“That’s my baby! That’s my baby!”
I rounded first, and out of the corner of my vision, I saw my mom waving her arms in the air. On my way to second, I looked up as the ball soared up, up, and out over the center-field fence. That’s when I slowed down. I don’t think there’s ever a reason to hurry when you got a bunch of white people cheering you on. I planted my foot on second base and took my sweet time rounding to third. The shortstop muttered something when I went by, but I couldn’t tell what it was, and I didn’t care. These were the moments you lived for. I liked to hear the applause, hear the kids call me “Homer.” Sometimes they even chanted it. “Ho-mer! Ho-mer! Ho-mer!” One time in basketball season, we were at an away game in the town of Good Hope, when I scored thirty points in the first half—a record for the school—and I walked off the court to the sound of the crowd chanting, “Hin-ton! Hin-ton! Hin-ton!” I couldn’t understand why all the Good Hope fans were chanting my name too or why when I sat on the bench none of the guys on my team were smiling or high-fiving me.
My coach went out to center court and started yelling at the crowd. “That’s enough now! You stop that!”
I turned to our point guard, who was sitting next to me, and said, “What are they saying?” He just shook his head, so I asked him again. “What are they saying?”
“Man, they are saying, ‘Nig-ger! Nig-ger!’” He hung his head.
That’s what the crowd was chanting. I thought it was “Hin-ton!” My pride went to shame in a split second. No one was cheering for my record-breaking half. When we got on the bus to make the hour-long drive home, our coach made us sit on the floor in the middle of the bus until we were outside of town. It wasn’t safe to sit by the windows if you were black.
* * *
When I crossed home plate, I looked over to see the pitcher throw his glove in the dirt, and for some reason, this made me smile more than the home run or the crowd chanting for me. They can beat you, but they can’t break you. I guess his mama hadn’t taught him the same things my mama did.
I hit a triple and another home run, and we ended up winning the game, 7–2. It turned out there was a scout at the game, but he must not have been looking for a third baseman or a power hitter, because he didn’t ask to talk to me or my mom before she had to leave. When I came out of the locker room back at the school, Lester was waiting outside for me. The sun was just beginning to dim a little in the sky as we began our walk back to Praco.
“Tough game.”
I looked at Lester and nodded. The team won, but it was a tough game for me. I could feel the soreness in my hip and shoulder starting to turn into real pain.
Lester slapped me on the back, and we both just started walking.
Flat Top was a two-lane road, and running alongside it was a ditch that bordered the woods for most of the way. Lester watched ahead, and I looked behind so that we could see any car that was coming even before we could hear it. If it was someone we knew, we flagged it down and caught a ride into Praco. If it was a car we didn’t recognize, we would jump into the ditch and hide the best we could. We would have to hide four or five times during the hour-and-a-half walk home.
I hoped someone we knew came by soon. I just wanted to get home to my mom’s cooking.
Lester and I didn’t talk too much on the walk. We were both busy scanning the road in two directions. If you got to talking, you could get distracted and then be surprised by a car coming up behind you. There weren’t many houses on this road, and there wasn’t anyone to help if we met trouble.
I heard the car before I saw it, but when it came into view, it was bright red. No one we knew drove a car that red.
“Car!” I yelled, and Lester and I both turned right and headed into the brush alongside of the road. The car was coming too fast, so we both kind of leaped the last foot and ended up on our sides in the deep culvert that ran next to the road. I think my foot might have kicked him in the head on the way down, but somehow we landed shoulder to shoulder. I held my breath because if someone was going to stop, you could usually hear the brakes kick in if you were quiet enough. We stayed quiet until the car went rushing past.
My heart was beating fast.
“You okay?” I asked Lester.
“Yep. You?”
