The Struggles of Johnny Cannon

by Isaiah Campbell

  She sighed and stared at Ma’s gravestone another couple of seconds, then she looked back at me. Her cheeks was wet.

  “I can’t. I’m moving away. That’s why I came out here to see you,” she said, and I forgot what I was saying.

  “You’re what?”

  “Moving. My mom and I. We’re leaving Cullman. Leaving Alabama.”

  It felt like I got punched in the gut.

  “What do you mean? Where you going?”

  “Mrs. Buttke’s son offered my mom a job at his hospital in Detroit. And, since my dad sent up the divorce papers, she’s decided to take the position.”

  All of a sudden, everything around us got darker and uglier. All of a sudden, I felt like I was in a cemetery.

  “But, I come here and tell my ma stories, all these stories. And you’re—” I swallowed real hard. “You’re the girl in my stories. I need you to be the girl in my stories.”

  Her eyes started watering up real bad.

  “No, Johnny, I need to be the girl in my own stories.” She grabbed me and gave me a hug. “I’m sorry. We’re leaving now. Please tell Willie I said good-bye.”

  “You ain’t going to tell him?”

  “No, I can’t. It’s too—I can’t. Please, just tell him, okay?”

  I nodded, she hugged me again, and then she walked away.

  She got ten steps off before she stopped. She came running back to me.

  “I almost forgot,” she said.

  Then she kissed me.

  Right on the lips.

  All the blood in my entire body went straight to my feet and I felt like I might pass out. She let go of me and I couldn’t wipe the goofiest grin of my life off my mouth.

  “There,” she said. “Operation Happy Ending is accomplished.”

  My brain started sounding the fire alarms.

  “Wait, you knew?”

  “I’m a girl,” she said. “We always know.”

  She turned and ran back to the car. Mrs. Macker honked and waved to me, and then they drove on down the road. Just like that.

  After a bit, I told Ma I’d see her later. I went and got into the truck and drove on up to the Parkinses’ house, where Pa and Sora was waiting for me with Tammy Jane.

  Everybody was real happy when I walked into the living room. Short-Guy was down there too. He was in the kitchen with Mrs. Parkins and she was teaching him how to make cornbread. Apparently that girl of his, Marge, really loved cornbread, so he wanted to surprise her when he saw her again. Plus it’d be good to take with us fishing.

  As soon as I walked in, Willie started talking ninety miles an hour.

  “Hey, guess what just happened? Bob Gorman called, and you know how he’s been in my dad’s fan club ever since the explosion? Well, Bob decided that it was about time Cullman had some diversity, and he’d rather it be ‘a colored man he can trust,’ so he’s going to run a joint campaign with him running for sheriff and my dad running for county commissioner.”

  Dang, it was a whole day of shocking news. It had already been weird seeing Bob acting like a new man, swearing he’d never lay another finger on Eddie again and that he reckoned Reverend Parkins was the finest man that ever walked the earth, a real exception to the “colored epidemic” or whatever. But this? This was mind-boggling.

  “Wow,” I said. “So does that mean—”

  “We ain’t going to move!” he said. “Which means you and me and Martha can keep on being friends forever.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, since it made me real happy and real sad at the same time.

  “Of course, Bull Connor pulled his endorsement of Bob when he heard about it, but still,” Willie said. Then he saw my face. “Wait, what’s wrong?”

  I told him about Martha moving, and he went from happy to sad maybe even harder than I had.

  “That messes up everything,” he said. I thought he might be about to cry.

  “Not quite everything,” I said, trying to find a happy side. “She did kiss me at the graveyard, so Operation Happy Ending worked out.”

  “She—she kissed you?” he asked. He looked even worse off at that.

  “Yeah, and it was real nice, even though I reckon it didn’t mean much to her,” I said. Then my brain started working and I had one of them eureka moments like what Archimedes had in the bathtub back in the third century before Jesus was born.

  “Wait, are you ate up over Martha?” I asked.

