Dear Father, Dear Son

by Larry Elder

  On television, barns don’t smell funny. In real life, they reek. Grandpa and I carried buckets of “slop”—leftover food mixed with corn, watermelon rinds, and potato peels—to feed the hogs he kept in the barn. I held my breath, dumped the stuff into the trough, and ran out.

  “Whatcha hurry?” he said. “Pigs ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  Grandma was short and sturdy and all business. I tried to imagine her forty years younger—and I could see my mother in her face.

  One morning after a rainfall, Grandma and I were walking in the field to feed the mules. We came to a four-inch bed of water.

  “Uh-oh. There go my tennis shoes.”

  “Git on my back,” she said.

  “Get on your back?”

  “Git on my back an’ I’ll tote you across.” She pointed at her rubber boots.

  “I can’t do that, Grandma.”

  “You ain’t heavy. Git on my back, an’ I’ll tote you across.”

  I hopped on her back. She toted me across the waterbed as if I was no heavier than a ladybug.

  “Let’s feed the mules. Then I’ll tote you back.”

  All the country boys walked barefoot. No trail was too rocky. The first time I tried to do the same, my feet bled. The country kids laughed at the “city sissies.” No matter how much we tried, we could not walk around out there without tennis shoes, or sandals at the very least.

  I became friends with a boy my age named Charles. We did everything together. We swam in my grandparents’ creek, where Charles grabbed a tree vine like Tarzan and swung way out and over before plunking down into the water. It took a while, but I worked up the nerve to do it, too. We sat in truck-tire inner-tubes and floated on the water. We bathed in the creek using the Ivory soap bars Grandpa said to take with us.

  “They float. Won’t lose ’em.”

  Charles and I walked to a little store run by a humorless white man who leaned against the wall the whole time we were in there, moving only to collect the money.

  “Whatcha want, boy?” he said when we walked in. “Ah said, whatcha want, boy?”

  I had never seen a customer treated like that.

  “Potato,” Charles said.

  “What kind of potato, boy? Osh potato?”

  “Yes, sir, osh potato.”

  “Then why didn’t ya say so? Cain’t read yo’ mind, now can I?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, all right then.”

  I couldn’t take anymore.

  “Look, mister, why—”

  Charles grabbed my arm and shook his head. He also asked for an RC Cola and a Moon Pie and we left.

  “You let him speak to you like that?”

  “Like what?” Charles said.

  “Like you were a piece of shit.”

  “It’s different down here,” he said.

  It sure was. On the train, we passed through small town depots with two arrows painted on the walls pointing to rest-rooms. One arrow would point to a door with a sign over it: “Colored Only.”

  The year before, Mom and Dad had taken us to the Century drive-in to see To Kill a Mockingbird. I asked so many questions that they told me to shut up so they could watch the movie. But this was real. And it was really like that movie.

  Grandpa, several times a week, picked tomatoes and berries from the garden, then went to the field to tear off several ears of corn. He put them in a box, set it in the car, came back hours later, and sat at the kitchen table, humming as he counted the coins from his pocket.

  “Grandpa, where did you go?”

  “To town to sell my produce.”

  “Can I go with you?”

  “Next time. Just don’t git in my way.”

  When we got to town, he drove down a street lined with tidy houses. We got out and rang the first doorbell.

  “’Mornin’ ma’am, y’all need anythin’?” Grandpa said holding his box.

  The lady said, “No, boy, and I thought I told you that two days ago.” She picked through the box. “You have anything fresh?”

  He assured her that he had picked everything that morning.

  “How much for this?” She picked up an ear of corn and fingered it.

  “Ten cents.”

  “Ten cents for this? It ain’t even near ready. I’ll take two for ten cents.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  We got back in the car and drove to the next house.

  Most people were rude, and almost all called him “boy” even though he was ten to thirty years older than the white housewives haggling with him. He may have made three or four dollars that morning.

  “Why does he put up with it?” I asked Mom when Grandpa and I got back. “He doesn’t need the money.”

  She sighed. “No, he doesn’t. Grandma even told him to ‘quit that foolishness.’ But Grandpa feels funny about money. He’s always afraid he’s going to run out.”

