recovering racist but never admitted it. Then again, perhaps he simply wished the very best for our childhood playmate of those summers long ago.

  A SUMMER DAY

  ON AN EARLY JUNE MORNING IN 1950, Aunt Grace’s old leghorn rooster woke me up. He might have awakened Tommy earlier in the morning because he was sleeping with a pillow over his head. It was a cool summer morning—a happy morning, too, because we were on summer vacation, and any morning that I didn’t have to go to school, vacation or not, was a happy morning. The air was clear as though there had been a hard rain during the night. The tall oak and black walnut trees growing alongside our house cast dark green, sun-dappled shadows over most of the dewy yard outside our windows where Tommy and I played. The chicken coop was on the far side of the yard in full morning sunshine. The white hens pecked and scratched at gravel, shit, and watermelon rinds, clucking all the while, and that cantankerous old rooster broadcast his authority to all in earshot.

  Our bedroom windows were thrown open to the cool morning air. Soft, early breezes wafted the sharp, pungent odor of walnut husks rotting on the ground into our room. Through the window screen, with my chin in my hands and my elbows on the windowsill, I watched yellow and black caterpillars on the trees, some as big as your thumb, going up and down about their silent business while that nasty old leghorn went noisily and self-importantly about his.

  My brother was thirteen that summer, old enough for Mother to trust him to take me downtown to see a movie and buy ten-cent hamburgers at the shiny white and stainless steel Krystal restaurant on the corner of Seventh and Cherry Streets. For thirty-five cents a person could get a cup of coffee and two tiny square hamburgers, a welcomed and affordable restorative at the beginning of the Great Depression. It is the oldest hamburger chain in the South. When I go back to Chattanooga I make it a point of eating a half dozen Krystal burgers in a single sitting, and I usually regret it.

  After lunch Tommy and I went to a matinee at the Tivoli or the State movie theaters. I don’t know what movie we saw this particular day but it was probably a Roy Rogers western or maybe an Abbott and Costello comedy. Mother gave us fare for the bus and money for hamburgers, the movie, and popcorn and candy.

  When the movie was over we always walked up to Martin-Thompson Sporting Goods on Cherry Street, catty-corner from the Krystal. That was where Daddy worked, and if he was in town in the afternoon we usually caught a ride home with him. Sometimes it was a couple of hours before Daddy was ready to go. When that was the case Tommy whiled away the time trying out the new baseball mitts and gloves and admiring the hunting gear, especially the rifles and shotguns. I’d go around the corner and stare at all the model airplanes in the window of the hobby shop on Seventh Street, or I’d go back to the stock room and tear off large pieces of brown Kraft paper and draw. If Albert or Harvey, the two black deliverymen who worked for the store, were around I’d sometimes sit and talk. Daddy said Albert was a high yellow nigger who was too uppity for his own good. Daddy didn’t approve of Albert’s penchant for snappy clothes, his cocky attitude, or his shiny hair that was straightened and kept in meticulous place with a stiff pomade. But Albert was nice to me and told me stories about himself and his family. He aspired to become a podiatrist.

  “Black folks always on they feet . . . you know what I mean, little man? Porters, conductors, maids, cooks. They always needin’ somebody to take care of their feet.”

  But this particular Saturday Daddy must have been on the road selling or delivering football equipment down on Sand Mountain, Alabama (where the black delivery men did not go, afraid that they might not come back if they did), so Tommy and I caught the Eastdale bus and headed home.

  It was hot and the bus was crowded. The seats in the front of the bus were all taken, so we stood, my brother hanging onto the overhead handrail and I, too short to reach the handrail, was hanging on to him. Every time the bus stopped and started I was thrown off balance and jostled against the other people who were hanging on to the handrail like Tommy was. We’d not gone far when I saw an empty seat at the back of the bus. It was directly beneath the rear windows and a sign that read, THIS PART OF THE CAR FOR THE COLORED RACE. The empty spot was in the middle of the bench between two rather large black women. I pulled away from Tommy and made my way to the back and sat down.

  One of the women was cooling herself with a cardboard fan that had a picture of Jesus on it . . . that 1941 Warner Sallman portrait of an Aryan Jesus that by then was making its saccharine way into every protestant church in America. Every now and again this woman’s fanning tempo picked up as she tilted her fan a little toward me, inconspicuously. The extra little breeze was cool and welcomed. So was her smile.

  Tommy was glaring at me as he clung on to the handrail with one hand. His free hand gestured what his lips were silently ordering me to do,

  “Get your fat ass back up here with me, you little shit! Get it up here—NOW!”

