Littlejohn

by Howard Owen

  The bottom line, though, truth be known, is probably that I never could face the prospect of sacrifice. This is not a solitary failing; my friends in the English department and I talk about it often. What do you do for aging parents who took care of their aging parents until the bitter end, come bedpans, Alzheimer’s, nervous breakdowns (yours) or whatever? And the amazing thing is, with Daddy and Mom, they didn’t even seem to mind. Even Mom, who was taking care of Daddy’s mother and brother and sister, with precious little appreciation, I might add, didn’t seem to bear any resentment. I would have borne quintuplets of resentment, had it been me. I see a therapist once a week now; I’d need a session a day to put up with what Mom endured. Except she didn’t “endure” or even “accept.” From the moment she married Daddy, she must have embraced his family as hers. It probably helped that her parents, or adopted parents, died not long after she and Daddy were married. They were much older.

  After Jeff and I separated, I talked with his mother, on the phone, one time. This year, I didn’t send his parents a Christmas card.

  Daddy has been gypped, swindled. It isn’t all my fault. I am a child of my times. We’re the ones who paved the way for the Me Generation. By the time I’m old and Justin is middle-aged, children probably will be allowed to give their parents a competency test every year, and when the scores dip enough, they’ll be permitted to send us to the showers, like the Jews. Sort of like SATs for the human race. Or maybe final exams.

  It was shortly after Christmas of 1955 that my Uncle Gruff called and invited us to come down for a week in March. Uncle Gruff’s real name is Cerrogordo. That’s why he’s so gruff, Daddy would tell me. He and Aunt Martha lived in Atlanta most of the time I was growing up, but they moved to the west coast of Florida for about five years before they found out early retirement didn’t suit either one of them.

  Daddy didn’t think we ought to go, because there was so much work to do on the farm, but Mom convinced him that the Lockamys could make do for one week in March. He finally agreed, using the excuse that it would do Aunt Connie and Uncle Lex good to get away for a while, too. I’m sure Mom would have preferred for just the three of us to go, but that was out of the question.

  So we packed the five of us into our green Chevrolet, Daddy and Lex in the front seat, Mom, Aunt Connie and me in the back, dressed as if we were going to church. It was the first time we’d been able to make such a trip, because Grandma had only died the year before. They had to take me out of school for a week, which I didn’t mind a bit.

  Thus began The Trip to Florida, capitalized because of its singular nature—my parents never went there again—and because Daddy almost killed Uncle Gruff and found a way to make money farming, a secret that had eluded our family for generations.

  We drove all day and stayed at a motor court in Hardeeville, South Carolina. I remember being very discouraged because we had only gone through one state. I was eight then, and I couldn’t wait to get to the state with my name, Georgia.

  Then the next morning, we were in Georgia almost immediately and before we knew it, we were out of Georgia and into Florida. Daddy stopped and took my picture at the state line: one shot in front of the Florida sign, then across the road for a shot of me holding my arm out toward the Georgia sign, like, this is my state.

  Uncle Gruff and Aunt Martha lived at a place called Jackson Island, on the Gulf of Mexico, and we had to cut across the top part of Florida to get there. A two-lane road connected the island with the mainland, across this huge savannah. It was the most lonesome place I’d ever been in my life. There were about fifty houses along the beach road, and you had to go back across the bridge to get to a grocery store. Uncle Gruff had a boat, and he’d fish for shrimp and red snapper and all kinds of seafood. I, of course, didn’t like fish, so they’d fix me hamburgers or spaghetti.

  The worst thing about Jackson Island was the waves. There weren’t any. There was this beautiful white sand, like sugar, and there were gulls all over the place, but the Gulf around Jackson Island was like a big pond, with little ripples about six inches high. The ironic thing is that when a hurricane comes up, the waves get even higher than they do in the Atlantic, which is why Jackson Island isn’t inhabited anymore.

