Another admirable quality: He tends not to duck a question that he knows is going to cast him in a bad or embarrassing light—and the answer, when you check later, turns out to be mostly accurate. You ask if he’s ever been in jail and he pauses. The Cothran curve of smile. “Only once. Four days once in a jail in Webster County for driving on a suspended license. I was coming back to Greenwood in a truck for the produce company. I’d been over to Alabama. I was driving almost dead on empty, so I fell in behind an eighteen-wheeler to pick up his wind draft. State trooper pulls me over and took me to jail when he found out I was on a suspended license for unpaid tickets. Thing that hurt me is I had to stay in that jail four days. Nobody from my family would come to bail me out.”
You ask about the first two marriages—the one that lasted a month and a half and the second, when he was nineteen, that went about nine months. What he chiefly remembers about these marriages is the fighting and his substance abuse. He recalls that his first wife—she was also eighteen—had a child from another union. “What happened with wife number one?” he says, cocking his head sideways. “It was grass and speed and booze. Basically, I was a speed freak. I’d party to four or five in the morning and then get up and try to go to work.” They fought, he left, he came back for a week, they broke up again, she left with the child for Louisiana. John went from 145 pounds to 118 pounds. (His weight always tends to balloon or plunge during periods of emotional stress.) Once, in the middle of it, his father came to the door. “I want to see my son,” Billy Cothran said. “Well, he’s standing right here,” the son said. “No, this is not my son,” his father said, turning and going to his car. Afterward, John says, he began kicking most of the dope habit, if not the excessive drinking. The last time he saw his first ex was a few years back, at a balloon festival in Greenwood, when his fourth ex was pregnant with the twins, Sara Elizabeth and Joseph Tyler. Sara and Joseph are the children John calls “my babies,” even though they’re in the early years of primary school. He is extremely devoted to his babies, and some of that must have to do with the recognition of how badly he’s screwed things up with his two older children. Ashley Nicole and J. J. live several hours away, with their mom, in the eastern part of the state. J. J. has had serious health problems from infancy.
“I hate myself for it now, because I realize I can never get that time back with them,” he says one day, standing in the middle of the room and nearly spitting out the word “hate.” He’s referring to the long period when he didn’t see them. But on another day, in a calmer voice, he says, with no judgment of the various parties involved: “Well, it wasn’t all my fault that I didn’t see my older ones for three years. Put it this way. My last two ex-wives just didn’t click.” John’s last two ex-wives are very different personalities, according to John. The third is a “real country girl type,” he says, while the fourth is much more uptown. He started courting his third when she was sixteen. She got only as far as sixth or seventh grade in school, he says. “Me and a buddy was dating her and her cousin. I was with the cousin, he was with her. One night I said to my buddy, ‘Hey, something’s wrong here. We’re dating the wrong women. We ought to reverse this thing.’ So the next night we went back out there to pick them up and we traded dates, and that’s the way it was.” This is the way he tells stories, without artifice or irony, straight ahead.
One of John’s expressions is “put it this way.” “Put it this way,” he’ll say. “I was a great-uncle at thirty-six.” Meaning that his sister’s child had a baby as a teenager. John’s only sibling, two years older than he is, got married at fifteen to a boy who was seventeen, and in the next generation her daughter repeated the pattern. Teenage marriage runs deep with the Cothrans. John’s mom, Alice, was a bride at sixteen.
“Put it this way,” he’ll say. “Most of my career has been spent in the grocery business.” He has sacked and shelved at Big Star, Wal-Mart Super Center, Jitney-Jungle, Piggly Wiggly, Kroger. This is one reason why he has such powerful legs and forearms: all that “throwing” of twenty-four-can cases of, say, Del Monte peaches or Franco-American SpaghettiOs. You rip open the box. You price the lids with a stamper. You rack the cans on a shelf. “What you’re doing is dropping to a concrete floor with a case of stock,” he says. “More or less, as I pick it up and see where it goes on the shelf, I drop right with it.” This has killed his knees and half wrecked his back, but he can still get the case off the dolly and throw with the best of them. “It’s about speed and know-how,” he says. “You take the flat-knife box cutter and make a rectangle and you cut the top off in one cut. You’re turning the box as you cut. You use your thumb as a guideline, a straight-edge. As you’re pulling the lid off the box, you’re reaching for your stamper. It’s in a leather holster on your apron, and you go right down the lids of the cans and put the price on. Bam-bam-bam-bam.”
