My uncle’s church in Winston-Salem was in an old neighborhood thick with churches. The Methodists and the Baptists had staked their claims only a block away. I always wanted to sneak into the Baptist church to see their baptismal pool, after I learned that Baptists believed in total immersion, but I was never given the chance, ecumenism being preached in our family but not practiced with much diligence. My aunt and uncle never criticized other sects or denominations, but I was gently led to understand that our way, the Presbyterian way, was simply better, more efficient. I’m sure the same discussions went on in the respective homes of Ford and Dodge dealers. With Catholics and Jews, they just seemed exasperated. How could anyone be so silly as to think you couldn’t pray directly to God? How could anyone ever doubt for a second that Jesus was the Messiah? But even here, it was like listening to someone extol the benefits of an automatic transmission over three on the tree. The closest I ever heard my uncle come to expressing even the mildest prejudice toward another religion was his fondness for the rhyme “How odd of God to choose the Jews.”
The one virulent prejudice my family harbored was toward what they considered the lower rungs of religion: the Pentecostals, snake handlers and faith healers like Oral Roberts, who was then the only preacher you ever saw on television, slapping people on the forehead and commanding them to be healed. Billy Graham was the one evangelist they respected (we went to hear him preach once, and I thought about following several people up to the front to profess my faith in Jesus but chickened out at the last minute, convinced that my meekness, like Peter’s, would earn me eternal disapproval from the Lord). That anyone, even someone who had never been to college or seminary, could just up and start preaching the Gospel was anathema in our family. Stump preachers were quacks just as surely as chiropractors. When we went out to eat, we said grace before the meal, but there was nothing ostentatious about that. We were just showing the flag. Still, religion was to me as water is to a fish: what I lived in, with no thought of an alternative. It was not only not a question of doubt, it was not even a question of faith. Jesus and all the stories I knew from the Bible were as real to me as my arms and legs. Santa and the Easter Bunny were things to believe in. Jesus just was. Uncle Tom was big and fleshy with a jowly double chin and a paunch. Except for a rather sharp nose that I always thought looked like it was sculpted out of wax, he had no lines to his body. He was all curves, like a man made of pillows. He did like to eat. If he had a vice, that was it. It was certainly the only thing I ever saw him do for fun. Mother called him fat behind his back, but he wasn’t fat, except around the belly. The word for such men then was portly. And a steady diet of my aunt’s cooking would have put pounds on anyone. She stuck to the Southern menu—ham, chicken, beef roasts, casseroles. There was nothing fancy about her recipes, but she had that knack that one in a hundred cooks possesses—the ability to make heavy food seem light. The best part of eating at my aunt’s table, though, was the mood. They never ate in the dining room unless there was a lot of company or it was Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter. Instead, we would crowd around the little table in a corner of the kitchen, where the smell of oyster stew and fried chicken and chocolate pound cake banished all unhappiness, as surely as the brightly lit yellow walls kept the night outside at bay. I had never felt safer than when sitting at that table, watching my aunt crumble a hard-boiled egg yolk over steamed spinach or patiently stirring custard on the stove.
My uncle looked relaxed only when he was fully dressed in a suit and tie, suspenders and a vest. If you put him in a bathing suit on the beach, he looked like he’d forgotten to finish dressing. He was one of the last men I knew to give up hats. His manner was as stiff as his wardrobe. He was not a dour man—he affected a jolly manner and he told more awful jokes than Reader’s Digest—but there was nothing easygoing about him. He was impatient, pious, more than a little close-minded and quick to take offense. He was also kind, generous, disarmingly naïve and transparently childlike. He took enormous pleasure in the simplest things—a blueberry muffin, a birthday card, a sturdy pair of wingtips. Small children and women, especially spinster women in his congregation, loved him, the men a little less. He didn’t care for sports and wasn’t much for small talk. If he found himself in a group of people where the conversation fell off, he filled the silence with one of his jokes, which just seemed to make everyone feel worse.
