Same Kind of Different As Me

by Ron Hall

  It wadn’t just the grown folks that put up a wall between white folks and colored folks, neither. Years later, I heard about one time in South Carolina ’bout five or six white boys used to walk to school together. Ever day, they had to get acrossed a creek tucked down there in a little shady patch of woods. Now that creek was on the way to the colored school, too, and one day the white boys decided they didn’t think it was right for the Negroes to cross the creek on the same foot logs they did. So they laid theirselves an ambush. They picked up sticks and old pieces of wood and lined up on them foot logs to wait for the colored children to come walkin along.

  “These here logs belong to the whites!” hollered one bully-boy when the colored children come up on the creek. “If you niggers want to get acrossed, you gon’ have to wade the water!”

  Well, the colored children wadn’t havin that, and a shootin war commenced with sticks and rocks just a-flyin. The sorry thing was, them white boys was victorious: They pitched enough rocks to win the foot logs, and them colored kids had to wade the water to get to school.

  I didn’t hear ’bout that story till I was growed, but I still felt sorry for them kids. Not so much about walkin to school in wet britches as ’cause I know what it’s like to get beat down for bein born with different-colored skin. And I know what it’s like to walk around with my eyes down low to keep it from happenin again.

  That’s what I did after the draggin.

  I was maybe fifteen, sixteen years old, walkin down the road that passed by the front of the plantation, on my way back from my auntie’s house. That’s when I seen that white lady beside her blue Ford sedan. She was bendin down a little, peekin up under the back side a’ the car, but kinda ladylike, tryin to keep her white skirt outta the dirt. Her hat was white, too, a little one, just big enough to cover the top of her head, with a brown rib-bon around it, like a stripe of chocolate. Like I told you before, she was dressed up like maybe she’d been to town.

  I asked her if she needed any help, and she said yes. I took the jack outta the trunk and set it down under the car, pickin out as firm a spot as I could find. I cranked the jack handle around and the car swayed, inchin up enough to where I could get the tire off.

  I was just puttin the lug nuts back on when them three boys rode outta the woods and asked the lady did she need any help. ’Course, the redheaded fella with the big teeth was the one that first spotted me and called me a nigger. And the next thing I knew, I had a rope squeezed tight around my neck and black terror slitherin through my belly like a water moccasin.

  “We gon’ teach you a lesson about botherin white ladies,” said the one holdin the rope.

  ’Cept I hadn’t been botherin her, just fixin her tire. But she didn’t volunteer no other story, and I didn’t say nothin ’cause for sure they wadn’t gon’ be believin me. I figured if I spoke, it would just add to my troubles.

  I kept an eye on the boy with the rope, and when he lashed it to his saddle, I knowed what was comin and got real scared. With both hands, I reached up to try to get the rope loose. That’s when they snapped their reins and took off just a-laughin.

  The horses trotted at first, goin slow enough for me to run. I was stumblin along behind, my hands still graspin at the noose and me tryin to keep my feet under me. The horses was only maybe ten feet in front of me, and I could hear their feet beatin the dirt. The dust stung my eyes. I could taste it.

  Then I heard a whoop and a holler. My feet flew out from under me and I crashed down in the dirt, my knees and elbows skiddin down the road. The horses pounded and pounded and I held on to the noose like a steerin wheel, tryin to pry my fingers inside of it to keep the noose from closin in tighter. The dirt was blindin me and chokin me. My shirtsleeves and the knees of my britches tore away, then my skin peeled back like a rabbit ready for the skillet. I couldn’t hear no more laughin, just the terrible thunder of them horses draggin me down to die.

  I expect I would a’ died if Bobby and his aunt, the Man’s wife from the other plantation, hadn’t been drivin down the road right then. I’d about blacked out by that time, and I don’t really remember too much of what happened next. I just know the draggin all of a sudden stopped. I peeked through my eyes, which had swoll up to slits and seen Bobby’s aunt standin in the road pointin a shotgun at them boys on horses.

  “Cut him loose!” she hollered. I felt the noose go slack and seen the raggedy end of the rope fall to the ground like a snake with the evil gone out of it. Then I heard them boys ride off laughin.