John has driven a twenty-four-foot “bob” truck for an interstate produce company, getting to glimpse parts of America that he never expected to see: Texas, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma. On that job, he and a partner would do turnarounds, catching fifteen-minute naps at rest stops before heading back to Mississippi. This is because the owner refused to put them up on the other end, he says. But he loved the feeling of freedom the road provided.
When he first broke into grocery work, all they’d let him do was sack on the front end. Three years later, Jitney-Jungle offered him five dollars an hour to stock shelves. That was a dollar and a quarter more than he was making at Big Star. He quit in the morning and began throwing for the competitor that same afternoon. He thought he was rich. This was 1982, and he’d been out of school for almost four years, not yet twenty, divorced twice. After several years at the Jungle, they made him head stocker. He was outworking everybody in the place.
At Big Star, the managers used to hold weekly time tests. The idea was to see how many cases of stock you could throw in half an hour. The fastest stocker in the store would get a free lunch or sometimes even an afternoon off. John got to where he could throw thirty-five to forty cases in thirty minutes, which was usually good enough for second place. There was another guy there whose name was James. “He was from Illinois. He could throw fifty cases in a half hour. Now, that’s pricing. And the thing was, James never looked like he was working. We got to be pretty good friends. He was black. He was in his twenties. I forget his last name. I’d be sacking on the front end, next to the cashiers, and when it got slack, I’d ease down the aisles where they were stocking. I asked him if he’d show me how. He said okay. That’s how I learned. I’ll never forget that guy.”
John Ed Cothran’s grandson has never been to an art museum or the ballet or a symphony hall. “No, never been to anything like that,” he says. Pause. Grin. “I have been to an aquarium. At the Memphis Zoo. Now, that just might be a fish thing.” What about classical music—ever tuned it in on your car radio? “Yes, I’ve tried to listen to that,” he says. “That don’t click.” But a memory has bulbed inside him—he’s making a connection to the question. He puts down his knife and fork, props them on opposite sides of his dinner plate. He’s been sawing on a piece of chicken-fried steak at a truck-stop restaurant, which is around the corner from where he sleeps. “Have you ever seen the moon through a telescope?” he asks. He tells this story: A few years ago he was bunking with a guy named Perry, who drove a truck. Perry had all these interesting friends. One was a guy who worked at some kind of drafting job. “He’s an artist,” John says. “Well, he more or less draws. Some kind of drafting job, I think. His name is Gary and he owns a telescope. I refer to him as an old burnt-out hippie, you know, long hair pulled back, sideburns. We used to spend a lot of time over at Gary and his wife’s.” One night, he and Perry and Gary were drinking beer and shooting the shit. Gary didn’t like the music on the radio. He told his wife to cut off the radio and to go get the telescope out of the closet. The three males went out into the yard. It was a beautiful and clear night. Gary said, “You ever looked at the moon
, Cothran?” John: “Course. I’m looking at the moon right now.” Gary: “No, I mean have you ever seen it?” John: “Okay, show me what the moon looks like.” Gary focused the telescope and said, “Take a look.”
John stayed out there for three hours. They couldn’t get him to go back inside. Everybody had to go to work the next day. “Put it this way,” he says. “I never knew anything like that could be so beautiful, never had any idea. That moon was luminous. I guess I never really got onto the word ‘luminous’ until I saw the moon in a telescope.”
Aluminous and soft Sunday evening in September several years ago, at John’s place. One saggy yellow sofa. One bad painting above the sofa. One blurry TV. One water bed. A couple of dinner plates and knives and forks and spoons. Some napkins and a roll of paper towels. Some bath towels and facecloths and toiletries. An automatic coffeemaker and a box of paper filters. A couple of food items in the fridge. And Fred the philodendron.
