The Last Holiday

by Gil Scott-Heron

  The most popular sport in the south was baseball, and the stands for the little league games were always fairly crowded with mature community experts. My game was somewhere between mediocre and all right, but my pitching reminded them of “Steel Arm Bob Scott,” my grandfather, who once pitched for the local team. My ripping and running in general through the dusty streets brought back stories of the four Scott children who had run and ripped twenty years before I arrived. Everyone remembered them, so Jackson felt like a town full of parents and grandparents. I was welcomed everywhere. I was identified and respected in Jackson as a Scott: “Bob Scott’s boy.” I was identified as though the Herons did not exist.

  I didn’t mind being connected to Bob Scott. I just didn’t know him because he’d died the year before I was born. Under consideration, I decided that most things that were important had happened just before I was born: my grandfather, the Second World War, Jackie Robinson, the things that were important to people in church or on the front porch at night. They had gotten all their living done, and their accomplishments were strung out behind them like pearls on a leash. Lazy evening conversations would allow us all to take figurative walks through the gardens where those highlights of their lives had been planted.

  My grandmother had been born Lily Hamilton, in Russellville, Alabama. It was an appropriate name for a delicate, fair-skinned woman with raven-black hair that nearly reached the floor when she let it down to brush it. She was scarcely more than five feet two inches, and never more than a hundred and ten pounds. She was a laundress. Her first job had been for the railroad, cleaning and preparing the tablecloths and place settings for the club car diners and the uniforms for the porters and conductors who worked on the rail on the two passenger trains that shuttled between Miami and Chicago. To facilitate that job she had moved to Jackson, Tennessee, roughly halfway between those two points. Once I landed in Jackson, every summer I rode on either the Seminole or the City of Miami, back and forth to Chicago to see my mother.

  By the time I came to live with Lily in 1950, she was “taking in” laundry for a living. She did her job at the house on Cumberland Street for individual, private customers who brought their clothes to the house and picked them up a few days later. I don’t know how she started doing that job or how she got her customers, but among the people she provided this service for was the mayor (though he had started bringing his clothes before he was mayor), the chief of police (though his wife and son came more often than he himself did), and the owner of a large downtown department store.

  I found out how she felt about quite a few things from listening to what she said to them, and about how much respect they had for her by the way they listened. I heard her address the chief about “the problem,” what wasn’t right, what was bothering folks, what needed to be done. He would nod his big bald head and in his half-growl he would drawl, “Aw, Lily, you know them kinda things take a while.”

  She would always speak her mind, and it took just the right amount of time for her to finish her points and to gather their shirts and other property. But she spoke her mind wherever she was. Like her evaluation of the waiting area reserved for Blacks in Corinth, Mississippi, a filthy, cave-dark backroom where we had to wait to change buses when we visited family back in Russellville, Alabama. She would be sure the white ticket seller heard her let loose a list of complaints. She seemed to make the other Black folks in there nervous. And I got the impression that she didn’t care. There were no good racists and no places where you would prefer to be discriminated against. There was no best racist state; but there may have been a worst racist state—from my brief experiences, that dishonor would have to go to Mississippi. For whatever reason, I felt bad in Mississippi. I felt Black and mistreated. Maybe it was because of the things I heard about Mississippi, about the murders there, about Mack Parker and Emmett Till and Medgar Evers, who were all murdered in Mississippi while I lived in Jackson. Maybe it was the size of the signs that said COLORED at the bus station in Corinth. Maybe it was the absolute stink in the bathroom of that bus station, which was unmatched in my experiences before or since.

  My mother and uncle used to say they hated to go to the stores in Jackson with Lily because she would embarrass them. White cashiers at uptown stores always waited on white folks first; they would never ask, “Who’s next?” If somebody white walked in they would go straight to the counter as if the Black people were invisible. But not with my grandmother. She was not in sync with certain facts. There were signs indicating some of the rules—like in that Mississippi bus station, with its “Colored” waiting room. But my grandmother didn’t consider it a rule for her if there was no sign. And white people had their own limits as to how far they could or would push that “us first” bullshit. So in line at the cash register my grandmother would loudly say, “I was here before them” and hold out her money. It wasn’t her stature that kept people off her; somehow her attitude and bearing brought her respect.

