by Rick Bragg
Our daddy came home almost every evening and we sat around a table and ate supper. I can remember him holding three-year-old Mark on his lap, trying to get him to eat off his plate, remember how the food got in his hair and his son’s hair, how my momma would run over, wiping, fussing, and my daddy laughing and laughing and laughing. It was nice, like I said, to hear that deep voice laugh.
I remember him sitting in the living room with a cigarette in his thin fingers, talking about living, about life. He talked of life beyond cotton fields and Goodwill stores and commodity cheese.
I guess he was trying, to be a daddy, a husband. But even at six years old I knew not to count on him, believe in him. I walked around him like he was a sleeping dog, afraid every minute that he would wake up and bite me. But the weeks turned into months, and still the demons in him were quiet, till the summer vanished into fall and the giant oaks around that giant house began to burn with orange, yellow and red.
Sam and I grew less and less afraid of the house. We climbed the stairs and slid down the bannister until Momma hollered at us to quit or she would whup us, which was an empty threat if ever there was one. We even dragged her up there, herself, one day, when Daddy was gone. She laughed like a schoolgirl.
But I never got completely over my fear of that second floor, so empty, like a family of ghosts lived over our heads. I would imagine they were chasing me as I flung myself on the bannister and slid down to safety, down to my momma and my brothers and the smell of baking cornbread and boiling beans and the sound of the Gospel Hour drifting from the plastic radio.
It was about that time I had my first taste of education in the Alabama public school system. We went to school at Spring Garden, where, in the first grade, I fell in love with a little girl named Janice. Janice Something. But the first grade was divided into a rigid caste system by the ancient teacher, and I was placed clear across the room from her. They named the sections of the divided classroom after birds. She was a Cardinal, one of the children of the well-to-do who studied from nice books with bright pictures, and I was a Jaybird, one of the poor or just plain dumb children who got what was left after the good books were passed out. Our lessons were simplistic, and I could always read. I memorized the simple reader, and the teacher was so impressed she let me read with the Cardinals one day. I did not miss a word, but the next day I was back with the Jaybirds. The teacher—and I will always, always remember this—told me I would be much more comfortable with my own kind. I was six, but even at six you understand what it means to be told you are not good enough to sit with the well-scrubbed.
Her name is lost in my head. She was an aristocrat, a white-haired woman with skin like a wadded-up paper bag that she had smeared red lipstick on and dusted with white powder. I did not know it then, but I was getting my first taste of the gentry, the old-money white Southerners who ran things, who treated the rest of the South like beggars with muddy feet who were about to track up their white shag carpeting. She drove a big car with fender skirts, probably a Cadillac, and wore glasses shaped like cat’s eyes.
On Sunday evenings, we visited my daddy’s people, strangers to me then, strangers to me now. But for one slender ripple in time I had a second family, a people unlike my momma’s people. These were people, the menfolk anyway, without any governors on their lives, not even the law. They drove the dirt roads drunk, the trunks of their cars loaded down with bootleg liquor and unstamped Old Milwaukee beer, the springs squealing, the bumpers striking sparks on the rocks, the men driving with one hand and alternately lighting cigarettes and fiddling with the AM radio with the other, searching for anything by Johnny Horton.
They fought each other like cats in a sack, existing—hell no, living—somewhere between the Snopeses of Faulkner’s imagination and the Forresters of The Yearling. It is a point of fact that the whole male contingent of the family got into a brawl in town—“they wasn’t fightin’ nobody else, just each other,” my momma said—and, as a family, went to jail. One cousin by marriage—and I am not making this up—refused to wear shoes, even in winter. They were constantly bailing each other out of jail, not for anything bad, merely for refusing to march in step with the twentieth century. If they had been machines instead of men, they would have had just one speed, wide-open, and they would have run at it until they blew themselves apart. I guess, in a way, they did. They are all dead now, not from age, but misuse.
