Separate Tables

One morning when I was cropping in the tobacco fields of someone I will call Semolina Pilchard, the tractor pulled up with what appeared to be an empty sled, and a little black boy, maybe five or six years old, popped up out of the thing – he’d sneaked in and hidden in the bottom just as the tractor was pulling out from the barn. 

The kid was so pleased with himself for successfully escaping his mama – who was too busy stringing tobacco to notice – that he busted into squeals of laughter. That surprising and delightful sound, like the one babies make when you put your mouth on their belly and make flatulent sounds, got us all laughing, too. 

Pilchard's right-hand man, Jackson, who was sort of our overseer in the field, told the boy he better get his self back to the barn before his mama whupped his behind, but the little guy didn’t scare easily. He’d pretend to leave, then would sneak back through the towering stalks of tobacco and pop up next to one of us like some sort of field sprite.

He bedeviled each of us, partly with our indulgence, crawling through the stalks to untie our boots, sticking tobacco worms on our shirts, knocking our hats off, and after each of his tricks, he’d dart off like a water bug, howling with laughter. 

If our culture’s symbology allowed it, I would say that on a merciless white-hot morning, he was a ray of darkshine, a mercurial imp of black joy that blessed us with innocent laughter the way only kittens and puppies and small children can.

When the sled was full, Jackson started up the tractor. “Come on, boy, I’m takin’ you back to yo’ mama,” he said. At the barn, the kid got some scolding, but Jackson defended him: “What the hell? He ain’t doin’ no harm, let’im come back out with us.” So the little black boy continued to entertain us till dinner by which, of course, I mean lunch. 

Back at the barn, the horseplay continued while we washed up. Wherever we croppers went, he went with us. We washed, he washed. We got our paper plates, he got his paper plates. We went over to the picnic tables under a pecan tree with the other white people, and he went with us. We started to eat, he started to eat. 

“You better run go find yo’ mama, boy,” Jackson told him.

“Nah, you better go find yo’ mama,” the kid shot back, then threw his head back and laughed.

“I ain’t kiddin’, boy. Git back over to the shed with yo’ mama!”

The kid pointed a fork full of mashed potatoes at Jackson. “Nah, I ain’t kiddin’ you, Mr. Jackson man,” he said, clearly wanting to drag out this joke as long as possible. 

Jackson put his plate down, bolted from his bench, walked over to the kid just as he was putting those potatoes in his mouth, yanked him up by the back of his collar, and said, “You git your black ass over there with yo' mama right NOW! You don’t belong over here! Now GO, and don’t come back, you hear me?!”

There was a momentary hush at the white people's table. At the black people's table, the kid got a scolding of the "what-I-told-you?" variety.

We felt a little awkward for a while, and the food didn’t go down as easily as it could’ve, but it didn’t take long for everything to get back to normal. Jackson had done a difficult thing. He had restored order, keeping the links in our community's Great Chain of Being in their assigned places. Someone was going to have to tell that kid sometime, and the situation forced that duty on Jackson.

I don’t think he enjoyed it. 

After we finished eating, the afternoon fields were white-hot again until another damn storm started building, and the croppers’ laughter was of the sordid, bitter variety, and I’m guessing that it was not my laughter alone that sprang, as the poet William Blake said, from excess of sorrow, not of joy.

It was 1962. What else were we supposed to do?

My Conversion

On Graduation Day, we finally shed the fatigues and donned the more formal 1505s which were tan with short sleeves, and instead of the usual cunt hats (Garrison or flight caps), we wore service caps, the kind bus drivers wear.

There were thousands of us out there on the parade ground, and it was hotter than hell, and from time to time we could see an airman collapse onto the asphalt, usually because the dumb ass kept his knees locked. The rest of us were all in step, thousands of heels digging into the hot asphalt to the beat of music provided by the Drum and Bugle Corps, together making clockwork thunder as we marched, eyes right, past the reviewing stand or whatever not-shit name it went by. There were flags and banners everywhere, and I guess each of them stood for something.

Picture Triumph of the Will, but in color, in broad daylight, in 94-degree heat.

My God! The precision, the unity, the order, the conformity, all of us faceless, nameless, all in step with the cold insistent drum beat, a terrible beauty, anonymous as the Russian soldiers firing their way down the Odessa steps! This mythic celebration of hierarchy, of obedience, of submission to the rung above -- even unto death --  this giving ourselves fully to a power greater than ourselves. . . 

Too much for a 19-year old to resist. Though, as is certainly apparent, I loathed this process and had great doubts about the current mission, my eyes watered. The hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood at attention. I was a part of the Great Body. I could help It kill and I could finally accept being killed for It. 

I was embarrassed by this religious experience. I never wanted it. It was an uninvited ecstasy.

It faded a few hours later as I was preparing to move out of my dorm and to another one while I awaited orders for my next assignment. But I will never forget it.

Fortunately, the Air Force never asked me to kill anyone or to be killed, except possibly through boredom. They soon put me to work in a job that required a Top Secret Codeword clearance, so I can't tell you what I did.

But I can assure you I was never asked to do a single thing that ensured the continued freedom of my country. Not one thing. I promise.

And they certainly prepared me well for that.

Welcome to the Air Force: 1970

 

Here's a cliche that pops up during conversations about military boot camp: "It may seem bad, but they're only breaking you down so they can build you back up." 

Just typing that almost makes the top of my head blow off.

Who died and made the Defense Department a destroyer of selves and creator of new ones? I speak as someone who went through this gross transfiguration. Am I speaking as the me that has been built back up? Or as the me that was broken down, but never built back up?

