Little Boy Blues (17 page)

Like any child who has been taught all his life to resist temptation when there is almost nothing to resist, I was easy prey for the first even vaguely sinful thing that came my way, and the first time I played that old 78, I was hooked. I can’t think of any other single song that exploded in my head quite like “Talking Blues.” I didn’t think rationally about it at the time. I was only five or six the first time I played it. But if I could have put my feelings in words, I think I would have said, “So this is what music can do to you. This is how powerful it can be, and with tools no more complicated than a voice and a guitar.” It was my first encounter with the boogie disease, and the only cure was more. But there was no more. No one in the family knew anything about Chris Bouchillon or his record. And while no one forbade my playing his songs, no one shared my pleasure in them, either. Here, for the first time that I can remember, I stepped out of my family’s shadow. There was nothing bold about this. At the time, I didn’t even notice. Apparently neither did anyone else, because years later, when the house was sold, Tom and Melita sold or gave away most of the contents, including the Victrola and the old records.

As far back as I can remember, I loved to sing. We sang around the house when I was little, and we always sang in Sunday school (“Jesus Loves Me,” “This Little Light of Mine,” “Jesus Wants Me as a Sunbeam”) and in the 11 o’clock service. The best time to
sing in church was at Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting, because then they sang old gospel songs that for some reason didn’t get sung on Sunday morning. On Wednesdays we sang “The Little Brown Church in the Wildwood” and “Bringing in the Sheaves.” My favorite was “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” because I got to stamp my feet while I sang.

In my mind I associated certain songs with certain people. Mother and Daddy both liked Glenn Miller’s “String of Pearls.” Daddy liked “Little Brown Jug,” and Uncle Tom sang “Asleep in the Deep” and “K-K-Katy.” Aunt Melita taught me “Church in the Wildwood” and “When You Wore a Tulip,” and we sang when the mood took us, while she cooked or cleaned house, with one of us singing the first line, “When you wore a tulip, a big yellow tulip,” then both of us together: “And I wore a big red rose.” I knew that Mother was in a good mood as soon as she got through the first couple of lines in “Blues in the Night”: “My mama done tol’ me, when I was in knee-pants—” And I knew to make myself scarce as soon as she began singing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” It wasn’t the self-pity or the melodrama that drove me away. It was the baldness of her need. She did better when she made fun of her misery. Of the songs she sang when she was in a good mood, my favorite was “(Won’t You Come Home) Bill Bailey.” At the time I took no notice of the wry self-awareness that colored her delivery. I liked the song the way I liked all songs, not for any important or even very explicable reason but merely because of a funny rhyme or a repeated phrase or because something in the lyric, some odd fact, reminded me of things or people in my life. I liked “Bill Bailey” because the name seemed familiar—there were some Baileys in our church. I liked it because Bill Bailey was a railroad brakeman and I was crazy about trains.
Mostly I liked it because the lyrics were about ordinary, everyday things and no moon-June-spoon stuff. “I’ll do the cookin’, honey, I’ll pay the rent … Remember that rainy evening, I drove you out, with nothin’ but a fine-tooth comb?” Mother stopped singing that song long before my childhood ended.

When I was eight, I fell in love with the girl who sat behind me in Mrs. Jenkins’s second-grade class at North Elementary School. Kathy was a blonde with a narrow face and suspicious blue eyes. I don’t think she liked me much, but I didn’t care. She knew all the words to “The Battle of New Orleans,” the Jimmy Driftwood song that Johnny Horton had a number-one hit with in 1959. I was a fool for that song, because its hero was Andrew Jackson, who was born not twenty miles up the road from my birthplace in Lancaster—fatherless, Scots-Irish and a Presbyterian in the bargain. Cecil B. DeMille’s remake
of The Buccaneer
had come out that same year, and the craggy Jackson’s defense of New Orleans against the British in the War of 1812 was my kind of story—underdog Americans defeating the pompous Redcoats. Even better, it had pirates, although sulky Yul Brynner in a shellacked wig was pretty hard to take as Jean Lafitte.

