Debbie Cruthirds met Snead Harris during her freshman year at Biloxi High School. Snead was two years ahead of her, a thick-necked, blue-eyed linebacker on the Indians varsity squad known for his toughness, his fuse-free temper, his Kawasaki motorcycle, his fondness for mixing high-proof Everclear with beer for what he called “Sneady Snacks,” and for being the only student at Biloxi High with a shaved head. (The shaved head was to disguise a case of very premature baldness that, according to family members, resulted from a bizarre medical condition: While he was playing in an uncle’s barn as a child, a hayseed fell into Snead’s dirty ear, sprouted, and grew into his ear canal, eventually requiring surgical extraction to relieve the pressure. Family members cite this as the cause for his baldness as well as for his violent bent.)
Debbie’s family, the Cruthirds, has been on the Mississippi Gulf Coast for generations, its men mostly shrimpers as her father was. Snead Harris was a transplant from Stone County, in the piney woods above the salt line, an immigrant from the hardscrabble, hard-luck inland. Rufus Little Harris, Snead’s great-great-grandfather, was a Confederate deserter from Missouri who took refuge in remote Stone County to avoid being hanged for desertion but died in prison anyway after shooting a preacher six times in the back for sheltering his beaten wife. One of Rufus’s four sons, Fant Harris, was shot by a black sharecropper while having intercourse with the man’s thirteen-year-old daughter; Fant survived long enough to organize the sharecropper’s lynching but died shortly thereafter from infection related to the gunshot wound. This legacy of violence and imprisonment went trickling and occasionally gushing into subsequent generations: Cameron’s grandfather Randall “Poke” Harris served four years in the state penitentiary at Parchman for beating a used-car salesman with a tire iron before stealing a 1955 Chevrolet Nomad. One can find it difficult, reviewing the Harrises’ ancestral rap sheet, to avoid hearing the echo of William Faulkner passing judgment on his notorious Snopeses: “a family, a clan, a race, maybe even a species, of pure sons of bitches.”
But Debbie didn’t see it that way: not at the age of fourteen, when she met Snead, nor even at the age of twenty-eight, when he abandoned her for good. “She loved him like crazy,” says Bylinda, who was eighteen months her sister’s junior. “Oh don’t get me wrong now. Them two was constant drama. Up and down all the time, breaking up and getting back together—that was pretty much every weekend. He’d cheat on her then she’d cheat on him and some poor guy’d get his ass whipped and then there they’d be together all hand in hand like nothing’d ever happened, two teddy bears. When she was with Snead, she was either crying tears of joy or tears of grief—hardly nothing in between.” Following high school, when Snead took a job as a derrickman on an offshore oil rig and Debbie started working as a nurse’s aide, their relationship appeared to smooth out—or at least Snead’s long absences eased the abrasiveness. “They’d throw these big-ass parties when Snead would come back from the rigs,” Bylinda recalls. “About as wild as you can imagine. Next morning there’d just be beer cans and bodies on the floor and, God help me, Snead and Deb passed out buck naked in a corner with these big dumb grins on their faces.”
One effect of those nights, aside from the grins, was Debbie’s unplanned pregnancy with Tanya. “I’ll say this for Snead,” Bylinda says. “He went down on his knees proposing the moment he found out he was gonna be a daddy.” They were married on February 27, 1985, six months before Tanya’s birth, and honeymooned at a Texas hunting ranch where Snead’s cousin worked. A year later they bought the house on Reconfort Avenue and settled into what no one describes as marital bliss. “He’d hit her sometimes,” says Bylinda’s husband, Bill. “I know that because he told me so, one of the times they come visit. I wouldn’t say he bragged about it. It was more like he was…like he thought he was giving me advice. Like if two guys are bass fishing and one says to the other one, ‘You know, man, if you let them topwater lures rest a bit before you get to reeling, you’ll probably get more strikes.’ That kinda tone. Sorta like, here’s something that works for me. I don’t recall what I said back to him but I can tell you it wasn’t what I should’ve said. I never wanted nothing to do with him.”
But Debbie did, despite everything. Tanya, who endured six years with her father before he left, saw things differently. “Daddy coming off the rigs wasn’t ever a good thing,” she recalls. “Mama’d go crazy cleaning and primping and cooking and talking about how good everything was gonna be. But it wasn’t good, not one time. Because you knew he was going to blow up but you never knew when or why or what for. That’s how she told it to me. He’d start hollering at the TV news because they put a black weather girl on there: ‘Now I gotta listen to a nigger telling me it’s raining.’ Or freaking out on Mama for letting me eat steak on account of steak’s too expensive for kids and him saying how fat I was anyway. I didn’t cry a single tear when Mama sat me down and told me he wasn’t coming back from Texas. Not a damn one.”