Or did I emerge unscathed from the crucible, my old self intact, so that I alone survived to tell you? I hope, by carefully examining my remaining memories of basic training, this narrative will answer that question. 

From a reasonable point of view (a peculiar angle from which to discuss this topic), basic training would be, first, the State's first opportunity to thank you for your sacrifice, including the timeworn, euphemistic "ultimate sacrifice." 

The State would convey its gratitude by making sure you were treated with the dignity you deserve and that your health -- both mental and physical -- was their highest concern.

From there It would prepare you for winning whatever war it had currently gotten itself into. There would be no time for anything else, not when our nation's freedom is at risk. And if you survived your service, the State would treat you like royalty upon your return, regardless of the physical and/or emotional damage you suffered on its behalf -- and that treatment would go beyond dishing out empty praise during political speeches.

But I found out the State isn't quite that thoughtful.

Here's how basic training (hereafter "boot camp") welcomed me to America's largest fraternity (Sorry! No Greek letters on your fatigues!) and helped me do my part to win the Vietnam War, ensuring that the Viet Cong would not ultimately be popping up in the cornfields of Iowa.

 They taught me to go to bed at exactly 9 p.m. and then wake up at exactly 5 a.m. to the cacophony of an asshole drill sergeant or, later, a flight (same as an Army platoon) leader, banging his nightstick on a tin garbage can and yelling "WAKE UP!! GET OUT OF BED! LET'S GO, LADIES! GET YOUR LAZY ASSES IN GEAR!" 

(We weren't ladies, actually.)

Then we had only a few minutes (fifteen, I believe), to cram ourselves into a shower with 49 other guys, shave, evacuate our bowels (sort of in unison, as it turns out), put on our fatigues according to regulation, then clean and store our toiletries.

The war effort was further aided by our marching to the chow hall and, while waiting in line, practicing our saluting in front of a mirrored wall, while our training instructor (aka "TI," same as an Army drill instructor) yelled helpful profanity-laced tips directly into our ears. 

We witnessed warm camaraderie and esprit de corps when our TI would cross paths with another flight's TI. Our guy would say to the other, for example, "Fuck you, Sgt. Hempson," to which Sgt. Hempson would reply, "It'd be the best piece of ass you ever had!"

We were yelled at as we received our food trays. The airmen filling those trays were only a few weeks farther along than we were, but they took great pleasure in luring us into talking so we'd get yelled at some more. For example, "Mornin,' airman. Where ya from?" Me, like an idiot: "Florida." My TI: "WHO THE FUCK IS TALKING IN THIS GODDAMN CHOW LINE?" 

During one breakfast, I learned why many young men decided to serve their country even in wartime, even if they weren't drafted. 

Nathan, a scrawny black kid from one of Philly's poverty pits, once told us while we were complaining about the shitty Air Force food, “What you fussin' about? This the first time in my life I ever had three squares a day.” 

Some of my other flight members had never been to a dentist or optometrist. So they decided to risk Vietnam in order to savor, for a while at least, a better life in the land of opportunity. 

I learned that immaculate, fussy tidiness was crucial in winning the Vietnam War. From time to time, our TI would surprise us with an inspection: 

Here are some things he inspected: 

Did our buttons, our shiny belt buckle and our zipper all line up perfectly? If not we got "gigged" (a gig was like a demerit and after a certain number of them, you'd eventually catch some sort of hell), hence those three perfectly aligned things were called the "gig line."

Could you bounce a quarter off your freshly made bunk? And were there 45-degree hospital corners where the linen was tucked in? Just to be sure, the inspector would actually bring a protractor.

Were your shirts and underwear folded in such a way their width was exactly 6 inches? The inspector brought measuring tape.

Was there any hair or leftover soap suds on your soap bar or soap dish or on the blade of your razor? 

About that last one: We strongly suspected that our first drill sergeant, a weary Nam vet named Tech Sgt. King, told our flight leader to put all our used toiletries in the ceiling and keep only the unused spotless ones in our foot locker. 

Our flight leader, a gung-ho former hippie named Zacchaeus Richardson who thought he was in a WWII movie, never admitted that King gave him that advice, but he must've done. Of course, this made it even more obvious that the whole show was a sadistic game, signifying nothing.

If anyone consistently failed these inspections, not only did he catch all sorts of shit from the TI, but the TI would say to the rest of us, "You better get this maggot's shit in working order or you're all gonna pay for it." 

 

This leads us to two additional features of basic training: the blanket party and the Section 8: The first, perfectly depicted here (can't believe it begins with a L'Oreal commercial), was a harsh form of physical punishment administered by the airmen to one of their under-performing brothers.

Everyone had to agree to it, so no one could snitch with impunity.This, of course, helped us bond with our brothers-in-arms the way we would need to bond in combat, while simultaneously, like barnyard chickens, pecking the weak ones to death. 

 

Let the reader decide whether this was tearing us down or building us back up. 

There was a blanket party in my flight, but I wasn't invited because it took place in the other bay (in our dorm, each flight was divided into two squads separated by a cinder-block wall that reached almost to the ceiling. Twenty-five of us were on one side, the same amount on the other). This particular assault aimed not to correct a messy gig-magnet but a compulsive masturbator or chicken-choker or yank-cranker or willy-whacker or the oddly alliterative and tautological onanising your ownanism, or whatever term you find most tasteful.