The Horton song told the whole story in a few verses (“In 1814, we took a little trip, along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip”), and Kathy knew every one. I was impressed, even after I learned the whole song myself. I was so swayed by her charms that I invited her to my birthday party. My family met this invitation with some skepticism. Who was this girl? What did we know about her? You might have thought she was out for my trust fund, the way they carried on. And that she knew “The Battle of New Orleans” cut no ice with them. Still, I guess I put up some kind of fuss, because they let her come, along with all my pre-certified
little friends. It was all for nothing, though, because when it was over, she let me know, in so many words, that unless I was prepared to offer her cake and ice cream every day, nothing would ever come of our romance.

So Kathy slipped away. All she left me was the song. I went around singing about the Battle of New Orleans for another year or more, and the song stuck in my memory far better than anything I learned in school that year. After a while I got it down to its essence—unconsciously—when I simply ignored the lyrics and hummed the melody. What I didn’t know then, and wouldn’t find out for years, was that the melody was an old fiddle tune called “The Eighth of January,” named after the date of the famous battle in 1815. It is also my birthday. If only Kathy had known that.

One afternoon, after a particularly dismal piano lesson, I asked Mother if she would teach me. It was not the first time I had broached the subject, and the answer had always been a firm no, but I never gave up hope. I tried flattery. “You would be a great teacher. We could have a lesson whenever we felt like it.” She smiled. “No, honey, they say that you should never teach your own children.” I had heard this before, too. She never said why it was a bad idea, and I knew that she never did anything she didn’t want to do, no matter who told her to do it, but I knew better than to challenge her. “Maybe I should just quit, then.”

“That’s not like you to say something like that.”

“I know.”

“When I was a girl about your age, I wanted to play basketball at school. But Mama told me I had to choose. I could play ball or keep on with my piano lessons.”

I didn’t have time to figure out what that had to do with my problem before she continued. “I don’t know why she made me choose, but I never hesitated. Goodness knows what would have happened if I hadn’t kept it up then. You know, piano is something that you’ll have your whole life. It may not mean much to you now, but later it will.”

“I just wish I could learn some different music.”

“Bach isn’t good enough for you?”

“No, I—”

“This is what I’m trying to explain to you. My daddy paid for piano lessons, he paid for college for any of us who would go. Now Kathleen wouldn’t go to college, I don’t know why, but she wouldn’t, and look at Kathleen now, living down there in Kershaw all alone, living by herself in Mama’s house, doing nothing but going uptown to the café for lunch every day. I don’t understand that. She’s just not like the rest of us, is all I can figure. Daddy believed in culture. We’re a cultured family, and there’s something you should take pride in. There are a lot of things you’re learning that you don’t understand now, but down the road you will.”

I don’t remember ever winning a dispute with my mother. If you cornered her with a point of logic, she simply changed the subject. It was like debating a greased pig. And sometimes she would preempt any further discussion by saying something astonishing enough to render you speechless. A few years before she died, we were arguing over the definition of a good parent, and I asked her for examples. Just who did she think embodied the Christ like qualities she seemed to think a good father or mother possessed? I asked the question with a certain smugness, assured that no matter who among our acquaintances she might nominate, I would be able to counter with some flaw or other. As
always, I underestimated her. After thinking for a moment, she responded irritably, as though the answer was so obvious that it pained her to have to point it out: Ben Cartwright. “Just see how he raised those boys,” she said. “Adam, Hoss and Little Joe. And without a mother.”

Mother never articulated precisely what she meant by a cultured family, besides the kind of family that paid for piano lessons. But there were piecemeal clues, and by eavesdropping and inferring, I worked out a pretty good idea of what she thought. Mostly it amounted to a series of negatives. It wasn’t a matter of what you were. It was more about what you didn’t want to be. It meant despising anything unrefined, low class, tacky: hillbilly music, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, stock-car racing, professional wrestling, beehive hairdos, snuff dipping, hot rods, loud talk, dirty jokes, people who said chimley for chimney or Mizrez for Mrs., and anyone who drank alcohol. On the other hand, one was cautioned to “never get above your raising.” This translated into rolling your eyes at anyone who liked jazz, classical music, art museums and movies with subtitles—this was a more abstract prejudice, since we had never met anyone who liked those things. But all that scorn for the lows and the highs left scant room for anything in the middle. The attributes of a cultured person, so far as I made it out, started and stopped with good manners, good grammar and a perfect attendance record at church.

