by Rick Bragg
Life was sweet, often, and the crises were small. There was the time we all loaded into my aunt Nita’s Chevrolet Biscayne—Sam, Mark, me, Momma, my grandma, Aunt Nita, my cousin Jeffery and our mean-spirited little dog, Barnabas—for a trip to Pensacola, and forgot the dog somewhere south of Montgomery when we all had to go into the woods to pee. We were twenty miles down the road when somebody said, “Where’s that damn dog,” and we rushed back, to find Barnabas looking bewildered at the side of the road, where we left him. He never did trust us much after that, and refused to get in a car at all.
There would have been no crises at all, if we had just had a slightly better understanding of the broader world. On that same trip, I was sitting in the bathroom of the $12-a-night Castaway Cottages, reading the Pensacola Visitor’s Guide, and I heard a siren and then, immediately, a pounding on the door. “Fire, Fire, Fire!!!” I heard my momma and Aunty Gracie Juanita scream, in harmony. Before I could even put my britches on my momma and Aunt Gracie Juanita had jerked it open, ripped me out of the bathroom and shoved me, naked as Marlon Brando, out into the hotel courtyard, where people stared in obvious wonder at why those two women had hurled a naked eleven-year-old boy out of their Castaway Cottage. I tried to cover myself and looked around for the blaze and the fire trucks. But all I saw was a mosquito sprayer on back of an old pickup, which blared its siren every few minutes to warn the old people with lung ailments that it was comin’ through.
We were poor, but we were not dull. Momma and the kinfolks and the welfare made childhood sweet and warm. Uncle Ed even bought us a pony, a mean-spirited little midget of a horse named Buster, who ultimately ran away and got hit by a transfer truck. When Sam and I made the basketball team at Roy Webb, we had new high-topped sneakers, Converse. Our aunts hauled us to the games and, after a while, we stopped wondering or even caring if our momma came.
The basketball games were the event of the week in the community, if you discount church. Our uniforms were purple and gold, and having one meant that you were part of something important. The floor was dark wood, waxed so many times that the planks seemed to float under a blurry haze of ice, and I can still remember the sound the rubber-bottomed sneakers made as we shifted direction. One boy, nicknamed Chewey because he was always getting caught in back of the lunchroom with a jaw stuffed with Red Man, didn’t have any toes, so his sneakers made a different, more muffled sound. I think it was the old sock he stuffed in the toes of his sneaks, to account. All I know is, if you weren’t careful Chewey would sneak up on you from behind and steal the ball, because you couldn’t hear him coming.
I was a shooter. I saw little point in defense, so I rested then. I saw little point in any part of the game that did not involve the ball in my hands, heading for the hoop. It might have been the single most significant reason why I didn’t get to play too long in any given game. “Don’t give it to him, he’ll shoot it,” my teammates would yell out to each other. But what got me into trouble most was the backing up. Because there was more glory in it when you knocked the bottom out from twenty feet than from two feet, I would dribble away from the goal. I would look over at the bench, all full of myself, only to see Coach Orville Johnson crooking his finger at me.
I think one of the proudest moments in my young life was a big game my eighth grade year—I believe it was Websters Chapel—when the coach looked down the bench, said, “I need a shooter,” and motioned to me.
I took the pass from way, way, way out, beyond the top and to one side of the key, and let her fly. The ball couldn’t arch very high—the damn roof was too low—but it swished so sweetly, so softly through the net that, I am certain, grown men in the bleachers had to wipe their eyes at the pure beauty of it. It was before the invention of the three-point shot, so they only gave me two, but if that shot wasn’t worth three I’ll eat a bug. I missed the next one clean, a brick, a rock, air-ball. I guess the first one could have been luck.
Naw.
Life was rich. On Fridays, in the lunchroom, we had hamburgers and chocolate ice cream. I had a new girlfriend every year from first grade on—I was a smooch ’em and leave ’em kind of boy—and one year, I was crowned King of Second Grade, or Third, I cannot remember, at the Roy Webb Junior High School Halloween Carnival. My queen was Debbie Grantham, who thought I was cute and didn’t care that we were on public assistance.
