by Rick Bragg
It was a cold winter that year, and it seemed that with each passing day of December the temperatures dropped a little more. Once it got so cold that the small pond near our house froze, which is no big deal to Yankees but was amazing to us. We skidded rocks over it, and gingerly stepped out on it, never more than a few inches. But my little brother, Mark, was fearless at age three.
He was wearing two coats and two pairs of pants, so trussed-up his arms stuck almost straight out at his sides. As my daddy stood with his hands in his pockets, smoking, lost in thought, Mark decided to go skating in his baby shoes.
He walked straight out to the edge of the pond and was fine, laughing, too light to even break the ice, but then one of us, Sam or me, made the ice crack with a rock or a footfall, and the next thing I saw was my daddy running, wild-eyed, crazy-looking, snatching up my little brother and running with him to the house. That night, for no reason at all beyond the fact he was drunk, he went mean again. Momma, as always, tried to fend him off even as she herded us out of harm’s way, back into the bedroom. We hid not in the bed but under it, and whispered to each other of how you reckon you can kill a grown man.
A few days later he left us, with no money, no car, nothing. I remember my momma sitting at the table, crying. At the time I thought it was because she missed him, but now I know that had nothing to do with it.
I remember how the meals got smaller and smaller, plainer and plainer. The welfare checks, the government cheese and peanut butter and grits and meal had quit when she went back to our daddy, so there was not even that. Once a week she would bundle us up in our coats and we would walk the mile or so to the old, gray, unpainted store, where an elderly man sold us groceries on credit, and then we would pull them home again in Sam’s wagon. She carried Mark, to keep him from running out into the road, and Sam I took turns pulling the wagon. People rode by us and stared, because no one—no one—walks in the Deep South. You ride, and if you don’t have something to ride in, you must be trash. I remember how the driver of a pulpwood truck made a regular run up and down the road, and when he would see us he would throw sticks of chewing gum out the window, sometimes a whole pack.
Eventually the credit ran out. The milkman came by one day to get his empties and left nothing for us. Weeks went by and we ate what was in the house, until finally I remember nothing but hoecakes. Usually, her sisters would have come to our rescue, but her decision to go back to my father had caused hurt, and bad feelings. Out of pride, she wanted to wait as long as she could.
Then she got sick. She lay for days in her bed, dragging herself out just long enough to fix us something to eat, then she would struggle down the path to the outside bathroom, hunched over, and stay out there too long, in the cold. Finally she would struggle back into her bed, and sleep like the dead. We did not know it then, but she was going to have another baby.
We were at rock bottom.
Then one day there was a knock at the door. It was a little boy, the color of bourbon, one of the children who lived down the road. He said his momma had some corn left over and please, ma’am, would we like it.
They must have seen us, walking that road. They must have heard how our daddy ran off. They knew. They were poor, very poor, living in unpainted houses that leaned like a drunk on a Saturday night, but for a window in time they had more than us.
It may seem like a little bitty thing, by 1990s reasoning. But this was a time when beatings were common, when it was routine, out of pure meanness, to take a young black man for a ride and leave him cut, broken or worse on the side of some pulpwood road. For sport. For fun. This was a time when townspeople in nearby Anniston clubbed riders and burned the buses of the Freedom Riders. This was a time of horrors, in Birmingham, in the backwoods of Mississippi. This was a time when the whole damn world seemed on fire.
That is why it mattered so.
We had seen our neighbors only from a distance. They drove junk cars and lived in the sharecroppers’ shacks, little houses of ancient pine boards, less than a mile from our own. Their children existed beside us in a parallel universe, climbing the same trees, stealing the same apples, swimming in the same creek, but, somehow, always upstream or downstream.
In the few contacts we had with them, as children, we had thrown rocks at them. I knew only one of them by name. He had some kind of brain condition that caused tremendous swelling in his head. The others called him Water Head, and he ran slower than the rest and I bounced a rock off his back. I heard him cry out.
I would like to say that we came together, after the little boy brought us that food, that we learned about and from each other, but that would be a lie. It was rural Alabama in 1965, two separate, distinct states. But at least, we didn’t throw no more rocks.
We stayed in that big house for a little while longer, until the trees were naked and black and the cold numbed our feet as we waited for the yellow school bus. Daddy would return from God knows where every now and then, but only to terrorize us, to drink and rage and, finally, sleep like he was dead. He would strike out at whoever was near, but again it always seemed that she was between him and us, absorbing his cruelty, accepting it. Then he would leave, without giving her a dime, without asking if we had food, without giving a damn.
She continued to be sick a lot of the time. For months, she had nothing healthy to eat or drink for her or the unborn child, unless you count cornbread. There was no money for a doctor and no way to get there.
Finally there was nothing. We packed our clothes for the last time on a February afternoon in 1966, as my daddy lay drunk. We moved silently through the house, packing, my momma shushing us when we would try to ask what we were doing. We loaded Sam’s wagon—he refused to leave without his wagon—and we walked down the railroad tracks to the store, to use the phone.