  I would hear white folks whispering in stores in uptown Jackson when my grandmother would stand at their counters and say, quite distinctly, that she wanted to purchase something on credit. As a rule, colored people couldn’t even ask for credit, but my grandmother did not follow rules like that. If she was speaking to a new employee, there would be a pause that hung in the air between us like a condor, not needing to wave its wings and disturb the air. The clerks would look at her—she was obviously unafraid to make eye contact with them—and feel their throats tighten. They would excuse themselves to go get their bosses to tell her no. But the boss would approve it, and the clerks would return with silly grins tearing their faces up while they wrote down whatever it was she wanted to buy. I could imagine the bosses saying, “That’s Lily, she’s Bob Scott’s wife.”

  There were regular gatherings on the front porch when the weather was warm. It could include any number of people from the neighborhood, but it always included Mrs. Cox, the school janitor’s wife from across the street, and someone from the Cole family next door, as well as either cousin Lessie or Uncle Robert. And no matter where the conversations started, they would end up speaking on race. What was happening here and there. What they had read in the papers. What information had come through from the men and women who worked on the trains and knew what was going on from Miami to Chicago. I remember hearing about Emmett Till and Mack Parker on the front porch. A twelve-year-old and a truck driver, both murdered by white people. Mack Parker was lynched and Emmett Till was beaten to death. Inevitably, someone would bring up possible solutions, something that could stop folks from getting killed that way. The most frequent conclusion was that some organization, perhaps the NAACP, needed to do something. My grandmother was rarely too talkative on those occasions. She would talk when she had something to say and laugh a lot at the things the excitable Mrs. Cox would say.

  What directed Blacks in Jackson was their belief in the Baptist church. We attended Berean Baptist church every Sunday. My grandmother did not like a lot of people. She wasn’t one to be doing a lot of laughing it up with strangers. She was friendly with the church people and participated in all of their various to-dos. When she was in Russellville with Uncle Counsel or when her children were home for a while, she was visibly happy. But Lily Scott did not like people for no reason. She was not stuck up or snooty or snobbish. She was not narrow-minded, naive, neurotic, nosy, or negative. She was not combative, complaining, compulsive, or complacent. You could count on her. She was predictable, patient, perceptive, persistent, proud, private, and practical. She had a healthy respect for hard work and was not afraid to put in her time. She was a sane, sensible, settled, serious, solid, single-minded survivor. And she was a religious and God-fearing woman with high ideals, strong principles, and most of all, a belief in the power of learning. Though she did not have a lot of formal book learning herself, she had insisted that her children be educated. And she had scrapped, scrimped, scrambled, scrunched, scrubbed, scratched, scuffled, slaved, and saved until somehow a
ll four of her children had graduated from college with honors.

  She read to me and taught me to read very early. At four years old we were reading the funny papers on Sunday and a few chapters from the Bible each night. On Thursdays there was a man who delivered The Chicago Defender, the Black weekly paper. It was in the Defender that I first read columns by Jesse B. Semple, including his conversations with Langston Hughes. His column became the first thing I would look for. I cannot remember too many Bible specifics after Exodus, but I do know the Old Testament had a lot of long names to pronounce and that taught me phonetics.

  The front porches of the Black folks in Jackson were where everyone sat in the cool of the early evening, and people always threw invitations our way if we walked by. But my grandmother rarely stopped. We would wave to folks we knew, naturally, and I would often hear, “That’s Bob Scott’s boy and Lily. Good man, Bob Scott.” I never understood how they always skipped over my father to attach me to my grandfather, but I didn’t mind or say anything because I knew my grandmother could hear them and she never turned around.