Against my will, I grew fond of them. I would have liked to have known them better.
What I know I learned from those Sunday evenings, when we visited my granddaddy Bobby and granny Velma Bragg’s house to eat a meal that took hours to cook and a solid thirty minutes just to put on the table. I remember fine fried chicken, and mashed potatoes piled high with a small lake of butter in the middle, and cracklin’ cornbread, and butter beans with a white chunk of fat pork floating like a raft in the middle, and sweet tea poured from gallon pickle jars. They lived in a big, rambling farmhouse, paid for with money from Bobby’s steady job at the cotton mill, and they had a short, fat dog named Boots who was about 150 in dog years and moved stiffly around the yard, blind as a concrete block.
Bobby Bragg, a white-haired little man, was what we would now call an eccentric. He still had a horse and wagon, and it was not too uncommon then to see Bobby riding around the mill village in his long underwear, drunk as a lord, alternately singing and cussing and—it must be said—shouting out bawdy limericks to mill workers and church ladies.
The town’s police officers seldom bothered the ornery old man, mainly because arresting him would would have left them not only with an unmanned horse and wagon but Bobby himself, and everyone with even a lick of sense knew Bobby would cut you as soon as look at you.
I was amazed by him. His hip bone was prone to come out of joint and when it happened he would not go to a doctor or do anything else that was remotely sensible, but he would limp and cuss and drink and limp and cuss and drink until all he could do was lie on the bed and cuss and drink. Until, one day, my granny Bragg had enough. She reached down and got his bad leg by the foot, and commenced to jerking and twisting and jerking and twisting until his hip bone popped back into place with a sound like, well, a pop, and he was cured.
When sober, he often dressed for dinner, not in a suit but in a fresh pair of overalls, and a white button-down shirt that was stiff as a board with starch. “Clean as a pin,” Momma said. Of the bad things that can be said about my granddaddy, no one could ever say he did not have a certain style. (It is widely believed in my family that a good many of my peculiarities, I most certainly got from him.)
My granny Velma Bragg was a sad-eyed little woman who looked very much like the part Cherokee she was, a sweet-natured woman with great patience who hovered over the men when they drank whiskey at a beautiful dining room table, trying to wipe up what they spilt before it ate away the varnish. I remember she was always kind, always gentle, especially to my momma. I guess, in a way, she had an idea what was in store for her. Momma and Granny Bragg still talk, every week. Survivors, both of them.
After supper the men went one way and the women went another. The old man, Bobby, would hold court on the porch, surrounded by his sons. The men drank—Lord, how they could drink—from endless cans of beer or from a jug when they had one. They even talked about drinking as they drank, and smoked Camels down to the barest nub before flipping them out in the dirt of the yard. When I close my eyes I can still see the trail of orange sparks it made. My momma often would holler for me to come inside, but I was enthralled. These men were what my momma’s kinfolk called sinners, and it seemed to me like sinning was a lot of fun.
Listening to them, I learned much of of what a boy should know, of cars, pistols, heavy machinery, shotguns and love, all of which, these men apparently believed, can be operated stone drunk. I learned that fighting drunk is better than sober because a clear-headed man hurts more when hit. I learned that it is okay to pull a knife while fighting drunk as long as you are cautious n
ot to cut off your own head.
I learned that whiskey will cure anything from a toothache to double pneumonia, if you drink enough. (Once when I was bad sick with flu, they even gave it to me. They heated it in a pan, being careful not to let it get anywhere close to an open flame, and poured it over honey in a coffee cup. Then someone, my granny probably, squeezed a lemon into it. I drank it down in four gulps, took two steps, a hop, a skip and a staggering leap and passed dead out on the floor. From what I heard later, everyone except my momma thought it was pretty amusing. I cannot say it cleared up any congestion, but it made my head hurt so bad that I did not notice it so much.)
