Songs on Tape
“Rollin’ in My Sweet Baby’s Arms.” Daddy picking, Sissy and me singing. We were tiny. Mama doesn’t seem to be there. She was in the kitchen cooking supper or something as she often was.
Daddy singing “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.” I wonder if Mama knew the reason he broke time so badly—I know she noticed—could he not help it or was he that drunk? He did it three times just in this song alone. Maddening. She’s talking in the background, water running, dishes clanking together. I guess this was as close as we got to idyllic.
“You Are My Sunshine,” Dandy’s favorite. Sissy on lead, I’m on high harmony, Mama on the low part. “Blue Suede Shoes,” just Sissy and me. Sissy on ukulele. She didn’t start playing guitar until she was eight, so this had to be before that. Stops and starts are right on. Breaking time didn’t get passed down to her, no sir.
Daddy on electric, Mama on acoustic doing something he wrote. It’s pretty good. Next song, something about putting on your warm coat, honey; Mama whispers, “You changed the key,” and he had. He didn’t acknowledge her but tried to right himself. Being told he was wrong drove him crazy, pissed him off. I wonder how she had to pay for suggesting that correction. Now they’re singing “Together Again.” Good, tight phrasing. I never could decide if I liked the Buck Owens or Ray Charles version better. They’re both great. What a song.
Mama singing “Crazy.” She used to get so nervous when she sang. Her voice and hands would shake.
Listening to these recordings reminds me of Sissy saying that Daddy used up all the colors in her watercolor set except for black and brown to paint a Native American chief on his workshop wall. He didn’t leave much room for anyone else with his noodling all over everything.
Sissy and me on “My Darling Clementine.” Mama and Daddy doing “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone.” The Doug Sahm version of it is genius, in my opinion—a great song with a singular melody. Charlie Pride’s is the definitive one. “I’m Looking for Blue Eyes” was my solo number. Daddy taught it to me and I still sing it today. “Tennessee Border,” Daddy’s foot stomping out his special internal rhythm.
“The Wurlitzer Prize (I Don’t Want to Get Over You).” I knew before I started listening that one of these would get to me, even if Daddy did make the minor into a major. Tears come. “Pass Me By (If You’re Only Passing Through).” I swear songs used to be better. I know that makes me sound old but I hardly care. He changed the lyric to “stop me now if you don’t know what you’re getting into.” I laugh through my tears.
“T for Texas.” Sissy’s just plain got it. I don’t know how old she is here but she is for certain under ten and you can just tell. “Blue Suede Shoes” again. “Hound Dog.” “When Will I Be Loved,” Mammy’s favorite, which she used to call “Pushed Around.” “Y’all do that ‘Pushed Around,’” she’d say.
Daddy asking me who sings “Silver Wings.”
“Merle Hagwud.”
I don’t remember ever not knowing the answer to that question.
I am lucky that some of the reel-to-reel tapes have been transferred to digital form. I don’t listen to them very often, but this afternoon I decide I should. It’s been so long since I’ve been with us. And nothing can take you back to a person like a voice can. The sounds of our voices take me home and to all that means. Ghosts come in, but they sway and smile, sometimes they sing along right into my ear and are happy for a minute. I am warm and connected.
They slip back out through the crack under the door, leaving silence in their place.
Name-tag pin in a heart-shaped box
I’ve had it since she died. “Lynn S. Moorer,” it says. I guess Mama wore it on her blouse or jacket at the meetings she attended for some Mobile women’s association. She’d been chosen by the law firm she worked for—McDermott, Slepian, Windom & Reed—to represent them. Mama was honored, but she deserved to be chosen. She represented herself well out in the world. She was smart and capable, hardworking, good-looking, and friendly. Everyone loved her. I don’t know how she kept it together so well.
That’s a lie.
Yes I do. It’s just how she was. I don’t think she thought she had a choice to do anything else.
