After the Flag Has Been Folded (9 page)

Later that day James got a call from the sheriff.

“He told me I needed to get over to the courthouse and take care of business because Bon had gotten a warrant out for my arrest.”

The sheriff was a friend. “He never would arrest me,” James said. “He'd just tell me about the warrants. I was on my way to Rogersville to the courthouse when I thought, ‘Hell, I'll just go rob a bank.'”

He didn't put any forethought or planning into the robbery. He just grabbed his gun and sauntered into the Colonial Heights bank. After he left the bank, he put the stolen money into a lunch box and swam the Holston River to a nearby town, where he bought a car and headed out-of-town.

By the time our family showed up at Granny's for Thanksgiving, Daddy's death had been relegated to the list of things our families didn't talk about anymore. All the hushed murmuring taking place that weekend focused on whether Uncle James had been the one who robbed the bank in Kingsport. The local rumor mill had pegged
him as the prime suspect. Granny Leona said she didn't believe for one minute that James had robbed that bank. “I asked James to his face if he stole that money,” she told me. “I could tell by looking into his eyes, he hadn't done it. He didn't say that. He just didn't say nothing. But I could tell he hadn't.”

But of course, he had.

From the moment James disappeared, FBI agents began watching most of Dad's brothers and sisters. They even harassed Mama that first year. They showed up at the door of our trailer house in Georgia, dressed in dark suits, narrow ties, white shirts, and butter-shined shoes.

“Is your mother home?” the taller of the two asked.

“Just a minute. I'll get her,” I said, not bothering to invite these strange-looking fellows inside. Mama didn't invite them in either.

“Mrs. Shelby Spears?”

“Yes,” Mama said.

“We are agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We are looking for James Spears. We understand he's your brother in-law.”

“So?” Mama replied.

“Do you have any idea where he might be? We have reason to believe he may have robbed a bank in Tennessee.”

“I don't have any idea where James is,” Mama said.

The fellow wrote down a phone number and handed it to Mama. “Would you give us a call if you hear from him?” he asked.

“No,” Mama said. “I don't know where James is. But even if I did, I wouldn't tell you. I'm not telling you anything Ma'am doesn't want me to.”

Ma'am was the name all the adults in the family called Granny Leona. Mama may not have gotten along all that well with Granny Leona, but there was no way she was going to purposely cross her. Granny wasn't in the best of health. Understandably, Mama didn't want to upset her any more than Daddy's death and James's disappearance already had.

So, throughout 1966 and 1967, I would come home from time to
time and find men, dressed in black, sitting in a car, watching our trailer house. But nobody in our family heard from James again until he was behind bars.

Federal agents finally tracked James down in Colorado a year later. By then he'd spent every nickel of the money he'd made off with. That was the same year Intermountain Telephone Company sold that cable franchise they'd bought from James. They reportedly got a million dollars for the system they'd paid thirty thousand for. A couple of years later it was sold again—for a reported three million dollars. If he'd made wiser choices, James could've been sitting on a beach drinking rum instead of learning to knit at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary or, as James called it, the University of Atlanta.

He had a lot of time to sit and ponder whether he really would've shot Aunt Bon or the bank teller that day. He still isn't sure. “Maybe,” he said. “It scares me when I think about it.”

The jury sentenced James to forty years. He served nearly seven years, until February 1975. From the time I was eleven until I was eighteen.

“That's where I goofed up,” James said. “I wasn't able to do what I told Dave I would do.”

He knows he not only broke a promise to his dead brother, but he also failed his own two boys. “It's weighed heavy on me for years what I done to them two boys and the rest of the family,” he said.

Still, he has no regrets about Aunt Bon. “I never regretted putting her ass out on the streets,” he said with a chuckle.

There's no question that James put our family and his family through a lot of misery and aggravation. Sometimes, on the rare occasions when he allows himself to think about it, he weeps over his actions. “It's bothered me for years I wasn't able to do what Dave asked me to do,” James said. “But look where I ended up. How could I help you all when I was in the Atlanta penitentiary? I had my own problems.”

It's an awful thing to say, but in some ways I'm glad Daddy didn't
live long enough to see James go to prison. Daddy looked up to his older brother; he would've been troubled by James's plight. I suspect if he knew about it, Daddy would be royally pissed that James didn't keep his promise to help care for us.