I turned twelve in the summer of 1971. I was what I had always been, the son of a woman who did all she could do on her own, and needed a little help. I had given very little thought to being poor, because it was the only realm of existence I knew. The lives I read about in books or saw on the black-and-white TV were disconnected somehow, not real. We were never invited into the nicer houses, never shopped in nicer stores. The ritziest place I had ever been inside was the dime store on the old courthouse square. It was run by two ancient sisters. I would walk the aisles, looking at the toys and worthless knickknacks and magazine rack, which I was not allowed to touch. The old women tracked me with their eyes, every step I made. At ten-minute intervals one of the old women would ask if they could help me. “No ma’am,” I would say, “I’m just lookin’.”
Once, at Christmas, I was looking for a present for my momma. They had some ceramic angels to hang on the wall, spray-painted gold. They broke easy, I guess. I picked one up and turned to the counter and one of the old women met me, saying, “You ain’t got enough money for that.” To this day I don’t know how that old woman knew how much money I had.
I got a lesson in who I was at Christmas, I believe in 1971. A fraternity at Jacksonville State University threw a party for the children of poor families. They bought me a coat, a pair of shoes, a football, and a transistor radio. They held the party in their fraternity house, all the sugar cookies you could handle, and the 7 Up flowed like water. Mark and I sat together, surrounded by strangers, and I drank it all in. I was twelve, but I remember everything about that night. I wasn’t old enough to be ashamed about being the charity these glowing young people had gathered around, like a Christmas tree. But I was beginning to realize the difference between me and them.
The men, who called themselves Brothers, drove up with their dates in fastback Mustangs, Camaro convertibles and cream-colored Cougars, high school graduation presents, for sure. The women were all pretty—I cannot remember a time when every single woman in sight had been so damned pretty—and they all smelled very, very nice. They wore sweaters over their shoulders and they kept wantin’ to reach out and mess up my crookedy haircut. The men all had on penny loafers and blue jackets with ties, more ties than I had ever seen, and smelled strongly of High Karate. It was like they had a big bottle somewheres and passed it around.
I did not understand the concept of “fraternity,” but I knew that these were the rich folks. They were not rich folk by Manhattan standards, merely by Possum Trot ones. They were nice rich folk—they had to be to empty their pockets for children they didn’t know—but were as alien to people like me as Eskimos and flying saucers.
These were the sons and daughters of small towns around Alabama and Georgia, the offspring of real estate brokers, insurance barons and English professors. They were members of their town’s First Baptist Church, give or take a Methodist or two, and just because they had a six-pack after the JSU Fighting Gamecocks whipped Troy State’s ass in football didn’t mean they did not love the Lord.
Their Christmas tree was the biggest one I had ever seen, even bigger than the one in church. It was piled three feet high with presents, and after singing “Silent Night” and sipping punch they handed them out to the sons and daughters of pulpwooders and janitors and drunks, who all sat perfectly still, like my brother Mark and me, afraid to move. The jacket they gave me was gray plaid wool, and the transistor radio already had batteries in it.
They were Southerners like me, yet completely different. I remember thinking that it would be very, very nice to be their kind instead. And I remember thinking that, no, that will never happen.
We were part of it, of that night, because we were poor and because we were children, and I like to think that the frat boys and their Little Sisters still do that for the poor children in and around town. But you simply outgrow your invitation into that better world, as your childhood races away from you. You reach the age, ultimately, when that barrier slams down hard again between you and them, and the rest of the nice, solid, decent middle class. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad, if it was a wall of iron instead of glass.
