Little Boy Blues (15 page)

The movie ad that obsessed me, though, was one for
Thunder
Road
, a low-budget movie filmed in North Carolina that starred Robert Mitchum as a moonshine runner. When I saw the movie years later, I was shocked to discover that Mitchum’s character was a soft-spoken man of the hills, because the ad portrayed him as a wild-eyed crazy man. And because moonshine was prominently mentioned in the ad, I also assumed he was drunk. And, because Mitchum bore a passing resemblance to my father, I began to confuse the two in my mind.

I saw my father hit my mother only once. He was not a violent man, although when he was drinking he didn’t know his own strength. If I made the mistake of coming within range of his arm, he would grab me and pull me down beside him on the sofa and hug me until I thought my ribs would crack. “I love you, you know that, don’t you, boy?” It was always “boy.” I cannot remember a single time when my father called me by name.

I don’t remember what they were fighting about that night. The whole scene, with me in the front row on the sofa, and them across the room, plays out in my head in complete silence. I don’t remember exactly how old I was, seven or eight maybe, and I don’t recall what happened next. It’s just the one image, of his knocking her to the floor. But it’s an image I cannot forget, and one of the reasons—the strangest reason—is that around the same time, I first saw the picture of wild man Robert Mitchum in the newspaper, and somehow the two images became fused: Mitchum squaring off against an unseen assailant and my father squaring off against my mother. Every time I saw that ad, I saw my father.

At the beginning of that summer, I worried every time my father drove off in the car that he would come home drunk or not come
home at all—as long as I knew him, he never said where he was going, unless you asked, and sometimes not even then. I went to sleep worrying that he would have started drinking while I slept, so every night when I said my prayers, I prayed that he would stay sober. But every morning, when I woke to the sun burning amber through the window shade, I could hear him rattling around in the kitchen. There was no whisky smell, just a faint scent of his hair tonic on the empty pillow beside my head.

As one day faded into the next and June turned into July and then August approached, I relaxed. Where before I had learned to brace myself for anything, now I got used to nothing happening. Every day was pretty much like the one before. The worst thing that happened was that one weekend I went to the Latauba river with my cousin and got the worst sunburn of my life. I was so burned, I couldn’t sleep, and my father stayed up with me, rubbing liniment into my back until well after midnight.

That summer he taught me how to fish and how to shoot. Mostly he taught me how to be comfortable with silence. Neither of us had much to say to the other one, and he taught me by example that this was fine. We could sit for an hour on the porch or by the pond without saying a word, just a couple of loners thrown together and enjoying the other’s presence without having to make conversation. Sometimes we got in the car and drove around, sometimes down to Kershaw, sometimes over to Great Falls, where we’d stop in and visit his aunt, who was a great cake baker. One time I opened her freezer and found a dozen cakes, angel’s food and devil’s food, all iced and ready to be delivered on the occasion of the next funeral or wedding supper. It felt like discovering gold. My overriding memory of that summer is that we had nowhere we had to go, we had nothing we had to do, and we made the most of it. I did not know it then, but that was the
longest time I would ever have with my father, just the two of us, and the last time I would see him for almost four years.

“I never heard of such a thing.” We were headed back to North Carolina but we weren’t even through Lancaster yet, and my mother had been raving for five minutes. There had been some discussion over the phone with my father about where to pick me up. I had heard him suggest that she meet me at my aunt and uncle’s across town, but she insisted on driving out to Jones Crossroads. Now I saw why. She wanted nothing to do with that uncle who was going to teach me manners. “I’ve never been so insulted in all my life. As hard as I try. But this takes the cake. I don’t think I’ve ever been so insulted in all my life.”

She didn’t run out of steam until we got to Charlotte, an hour down the road, and even then she didn’t drop it altogether. But the longer she ranted, the less anxious I became, once I realized that she wasn’t going to blame me. This was one of those battles that were taking place over my head, with me in the middle. I was the prize being fought over, even though one of the parties in the argument didn’t even know there was a fight going on.

“So, tell me,” she said when we were almost home, “did you have a good summer with your precious father?”

“Yes’m. It was fun.”

“Did they have to teach you that, too? How to have fun?”

“No’m.”

“You know, we could all have fun if Mack would just do the right thing and stay with us where he belongs. Did you ever think of that?”

  Talking Blues  

I was trying to play “Country Gardens.” On the sheet music in front of me, tall stacks of notes strutted across the page in a parade I couldn’t keep pace with. My fingers groped for the right keys, found some and then staggered through the first measure again. Stamp your feet, my piano teacher had suggested, just to get the rhythm in your head. The song was supposed to sound like a march. That threw me. What did marches have to do with country gardens? For the umpteenth time, I read the words at the top of the page: “English Morris Dance Tune, collected by Cecil J. Sharp, set for the piano by Percy Aldridge Grainger.” I felt the same giddy terror I experienced when reading my science textbook. How could more-or-less plain English words be so impenetrable? What was a Morris Dance? How could you collect a song? What did “set for the piano” mean? But even reading what I couldn’t understand was easier than trying to play a song I’d heard my teacher play only once, a song with a brisk tempo, fistfuls of notes for both hands at once and three malevolent-looking little flats perched there on the staff. Cutting trail in the key of
E-flat was slow work, and the thickety clusters of notes supplied by Mr. Grainger weren’t making it any easier. The more notes on a page, the angrier the page looked to me. I felt under attack. My usual response was to counterattack, to meet anger with anger. I did not play most songs so much as try to annihilate them. Perhaps that’s why my teacher gave me “Country Gardens.” Perhaps she thought, very well, if he wants to beat a song to death, here’s one that’ll give him a fight.