  “Run out? He’s got everything he needs.”

  “That’s the way he is, always has been. We just let him alone. You should, too.”

  “Well, I’m not going anymore.”

  Then there was church—the hot, wooden country church with the big, earthy country preacher.

  Dad shook his head. “All that hollerin’ and whoopin’. I couldn’t stand it. I like to be talked to like I’m an adult. I don’t like to be preached at.”

  Grandpa’s wooden church had a heavy preacher who pounded the Bible and wiped his face with a white handkerchief that he stuffed in his breast pocket and then whipped out again for another wipe.

  People in the pews cooled their faces with paper fans attached to ice cream sticks. On the fans, the local funeral home advertised “traditional family services since 1910.”

  “Gawd,” the preacher shouted, “Gawd says you … will … find … a way!”

  The quiet man sitting next to me erupted. “Yes, sah! You will find a way!”

  Then the man behind me stood, “Tell it, Rev! Tell it!”

  I wondered whether I was being rude by not saying anything. I’d never seen anything like it. In L.A., we went to a polite church with low-key sermons delivered by a guy who looked like an accounting clerk.

  Here people got up. They waved. They jumped up and screamed. Some fell to their knees. Everybody was “brotha” and “sista.” A man cried. A woman passed out.

  Dad shook his head. “Couldn’t take all that ‘testifyin’.’ But I’ll give ’em this. They got good singin’.”

  The choir had at least three singers with voices as beautiful and powerful as that of Aretha Franklin. When I said this to Grandpa on the way home, I expected him to ask who she was.

  “You mean the Reverend Franklin’s daughter?” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Boy, you don’t know Rev Franklin?”

  “Sueberta,” he turned to his wife, “boy don’t know Rev Franklin.”

  “Lawdy!” Grandma said.

  Reverend C. L. Franklin, I learned, besides being a fine gospel singer, was the most popular and respected preacher in the South, far more well-known than the “Queen of Soul.”

  Dad said he wished he’d gotten to know Grandpa and Grandma. He met them only once shortly after he and Mom married.

  “You know,” I said, “I was sitting in the tub, and I heard Mom in the next room complaining about you to Grandma and Grandpa.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “When she left the room, Grandma said, ‘You know, I do believe she’s too hard on that boy.’”

  “Uh-huh,” Grandpa said, “’tain’t nothin’ wrong with that boy.”

  “They said that?” Dad said. “Well, I’ll say.”

  The summers down on the farm were glorious.

  Mom was born and raised on this magnificent land, where her big, rowdy family grew or raised everything they needed. They were self-sufficient. It was a big deal for a black family to own a farm and theirs was a large one that had been in her family for generations. It made them a kind of Depression-era Bible B
elt black gentry, who even managed to send Mom and her youngest brother “away for schoolin’.” Mom never knew about a Great Depression. She and her brothers ate well, and made money selling the surplus.

  Dad’s mother lived in rented rooms, often awakening him in the middle of the night. “Git dressed,” she’d say.

  They would tip-toe down the steps in the darkness to jump the rent. He had no choice but to walk into little country stores to buy food and put up with demeaning service—assuming the store would even extend service. No wonder Dad couldn’t wait to get out of the country, and isn’t the least bit nostalgic about the place.

  “Me and your mother were in two different worlds down there,” Dad said, getting up for another cup. “Night and day.”

  Dad wanted to hear about the time I stayed with Aunt Juanita.

  On the way to Huntsville one summer, we stopped off in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Mom and Dennis stayed with cousins. I spent two weeks with my mother’s sister, Aunt Nita, whose husband, Eddie, had introduced my parents.

  Aunt Nita, like everybody down here, called my mother Ola.

  “Ola, it’s so nice see you! Oh, my goodness, your boys are so skinny. And I thought they’d be fattened up by now. Does your Momma ever feed you?”

  “Just bread and water.”

  “Larry,” Mom said. “Stop it.”