Snead Harris had taken an oilfield job in west Texas—a twelve-month contract gig paying him twice what he was earning offshore. Over the course of his first three months in Texas his phone calls home gradually petered until his final call, when he told Debbie he’d met another woman and wasn’t coming home. “I remember the show Full House was on the TV when she was telling me,” Tanya says. “And something on that show making me laugh right after Mama stood up, and her throwing this look back at me and saying, ‘Girl-Bunny, you understood all I just told you, right?’ And me saying, ‘Yes, ma’am. I sure as heck did.’ ”
By this time Cameron, the miracle baby, was three years old, a whirligig of toddler energy. Debbie reconnected with her Catholic faith after Cameron’s birth, believing that with her son she’d been divinely accorded some sort of second chance—that from her womb had emerged not just a child but a set of personalized commandments. She feared this newfound piety, however, might’ve alienated her husband and factored into his leaving. “His people was hard-shell Baptists,” explains Bylinda. “They thought Catholics drank blood.” In the immediate wake of Snead’s desertion, Debbie set aside religion to take a back-first plunge into depression, dropping into a yearlong emotional coma. “I took care of both of them, really,” recalls Tanya. “Mama couldn’t cook so I cooked. Mama couldn’t get Cam dressed so I did. That was me yanking off his wet Pull-Ups. Mama’d cry and Cam’d cry and I’d be switching back and forth between them, holding them, telling them it was all gonna be all right.”
So this was how Cameron Harris grew up: with two kinds of mothers, a phantom of a father, several years of maternal weeping jags, and an infinite amount of fried oysters. “My Mamaw taught me to fry oysters when I wasn’t even tall enough to see over the stove,” Tanya says with a laugh. “Dixie Seafood used to be across from where the Biz-E-Bee is so I could always get a jar. That’s all Cam would eat. I’m serious. They was like chicken tenders to him.”
Despite this deep-fried, cornmeal-crusted diet, Cameron grew up lean and lithesome, with delicate, doll-like features. Debbie Harris, everyone agrees, was a looker—her sister claims she was a ringer for the model Cheryl Tiegs, with beach-blond hair and spacious, searching, delft blue eyes plus a pair of narrow, elongated legs that could so powerfully distract men that, the story goes, they were once the cause of a gnarly waterskiing accident—and Cameron clearly favored her. “The memory of mine that’s most vivid,” says Mary Annie Fillingame, Cameron’s third-grade teacher, “is how beautiful a child he was. I don’t think I’d seen a prettier boy in all my life. You know, he had that terrible fall the year I had him, when he cut his little cheek. I remember him coming in with all the bandages and me thinking, of course, oh that poor child, but also thinking: My stars, that perfect face. That poor perfect face.”
Tanya, by her own vinegary admission, took after her father. His lumpy linebacker’s figure was hers from birth. Instead of the bouncy gold curls of her mother and brother, Tanya was endowed with a hea
d of coarse beige hair she likens to “badger fur,” in which gray streaks started appearing during puberty. Her body reacted to heat not just by sweating but by breaking out in vast pink continents of hives, a liability for Gulf Coast summers. Her flat feet made her waddle like a duck. If any of this ever distressed her, however, Tanya doesn’t show it. From an early age she equipped herself with the armor of self-deprecating humor, insulting herself before anyone else could. In grade school she invented a character she called “Fat Sally,” pulling a pair of pink tights up to her chest and pretending to hunt for cake, and, with acid cheer, she would volunteer to be a human shield during dodgeball games. She didn’t lack for friends, but popularity wasn’t a goal of hers. While other kids were gathering after school, Tanya was making a beeline home to help raise a baby. Debbie was working nights as a nurse at the Merit Health hospital in Biloxi; she and Tanya traded shifts taking care of Cameron.