These are roughly the furnishings of Unit C, 311 Evelyn Street, Senatobia, Mississippi. It’s a duplex, what’s known in the South as a “shotgun” house: three small rooms lined up one behind the other. Out on the concrete stoop, illumined by a yellow bulb, there’s a shiny green barbecue grill, unused. The rent here is $300 a month. The renter’s blue Nissan King Cab pickup is out in the driveway. In the bed of the truck, which is rusting out and has a bad transmission, are four or five bags of garden mulch from the Depot. His fourth ex is supposed to come over and pick them up tonight.
She gave him the execrable painting over the sofa. “She said it would go real nice in my living room,” he says.
“Well, it’s a roof,” he’d said the day before, opening the screen door, and then standing aside and letting his guest go first. But that was a quick look. Tonight he has a lot more time to talk. This is the third conversation in four days. John was off today. He slept in and spent most of the afternoon across town, at his ex’s, playing with the babies. Last night, after he got off work, he and a buddy went to a beer joint up near Memphis. “If you’re paying,” John had told his buddy, since he didn’t have any money. His buddy was. They were hoping to run into loose women, but no luck. He got home to Senatobia at about three in the morning. Senatobia’s a little burg right off I-55, straight south of Memphis. If you were hurtling to New Orleans and had last gassed up, say, in rural Tennessee, you might have a reason to pull off and refuel your belly and car at the BP truck-stop station adjacent to the exit ramp. When he’s in Senatobia and goes out to eat, John heads for the BP station.
You keep thinking that the shiny, green, unused barbecue grill out on his stoop looks all wrong amid these lean cultural holdings.
“That’s Fred,” he says, nodding at the plant in the blue plastic pot on the kitchen counter. Fred’s been around since 1993 and, like his owner, has gone through extremely bad days. “Bought him at a little old flea market place out there on Park Avenue in Greenwood.” He gave Fred to the woman destined to be his fourth wife while they were still courting. Every time they’d fight, Fred would go down, get weak. They’d make up, Fred would perk right up. Once, after a fight, he seized Fred and took him to his place. “She comes for it, and we’re pulling at it, and she says, ‘It’s mine, you gave it to me,’ and I say, ‘No, by damn, woman, you won’t have it,’ and she’s still trying to get it away from me, and I pull away from her and throw it clear across the room and it smashes against the wall.” But Fred survived. John married his fourth wife, and every time they fought, Fred seemed to wilt, and then they’d make up, and he’d get good again. “Sounds crazy, I know,” he says. About three or four months before he moved out—that was the summer of 1998—Fred was apparently pretty yellow, but John was so enraged then that he didn’t notice. After the divorce, in November of that year, he asked for custody of Fred. He’s been nursing him back ever since. Fred’s up to about a half-dozen fresh green leaves on his spindly stalk.
The working man is in shorts and sneakers and a sleeveless blue jersey. He looks puffy. He’s up 20 pounds, he says. He’s carrying 175 pounds on his five-foot-eight frame. He’s been as high as 190. It’s the stress of his supervisor’s job at the Depot that’s causing him to go up again, he says. Six months ago, they made him head of the kitchen and bath department. He was proud, but there’s so much damn paperwork to fill out. Writing evaluations for his workers—“associates” is how they’re referred to at the Depot—drives him crazy. “I write real short sentences,” he says.
He’s at the kitchen counter, brewing a couple quarts of tea. “I have me a glass of brewed tea and a BC tablet every morning of my life,” he says. “That’s breakfast. BC headache tablets are about as far as I go now with drugs.” He pours sugar from a one-pound sack into a green plastic pitcher—doesn’t measure it out, just holds the sack in two hands and dumps a large amount in. He adds the water, then stirs the water and sugar into a solution, then pours it into the back of the coffeemaker. He dumps loose tea into the filter part of the apparatus. “Done,” he says. While he’s cleaning up, you ask whether nursing Fred back to health isn’t connected in some way to the telescope story, or to the sixth-grader who put down his fists and refused to fight in the schoolyard, or to the kid who wouldn’t go out for pony league because he was scared of getting hit by a pitch. He considers this. “I have been told I’m very kindhearted,” he says. He wipes off the drain board with a rancid-looking sponge. “I ain’t got two chairs,” he says. “I’m a poor man. We can go outside and talk if you want. I can drop the tailgate of my truck and we can do redneck style.”