Ironically, right next to the
Kingsport Times-News
headline article about the bank robbery was a story about the 25th Infantry Division retaliating for a massacre that had taken place days earlier in the Central Highlands. It was all part of the same ongoing military operation, known as Paul Revere, that Daddy had been involved in during the months leading up to his death:

 

GI
s
REVENGE TRAGIC LOSSES

Uncle James hasn't talked much about Daddy over the years, but I'd bet there isn't a day that goes by that he isn't tortured by his broken promise to his brother.

It seems to me there are two kinds of problems in life: the kind we
create for ourselves, and the kind others create for us. Unlike James's, Mama's problems weren't of her own making, not at first anyway.

Looking back, it's hard to tell which of our family's problems were the result of Daddy's death and which were the result of our own sorry choices. Truth is, after Daddy died, none of us could think too clearly anymore.

I
T HAD BEEN TWO YEARS SINCE THE MAN IN THE JEEP DROVE AROUND THE
S-
CURVED ROADWAYS OF
H
AWKINS
County to tell the Widow Spears that her husband had bled to death in Vietnam's Ia Drang Valley. Two years since doctors told the Widow Spears they thought her youngest child had leukemia and might be dying. Two years since the Widow Spears called Elmer White, a former neighbor on Morris Road in Columbus, Georgia, and asked him to find her a place to park our new home. Two years since some man hitched a twelve-by-sixty-foot trailer to a rig and hauled the Widow Spears and her children all the way to Georgia.

Linda was treated by military doctors at Fort Benning's Martin Army Hospital. It was the very same hospital Daddy had carried me into in 1961 when I'd tumbled willy-nilly from my bunk bed and busted my chin wide open. The front of my cotton slip had been covered with blood, and I'd hollered for Mama the entire time as Daddy sped down Victory Drive toward the hospital. “It took five stitches,” Daddy told Mama when he delivered me safely back home. Like the blood on my slip, my tears had all dried up.

Daddy had made me and everybody else in the emergency room laugh when he said I looked like a prizefighter. Making other people laugh was easy for him.

In the aftermath of my father's death, I couldn't remember the last
time Mama had laughed or smiled. She may have breathed a sigh of relief when the doctors at Martin Army said Linda didn't have leukemia, just a severe kidney infection and a heart murmur. But such relief passed as quickly as an afternoon cloudburst, so common to Georgia. It did little to diminish the constant burn in her soul.

Leslie was the first friend I made at Lake Forest Trailer Court. She was a year younger than me. I was in sixth grade; she was in the fifth. We met at the pool. She was wearing a black-and-white one-piece bathing suit and was among a group of kids diving from the sides of the deep end of the oval-shaped pool, strands of blond hair clumped together around her shoulders. She didn't have freckles like me. Her arms and legs were the color of caramel candy. Across her back was a smattering of small, dark moles. She was having a difficult time keeping her ample chest tucked into the zip front of her suit.

Her older brother, James, didn't look at all like her. With freckles and a shock of coarse red hair, he looked as though somebody had given him a good dusting from a box of cayenne. His legs, arms, and shoulders were thick, like a linebacker's.

The pool was the first thing Mama had pointed out to us when we arrived at the trailer court. A chain link fence was the only border between the pool and the stream of traffic running north-south along Morris Road. Lake Forest was about a mile down the road from the house we'd lived in before Daddy got his orders to Hawaii. The neighborhood seemed familiar. I recognized the school yard at Edgewood Elementary where I had built miniature houses from pine straw with my classmates during recess. Across the street from the school was the grocery store where Mama bought milk and eggs. Even the brick house we'd called home before moving to Hawaii appeared the same. There was the cement stoop where Mama sat after tying a string to my loose tooth and telling me to walk toward the pine towering over the front yard. Ball games were still played in the dusty diamond where Frankie and I had played catch with Daddy before supper each night. But I didn't recognize the car parked in the
driveway where Daddy used to hop off the back of an Army truck after a couple of days in the field.

And I didn't notice it right away, but somewhere between where Edgewood Road turned into Morris Road, a crevasse appeared. Often ignored but not the least bit invisible, the divide separated North Columbus from the south side, the haves from the have-nots, the city's privileged children from the underprivileged.

Kids in North Columbus lived in brick homes with backyard patios, oval-shaped pools, and gas barbecues. Lawn companies hired men from South Columbus to keep the sweeping lawns of North Columbus green and clipped. In South Columbus, kids lived in trailers or housing projects. They swam in snake-infested creeks or dashed through sprinkler hoses to cool off. They played ball in dirt streets and built forts in dusty yards.

