by Rick Bragg
It would be years before I realized the main reason she exiled herself to the little house, going out only to buy groceries. She avoided crowds, even our school. It was a long time before I realized that she stayed home because she was afraid we might be ashamed of her, ashamed of the woman with rough hands like a man and donated clothes that a well-off lady might recognize as something she threw away. She could live with the fact that she wore old tennis shoes with the toes worn clean through, but she was afraid we would be ashamed of her.
So that we would be proud of her, so that we could say our momma had a high school education, she went to a night school with Aunt Gracie Juanita and began her education again, almost from the beginning. Momma had quit school as a little girl. She resumed her studies as a grown woman, hunched over a fifth grade reader. Momma studied at home mostly, at the kitchen table, and she flew through those math, literature, grammar and science books, passing a grade every few months, sometimes in just weeks. “I liked the literature, because it had poems in it,” she told me.
Some twenty years after she quit school, she took a hard test and got her GED, her diploma.
I do not ever remember being ashamed of her, not when I was a little boy. Later, when I was older, when I was discovering girls and making friends, I admit I was content to let her remain hidden there, in her own exile. But I will get to that later. As children, we never knew how tenuous our existence was. She absorbed that unpleasantness, too.
We wore hand-me-downs and charity clothes and slept on sheets that our kinfolks made from the sacks of a brand of hog feed called “Shorts,” but every fall we got brand-new underwear—genuine Fruit of the Loom—and a few pairs of pants and shirts and socks that no one had ever worn before. And there were always new shoes. She walked around with her toes sticking out, but we got new shoes. Because we were children, we begged for things we couldn’t have, but instead of slapping us or yelling at us, the way so many mommas did, she just said no, she was sorry. There was a look on her face, then, that I now know was the look of someone who is just flat beat down. I saw it other times, when she stood in line at the grocery store with one hand frantically flipping through the one-dollar bills in her change purse, praying that the cash register would stop ringing before long. Still, we kept kept asking, kept wanting.
In the second grade, it was a pair of cowboy boots.
They were jet black on the bottom and bright blue on the top, like the television cowboys wore, like Hank Williams wore. I was certain there would not be a finer pair of boots in all of Roy Webb School and certainly not in Imo Goodwin’s second grade class. I begged and I begged, for excruciating days. For her, it must have been like fingernails being dragged slowly down a blackboard.
One morning I found them at the foot of my bed.
And I was transformed. I had been little towheaded Ricky Bragg. Now, I was Steve McQueen, “the bounty hunter.” I was “Have Gun, Will Travel.”
I was so proud of them that I would sit with my feet splayed way out into the aisles so that you couldn’t help but see them, and sometimes trip over them. Mrs. Goodwin warned me to put my feet under my desk like a gentleman and quit slouching, but what good are new shoes if no one can see them, so I would slide them back under the desk for a few minutes and then ease them back out into the aisle, an inch at a time. I would actually even work the boot half off my foot, so I could stick it even further into view.
Then, one day, Goodwin caught me by surprise. It was study hall. She snuck up on me from behind and drop-kicked my half-on, half-off boot to the front of the room, then chased it down and kicked it again, clear out the open door and into the hall. The second graders, me included, held our breath. Mrs. Goodwin was seventy if she was a day. We thought she had lost her mind. She actually cackled as she did it, hopping around the room like some skinny old bird dusted with DDT.
I cannot begin to tell you how ashamed I was. She stood over me and dared me to go get it, saying she would paddle me if I did, so I just sat there with one boot on and one off, my face hot. But there was no way she was going to make me cry.
In study hall, she usually let us go, one at a time, to get a drink of water. I saw my opportunity. She did not let me go, but I gave Woodrow Brown a nickel—my milk money—and he brought my boot in for me.
Like I said, we were too stupid to realize that, as our lives spun round and round on these trivial things, my momma’s life was running through her hands like water.