  Bobby and his aunt hustled me into their car and drove me to my auntie’s house. She tended to me with her roots and potions, slatherin a paste on my eyes to ease the swellin. I stayed in her bed a week till the swellin went down and I could see good again. Took about that long for my skin to scab over so I could put on pants and a shirt.

  I knowed who done it. And I figured their daddies was in the Klan. But in Red River Parish, colored men had learned it was better to keep their mouths shut than tell what they know, ’less they wanted worse things to happen to their family, like maybe wakin up in the middle of the night with the house on fire.

  Lookin back, I figure what them boys done caused me to get a little throwed off in life. And for sure I wadn’t gon’ be offerin to help no white ladies no more.

  11

  The first time I saw Deborah, I began plotting to steal her. Not for myself at first, but for Sigma Chi, the fraternity I pledged after transferring from East Texas State to TCU as a sophomore. It was the spring of 1965, and I was on academic probation. Deborah, meanwhile, was a sophomore on an academic scholarship, and by the time I met her was also a Tri Delt sorority girl and a “sweetheart” of Delta Tau Delta, our rival fraternity. I planned to make her a Sigma Chi sweetheart, a little inter-frat coup that carried with it the novel perk of adding an intellectual girl to our table at the Student Union.

  Deborah grew up in Snyder, a tumbleweed-tossed West Texas town so flat you could stand on a cow chip and see New Mexico. It’s an everybody-knows- your-business place where schoolchildren dream of traveling to exotic places like Lubbock or Abilene. Nothing green grows there outside the produce section at the Piggly Wiggly. Snyder is also the last recorded place a human ever laid eyes on a white buffalo, and today a giant plaster one keeps watch over the courthouse in the town square.

  Deborah has two sisters: Gretchen, a former runner-up in the Miss Snyder beauty pageant; and Daphene, who is Deborah’s twin only by virtue of the fact that the two were born on the same day. Tall and voluptuous, young Daphene grew up a party girl who never met a boy she didn’t like or a book that she did. Deborah, meanwhile, was her opposite: a bookworm and as neat as a preacher’s wife on Sunday. As a teenager, Deborah had the figure of a drinking straw and, being on the shy side, stuffed her mouth full of popcorn to keep the boys from kissing her at the picture show. But with dark hair and eyes upturned at the corners, she was very pretty and spoke with a soft Texas lilt, perfectly pitched, like a Southern aristocrat.

  It was with this weapon that she first snared me. One warm fall night in 1966, Sigma Chi was gearing up for a “woodsy,” an informal event in which the fraternity trooped into the woods, hauled in coolers full of iced-down beer, and made out with their dates.

  Only I didn’t have a date, a fact I had been sharing with my friend Glenn Whittington when Deborah walked into the Student Union.

  Glenn was the guy everybody loves—funny, affable, the perpetual match-maker. Spotting Deborah, he waved her over to our table. After some preliminary chitchat, he dived right in: “Deborah, do you know my friend Ron? He needs a date tonight for a woodsy.”

  Deborah drilled Glenn with a stare. “If your friend wants to date me,” she announced in that uncompromising way of proud Southern women, “he can call me.” Then she spun on her penny loafer and marched away. Never even glanced my way.

  Now, up to that point, I had been into rich blonde party girls endowed with the assets necessary for the moment. I had never been w
ith someone on an academic scholarship, someone who had actually studied for a test. This intrigued me. Plus, she was very, very pretty. I called her the next day.

  She agreed to go to the woodsy with me, though we didn’t make out. I learned that she had just broken up with her boyfriend, a Delta Tau Delta hunk named Frank. But by the following Monday, she’d gotten back together with him. I didn’t take it personally, and we made a deal: Next time she broke up with him, she’d call me. A couple of weeks later she did.

  We went out again on a Friday night. By the next Monday, she was back with Frank. This went on for weeks—she’d break up with him and call me for a weekend date. Then, by Monday, they’d reunite. You might think these capitulations would bruise my ego, but Deborah and I were really more friends than anything else. We thought the whole arrangement was hysterically funny.