  Their orderly little house sat down the street from Black Draught, a laxative factory. They bought the house right after they married, and stayed there for going on twenty years. Aunt Nita’s friends had long ago moved into bigger houses in better neighborhoods. But Uncle Eddie was having none of it. The house, like his car and his barbershop, was “bought and paid for.”

  They were sisters, all right. Aunt Nita’s face resembled Mom’s. And they were both light-skinned with soft hair. Aunt Nita barely finished the seventh grade, and bragged about her husband who “darned near finished high school.” She felt lucky to be married, and even luckier that someone as learned and worldly as Uncle Eddie had married her.

  “Child, you should hear him talkin’ those politics.”

  Aunt Nita was heavy, but never fretted about her weight. She liked to eat and considered a round, well-fed husband a patriotic duty. She liked big “church hats” and pinned them with fresh flowers. She wore dresses and heels, even while cooking and cleaning. Her house was spotless. She even color-coordinated the little squares of soap placed in glass bowls on either side of the sink in the perfumed bathroom.

  Glass was everywhere. The kitchen tabletop was glass. You could have looked through it and seen the floor had Aunt Nita not covered every square inch of the tabletop with homemade place mats. That glass tabletop wouldn’t have lasted very long in our house before somebody slammed something down and broke it. But no one slammed anything in this house. No one shouted. No one even raised a voice. They practically whispered.

  Why wouldn’t Dad, as a single man looking for a good wife, want to meet Juanita’s sister?

  When Uncle Eddie got up in the morning, his bed was already made up, hotel neat, before his second cup of coffee.

  Each night, Aunt Nita laid out his clothes for the next day. She allowed him to select the ties, but she retained the right to overrule.

  “Tomorrow, I think your blue suit. It just came back from the cleaners. And that spot finally came out. Had to send it back two times.”

  “Whatever you say, Honey.”

  Aunt Nita and her three hundred pounds sprinted to the door when Uncle Eddie pulled in the driveway. Once inside, he stood in the bedroom and removed his suit coat, tie bar, tie, cuff links, white shirt, belt, pants, and dress shoes. He handed them to Aunt Nita in exchange for his robe that she held open for his arms to slide though.

  She brought his slippers, pipe, and the Chattanooga Times, and he settled into the easy chair and waited for dinner.

  “How did it go today?” she asked.

  He talked about the barbershop and the customers. She listened to his complaints and made suggestions.

  “Well, the last time you gave him credit, it took him two months to pay. Don’t cut his hair so short next time. Then he’ll have to come back sooner. If he don’t, he’ll look like a gangster.”

  Uncle Eddie vented about the latest outrage committed by the Democrats. She asked about his stocks.

  “Up an eighth of a point, might even split two-for-one.”

  She didn’t have a clue what that meant.

  “Oh, that’s wonderful, Honey.”

  Uncle Eddie complained about the economy and how the Democrats “foul it up.”

  “Well, I know you goin’ to do somethin’ about it.”

  She winked at me.

  “Dinner is ’bout ready. Come to the table in two minutes. Wash your hands.”

  “Ain’t you going downtown tomorrow?” Uncle Eddie asked.

  “No, Honey. Friday.”

  “Well, take the money you need from my wallet. If it ain’t enough, let me know.”

  “All right, Honey.”

  They had already said more to each other than Mom and Dad did in a month.

  Dinner was five courses, followed by an after-dinner shot of whiskey.

  “How did you like the soup tonight? Wasn’t too hot?”

  “No, Sweetie, it was perfect.”

  If he had asked for toothpick, she would have grabbed an ax and chopped down a tree to make sure he got a fresh one. She again brought him a pipe and tobacco, sat next to him, and watched whatever he wanted on television.

  “Honey, I’m thinking about having a few of the men from the caucus over next Saturday. Would that be too much trouble?”

  It was like asking the dog if he wanted to go out for a w.a.l.k.

  “You mean I get to use my new silverware?” she said excitedly.

  Aunt Nita planned for Saturday like D-Day. The house was small so that every bit of space had to be used efficiently. How many people? Where would they sit?

  What would she serve? What did she serve last time?