Outside, in the saffron evening, with the electric drone of the crickets and cicadas just coming up, the talk winds this way and that. He tells of an old teacher—dead now—“who believed in me, only one. He taught history and science. It was eighth grade. He called me aside and said, ‘You can do this stuff, Cothran.’ After that, I never got below a ninety on a science paper for him. Every other teacher I ever had, I felt stupid.”
He recounts the hotheaded thing he said to his last ex’s lawyer during divorce proceedings the previous year. “I told him I’d do whatever I had to do in order to ‘take’ my kids. I didn’t say, ‘I’ll do whatever I have to do to see my kids.’ I got mad. I said, ‘Listen, they’re my kids just like hers, I’ll do whatever I have to do to take my kids, you got it?’ Her lawyer said I’d be sorry for saying that, and of course he was right.” According to the divorce decree, John has to have his ex’s stated consent every time he wishes to see his children—and it has to be done with her supervision.
He tells of a fellow worker at the Depot with whom he’s gotten friendly. He’s full of tattoos. He’s from San Diego and has five kids. The Depot moved him from California to Memphis when the company was opening more stores in Tennessee. “You look at him and you’d think he was a grunge rock freak. But, see, it’s all Christian-based. You gotta take a closer look. It’s stuff like ‘Sin Kills’ and ‘Jesus Protects.’ Me and him was taking freight out to the dock one day, and I said, ‘I’m tired of this fucking shit,’ something like that, I can’t even remember now what it was I was mad at. And he looks at me and he says, ‘You just enjoy cussing like that, don’t you?’ I look back at him and said, ‘I’ve never thought about it.’ But that was it. Now, I just won’t swear in front of him or do any kind of dirty talking, because I know he doesn’t want to hear it.”
He describes a black man he used to work with at the produce wholesaler in Greenwood. “His name was Jerry. We called him J-Boy. Huge guy. I got mad at him once and yelled bad things at him. Next day I said, ‘J-Boy, I apologize for yelling at you. I’m a supervisor here and you’re an employee of the company, but I didn’t show respect to you.’ So he comes over and hugs me. He ended up saying, ‘I love you, Cothran.’ After that we really got to be friends. I’d say to him, ‘You sorry-ass white boy,’ and he’d say right back, ‘Yeah, you ain’t nothing but a sorry-ass nigger.’ ”
There’s a loud pop from the darkness. It seems to have come from anoth
er street. “Transformer box went out again,” he says. “Let’s go look.” On the next block, a small crowd of kids and adults are gathering below a utility pole. There are still sparks jumping from the box at the top of the pole. The kids lean on their bikes and watch; the adults greet one another. It’s like Sunday evening free neighborhood fireworks. “We come out to watch the transformers blow,” John says.
Back at his place, the talk again trombones toward one thing and the next, but the subtext of the conversation, race, is a word that hasn’t been uttered, not in any direct way. Headlights illumine the corner at Evelyn Street. Is his fourth ex coming for the mulch? The car is about a hundred yards away. The subject of race and racial attitudes has just slid into the conversation: The visitor has said there’s something he’d like to discuss.
“What’s that?” says John, knowing exactly what it is. He spits the juice. “I think we timed that just about right,” he says. “My ex is here.” The car comes closer, and he realizes it isn’t hers. “Damn.” He grins. And yet, with the word having been said out loud, he seems almost eager to discuss race—as if there’s something freeing in it. “Now, okay, as far as the race thing goes, you want to talk about it, and maybe you don’t agree with me on this, but I don’t believe in the business of, what’s the word I’m looking for, you know, when the blacks and whites are getting married?”
Sons of Mississippi Page 27