As the years went by, she went out less and less when she didn’t have to, to chase the work. She never went to church. She just prayed at home. She almost never went to the PTA meetings, or Halloween Carnivals, or Christmas parades, or, later, to see us play basketball or baseball. Our aunts Nita and Jo drove us where we needed to go. Years later when I was in junior high school, I won the Calhoun County public speaking championship sponsored by the 4-H Club. My momma didn’t go.
A hundred times in my life, people have asked me why didn’t she just get another husband. One idiot, one of those trust fund babies that the newspaper business is riddled with, even asked why she didn’t just go to college.
You have to understand the time and place. She was a married woman in Alabama in the 1960s. Divorce was shameful at best, and impossible if the man did not agree. She was not weak. She was never weak. But convention bound her, and something else. Despite everything she had been through, all the hopeless times, I believe she felt some loyalty to him. She was a product of the rural, poor, Protestant South. She was in her mid-twenties, alone, and trapped.
I guess that, somewhere, there was still the ghost of some love. She never talked about him, never pined for him in any way we could see. But all her life she kept a small brown suitcase stashed high on a shelf in the hall, containing all the things that were valuable or precious to her. It didn’t hold much. It had three birth certificates, and a bundle of letters from him, when they were still young, before Korea.
It burned in a fire in 1993, with just about everything else she owned, and the last tangible link to the boy she had met and fallen in love with was gone.
Two tiny black-and-white photographs, the only ones we have of him now, survived that fire. In one, he is fresh-faced and fearless and probably more than just a little drunk, dressed in his winter uniform in Korea, one arm slung over the shoulders of a buddy who is swigging on a bottle of whiskey. They seem to be someplace warm and safe and dry, and it must have been taken before the killing began, because he looks too brave, too fresh, too dashing.
The other is so unlike my memories of him that I almost can’t believe it is him. It is springtime, maybe, because he is in a T-shirt, on what seems to be a military base. The hills in the background look like the hills of pictures I have seen of Korea. He is cuddling a puppy to his cheek.
Like I said, the pictures are very small. It hurts my eyes to look at them for long.
9
On the wings of a great speckled bird
If I live to be a hundred, I will never forget her, eyes closed, lips moving in prayer, both hands pressed to the warm plastic top of the black-and-white television. On the screen was a young Oral Roberts in shades of gray, assuring my momma that God was close, that she could feel Him if her faith was strong enough, coursing through that second-hand Zenith.
The fact that my momma did not go to church did not mean that she did not seek God. The television preachers—beamed to us from Baton Rouge, from Tulsa, from the Birmingham Municipal Auditorium—brought not only His Word, but salvation. All you had to do was reach out and feel the screen, feel that warmth, that electricity, and be Saved. I reached out to touch it myself once or twice, but all I felt was the hot glow of the picture tube.
I am not making fun of this. I mention it at all only because faith is part of my momma’s life, and because my own struggle to understand, to believe, to accept, consumed so much of my childhood. That faith, that belief, made the unbearable somehow bearable for her, and the loneliness, less. I am descended from a
people who know there is a God with the same certainty that they know walking into a river will get them wet. The promise of heaven, the assurance of it, was balm, even if you had to turn the antenna to fix the prophet’s horizontal roll.
I was only nine years old, but I knew even then that God didn’t live in no damn TV. But I never told my momma. She needed to believe that somebody bigger and stronger than her was looking out for all of us, so on Sundays she turned on the television for her preaching, and worshipped. The prophets on Channel 6 did not know or care that she was wearing old blue jeans cut off at the knee and rubber dime store flip-flops, as long as she sent them a list of prayer requests every month wrapped around a one-dollar bill. They praised God and said that, of course, it would be nice if she could send five dollars or maybe ten, but that kind of salvation was too rich for our blood. When I was little, I truly believed that the reason we had it so hard was because we could only afford a dollar’s worth of salvation a month.