His father, Brother James Bryan, had been something of a local celebrity in Birmingham, Alabama, where he preached and ran a mission for the city’s down-and-out in the first half of the twentieth century (it was always easy for me to figure out how old my uncle was, because he was born in 1900). One of the handful of books in our apartment was a biography of Brother Bryan called Religion in Shoes. I think my uncle became a preacher because of his father, whom he revered, but he was otherwise singularly unqualified for the job. He wasn’t inspiring in the pulpit—I took my mother’s word for this—and he was tone deaf when it came to dealing with other people. He lacked, by any definition, the common touch, and as I grew older, I came to think of him as a man who was trying, not very successfully, to lead someone else’s life.
My uncle was not much of a father figure in any conventional sense. He was useless at games, knew nothing about cars or how to start a fire without matches or how to fish or fire a gun. To his credit, he never pretended otherwise. He never said so, but he let me know early in life that if I was going to hang around with him, we’d be doing what he did, not what I wanted to do. That was fine with me. I liked going on errands to the newspaper and the radio station or the dry cleaners, where you walked into a room that felt like it was made out of heat, or the city market, where the smell of the fish market against the far wall slapped you in the face all the way across the room. I liked it when we went downtown together for haircuts, and I could sit on the board straddling the red leather armrests of the baroque barber chair and sneak a peek out the window onto Trade Street where the one-legged man was hawking Blum’s Almanac on the sidewalk. And I knew the precise location of every gumball machine in every one of these establishments. Some errands were more fun than others. If we stopped at the hospital, I had to cool my heels in the waiting room, because in the fifties, children weren’t allowed on the wards or even in private rooms. Most of my childhood, at least the parts where childhood overlapped with the adult world, was spent waiting for something to happen—waiting to go someplace in the car, waiting while they visited or shopped, waiting to go home—and the nadir of these powerless, impotent, kicking-the-seat-in-front-of-you moments was the hospital waiting room. My uncle never said anything about making it up to me after one of these visits, but more often than not on the way home he would invent an errand to please me. Sometimes it was the Orange Crush bottling factory, where I could stand as long as anyone would let me and watch the bottles coming down the assembly line, getting filled, then capped, then cased. And at the end there was always a bottle of orange soda for the ride home. Or, better yet, we would detour to the train yards at the north end of town. The age of the steam train, like the era of the tent-show circus, was nearly over by the time I was born, but one line, Norfolk & Western, kept the steam engines running a few years after everyone else had converted to diesel. We would roll up into the lot alongside the tracks, park and then sit for half an hour watching the switch engines shuttling boxcars back and forth. The endless changes of direction caused the drive-wheels, big as houses to my eye, to spin and scream where they struggled to gain a purchase on the tracks, while white smoke poured from the smokestacks. My uncle got a flat almost every time he drove into that lot, but he never stopped taking me up there.
Tom and Melita weren’t big readers. They didn’t watch much television, even when they got one (although she did become a devoted fan of I Love Lucy late in life). They didn’t go to movies unless it was a Bible story or a movie with a Christian theme, such as Ben-Hur. During the day, my aunt kept the radio on for company while she cooked, but while everyone I knew had he
ard Elvis Presley, I had only heard of Elvis (until one night while riding in someone else’s car—someone with a car radio; I remember sitting in the backseat when a syrupy voice filled the car with a lachrymose ballad—”That’s Elvis,” someone said, and I laughed, because I had thought he would sound scary). The station my aunt tuned in broadcast a mixture of crooners, lush instrumentals from the Percy Faith Orchestra and the occasional novelty tune, Leroy Anderson’s “The Syncopated Clock” or one of Slim Gaillard’s nonsense numbers, such as “Cement Mixer, Putti, Putti.” Mostly, though, my aunt and uncle just worked. After supper, he would return to his study to handle paperwork, type letters, work on his sermon or record the next day’s dial-a-prayer, a phone service he was most proud of having introduced to Winston-Salem. This was about as space-age as things got in our family in the fifties, when no one ever went anywhere and no one ever had a new car or air-conditioning or any appliance more modern than a steam iron.