I thought about it for a second. Was I okay? Here I was in the dirt again for the second time that day. I might even be in it again a few more times before we got home. I could feel a sharp rock pressing into the back of my head. I had scraped my arm against something with thorns—maybe it was a devil’s walking stick or another tree with spikes we called the toothache tree. If only I had a car, I wouldn’t have to be lying in the dirt with my eyes down like some disobedient dog that’s so scared he’s about to piss himself. And what was Lester going to do next year when I was graduated and he had to make this walk himself? I wasn’t okay. He wasn’t either. Nothing about this was okay. But here we were. Again.
“You know what’s strange?” I asked Lester.
“Besides us lying in this ditch?”
“Yeah, besides the obvious.”
“Besides your hair?”
I laughed. “Yeah, besides my hair and my big feet and all that.”
“Okay, then. What’s strange?”
I looked up at the sky. It was just that perfect shade of in-between. When it goes from the bright blue of the day to the black blue of the night. I wish I knew the name for that color. It was like an ending and a beginning. Whatever you called that color, it always made me sad and happy at the exact same time. Like when everyone sang “Amazing Grace” at church. It’s a song that made a guy hopeful but also reminded him that he was a wretch that needed to be saved.
“It’s strange what you can get used to.”
Lester grunted in his Lester way. I knew it meant he agreed with me. Lester wasn’t a big talker.
“There’s some things a body shouldn’t have to get used to,” I said.
Lester turned his head toward mine and gave his chin a little lift in agreement. We could both hear another car coming in the distance, and we knew it wasn’t time to get up out of the dirt. Not yet.
I took a deep breath. I knew I had a choice. Looking up at that sky, I knew I could get angry or I could have some faith. It was always a choice. I could easily have been angry, and maybe I should have been angry. This was God’s country, and I chose instead to love every single shade of blue that the sky wanted to show me. And when I turned my head to the right, I could see what looked like ten different shades of green. This was real and true, and it reminded me that even when you are flat on your back on the ground, there is beauty if you look for it. I took another deep breath. The dirt smelled a little bit like burned sugar. I knew my mom was waiting at home with some grits and turkey neck and a sweet piece of cobbler. I had just played a great baseball game, and even if the scouts and the coaches and the colleges didn’t want to pay attention, I knew I could hit like nobody else. Hell, even in the dirt, I had my best friend at my side. Things could have been worse. They could always be worse.
I listened as the car came closer. It had that whine and deep throttle noise that was more old truck than sedan. I closed my eyes as it passed by, and we waited. I didn’t hear brakes, and I didn’t hear any other cars. I could only hear my breathing and Lester’s. I wanted to protect him. Protect myself. Protect my mom and my sisters and brothers. Protect everyone in this whole world who couldn’t walk down a street without feeling some kind of fear. The soil of Alabama was full of the sweat and tears and blood and fear of guys just like us. Guys who were forced to the ground just because of the color of their skin.
This was something that I didn’t want to get used to.
This was something that should never be normal.
“Let’s get going,” I said, and with that, we climbed out of the ditch and continued our long walk home.
3
A TWO-YEAR TEST DRIVE
If you are big and brave enough to throw a rock, you’
d better be big and brave enough not to hide your hands behind your back when you get caught. You show your hands, and you own up to what you done.
—BUHLAR HINTON
Mary Lee Mine No. 2, 1975
There was blood everywhere. I could feel it on my face, taste it as it rushed like a waterfall into my mouth, over my chin, and down the inside of my shirt. I wanted to spit, but it was like my lips didn’t work, so I just tried to turn my head so I wouldn’t choke on the blood or get sick from the coppery, sweet taste of it. The pain was sharp and hot, and it felt like my whole head had been split right in two. I could feel something hanging below my lip, but as much as I wanted to run my hands over my face to hold it together, I knew that whatever was bleeding wouldn’t be helped by the toxic filth of the Mary Lee getting into it.