You see them every day on their side. On their side, the teacher calls their name in homeroom and they walk with their heads up to her desk, to leave their lunch money, and pay their own way. On your side, the teacher calls your name and you stare at the tops of your shoes, waiting for her to check the box beside your name that says “Free,” wishing she would hurry. On their side, the summer glows with bronze beauties in bathing suits at the beach. On your side, people step away from you as you wait in line at the hamburger stand, because you smell like sweat and fertilizer and diesel fuel.
On the other side are cars that don’t tinkle with the sound of rolling beer bottles, and houses that don’t have a bed in the living room. But what really kills you on that other side are the people—the smiling, carefree people—who can just as easily look over into your side, and turn their face away.
Only the oxygen is richer on your side. It has to be. Because your childhood burns away much, much faster.
All I had to do was look across the Formica-topped kitchen table to my brother Sam, to see my future. At thirteen, he had done a man’s job, shoveling coal, pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with rocks, mucking out hog pens, loading boxcars at Dixie Clay with an endless line of fifty-pound bags of clay and lime. Some nights he would go to sleep sitting in that hard-backed chair, and Momma would lead him to bed. The work was his birthright. It was what he got instead of a Mustang.
11
Under a hateful sky
You begged the sky for a single cloud.
The sun did not shine down, it bored into you, through your hat and hair and skull, until you could feel it inside your very brain, till little specks of that sun seemed to break away and dance around, just outside your eyes. It turned the shovel handle hot and baked the red dirt till you could feel it through your leather work boots, radiating. Your sweat did not drip, it ran, turning the dust to mud on your face, soaking your T-shirt and your jeans, clinging like dead skin. The salt in it stung your eyes, until your lids were bright red and the whites were bloodshot, like a drunk man. Every now and then you or some man beside you would uncover a ground rattler, and you would chop it to little pieces with your shovel or beat it to mush with rakes, not just because it could bite you, kill you, but because it got in your way, because you had to take an extra step, to raise your arms an extra time, under that sun.
We did the hand labor in clearing land and building roads and grading lots for construction, digging out rocks and stumps and sawing down the pines, making room for new three-bedroom brick ranch houses with two-car garages and above-ground pools, working mostly for our uncle Ed. We scurried around the big, loud yellow International Harvester bulldozers and battered Chevrolet dump trucks, like worker ants scrambling around their fat queens, trying to keep our feet from being crushed under the trucks, looking out of the corner of our eyes for Mr. Bivens, the truck driver.
We did a lot of work, for a lot of people, but this was the hardest, the most regular, the dirtiest. We all did it at one time, Sam, me, finally Mark, and we were glad to get it. Our uncle treated us decent, paid on time and bought us, twice a day, an ice-cold RC. The sun burned down on him, too, he just didn’t give a damn. I have known a lot of tough men, men who seemed immune to the elements, even to bullets, but no one ignored the pain like Ed Fair. As a child, his legs had not just been broken but shattered by a speeding car. Yet he worked twelve-hour days on those legs, pieced together with iron rods and fragments of bone, working the pedals of the big tractor, moving mountains, ignoring the pain. It was impossible to whine about the hard work to a man like that. We just did it, every summer, on weekends, after school, if he needed us. We started when we were in junior high, as soon as our momma decided we had sense enough, as soon as we were big enough to realistically do the work.
Our uncle Ed expected us to work as hard as anyone else in the crew, but the fact is he looked after us, trying to make sure we didn’t get hurt. He looked after us in other ways, too.
One summer day, I think we might have been laying sod, I went into a country store to get some cold drinks and other junk food for the crew at lunch. I was covered head to toe in grime and sweat. For some reason, maybe because I didn’t have enough money, maybe because I had forgotten what I was supposed to get, I had to turn around and go out again, and when I got back inside the store the man behind the cash register was glaring at me. “You gonna pay for the Coke you stole,” he said. There were other people in the store, and they stared at me.
I told him I didn’t steal anything. Then my uncle Ed, wondering why I was taking so long, walked in the door. He faced down the man, and I had little doubt he would have fought him right then and there.