Even from our side of the wall, we could hear the appropriately named Johnson's cot start squeaking shortly after lights-out as he began methodically jerking off, and then we could hear his bay mates, first humanely pleading, then yelling insistently that he "leave [his] fucking pecker alone and let [them] get some sleep!" 

But the kid continued his intense romantic relationship with his imaginary lover for about a week before his bay-mates blanket-partied him so fiercely that his libido shrunk to the size of a dehydrated blueberry.

Later, the men in white coats came to take him away, and Johnson got the Section 8 he was pulling for and was sent back home to practice his art in the privacy of his own room or to find some other creative outlet for his relentless urge to purge.

(New lesson from that: When the enemy is firing away at you, you don't want to be caught with your pants down. And another: Sublimate your autoerotic impulses into rage against the North Vietnamese.)

So I'm not sure Johnson was either broken down or built up or neither.

And speaking of Johnson, what a meat grinder we were all being forced through those first few weeks. Probably nuns go through this, or used to anyway, when they marry Jesus and are forced to give up their birth names and all the experiences attached to those names. We wondered sometimes if our pre-boot-camp lives, before this new Mother had abducted us, were merely false memories our brain tantalized us with in order to increase our present suffering. 

All of us could echo Charles from John Fowles' French Lieutenant's Woman, "I am infinitely strange to myself." I could neither recognize nor understand my reflection in the mirror. Whoever I saw in there, I didn't like him.

Some nights, after lights out, when not immediately overcome with fatigue, I would look at the red EXIT light at the end of the barracks and reflect that within just a few weeks, I had gone from being the almost-hippie editor of a college newspaper, a careless, goofy, naïve student living at home, happily wasting time and skipping class to play basketball; and from there to being a newlywed living in an attic apartment in Lake City and owning my first car, a slate-blue ‘63 Ford Galaxy 500 that always ran hot, and having my first grownup job – a writer for the Lake City Reporter – yes, had gone from all those simple songs of innocence to this concrete inferno, my hair shorn, my wife 1200 miles away, my freedom gone, and a deranged drill sergeant for a mentor.

 

Adam, Eve and Mr. Hyde

There is some irony, surely lost on the creators of basic-training hazing, that a major part of their "breaking us down" consisted of making us less messy, more neat, more obsessive about tidiness, more fussy and more delicate about our surroundings, more likely to strive for a clean and orderly . . 

Wait a second! That sounds like conventional woman's work. Watch any Japanese movie, and you can see this in action when the tired businessman husband comes home, takes off his clothes and drops them on the floor for his wife to pick up, then brusquely orders her to "start my bath," while he settles himself on a tatami mat and torches up a cigarette. Or watch Mad Men! Or most families today!

According to the indisputable codes of the Universal Sex and Gender Role Department of Conventions (USGRDC), men are naturally messy unless they are Felix from The Odd Couple or they just don't give a damn if they stray from the conventional image of masculinity.

So during those dainty white-glove inspections, the State was breaking down the sloppy male, while building up the Martha Stewart within. We would assault our enemies with brooms, dusters, mops, buffers, measuring tapes and protractors!

The American military obviously derived this transformative process from two models: The Book of Genesis and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In Genesis' second version of the creation, the "Lord God took one of [Adam's] ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman."

In boot camp, the TIs reached into our chaotic, unfocused, unsanitary maleness, then extracted a rib from which they made a separate, more feminine being, someone punctilious enough to create hospital corners, keep hair off his razor, and fold his State-issued white boxers with a 6-inch width. 

Likewise, our bellicose superiors understood, like Dr. Jekyll, that the good man must have his bad side removed, separated, so that virtue might be unencumbered by the temptations of the flesh, while the sinful shadow may go on about his savage earthly pursuits without an endless nagging conscience to dilute his pleasure.

Some time after the State began plagiarizing this paradigm, some confusion arose. 

Once they had turned Adam's rib into a woman, they killed her. Every single insult hurled our way in boot camp either expressed contempt for what was perceived as effeminate or included a variety of obscene terms for female genitalia.

To see this mis-homoerotic,* misogynistic routine depicted artfully and accurately, take another look at Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. The cold, stark, deep-focused, symmetrical first half is not only the best depiction of boot camp on film, but a veritable orgy of verbal cannonballs smashing down the gates of femininity. This all-out assault on the Woman, of course, is what makes its ending, ass deep in irony, so satisfying.

I admit that I was once directly affected by such language. The end of boot camp was only a couple of weeks away, but I was about to hit a psychological wall, meaning the madness was threatening to overwhelm me. I was talking to my friend Miller (who referred to himself as a "Chinese brother") and I asked him if he sometimes felt this was all too much.

He was sitting on the stairwell in our dorm spit-shining his combat boots. I was leaning against the railing next to him. Not looking up at me, but rather looking for his reflection in his boot, he said, "Are you shitting me? This is a pussy outfit. This ain't nothing. This is easy."

He was so certain of this that I believed him, and I cruised through the remainder of my time in that foul Texas armpit. I was not a pussy. Maybe Miller helped me see that the Air Force had succeeded in its mission to "kill the Woman within."

And they did it by first removing the female rib from my side, then beating the living shit out of me with it.

And when the State furtively laced our chow with Jekyll's potion, our broken down best selves were indeed separated from our worst, and the Air Force kept the latter, kept the weed, not the flower; built it up, watered it with degradation, intimidation and humiliation, fertilized it with mountains upon mountains of bullshit, and our now purely masculine selves, free from desires for kindness, compassion or nurturing, were clothed in the armor of war.