Before Daddy's death, we had lived north of that divide. Now we lived south, just across the railroad tracks and down the road apiece from the projects. Or as I more often than not heard the large complex referred to, “that place where all them niggers live.”

I did not return to Edgewood Elementary. Instead I attended Tillinghurst, a school for white kids in what was primarily a black neighborhood. School was already in full swing by the time we arrived in October.

Even before we moved to Hawaii in 1963, Mama had tired of the sporadic waitress jobs she held whenever Daddy needed help making ends meet. She decided that maybe she'd study to become a nurse. Nursing would give her a regular paycheck, one that Daddy couldn't gamble away. An avid poker player, my father often won big, but once in a while he lost big, too. “He'd lose whole paychecks at a time,” Mama recalled.

When Daddy was stationed at Fort Benning, before we moved to Hawaii, Mama had began her nursing studies at the Medical Center in Columbus.

“I had a girlfriend, Ivy, who came to live with us in Columbus,”
Mama said. “She wanted to get out of Rogersville, and I wanted to go to school. It worked out pretty good for a few weeks, until Ivy decided to return to Tennessee.” Ivy didn't stick around long enough for Mama to earn any credits, just long enough for Mama to get a glimpse of higher education.

In the fall of 1966, after enrolling Linda and me at Tillinghurst and Frank at Eddy Junior High, Mama signed up for classes through the Manpower Program. Enacted in 1962, the Manpower Development and Training Act instituted a major federal job-training program designed specifically to provide work incentives for disadvantaged families like ours. It would take Mama a little over a year to earn her certification as a licensed practical nurse. Manpower gave her a small stipend, about fifty dollars a month.

She still had about $2,500 left of the $10,000 serviceman's insurance provided for us. The trailer had cost her $5,700, and she had bought some new furniture. Beds mostly. The living room furniture was the same set my folks had bought in Hawaii: a couch crafted from ornately carved Koa wood, holding six plump but unforgiving cushions, and a matching chair and coffee table. I don't know what possessed my folks to buy such an ensemble, but it wasn't comfort.

Social Security and veterans' benefits also helped Mama pay the bills. But she had made Granny Leona one of Daddy's dependents so she could turn over a portion of his benefits to her. This was a generous move, considering that Mama had no idea how she was going to support three kids once her remaining twenty-five hundred dollars ran out.

Mama doesn't talk about why she signed that money over to Granny. She simply says that Granny needed it. I'm not even sure any of my relatives knew what Mama had done. Honestly, I don't think many folks, kin or otherwise, ever gave a second thought to how Mama would pay the bills. Most of our kin were living hand-to-mouth themselves. With the exception of Uncle James, who'd robbed the bank, the only family member with any change to spare was Uncle
Carl, who had made a comfortable life for himself in Clinton, a town that made money from Tennessee's Oak Ridge nuclear-weapons plant, proud producers of the atomic bomb. Out of all the Mayes boys, Carl did the best job of carving out a middle-class life for himself and his family. In his later years, he was a generous man, but early on, selfishness marred him. Mama had referred to her brother's flaw in a letter Daddy never got, dated July 17, 1966:

I asked Mama to explain why she was so upset with her brother at the time. Carl and Blanche had taken my mother in when she was fourteen. Granny Ruth had left Mama with Grandpa Harve while she made a trek to Oregon to see her sons, and she ended up staying gone for a couple of years. Mama told me Granny Ruth had likely tired of Grandpa Harve's mean ways, so she just up and left, leaving Mama to fend for herself. Carl and Blanche stepped in as surrogate parents. Carl once told me he took Mama in because she was running the streets, becoming way too familiar with boys. Blanche treated Mama just like a daughter, making sure she had clothes for school and keeping a tight rein on her. I couldn't imagine what had transpired between them in 1966 that upset Mama so.

“When we were getting ready to leave Hawaii, I wrote to Roy, Carl, Charlie, and Woody and asked them to send me money so I could get Dad a plane ticket home,” Mama explained. “Charlie wrote back and said he didn't have any money, but I could send Dad to Long Beach and he and Joyce would pick him up there and care for him until I got there.