  There were also jellyfish everywhere, from little ones that just stung a little bit to big ugly ones that would raise welts. Daddy said his main memory of that trip was me standing waist deep in the Gulf, doing a complete circle every few steps to keep an eye out for jellyfish, and Uncle Gruff yelling out, “There’s one, Georgia!” every once in a while, just to see me jump and scream.

  There was something about standing out there in the Gulf of Mexico and looking across this flat, empty expanse that ran for a thousand miles that made me feel somehow deserted. I can’t stand to be at a beach without lots of people; I’d rather go to Virginia Beach, where you can barely find space for your towel, than one of those TV beaches where some jerk strolls along the sand with his dog, no other human beings in sight, while he ponders the tragedy of receding hairline. It’s strange, but mountains don’t affect me that way. Jeff and I used to rent a cottage up on the west side of the Blue Ridge for a week every summer, and I couldn’t get enough of just staring off into the side of a mountain from a rocking chair. But don’t leave me alone at the beach.

  We stayed at Jackson Island from Sunday afternoon until early Saturday morning. Uncle Gruff was a great storyteller, and everybody wanted to hear the old, old stories, ones that had been handed down like heirlooms from a widowed aunt to an older sister. Daddy knew a few, too, and between him and Gruff, I think they must have covered the whole family, all the way back to Scotland. It was the first of many tellings I can remember, and I never got tired of them.

  Uncle Gruff told about how Captain McCain, my great-grandfather, came up the river from Newport, almost broke and on his way back home to Randolph County to play the prodigal returning, about how he heard about the job at Amos Geddie’s sawmill while sitting in a tavern in Port Campbell and walked all the way to Geddie to talk his way into a supervisor’s position. He said he’d been out west, fighting Indians or Mexicans or whatever. His family were Quakers, and he must have been the black sheep.

  Daddy chimed in with the part about how the Captain wooed Amos’s daughter, Barbara, who was two years older than him, and no beauty to boot, and how he extorted the 320 acres of Geddie land nearest to the Blue Sandhills as a wedding present.

  “And Mallie and Zebediah, too, don’t forget that,” Gruff said, and Daddy told us about the Captain’s slaves, a couple and the one child they were allowed to take with them from the Geddie farm to the new one that was just being built, about how Mallie had to change her name to McCain, then changed it back to Geddie as soon as the war was over.

  Gruff told us about the first time Captain McCain came to Geddie Presbyterian Church, when he was courting Barbara, how they told him he’d have to stand, because all the pews belonged to individual families, and how he shamed everyone by sitting on a footstool up by the choir, then putting a ten-dollar gold piece into the offering plate.

  Daddy told how the captain and his son, Red John, along with the rest of the home guard, met the Union army in front of the church, supposedly to surrender, and how someone started shooting. Daddy said it was Red John, his and Gruff’s daddy, but Gruff said it wasn’t. Between them, they told how the Yankees chased the home guard into the sandhills and then burned everything to the ground. My favorite part was where they set the sawdust pile at the lumber yard afire and it burned and smoldered for twenty years. They called it Yankees’ Revenge.

  Then Aunt Connie told about the hard times after the war, when Red John’s two brothers gave up their shares of the farm and went to work for their fathers-in-law, and how Red John had brought it back, borrowing for seed in the spring and using most of the harvest to pay back the loan, praying that the crops didn’t fail. And Gruff told about how Red John married Faith Geddie when he was forty-nine and she was twenty-three and a wi
dow, and about the funny names they gave their children.

  They’d talk and argue and correct all night on the porch, looking out across the almost-silent waters, and I took in every word, without even knowing it at the time.

  It was Thursday night that Daddy got into the argument with Uncle Gruff. Daddy almost never lost his temper, but Gruff had read something about The Diary of Anne Frank, which had just been made into a play, and he said that he was tired of hearing about the damn Jews, that all they’d ever done to him in Atlanta was screw him out of money, and that maybe Hitler wasn’t on the wrong track after all.