That was the plan, anyway.

 

Lamar, Jesus and Hearts

When he was too young to remember this, Lamar stayed at Mrs. Bernard's house while his mom and his dad were at work.

Mrs. Bernard had a round white face with a disappointed mouth, big green eyes and surprised eyebrows. She rarely smiled. Everything had pretty much worked out the way she hoped, but she certainly had nothing to sing and dance about. She didn't seem to think so anyway.

Her hair was pulled back in a bun, and one time she scared the living daylights out of Lamar when she pulled out a couple of bobby pins and put them between her lips, allowing her hair to tumble Rapunzel-like down past her back.

She had no toys because her daughter, Thelma, was 17 and no longer needed them. Thelma was very tall, taller than Lamar’s daddy, and she had short blonde hair and wore all the Fifties stuff (but not all at the same time): poodle skirts, pedal-pushers, bobby socks, saddle oxfords, and the rest.

Thelma's hair style

Mrs. Bernard also had no television -- hardly anyone did in that neck of the woods -- so Lamar's entertainment was a radio that faithfully delivered country church sermons, weather reports, and big-band music from the 1940s.


When she wanted Lamar to take a nap, she would sing him to sleep in her squeaking rocking chair. She sang hymns and lullabies.

As he grew drowsy, he would gaze through drooping lids at the pictures on her wall. Most of them were of her family, one of which was Mrs. Bernard's grandfather when he was a Confederate soldier. 

Staring blankly at the camera, the soldier didn't seem to have any feelings one way or the other.

Next to the soldier was a picture of someone Lamar recognized as Jesus from the fans everyone used in the air-conditionless Baptist church he went to. Jesus on the front, insurance advertisements on the back, the fan stapled to an oversized Popsicle stick.

But this Jesus was different. On his chest was a reddish object with thorns around it and light rays shooting out of it.

Lamar asked Mrs. Bernard what that thing on Jesus' chest was. "That's his heart," she whispered.

"Why can we see it?"

Mrs. Bernard was silent for a moment, then changed the subject.

"You know, the Bible tells us that Jesus stands at the door and knocks, and if we open the door he will come in. And that door is our heart."

"Jesus knocks on our heart?"

"Yes. Now go to sleep."

He became fascinated with that picture. He stared at it the way a dog stares at his owner when he doesn't understand what’s being asked of him.

Lamar kept trying to solve it. “Why can I see his heart? Does my heart look like that? Why is there barbed wire on his heart?”

He put his hand on his chest and he could feel his heart beating, but he kept his eyes on Jesus’s chest with His heart showing. That was sort of scary.

One day, Lamar wanted to go for a walk, so Mrs. Bernard let him out the back door where her yard quickly turned into a pine forest.

"Go on out and play awhile, and just holler if you need me," she said.

He walked out into the woods, treading quietly on the soft pine straw which soon gave way to underbrush, some of it as tall as Lamar. He walked a little longer, looking for blackberry bushes. He knew to be careful picking the berries, or the thorns would scratch him and hurt like heck.

When he looked back, Mrs. Bernard’s house had grown smaller and he felt that familiar combination of fear, guilt and excitement that always descended on him when he came close to crossing over the boundaries set by grownups.

He walked a little farther anyway. Something in the brush rustled.

When it rustled a second time, Lamar turned around and started walking back to the house.

Then he heard a rustle and a grunt. He felt a chill settle on his head and neck. He walked faster, but Mrs. Bernard's house stubbornly refused to get closer.

The grunt became a snort, and the rustling stopped. Lamar looked over his shoulder.

It was a pig. A dang big pig. And he was coming for Lamar, and, as he had done so many times in dreams, he ran for his life, hollering as he ran.

Mrs. Bernard rushed out the back door, raced her lumpy old body out to meet him, then pulled the sobbing child into her arms and shooed the pig away.

That pig musta been at least this big, maybe bigger.

Between sobs, Lamar could hear his heart beating, but this time it seemed to be in his head, thud-thudding in his ears. His heart had changed places.

Soon Mrs. Bernard was rocking him in her chair, rocking and humming, trying to calm him down. "There, there, it's okay, Lamar. Bless your heart, sweetie, bless your heart. Don't be afraid. It's all right. That pig wasn't gonna hurt you. He probably was just playing with you."

The rocking, her soft voice, her big arms holding him all snuggly next to her old-woman breast . . . it helped. He would not be killed and eaten, not this time. Rocking, he could hear her heartbeat blending with the chair’s rhythmic squeaking.

He heard the school bus pull up. Lovely Thelma bounced into the house, then shushed herself when she saw her mother rocking Lamar. He looked up at her. She was so beautiful, and that helped, too.

Almost immediately, his mom came to pick him up, and Mrs. Bernard walked her into the kitchen and told her the pig story. 

Lamar stayed in the living room by himself, stayed seated in the rocker and studied the Jesus picture.

Jesus’s heart remained outside his shirt, for everyone to see. Beating. Beating faster when he was scared, probably.

His visible heart, crowned by thorns, just beating and beating.

My Chucks History

In the 1940s, all the cool basketball players wore black high-top U.S. Keds. In the 1950s, black Keds went out of style, and all the cool basketball players wore white high-top Keds.

Only girls wore low top sneakers. Also, sneakers were called tennis shoes back then.

U.S. Keds in the old days

I wore white high-top Keds when I played basketball in the 7th grade in 1962.

In 1963, our coach Mack Primm walked into the gym just before practice with a big bag under his arm, and he said, "Boys, I wanna show you something."