It must have been a pitiful sight. A tall, pale, blond woman carrying a brown suitcase, a three-year-old child stumbling along beside her, holding on to her hand, and two other little boys, one tugging a wagon, the other, me, holding tight a squirming, half-starved stray puppy that had just showed up there a few days before. I wish I could remember its name. I’m sure it had one.
Momma called a taxi from Piedmont. She had hidden seven dollars, just for this, but seven dollars was not nearly enough to carry us the twenty miles to our grandma Bundrum’s house. “I reckon the taxi man felt sorry for us,” my momma said. He took us there anyway.
A few months later my momma had her baby, another boy. He died in the hospital. Later, back in my grandma’s house, my brothers and I stood around the bed and wondered, for weeks, why she just lay there.
Thirty years later, I drove out to the big house myself one day, to look, to see what time had done to the place. The old store, built from brick during the Depression, was still standing, but the windows were broken out and the door had a rusty chain across it. I peeked in the windows and through the gloom I could see the counter, the empty shelves that should have been lined with tins of mackerel and sacks of beans and giant jars of pickled pigs’ feet. Someday, I believe, some Yankee photographer will drive past, see it as quaint, and put a picture of it in a coffee-table book. That is where a big part of the Old South is, on coffee tables in Greenwich Village.
The fields and apple orchards, where we stole green apples and ate them until we thought we would burst, are abandoned. The fields are waist high with weeds. It has not been profitable to grow cotton, corn and other big field crops for a long time, so the ground is worthless, at least until some developers decide the time is ripe for another pod of identical, vinyl-sided tract houses at $63,000 a shot.
The railroad tracks we walked as a shortcut to the store are overgrown with weeds, more a scar on the ground than a remnant of rails. When I was six I had lain awake at night and listened to the freight trains hurtle by in the dark, and it was a lullaby. There, I used to think, is my way out of here. If all else goes to hell, I can always sneak away in the middle of the night and flag down that train, and leave this p
lace. I was six. I didn’t know any better. I thought it would stop for me.
Finally, I worked my courage up and drove to where the hateful old house used to sit. I expected to find it in sticks, falling down, abandoned. I believed it was in its death throes when we were there, so long ago. But as my own car crept closer and closer I could not believe my eyes. I do not believe in ghosts, I do not believe—now that I’m grown—in haunted houses. I have not been afraid to open the closet door for a long, long time. But this looked like magic.
The big house had been reborn. It was like new, covered in a new skin of gleaming white aluminum siding. Instead of finding any flaws and decay as the car crawled near, I noticed that it became more perfect, more precious. It was like a postcard for the gentility, framed by a canopy of massive trees and surrounded by manicured grass. I noticed a swing hanging from one of the huge oaks, and toys, in bright plastic, scattered around the yard.
I wanted to scream.
7
No papers on him
All of my life, when I thought of my mother’s sons, I thought of only three. The fourth brother, the one without a name, faded from my mind’s eye, like an old newspaper left in the back window of a car. I was still six years old when they buried him beside my grandfather, my mother’s father, and the sliver of life he had was too narrow, too fleeting, to register very much in my memory. I never saw my momma rock him, feed him or sing to him, like she sang to our baby brother, Mark. But it was the fact he never got a name, more than anything, that made it so easy to forget him. At least, it made it easier to think about him when we did remember.
The gravestone in our town cemetery just reads “Baby Bragg.” It has a kneeling lamb on top of a plain granite slab. When I was little my momma would take me with her to the grave and let me touch it. I thought it was pretty, then. I still do.
Our father did not come to the hospital, did not come to the cemetery. Our kinfolks, on the Bundrum side, helped her through it as they have helped us through so many other things. They cooked us food and they told us stories while our momma lay in my grandmother’s bed, the most comfortable one, and as the weeks passed I began to wonder if she would ever get up again. It was the first and only time we had ever seen her whipped by anything. Not even Daddy had been able to do that.
We shouldn’t have worried. One morning she just slid her legs over the side of the bed and went to make biscuits, and except for the fact we couldn’t make her laugh quite so easy anymore, she seemed the same.
For thirty years, she never mentioned it, any of it. For a while she went to the cemetery to put flowers on the grave and pluck the wild onions from it, but over time she just stopped going. I figured she had mourned all she could, and moved on. I thought that, maybe, she had squeezed it out of her mind. I was stupid to think that.
I had never asked her about him, over the years. I envisioned my questions about her fourth child, somehow, as throwing open a door she had nailed shut, and dragging out some old, forgotten pain.
Instead, when I finally asked, I found it fresh as yesterday.
It was August of 1996. The little air conditioner in her house, really my late grandma’s house, had finally died, and it was damp and hot. The oscillating fan chased the flies around the living room.
“Momma,” I said, “do you ever think about the baby?” She nodded her head, and spoke without looking at me.
“He had a birthday, the other day,” she said. “He would have been thirty. I was sittin’ down in the living room, just yesterday, countin’ back. That’s how I can tell, by countin’ back. Y’all come three years apart. First it was Sam, and three years later it was you, then three years later it was Mark, and then three years later, it was him. Ain’t it funny, how that was? When he died, I tried to make Mark the baby again, I babied him too much, I reckon. I tried to keep him a baby as long as I could.”