The TV preachers peddled promises, and offered hope to people who had none. There would have been great good in that, I believe, if they had not followed every sermon with a request for a portion of their flock’s old-age pensions. Instead, it was an odd mix of good and evil, and people like my momma understood their avarice but forgave it, because the words the men spoke were comfort to her and their preaching was first-rate. I remember a jolly fat man named Wally Fowler who banged on a piano like he was pounding at Lucifer himself, and a young Jimmy Swaggart before there were any prostitutes in his life that we knew of.
It was a ritual on Sunday mornings. She would get up early and make a special breakfast, maybe biscuits with apple butter, and scrambled eggs mixed with crumbled-up sausage. She would take a diced-up tomato from the garden, a big, red thing, not those fake, pink things that New Yorkers eat because they don’t know no better, and drizzle over it a tablespoon of fresh-brewed coffee and a little hot grease from the skillet where she cooked the sausage, and then dust the whole thing with black pepper. She called it red-eye gravy.
We would eat with our plates balanced on our knees in the living room, listening to the gospel music shows that were a warm-up to the evangelists. I remember the Florida Boys—“Here they are folks, up from Pensacola, Florida, with sand in their shoes!”—and the Dixie Echoes, and the Happy Goodman Family, and others. They were quartets, mostly, men in good suits who never, ever moved their legs as they sang. Everyone knew that people who moved too much when they sang were inviting hell and damnation. Look what happened to Elvis.
They sang the same songs that filled the church hymnals, mostly, songs we knew from heart even though we had seldom been anywhere close to a church. My daddy had not believed in them. You could not have forced him into a church pew with a bazooka. But we did not need a hymnal. We did not need an eighty-year-old woman pecking on a church organ. We got out of bed at 6 A.M. on Sunday and heard “Closer Walk with Thee” sung by people who owned a tour bus.
Just like in the real thing, our electronic church had singing first, then the Gospel. The preacher, usually the young-looking Oral Roberts—the one who would later say that God threatened to take his life if he failed to raise a specific dollar amount in his crusade—read from the Scripture and explained it to us. The message I got was that sleeping with your neighbor’s wife would sock you into hell just as quick in 1967 as in the age of Pharoah. I listened, and I think I understood. I just never felt anything.
I never felt any fear of The Pit, or felt a joy at the notion of harp music and milk and honey, which sounded pretty dull to a nine-year-old boy raised on fiddle music and biscuits and gravy. Because they had to devote so much time to begging, things like fire and brimstone and eternal bliss got a little less attention than they should have. The pay-for-pray preachers all seemed frantic to build a new cathedral or a Christian amusement park. All my momma was praying for was enough money to last till the first of the month.
Some of those TV preachers did good things with their millions, and some lied, cheated and stole, so it’s unfair to lump them all into one pile. But I wish those bad ones could have seen my momma with her hand on her thirty-five-dollar television, believing. Maybe they would have done better. Probably not.
I was lucky, in a way. Other mommas and daddies beat Jesus into their children, or used the Son of God as an anvil to hammer out their behavior. I remember one time when we were stripping cane for a farmer, and a little girl, no more than six or seven, was exhausted. It was a tedious process, even for a grownup. You reached as high up on the stalk as you could reach, wrapped the fingers of your other hand around the top of the stalk, and ripped downward, leaving the naked stalk standing. The little girl didn’t have any gloves, and her hands must have hurt.
Her daddy, the farmer we worked for, asked her why she had stopped working. She said she couldn’t do it any more.
“Baby,” he said, “do you love the Lord?”
The little girl nodded her head.
“Well,” the farmer said, “the Lord wants you to strip that cane.”
The little girl started to cry, and I worked on by.
That didn’t happen in my world. God was a benevolent force. He stared down at us from the wall in The Last Supper, or from the cross, His head bowed in its crown of thorns. But in all those pictures, all dime-store images painted on cardboard, the face of Christ was beatific, as, I believed, would be the face of God. I had no doubt that They existed. I was as sure of Them as I was of other people I had never met but had heard of, like my grandfather Charlie Bundrum, or John Kennedy, or Alan Ladd. I believed. I just didn’t feel that feeling, that joy, that religious charge that others did. I thought I had something bad wrong with me.
