All Over but the Shoutin' (42 page)

I had plenty of time to think. I knew that I had had a good career, that editors had trusted me with important stories, that I had survived the people who tried to block my way, that I had made the people who had helped me proud of me. But I barely thought of them, as the yellow taxis flowed and honked and the lunchtime crowds poured down the sidewalks through the last snow of the year. I thought instead of a woman in Alabama, who was probably soaking beans and flipping through the King James Bible, a woman who didn’t even know what the Pulitzer was.

This glorious thing, this prize, was validation of my mother’s sacrifice. It was payment—not in full, but a payment nonetheless—for her sweat, and her blood. “Now, people will speak to her when they see her on the street,” explained one editor, a Southern man who knows something of snobbery, of class.

I will not lie and say that I was not thrilled to get it. Maybe I didn’t even deserve it, but by some miracle it had happened, and several times since that day I have felt like pumping my fist in the air and letting out a howl. Even though she was oblivious to all this—I had not called her because I was afraid it might not come true—she was with me then, on that sidewalk, in that big city, just as sure as if she had been walking beside me. I wasn’t even sure, though, how I would tell her. I would have to explain it first, give shape to it, before it would matter to her what we now held, both of us.

What I felt mostly was relief. I knew that this would bring her attention, respect. It would be a chance for me to spread the word of what she had done for me, and the words would have real weight, because of the prize itself.

Later, at the table, over honest-to-God champagne that did not come from the Piggly Wiggly, Lelyveld told me that I had won the prize for feature writing, along with Robert D. McFadden, for spot news reporting, and Robert B. Semple Jr., for editorials. (Now that I have a Pulitzer, I may also get a middle initial.) The glasses clinked and people smiled but I don’t remember smiling, just that relief, that sweet relief.

One of the men had the beginnings of tears in his eyes, and he got up from the table to call his wife. Lelyveld looked at me and asked me, “What now?” and I truthfully didn’t know. It was like the fights in the playground when I was a boy, when you take one last blind swing, wipe the dirt out of your eyes, and realize that the other boys you were fighting, biting and gouging have left the field of honor to you, and run for the teacher.

But instead there was Lelyveld, and Gene Roberts, and Howell Raines, the legends, raising glasses to me. I don’t give a damn how corny it sounds, it was nice.

Later that afternoon, we walked into the newsroom of the
New York Times
to applause.

People who have lived a long time have called this day the best day of their lives. Lelyveld stood on a desk and said nice things about us, about me, and I tried to say something that made sense. For the first time in my life, I really had nothing to say. I felt stupid, as if, by whittling down the chip on my shoulder, I had nicked away part of my brain.

Then I went looking for a phone, to call my momma. It had been more than an hour since the announcement, plenty of time to discover a miscount in votes or a mistake in the order of finish. It was safe now, I figured.

I know how silly and paranoid that sounds, especially coming from a man who gets a perverse thrill from taking chances. But it is a common condition of being poor white trash: you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.

But this thing was ours now. No one could take it away from us.

The phone was busy. It was probably my aunt Jo, I figured. It usually was, when the phone was busy. I finally got her, on the fifth try.

“Momma, you remember that big award I told you about, the one I said I probably wouldn’t win? Well, I won it.”

“Well,” she said.

“It’s the Pulitzer Prize, Momma. It’s the highest honor you can win in our business.

“Well,” she said, “thank God.” One reporter had already called her, and she truly had not known what he was talking about.

She truthfully had never heard of the Pulitzer. But as soon as she hung up her phone, it started to ring. It seemed like every newspaper in Alabama called her, over the next twenty-four hours. The
Anniston Star
took a picture of her and ran it on the front page, in color. The
Jacksonville News
interviewed her, and the
Birmingham News
, and the
Mobile Press Register.
Story after story ran, saying nice things about her son, about her. Instead of talking about the prize—she could not pronounce it, she was so afraid of saying it wrong—she just said she was proud of me, that she always had been, and that she sure hoped I had brought a coat to New York, because I wasn’t good at remembering things like that, and it was supposed to get cold.

