by Barry Moser
“Be damned if I know, but I sure hope it’s in some Jew’s front yard.”
I had come from my room at the back of the house to watch the show myself. We watched scores of beat-up cars and sorry-looking pickup trucks pass by, punctuated now and again by a shiny Cadillac or a new Lincoln. They were all in a slow procession up the street heading toward Missionary Ridge where several Jewish families and that well-to-do black dentist had fine homes overlooking the city.
The interior lights in the cars and trucks were on, or at least they were on in those that had interior lights that worked. Each car was full of Klansmen and Klanswomen in their hoods and sheets. There were children, too—Klanskids, I suppose they’d be called—dressed in miniature Klan regalia. One was riding on the hood of a car, leaning back against the wraparound windshield. Everything was moving so slowly the child wasn’t likely to fall off, and even if he had he probably wouldn’t have been seriously hurt. One of the lead trucks had a loudspeaker mounted on top of the cab. It amplified a man’s gravelly, nasal voice that chanted, over and over—a harping drumbeat of rampant hatred, disguised fear, and ignorance.
“Nigga! Don’t you never fergit yore place.”
“Don’t you never fergit yore place.”
“Nigga, never fergit yore place.”
“Never fergit yore place.”
“Never fergit. . . .”
If there was more to the chant than that, I don’t remember what it was. It eventually died out altogether. Diminuendo.
Everybody settled back into the card game. I was headed back to my room and stopped in the kitchen to browse in the refrigerator for something more to eat when I heard the front screen door slapping frantically against its latch. I heard someone crying, wailing, and trying desperately to get in.
It was Verneta. But before Mother could unlatch the screen door, Verneta pulled it apart from its hook and eye and burst into the brightly lit living room, blind with fear, and sobbing a litany of terror:
“Oh, sweet Jesus, Billie, what’m I gonna do? What’m I gonna do? What’m I gonna do? What’m I gonna do?” Mother took her in her arms.
Verneta’s sable skin was ashen, drawn, and streaked with tears.
Mother held Verneta tight and soothed her with gentle whispers and consoling pats and caresses on her back and shoulders.
“They’re not after you V’nita,” Mother whispered. “They’re not after you. You’re all right. It’s gonna be OK. Gonna be OK.”
Floyd laughed condescendingly. Never looking up from his hand of cards, he said, “Billie’s right, V’nita, they ain’t after you. Them ol’ boys there ain’t got no problem with good niggers like you and your mammy. Now, that brother of yours, Leonard . . . he gets a mite uppity sometimes. You might wanna talk to that boy.”
Everybody at the table grunted and nodded in agreement.
Then Floyd told Verneta to “go on back home, now. . . . You heard me. Go on.”
She did as Floyd told her to do, and Mother went with her, across the street and up that long, steep hill in the dark.
Everybody else played canasta.
I WENT BACK TO MY ROOM and lay down on the bed and stared at the model airplanes that hung from the ceiling. Whatever I had been looking for in the refrigerator was still in the refrigerator. I couldn’t eat anything. Verneta’s face, distorted by terror and ashened by fear, was burned forever into my memory. I can see her face to this day, fifty-eight years later. Can see her mouth drawn down and terror struck, and I can’t understand how she could have been as articulate as she was with her mouth so contorted. Can see her face nuzzled into Mother’s neck as Mother tried to comfort her—and I imagine it looked much like it did when she was that little girl who stuck her head in the flour barrel so she could be white and go to a picture show with her little friend Billie, who was now holding her and comforting her again.
It may very well have been that night, it may have been that very event—the slapping of the screen door, the wails of terror, the gaunt pallor of despair—that began a series of awakenings inside me that initiated my ongoing recovery from racism. Had Tommy been home I don’t know how he would have reacted. Would he, like Floyd, have laughed at Verneta and belittled her fear? Would he have shooed her out of the house so the card game could proceed without the unwanted distraction? Or would it have been an epiphany for him as it was for me?
PART TWO
ABOVE THE RIVER
How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man’s life, religiously preserve the merest trifles.
