Maybe it was all just too much, the cottonmouth water-moccasins in the creek, the giant mosquitoes called “gabber-nipples” or “gallon-nippers” on the wall, the mother drunk on the sofa, the crickets rubbing their legs at dusk, the yellow and white honeysuckle I sucked dry. After tearing off the part that holds the petals together, I found the delicate string, pulled it out, and tasted the nectar like honey. “Kill the flower,” a neighbor used to say, “and you’ll taste something real sweet.” He hunted possum, cut up snakes, and took the legs off daddy long leg spiders so I could watch the ball of a body bouncing on the dirt.
Here in Nashville, I remember what had seemed long faded away. It’s enough like the Atlanta I knew as a child to make me feel cornered. Unease, a state of mind that is close to panic, overcomes me when I least expect it. Old rules of behavior beset me, even when walking down the street. “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” Whenever I see a twig, a piece of paper, anything at all on a crack, I stop and move it with my foot, as nonchalantly as I can. Seeing spiders that appear in all shapes and sizes, I know with absolute certainty that if I kill one, I’ll be punished. “Don’t you kill that spider if you want to live,” Lucille said. Wedged in the corners of windows or dropping down before me, they hang in the air, whether dead or alive no matter. They’re everywhere.
In the South, domesticity and chatter and ease are almost always accompanied by something gross. The sweetest memory depends on the shattered life of whatever is granted neither leisure nor mercy. In Atlanta, “the city too busy to hate,” Lester Maddox took up the Confederate flag, iron skillets, and axe handles at his Pickrick Restaurant to block “colored folk” or those he called “heathen rascals” and “race mixers” from entry. During the first lunch counter sit-ins, my father’s friend Charlie Lebedin dragged the Reverend Ashton Jones by his feet, across the floor and out the door of his Leb’s restaurant at 66 Luckie Street, on the corner of Forsyth. He paid white crackers to kick and spit at black student protestors; then he turned off the lights and locked the demonstrators inside. My anger about this further divided me from my parents, who tried to ignore it all, and I watched their irritation with me turn to disdain. They didn’t want me around.
I was 13 when Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his letter from the Birmingham jail, and four girls died in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing there, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas and Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon. Malcolm X suffered Elijah Muhammad’s discipline of public silence after he described Kennedy’s murder as a case of “the chickens coming home to roost.” A week after his assassination, Liberace in satin and diamonds appeared with Cassius Clay on The Jack Paar Show. Clay had not yet become Mohammed Ali. But in 1964, after he punched out Sonny Liston in six rounds, I danced through the house, jumped up and down, shouting: “I am the greatest.” “
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Only two people mattered to me, and they are still on my mind: Thomas, the yardman who killed the chickens I had raised at my father’s command, and Lucille, the woman who raised me, and, I almost wrote, “the love of my life.” So, it’s done. I’ve said it. She is close by even now. When she walked into our house in Atlanta for her interview, I was just a baby, and my mother used to tell me how I climbed up into her lap and clung to her like a “barnacle” that couldn’t be “pried off.” If it hadn’t been for her, I would be dead. I’m sure of it.
I hear my mother ringing the bronze bell my father brought back from Czechoslovakia in 1946. In the morning when she awakened, she called for Lucille to bring her breakfast in bed. I still see the little peeing boy and hear the tinkling sound of the bell, a “bronze replica,” my father said, “of the main fountain in the center of Prague.”
Taking photos satisfied my father’s sense of control, photos of the peeing boy and my smiling mother, of a beggar on the curb in the Bowery and women bending down as they scrubbed their clothes on the rocks in Mexico.
Lucille stood up to him. Lucille gave me joy. She walked around the house humming. Outside on a late spring afternoon, she spoke out loud the names of bushes, flowers, trees, and vines. We talked about lightning bugs, black widow spiders, daddy long legs, dried-out shells of June bugs left on trees, the difference between crickets and cicadas. She taught me the kind of dread that was also desire: the longing to go out of this world and know what can’t be seen. She brought ghosts into my bedroom, the dead man in the closet, the white woman who appeared trying to get her hand through the screen of my window. When the trains passed, she told me to listen to them and behave, “‘cause they were carrying the souls of orphans who cried out in the night.”
Out back, Lucille conjured up love songs that only I could hear. When she wasn’t crooning, she taught me how to recognize the ghosts that mattered most to her: little girls bit by spiders, husbands whose legs were torn off by scythes in the field or lost in the wheels of cotton mills, white women whom lust had worn down like the heels of her shoes.
One spring morning in 1960 Lucille heard about the students from Morehouse, Spelman, Morris Brown, and Clark colleges. They were still sitting in protest against segregation at 10 lunch counters and cafeterias throughout the city of Atlanta. My father came home, mad “as a two-legged bat,” Lucille said, after he couldn’t have lunch at Leb’s Restaurant downtown because of the sit-ins. Lucille stayed in the kitchen and refused to speak to anyone for three hours. She cursed those “pig-eyed juveniles” making trouble. Thomas called her a “house slave, who’d die with nothing in her hands but her white lies.” She took her lighter, flicked it on and chased him, flame glinting, out of the house and down Plymouth Road.
A few months later, I heard Lucille tell him: “I don’t want you round here, go on and get your fool self to Birmingham,” which for her meant dynamite, blood, and riots. But Thomas never kept quiet. “You can fall in a ditch and stay there till I go,” he said. He wanted me to know about South Georgia, where he used to make 25 cents a day at a sawmill in 1939. Before that, he worked as a sharecropper, but said he had decided not long after he’d been whipped, “cut till the blood stopped dripping,” that he’d never work on a farm again. “I wouldn’t tell a mule good morning,” he used to repeat. Years later, I understood that this was his response to the dubious gift to freed slaves of “40 acres and a mule.” At 82, not long after Lucille had died, he remembered: “You couldn’t tip your hat to a white woman. You’d get the chair. They’d break your neck. You wouldn’t raise your head. Did, you wouldn’t take it down.”
Lucille
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WHAT DO I REMEMBER of that thumping rhythm, the bulging eyes of the peg-legged man? A lonely Saturday afternoon in the kitchen with Lucille, breathing in her wet laughs as she flicked the TV dial. I must have been about eight years old. My choice was Popeye in his white navy uniform, but as usual she controlled the channels. Quick Draw McGraw and The Mickey Mouse Club lost out to Maverick and Rawhide. She dominated always. Humming, she adjusted things and the picture took shape.
Out onto the stage came a black man with one leg. One peg. It was “Peg Leg” Bates. Oh what, I wondered, happened to cause such a sight? As always, Lucille told me a story. Peg Leg, she said, “felt too deep, his heart was too good,” but the devil had him in his hands and bore down on him in a car on the road to Florida. Dang fool, I didn’t want to listen, but I did. I didn’t want to hear any more, but Lucille never stopped, never did stop. After the crash, no one came for hours to get Bates out from under the car. That was the story that she told me.
Years later I found out what really happened. The lights went out while he was working in a cotton gin mill in South Carolina. His leg got caught and mangled in the conveyor belt. Since white hospitals were segregated and there were no black hospitals nearby, the doctor cut off the leg on a kitchen table. Down South, nobody thought enough of a black man to send him to a hospital.
“Learned”