I keep it in a heart-shaped box on my own dresser now, just as I’m sure she would’ve kept it in a heart-shaped box on hers had she lived. There is a pair of her earrings in there, as well as a sterling-silver spoon ring, an old St. Francis of Assisi tag that used to hang on my dog’s collar, and four Susan B. Anthony dollars. Mama got us each four of them in 1979. I don’t know how she felt about feminism and I wish I did.
SISSY WAS BORN IN QUANTICO ON OCTOBER 22, 1968. The three of them moved back to Alabama when she was an infant and Daddy was discharged from the marines. They stayed with Mammy and Dandy in Frankville for a while, and with Nanny and Pawpaw in Jackson for a while, then they moved up to Pine Hill in early 1969 when Daddy got a job at MacMillan Bloedel. They landed in Mobile not too long after that and I was born there on June 21, 1972. We lived on Kittyhawk Street.
I was seventeen months old or so when Mama and Daddy decided that we would move up to Frankville. They bought the old home place up the hill from Mammy and Dandy’s house, where Mammy and her sister, Lucille, were raised. No one had lived in it for more than ten years. Lucille had moved to California a decade before and had convinced her mama, known as Mama Fannie to us, to move out there with her in the 1960s. She must’ve done so in a hurry because there was still flour and cornmeal in the tin canisters in the kitchen and a bathrobe hanging on a tenpenny nail on the back of the bathroom door.
Nature is always in the process of trying to reclaim what we decide belongs to us, and houses, left to their own devices, will fully cooperate. Hinges rust, boards decompose, pipes clog, and dirt and dust creep in to help all manner of flora and fauna build their nests. They, too, like to sometimes get out of the weather. This is never truer than in the Deep South region of the United States, hot, humid, buggy, and just plain ripe as it is. You have to constantly beat back the rot. It’s the only thing that moves quickly besides the kudzu and pine trees.
It was wintertime when we made the move from Mobile to Frankville. The snakes and such had gone down into their holes. The grass had dried, but even so, Daddy had to cut a path from the driveway to the door of the house with a machete because everything was so grown over. There was still electricity, but no running water. Daddy toted buckets of water from the outside faucet for Nanny and Mama to heat on the stove and mix with lye soap, Clorox, and any other kinds of cleaning solution they could think of to make the place habitable. They used shovels to remove the rat pills and various sorts of carcasses and filth off the floor. There was quite a clean-up to do before the house was livable. Daddy wasn’t a patient man, to my knowledge not with anyone, and certainly not with us. I’m sure that the sheer labor of such an undertaking had gotten the better of him when I toddled out into the pasture one afternoon. We were all outside according to Nanny, working on getting the yard into some sort of less junglelike order. I started to cry, probably fearing I was lost. But Nanny was on my trail and headed toward me. She said she saw Daddy pick up a stick from the ground, fix his gaze on me, and draw back his arm. She scooped me up just in time. No, I don’t remember it, but I believe her. I saw him do the same thing on multiple occasions to stray dogs that would wander up in the yard. It’s almost hard to take personally, but it still makes me wince and ache a cold ache.
We lived in the house in Frankville until I was twelve years old.
It was a seven-room house and on the edge of ramshackle. It was the second one to stand on that parcel of land since the first had burned just before Lucille’s high school graduation. The house was rebuilt identically.
It was made of wood and painted white, except for the ceiling of the front porch, which was a light turquoise. Painting door frames or the roof of your porch turquoise is supposed to keep out evil spirits. Seems some spirits slipped past and took a right
at the dining room door off the hallway and set up shop at the pie safe Mama had refinished to use as a liquor cabinet.
There were always grand plans for the house, but they would get started and never completed. Mama and Daddy would knock out a wall here and put up a partition there, leaving it more haphazard looking than it was before, always as if someone had a bright idea and then suddenly grew bored. Or depressed. Or ran out of money.