Bag  rustles, we lean forward, Coach Primm pulls out a shoe box. So what?

He takes out a pair of white high-top Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars. "Take a look at these shoes, fellows," he said. "I want these to be the Pinetta Indians' team shoe. They cost $6.75, so try and get me the money as soon as possible because I gotta order them."

Then he pulled out some off-white socks that had elastic on the top, but nowhere else, meaning they tended to droop and buckle. They cost fifty cents each.

The kind of Keds I wore

I went home and told my dad about the Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars (it would be decades before they were called "Chucks) and the floppy socks. He laughed at the idea of spending $6.75 on tennis shoes, but agreed to pay for one pair of the baggy socks. 

I begged Mama Joyce for Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars, and she said "We can't afford that, but let's go to Cohn's and see if we can kind some tennis shoes that look like them."

Cohn's was sort of like a dollar store. It was full of Japanese made cheap stuff for poor people. Back then "Made in Japan" was a joke meaning cheaply made crap that will fall apart in no time. Who knew they would wind up making Lexuses?!

We found some white high tops with a brand name I never heard of, but they looked a little like Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars, so I was like, "Well okay." They cost $2.40.

A few weeks later the soles started to come off, so my dad agreed to fund a purchase of duct tape to bring the shoes' soles and bodies back together.

In the 9th grade, I bought a pair of Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars with money I made working in tobacco. That was the year I set a Pinetta Indian record for most points in a junior varsity game, 26. I was really good at drawing fouls, and in that game I made 14 out of 16 freethrows, and I scored seven points in overtime to help us win.

I'm still so proud of that I'm willing to interrupt an otherwise interesting story about Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars.

By the time I started college -- 1968 -- the Boston Celtics had gone back to black Chuck Taylors and they were low tops. Boy, did they look cool. And, boy, did it make it okay for guys to wear them, not just when playing basketball, but when we walked across campus holding our textbooks. Girls still didn't wear them, by the way.

Celtics' Sam Jones in Chucks

I knew how cool I looked with my low-top Chuck Taylors and Levi jeans. So easy to be fashionable. 

And so fun to have a wardrobe that cried out, "I am not a grownup. I have no serious obligations. I obey no clock. I am young and growing in knowledge. I have no pains in my joints, nor do I limp, nor will I in the foreseeable future. I love you, Chuck Taylors and jeans, and all that you stand for!" 

So was it any surprise that my first purchase after retiring from roughly 35 years of teaching was a pair of black Chucks?  

They're my Lucky Charms without the milk. They are my talispersons. As long as my soles are young, my body will follow. 

Beatty's Cage

A high-school incident either transformed me into someone else or revealed my real self. I'll never know which.

Beatty (as I will call him) was a junior at Madison High School. He lived just east of town on the main drag, Highway 90, just past a dying shopping plaza, once home to Setzer's grocery store, a bakery and a bowling alley. Beatty's neighborhood was made up of dilapidated wood-frame houses turned gray from age. 

They couldn't possibly have had indoor plumbing. Some had crooked, jury-rigged TV antennas, giving license to the more fortunate passers-by to cough up the old saw, "They ain't got a pot to piss in, but they sure got to have them some TV."

Beatty walked to and from school, typically wearing an old short-sleeved, threadbare shirt that was too small for him and missing a button or two, and a pair of dark greenish work pants that were too large, kept up by a tightly knotted rope. 

He never wore jeans, and apparently owned only two pairs of work pants and no more than three shirts. He wore the same scuffed and weathered loafers every day and never appeared freshly showered or right out of the bath.

He was in my English class and it was hard for me to keep my eyes off him. He sat next to the wall and would often lean his large, narrow head against it while he pondered God knows what. He always had a pencil in his hand and another perched behind his left ear. 

He kept an old-styled zip-up, fake-leather notebook open on his desk, and when Ol' Lady Faught (our teacher) said something he deemed significant, he'd write it down, or write something, anyway.

Beatty conducted himself like a scholar. Quiet and respectful in class, he always appeared thoughtful and engaged and he carried a load of textbooks with him on his daily pilgrimage to and from Shanty Row. He resembled "the Studious Young Man" as if he were playing the role of one. This is not the kind of company most high-school kids seek. 

So yes, he kept to himself, because all the other students kept away from him.

One of the few things I ever heard him say was "No, ma'am," in a flat, bass voice, when Ol' Lady Faught asked him if he had done his homework or if he could answer a question. He hardly ever turned in anything. I once saw a quiz he had taken, and the paper seemed to have been wadded up before its use, his writing, in smudged pencil markings, tiny and illegible.

He made all F's, with perhaps a mercy D tossed in occasionally from a generous teacher. His scholarly persona was pure theater, but why choose such an unappealing role? 

So, even though he was a muscular young man -- I'd guess 5'11, 180 pounds -- he was a prime victim of bullying.

And he was black. And it was Madison High's second year of integration. And he was segregated from both blacks and whites.

One day after Phys. Ed., the last class of the day, he was in the locker-room changing back into his grubby wardrobe. He was by himself in a small enclave of lockers with a lockable gate. It resembled a jail cell.

Some kids decided to make it one. They locked him in. One of them scribbled on a sheet of notebook paper "DO NOT FEED THE MONKEY" and taped it to Beatty's cell. 

The alpha punk howled for his henchmen, and they gathered round him, making ape calls and monkey screams. Some threw playground balls and wadded paper against the gate.