  When Tommy got really mad his eyes changed color, from the hazel color we shared, to a sour, yellow-brown like the color of the Beech-Nut tobacco juice Daddy spat. Tommy’s anger made his bad eye worse, causing it to cross and to squint. I saw the fury in those eyes of his ordering me to get off my ass and come stand with him. But I did not. I stayed where I was because I was perfectly happy wedged comfortably between two big women, my feet dangling, not quite reaching the floor.

  When the bus turned west off Tunnel Boulevard and onto Shallowford Road Tommy reached across and pulled the cord that rang the bell letting the driver know he wanted to get off at the next stop. In the few moments it took us to reach our stop, I considered not getting off at all. I was afraid of Tommy when he got mad, and I could just as easily get off at the next stop since it was only a short block farther up the road, right in front of Velma’s house. I could have avoided my brother altogether had I done that. I could have gone in and visited with Velma for a while before going home. For all I knew Mother might have been visiting, as she often did, sitting out on the big screened-in front porch sipping iced tea and shelling peas or stringing beans.

  When the bus stopped Tommy got off at the front. I got off at the back. The doors were sliding shut when he hit me. A right to my head. He hit me again as I was falling to the hot pavement. I sprawled into gravel and dusty grass, bleeding from my nose and mouth. Then he kicked me. I curled up in a ball and he kicked me again. And again. Through the ringing in my ears I heard him say,

  “Don’t you never sit with niggers again, you hear me, you little morphadite? You hear me? DO YOU HEAR ME?”

  I lay whimpering, and did not answer him.

  Then THUD! Another kick.

  When he turned and walked away, I saw—through squinted eyes and tears—that his fists were still balled up. I sat up, tasting the iron of my blood mingling with the salt of my tears and the smells of hot summer tar and the diesel exhaust of the bus pulling away.

  I heard Tommy whistle for our dog. Like nothing had happened.

  KLAVALCADE

  I NEVER HEARD THE R IN Verneta’s name when I was a child. What I heard was V’nita—with a long e sound—and to this day when I say her name I pronounce it as I heard it when I was a little boy. The friendship between her and Mother never diminished over the years. In the privacy of our living room or sitting at the kitchen table they were equals and my mother treated her as such. Verneta called Mother “Billie” and Billie called Verneta “V’nita,” just like everybody else did, even my brother and I. In the cooler months they sat and drank coffee; in the summer months they sat on the screened-in front porch and drank iced tea. I wish that I had listened to their conversations and could remember what they talked about, but I did not. I do remember that they got into arguments sometimes, but it never got heated and they never got angry with one another. I never heard Mother say, as she did to Tommy and me,

  “Now you listen to me. . . .”

  On the other hand, if there was a car i
n our driveway that Verneta didn’t recognize, or if she knew that there was a stranger visiting—a preacher, say, or maybe a salesman trying to sell Mother a new vacuum cleaner, or a Christian Science practitioner, Verneta would go to the back door and knock. She waited politely for “Miss Billie” to come let her in. She would not sit, nor was she invited to sit. In front of white company, Verneta would neither argue nor disagree with anything my mother said. It was always,

  “Yes’m, Miss Billie” or “No’m, Miss Wilhelmina.”

  509 Shallowford Road, c. 1958

  ONE SUMMER NIGHT IN 1957, Verneta did come to the front door while Mother and Daddy had company. They were playing canasta with family and friends and debating whether or not Jesus was really a Jew—the consensus among them was that he was not—according to Mother he was just a “dark, Mediterranean type.”

  Tommy, now a twenty-year-old with a red MG convertible and an endocrine system raging at full throttle, was out on a date with a woman named Maxine, who worked for our cousin Wayland and was ten years older than Tommy. We didn’t see much of my Tom-catting brother in those days.

  The living room windows and the door that opened to the front porch were propped open to let out the cigar and cigarette smoke, and to let in some fresh air. An old reciprocating fan grumbled on the floor and kept the smoky air circulating. The screen door of the porch was latched tight to keep out mosquitoes and moths. Lightning bugs blinked on and off in the front yard.

  The quiet laziness of the card game conversation was suddenly interrupted by noise from the street. The Ku Klux Klan was parading up Shallowford Road in a “klavalcade,” the term Klansmen use for a convoy of their cars and trucks, fond as they are of alliteration. It was a show of presence and power that typically preceded a cross burning somewhere. Everybody put down their cards and went out on the front porch to watch and wonder aloud where them good ol’ boys there were goin’ to go burn their cross that night. Somebody said,