Little Boy Blues

by Malcolm Jones

  “So why did you say that I didn’t like her cooking?” Then I remembered. It was a week or so before. Catherine had tried to get me to eat congealed salad, and I put up a fight that ended with my saying that my mother didn’t like Catherine’s cooking either.

  “She said she quit because she didn’t want to work for anyone who didn’t like what she did. She said you said I didn’t like her cooking.”

  “I heard you tell Daddy.”

  “Honey, I never did any such thing.”

  “You said she put too much salt in the butter beans.”

  “Oh well, that. That’s not the same thing.”

  “You said she was no Tina.”

  “Honey, Tina was a treasure. Mama used to say she’d never seen a better cook. That doesn’t mean I didn’t think Catherine could cook, too.”

  “Can’t you tell her that?”

  “Oh, it’s too late for that. Nigras today are just sensitive as they can be about every little thing. Catherine was one of those touchy ones. You’ve run her off for good.”

  “I didn’t mean it.”

  “I just hope we’ve learned a lesson from this. You have to be very careful what you say to people. You don’t want to hurt people’s feelings, do you?”

  “No’m.”

  “You know how you’ve been working on talking too loud? Well, now I want you to work on being quiet and being very careful about what you say to people. Don’t always say everything you know. Have I ever told you how quiet my daddy was? He was very reserved at all times. I wish you could have known him.”

  “Yes’m.” I relaxed a little, knowing now that I wasn’t going to get a spanking.

  “So can you stay home and do the cooking and be with me?”

  “No, honey, I wish I could, but Mommy has to teach school. You can stay with Tom and Melita.”

  “But I want to stay with you.”

  “I know you do, and I do too, but I just can’t make it happen.” She gave me a funny look. “Is that what this was all about?”

  By the time I turned ten, I had lost interest in putting on shows with my marionettes, preferring to work with them alone on plots that I improvised as I went along. Ultimately boredom, not necessity, became the mother of my invention, leading to odd scenarios starring the cowgirl, the wolf and the minstrel boy. There was no intent in these inventions, and hardly any volition. I felt, rather, as though I were peering down, like some sort of minor god, and merely observing the marionettes in their off-hours, when they talked among themselves.

  It was around this time that my mother mounted her campaign to make me more of a regular boy. (At church I overheard another woman say something to Mother about her special son. “Oh, no,” she replied, “he’s just a regular boy.”) She signed me up for the Cub Scouts. She bought me a baseball glove and paid to have a basketball hoop installed in the yard behind our apartment. “You know your father went to college on a football scholarship, don’t you?” she often reminded me. Marionettes were not part of the regular-boy package, although as soon as they began to gather dust, I got the lecture about not being a quitter. In time, I discovered that the immediate subject of these lectures was not the issue. Don’t give up the piano, don’t abandon your old friends, when are you going to give me a puppet show—it didn’t matter what the subject was. What mattered was that my mother hated change, especially in me. But that took years to figure out. When I was ten, I merely suspected that she thought of me as a sort of apprentice failure following in my father’s footsteps. That bothered me not because I agreed with her but because I did not want to be the latest person in her life to let her down. So that fall, when my new class held a talent show, I brought the minstrel boy out of semi-retirement and had him play the toy piano. Two girls lip-synching “Hit the Road, Jack” won the contest, and I never picked up a marionette again.

  Two things stuck with me about the day I witnessed the performance of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” First, when I was escorted backstage, I was surprised by how big the marionettes were (each of them came up to my chest) and how dirty. Their clothes were dingy and worn, the paint on their faces chipped and scored. One of the giant’s hands was missing a thumb, the stump just raw wood. Seen up close, everything looked old and scuffed, even the people who ran the show. Shows like this must have been the last gasp of small-time live entertainment: vaudeville, medicine shows, minstrelsy. As their usual bookings dried up, some of the milder acts turned to the school circuit. And by the time I got out of elementary school in the early sixties, even those gigs had died off—the puppet shows and magic acts and the science guy with the shiny ball that could make a girl’s hair stand on end. There’s been nothing like it since: the small-time but inimitable traveling troupe.

  I was shocked when I saw the beanstalk for what it was, a tattered thing made of nothing more than crudely knotted strips of cloth from an old bedsheet that had been dyed green. This was the object that, when seen from the audience, had seemed to levitate magically from the well into which Jack’s mother had furiously thrown the magic beans. For the four or five seconds that it took to rise in the half-light of morning on the small stage, I had believed it completely. It took nothing more than this to fool me. And in the same instant that I understood the deception, I also understood, even without being able to articulate the thought, that I liked being fooled (this was, after all, the first time I had ever fallen in love with anything). And realizing that, I understood something else: I wanted to fool other people in the same way. (I was affected with a similar feeling the first time I saw a magic show a year later, but there I realized immediately that no real magic was going on. The whole transaction between magician and audience was like that between a pitcher and batter: it was about skill and deception, and both parties were in on it together.) These tattered things, strung up and marched through a story whose ending was known to everyone in the audience before they took their seats, were capable of summoning not just a willing but a craven, abject suspension of disbelief. In the six or seven seconds that it took to rise out of sight, it really had been a magical beanstalk ascending to heaven. And that curtained proscenium—it didn’t matter that it was stained, faded, patched and repatched—was like a door I could walk through, and once I had crossed the threshold, I never wanted to leave.