“Look at Gene Self. A grown man taking piano lessons. If he can do it, you shouldn’t have any trouble. It’s easy to learn when you’re young. And you know what he told me? He said, ‘I wish I hadn’t wasted all that time before I started.’ You should think about that.”

“I will. But would you just show me some things sometime? I mean, like the way you play.”

“I mean. I mean. Don’t start a sentence with ‘I mean.’ Are you listening to yourself? I mean this. I mean that. Don’t let that get to be a habit. And how do you think your teacher would feel if she found out I was going behind her back?”

It was tempting to say I didn’t think she’d care, but I said nothing. The effort that cost me must have shown in my face.

“Don’t scrunch up your face like that. You look like Frances Brady behind those smudgy glasses when you make that face.”

Frances Brady was one of three other women who carpooled out to the county school where they all taught, and as far as I could determine, she was my mother’s archenemy. Hardly a day passed that Mother did not come to report some new slight from Frances Brady.

“She looks back over the seat at Daves and scrunches up her face just like that. I want to tell her how it looks, because I would want someone to tell me, but I know she’d take it the wrong way. And I don’t know how she sees out of those glasses. They look like they’ve been smeared with jelly.”

The women in the carpool called each other by their last names because there was Frances Brady and Frances Daves. So when Mother talked about them, it was Brady and Daves and Vickery. It always sounded like tough-guy talk in the movies when she did that, and I couldn’t stop the image of all of them talking out of one side of their mouths while balancing a lit cigarette in the other corner. Brady had joined the carpool only that fall. She was a single woman who lived at the YWCA, and, in Mother’s words, “a pill.” Brady and Mother didn’t get along from the first day, but Mother wasn’t going to stand for it.

“I don’t know what I’ve ever done to that woman, but I’m going
to win her over.” Mother had been complaining about Brady long before she met her. It began over the summer, when Vickery called to say there would be a new member in the carpool and could they change the stop where they picked Mother up. Could she drive to the Y and then they could all leave from there, because Brady didn’t drive? Mother went around for a week threatening to drive herself to Kernersville, but her mechanic at the Shell station told her not to drive her ten-year-old used car that far every day. Now it was coming up on Christmas, and the cold war between the front and backseat was still raging. Further infuriating to Mother was that Daves and Brady were getting on, as she put it, “like a house afire. Sometimes I wonder if I’m in that car at all for all the attention they pay me. I hope you never treat anyone that way.”

We had reached our neighborhood. Every block had at least four or five for-sale signs in the front yards. I noticed that the Morgans had not sold their house yet. Maybe that meant that Sam, the only boy my age left in the neighborhood, wouldn’t have to move after all.

“Do you think Ethel will move?”

“Oh, honey, don’t say that.”

Ethel was a seamstress who made all my mother’s clothes. They had met when Ethel still worked at the hat shop downtown, before the hat shop went out of business because ladies weren’t buying hats anymore. They became friends when it turned out Ethel lived two blocks from our apartment. We went over to her house almost every Saturday night to eat spaghetti and watch
Bonanza
. Ethel had a color set. She also owned her home, and like all the other homeowners in that part of town, talked about little else but how the Negroes were moving in and taking over.

Ethel said she didn’t plan to move. She didn’t care what color her neighbors were as long as they were nice. But Ethel had a grown daughter who lived down in the country somewhere, and the daughter was always after her mother to sell out and move in with her.

Mother pulled into the small parking lot in front of our apartment.

“I think she would have said something to me if she had any such idea.”

“Aren’t we going out to eat?”

“Not tonight, honey. I’ve got choir practice, so we’ll just have chicken pie, if that’s all right with you.”

“Yeah,” I said enthusiastically. The “yeah” earned me a look. “I mean—yes’m.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I mean. I mean. I mean. What are we going to do with you?”