I never really believed I would end up working the coal mines, but it was the only place I could get a decent wage right out of high school. There weren’t many options for me after graduation. No scholarship. No college. No opportunities other than those I could make for myself. Hell, we didn’t even have ten dollars extra to pay for my class ring when I graduated. The mines were the best-paying job around, and as much as I had sworn I would never work them, I wasn’t going to turn my back on a decent job. Good jobs were few and far between, and there were long lines of men trying to get on at the mines. I had a leg up because we lived in Praco, because my dad had been a company man, and because I knew a few of the white guys from high school who put in a good word for me with the superintendent. My ability to get along with the whites also helped, and I didn’t have any reputation from school or from town for causing trouble.
I was responsible for installing the long steel bolts that supported the roof and kept it from falling. Whether it was whole roofs that caved in and crushed miners or heavy rocks falling loose from between the bolts, death came from above in a mine. You could literally be knocked senseless like my dad, or have your skull bashed in by a loose boulder or sliced open by a razor-sharp piece of shale raining down from forty feet above. Pinning, as we called it, wasn’t an easy job. No job in the mines was easy. Most days, we were working in small shafts and tunnels where we had less than four feet of height to maneuver in. You ride the elevator down almost a mile, and then you get in shuttle cars that you ride for miles in dark, dank air in a world with no light and no color. It’s dark when you go down in the morning, it’s dark all day, and it’s dark when you get outside at night. It wasn’t easy to maneuver the machinery and the bolts, some of them four or eight feet long, and drill holes into solid rock and secure the bolts with steel plates, but it had to be done and done right or men would die. Some days it felt like the best you could do was pray that the roof’s weight held.
I hated every second of it.
I wasn’t meant to be kept in a small space; I didn’t like to be hunched over, to feel like walls were slowly closing in on me and there was no place to run, no place where there was light and air and space for a man to breathe. I didn’t know much, but I knew that God didn’t make me to live underground or in a small space. It felt like climbing into your own coffin every day. What man in his right mind would do that? I used to imagine I was outside—walking in the woods or driving on a long stretch of highway across the country. I didn’t have my own car, but I loved to drive. I would ride that elevator into the mine, but in my head, I was traveling across Alabama and out West. I’d drive through Texas and New Mexico. Some days, I’d make it all the way to the Pacific Ocean, but other days, I’d hang a left in Texas and travel down through Mexico and even make it into Central America, where I’d dance with beautiful women in Honduras and Panama. Other times, I’d go north and visit the Great Lakes before heading to the wide-open skies of Montana and then up into Canada. I was never sure how far north a person could drive—was Greenland up there? Could you actually drive to Alaska or the North Pole? I didn’t know, and I didn’t care for cold weather like that, so I’d always turn my imaginary car around in Canada. Some days, I would go up to Maine to eat lobster drenched in warm butter, and other days, I would go swimming in Key West, Florida. In my mind, I would travel anywhere but into that black, dark pit where every breath was full of float dust that brought coal and rock and dirt into your lungs where it settled in and took root as if to punish you for disturbing it in the first place. I grew up with old men who hadn’t gone into the mines in twenty years but still turned their handkerchiefs black every time they coughed or blew their noses or wiped their foreheads on a hot summer day. I saw other men dying before they even got a chance to retire—watched them struggling to breathe from lungs that were full of a sickness that didn’t have a name. I remember my mom making soup and cakes and bringing them to women who had lost their husbands to the mine. So many soups and so many cakes, and so many women and children left on their own. Growing up, it seemed like every month men disappeared from Praco, and I remember thinking that the mine openings were actually the mouths of great big monsters that lived underground, and when the men walked in, they were chewed up and either spit out broken like my dad or they were swallowed and gone forever. I didn’t want to die in the mine or sweat coal for the rest of my life or have the mine grow in my lungs until it choked everything out, but what else was a guy to do when he was ready to work and earn his way in the world? Working for minimum wage in a fast-food joint where white people still didn’t want to see that a black man might be touching their food didn’t set well with me either. The sad truth was, the best way to go up in the world was to go down into the mines. And the more dangerous the job, the better it paid.
