All Over but the Shoutin' (13 page)

Then I thought of the pain that act would draw from my momma, and I knew it was better to let the baby rest as he is. I cannot fix everything that is wrong, flawed or broken in my past, in her past. I cannot recast those years in smooth, cool marble, and believe that my meddling will make things all better again. The name of the child is etched into her head, her heart, her soul. Now, because of my meddling, it is etched in mine.

As the car ate up the miles to Atlanta, dodging the wobbling tourists and drunken pickup trucks and eighteen wheelers that hurtled by in the dark, I started to cry.

W
hen we first went back to my grandma’s house to live, I went to bed every night afraid there would be a knock at the door, that he would come for us, mad, drunk, enraged. But he never did. He never would. I did not miss him. I did not even wonder what happened to him. After a while I did not think of him at all. I learned what became of him only from the gossip of kinfolks.

After we left the last time, he began the steady process of drinking himself to death. It took a long, long time. By the time it was accomplished, my childhood was done. My mother’s youth was burned away, more by working in the fields than by the time, making her old much too soon.

It would be years before I spoke to him in person again. To be accurate, I did see him from time to time from a distance. It was a small place, our world, and I would see him slide by in his car.

A year or two after we left him, I saw him in the parking lot of a grocery store in Piedmont. He saw me, too, and got out of his car, motioning to me, staggering across the asphalt like it was a deck pitching and rolling beneath his rubbery legs. I ran.

8
In the mouth of the machine

T
here were still three of us to raise, in the summer of 1966, back in the peace and safety of my grandmother’s tiny house. My momma enrolled us in Roy Webb Elementary School, the closest public school, and begged a ride to the county seat in Anniston to sign us up again for welfare. It killed her pride to do it, but she knew that her chances of making enough money to clothe, feed, care for and educate us—her with no skills, no education to speak of—were damn slim. She signed us up for free lunches. She hated it, but she did it. To not do it, she said, would have been “false pride.”

She went back into the fields, picking for a few dollars a day again, but there was always work for her because she was good and fast at it, and because she always picked clean, without a bunch of trash in the sack. She worked at it for two or three more years, until one day a gigantic mechanical monster roared out of some nightmare and into the field, and took the work away.

The mechanical pickers had been used in the bigger fields down South for a long time, but it was the late 1960s before they began to gnaw their way through the fields that ringed our lives. At first there was still work on the smaller fields, and later my momma picked the “trash” cotton, the wisps and dirt-crusted bolls that were left after the big pickers passed through. The first time I ever saw one I stood amazed. It was big as God, and picked rows and rows at a time. I did not know it then but I was seeing a way of life disappear into the maw of the thing. No matter how poor or desperate you were, back then, there had always been the field. It did not matter that most white people considered it “nigger work.” It was our work.

When that work was gone she did whatever she could find. She stripped long rows of sugar cane and picked tomatoes and picked up pecans, doing backbreaking stoop labor, sometimes for money and sometimes for “halves.” She cleaned the houses of the rich folks and flipped hamburgers at a café and took in washing and ironing. People would drive up to our house in nice, big cars and leave off bundles tied up in sheets. She washed some of the clothes in a sink and some in the old wringer washing machine on the back porch. Once, I remember with brutal clarity, I stuck my fingers between the wringers to see what would happen. It hurt. That was about what I expected would happen.

She ironed in the tiny bedroom I shared with my brothers. I used to go to sleep, countless nights, with the clothes of strangers heaped around my bed, under strict orders not to touch them. I touched them anyway. She only made a few pennies a shirt or blouse, but she worked hours and hours at it, dripping sweat, the hiss of the iron like a live thing. I touched the bottom once, to see what would happen. That, too, was about what I expected. (I did not know it then, but I was in training to be a reporter, or an imbecile.)

It seemed all she did was work. She did not go on dates even though she was still a pretty woman in those early years. She did not go to church because she did not want people to stare at her, because she did not want to have to explain where her husband was. At least, that was part of it.

It would be years before I realized the main reason she exiled herself to the little house, going out only to buy groceries. She avoided crowds, even our school. It was a long time before I realized that she stayed home because she was afraid we might be ashamed of her, ashamed of the woman with rough hands like a man and donated clothes that a well-off lady might recognize as something she threw away. She could live with the fact that she wore old tennis shoes with the toes worn clean through, but she was afraid we would be ashamed of her.

So that we would be proud of her, so that we could say our momma had a high school education, she went to a night school with Aunt Gracie Juanita and began her education again, almost from the beginning. Momma had quit school as a little girl. She resumed her studies as a grown woman, hunched over a fifth grade reader. Momma studied at home mostly, at the kitchen table, and she flew through those math, literature, grammar and science books, passing a grade every few months, sometimes in just weeks. “I liked the literature, because it had poems in it,” she told me.

Some twenty years after she quit school, she took a hard test and got her GED, her diploma.

I do not ever remember being ashamed of her, not when I was a little boy. Later, when I was older, when I was discovering girls and making friends, I admit I was content to let her remain hidden there, in her own exile. But I will get to that later. As children, we never knew how tenuous our existence was. She absorbed that unpleasantness, too.