—SIR RICHARD BURTON
Sindh Revisited
BAYLOR
THE BAYLOR SCHOOL sits on a cliff high above the Tennessee River. Looking south you see Lookout Mountain in the misty distance as it looms high and humpbacked, seeming to brood on its historic past, the river beneath it, and parts of the city of Chattanooga, which lies at its foot on the other side of the river. In the Cherokee language, the name Chattanooga means “to draw fish out of water,” but my brother and I grew up being taught that it meant “the eagle’s nest.”
Looking west you see the Grand Canyon of the Tennessee River, so called because the river cuts a deep gorge between the high wooded plateau of Prentice Cooper State Forest on the south and Signal Mountain on the north. In the distance it turns south and meanders out of sight behind Prentice Cooper and Raccoon Mountain. Storms coming up that gorge are breathtaking spectacles—as are the sunsets.
The Baylor campus is, without doubt, one of the most beautiful academic campuses I have ever seen anywhere. By comparison, the very prestigious Deerfield Academy, which is a few miles from where I live today, looks like a home for the impecunious.
John Roy Baylor founded the school in 1893. It was originally called the University School of Chattanooga and was first located in the urban section of the city, but in 1915 the school moved to its present location overlooking the river. When the United Sates entered World War I in 1917 there was a need for educated young men for the military, and Baylor did its part by becoming an all-male military school. And so it remained until 1971.
TOMMY AND I were Baylor cadets in the 1950s. Just how we, coming from a not-so-well-to-do family who lived in a subaltern section of Chattanooga, were financially able to go to Baylor was a mystery for a long time. Daddy and Mother told us that we had been given football scholarships, which made no sense whatsoever, given that neither of us had ever played football. But Daddy’s close friend Joe Engle, owner of the Joe Engle Bat Company in Chattanooga, was a talent scout for Georgia Tech’s football team. He placed exceptional ball players from all over the South at Baylor for a postgrad year to prep them for Georgia Tech, so we figured that maybe he had pulled a few strings for us.
Neither Tommy nor I knew any better until a few years ago when a former classmate of mine, Sebert Brewer Jr., contacted me. Sebert was a trustee of the Benwood Foundation, a philanthropic organization founded by George Thomas Hunter in 1944 as a perpetual homage to his uncle, Benjamin Thomas, one of the original owners of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company in Chattanooga (where the beverage was first put into bottles in 1899). When George Hunter died in 1950, 70 percent of Coca-Cola Bottling Company stock went to the foundation, just in time to benefit Tommy in 1951 and me in 1952.
Sebert called to tell me that the Benwood Foundation was initiating a fund-raising program and was contacting people who had benefited from it to give testimonials. He asked if I would participate. I did, and was happy to do so. This was the first I knew of the grant, and since it was an anonymous grant, I wonder if Mother and Daddy knew all along. If they did they never told us.
TOMMY WENT TO BAYLOR from 1951 to 1954, seventh to tenth grade. He dropped out after his sophomore year. Being two years older than his classmates was an issue that continued to eat at him, especially when a cadet officer who was younger, or perhaps the same age, dressed him down or called him “son” or “boy.” Tommy hated that. His issues
with reading still hounded him, though his skills in math were pretty good and would later serve him well as an officer of the Collateral Investment Company in Nashville.
I went to Baylor for six years, graduating in 1958. I’m sure that most people think that spending six years in an all-male military school would be tantamount to spending six years in prison, and in some ways I suppose that is true. Had I been an intellectually curious boy and a better athlete, my experience there might have been more rewarding. But despite the privilege and honor of going to Baylor, and despite the fact that it was eminently more stimulating than Sunnyside, I was neither intellectually curious nor athletically gifted. And neither was Tommy. Neither of us caused trouble, at least not intentionally, but both of us got into trouble from time to time. Nothing serious. We went where we were told to go. And we usually did what we were told to do—except for things like reading assignments and homework.
MOST OF MY MEMORIES from that time have the visual qualities of dreams: the images are slightly out of focus and dissolve at the edge. The palette is muted and nearly void of color. However, a few of those memories are clear and stand out in my mind’s eye in full, lucid color, like photographs. They are sharp and crisp to the edge of the memory and beyond, vivid and salient dioramas, like my first day.