  “Well, yeah, I’m sad she’s leaving,” he said. His lip looked like it wanted to tremble but he was holding it back.

  “No, that ain’t what I mean. Did Cupid get you in the butt with one of his arrows for her?”

  “Look, that don’t matter,” he said. “She’s your girl, and—”

  “No she ain’t. She told me that herself.”

  He blinked a couple of times when I said that and I thought he might have almost smiled, but then he remembered that she was moving.

  “Well, anyway, I’m your guy, so I ain’t ate up over her.”

  He refused to talk any more about it. We sat down to wait for the cornbread so we could get going. But, after a little bit, the Mackers’ car pulled into the driveway and Mrs. Macker walked up to the door. Mrs. Parkins came out of the kitchen and answered it.

  After some quick greetings between them, Mrs. Macker told the news to Mrs. Parkins and to everybody else, which led to a whole mess of hugging and some tears and such. Then Mrs. Macker asked if she could write down the Parkinses’ address and phone number, in case she needed any mail or something, since she wasn’t yet sure of where they’d be living up in Detroit.

  The whole time they was talking, Willie was looking out the window. He was staring at Martha, who was sitting in the car. I went over next to him.

  “Go out there and talk to her,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Ain’t nothing much to say. We’re just friends.”

  I socked him in the shoulder for being stupid, ’cause that’s what blood brothers is supposed to do.

  “You’re ate up over her. And I have a feeling that she feels close to the same about you. So go talk to her.”

  “No, it ain’t right,” he said. “I’m your guy.”

  I remembered what Martha had said in the cemetery.

  “Maybe it’s about time you be your own guy for once,” I said. “And get out there. Or I swear I will kick your butt, crippled or not.”

  It took him a second, but he finally agreed. I watched through the window as he made his way over to her door. She got out of the car and he started talking. Then he started crying. Then she started crying.

  And then she grabbed him by the face and they kissed.

  And it sure looked like she enjoyed it a heck of a lot more than the kiss she’d given to me.

  Part of me was real happy for them. Like, maybe about a quarter of me was. The other parts of me was hurt real bad. Watching the girl you’re hung up on get tangled up with somebody else is bad. Watching her get in with your blood brother is torture. But I wasn’t about to cry. No sir, not going to let that happen.

  Dadgummit, my eyes started leaking.

  Thank goodness Short-Guy didn’t know how to cook to save his life, ’cause he started burning the cornbread and tried to pull it out, but he forgot the oven mitts, and so he screamed something fierce. Mrs. Parkins ran in to help him out, but he didn’t stop his screaming. He screamed more than he had when he’d gotten shot in the gut.

  Woke up Tammy Jane, too. She started crying, which made me stop.

  Sora went and grabbed her and pulled out the bottle. Then she saw my eyes and handed my sister to me. I put the bottle in that little girl’s mouth and watched her as she started eating. The sparkle in her eyes and the little grunts she was making started to do what Willie always tried to do, it made me forget about my problems.

  I glanced back out at Willie and Martha, they was hugging on each other now. Then I looked back at Tammy Jane.

  “I reckon you’re the girl in my
stories now, ain’t you?” I asked.

  Pa came over to me. “So, Martha’s leaving. You going to be okay?”

  I kept on looking at Tammy Jane’s face. “Yeah. I’m going to be fine.”

  “You sure?”

  I shrugged. Then Tammy Jane pooped. Seemed about right.

  After a little while, Carlos’s truck pulled around Willie and Martha and he hopped out and ran in. He scanned the room real fast and landed on me.

  “Chico, are you busy?” he asked. Then he looked out and saw Willie and Martha a-hugging away, and Tammy Jane still pooping away, and me trying my best to look away from it all ’cause I wasn’t about to let myself end my day with a bout of crying. “Ah, you are busy, but you’d prefer to be distracted, yes?”

  I nodded and snorted up them tears that was working their way down my nose pipes.

  “Then you should come with me.”

