All Over but the Shoutin' (3 page)

I know that my father had not always been the tortured man of my childhood, that when he started courting my momma, a tall, serenely beautiful woman who looked like a 1940s movie star, he had worn black penny loafers with dimes in them and pants with creases sharp enough to slice bologna. I know he had once been just a slight, dark, part Cherokee man who had a reputation for being a little too quick to pull his knife, who could not hold his liquor, but who consumed life in great gulps. I know he liked to hear his brother-in-law pick the guitar, that he liked to see dogs and chickens fight, and a pretty woman dance.

And I know that something happened to him in those years when he was a marine in Korea, something involving a bitter cold night in a place he could not spell or even pronounce. And I know that after that he was too often mean and cold, and kept a secret that he only talked about when he was either knee-walkin’ drunk or scared of dying, like he was at the end, when he called me to his side and told it.

I know a good bit. But one of the best men I have ever known told me once that to tell a story right you have to lean the words against each other so that they don’t all fall down, and I needed more words, more facts. I spent a year just talking to the people close to me, filling in the holes in my memory.

I would not have written it at all if my momma had said no. I asked if I should, and I warned her that for every smile it evoked it would bring an equal number of tears. She was quiet a minute, staring out the window of the car. “Write it,” she said. “I sat quiet, for fifty years.”

The biggest reason for writing this story is to set one thing straight from now on. My momma believes that she failed, that her three sons, being all she has ever had, did not get enough of the fine things in life because she was our mother. My older brother, Sam, has worked like a dog his whole life, in the coal yard and clay pits when he was eleven, with a pick and shovel and yard rake when he was a young man, and now in the cotton mill. If he has ever had a full day of rest in his life, I cannot remember when. She blames herself for that.

My younger brother, Mark, has known the inside of jails. He is a hard drinker and fighter who bears the long scars of knife wounds on his body and still carries a bullet in one arm, who seems to have somehow absorbed the spirit of the father he cannot even remember. She blames herself for that.

Then there is me, the newspaperman who, through the leg-up that she gave him and a series of happy accidents, wound up at the temple of this profession, working under legends. I am no better, no worse than my brothers; in fact they are both smarter than me. But the truth is that I am proud of who and what I am, just as proud of being the son of a woman who picked cotton and took in ironing as I am of working for a place like the
New York Times.
I have always believed that one could not have been without the other. My job has carried me to see things seldom seen by a country boy, without a white-trash, first-pick draft notice, to the other side of the world and into the same columned mansions where my momma used to clean bathrooms. When I was a man of thirty-three they even let me into Harvard, and I was not holding a mop. When I was thirty-six, I won the highest honor our profession bestows.

I hope she blames herself for that, too.

I hope she sees some of her backbone in me, because without it I would have been more accepting of the words of others, of the editor who once looked me dead in the eye and told me I was not sophisticated enough to cover the Anniston, Alabama, city council, of one or two Yankee reporters who allowed that I was mildly talented in a quaint Southern way, of a high school teacher who said a boy like me ought to think about a good trade school. It was my momma who said, “Don’t never take nothin’ off nobody.” And while it was my daddy who taught me to fight dirty, she was the one who taught me not to give a damn when it hurt.

I hope she sees some of her gentleness and sensitivity in my words, because if there is any of that in me still, it came from her. In an important way, her sadness is in every story I write. I have written mostly about people whose lives came and went on tides of whim, apathy and cruelty. Some reporters know Washington. I know this. I have, heaven help me, a talent for it. I have never felt so at home as I did in Haiti, where little girls with dead eyes hold your hands and whisper about fathers who were shot in the back of the head by grinning soldiers. I walked through neighborhoods in my own country where the killing is done with laughter, acting like I was ten feet tall and bulletproof even as my legs trembled, because I believe that if we are going to write about life and death, we should not do it from the cheap seats.

I believe I was drawn to those stories because of her; because of all the lessons my mother tried to teach me, the most important was that every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it. The only time I ever made her truly ashamed of me was the day I made fun of a boy from a family that was even poorer than us. His daddy had shaved his head to cheat the lice, and I laughed at him, made fun of him, until I saw the look in my momma’s eyes.

So, this story is for her, as have been, in smaller ways, all the stories I have ever told and the method in which I told them. I would like to be able to say, with trite and silly melodrama, that I am sorry that my father did not live to see his son’s name on a book. But that would be a bigger lie than I can tell, sober. I will not track the muck of cheap sentimentality into this story by saying that it will be in any way an instrument for healing. I understand him better now, understand the pounding his character endured in that defining time overseas. But somewhere between understanding and forgiveness there is another wall, too wide to get around.

The errors in this book that I know of are omissions, not fabrications, intended to spare people who have enough pain in their lives, a little more.

After my grandmother’s funeral I strolled over to his tiny headstone in a corner of the cemetery in Jacksonville. I still wonder sometimes to whom the Marines handed the triangle of American flag that had draped his coffin. I do not want it. I only wonder. I noticed that someone had cared enough to come by and pluck the weeds and wild onions from the grave, to put a pink silk flower in a vase, and I wondered about that, too. But if there was any real regret in me, I could not find it. There was no pain to speak of, I think because the dead place inside me where my father resides is shiny and slick and perfectly symmetrical, polished by a lifetime. It is not pain so much as a sculpture of it. It is hard to the touch, but smooth.

No, this is not an important book. The people who know about books call it a memoir, but that is much too fancy a word for me, for her, for him. It is only a story of a handful of lives, in which one tall, blond woman, her back forever bent by the pull of that sack, comes off looking good and noble, and a dead man gets to answer for himself from deep in the ground. In these pages I will make the dead dance again with the living, not to get at any great truth, just a few little ones. It is still a damn hard thing to do, when you think about it.