She had not been to a beauty shop in twenty years, and she was ashamed of her hair, and her mouth, because it still didn’t have any teeth in it. When the
Star
photographer called, she called me, in a panic. “They want to take my picture,” she said. “They want to come in the house.” I told her she didn’t have to let them, not if she didn’t want to, but she thought somehow she would be letting me down if she refused.

I have the paper folded in my desk. The photographer had her hold a framed picture of me, one of those that had survived the fire, more or less.

At first glance, the newspaper photo looks like one of those pictures you see in the paper when a teenager is killed in a car wreck, just a grim-faced momma staring down at the likeness of a fresh-faced boy. She told me she would have liked to have smiled, to appear happy, but she was afraid that if she grinned people could see her gums.

I did not really notice, not for a long time, that in the photograph she is sitting in the yard.

I
told her that day that we would have to travel to New York to accept the prize, but she just said, no, she couldn’t do that, she could never do anything like that. It was not the plane ride that frightened her: she had never been on a plane or even near one, unless you count the one they stuck up on a big pedestal near a rest stop down between Montgomery and Troy. It was the people she couldn’t face, all those fancy people.

I told her how silly she was acting, that she had to go, that we were as good as anybody, that we could dress up and hold our heads high and pass ourselves off as the gentry, and if they caught on, we wouldn’t give a damn. I told her it was easy, but no matter how much I coaxed her and reassured her she just said no in a tiny voice. The program called for a short cocktail party-reception, which she equated with people dripping in diamonds, and a lunch, where she would not know which fork to use, and would not be able to chew the food because she didn’t have any teeth. I told her we would get her some damn teeth, I told her we would get her some nice clothes, I promised that I would not leave her side for even a second. She just apologized, over and over, for letting me down, for not being there with me.

I gave up after a while. I had to make myself understand, had to tell myself that all my momma’s experiences with people in suits had been bad. She had always been on her knees to them, cleaning their floors. She did not think she belonged, even for just a little while. I think she was afraid just as I have always been afraid, that they would spot the imposter in their midst, that they would ask her to clear the table.

I could have called one of the ex-girlfriends, but somehow that seemed wrong. This was not a date, it was something precious, and I called my momma one last time to beg her to go.

“I been thinking about it,” she said, “and I reckon I can do it.” I almost dropped the phone.

The phone had rung steady for days and days. Kinfolks we had not heard from in years suddenly called her, to say how proud they were. Teachers from elementary school called to tell her that they always knew I was something special. Perfect strangers had called, to say how proud they were that someone in our town had won something so grand. They stopped their cars when they saw her in the yard. People did speak to her on the street, people who had never spoken to her before.

Finally, she had just swallowed down her fear and hitched up her man’s britches, and decided that if this thing was so important to them, then it must be ever so important to me.

We only had a week or two to get ready, and the kinfolks, God bless them, mobilized. My momma didn’t own a suitcase because there was no place she had ever really wanted to go—we used to pack our clothes in paper sacks when we went to Pensacola to play in the water—and didn’t have any dress-up clothes. Within a week, she had five suitcases and three hanging bags and more dresses than she needed. My cousin gave her a permanent and she practiced smiling in front of the mirror, so that she could seem friendly and still not reveal that she didn’t have a tooth in her head. She still refused to get new dentures. There wasn’t time, she said, to get them made at Pell City, and all my arguments to have someone else make them were ignored. “Costs too much,” she said, and went back to practicing.

The kinfolks had little faith that I could care for her in the big city—I think they were afraid I would lose her or let her get hit by a taxi—and they recruited my cousin Jackie, who was the only one who had flown before, to accompany her.

The
Times
offered to fly us up for free, but I told my momma we could take a car or a bus or drive, if she would feel better that way. She just said no, that wasn’t what she was afraid of, and on an unseasonably hot day in May, we worked our way through Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta, on our great adventure.