For a while Tanya had a boyfriend in high school, a Russian-born adoptee named Oleg who played cornet in the marching band and death-metal guitar in his bedroom. Oleg was a spindly, tiny boy, barely five feet tall—as an orphan in Russia, Tanya says, he’d been severely malnourished—making them an incongruous-looking couple. A card he once gave Tanya bore an illustration of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet holding hands, which he annotated by drawing an arrow pointing from Piglet to the word ME with another arrow connecting Winnie the Pooh with YOU. Whatever Oleg’s intent, Tanya interpreted it, heart-stung, as a depiction of their physical pairing, the lopsided way they must’ve looked walking hand-in-hand through the school hallways. Following their breakup, Oleg wrote her a long and sentimental letter in which he thanked her for, among other things, teaching him “how to be a man.” Here was something else Tanya didn’t know how to interpret. Maybe he meant she’d shown him the proper way to kiss a girl and what to say to make a girl feel special. But then she’d also taught him how to chug a beer, bait a fishing hook, and change a flat tire, so she wasn’t sure.
Cameron, entering middle school at this time, had grown into a happy, engaged, even irrepressible boy. His sights were set on becoming an actor, and he went so far as to take after-school acting classes in Gulfport where he appeared as Fyedka in a production of Fiddler on the Roof. Along with his best friend, Bucky Petz, Cameron made movies using Bucky’s VHS camcorder. They christened their partnership CB Productions and dedicated every film to the memory of Cameron’s dog, Lucky. Tanya starred in one of these movies—as the victim of a sand monster slowly consuming her into the gut of Biloxi beach.
Despite the years separating them, sister and brother were never far apart. Their inchoate selves seemed nurtured and secured by the other’s presence, symbiotically linked. Tanya had a television in her bedroom, and many nights would find her and Cameron curled together in its quivering silver glow, Cameron usually drifting off to sleep beside his sister—most nights, according to Tanya. When nightmares struck, or when the passing trains rattled him from sleep, it was in Tanya’s bed that Cameron sought refuge.
Highlighting Tanya’s role risks diminishing Debbie’s. Debbie worked long hours, and the stress of single parenthood left her brittle at times, but tenderness was never in short supply. Tanya and Debbie confided in one another: The first person to whom Tanya reported her first kiss, from Oleg, was her mother, and Tanya was Debbie’s sounding board for conflicts at work and, later, for thoughts about her dating life. Together, almost as partners, they fawned over Cameron.
Like all children, Tanya and Cameron didn’t lack their mild traumas and troubles. Debbie’s temper, prefiguring Cameron’s, could spontaneously combust; her children now laugh about the way she’d sometimes hurl a flip-flop at them when angry, about her gunslinger’s adeptness at removing the sandal and firing it their way in a single smooth stroke, but it wasn’t likely a laughing matter then. Money was always tight in the Harris household. For as long as they can remember the ringing telephone was ignored until the answering machine could confirm that the caller wasn’t a debt collector. Cameron, like his sister, struggled mightily with schoolwork, and while Tanya seemed immune to social cruelty, Cameron’s awkward exuberance made him an occasional target for bullies. In seventh grade Bucky moved to Florida; the loss of his best friend struck Cameron hard, as all losses seemed to do, and he has never, to this day, fitted anyone else into the best-friend slot. He tended, like his mother, toward emotional extremes. When his dog, Lucky, broke loose, and the eight-year-old Cameron found the dog’s crushed body at the side of Division Street, he cried for three days straight, stranded far beyond the reach of any consolation from his mother and sister, marooned on an island of terrible, shrieking grief. He was also, Tanya says, prone to overthinking—to pondering choices, even minor ones, to the point of anxious immobility. “You know how you get a gut feeling about something, and just go with it?” she says. “Cameron never seemed to have that. He still doesn’t. He just chews and chews things in his head until there’s nothing left to chew.”
Cameron’s adolescence coincided with what might be called his mother’s second adolescence. After years of moping about Snead’s abandonment followed by years in which she threw herself into the church, and with Cameron outgrowing his need for her attention plus her transfer to the hospital’s day shift, Debbie Harris decided it was time to try dating. “She had to been lonely,” says Tanya, who helped her mother craft her first online dating profile. “Dinner’d be cleaned up, the laundry all folded, and Cam and I’d be back in my room watching TV. I reckon she didn’t feel there was a whole lot left for her at night. And maybe she’d finally gotten Daddy’s poison out of her system.”