God help me, Momma, if I am clumsy.

1
THE
WIDOW’S MITE

1
A man who buys books
because they’re pretty

M
y mother and father were born in the most beautiful place on earth, in the foothills of the Appalachians along the Alabama-Georgia line. It was a place where gray mists hid the tops of low, deep-green mountains, where redbone and bluetick hounds flashed through the pines as they chased possums into the sacks of old men in frayed overalls, where old women in bonnets dipped Bruton snuff and hummed “Faded Love and Winter Roses” as they shelled purple hulls, canned peaches and made biscuits too good for this world. It was a place where playing the church piano loud was near as important as playing it right, where fearless young men steered long, black Buicks loaded with yellow whiskey down roads the color of dried blood, where the first frost meant hog killin’ time and the mouthwatering smell of cracklin’s would drift for acres from giant, bubbling pots. It was a place where the screams of panthers, like a woman’s anguished cry, still haunted the most remote ridges and hollows in the dead of night, where children believed they could choke off the cries of night birds by circling one wrist with a thumb and forefinger and squeezing tight, and where the cotton blew off the wagons and hung like scraps of cloud in the branches of trees.

It was about 120 miles west of Atlanta, about 100 miles east of Birmingham, close to nothin’ but that dull red ground. Life here between the meandering dirt roads and skinny blacktop was full, rich, original and real, but harsh, hard, mean as a damn snake. My parents grew up in the 1940s and 1950s in the poor, upland South, a million miles from the Mississippi Delta and the Black Belt and the jasmine-scented verandas of what most people came to know as the Old South. My ancestors never saw a mint julep, but they sipped five-day-old likker out of ceramic jugs and Bell jars until they could not remember their Christian names.

Men paid for their plain-plank houses and a few acres of land by sawing and hand-lifting pulpwood onto ragged trucks for pennies a ton. They worked in the blast furnace heat of the pipe shops, loaded boxcars at the clay pits and tended the nerve gas stockpiles at the army base, carrying caged birds to test for leaks. They coaxed crops to grow in the up-country clay that no amount of fertilizer would ever turn into rich bottomland, tried in vain to keep their fingers, hands and arms out of the hungry machinery of the cotton mills, so that the first thing you thought when you saw an empty sleeve was not war, but the threshing racks. The summers withered the cotton and corn and the tornado season lasted ten months, making splinters out of their barns, twisting the tin off their roofs, yanking their tombstones out of the ground. Their women worked themselves to death, their mules succumbed to worms and their children were crippled by rickets and perished from fever, but every Sunday morning The Word leaked out of little white-wood sanctuaries where preachers thrust ragged Bibles at the rafters and promised them that while sickness and poverty and Lucifer might take their families, the soul of man never dies.

White people had it hard and black people had it harder than that, because what are the table scraps of nothing? This was not the genteel and parochial South, where monied whites felt they owed some generations-old debt to their black neighbors because their great-great-grandfather owned their great-great-grandfather. No one I knew ever had a mammy. This was two separate states, both wanting and desperate, kept separate by hard men who hid their faces under hoods and their deeds under some twisted interpretation of the Bible, and kicked the living shit out of anyone who thought it should be different. Even into my own youth, the orange fires of shacks and crosses lit up the evening sky. It seems a cliché now, to see it on movie screens. At the time, it burned my eyes.

It was as if God made them pay for the loveliness of their scenery by demanding everything else. Yet the grimness of it faded for a while, at dinner on the ground at the Protestant churches, where people sat on the springtime grass and ate potato salad and sipped sweet tea from an aluminum tub with a huge block of ice floating in it. The pain eased at family reunions where the men barbecued twenty-four hours straight and the women took turns holding babies and balancing plates on their knees, trying to keep the grease from soaking through on the one good dress they had. The hardness of it softened in the all-night gospel singings that ushered in the dawn with the promise that “I’ll have a new body, praise the Lord, I’ll have a new life,” as babies crawled up into the ample laps of grandmothers to sleep across jiggling knees. If all else failed, you could just wash it away for a while, at the stills deep in the woods or in the highly illegal beer joints and so-called social clubs, where the guitar pickers played with their eyes closed, lost in the booze and the words of lost love and betrayal. They sang about women who walked the hills in long black veils, of whispering pines, and trains.

It was the backdrop and the sound track of our lives. I was born into it in the summer of 1959, just in time to taste it, absorb it, love it and hate it and know its secrets. When I was a teenager, I watched it shudder and gasp and finally begin to die, the pines clear-cut into huge patches of muddy wasteland and the character of the little towns murdered by generic subdivisions and generic fast-food restaurants. The South I was born in was eulogized by pay-as-you-pray TV preachers, enclosed in a coffin of light blue aluminum siding and laid to rest in a polyester suit, from Wal-Mart.

I watched the races fall into an uneasy and imperfect peace and the grip of the poverty ease. There was reason to rejoice in that, because while I was never ashamed to be a Southerner there was always a feeling, a need, to explain myself. But as change came in good ways, I saw Southernness become a fashion, watched men wear their camouflage deer-hunting clothes to the mall because they thought it looked cool, watched Hank Williams and his elegant western suits give way to pretty boys in ridiculous Rodeo Drive leather chaps. And I thought of my granddaddy Bobby Bragg, gentler than his son in some ways, who sat down to dinner in clean overalls, a spotless white shirt buttoned to the neck and black wingtip shoes.