They talked about the mill. They talked about dogs. They talked about fistfights and bootleggers and, a little, about war, but not my daddy’s war. They talked about the new war, Vietnam, but my daddy never joined in, that I remember. He drank, smoked his cigarettes. Once, I recall, he came off the porch and walked off into the night for a long time. I remember it because Momma came outside, some time later, ready to go, and we had to search for him. We found him in the car, just sitting, smoking.
Now and then, the men talked of what they called “the nigger trouble,” but I could not attach any significance to that. We had no contact with black people beyond a wave, now and then, from a car or from the side of a road. I was not of a world where there were maids, cooks or servants. When they picked in the cotton field beside white pickers, like my momma, they kept to themselves. There were no black people in my school, and at that time no black person had ever been in my house or in my yard. So how, I wondered, could there be trouble between us? They lived in their world, and we lived in our world. It became gradually clear, as I sat there listening, watching the orange comets of their cigarettes arch across the dark, what the trouble was about.
They were sick and tired of living in their world. They wanted to live in our world, too.
6
The free show
Everybody seems to be here, everybody white. The city auditorium is packed with sweating, jostling bodies, and two little blond-haired boys try hard not to get stepped on as their momma, holding tight to their hands, steers them through the cheering crowd. A band is playing “Dixie” as the people clap their hands in time, and someone is waving a Confederate battle flag back and forth, back and forth. There are pipe shop workers still in their soot-covered, dark-blue work clothes, and big-haired ladies who work behind the counters of the Calhoun County Courthouse, and old, sun-scorched men in Liberty overalls and brown fedoras who drove all the way from Rabbit Town and Talladega and Knighten’s Crossroad, just to see the free show. Up on the big stage a beautiful woman in a lime green minidress, knee-high go-go boots and a Styrofoam boater hat with WALLACE on it prances out and starts to sing loud about the day “my momma socked it to the Harper Valley PTA,” and though it did not register at the time, I am certain a few of the church ladies swallowed their snuff.
Then, some time later, I see him.
He walks out onto the stage to a roar of welcome that seems to swell and swell until I finally put my hands over my ears. I catch only glimpses of him as the forest of grownups sway and shift in front of me, but I can make out the well-oiled, slicked-down, coal-black hair, and the pugnacious face, the wrinkled and baggy suit, the kind the men at the courthouse have on when you go beg the judge to let your daddy out of jail. I see him raise his balled fists above his head and bring one down hard, hammering at the air as if he is smashing the heads of those pointy-headed intellectuals and outside agitators, and the people roar again. He strokes their anger, their resentment, like a mean cat.
The look on those faces, on all those upturned, adoring faces, reminds me of the faces of people in church, the people who have been touched deep down by the preacher’s words, who raise their hands into the air, reaching out to Jesus, saved. They are in The Rapture. They are packed tight into this smoky auditorium in the pipe shop town of Anniston, Alabama, but that little man in the rumpled suit is taking them someplace higher.
Sam and I stand together, understanding only a little of what is being said. The governor talks about a lot of things but mostly he seems to be telling us we are better than the nigras.
We had not known we were better than anybody.
I grew up in a house where the word nigger was as much a part of the vocabulary as “hey,” or “pass the peas.” If I was rewriting my life, if I was using this story as a way to make my life slickly perfect, this is the part I would change. But it would be a lie. It is part of me, of who I was, and I guess who I am.
It does no good to try and qualify it, certainly not to the people whom that word slashes like a razor. It does no good to say we didn’t know any better or that it was part of our culture or that Yankees just don’t understand that, when a Southerner uses it now, he doesn’t “mean anything” by it.
But if you sit and talk to old black people, the people who recall the time of my childhood, that time in history, they will tell you that there are degrees of meanness in this world, degrees of hatred, degrees of ignorance, and calculating those degrees, over decades, was a means of survival. They will tell you that the depth of that meanness and hatred and ignorance varies from soul to soul, that white Southerners are not the same and symmetrical, like the boards in a white picket fence. They will tell you that the depth of that meanness often depends on what life has done to a person, on the impressions left by brushes with people different from you, on those rare times when the parallel universes came close enough to touch.