We wore hand-me-downs and charity clothes and slept on sheets that our kinfolks made from the sacks of a brand of hog feed called “Shorts,” but every fall we got brand-new underwear—genuine Fruit of the Loom—and a few pairs of pants and shirts and socks that no one had ever worn before. And there were always new shoes. She walked around with her toes sticking out, but we got new shoes. Because we were children, we begged for things we couldn’t have, but instead of slapping us or yelling at us, the way so many mommas did, she just said no, she was sorry. There was a look on her face, then, that I now know was the look of someone who is just flat beat down. I saw it other times, when she stood in line at the grocery store with one hand frantically flipping through the one-dollar bills in her change purse, praying that the cash register would stop ringing before long. Still, we kept kept asking, kept wanting.

In the second grade, it was a pair of cowboy boots.

T
hey were jet black on the bottom and bright blue on the top, like the television cowboys wore, like Hank Williams wore. I was certain there would not be a finer pair of boots in all of Roy Webb School and certainly not in Imo Goodwin’s second grade class. I begged and I begged, for excruciating days. For her, it must have been like fingernails being dragged slowly down a blackboard.

One morning I found them at the foot of my bed.

And I was transformed. I had been little towheaded Ricky Bragg. Now, I was Steve McQueen, “the bounty hunter.” I was “Have Gun, Will Travel.”

I was so proud of them that I would sit with my feet splayed way out into the aisles so that you couldn’t help but see them, and sometimes trip over them. Mrs. Goodwin warned me to put my feet under my desk like a gentleman and quit slouching, but what good are new shoes if no one can see them, so I would slide them back under the desk for a few minutes and then ease them back out into the aisle, an inch at a time. I would actually even work the boot half off my foot, so I could stick it even further into view.

Then, one day, Goodwin caught me by surprise. It was study hall. She snuck up on me from behind and drop-kicked my half-on, half-off boot to the front of the room, then chased it down and kicked it again, clear out the open door and into the hall. The second graders, me included, held our breath. Mrs. Goodwin was seventy if she was a day. We thought she had lost her mind. She actually cackled as she did it, hopping around the room like some skinny old bird dusted with DDT.

I cannot begin to tell you how ashamed I was. She stood over me and dared me to go get it, saying she would paddle me if I did, so I just sat there with one boot on and one off, my face hot. But there was no way she was going to make me cry.

In study hall, she usually let us go, one at a time, to get a drink of water. I saw my opportunity. She did not let me go, but I gave Woodrow Brown a nickel—my milk money—and he brought my boot in for me.

L
ike I said, we were too stupid to realize that, as our lives spun round and round on these trivial things, my momma’s life was running through her hands like water.

As the years went by, she went out less and less when she didn’t have to, to chase the work. She never went to church. She just prayed at home. She almost never went to the PTA meetings, or Halloween Carnivals, or Christmas parades, or, later, to see us play basketball or baseball. Our aunts Nita and Jo drove us where we needed to go. Years later when I was in junior high school, I won the Calhoun County public speaking championship sponsored by the 4-H Club. My momma didn’t go.

A hundred times in my life, people have asked me why didn’t she just get another husband. One idiot, one of those trust fund babies that the newspaper business is riddled with, even asked why she didn’t just go to college.

You have to understand the time and place. She was a married woman in Alabama in the 1960s. Divorce was shameful at best, and impossible if the man did not agree. She was not weak. She was never weak. But convention bound her, and something else. Despite everything she had been through, all the hopeless times, I believe she felt some loyalty to him. She was a product of the rural, poor, Protestant South. She was in her mid-twenties, alone, and trapped.

I guess that, somewhere, there was still the ghost of some love. She never talked about him, never pined for him in any way we could see. But all her life she kept a small brown suitcase stashed high on a shelf in the hall, containing all the things that were valuable or precious to her. It didn’t hold much. It had three birth certificates, and a bundle of letters from him, when they were still young, before Korea.

It burned in a fire in 1993, with just about everything else she owned, and the last tangible link to the boy she had met and fallen in love with was gone.

Two tiny black-and-white photographs, the only ones we have of him now, survived that fire. In one, he is fresh-faced and fearless and probably more than just a little drunk, dressed in his winter uniform in Korea, one arm slung over the shoulders of a buddy who is swigging on a bottle of whiskey. They seem to be someplace warm and safe and dry, and it must have been taken before the killing began, because he looks too brave, too fresh, too dashing.

The other is so unlike my memories of him that I almost can’t believe it is him. It is springtime, maybe, because he is in a T-shirt, on what seems to be a military base. The hills in the background look like the hills of pictures I have seen of Korea. He is cuddling a puppy to his cheek.

Like I said, the pictures are very small. It hurts my eyes to look at them for long.

9
On the wings of a great speckled bird

I
f I live to be a hundred, I will never forget her, eyes closed, lips moving in prayer, both hands pressed to the warm plastic top of the black-and-white television. On the screen was a young Oral Roberts in shades of gray, assuring my momma that God was close, that she could feel Him if her faith was strong enough, coursing through that second-hand Zenith.