Uncle Tom and Aunt Melita drank tea, not coffee. She never learned to drive. They didn’t play cards or go dancing, and except at Sunday dinner and on vacation, they never went out to eat. She was the only woman I ever knew who still darned her husband’s socks. Even their vacations were eccentric. Every summer, for two weeks in August, they went to a place called Chautauqua in western New York State. I had never heard of people who went on vacation so that they could attend lectures on current events, go to Bible study and listen to the symphony at night. I went along with them three times and always had a good time, but when I returned home and had to explain what this place was to my friends or their parents, I realized how odd it sounded. It was as though Tom and Melita lived life under a bell jar, cut off from other humans. The people in their church treated them that way. The preacher and his wife constituted their own social circle.
I never heard anyone speak unkindly of my aunt, except my mother, and she only ever complained of how saintly her sister was. Aunt Melita was a quiet, sweet-tempered woman who lived in her husband’s shadow—lived to make him happy however she could: by cooking what he liked to eat, by deferring to his opinions and tolerating his impatience and his habit of always seeming in a hurry. I thought of her—I believe everyone did—as having no life of her own, unless one can be said to have a life that is led in continual subservience to another. Part of this was occupational hazard: a preacher’s wife in that time and place was defined by what her husband did for a living, although neither my aunt nor my uncle would have called what he did a job. They would have said it was a calling, and she was part of that.
My aunt and uncle had no children of their own, after their one daughter died in infancy back in the twenties. Wherever I went with them, I was mistaken for their grandson. Aunt Melita was fifteen years older than my mother, and by the time I knew her, her hair was already turning gray. She never bothered to color it, much to my mother’s annoyance: “I don’t see why you don’t try a little rinse, Melita. You know, a man likes to have his wife look young.” I thought of my mother as the modern member of her family. She kept up with current fashion trends, drove her own car, bought her vegetables in the frozen section of the supermarket and got her hair done every week. More than that, she moved at what I considered a modern pace. She was always in a rush. Aunt Melita, in contrast, never did anything in a hurry, cooked from scratch and never got a permanent until she was in her seventies. It impressed me that someone who was born before the airplane was invented, when everyone cooked over a woodstove and almost no one had electricity, a telephone or a car, could handle all the changes of the century through which she lived with such grace. But my aunt, however diffident she may have seemed, had a very clear notion of who she was, and changes beyond her doorstep seemed to affect her not at all, perhaps because she had seen so much of it.
It was from my aunt that I first learned the lesson that the people you know best, or think you know best, can with the turn of a phrase or a trick of the light seem altogether mysterious, leaving you to wonder if anything you thought you knew is true. When I spent the night at my uncle and aunt’s house, I was usually asleep long before my aunt turned in, but on those rare occasions when for some reason I couldn’t sleep, she would let me watch her take her hair down and comb it out. She wore it long, halfway down her back, but during the day she kept it tucked into a neat bun until it was time for bed. Watching her take out the comb and the pins that held everything in place and then watching her hair fall like smoke around her face was like watching a magic trick, because with her hair down, she looked quite different: younger, less sharply defined, but more present somehow, more vulnerable, enough to make it seem as though the version of herself that she showed the world for most of her waking life were nothing more than a screen, a way of putting distance between herself and that world. Seeing her at her mirror with the brush moving through her hair always made me catch my breath a little. It was like encountering a stranger in the house at bedtime.
Most nights, though, hours before she finally turned off the kitchen light and went to bed herself, she put me to sleep with a back rub and a Bible story. The tales she told, in a soft, hypnotic voice, sounded oddly violent coming from the mouth of someone so mild, but I think it was just that she knew what I wanted to hear: David and Goliath, Joshua bringing down the walls of Jericho, Jesus walking on water and manufacturing loaves and fishes sufficient for a crowd of five thousand. I never went to sleep before she finished, and always begged for one more story. More often than not I got it. We had a catchphrase that we used only on each other: “I’m going to pester you.” She deployed it with mock ferocity to coax me through a chore, to get me out of the tub, to get me to finish my dinner. At night, in bed, I took it up, pestering her not to stop telling stories. It was a little like a secret code, a way of talking that only we shared. We certainly never pestered anyone else. Pester was the first word I remember thinking of as a word, worrying its mustardy sound over my tongue, saying it in private until it became nonsense. I’ve never known anyone else who said it, certainly not the way we said it: chanted back and forth, something said over and over just for the fun of saying it, and I made the game go on as long as I could. I didn’t want her to leave, not before I fell asleep, and usually she accommodated me, turning off the little lamp beside my bed and sitting there in the almost dark with just the light from the hall coming through the half-closed door, whispering to me. Sometimes it was something from the Psalms, or just a phrase or a sentence, dreamily spoken over and over, as though she, too, were drifting off. (What did she say? I wish I could remember. But all that’s left is the comforting sound of her voice, light and soft, like an extra blanket.) If she got to the door before I was asleep, I would try to hold her there as long as I could by saying, “Love you the most.” Then we said that back and forth there in the dark, playing catch with words until I was too sleepy to go on.