  5

  My grandmother would sometimes talk about her life back in Russellville, Alabama, before she moved to Jackson. She had several brothers and sisters, though I remember only two of her brothers; she would take me to see them in Alabama. She always noted the steady consistency of her brothers, how dependable they were, and how well they served as the decision makers for her generation. We stayed with Uncle Buddy, whose name was Morgan, after their father. He was the oldest and head of the family, a sober elder statesman who never said four words when three would get it said. There was also Uncle Counsel, a short, wiry, fast-talking man with a quick wit and dozens of new stories to tell.

  The Hamiltons, my grandmother’s family, were almost white people. The father of my grandmother and her brothers had been a white man who evidently could not marry their black mother because they were in Alabama. Apparently he spent most of his day in the large house at the front of the property, where Uncle Buddy now lived, and then came to join his family at the back in the evening. I don’t remember ever seeing a picture of him, or them, from what would have been the early 1900s, but they were all named Hamilton and collectively made decisions about how the farm and livestock would be handled.

  The Hamiltons came in two distinctive sizes. There was the small, economy size of my grandmother, with her energetic work ethic that carried her around the house and the yard from “can see” to “can’t see,” sweeping, dusting, digging around the flowers and the pomegranate bush; Uncle Counsel was her size and had the same type of irrepressible energy. Uncle Buddy represented the other size, extra large, and was always a comfort when he was near, this huge person in faded overalls and a sun-shielding hat. He represented stability, reliability, and security, and his size implied strength of both physique and character. It was darker than a thousand midnights just outside the bedroom window at Uncle Buddy’s place in Russellville, but I knew he was around and I never had any trouble sleeping there.

  It was always Uncle Buddy, with his long calm face and thoughtful eyes, who met us at the bus station in Tuscumbia, or less often met the train at Red Bay, Alabama. There was no direct anything to Russellville. My grandmother and I would crawl into the northwest corner of Alabama on a gas-choked, dusty Greyhound or a near lifeless locomotive. A trip of less than 150 miles took the better part of a day before braking at this cluster of clapboards or solitary shacks as though we had arrived somewhere.

  As always, Uncle Buddy would come shuffling up with a welcoming grin for his sister and a nod for me. That was one of his speeches, that nod. After a long description of something by Uncle Counsel he would nod his head and smile. After an agreement was reached about things the family needed to have done, he would nod that it would be done. He could have been known as the Nodfather.

  One of the more interesting stories I heard about the type of stock I came from concerned Uncle Buddy. One day he was down the path in the backyard while the rest of the family was gathered on the back porch. All of a sudden Buddy appeared holding his hand over his eye. When he got up close and moved his hand, the people on the porch could see that a bumblebee had stung him and left the stinger in the white of his eye. My grandmother said that everybody was screaming except Buddy. They helped him sit down and Lily removed the stinger with a pair of tweezers. When she finally had it, they gave him a damp cloth and he got up and said, “Thank you, I appreciate that.” Then he went on back to whatever he’d been doing in the yard.

  I used to think that under the word stoic in the dictionary there should be a picture of Uncle Buddy. But stoic isn’t right, because it doesn’t incorporate Uncle Buddy’s smile and kind eyes. And having a bee stinger in your eye and saying nothing until you thank the person who removes it goes beyond stoicism. It’s a wonder he didn’t just nod.

  I always enjoyed myself at Uncle Counsel’s house, where we went for meals sometimes. He had children near my age and I could play with them. The meals were always great, with a lot of family members around the table and recollections by Uncle Counsel that kept everyone laughing. The Hamilton family was close, and I never felt left out of anything because of my grandmother’s love and the love they all felt for her was partly mine.