Daddy wanted more out of life than Frankville could give. He knew the world was bigger than the one he’d grown up in, and that seemed to rub against him like a rock in your shoe. But there he sat, in Frankville, mad about what he didn’t do with his life. Mad and staring at the heat lightning from the side porch off the bedroom he and Mama shared, sipping Jim Beam and water from his ever-present avocado-green insulated tumbler with the white rim. He never could make the big ideas and plans he had for himself come to fruition. The thing is, he never really spoke about those big ideas and plans; they could just be seen in him, in his dissatisfaction and frustration, and in his absolutely-bored-to-death irritation.
Daddy’s main disease was alcoholism. But I don’t think it began and ended there. I have more than a suspicion that there was very likely something else going on, something else that didn’t allow his mind to operate properly. Normally? I don’t know what normal is.
Was he bipolar? I know he was depressed. His moods swung violently. He was unpredictable. He did dangerous things. I’m pretty certain he didn’t care if he lived or died. He would come up out of the misery every once in a while and when he did it felt like the sun was shining directly on you and only for you. That’s what his happiness felt like. He’d deliver a sweet “That’s my girl” and a pat on the back or the head when he was pleased with you. But that was only every once in a while.
Schizophrenia? Could’ve been. Borderline personality disorder? I don’t want to believe it was just plain meanness. Yes, he was a garden-variety alcoholic, and they’re all over the place. But something tells me he stuck out even in that garden, as an outlier of sorts, one who drank to ease his ills, to lose himself and the devil in his head. One who knew exactly why he drank and that he did it to get drunk. It was never a celebratory, social (although he did drink socially, just as he drank by himself), or feel-good thing. It was a necessity that I’m pretty sure he ended up knowing had ruined his life. I think he despised it. It made him despise himself.
When I think of him now, I see him in a way I couldn’t as a child. I see what a big brain he had. But I’ve lost the awe I had for him then. I held him simultaneously in awe and contempt when I was a girl. It was confusing and made me conflicted, just like he was. My awe has since turned to sympathy, even empathy sometimes, as I navigate the world as an adult and try to find my place in it. He always seemed to be trying to find his place in it. Even having lost the weird veneration that clashed with my disdain and hurt, I grieve for him. I grieve for what he, and we, could’ve been.
Daddy was and still is hard to figure. I tried to do it while he was here, as much as a little girl can figure things. Truth is, I’ve never quit trying. There is so much I just don’t know about him. I feel like I hardly knew him at all. That leaves me wanting and cold. Daddy was only happy in flashes and flickers. He was mainly discontent, and in a way I’ve never seen up close since that handful of years I spent with him. I’ve tried to chase down some sort of trajectory in reverse, starting with the end and going back to the beginning, to find the details that would point to the thing or things that made him so miserable with himself and his life. I can’t do it. All I have are pieces—my own memories of him mixed with stories and recountings that other people have offered. I’ve asked folks who knew him better than I did about every detail they can give me, and I still come up short, because all the things don’t reconcile. They tell me about a man I didn’t ever know. I don’t guess they’re supposed to make sense. Are we all not complicated? Do any of us reconcile? I wrestle with that most every time I think of him.
Complicated, yes. Conflicted, yes. But those conditions don’t explain him and the way it all went to me. Being complicated and conflicted doesn’t make you put a .30-06 rifle in between your eyes. He was beyond complicated and conflicted.
Or maybe not. Maybe he only lacked the tools with which to deal with those things. Maybe he just took it all too hard. Some of us do. Sometimes I just wonder what in holy hell was wrong with him.
Leon Harris delivered the eulogy at Daddy’s funeral. He’d known Daddy since he was a boy, Leon says since 1951. That would’ve made Daddy nine or ten years old when they met. I emailed Leon in 2014, asking him to tell me what, anything at all, he remembered. I knew there was no forgetting Daddy.
April 22, 2014
Hey Babe! Shock may be a better word. I didn’t figure you still knew me. Yes I ask about you and Shelby every time I see Kat. All of you family meant a lot to me. We all kinda grew up together. And I know how far NY is from Ala. Nell and I lived on Long Island for two years. I pulled a house trailer from the big town of Frankville right down Broadway (country came to town) to Roslyn where I was stationed at the time.