Beatty said nothing. He looked at them with neither surprise nor outrage. His eyes said "I see you," that is all.

I would like to lie and say I heard about this outrage second hand, but I was there when it happened, the middle part of it anyway. I didn't see them lock him in and I do not how he escaped. 

I was sickened by it, literally. I felt lost, like I had fallen into a bad movie. Of course, I didn't participate, because I wasn't friends with this particular pack of rabid hyenas, and I wasn't friends with Beatty -- no one was. I was just a bystander, doing nothing about his misery.

But Beatty's public humiliation did something about me. 

I witnessed firsthand prejudice, difference and fear commingled to form an elixir of cruelty, and that elixir's shelf life extended by cowardice. I saw who we are.

The last time I saw Beatty, I was sitting on the porch swing of our ratty little rental on Marion St., less than a block from MHS. It was the last day of school, and Beatty was trudging past the house on his long, long walk back home.

A classmate, riding his new firetruck red scooter, pulled up next to Beatty, stopped, and leaned toward him with one foot on the ground, the engine still running. Time for a chat.

"Go home, nigger," he said, "and don't come back next year."

Beatty pivoted slowly toward the shit-head and said, like a young James Earl Jones, "Oh, I'll BE back."

Had this been a bad movie, I would've broken character, been brave, leapt off my porch, run out to the road and spoken the truth: "God, I am so sorry, Beatty. I hate them, too."

Instead, I sat on the swing and watched him walk back to Shanty Town, the fumes of that fucking scooter still in his nose. 

Santa in the Cotton Field

I was just leaving Starbucks as the sun was rising this morning, and some woman I'd never seen before walked up to me, handed me a card, said "Merry Christmas" with no exclamation point, then walked away. It was a $10 Starbucks gift card.

And I remembered what Christmas was about. 

And I remembered a Christmas I had one July in the early Sixties.

On a scorching hot day, I was pulling weeds in a cotton field for my dad's best friend, M.C. Herring. I was part of a crew of workers, all of them older than me. M.C.'s son Jerry was there, and a couple of dudes I'll call Tommy and LeRoy.

We worked on our hands and knees in that hot, soft, Florida soil, essentially crawling from one cotton plant to the next, yanking the weeds from the dirt and tossing them over our shoulders.

Even as young bloods, when we stood up, our aching knees and backs made us feel like old people.

For most of the morning, my group stayed in a cluster and fought off the heat by shooting the bull and telling jokes. Idle chatter proved an effective distraction from the heat, and it sort of broke the charm for someone to mention, even casually, that “it’s hotter’n hell out here.” 

It seemed like if we didn't think about it, it couldn't hurt us.

We were having a reasonably good time until Tommy started talking about what he’d brought for lunch. He stood up, put his hands on his lower back, and smiled meanly down at us: “Yep, it shore is gonna feel good to sit in the shade and sip on some of that lemonade mama made me.”

That pretty much broke the spell, and soon we were all talking about our lunches and about what time it was, about how much longer before Mr. Herring let us stop and about just how dadgummed hot it was out here.

We compared how wet with sweat our shirts were, and Tommy, always the best “sweater,” won easily, his entire shirt being drenched a darker shade of blue. Then we started up with stories of people who got “bear caught” in the fields, meaning they turned pale (unless they were black) and quit making sense and started seeing things that weren’t there and got dizzy and sometimes puked. There's probably a medical term for "bear caught."

After a while we got too hot to talk, so we just quietly pulled weeds and thought our private thoughts. Heat and humidity lay on us like a quilt, and the air wouldn't stir a bit. Whatever sound a root makes being yanked up out of the dirt was all we heard.

Finally, we saw Mr. Herring’s truck pull up at the edge of the field, and he came trudging across the rows. He didn't tolerate any slacking or goofing on the job, so when we saw him, we turned it up a notch, snatching at those weeds like they were trying to run away from us.

“How you boys doin’?” he asked.

“We doin’ alright,” Jerry said. “It’s gettin’ pretty hot out here, though.”

“Reckon when we can stop and eat?” Tommy asked.

Mr. Herring put his hands in his pockets and scanned the field. “Looks like you been takin’ it mighty easy already. Y’all oughta have half this field done by now. You just keep goin’, we’ll stop d’rectly.” And he left.

We went back at it, quietly again. The dirt was getting awfully hot on my hands, and sweat was dripping off my nose like snot. The sand's heat radiated through my boots. I began to fall behind.

The voice in my head started drifting off on strange, dream-like, unmarked roads. I fought off this creepiness by repeating to myself, “It can’t be that much longer. It can’t be that much longer.” The other guys finished their rows, and were about 30 yards into their next one by the time I finished mine.

I tried halfheartedly to catch up, but I couldn’t stay focused. The ground started moving under my feet like those people-movers at airports. The earth was no longer stable, and the cotton field tilted and there was no tobacco stalk to hold onto. I dropped back down on my knees and tugged at some weeds.

I looked up, and Mr. Herring was back, talking to the guys way up ahead of me. When he left, I walked over to get the news: “He said 30 more minutes,” Jerry told me. Well, we weren’t stupid, so we slowed down a bit, I more than the others, because we knew those 30 minutes would end whether we worked hard or not. Thirty minutes. That ain't nothing.

I was hungry and then I wasn't and then I was again. A ham sammich and a glass of ice tea were waiting on me. Couldn’t be more than 20 minutes now.

Maybe 15 minutes left, and I be danged if Mr. Herring doesn’t come back again. This time he walks up to me first: “Just finish this row, and we’ll go get dinner,” and he walks off and tells the others. I watch him tell them. Then I watch them tap into their energy reserves and start racing toward the end of the rows.