  The Family Business

  “Let us pray.” Every Sunday at 11:55 a.m., those words brought me out of my trance as surely as if Uncle Tom had said, “When I count to three, you will wake up and remember none of what just happened.” “Let us pray” was the unvarying tagline with which he ended his sermons. Now it was time to sing the last of the three hymns that punctuated every service. The hymns were my favorite part. But while we sang, I kept one eye on my uncle. When he took his pocket watch off the pulpit and clipped it back on its chain, I knew for sure church was over.

  Religion was the family business. That’s the way I thought of it growing up. Until I was eight, when Uncle Tom and Aunt Melita moved away from Winston-Salem, I spent so much time under their roof that I felt as much a part of their household as I did my own, maybe more so. They both stayed home all day, my aunt in the house, cooking and cleaning, my uncle in his study, a small pine-paneled room crowded with an enormous desk, three or four filing cabinets, a big red leather armchair overflowing with papers, and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covering two walls, the shelves packed with thick, uniform, leather-bound books connected to my uncle’s work (or so I supposed, since I never knew him to open one). The study was my favorite room. I liked to go there while my uncle worked and sit in the big chair and draw on scrap paper, of which he had an endless supply. On days when he wasn’t typing letters, he and I would switch places sometimes, and he would let me roll a sheet of paper into his old LC Smith typewriter and pretend to type. This was before I learned to read, but all the same, my first memory of writing is the pleasure I took in that sharp clack when the metal key slammed into the paper and left the imprint of a letter.

  During t
he school year, while my parents were at work, I spent every weekday with my aunt and uncle. I watched my aunt cook and helped her roll out dough for pie crust. I went with her to put water in the birdbath, and she taught me how to plant seeds for zinnias. I watched my uncle prepare his sermons. I rode along with him on his hospital visits, and his visits to the radio station to drop off announcements. After weddings and funerals, I watched him search his desk for the well-thumbed notebook in which he recorded every nuptial and burial he had ever conducted, noting the names and dates with the methodical precision of a bank teller tallying up the contents of his cash drawer. Sometimes I accompanied him when he called on his parishioners in their homes, where I remember sitting alone on a series of sofas in tiny living rooms while I waited for him to check on the sick or make his condolences to a widow. In the winter, it was always too hot in those closed-in little rooms that always smelled of last night’s dinner, burnt coffee and cigarettes and where the people called my uncle Preacher Bryan. But no matter how hot it got, I kept my coat on. I felt like an alien in those homes, and I was ready to leave the minute we got there.

  My introduction to the alphabet as a group of letters that could be rearranged into words came from watching my uncle open the glass front on the display case in the front yard of the church, take the white-painted metal letters off the board and replace them with letters that spelled out the name of next Sunday’s sermon. We did this at the end of every week. It was a routine, just part of the job, the same way my uncle’s nap after lunch on Sunday was part of the job: Sunday was the day he worked hardest: putting on his uniform, a black robe that fell almost to his ankles (and with a purple sash over his shoulders on special days, like communion Sundays and Easter service), going out and running the church service, delivering the sermon and then sending people back into the world with a handshake and a few words at the church door when the service had ended. That was his job, that was what he did, and by extension, it was what we all did.

  Sunday was always the longest day of the week, because I knew ahead of time what was going to happen and the order in which it would unfold. Getting dressed took forever, because I had to get dressed up: coat, tie, hard-soled shoes, the works. When I was very small, my mother liked to dress me in caps that matched my jacket, and once she bought me a shirt with French cuffs and made me wear cuff links. After I got my church uniform on, the real torture began. My shirt collar chafed my neck. My shoes, always stiff because I wore them only once a week, hurt my feet. My wool coat itched where it rubbed my skin. That made church tick by even more slowly. I always sat with my aunt and my father, when he was around (same spot every Sunday: three-quarters of the way back, on the far left of the sanctuary). Mother was in the choir, and Uncle Tom was preaching. Sitting still for an hour was hard, especially the last twenty minutes, because that was when Uncle Tom would deliver his sermon. Everything that led up to that was tolerable, because there was a lot of standing up and sitting down: there were hymns, there was the choir’s anthem and sometimes a solo during the offertory, there were responsive readings, the Lord’s Prayer and the Doxology. Then came the sermon. This was long before preachers felt compelled to offer some entertainment for the children in the audience. When I was little, there were no such concessions. You were expected to sit there politely while the preacher talked, and if you “acted up,” you got a spanking when you got home. I was allowed to fill the time by drawing. I must have copied Warner Sallman’s head of Christ a thousand times. Mostly I drew Revolutionary War soldiers fighting the British. With half an ear, I kept track of where Uncle Tom was in his sermon. I have no idea if he was a compelling preacher or not (my mother complained that he read his sermons). He certainly never threatened anyone with hellfire or in any way questioned the sincerity of his congregation—faith, in our family, was a given; doubt and ambiguity did not exist, which left me, years later, singularly unprepared to deal with these pitfalls as an adult. Best of all, he never ran long: he had people out the door and on the way to Sunday dinner at the stroke of noon every Sunday. He had no sense of irony or self-mockery about what he did for a living, but in an unguarded moment, he once told me that getting people out the door by noon was all most people wanted in a preacher.