OUR FRONT YARD was in its usual morning shade from the large sweet gum tree that stood in the corner of our neighbors’ front yard next to our driveway. Chickadees and sparrows flitted about here and there. It was about seven o’clock.
The grass in the shadow of the tree was wet with dew. I was apprehensive, and proud, as I stood on the front porch with Mother and Tommy. I was holding Pinocchio, who had just come back from one of his random scoots. Mother had dressed me as if I were going to the doctor’s office—clean underwear and fresh socks with holes in neither, neatly pressed slacks, a freshly ironed shirt, hair parted and combed and held in place with Vitalis hair tonic. She was worried that Pinocchio was going to get my shirt dirty. I would get my first uniform in two or three weeks along with all the other new boys, except that mine was a used uniform and would be tailored to fit me well by Nap Turner. Tommy was wearing his uniform, as all old boys were required to do on the first day unless they had good reason not to.
The bus pulled up in front of our house, a small courtesy extended to new day boys on their first day of school. It was an International Harvester, I believe, painted battleship gray with the school’s full name, THE BAYLOR SCHOOL FOR BOYS, lettered on the sides in red ten-inch-high Gothic letters. The folding doors squealed when the driver cranked them open. Mother stood watching, holding little Pinocchio in her arms. She might have been crying.
Tommy and I walked quickly across the wet grass, alert to fresh turds that the dog might have left behind. Tommy got on first. I got on after him, and seeing no familiar faces, I took the first available seat, which was behind the driver.
The hard leather seats were lumpy, cracked with age, and listed forward from years of use and misuse. Tommy didn’t sit with me. He was as uncomfortable at Baylor as a whore in church and I think that this day I added to his discomfort. I embarrassed him, his little brother in his clean civvies and his Vitalis-stiff hair.
BAYLOR WAS ON THE other side of town, ten or eleven miles away from our home, and given all the starts and stops picking up students and the occasional staff member, it was about an hour’s ride down McCallie Avenue toward town, across the river on the Walnut Street Bridge, on into North Chattanooga, through Stringer’s Ridge tunnel, into Red Bank, and finally turning left off of State Route 8 to the lush and verdant Baylor campus. When the bus doors clanked opened, I stepped down onto the paved quadrangle of The Baylor School for Boys, and my life changed for all time to come.
NEITHER TOMMY NOR I was a stranger to the school. We had been campers at the Baylor Summer Camp, so we knew the campus as campers would, we knew a few older boys who worked as counselors, and we knew a few faculty members who oversaw the counselors and supervised various activities.
As a first-year day boy, knowing the campus and some of the older boys and members of the staff gave me a bit of stature and seniority over the other new cadets who were coming to the campus for the first time. What little seniority I had cut no slack elsewhere, because I, like all new boys—especially new seventh graders—was at the bottom of a very long and complex pecking order, a pecking order born out of normal adolescent, macho behavior, and the military mentality that permeated the school at that time.
All new boys were subject to harassments from upperclassmen. It was a tradition, a tradition that Tommy hated from his first day on campus. Depending on the degree of sadism in a particular old boy’s psychological makeup, that harassment came in varying degrees of hectoring. My first experience of this tradition came on my first day. A small group of old boys noticed me and another new boy walking across the quadrangle before the first-period classes started at 8:00. And even though I knew the campus as a camper would know it, I did not know where the classrooms were, and we probably looked considerably confused and lost. They ordered us to stop and to stand at attention, never mind that we had not had our first lesson in military formation yet and were not in uniform. One of the boys bent down into my face close enough I could smell his breath. He growled at me,
“Boy, have you got your keys to the flagpole, yet?”
I was scared shitless. I had no idea what he was talking about.
“No.”
“No, SIR, boy!”
“No, SIR.” My voice quavered.
Another old boy put his face in mine.
“You been measured for your rifle yet, son?”
I was so scared I could hardly answer.
“No, SIR,” I answered, looking at the ground. I had no idea what he was talking about either.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you, son.”
“Yes, SIR.”
I was about to cry.
It was not at all unusual for seniors to call underclassmen “son,” or “boy,” appropriating a slur usually reserved for black men—another reason it infuriated my brother so much when another cadet called him one or the other.
There were no keys to the flagpole.