I, however, have no energy reserve, and I stare down at my row with despair and disbelief.

This is not gonna be possible. My heaving chest warns of an onset of unmanly crying – something that had never happened to me in the fields and never would again. I bitterly yank a few weeds while the sweat runs into my eyes, and I start feeling trembly and nauseated and I picture an actual bear, a grizzly, catching someone, and my face feels flushed and feverish, and I have a long, long way to go, and I know I’m not gonna make it.

When the older guys finish their rows, I can see them grabbing their Styrofoam water jugs and heading for the shade, but I can’t see the end of my row. The dang thing gets longer every time I look at it.

Maybe 20 rows away from me, I see an old black man rise up off his knees and put his hands on his aching back. I recognize him as Joe Williams, Mr. Herring’s right-hand man.

Joe was a hardworking, gentle, enduring man of decency, and he didn't seem to give a crap if you were black or white.

He looked like a leaner, reed-legged version of Morgan Freeman. I wish there were an original way to say “he always had a twinkle in his eye,” because he really did. He was always smiling but with a smile that had a kind of sadness to it, maybe resignation is the word.

Like he was saying, "Life's hard but we alright, just keep on at it. Can't understand everything, can't make heads or tails of it, but that's just what it's like. Mercy me, mercy, mercy. Being sad ain't gonna change nothing, being mad ain't either."

Like when you look down and shake your head and say, "Lord, Lord. Lordy me."

And, after I pull a few more pathetic tear-soaked weeds,  I see him headed my way. He goes to the end of my row and starts working his way toward me, pulling my weeds. 

He didn’t have to do that, this old guy who was probably hurting from the heat more than I was, but there he was, inspiring me to get my butt in gear and meet him halfway.

When we met, I thanked him and mumbled something like “I didn’t think I was gonna make it,” and whatever he said in response, he was smiling his Joe smile, and he was kind, and he didn't expect anything from me in return, that's not why he did it. 

He saw suffering and tried to heal it.

When he left, he patted my scrawny little back with his old black hand.

It was 95 degrees out there in the cotton field, and there was sand instead of snow, dripping sweat instead of icicles, but so what? Santa and the generous spirit of Christmas were present, clearly visible through my blurry eyes.

Tobacco, Radio and Rain

Let us now continue our agrarian saga (Google "agrarian").

How did we not go crazy during the course of a 10-hour summer day? One answer lies in an advertising jingle frequently heard on WMAF radio, Madison, Florida, coming at you with 5000 watts of power: “Take a constant companion wherever you go / Take a PORTable RAdioooo!” 

Sitting somewhere on that tobacco table was a cheap transistor radio with a crappy speaker and it was always on. Perhaps because our choices were limited, I don’t recall there ever being any argument over what to listen to. 

Transistor radio

Hardly any of us wanted to listen to the country music station from nearby Valdosta, Georgia. WMAF had nothing but junk – the gospel hour (very bad church music), a call-in swap shop ("I have a used Timex with a scratched crystal. Could somebody gimme a bird dog for that?"), a farm report about weather and the price of hogs, and the truly boring “Easy Listening with Stewart” – until 4 p.m. when “Downbeat” started, an hour and a half of rock’n’roll. 

Our most constant companion was about the only other station we could pick up: “This is the Big Ape, the Mighty 690, W-A-P-E, Jacksonville!” This was pre-FM, so we heard all our favorite songs through the crackle of static which grew worse during afternoon thunderstorms. 

Once I shifted into my rhythmic cruise control as a hander, I left the tobacco table and went wherever the songs from the Big Ape took me (not literally). I might as well have been wearing earplugs.

I heard Ray Charles sing “I Can’t Stop Loving You” God knows how many times in the course of a day, but I never tired of it, and I always sang along with it – to myself, when I couldn’t hit the notes – and I always aimed it directly at my imaginary girlfriends (it should be noted that these were actual human beings I went to school with, but who were pretty much unaware of my existence). Sing the song, children!

This was also the time of funny or novelty songs sung by Ray Stevens ("Ahab the Arab" and "Guitarzan") and Roger Miller ("Dang Me" and "Chug-a-Lug"). We memorized these songs long before they quit being funny and began to drive us insane.

As the day grew longer and hotter, sweat trickled down into our eyes, and we’d blot it with the back of our hands, the fronts being covered with black tobacco tar. We had to keep our Styrofoam water jugs handy, and drink frequently of the Styrofoam-tasting water, little bits of ice still rattling around in there at the end of the day.

Some days, Van would run into Madison and come back with a crate of cold Cokes, in those little 6.5-ounce bottles. God, those things were good. 

And some days he’d be good enough to bring a couple of watermelons from his fields, and we’d stop working long enough to bury our faces in their sweetness, and the juice would be steady running down our chins.

Other days, we caught a nature break when a thunderstorm would chase the croppers in from the field, and we’d all huddle under the awning or inside the barn and swap stories about people getting struck by lightning.

For me, these yarns triggered a special kind of terror. When I was just a wee thing, hardly a toddler, I was leaning against the railing of a baby bed during a particularly vicious thunderstorm. When lightning hit a tree just a few feet from the house, I was jettisoned, by fear combined with a desire to fly, out of the baby bed and onto the floor, head first.