She made it fine through the X-ray machine, but when it came time to get on the plane, we had a little confusion. My momma had never been to an airport, and she believed that you had to walk out on the tarmac to get on the plane, like Elvis in
Blue Hawaii.
When I took her in tow and led her down the ramp at the loading gate, she said she didn’t think she’d go into that confining place, she’d just wait and get on the plane, thank you very much. I told her, Ma, this is how you get on the plane, and she didn’t like that one damn bit, because she couldn’t see the thing she was getting on.

We sat in first class, in the front row. That was when my momma asked me the first of what I estimate to be one million questions.

How big was it? How many people rode on it? Where did they sit? How many pilots did it take to fly it? Did I reckon they was any good at what they did? Were we moving yet? Could we feel it move? Did we get to sit in the front row because we won the Pulitzer? Had I ever flown this plane before and did I reckon it was a pretty good one, because she had seen on the TV that some of them wasn’t? Would we see a movie—she had heard they had movies sometimes—and would it have cussing in it? Would we be flying over water, which she certainly hoped we would not be, and was there a raft?

That was before the plane had moved. When we finally pushed back from the gate and the plane gave that little, reassuring lurch that tells you that, indeed, you might actually be flying somewhere today, Momma’s eyes got big.

Then the questions poured. Was it supposed to make so much racket just rolling on the ground? If they brought you food, did you have to eat it? How did the man flying the plane know where to go? How did he keep from getting lost above the clouds? How high would we fly? How fast would we go? Did the flight attendants (she called them “them ladies”) ever get to sit down or did they fly the whole time standing up? Did I think anyone would mind if she prayed?

Finally, the plane taxied down the runway and, with a shudder that was less than reassuring, slipped into the sky. My momma watched it for a second or two out the window, until we got about as high as a barn loft, then refused to look out the window the rest of the trip.

She did not whimper, even though she was scared to death, and I patted her like an idiot and told her everything was fine. She nodded her head, swallowed, and fixed me with one of those hard looks that she hadn’t used on me since I was a little boy.

“Ricky,” she said, “what keeps us in the air?”

I truly did not know. But considering the situation, I thought it best to lie. I told her that the plane was held aloft by the air being forced through the whirling turbine engines, which did something, which did something else, which resulted in “thrust.” Yeah, thrust. That’s it. “Thrust,” I said gravely, knowingly, “keeps it aloft.”

They served us a meal on a white tablecloth, which she marveled at, and she admired the tiny little salt and pepper shakers, saying, “Why, I never have seen such a purty thing.” She didn’t think much of the food, the stringy chicken. But the meal took her mind off the fact we were soaring so high above the ground, so it was a blessing.

We talked the whole time, saying nothing, and she made it just fine until we started to come down, and she prayed again.

I thought we were home free when we landed with just a mild bump and walked safely off the plane, and I had forgotten about the escalator. Momma had never seen one, and I had to keep an arm around her, to guide her down. She would come to refer to it as “that thang that eats your toes.”

But it was the taxi ride that damn near killed us. I had warned her that the taxi drivers blistered through bumper-to-bumper traffic like they had stole something and were trying to get away, but it was still the wildest ride of her life. Ma, Cousin Jackie and I were wedged tight in the backseat—Momma, the precious cargo, in the middle—and my greatest fear was that one of the doors would pop open from the strain of three bodies slammed against it at every twist and turn. Momma seemed to be out of questions, or maybe she was just too terrified to speak. By the time the taxi made it to the hotel in Times Square, she was pale and rubber-legged.

But there was still one man-made hurdle left to leap. Momma had never been in an elevator either, and this was a glass-enclosed one that shot you heavenward like a crystal bullet. This was a woman who had never, until that day, been higher than a rooftop, when she used to help her daddy nail down shingles. I was treating her like a human yo-yo.