“I know the boy. I helped raise him. The boy don’t steal,” he said. “He don’t have to steal, if he wants a cold drink. I got enough money in my back pocket to buy your whole damn store.” Then he walked out, me in tow, leaving the man red-faced and shamed behind the front counter. I hope he realizes how close he came to getting a no. 9 work boot up his behind, one with a built-up heel, to compensate for Uncle Ed’s worst bad leg.
I appreciated the work, but I dreaded it. I dreaded the last day of class, the beginning of summer vacation. The next morning our momma would wake us up, feed us a biscuit and some fried eggs and hand us a brown-paper bag that contained two skinny, white-bread, potted meat sandwiches—a pink paste made from ground pork and preservatives—and a cookie. She never sent chocolate. Chocolate melted to mush in the cab of the dump trucks, and you had to lick it off the wrapper. You rode to the job in an insidious mix of diesel fumes and gray cigarette smoke, the big trucks moaning, bouncing, jerking along the roads, and before you had done even a lick of work you were wishing the day was over, the sun was down.
If we were clearing a lot that day, we followed the bulldozer into the pines and, with chain saws that vibrated so hard you had to be careful to keep your tongue out from between your clicking teeth, we chopped up the trees that the machine pushed down. Then the work really started. The logs were cut in six-feet lengths—the only way they could be sold as pulpwood—and we had to heave them over the side of the dump trucks, which stood about eight feet high. Some of the logs weighed fifty pounds and some weighed two hundred. Sometimes, all you could do was get one end of the log over the side of the truck and try to shove the rest of it over, trying to keep it from knocking your teeth out if you failed and it fell back down on you. The sap, sticky as gum, coated your arms and face and the chips of bark gored into your eyes, and every step you made you expected to feel the needle-sharp fangs of a copperhead or rattlesnake sink into your calf, because there was no way to tell where you put your feet in that tangle of broken limbs.
But the worst of it was when we had to get a house ready for its yard, which meant every rock and root and clod of hard mud had to be dug, picked or raked away, and piled in mounds for “the trash man.” Sam and I were the trash men, because we were always the youngest in the crew. We used giant forks, half as tall as us, big enough to hold forty pounds, to shovel the trash up and heave it, over our shoulder, into the back of the dump truck. Sometimes we couldn’t get the truck between the trees—some yuppie was always afraid of getting a dogwood scratched—and we would load it into a wheelbarrow and, straining our guts out, push it up a two-by-eight onto the back of the flatbed truck, and dump it.
“Someday, you gonna get a good job,” my uncle Ed told me. “You ought to take that fork and hang it on the wall, so you’ll remember what this was like. You’ll never gripe a
bout that good job. You never will.”
I knew this was not forever. It was the just the way, the means, by which we had things. Sam had caught the worst of it; I guess the oldest, by nature, always do. He worked, as a boy of twelve and thirteen, to help our momma, for nickels and dimes and quarters, trading his labor for a pickup load of coal. He would help a man cut hogs—the bloody castrating and nose-ringing work—for meat. By the time he was fifteen, his arms were corded with muscle, his legs hard as a pine knot. I saw him as indestructible, so much so that, one time when he accidentally ripped into his leg with the power saw, I was surprised to see him bleed.
The work was a hard and temporary thing that, I hoped, would pass in time. For me, it was a purification by fire, a thing that would make every other job, every other thing I ever did for the rest of my life, so laughingly easy by comparison.
For Sam, it was the first step in a long, long walk, where the scenery seldom changed.
Roy Webb Junior High School is a red-brick, one-story building on Roy Webb Road, and sits in the middle of the Roy Webb Community. I never bothered to ask who Roy Webb was, but if modesty was one of his virtues in life, he is twirling ’neath the red clay now. There were a few rich kids, but most of the children were the sons and daughters of working people. Even within a society like that, there are classes. I remember, when I was in the elementary school, having to answer questions about why we lived in our grandmother’s house. The word spread. “They ain’t got no daddy.”