  Her stuffed turkey was a hit last month, but she’d sooner use a box of “store bought” cake mix before she served the same thing twice. When to serve it? Last time there had been a minor crisis. Eddie’s caucus hadn’t quite finished strategizing the fall election when she brought out the salads.

  “Too early. That ain’t gonna happen again. But it ain’t my fault they so darn long-winded.”

  She took pride in doing everything by herself—no assistant, no helper, no servers, and no one to help clean up afterward. She made the desserts from scratch. This time there would be three homemade peach cobblers, two cherry pies, three sweet potatoes pies, and two cakes—one angel food and one devil’s food.

  Cooking started Thursday.

  “Now you just stay out of the way.”

  “Can I at least help set the table?” I asked Saturday morning.

  She allowed me to set out the knifes, forks, appetizer forks, spoons, soup spoons, dessert spoons, and the cloth napkins and holders.

  “No, no, no, boy, that spoon there. Don’t tell me y’all don’t know how to set a proper table?”

  “No, Aunt Nita. We don’t use dessert spoons.”

  “Oh, my goodness! Bet Ola has to hide your sorry behind when she throws a party.”

  When I told her that we never had a party, Aunt Nita practically had to be resuscitated.

  “No party? What does she do when Randy has folks over for dinner?”

  “Dad doesn’t bring anybody over for dinner.”

  She needed smelling salts.

  “Ola ain’t never cooked nothin’ for your father’s folks?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, my Lord, my goodness, my goodness. I’m gonna have to talk to that girl.”

  Saturday was a big success.

  After dinner and when the compliments were over, the women fanned out to the living room, and the men to the front porch which had been screened in to protect against the Tennessee flying bugs.

  The wom
en laughed and hooted about church and their children and other people. The men discussed politics. When the political talk ran dry, they sat and smoked pipes, the quiet broken only by the laughter of the wives inside.

  After the party, Uncle Eddie went to bed and I helped Aunt Nita with the dishes.

  “Ola ain’t never had a party. Well, I’ll say. I’m gonna have to talk to that girl.”

  “Dad, before you met Mom, how many times had they had you over for dinner?”

  “Bunch of times,” he said. “And I thought, damn, and she has a sister?”

  “Bet you thought Mom would drop rose petals when you got up to take a leak.”

  “Well,” he said, “not every time.”

  He didn’t know that I met his mother on one trip. I only saw her once.

  “I want to meet Dad’s mother,” I told Mom during one of the summers we spent with Aunt Nita and Uncle Eddie in Chattanooga.

  “I met her before,” Uncle Eddie said. “Nice lady. Ain’t got no phone.”

  Uncle Eddie had her neighbor’s phone number who then contacted her. Uncle Eddie drove Aunt Nita, Mom, and me three hours to Athens.

  The wallpaper was peeling in the living room of the small house. The room had a big lumpy couch with a Folger’s coffee can holding up one end. A small television set was in the corner on top of a TV tray table. The television was on, the sound was down, the screen flickering. On a small table in the opposite corner sat an old desk fan with the blades spinning.

  “Hot down he-ah, ain’t it?” she said.

  There was a black bug crawling up the wall behind Dad’s mother. She followed my eyes to it, took a look, turned back, and gave it no thought.

  “How’s Ran treatin’ you, Honey?” she asked Mom.

  She was tiny and short with an apron around her waist. Her flabby little arms waved off flies.

  “How’s yo daddy?”

  “Fine, thank you,” I said. I didn’t know what to call her. Grandma? Mrs. Elder?

  “You know he writes me nearly every month.” She pushed up her glasses and waved off a fly. “Yep, pert near every month.” She went to the bedroom and came out with a stack of envelopes. “A boy down yonder comes an’ reads it to me. Pert near every month.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  Uncle Eddie, Aunt Nita, and Mom talked about the summer heat. Dad’s mother kept staring at me. How did she survive? There was no car anywhere around. Did people bring her food? What does she do all day? What was she doing when we pulled up? Even the television had bad reception. No phone? The nearest neighbor was too far for her to walk to. What did Dad do down here when he was my age? What did he do when he came home from school? What did he play with? There were no kids around. It was the first time I was glad I had brothers—even Dennis.