“Roy sent some money. I can't remember what Woody did, but Carl sent me a letter. He said if I wanted money I could get it the same way he did—go to the bank and borrow it. I finally went to Schofield and asked somebody there to help, and they did. The Army paid for Dad's plane ticket. Charlie took care of Dad until we arrived in the States a couple weeks later.

“I was mad, so I didn't tell Blanche and Carl that I was back in Tennessee. When they found out I was there, they drove over to see us, and that's what I wrote your Daddy about. I told Carl that I would never forgive him for what he did. I told him, ‘You didn't just do this to me or Dad. You did this to my husband. I won't forgive you for that.'”

But Mama and Carl eventually patched things up. And in the later years of his life, Carl was generous to us. He loaned me a thousand dollars to buy my first home. I paid him back one hundred dollars a month until the loan was paid in full. For years I kept the letters we exchanged during that time. Carl and I became great friends in the process.

After we moved back to Georgia, Mama managed to care for us and her stroke-smitten father on her own. She even scraped together enough money to hire a woman to come in and care for us. For five dollars a day, Thelma did the washing, ironing, cleaning, and scolding.

Thelma taught me how to make a bed, wash a plate, and fry a chicken. “Don't just wash the front of that plate,” she said. “It's got a back, too!” Bending over the corner of Mama's bed, Thelma would lift a section of sheet and fold it into a triangle, like the back of an envelope. “Now tuck that up under the mattress,” Thelma said, explaining how to make a flat sheet fit snug on a bed. “That's called a hospital corner.”

Thelma could be firm, but she was never cross or mean. She and Grandpa Harve liked to spend their afternoons sipping peach brandy and watching the soaps or ball games. Thelma was the first black person I felt the freedom to love or be loved by. She took good care of us kids in that first year after Daddy died.

Mama doesn't recall those first few years after Daddy's death as being all that difficult, financially or any other way, and it angers her that I do. A fiercely proud woman, she insists that our family did not suffer any financial consequences due to Daddy's death.

“I don't recall you going hungry at any point,” she said. “You had a roof over your head and clothes to wear. I don't know where you get this idea that we were poor. We lived in a brand-new trailer. We even had a maid!”

“You paid her five dollars a day.”

“It was the going rate,” she said. “We were never underclass.”

“Okay, so we were obviously better off than Thelma,” I said. “But you honestly don't remember having to struggle after Daddy died?”

“No, I don't,” Mama said. “The only poverty that existed exists in your mind.”

If there is one thing Mama can't tolerate, it is the suggestion that our trailer-park existence made us disadvantaged or “underclass.” She abhors the idea that outsiders might have considered us trailer trash, or white trash, just because of our lifestyle and our socioeconomic standing.

When Mama carries on this way, I am reminded of why Daddy found her stubborn streak amusing. Mama chain-smoked, drank her coffee black, and preferred her beer straight from the can. She danced with men whose names I never knew and bedded more than a couple of them. In a five-year span, the trailer was moved four times. We never stayed in one lot long enough to remove the rubber tires or to warrant a porch. To this day I think of wooden porches as a sign of stability. I'm a sucker for a home with a wraparound porch. After Daddy died, Mama wasn't up for the kind of commitment a wooden porch required; so for the first three years, cinder blocks were piled outside the front and back doors of the trailer so we could step in or out of the house. Cinder blocks could be loaded in a hurry.

But on the chance that I was wrong about my memory of our economic and social standing following Daddy's death, I called my
sister and asked her about her remembrances. We had a good chuckle about the symbolism of a front porch. “Do you remember doing without after Daddy died?” I asked.

“Yes,” Linda said. “I remember we got clothes once a year, right before school started. Usually it was just a couple of outfits and one pair of shoes. I remember never having money for lunch. If I could scrape together twenty-five cents, I would try and get somebody in the lunch line to buy me an ice cream sandwich. They wouldn't let you buy the ice cream without the lunch, and there weren't free lunch programs in those days.”

“Did you consider us poor?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “But not the same kind of poor Mama grew up with.”

Mama's definition of poverty is much more austere. For good reason. She has memories of growing up impoverished among the stately manor homes that belonged to the wealthy families in Rogersville. Grandpa Harve and Grandma Ruth's house didn't have a bathtub or shower. Baths were given in an aluminum tub in the kitchen, with water heated in kettles atop the woodstove and shared among the kids. The last person to bathe usually did so in cold, dirty water. There were no light fixtures, only bulbs on a string. Grandma Ruth took in other people's washing to help make ends meet.