Little Boy Blues Page 2

  I grew up feeling powerless—powerless to help my mother or cure my father’s alcoholism, powerless to stop their fighting or shore up their marriage. And as I grew I spent more and more time in my own head, developing habits (reading and drawing mostly, although there were brief, abortive flings with model airplanes and a chemistry set) to help myself wall out the world. But the feeling of helplessness, a lack of control over any aspect of my life, never went away, even in the best of times. I never spoke about any of this to another living soul, perhaps because, growing up alone and in a peculiar situation, I had no outside point of reference. In the households I knew best, people either talked too much or not at all. Melita and Tom took great pains to avoid any unpleasantness in my presence—they even talked my mother out of letting me attend my grandmother’s funeral when I was nine, because they thought I should be spared. Spared what, they never said.

  Carefully, as I had been taught, I opened the top of the box and pulled the marionette out. It was tied to a piece of cardboard, and the strings and the wooden controls to which they were knotted were looped over the back of the cardboard.

  “Here,” Daddy said, setting aside his cigarette and pulling out his pocketknife, “let me help you with that. We’ll just cut those strings and have him out—”

  “Mack!”

  Daddy laughed.

  “Don’t cut the strings!” I said anxiously. “That’s what makes him work.”

  “Is that right?” my father said. “Can you give us a show?”

  The Southern households in which I grew up in the fifties and early sixties were populated by aunts and uncles and grandparents born in the nineteenth century. My father, the youngest member of my immediate family, was born in 1920. I had three aunts who never learned to drive. No one in my immediate family—my parents and the aunt and uncle who partly reared me—owned a television set or even had a car radio. My earliest views on life were formed by people who, even when they weren’t born in the nineteenth century, saw the world much as it was seen during Reconstruction. General Sherman’s name was still a dirty word in our family, and my mother loved to show me the “Sherman quilt,” as she always called it, that had been buried with the rest of the family valuables when Sherman marched north through South Carolina in 1865.

  No one in my family saw anything wrong with giving a child a minstrel-show marionette as a Christmas present. If they thought about it at all, they would have said it was cute. Blackface minstrels were cute the same way pictures of little pickaninnies eating enormous slices of watermelon were cute. Most of my family were casually racist: white Southerners who didn’t care much one way or the other. They lived through epochal events—Little Rock had been placed under martial law just four months before the Christmas I received my first marionette—but they were actors in the most passive sense. The only issue that concerned the white people among whom I grew up was the preservation of the status quo, and they weren’t particularly militant even about that. They tolerated change when it didn’t inconvenience them, and otherwise turned a blind eye to the inequalities inherent in segregation. That took some effort in a city where the issue of race stained every aspect of life. I am just old enough to remember the colored balcony in movie theaters and white-only drinking fountains in downtown department stores in Winston-Salem in the fifties. And where segregation wasn’t legally enforced, it was de facto. Black people didn’t ride in the back of the bus in Winston-Salem, but only because they had their own black-owned and-operated mass transit, the Safe Bus Co., catering to people on the east side of town. As far back as I can remember, race and bigotry were everywhere and nowhere, like an odorless, tasteless gas that you breathed in every day.

  When I was a small boy, there were two or three times, always when we were alone, when I heard my father say the word nigger. The sole instance in our shared history where I’m sure that I’m quoting him verbatim occurred when I was five or six. It was twilight, and we were in the car together. We passed the local drugstore just when the black deliveryman came out and got into his car. “That nigger acts like he owns the world,” Daddy said, about as casually as he would ask for the salt. I was shocked and confused. Didn’t he know better? I’m sure I didn’t correct him. I had been brought up to never correct an adult. But that would have been one of the earliest occasions where I blundered into the lifelong dilemma of squaring the ugliness in people you love with whatever it is you love about them.

  It would have been my mother, then, who forbade me to use that word. This was, I suspect, mostly just good manners on her part. She had, after all, grown up in the Jim Crow South, a world where, when you felt particularly generous, you said nigra instead of colored people. She was the child of her environment, and all her life she lugged around a lot of petty prejudices. She knew for a fact that blacks had natural rhythm, that Jews were good with money and that Roman Catholics were up to something, even if she wasn’t sure what. With a great show of impatience, she would often wonder aloud just what black people wanted to be called. The question came laden with the peevish implication that someone was being fickle. And yet, grumbling all the way, she gamely made the transition from nigra to negro to black (always plural in her conversation and always accompanied by a definite article: “the blacks”) and, ultimately, to African-Americans. A lifelong yellow-dog Democrat, she tried hard to take what was, by her standards, a liberal view on race. She might never have come up with the idea of integration by herself, but when it came, she went along with it. She began her teaching career in totally segregated schools, and I’m sure she never questioned that arrangement. She finished that career thirty years later teaching integrated classrooms in a predominantly black neighborhood. I never heard her question that situation either, and she wasn’t one to avoid criticism: I got an earful on plenty of occasions about the serial absurdities of changing educational philosophies inflicted by the central office. And whenever I’m tempted to feel more enlightened than she was, I remind myself that she had more African-American friends than I have ever had.

  Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was never Birmingham, largely because it was still an oligarchy ruled by the same men who ran the tobacco and textile factories. These men were prescient enough to anticipate the future and wise enough to accommodate it peaceably and efficiently. Sit-ins, boycotts and protests did occur, but they encountered little resistance from people in power. The city elected its first black alderman in 1947. The first black student attended an all-white school in 1957. Three years later the city desegregated its lunch counters after a four-month protest. There were no church bombings, police dogs or fire hoses. The viciousness and violence that characterized the fight over desegregation in the Deep South was never allowed to surface in Winston-Salem.

  The nastiest fight over race in the city during my childhood was an organized but ultimately futile attempt to integrate the north side of town in the early sixties. There was no violence, just a lot of name-calling and bigotry. The “victory” belonged to those in retreat: white homeowners defeated integration not by putting up a fight but by not doing so. They simply sold out and moved away. In less than ten years, the north end of town reversed its racial complexion, but in the end it was just as monochromatic as it had been to start with. (My uncle’s church—he was gone when all this happened, to another church in another town—was sold by its white congregation, which decamped to the west side of town. The last time I was in that church was as a local newspaper reporter covering an NAACP meeting.) I was ten when the racial complexion of my neighborhood started to change. With all this history-in-the-making at my doorstep, I began asking questions. What’s blockbusting? What’s wrong with being organized? Why are people moving out? Why don’t they want to live with black people? It was easy to ask these questions, and easy to condemn my white neighbors who were so eager to escape, because I brought no baggage into the fight. Unlike the adults around me, I had no mixed feelings and no guilt, and I certainly didn’t have to look black people in the eye an
d apologize for living my whole life at their expense. I was free to be fervent, idealistic and an altogether self-righteous little prig. This was about twenty years before I discovered, and then only by stumbling over the information, and then only by reading carefully in a family history, that my great-great-grandfather had owned slaves—not many, four or five at a time usually, but when one is too many, even one is enough to convict. After that fact took out a long-term lease in my head, I lost my taste for the high ground when arguing with my family about race. Not many years ago, I was sitting in the kitchen of one of my aunts at Christmas when she started in on how black kids had had the temerity on the previous Halloween to come trick or treating at her door. One of them even asked her for more candy.

  “I started to say, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’” she said.

  I started to say, “Oh yes, they do,” but for once I held my tongue. She was baiting me, and we both knew it, and I decided not to give her the satisfaction. Besides, for all I know, she was right. The more I thought about it, the more I hoped so.

  Marionettes are not easy for an adult to manipulate, and for a not especially well-coordinated five-year-old, they proved nearly impossible. At first I just sort of jumped them around the room, like paratroopers coming in for a bounce landing. Then I learned to make them bow, raise a hand or a foot. Months went by before I could make them walk with anything that approached a realistic gait. If I laid them down, their strings got tangled. If I put them in a drawer, they got tangled. The worst was when two or three marionettes got tangled together. At first the grownups helped me separate my troupe, but I soon began to refuse offers of help. I was determined to do it myself, and by the time Christmas came around again, I was the modestly proficient master of what turned out to be a tiny but expanding universe. The minstrel marionette, whose sole function, by virtue of his outfit and aspect, was dancing, soon had company. Subsequent Christmases and birthdays brought Hansel and Gretel and a witch, a cowgirl, a white-faced clown, Red Riding Hood, a wolf and a man in a green pointed hat who could double as a woodsman for Red Riding Hood or could star as Robin Hood. I came to favor the characters whose outfits left them vaguely defined, because I could put them to work in a variety of theatricals. The witch was always a witch, but Hansel and Gretel could be just about anyone. Sometimes I would introduce my old stuffed bear in nonspeaking, non moving parts, just to pad out the cast.

  The argument started on the drive home from the pony ride. Every Saturday, without fail, my mother drove me across town to the new shopping center, the city’s first, which featured a tiny amusement park with a merry-go-round, a miniature golf course, a concession stand that sold popcorn in tall bags, and a pony ride. For three years in a row, starting when I was four, we went every week from early spring to late fall, just the two of us, sometimes even when it rained. On this day, my aunt was along. Uncle Tom was at a conference in Florida—he had flown, for the first time in his fifty-eight years—and my mother had promised to take Melita, who did not drive, to Thalhimers to see what she could find for a gift certificate that she had received from her ladies’ circle in the church. We had started back sooner than I wanted because it had begun to drizzle. (“You know you don’t want to stay out here in the rain. You’ll ruin your new shoes. You want to keep them nice, don’t you?” “Yes.” “Yes what?” “Yes’m.” Earlier my mother had insisted that we run by the shoe store to buy me a pair of lace-up black oxfords to start school, and foolishly I had insisted on wearing them out of the store. So it was my fault if my shoes got ruined, and if I didn’t get to ride the pony, that would be my fault, too. I thought about suggesting that we get the old shoes out of the box, but that would mean getting down off the pony, and I knew that once that happened, there would be no getting back on. “It’s not raining hard. You and Aunt Melita can wait over there where it’s dry.” “No, darling, we’ll have to go. They’ll still be here next week.”) I was in the backseat, staring up at the telephone lines, because it was all I could see out of the old car with its high windows. I wondered if I would be able to see my uncle’s plane when it landed. Mother and Aunt Melita were talking in the front seat, but I paid no attention until my mother’s voice acquired the slightly higher pitch that told me she was getting upset.