  Our punctuated dating ended, though, in the spring of my senior year when I tore open an official-looking envelope to find an invitation to the Vietnam War. That led me to boot camp in Fort Polk, Louisiana; then to Albuquerque, where I smoked marijuana once and woke up next to a fat girl; and then, ultimately, to permanent duty at Fort Carson, Colorado.

  Just after I left Fort Polk, I narrowly missed assignment as a rifleman in a ground unit bound for the demilitarized zone. I had just completed basic and advanced infantry training and found myself bivouacked with twenty-five thousand other freshly minted soldiers on an airfield in Colorado Springs.

  “Hall! Ronald R.!” a razor-sharp second lieutenant barked. “Grab your gear and get aboard.” He pointed at one in a long string of military transport jets that I knew were headed straight to the shooting war.

  But for some reason he asked me a few questions, and when he found out I had three and a half years of college, he reassigned me.

  “I’ve got good news and bad news,” he said. “The good news is, there’s an opening in nuclear weapons support in Albuquerque. The bad news is, you have to qualify for a top secret security clearance. If you don’t, I’ll put your butt on a plane just like that one.”

  I swore to the lieutenant that my record was clean. He shipped me off to Albuquerque, where I got the top secret clearance. Of course, I probably wouldn’t have if the army had known I’d wind up smoking marijuana with a fat girl.

  During my two-year army hitch, Deborah and I exchanged a few letters. Nothing purple and steamy, just keeping in touch the way people did before e-mail and free long distance. In December 1968, my tour complete, I headed back to Texas to finish my degree in night school. To earn money, I landed a job peddling Campbell’s Soup to grocery store managers. I hated walking into the Piggly Wiggly wearing a three-piece suit and carrying a feather duster. In addition to lobbying managers to increase shelf space for oddball products like giblet gravy, it was my job to whisk the dirt off slow movers like green-pea soup.

  I called Deborah just to say hi. She reeled off two years’ worth of TCU’s social history—who’d dropped out, who’d graduated, and of course, who got married. In those days, girls lined up husbands by their senior year and, if all went well, married them by spring semester. I had always thought Tri Delt sisters were the prettiest girls on campus. Jokingly I asked Deborah, “Are there any Tri Delts who aren’t married yet?”

  “Just me,” she said. “And I have gotten so cute. You’re just going to love me.”

  She was right. Gone was the pretty, slightly pugnacious scholarship student I’d taken to the woodsy. In her place was a gorgeous, educated woman, confident and full of fun. We started dating, and within a month had stopped dating anyone but each other.

  In the spring of 1969, Deborah returned from the wedding of a college friend in San Antonio and told me, “Everybody down there thinks you and I should get married.”

  I smiled. “What do you think?”

  “I think we should, too.”

  “Well, why don’t we?”

  “You have to ask me first.”

  I gave her a kiss and told her I’d work on it.

  In July, my father loaned me money to buy a ring. But I didn’t know how to propose and groused out loud to my roommate, Kelly Adams, about my dilemma.

  “You want me to propose for you?” he asked.

  If it worked for Cyrano de Bergerac, I reasoned, I might as well give it a whirl. I gave Kelly the ring and we went to visit Deborah at her apartment, the three of us clustered in her living room in an awkward circle.

  “Ronnie’s got something he wants to ask you,” Kelly said to Deborah, handing over the ring. “He wants to know if you’ll marry him.”

  Deborah rolled her eyes. “Maybe he should ask me?”

  I grinned. “Well, will you?”

  She should have told me to go back out and come in again. Instead, she said yes. “By the way,” she added. “That was about the worst proposal I have ever heard.”

  We married in October 1969, and Deborah went to work teaching elementary school, while I entered the world of investment banking. I finished my degree in night school, then stayed on another year and earned an MBA. By 1971, I’d begun buying and selling paintings as a sideline. Two years later, our daughter, Regan, was born.

  By 1975, the year before our son, Carson, was born, I was earning twice as much selling art as I was making as a banker. So I began to look for reasons to strike out on my own. It wasn’t long before a reason arrived in the form of The Signal, a work by Charles Russell, the noted painter of Western art. In 1910, as a wedding gift, Russell had given the painting to the Crowfoots, a prominent Montana family whose descendants later settled in Puerto Rico. Through a contact in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I learned that a Crowfoot heir was interested in selling.