  After church, we all went out to eat, which meant standing in line at the K&W cafeteria or waiting at the Town Steak House to get a table, then waiting for the food to come, then more waiting for everyone else to finish eating. And then time seemed to stop completely, especially if I found myself back at Tom and Melita’s. Uncle Tom’s nap lasted most of the afternoon. When I was small, I sometimes napped with him, although I slept very little, because he snored. So I lay there, watching his belly rise and fall, watching the curtains lift in the sluggish air, pulling the tangled covers up, then pushing them down. My aunt and uncle’s mattress was so old that it had conformed to the shapes of their bodies, which left me imagining that I had fallen into the trough of a wave that would never swell, never crest. If I got up, my aunt forbade me to make noise. This was the only time she was ever strict with me (unlike my mother, my aunt never coached me in how to behave; the only pieces of advice she ever gave me—always read with a good light, and mind your posture, and you’ll be glad you did when you get older—were practical and down to earth, and even now, when I find myself backsliding, I hear her voice correcting me). I was forbidden to do much of anything on Sunday, because, Aunt Melita explained, it was the Lord’s day and a day of rest. God didn’t want us to do anything that day but appreciate his creation. There were strict rules about all this in the Bible. If your ox fell in a ditch, you could haul him out. If you fell into the ditch, you had to stay there. I spent most of my Sundays feeling as though I had fallen into a ditch, and wishing I had an ox.

  I liked two things about church. I liked the sanctuary, with all that space rising up to the roof and the stained-glass windows that showered the parishioners with little flecks of colored light. And I loved the music, especially the hymns, and of those I favored the ones with brisk tempos: “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name,” “For the Beauty of the Earth,” “This Is My Father’s World.” When we sang, with the women around us doing their best to find the melody and the men just rumbling along somewhere in the bass register, I came as close as I would ever come to that feeling you were supposed to have of Christ entering your body and taking possession of your soul. It was, to use a church word, an exalted feeling. It is my oldest and closest connection to the spiritual realm.

  Throughout my childhood, I tried hard to be obedient, to walk in the path of Jesus and to obey the commandments. I said my prayers every night before bed. I loved my red leather Bible with my name stamped in gold letters on the cover, even if I never looked inside much, except to stare at the handful of black-and-white photographs of the Holy Land—sere, rocky landscapes that made me wonder how it had gotten so run-down looking. But I was never a perfect little scholar in the temple, like Jesus. I had my lapses. It grieved me, I think, even more than it worried my aunt and uncle, that I could never memorize even the kindergarten version of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Who made you? God. What else did God make? God made all things. After that, I stumbled. My uncle subscribed to a magazine called The Christian Observer, and every issue carried letters from children writing in to Dear Mr. Converse, announcing that they had memorized their Catechism. Sometimes my uncle would read those letters aloud, as an incentive to get me through the chore, but they just made me feel worse. There were kids out there who could do what I couldn’t, and they weren’t even preachers’ kids. Religion wasn’t their family business. I made sure to compensate for that failure at Sunday school. When we sat in a circle and were asked in turn for sentence prayers, I always had one ready. Whenever a teacher wanted to know who Zacheus was or the story behind Naboth’s vineyard, my hand was the first one up. I knew about the Woman at the Well, Benjamin’s cup, the Seven Foolish Virgins and the miracle at Cana (though this was not a story often told, for while it records J
esus’ first miracle, it also involves wine—my aunt got around this awkward fact by explaining to me that wine in the Bible wasn’t what we knew as wine, but more like grape juice, in the same way that Methuselah wasn’t 969 years old in our years).

  The only culture I knew growing up was church culture. Everyone I knew went to services on Sunday, but there was also choir practice and Wednesday-night prayer meeting and youth group. The church also served as an informal social club, a place to meet your friends, a place to stand around in the parking lot and catch up after services were done. Teenagers did this, of course, but so did grown men, the women not so much. The women had what they called circle meetings, where they met in each other’s homes every month for Bible study and refreshments—the Southern Protestant equivalent of book group. Then there were funerals and weddings, with the receptions held in the church activities room (always dry: I never attended a wedding where alcohol was served until I was an adult). Some churches sponsored softball leagues, and there were blanket drives and church suppers, and once a year there was revival week, where preachers famed for their stem-winding oratory were imported to preach every night, although back then no one but holy rollers talked about being born again. But while the South of my childhood was every bit as religious as the South is today, churches then were less aggressive about competing for your time. They were more willing to share you with the Elks or the bridge club. And they never stuck their noses into politics. Perhaps they didn’t compete because there was so little to compete with. Life then was no less complicated than it is today, but it was a lot emptier. There was less to do and more time to do it in. Some people went to church just to get out of the house.