  I didn’t put up no arguing, especially ’cause folks was finally noticing Tammy Jane’s odor and they probably was about to expect me to change her, which really ain’t exactly up my alley at all. I handed her off to Pa, ran out and hopped in the passenger door of his truck, and we took off down the road.

  We was quiet for a bit, which I was glad for, ’cause I sure didn’t feel like talking.

  “Is all okay?” Carlos said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I’m just really learning some hard lessons for my life.”

  “Such as?”

  I sighed. “Like that there ain’t no happy endings. Not a darn one of them.”

  He waited for me to go on, but like I said, I wasn’t down for talking. So he turned on the radio to the only Spanish station there was in the entire South, and we listened as it faded in and out with trumpets blowing and fellas squalling and the occasional guitar playing a tune. It was all punctuated with static and noise, sort of like how my life was, and so I didn’t complain none.

  We drove for a good while, outside of Cullman County and on down to Birmingham, straight to the Greyhound bus station.

  We got out and we went over and sat on a bench. Still not saying much at all. Finally even I got tired of the quiet.

  “So, what are we doing here?” I asked.

  “Do you remember me telling you about Operation Pedro Pan?”

  I did. It was back when we was finding our way out of Havana and we’d seen an airplane getting ready to head back to America. He’d told me that there was a priest in America that was arranging for kids from Cuba to get sent on up to the States for safekeeping. Operation Pedro Pan was the name of it all, and it was doing pretty good at flying under everybody’s radar.

  The bus came around the bend and pulled into the station.

  “Well,” he said, “I think you’re about to learn something about happy endings.”

  I didn’t get no chance to answer him before the bus pulled up and the doors opened and folks all started pouring out. Carlos stood up, so I did too.

  We was watching the folk as they came off the bus, all of them looking tired and wore out and not a single one of them looking like the ending of the trip they’d just had was a happy one. I reckoned maybe that was the lesson.

  I was wrong.

  ’Cause after all them folks came off the bus, there was a lull in the traffic, and then another person came off.

  She was brown skinned, just like Carlos, and her eyes had the color that firewood gets right before it catches. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but it still made sure you noticed it and said “wow.”

  She looked around until she spied Carlos. When she did, she smiled.

  And that’s when I learned the lesson.

  See, her smile wasn’t like no other smile I’d ever seen before in my entire life. You could search a million art museums, dig through a thousand magazines, or watch every movie that’s ever been made, and there ain’t no chance you’d find a smile like hers. I halfway wished Mrs. Macker was around with one of them defibrillators, ’cause I swear my heart plumb stopped. Then it started again, all its own, but beating a different tune for the first time in forever.

  ’Cause that’s the deal about happy endings. They don’t exist. But there is something that does.

  Happy beginnings. Those are the best thing in the world.

  While I was standing there with my jaw dangling down around my ankles, she came over to us and gave Carlos a hug.

  “Primo!” she said, which is Spanish for cousin.

  He picked her up and swung her around. Then he set her down and pointed her toward me.

  “Here’s someone I want you to meet,” he said to her. “This is Johnny Cannon. Johnny, this is my little cousin, Caridad.”

  She held out her hand to me.

  “You can call me Cari.”

  I shook it and I’m pretty sure she could feel my pulse pounding through my fingers.

  “Johnny?” Carlos said. He nudged me with his elbow. “Do you have anything to say?”

  I stammered for a bit, but then I got my footing. This wasn’t like how it’d been with Martha. Not even for a second.

  “Yeah,” I said. “How do you feel about fishing?”

  Her smile got even wider. Which was all the evidence I’ve ever needed that there really is a Good Lord up in the heavens.

  “That’s not the question to ask,” she said with a Cuban accent that probably made even her cusswords sound good. “The real question is, how do you feel about a girl that can fish better than you?”

  Now I was the one grinning.

  “Cari, I ain’t going to lie. I reckon this is the start of something real good.”

  And let me tell you, I was more right than I could have dreamed.