To find our own, to find what ultimately shaped and softened my own family, I have to reach back into the darkest and ugliest time of my childhood. To find the good in it we have to peel back layers of bad, the last few months we lived with our daddy, the year we went to sleep every night afraid.
It unfolded against a backdrop of a broader meanness, a racial one. It was a year of burning buses and Klan picnics, and looking down on it from up high was the man they called the “Fighting Judge.” Wallace had lost his first run for governor because he claimed he was “out-niggered,” and vowed never to lose another race because he seemed soft on segregation. The people and the governor fed off each other, until both grew full on their own doomed ideal. They thought it would last forever.
But in the midst of it, in the middle of the hating and fear, was a simple kindness from the most unexpected place, from people who had no reason, beyond their own common decency, to reach across that fence of hate that so many people worked so hard to build.
The closet door banged open in the fall of 1965, and the old monster was loose among us, again.
Someone had sold my daddy several bottles of aged moonshine of high quality, or so he believed. It was not in ceramic jugs or Mason or Bell jars, but in thin, dark brown bottles of about a half pint. One night, he drank one straight down, standing up in the kitchen, and another. I cannot remember exactly what happened next, but it ended with Momma slamming the door to our bedroom, to protect us.
The next day I came home from the first grade at Spring Garden Elementary to find her standing over the sink, slowly pouring bottle after bottle of it down the drain.
I was six years old. I was still trying to figure out what nine plus nine was, still trying to color between the lines. But as I watched her, I distinctly remember thinking: “He’s gonna kill you, Momma. He’s gonna kill you for that.”
That night, when he came home, Sam and I, pitiful in our inability to help her, to protect her, stood in the door of the kitchen and watched as he opened the cupboard and reached for his home brew. “Not all of it?” he asked, and she nodded. My momma did not run, did not hide. She stood there like a statue. Then, slowly she took off her glasses.
“Don’t hurt my teeth,” she said.
I guess the angels were with her. He looked at her, hard, and she nodded her head, slowly. Then he just went over to the Formica table and sat down.
“Margaret,” he said, “you couldn’t have hurt me no worse if you shot me dea
d.” He got up, after a while, and walked out the door, to find a bottle somewhere else. I didn’t know then, like I do now, of the devils that rode his back, flogging him, didn’t know that he was free of them sometimes, for weeks, for months, and he lived upright, then, mostly sober. But that when they descended shrieking on him the only place to hide was in the bottom of a bottle. But instead of freeing him, it only fed them.
She never moved until the door banged, and then she just walked kind of stiff-like into her bedroom, and shut the door.
He quit work. He stayed drunk most of the time, instead of weekends, and he yelled at her and told her how sorry he was that he ever married her, what a mistake it was when she brought a passel of brats into his life, cluttering it up. Once, drunk, he tried to cut my hair. My momma stopped him, and he hit her.
And there was nothing, nothing we could do. I would stand beside Sam, a little behind him, because like her he always seemed to be between him and me. Once, I guess because I couldn’t stand it anymore, I screamed at him to leave our momma alone, and he got up out of his chair and reached for me, but what might have happened I will never know. Sam launched himself at our daddy like a wildcat, and in my mind’s eye I can see him swinging his little balled-up fists into that grown man, again and again. My daddy grabbed his hands, and then Sam commenced to kicking his shins, or trying to, as my daddy swung him wildly around the room.
I remember that my own fear seemed to break then, and I ran in and grabbed one of his legs above the thigh, and bit him hard, behind the leg in the bend of his knee, and heard him howl. I do not remember him hitting us, only that my momma, one more time, somehow got between us, saving us. Mostly I remember how helpless and weak and useless I was.