Because our apartment faced east, afternoon light in the living room was never more than anemic, even with the curtains drawn back. There in the gloom, I spent an hour of every afternoon after school for three years, from the age of nine until I turned twelve. I was supposed to be practicing. That was the way I thought of it, not as learning how to play the piano, or mastering an instrument, but more like exercising, like doing push-ups. There were always scales to learn, études to plod through. Mostly I sat, counting the minutes, listening to the silence, gazing into that watery light. Or I stared at the sheet music above the keyboard, tracing the orderly up-and-down of the notes as they moved across the staff. Most of the time, I felt like an illiterate.

Summoning all my strength, I waded into another couple of rounds with “Country Gardens,” mercilessly pounding the keys that always reminded me of the teeth of old people: chipped and yellowed. I saw my trouble: the rhythms differed in the bass and treble. The treble notes had a little stutter step, while the bass just clomped along evenly. I went to work on the right hand, and I was just beginning to isolate the hint of a dance rhythm when my doglike hearing apprehended the car door slam. That was my signal to make some noise on the keyboard. I struck up “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee,” a hymn I knew by heart. I timed it just right, finishing a verse when Mother’s key turned in the lock.

As soon as she came through the door, I stopped playing and said, “The Morgans are moving.” The pre-emptive strike was mine. There would be no questions about piano practice now. To ensure that, I slid off the bench and moved away from the piano.

“And you got a letter from Leenie.”

“Moving where?” I could tell from the tension in her voice that I had her full attention.

“They bought a house. Somewhere out in the country, Pfafftown, I think.”

The defections had been piling up for months, as more and more of our old neighbors moved out. Nearly all my friends had gone already. It had happened block by block, and grew closer to us every month. It was the same in every case. A black family moved onto a block, and overnight for-sale signs popped up on all the nearby lawns. There weren’t any black families in our apartment complex yet, but if the Morgans had sold, that meant Negro families would soon be living a block away.

Mother put down her school bag and her pocketbook on the table in the dinette and picked up the letter from her sister. She still had her coat on and her car keys in her left hand. Staring at the envelope, she said, “Leenie’s handwriting is deteriorating.” I liked it when people used words I didn’t understand. I was trying what my teacher had told us to do: decipher meaning from context. It made me feel like a detective or spy. But then Mother dropped the letter on the table without opening it. That got my attention. Any other time she would have had it open right away Only. one of her sisters still lived in Kershaw, the South Carolina town where she grew up. Her mother had been dead for two years (her father died in the forties), and the other two surviving sisters had not lived in Kershaw in years. But getting a letter from any of them was still like getting a letter from home. She never said so
explicitly, but I understood that we were exiles in North Carolina, and one day, when order was restored, we would return to Kershaw and live there happily ever after.

“Everything is changing,” Mother said.

“Deteriorating?”

“What?”

“Everything is deteriorating?” I wasn’t sure I had it right.

She laughed and said, “You and your fifty-cent words. Now hurry and get your Scout uniform on before we go to eat. You won’t have time to change when we get back.”

My earliest musical memory: my mother and I are sitting beside each other on the piano bench at the black studio piano in my Aunt Melita and Uncle Tom’s living room in Winston-Salem. I am three or four, and Mother is playing and together we are singing “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.” I liked everything about what was happening: the melody, that curious old bear and, best of all, the fact that he went over that mountain again and again—I never wanted the song to end. I loved watching my mother’s hands move over the keys, producing sounds that somehow combined into song. The piano was like some weird machine that only she knew how to manipulate—when to depress the pedals, when to use the black keys. At some point I became big enough to lift the top and look down into the works. I loved watching the felted hammers being driven into the strings while she played. Later, when I sidled over to the piano and tried a few notes, I produced nothing but chaos, which only ramped up my admiration for her skill. My mother at the piano was my mother at her best: exuberant, knowledgeable, in control.

The piano on which I practiced was the same piano on which Mother had learned to play. It came to our apartment after my grandmother died, when I was nine. It was an upright, but in our tiny living room it looked enormous, like something designed by a Hollywood prop department just so Laurel could drop it on Hardy’s head. Once the movers got it in, there was only room for the sofa, a cane chair, a couple of end tables and the coffee table. And when Mother sat down to play, it was as though an orchestra had come to live with us. I thought the room was going to explode.

Once the piano arrived, Mother played all the time. She would play standards, spirituals and hymns, and she did it all by ear. I never saw her consult a sheet of music unless she was completely unfamiliar with a song, and even then she used the music in front of her as nothing more than a sketch that she was free to alter, embellish and expand upon as she saw fit. She could read music (her college degree was “public school music,” a category that only later sounded odd to me. It probably wasn’t odd at all when she graduated in the thirties, especially in the South, where many all-girl colleges were hardly more than high-class finishing schools. As my mother explained, a young woman of her generation expected to work only until she landed a husband). Mostly, though, Mother played by ear. I always marveled at her ability to hear any song, even one she’d never heard before, and then sit down and play it through. She had a busy left hand and an addiction to the sustain pedal, and she always made it sound like at least two people were playing.