Certainly I’ll try to be as helpful as I can. Give me a little time to do some head scratching. Probably not too long, as I am 83yrs young now. I ride a Harley so I can stay ahead of rigor mortis. I’ve been all over New York… city and state. Don’t be shocked if I show up on 87th asking for a bologna sandwich.
Love to you and yours
Leon.
I wrote back that day.
April 22, 2014
Hey!
You don’t know how happy it makes me to hear from you. I would love to hear anything you have to say about any of it—Daddy, Moorers, New York, bologna—it would be a thrill.
I had no idea you and Nell lived up here—the things we find out as we get older. Or don’t. Ha.
And anytime you want to show up would be fine with me—we’ll go next door and get a bagel.
Love,
Allison
After a week Leon sent this letter.
4/29/14
peevey landing
on the tombigbee river
ok ms.allison, here we go. you have my permission to quote… misquote… trashcan… edit… anything your little heart desires.
i found very quickly my fingers work better than my head.
as i will do a lot of memory rambling, please understand some of the dates or timing my be wrong. most of this may be completely useless to you. feel free to use what you want. maybe it will even help you to feel a little better about your dad. i pray so.
i first came in contact with your dad when i married billie nell johnson in 1951. her parents were real good friends with your grandparents, vernon and frances moorer. franklin and kat were teenagers. i would come on leave from the usaf and someway we all became dear friends. franklin and i went coon
hunting and fished some on the river. i taught him to play the guitar. he soon became much better than his teacher. he did that in a lot of ways. jimmy dixon taught him to play blues and again he became much better than jimmy.
i have never figured out if franklin was two people in one body or if he was one person who made a change into someone i did not know.
we bought a carriage (buggy) one time. he paid for it and i supplied the truck and fuel to go to north alabama to pick it up. i found it when i went upstate to preach while i was in howard college.
franklin spent quite a few weekends with me and nell. i was a motorcycle patrolman on homewood pd while in college. i was also chaplain at the tb hospital for a while. sometimes franklin would lead the singing when i preached. he did the same at the jimmy hale rescue mission downtown birmingham when i preached there. sometimes he would play the piano (chords) as i tried to sing.
i was pastor of verbena baptist church and sometimes franklin would go with nell and me to church. it was about 65 miles from birmingham and we would all spend the day in the area and come back home that night. we had a youth reviv
al one time and franklin said let me preach one night, and i did. and i would do it again. he used as his text, philippians 4th chapter and verse 13. his topic was, “i can do anything”. i used this at franklin’s funeral. i can’t find my notes now.
somehow we lost contact. i think he was at auburn and i went to work at a chemical company. he would visit but not very often. i went to work for the drug education council as instructor and counselor. franklin came to me once while he was in charge of personel dept. at a large paper co. he wanted to know how he could help one of his employees who had a drinking problem. he did the same one time after he started teaching at theodore. this time he was concerned about a friend, i have felt so stupid and faulted myself many times since then because he was probably asking for help. and one of his best friends didn’t give help.
the franklin i knew was a good man… i would even say a spiritual minded man… i don’t know what happened or when…
but, boy wouldn’t i like to have a second shot at life???
maybe we all would.
i hope this will help. if it raises questions i can answer i will try.
good wishes and prayers and love to you.
Rothko and thoughts on suicide
H. and I went to see a Mark Rothko exhibit at the fine arts museum in Houston.
This was a retrospective installation spanning Rothko’s entire career, starting with his earliest works, which were by every modicum of measurement admirable, and ending with his signature pieces—those big blocks of color and dark and lines that led to the ones that can be mistaken for nothing. The black-and-purple ones. The ones like the ones that hang in the chapel. The ones that serve as invitations, invocations, and inducements to sit down and shut up. I like those best.
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