* * *
The ambulance ride was a blur, but I remember seeing my sister waiting at the top of the mine when they brought me out. She was crying because of all the blood, and I didn’t understand why the paramedics said they couldn’t put an oxygen mask on my face. I tried to tell them about the monster and how it had chewed me up and spit me out, but there was too much blood in my mouth, and I couldn’t move my lips the right way to get the words out, so it seemed easier just to close my eyes and imagine I was back in Panama and there was a beautiful woman in a red dress that left her brown shoulders bare who wanted to dance with me, so I held her in my arms and we danced in slow circles around and around and around while the ambulance sirens played their music.
The rock that virtually sliced off my nose fell down from about twenty feet above me that day. I was lucky that even though it was heavy enough to cause a concussion and sharp enough to slice through my face like it was butter, there was no permanent damage other than a large scar across my nose from the twenty-two stitches it took to put me back together again. I’d like to say that I never went back down in the mine after that day, but then I’d be lying. I worked in that mine for five long years.
* * *
There was no big event that caused me to leave the mines. One day, I just woke up late and the sun was shining and I could hear birds chirping and the sky was the brightest blue I had ever seen, and I just knew I couldn’t go down in that dark place again. I wanted to be in the sunshine. I was twenty-four years old, and it seemed like all I had on my brain was women, and there were no women at the bottom of that mine.
After high school, I had started a recreational softball league with Lester as my star pitcher. But most of the guys who had played were moving on and getting too busy with work and life to show up on a regular basis, so we had just ended the league. Lester had gone down into the mines too, but he worked over at the Bessie Mine, not the Mary Lee, and he had no plans of giving up a solid job anytime soon. He just shook his head at me when I told him I’d rather be poor in the light than rich in the dark. Lester put his head down, went to work, and didn’t complain one way or the other. I admired that about him. But life pulled at me in a different way, and I dreamed of big adventures, beautiful women, and a life where a man could be rewarded for his hard work without putting his life at risk. I imagined going to law school or even business school. I would wear silk suit
s, and I imagined myself as a CEO or a lawyer who could outargue anyone in a courtroom. Sometimes I even imagined I was a doctor or a firefighter. I didn’t dream of baseball anymore; that was still too painful. I knew that if I had been born someone else, I would have gotten a scholarship and gone to college, maybe even been drafted, and that knowledge hurt so much I put that dream away.
During the four years or so we ran the softball league, I had also been dating two sisters on the sly. One of the guys I played against, Reggie, was pretty angry about it because he had asked out the younger sister and she turned him down and confessed that she was dating me in secret. I was openly dating the older sister, but I had the younger one on lock. Reggie was going around town talking some big talk about how he was going to take me down. I wasn’t too worried about it, because I had at least half a foot on him and probably about sixty pounds. Reggie was a little guy, with mean eyes that always seemed to be staring my way. We had a lot of friends in common, so I knew what he said about me. I heard everything. He was like a snake slithering around behind my back wherever I went, but I knew he was all hiss and no bite.
I wasn’t proud of dating two sisters, and there was no doubt my mom would’ve skinned my behind if she’d found out, but women were my one weakness. My one true vice. I didn’t drink. I didn’t smoke or do drugs. But I fell in and out of lust every single day, it seemed. There was no greater thrill than the chase for me. I didn’t care if they were married, had a boyfriend, or if I was dating their sister. Maybe it was a gift or maybe it was a curse, but when I was talking with a woman, whether it was for an hour or for a night, she was the only one for me. I wasn’t playing a game, and I don’t know how to explain exactly how I justified it in my head, but whatever girl was in front of me was absolutely the sole focus of my attention and my love. And my favorite thing was when one of my friends would tell me a girl was out of my league. “Give me five minutes,” I would answer. And it never failed. I could sweet-talk any woman until she was weak in the knees. And I meant every word I said to every single one of them. I believed it, so they believed it.
The Sun Does Shine Page 4