  Uncle Gruff had been drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon for about three hours when he said that, and I’m sure he didn’t really mean it, or at least I hope he didn’t, but he was always throwing around words like “nigger” and “kike” like loose change. Even in the South in 1956 he stood out, no mean feat.

  Daddy didn’t raise his voice.

  “Don’t be talking about something you don’t know nothing about, Gruff,” he said. He was drinking Coke and he put the glass down.

  Uncle Gruff was quiet for a second or two, then he started ranting and raving about how he’d half-raised Daddy (Daddy said later all he remembered Gruff raising was hell) and how he wasn’t going to take that from somebody who had to get his wife to teach him how to write his name, so what the shit did he know about politics?

  Daddy told him to watch his mouth. He was a little red in the face now. But Gruff wouldn’t stop. He finally made Daddy snap when he started telling us about how he used to come to Daddy’s classroom at school and there would be Daddy sitting over in the corner crying because he couldn’t read. Uncle Gruff was a mean drunk.

  Daddy got up and went in the kitchen. He came back out with the biggest, nastiest-looking butcher knife that Uncle Gruff and Aunt Martha had taken with them from Atlanta when they retired. He walked right over to Gruff, who was trying to walk backward while still in his chair, so that he looked like one of the crabs we’d see at night on the beach, and he stuck the knife right in Gruff’s face.

  “If you don’t shut up about the Jews, and if you don’t shut up about me,” Daddy told him in a strained voice so unlike his usual bass that it scared me more than the knife, “I’ll cut your D head off.” Daddy didn’t like cursing; he might have cut Uncle Gruff’s head off without ever uttering a profanity.

  He backed Gruff up to the wall, where he was getting sober in a hurry. Uncle Lex tried to talk to him, and Aunt Connie took me into the hallway leading back to the bedrooms. Gruff told Daddy he was sorry, and Mom managed to walk up to him and take the knife away. Gruff sulked all the next day, but they shook hands when we left, and Gruff came to see us every year or so, even more after Aunt Martha died.

  Daddy didn’t show me the pictures from Germany until I was a junior in high school. Where we lived, there was nothing but white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the high school. The blacks and Indians went to their own schools, and all the Jews lived in town. I guess they burned the Catholics at the stake or something.

  It’s painful for me to look back and see the way we were, but all the I’m-sorry’s in the world won’t make it any different.

  They had integrated the schools that year, fall of 1965, and nobody—at least, nobody white—was very happy about it. Even Daddy grumbled about the federal government trying to tell us what to do, and Mom said it would be the end of the state education system. Even then, whites were pulling their kids out of schools all over and starting their own segregation academies.

  The first two years, it was voluntary. There were six blacks in the junior class, another seven in the sophomore class and a dozen freshmen. Their lives must have been total hell. Nobody actually did serious bodily harm to any of them, just called them niggers about two trillion times, and painted it on their lockers, and laughed at their accents—which weren’t much if any worse than ours, probably—and in general tried to make them commit suicide.

  One of them did. Latricia Wonsley was her name. She went home after her biology teacher ridiculed her for “axing” for something and the whole class joined in, reducing her to tears. She went home, got a chair from the kitchen table, stood on it with a piece of clothesline she’d cut, tied it around her neck and secured it to a light fixture, kicked the chair away and hanged herself right there in the living room. They said she had been an A student at her old school, Carver High, and her parents expected her to show the white kids at Geddie High what a smart black girl could do when she had the chance. She obviously never had the chance. A month before she killed herself, someone had smeared her locker door, which was right next to mine, with Crisco, a crude allusion to the Royal Crown Pomade black people used in those days when they still so desperately seemed to need to be white. A couple of white boys allegedly exposed themselves to her in an empty classroom, and nobody was ever punished. There were different books, different methods, and nobody ever tried to help Latricia Wonsley figure them out.

  The day after it happened, it was all over school, of course, and Mike Draughon told Bonnie Cain and me that it was the sight of Ernest Naylor’s penis—except he didn’t say penis, of course—that drove her to it. We were a very clever, witty crowd.