Matinee Idyll
Going to the movies was my most exotic thrill as a child. It happened so rarely that stepping into any theater was an event, the closest thing to real magic that I could imagine. The gilded ticket booth out front, popcorn geysering forth inside a glass-walled machine at the concession stand, the rich velvet curtain parting just before the newsreels and cartoons and previews—it was like the church had run off and joined the circus. And you never knew when you were going to get to go or if you would ever be allowed to go again. So you didn’t miss a single detail of the experience.
Even when Disney movies came to town, no one I knew got to go to every one. After I saw Snow White, I returned home and acted it out for the other kids in the neighborhood and then we played Snow White for days. Other kids taught us the plots of Toby Tyler and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. (None of us had the guts to re-enact Old Yeller, our first encounter with tragedy.) Bible movies were the best fodder for backyard epics. My mother donated a threadbare beach towel that served as a costume for Moses parting the Red Sea, Ben-Hur racing in a chariot and Samson before he lost his hair. No one liked playing the blind S
amson, because the rest of us just ran away and hid, but pulling down the temple on the Philistines did cheer us up.
In the years before I started school in 1958, our apartment complex was crawling with kids my age. After that, our stock company drifted away one actor at a time, as parents saved up enough for down payments on new houses and departed for neighborhoods a notch above ours, leaving me without companions: that exodus was my first lesson in the realities of a semi-broken home, since unlike everyone around us, my mother and father and I weren’t going anywhere. By the time I was nine, the neighborhood was nothing but families with tiny babies. Even then, for a little while longer, I trooped out to the backyard and acted out scenes from old favorites, but with no one to play with and the weight of my years on my shoulders, I soon gave it up.
In the summer of 1961, everything changed about the way I looked at movies. Mother and I spent July living in the house where she grew up in Kershaw, a tiny mill town “just a little bit south of North Carolina” she always sang as we approached the outskirts (passing the sign that said THE KU KLUX KLAN WELCOMES YOU TO KERSHAW—when I asked what the Ku Klux Klan was, she made a face like she had smelled something rotten and said, “White trash”). Mother loved Kershaw because it was always home in her mind. I loved it because it was nothing like Winston-Salem. Both town and city were products of the industrial Piedmont South. Kershaw had a cottonseed-oil factory on the north end of town, complete with a mill village where the white factory workers lived (black people lived on the south end and everyone else lived in between). Winston-Salem had tobacco factories and textile mills, and it was big enough to boast two modest skyscrapers when I was a child (the Reynolds Building was designed by the same architects who designed the Empire State Building). But the apartments where we lived, postwar constructions thrown up as affordable housing for GIs coming home from World War II and Korea, seemed a thin and depthless world. What few trees stood there were barely taller than I was. Going to Kershaw was like stepping into three dimensions. The houses weren’t all alike, and the towering trees, pine and live oak, cast everything beneath them in deep, green shadow. Even the soil was more interesting. Winston-Salem was all red clay. Kershaw, riding the cusp of the coastal plain, had soil so sandy white that it reflected the noon sun like a mirror, although in the shade, it was always cool and a little damp, and it gave off a pungent odor, sharp and sour, that hung in your nostrils like bleach. I should have hated it but I didn’t.
Little Boy Blues Page 5