The effect of this, for Cameron, was that men started coming around the house on Reconfort Avenue—lots of them, though never for very long. Donna Arlut, a co-worker of Debbie’s at the hospital, observed this period in their life. “Deb went on dates a lot but I don’t recall her ever going past a fourth or fifth,” she recalls. “Heck, I set her up on a few of those. Honestly, I don’t think she knew what to do with a decent guy. You gotta remember, Snead wasn’t just her first husband—he was her first boyfriend. Her first and only everything. So she didn’t know what love was. She didn’t know it didn’t have to be torture. I’m guessing a lot of those men found themselves very confused after a few dates with Deb.”
Ingratiating themselves with Cameron was a common maneuver for these men. They took him fishing for croakers at the harbor, rode him around on their boats, taught him how to hit golf balls at a driving range, threw catch with him in the front yard. One of them, a highway patrolman, let Cameron fire his service revolver at a hunting camp up near Jackson. This patrolman, according to Tanya, was also in a way responsible for Cameron’s high-school football career. Apparently unimpressed with Cameron’s visit to his hunting camp, he expressed concern about Cameron’s manliness to Debbie just as Cameron was about to enter Biloxi High School. “He told Mama he thought Cam was a little weak or something,” Tanya recalls. “Told her the best thing she could do for him was to get his scrawny self onto a football field.” Debbie Harris didn’t think enough of the patrolman to continue dating him, but, pricked by his comments, and perhaps suffused with nostalgia for Snead’s old glories as a varsity linebacker, she did defer to his counsel. That summer she convinced Cameron to try out for the junior varsity football team.
Cameron was nothing like his snarling, thick-necked, bruise-dispensing father. He was slender and lissome, and he carried himself nimbly and elusively, less like a bull than a deer. “So, an ideal wide receiver,” says his former coach, Tom Bud Necaise. “I saw it that first tryout, clear as day. He had good straight-line speed but you put him on a route and he could run it like nobody’s business. He just had these superb instincts. To be honest, after just a few weeks in, I was figuring him for a future college ball player. I really was.”
As Cameron was embracing football, furiously studying the game in order to catch up with teammates who’d been pl
aying since grade school and spending long grunt-filled hours in the weight room, Debbie was finally embracing one of the men she’d met online. Jim Yarbrough was recently divorced, with three kids of his own, and had served in the Navy during the first Gulf War. Jim had a modestly dangerous side to him—he was a professional poker player—which seemed to satisfy Debbie’s appetite for a bad boy. But Jim was good to her, and for the first time since Snead Harris bolted to Texas, Debbie’s friends and daughter saw her illuminated by love or something close to it, discerned a newly honeyed melody in her voice. She and Jim attended every one of Cameron’s games together, except when Jim had a conflicting poker tournament, and on “Military Night” at Harrison Central High School, during Cameron’s sophomore year, Jim Yarbrough was among the veteran parents lauded on-field at the halftime ceremony. This was by Cameron’s request. He liked that Jim didn’t use him to peacock for Debbie, didn’t drag him fishing or golfing or boating or shooting; Jim had his own kids to tend to. What Jim did best (in Cameron’s eyes)—quietly, even wordlessly—was to respect Cameron. With a poker player’s intuition, he seemed able to read precisely who and what Cameron was, zeroing straight into his essence without objections or judgments, and with an easeful tolerance for adolescent muddles. It helped, too, that Jim had played community college ball: His postgame commentaries, on the drives back home, were always filigreed with fresh insight.
By the end of his second JV football season, Cameron’s talents were glittering. The first time his picture appeared in the Biloxi Sun Herald wasn’t after his recovery at the Biz-E-Bee; it was after a winning game against D’Iberville High School, the camera catching Cameron in soaring flight above three hapless-looking defenders. His mother had the newspaper page framed and with great ceremony hung it in the living room. Cameron was a lock for the next season’s varsity squad, and in the spring Coach Necaise dropped by the house to talk about the college recruiting process with him and Debbie and to leave a copy of the NCAA Guide for the College-Bound Student-Athlete. He’d already mentioned Cameron to Coach Cutcliffe up at Ole Miss, he said, and he’d gotten an unsolicited feeler from the receivers coach at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. “I was seeing a bright, bright future for Cameron,” Coach Necaise says. “That boy had some hellacious legs under him, some real speed and agility, and a set of big soft hands that the ball loved sticking to. The hours he put in the weight room, too, and out on the track—he had the drive. I’d say the only thing he lacked was confidence but we were making headway with that until the tragedy with his mama.” At this Necaise sighs, and with a sour, deflated expression shakes his head. “That pulled the rug right from under him.”
Anatomy of a Miracle Page 11