  From my office at the bank, I telephoned Mr. Crowfoot in San Juan and told him I would like to buy his painting. But I was far too busy to fly to Puerto Rico, I explained, and helped him see the wisdom of traveling to Texas and bringing his heirloom with him. The truth was that while I was doing better than some men my age, I could neither afford to buy a plane ticket to San Juan nor take time off from my day job.

  So Mr. Crowfoot flew to Fort Worth where I showered him with Texas hospitality, which meant big steaks and lots of liquor. By dessert, he’d agreed to sell me the Russell for $28,000. Not only that, he said he’d leave the painting in my care and allow me to delay payment for ninety days. It was an incredible opportunity, my first chance to turn a five-figure profit. I marked up the price on The Signal to $40,000 and started searching for a buyer.

  But three months passes quickly when you’re holding a ninety-day note. After forty-five days streaked by, I started to sweat. Then I had an idea: On day forty-six, with no actual prospects in mind, I drove to the airport and bought a ticket to Los Angeles. From the departure gate, I called in sick to the bank, connecting with my boss just as my boarding call blared over the PA.

  After touching down at LAX, I paid five bucks for a rental car and asked the counter girl to point me toward Beverly Hills. A short trip on I-5 led me to Sunset Boulevard, where I glided off the freeway and into the rarified land of palm trees, high walls, and mansions. Winding through the famous avenue’s shady curves, I popped out near Rodeo Drive, an art gallery mecca. Carrying the Russell under my arm, I walked into the first gallery I found and offered The Signal for sale.

  Not interested, they told me. But they had a client who might be, and they called a Mr. Barney Goldberg to say I was on my way over with something he was going to like. Mr. Goldberg didn’t live far away and, unexpectedly, he didn’t live in a mansion. But his large hacienda-style home still looked like money. The moment I stepped onto the porch, the door swung open.

  “Poopsie!” gushed a six-foot bald man who looked exactly like a cross between Gene Autry, Liberace, and Moshe Dayan. The man thrust out diamond-laden hands and wrapped me in a bear hug as though I were long-lost kin.

  “No, sir,” I said, shaking my head, “I’m not Poopsie. I’m Ron Hall.”

  “No, you are not!” he scolded like a doting
aunt insisting that a full child take a second helping of pie. “You’re Poopsie! And you can call me Snookems!”

  While he was saying this, I took in his glittering ensemble: Strapped around his head behind gold aviator sunglasses, Mr. Goldberg wore a black patch over his left eye, and below that, a pearl-snap cowboy shirt and jeans, white-python-skin cockroach-killer boots with gold tips and heel ornaments, and a solid gold, buffalo-shaped belt buckle with rubies for eyes and diamonds everywhere else. A diamond of at least three carats rode every one of his fingers except for his ring fingers—he wore ten carats on each of those.

  Mr. Goldberg—Snookems—ushered me into his manly, lodgelike home, where collections of antique firearms, cowboy memorabilia, and Navajo blankets dressed every space. But it was his walls that most interested me: Every one was covered floor-to-ceiling with high-end Western art: Remingtons, Boreins, and . . . Russells.

  I’m saved, I thought, mentally writing Mr. Crowfoot a check. I was certain Snookems was a prime buyer for The Signal. After my impromptu tour of his home, he invited me to enjoy a glass of wine before lunch—way before lunch. I practically sat on the edge of my seat waiting for him to make an offer on the Russell.

  He took a sip of wine and began: “As you can see,” he said, gesturing toward his art-laden walls, “I don’t need this little thing you’ve brought.”

  My heart plunged into my stomach.

  “But you are such a sweetie pie . . . ,” he went on, “that I’m going to sell your Russell to one of my buddies and send you the money!”

  Snookems beamed excitedly, as if he’d just offered to sell me Tahiti for a dollar. But since I had no other prospects, I accepted his offer. We never did have lunch, just more wine, as we hashed out the vague outlines of a deal. I stressed to him that I had to have the money in forty-four days, or else Mr. Crowfoot would come hunting for my scalp.