All rifles are the same. No measurements are required.
But a frightened and nervous eleven-year-old kid knows no better. I suppose the japes went on until the school dropped the military program in 1971.
For the next four years my classmates and I endured harassments, large and small, lessening in degrees of torment each year until we became upperclassmen and graduated from harrasees to harassers. Tommy left Baylor before he had the opportunity to savor the experience from the other side of harassment. Once he left, he never went back. From that time on he had nothing positive to say about The Baylor School for Boys, and he spoke well of only a few teachers. He was disdainful of all his classmates except a very few. If Baylor had caught on fire, as the expression goes, Tommy wouldn’t have pissed on it to put it out.
THE ACADEMIC DAY ENDED in the afternoon at 2:15, and unless it rained, we fell into military formation in the quadrangle or on the drill field at 2:30 and drilled for the next hour. On rainy days we spent the hour in class studying U.S. Army field manuals and committing the eleven General Orders to memory.
On the drill field we learned the School of the Soldier (moving, standing, turning, and marching as a single body—squads, platoons, companies, and battalions); we learned the Manual of Arms (standing, marching, and saluting with rifles); and those of us who eventually became cadet officers learned the Manual of the Saber (standing, marching, and saluting with the saber). My parents must have sacrificed to buy my saber. There was no such thing as used sabers, as there were used uniforms. We all kept them. Today mine lives on the fireplace mantel in my library, CADET LT. ARTHUR B. MOSER engraved on its blade.
Having that saber—having earned that saber—was a consolation for Tommy’s inheriting the sword our grandfather Albert LaFayette Moser was awarded fo
r being the best drilled cadet at Sweetwater College, which was then a military school in Sweetwater, Tennessee. That sword is, and has been, an object of family myth for generations. In a letter dated July 15, 1932, my grandfather’s brother, George, instructed his nephew, our father, to send him the sword. George told Arthur Boyd that the sword was Albert’s soul and that Arthur Boyd was to prepare it for shipment according to George Moser’s explicit instructions: “It is your daddy’s soul,” he said, “so do him this courtesy: Make a little case for it, make it look as much like a coffin as you can; Line it with gray, and cover the exterior parts with black, trim it with marigold and daises. Spend a little of his money of him who lived his life entirely in vain; express the achievement to me.”
It never happened. Arthur Boyd ignored his uncle’s instructions and the sword passed down to Tommy. Growing up knowing this, I was told that I would inherit our grandfather’s knife, a little sword for the little brother. But there was never any such knife. My nephew, Todd Moser, is the current proprietor of Albert LaFayette Moser’s sword and it rests today in his home outside Nashville and will eventually pass to his nephew, Andrew.
THE ONE THING THAT Tommy did seem to enjoy at Baylor, and to take pride in, was the uniform. We had to pay particular attention to our uniforms, and it was the sort of fastidious attention that suited Tommy well. He was good at it. He was downright enthusiastic about its presentation. He took a lot better care of his uniform than I did mine, and he looked better in it than I did.
Tommy Moser in Baylor uniform, 1954
Our gray wool trousers had black stripes down the outside seams. The blouse was the same gray wool. Black chevrons on the sleeve of the blouse indicated the military rank: the two lowest ranks (private first class and corporals) wore inverted-V chevrons on the lower part of the sleeve below the elbow. The higher ranks (sergeants, lieutenants, and captains) wore chevrons on the upper part of the sleeve above the elbow. Polished brass cross arms were worn on the lapels of our jackets and blouses. The blouse was cinched at the waist with a black leather Sam Browne belt. Our blue Oxford shirts were always pressed and heavily starched, the collar points held down with “Spiffies,” wire apparatuses that fit under the tie and pinned into the collar points to hold them down and in place invisibly. Our shoes were polished until we could see our reflection in them. I used spit with my wax polish, touching the polishing cloth to my tongue to help rub the polish into the leather. They looked fine, but Tommy’s were always much better. He used spit and alcohol with the wax polish, and his shoes had the mirror perfection of patent leather. Some boys actually had patent leather shoes and Sam Browne belts that they wore for Wednesday inspections. Such accoutrements were well beyond Mother and Daddy’s means.