  “Honey, Mama did promise me the chocolate set.” My aunt did not say anything for a few moments.

  “I can’t say that I recall.”

  The car shuddered to a stop.

  “Oh!” Mother said, “I keep forgetting they’ve put a stop sign at that corner.” She put the car in gear, and we got under way once more. “Honey, quick, look! Who lives in that house?”

  I peered up over the windowsill. “Joe King.” (Joseph Wallace King was our city’s best-known artist, a one-armed portraitist who specialized in doe-eyed, bare-breasted Madonnas posed against stormy skies. He signed his work Vinciata, and he usually wore a full-length cape when he went about town.)

  “You remembered. You think a drunk made that fence?” This time I knew without looking what she was talking about: the fence surrounding King’s property was composed of serpentine curves for its entire length, and inside each loop someone had planted a tree to make it look as though the trees came first. Because I wasn’t looking out the window, I saw my aunt quickly turn when Mother said the word “drunk” and shake her head, warning her off that topic. Mother gave the steering wheel an impatient little tap.

  “Some day we’re just going to drop in on old Joe, and you can show him your drawings. Maybe he’ll give you lessons.”

  “Margaret, if you think I’m being unfair,” my aunt said softly, “then take the cups.”

  “I don’t think any such thing, Melita. I never said that.” She stopped talking long enough to make a right turn. “I just think the set shouldn’t be broken up, and I distinctly remember standing there in the dining room with Mama when she told me the set was mine. The point is, things should stay together. Every time I look at Aunt Mat’s lamp and think of what happened with Eileen, I just think what a shame things like that have to happen. But please don’t put words in my mouth.”

  “You mean her stroke?” I said from the backseat. I was all ears now, because stroke was a new word for me, and I was having trouble figuring out exactly what it meant the way adults had been using it lately. Eavesdropping on my family’s conversations was like reading a book that was missing its opening chapters. Most of what they talked about concerned people I barely knew (my aunt Eileen) and people I did not know at all (Aunt Mat was dead long before I was born). I was left to sort it all out as best I could. As a result, I reached some interesting conclusions. I had decided that strokes, for example, were something like evil spells, since people who suffered strokes couldn’t move, like my aunt Eileen.

  “No, honey, not like that. I was down at Eileen’s years ago when she was living in Aunt Mat’s house and Aunt Mat had promised me two lamps. They were a match. You know the blue lamp in the living room? Well, there were two just alike and they were both supposed to be mine, and Eileen said she didn’t know anything about that, so she kept the other one. And what happened but the next week she was cleaning in the living room and knocked her lamp off on the floor and it broke in a million pieces. I don’t know what you call that.” Whatever it was called, it sounded like she liked it. I wondered if Aunt Melita was going to have a stroke, too, because she kept the chocolate cups. I didn’t know what chocolate cups were, but they sounded good.

  “Does Joe King give lessons?” I asked.

  “Honey, don’t interrupt. I don’t know. I’m sure he doesn’t give lessons for free, and right now we sure can’t afford it.”

  “If it’s a problem, I’m sure we could help,” my aunt suggested.

  “Melita, you and Tom—thank you, it’s very generous, but right now—”

  “But if it would make the difference.”

  “Joe King does not give lessons,” my mother said firmly.

  I always thought of my parents’ bed
room as my mother’s because there was no trace of a man anywhere in it, from the blue chenille bedspread to the faint odor of face powder that always hung in the air (my father and I shared the closet in my room; the sleeves of the big suit coats hung right at my eye level and a big pile of dust-covered, enormous shoes cluttered the closet floor where Daddy thought he was hiding his half-empty liquor bottles). Whenever I missed my mother when she was out of the apartment, I would stand just inside her room and inhale the air. Sometimes, if she was not in too big a hurry, she let me sit on the cedar chest and watch her put on her makeup. Once I brought in Hansel and tried to use the top of the cedar chest as a stage to give her a show while she stood at the mirror, but the clattering of the marionette’s black plastic shoes on the wooden top made her jumpy and she told me to put it away. I was not allowed to touch her jewelry box, where she kept her pearls, or her makeup, because once when I was very small, I had eaten a stick of lipstick—it tasted like those tiny wax Coca-Cola bottles that were filled with colored sugar water. Gradually, in my mind, my mother’s rigid, unvarying routines became my image of her, from the way she put on a hat to go to church to the way, each evening after supper, she would open the card table and grade papers and pay bills. I learned to love these routines, because it was the same in my mind as loving her, although it never occurred to me until much later that she did not love them but used them as bulwarks against uncertainty. Routine, to the extent that she could impose it on a life she didn’t anticipate and from which she could not extricate herself, was what was keeping her sane.