  When I got home that day—it was sometime after Christmas and before spring planting—Daddy was inside, sitting by the oil heater eating parched peanuts. It was just before we moved into Grandma’s old house, after Lex and Connie died.

  “Nigger girl killed herself last night,” I said, swelled in the importance of imparting grownup news.

  He stopped shelling peanuts and asked me who she was. I told him Latricia Wonsley. He said that her mother used to do laundry for us, and that he’d known her daddy since before the war. Daddy knew everybody in Geddie, East Geddie and Old Geddie back then.

  “We ought to fix something and take it down there,” he said, thinking a coconut pie or a cake or something. People have been known to gain five pounds at a loved one’s funeral in the Geddies.

  I told him I didn’t think that was a very good idea, because the Wonsleys, whoever they were, probably hated white people.

  He asked me how come, and I told him about some of the “jokes” that my more mean-spirited classmates, with the full consent and approval of the silent majority, had played on Latricia (leaving out the part where she was exposed to Ernest Naylor’s not-so-private parts, of course).

  Daddy and Mom had heard me tell some of the stories at supper, and if they didn’t laugh out loud, they seemed to accept it as just part of high school pranks. Making life hard for black people was the official pastime of Scots County, after all.

  “So you think she killed herself because you all were so mean to her?” he asked me. I wasn’t ready to accept responsibility for Latricia Wonsley’s suicide, and I told him so. Told him that she apparently couldn’t take a joke very well.

  He got up and threw the peanut shells and newspaper he’d held in his lap into the trash, then went into his and Mom’s bedroom. He was gone about five minutes, and I thought we were through talking about Latricia Wonsley. I got myself a Pepsi out of the refrigerator and was sitting on the couch when he came back in with a handful of photographs.

  “I got something I want to show you,” he said. “It’s some pictures I took when I was in the Army, during the war.”

  He’d never shown me those pictures, and he’d never talked about the war other than to say he was a cook, which didn’t appear to be the kind of thing you’d use for bragging material in the neighborhood.

  What really got to him, Daddy said after he’d showed me the pictures of the Jews, was the German people. I saw what he intended for me to see in the pictures of them: There was relief, of course, there was obsequiousness, there was a certain haughtiness. Nowhere, though, was there any shame. And, like Daddy said, the Germans might as well have been us. They had little dogs and gardens and wore hats and went to school.

  Daddy took the pictures from me and put his hairy, freckled hand on mine. />
  “When you don’t treat folks like human beings,” he said, “something terrible can happen. Let’s us don’t be like that.”

  This was the beginning of my liberal education, coming from a Southern farmer who still called (and still calls) blacks “colored people.” It would be two more years, in my freshman year at UNC—G, before another teacher would broach this still-delicate matter of Southern whites treating blacks like garbage. And within four years, I was exercising the college student’s God-given right to assume omniscience and was lecturing Daddy on the atrocities of the South. He handled it as he did most things, with grace.

  I would like to say that a veil was lifted from my eyes and that I went and sinned no more after Daddy showed me his war pictures. But is there a sixteen-year-old who isn’t mainly powered by the force of peer pressure? I certainly wasn’t strong enough to rebel against it. We still either laughed at black kids or acted as if they didn’t exist. It was more like I’d still do and say these hateful things, but later I would think about what I did and feel guilty. It took years for my guilt reflexes to get quick enough to kick in before I did a spiteful thing to another person.

  And Daddy and Mom weren’t saints. They still felt as if the feds were bringing back Reconstruction, but they were able to separate the cause from the effect, so that they didn’t, as lots of my friends’ parents did, treat black children like the chosen instruments of the Evil Empire in Washington.

  It probably helped Mom that she had to spend a summer school at Carver. She had never been in a black high school before, but the summer before my senior year, she was persuaded to teach a course there in remedial English to help some of the kids make the transition to the white world.