  Back in Jackson we had family around, too. The Scott house on South Cumberland was the second from the corner of Tanyard Street. Make a left on Tanyard and the third house was where Miss Emmaline Miles lived. I called Miss Emmaline “Aunt Sissy,” and while there were a lot of folks identified like relatives in the south, like Cousin Lessie or Uncle Robert next door to us, Aunt Sissy was really my aunt; in fact, great aunt. She was Bob Scott’s sister. I didn’t always understand Aunt Sissy and the way she would hug me and call on African spirits. She would surprise me on her porch with fierce, emotional, smothering embraces and would run her bony fingers up and down my spine as she held me. She was also a virtual river of information that I could have used to find out more about the man I got half of my name from, Bob Scott. But I was too young to know to ask.

  Everybody who talked about Bob Scott for any length of time brought up his love of sports. This alone was enough to make him my favorite relative, especially among the Scott men. My mother had a photograph in an album, a posed black-and-white family portrait that was taken in the late 1930s or early 1940s. It was the entire Scott family, three teenaged girls in Sunday dresses, a fresh-faced boy in a suit jacket and white shirt with no tie, and a short, fair-skinned lady with long dark hair. They were standing in a half circle around a well-dressed gentleman who sat at an angle. It was the only picture I’d ever seen of the man, Bob Scott, who was obviously tense at the center of the semicircle, holding a cane with large, strong hands, searching for the camera with sightless eyes.

  I was struck by how tall Bob Scott was, reaching his wife’s shoulder level while seated. I could also see two things I was looking for in him right away. First, the athlete, Steel Arm Bob, the pitcher who bested Satchel Paige. The second thing was Aunt Sissy. I was looking for the family resemblance between him and his sister, and it was right out front. The tall rawboned physique, the African cheekbones, the bushy hair and eyebrows, the sad eyes. It was all there. Because of Aunt Sissy and the other older people in South Jackson, I was looking for myself in that old portrait, too. I was looking for what they saw when I passed by and they said, “That’s Bob Scott’s boy. Good man, Bob Scott.” I was looking for what made Aunt Sissy hug me and call me her only blood relative when I dropped in after running an errand for her, for what made her say we had royal African blood in our veins, why she would invent words for illnesses that were allegedly attacking her, like “the epizootic,” something that afflicted only special people—people like us.

  “He was a gentleman and a gentle man,” my grandmother told me about her husband. It was as nice a summary as I was likely to get. It told me something about the two of them that corresponded to things I had been told and overheard.

  “Daddy
never whipped us,” my mother told me on a visit to Jackson. “But mama did. He would even try to talk her out of it.”

  “He never whipped any of you?” I asked.

  “No. You see, he said that no Scott man would hit a woman or a child, that having to resort to that would mean he had lost control of his home and he would have to leave.”

  Maybe she sensed what I was wondering.

  “Daddy was the insurance man,” she added, “during the real Depression, when everybody was depressed.”

  I knew an insurance man in Jackson. His name was Mr. Fuller, and he came around once a week, though sometimes it seemed liked every day. He was a middle-aged balding gentleman who was always sweating and wiping his face and head with a handkerchief. He stood in the living room thumbing through his receipt book, waiting for my grandmother and sweating. And as he wiped his face, he would peek to see whether I was looking at him. I was. Mr. Fuller seemed ill at ease, but he was duty-bound to collect that little bit of change every week.

  “Sometimes people didn’t have it,” my mother continued. “It was just small change, but they didn’t have it. But during those times, with money being so short, you needed your insurance more than ever. Because you couldn’t just skip a week and not be protected for that week. You would lose all of your money, your policy, and your investment to that point.”

  “He was a tall, big-boned man with brown skin that had red undertones like an Indian, and a wide, open face with a large nose. Solid. Honest. Thoughtful.”

  By the time I was eight or so, I could cross large streets and run errands. I went over to Aunt Sissy’s every day. There were few disruptions to the quiet, organized life my grandmother and I lived, and one of the only people or things that could really get under Lily’s skin was Sissy. She was too playful and unlike a sixty-year-old for my grandmother, who wanted Sissy to act her age. But hell, sometimes Lily Scott wanted me to act her age. Somehow Sissy’s irreverence and disregard for quiet sanity irritated Lily; Sissy probably thought her sister-in-law took herself too seriously.