My momma, a little worried, finally sent me to the source a few years later. She sent me to a real church.
Maybe they thought I needed to hear The Word without any electronic interference. Maybe they believed The Spirit was lost somewhere over Tupelo, snagged by a power line. Either way, one grim Sunday morning, I found myself bathed like I had never been bathed before—she cleaned so deep inside my ears I thought she would gouge all the way through and pull the washrag out the other side of my head—and dusted with so much talcum I was chemically unable to sweat. She had bound my feet up in hand-me-down shoes—handed down from people I had never seen—and slicked down my hair with the slimy residue from that bottomless, dust-covered bottle of Rose Hair Oil that she had used casserole, a million biscuits, a bathtub-sized vat of banana pudding, pies (lemon, cherry, apple, peach, fig, pecan, chocolate-walnut), cakes (you name it) and enough iced tea and RC Colas to drown a normal man. Off to one side a woman fried up shrimp in an electric skillet, but the children kept running over the extension cord that led to the church and cutting her power off. And over there, a man grilled hamburgers and served them up with a big round slice of Vidalia onion. If this is church, I thought, let me in.
This was religion without pretension. The church was brand-new, a big, square box made from concrete blocks, painted white, the whole gigantic thing resting on a massive concrete slab. The men of the church, who paid the bills for construction with money they couldn’t really spare, did not care much for aesthetics, but they knew their Bible, particularly Matthew. Only a fool will build on sand, and since there was no solid rock, they built their own out of cement. I think Matthew was referring to character, not architecture, but the fact remains, that was one damn solid church.
The people were solid, too. You could look down the pews and not see one necktie. The men came to church in what we called “dress shirts”—that was any shirt that didn’t have the red, telltale spots of transmission fluid on its arms or tiny pinpoint black holes made from the flying sparks of the foundry. They wore blue jeans, neatly ironed. In every shirt’s pocket, there was a pack of Camel cigarettes—no filter tips, only sissies smoked filter tips—and on the ring finger of every left hand, a band of gold. A man who had no family, who had no roots and responsibilities, was no man at all.
/> The women wore dresses they made themselves on Singer sewing machines or bought on sale at J. C. Penney in Anniston. A few of them worked but mainly they raised babies and gardens. Their mommas taught them how to cook, sew and can, and they had no way of knowing, none of us truly did, that they would be the last of their kind, the last generation to live that way and to use those skills. It is a cliché to call it a simple time, but it was.
The old sat up front. You could snap a rubber band down the first pew and, no matter how lousy your aim was, sting somebody with a bamto weigh down a million cowlicks on the untamed head of my brother Sam. In one hand I held a Bible I had never even cracked, and in the other I had a quarter my momma had told me to deliver unto the collection plate, if it came my way.
I noticed I was the only one going. Mark was still too little to waste good religion on, and Sam, at the faintest notion of church, had cut and run. That morning, I had stomped and rolled my eyes and even said “damn” under my breath at the prospect of church, of being forced to “have fellowship” with strangers. I did not understand exactly what “having fellowship” meant, but I knew it couldn’t be good. But my grandma Bundrum, who wasn’t big on churches her ownself, had whispered to me that if a really competent sinner enters church, the whole thing splits right down the middle. That alone, I reasoned, would be worth seeing.
At worst, it would be a show.
After I was pronounced clean, dusted and oiled, I stood in the white chert of the driveway, waiting for my ride to Hollis Crossroads Baptist Church, waiting for the One Living God to reveal himself to me or at least whisper in my ear. I was nine, and a little afraid.
I went that day with my cousins Linda, Wanda and Charlotte, my aunt Edna’s girls, in a 1962 Thunderbird that wouldn’t go in reverse. You had to park it with its nose facing the wide-open spaces or you were trapped.