  Johnny Cannon

  November 13, 1961

  Biography Project

  Well, Mr. Braswell, this here’s my biography project, as you can tell ’cause I put it right up there in the title of it so you’d know what it is for sure. And I reckon you’re going to give me an A on it, for reasons I’ll tell you down there at the end. Just you wait, it’s a humdinger.

  I decided to pick somebody for this biography project that you don’t get to hear about nearly as much as you should, and who deserves a lot more credit than they get for all the things they’ve done.

  I’m writing this here biography on the American Woman.

  She was born, I reckon, back in 1620, when Mary Winslow, who was only about the same age I am, stepped off the Mayflower and became the first woman settler to the New World. She didn’t have an easy time of it, though, which you’re going to see is sort of a theme of this whole biography. Mary Winslow’s pa died on the boat before they got off and her ma died in the horrible winter they had to endure. But I reckon that’s sort of fitting for the beginning of this story, ’cause if there’s one thing that’s a fact about the American Woman, it’s that she has a tendency to shine through the worst challenges a body can face.

  Of course, Mary Winslow wasn’t the only woman on the Mayflower, and she sure wasn’t the only woman that came to settle the New World. But all them women had it real hard, especially the ones that would come over later. Since a lot of folks reckoned the new frontier was more of a man’s place, a lot of the women that came had to be servants and slaves just to get passage from England. But they did it, no matter the cost. That’s another theme you’ll see in this biography.

  Of course, there was already some women that lived on this spot of land we call America, the natives. And from Pocahontas with the settlers to Sacagawea with Lewis and Clark, they worked to adapt and interact with the folks that wasn’t like themselves, all ’cause they realized that, for the most part, them white folk wouldn’t survive without their help. Heck, Pocahontas married John Rolfe and made even the most racist fella get all romantic about a mixed marriage. And that’s something. That’s the American Woman.

  Of course, there’s women we’ve all heard about, especially from the Revolutionary War, like Martha Washington or Betsy Ross. But what I’ve started realizing
is that we hear more about them ’cause us menfolk like how they sort of fit into the mold of what we think a woman ought to be, sewing by the fire or making Martha Washington candy.

  But you never hear about Deborah Sampson, who cut her hair and called herself Robert Shurtleff, or about Ann Bailey, who did the same and went by Sam Gay. They both enlisted into the Continental Army and fought alongside them musket men we always hear about. In fact, Ann Bailey got promoted all the way up to being a corporal before they figured out she was a woman. Then they threw her in jail. For being a woman.

  See, that’s the amazing thing about the American Woman. Even though the whole society made it seem like they wasn’t wanted or wasn’t needed—’cause they wasn’t allowed to vote, wasn’t allowed very often to choose who they’d marry, or whether or not they wanted to have babies, or any of that stuff—those women still fought for freedom. Fought for the right to be an American Woman.

  The best examples of that are the women who was slaves, like Harriet Tubman. Did you know that, after she escaped from the South to the North for her freedom, she turned right back around and snuck back down to start helping other slaves find their freedom too? Not only that, but during the Civil War, she was a spy for the Yankees and helped Colonel Montgomery capture Jacksonville, down in Florida. All the while there was folks that didn’t believe she ought to be doing that stuff. And not just ’cause she was black, though that was part of it. ’Cause she was a woman.

  But she didn’t care. ’Cause she was an American Woman.

  The American Woman really started flexing her muscles after that, ’cause she started seeing that the only way to change society was to make her voice be heard. And it wasn’t enough to whisper her thoughts to her husband for him to speak it from the pulpit or whatever. She deserved to be heard on her own.

  Take Susan B. Anthony, for example. She was one of them that was fighting to get rid of slavery before the Civil War, and then after that, she started fighting for the chains of society to be taken off of women. She got arrested for voting, which sounds crazy these days, but back then men was real scared of women with power. I reckon they still are. Anyway, she helped start the suffrage movement in hopes to give women more rights, especially the right to vote. She wouldn’t get to see that right come before she died, though. But that’s the thing about the American Woman. She never stops fighting, even if she knows she won’t get to see the victory.