If she felt that way, then surely she had given the child a name, at least a name she called him in her head. I did not want to ask that, either, but I had to know.
“Yes,” she said, and for a few minutes she was quiet, and I thought that was all she was going to say. “I wanted to name him Randy John,” she finally said. “I thought it sounded real nice. Randy. I always liked that name, Randy. And I thought it would be real nice to name one of y’all after your uncle John, ’cause he was good to us, like we named you Ricky Ed, for your uncle Ed. If he had lived a little while, I would have named him that. But he didn’t.”
Apparently, the people at the hospital and courthouse did not bother to record the name of dead babies of women who picked cotton. Officially, he never existed. People where I come from would have just said that he “didn’t have no papers on him.”
I waited for her to tell me more but there wasn’t anything more to say. That night, on the drive back to my home in Atlanta, I thought of the baby for the first time as a human being who was connected to me, by blood, family, and, finally, name. It was not a name that you’d find on the fancy letterhead of some big shot Atlanta lawyer or in the social register of the weekly paper, but it had a ring to it. It was honest and Southern, and fit just fine there in the hills of home.
For a little while, I thought that maybe he should have a new gravestone, one with his name on it. It would be small like the other, with a lamb on it, too, but there would be a name. There ought to be a name.
Then I thought of the pain that act would draw from my momma, and I knew it was better to let the baby rest as he is. I cannot fix everything that is wrong, flawed or broken in my past, in her past. I cannot recast those years in smooth, cool marble, and believe that my meddling will make things all better again. The name of the child is etched into her head, her heart, her soul. Now, because of my meddling, it is etched in mine.
As the car ate up the miles to Atlanta, dodging the wobbling tourists and drunken pickup trucks and eighteen wheelers that hurtled by in the dark, I started to cry.
When we first went back to my grandma’s house to live, I went to bed every night afraid there would be a knock at the door, that he would come for us, mad, drunk, enraged. But he never did. He never would. I did not miss him. I did not even wonder what happened to him. After a while I did not think of him at all. I learned what became of him only from the gossip of kinfolks.
After we left the last time, he began the steady process of drinking himself to death. It took a long, long time. By the time it was accomplished, my childhood was done. My mother’s youth was burned away, more by working in the fields than by the time, making her old much too soon.
It would be years before I spoke to him in person again. To be accurate, I did see him from time to time from a distance. It was a small place, our world, and I would see him slide by in his car.
A year or two after we left him, I saw him in the parking lot of a grocery store in Piedmont. He saw me, too, and got out of his car, motioning to me, staggering across the asphalt like it was a deck pitching and rolling beneath his rubbery legs. I ran.
8
In the mouth of the machine
There were still three of us to raise, in the summer of 1966, back in the peace and safety of my grandmother’s tiny house. My momma enrolled us in Roy Webb Elementary School, the closest public school, and begged a ride to the county seat in Anniston to sign us up again for welfare. It killed her pride to do it, but she knew that her chances of making enough money to clothe, feed, care for and educate us—her with no skills, no education to speak of—were damn slim. She signed us up for free lunches. She hated it, but she did it. To not do it, she said, would have been “false pride.”
She went back into the fields, picking for a few dollars a day again, but there was always work for her because she was good and fast at it, and because she always picked clean, without a bunch of trash in the sack. She worked at it for two or three more years, until one day a gigantic mechanical monster roared out of some nightmare and into the field, and took the work away.
The mechanical pickers ha
d been used in the bigger fields down South for a long time, but it was the late 1960s before they began to gnaw their way through the fields that ringed our lives. At first there was still work on the smaller fields, and later my momma picked the “trash” cotton, the wisps and dirt-crusted bolls that were left after the big pickers passed through. The first time I ever saw one I stood amazed. It was big as God, and picked rows and rows at a time. I did not know it then but I was seeing a way of life disappear into the maw of the thing. No matter how poor or desperate you were, back then, there had always been the field. It did not matter that most white people considered it “nigger work.” It was our work.
When that work was gone she did whatever she could find. She stripped long rows of sugar cane and picked tomatoes and picked up pecans, doing backbreaking stoop labor, sometimes for money and sometimes for “halves.” She cleaned the houses of the rich folks and flipped hamburgers at a café and took in washing and ironing. People would drive up to our house in nice, big cars and leave off bundles tied up in sheets. She washed some of the clothes in a sink and some in the old wringer washing machine on the back porch. Once, I remember with brutal clarity, I stuck my fingers between the wringers to see what would happen. It hurt. That was about what I expected would happen.
She ironed in the tiny bedroom I shared with my brothers. I used to go to sleep, countless nights, with the clothes of strangers heaped around my bed, under strict orders not to touch them. I touched them anyway. She only made a few pennies a shirt or blouse, but she worked hours and hours at it, dripping sweat, the hiss of the iron like a live thing. I touched the bottom once, to see what would happen. That, too, was about what I expected. (I did not know it then, but I was in training to be a reporter, or an imbecile.)
It seemed all she did was work. She did not go on dates even though she was still a pretty woman in those early years. She did not go to church because she did not want people to stare at her, because she did not want to have to explain where her husband was. At least, that was part of it.