Since this was before infants were required to wear crash-helmets and flack-jackets to bed, I was knocked senseless, and, not only did I never quite recover, but I was cursed with a lifelong fear of lightning, as if it were the number-one weather-related killer in Florida.*

I "jumped" out of one of these.

So when one of those storms visited the tobacco fields (and they inevitably did), I grew a bit uncomfortable. I was left to pray to the good Lord that if someone must be struck dead, please let it be someone else, say, that one guy who'd been getting on my nerves a lot lately by singing those funny songs that we were all sick of.

Anyway, when the roar of the rain on the barn’s tin roof dwindled to a dibble-dop and the thunder faded into off and on grumblings in the distance, we emerged from the shelter, and the weary croppers climbed into the sleds and were dragged back into the now muddy fields.

Before the storm began, their clothes had been drenched in sweat and lay heavily on their skin. Now they were about to be saturated by the rain-soaked tobacco leaves, and their grimy, muddy jeans would be drooping halfway down their butts during the day’s long final hours.

Those wet tobacco leaves often gave me nicotine poisoning, by the way, but I don't have the stomach to tell you about that right now.

While we wait for the field of streams to dry out, I'll work on some brief tales of my career in cropping. 

*It is.

Child Labor

I imagine when people walk by me on the streets of Oviedo, they say to themselves, "Uuuuuuu, look at Mr. Fancy Pants, look at Mr. Smarty Pants, Mr. Bookworm, Mr. Know-It-All! What a skinny old guy, probably a delicate precious little snowflake. Uuuuu, take care of the earth, give money to lazy poor people! Ol' Mr. Socialist who's never done a lick of hard work in his life. Always had his nose in a book! Mommy did everything for him! Everything given to him on a silver spoon! Born with a golden platter on his head! Probably going somewhere for a cup of tea and a kale sandwich! No wait, I meant 'born with a silver spoon in his mouth,' but anyway my point is well taken!"

These imaginary people are partly right, but not about work!

I had my first paying job when I was 8. The back part of our old house was used by a black sharecropper (Google "sharecropper") as a place to take cooked (also called "cured") tobacco off the stick, then arrange it in doughnut-shaped piles and tie it up in a huge sheet before tossing it on the back of a truck to be taken to Madison where tobacco companies would buy it. 

The black sharecropper was Nat Thomas (called Nay-THAHN by his wife Lula), and he sharecropped with Granddaddy, and the tobacco in my house came freshly cooked from the barn across the road. 

Cooked or cured tobacco

That same barn burnt down twice in a period of about eight years. (Once when the barn burnt, my dad was working on the transmission of our pathetic yellow English Ford Consul when the fire broke out and, even with a bad back, he picked up the transmission and rushed it across the road to safety as if he were carrying an endangered and very heavy baby.)

Nat did not have a cell phone or any other kind of phone, so someone had to drive up to his house and tell him his barn burnt down or wait for him to drive over and see it for himself.

One summer day I was hanging around in the back of the house talking to Lula, a short, thin woman who had the coloring of movie Indians, always in a straw hat and a loose fitting dress. I saw some of the stuff she was doing, so I started doing it because, I don’t know, I liked to feel productive: things like sweeping up loose pieces of tobacco leaves or handing her the next stick of tobacco to de-string. I must have done this all afternoon, so when Nat came by to pick her up, she took on over (i.e., exaggerated) what a big help I’d been to her. 

Nat was a huge man, with a broad face, high cheek bones, piercing dark-yellow eyes, with a wide mouth and big lips that stretched practically across his entire face. After Lula bragged on me, he cocked his head and said, “Sho nuff?” Then he fished around in the pockets of his khaki work pants and handed me a fifty-cent piece. “Here’s ya some money to buy ya some can’y wit.”

So in 1958, a black man who kept his tobacco in the back of my house gave me my first salary. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t allowed to buy “can’y” wit it.

Not long after that, working in tobacco became a real job.

One day, perhaps a year or so later, our neighbor Van Hinton dropped by and was talking about his tobacco crop, and my eyes lit up. My mom said to Van, “This one thinks he’d like to work in tobacco, but I expect he’d change his tune pretty quick if he ever got out in the fields.” 

Van said he had room for a couple more in his crew if my sister Martha and I wanted to try it. Well, I thought this was the greatest thing ever, as I always do when I hear something I interpret as being good news involving me. My heart leapt up.

Me, working in tobacco! I could already envision my little arms become brawny and tan, the hair darkened by tobacco tar, a straw hat with a John Wayne tilt, and some of those cool brogan work boots farmers always wore, and my own water jug and everything! And I could pack a lunch! And get up before daylight! Oh God, this was just absolutely too rich!

When tobacco harvesting season finally came round in June, Mama Joyce woke Martha and me at about 5 a.m. and we put on our most worn-out clothes, tried to force down a bowl of Cheerios, and walked with her the half mile up the road to Van’s tobacco barn, and my career began in earnest.

On the way to Van’s, Mama gave me some advice she’d repeat many times over the years: “Remember: The boss is always right. Earn your money. Put in a full day’s work. Act like somebody.” 

Van said he would start us out at $3 a day, and if we worked out okay, he’d give us a raise to $4. My mom, who had worked in tobacco back in the day, was lucky enough to start out at $5 a day.

Mule pulling tobacco sled

Martha and I were handers which means we handed leaves of tobacco to someone who tied them to a stick. My mom was our stringer and she was lightning quick.

 
If we didn’t get the stuff to her hands in time, she’d be snapping her fingers. “Come on, now, get it to me! They ’bout to bring in another load.”

At first, of course, we looked like a couple of idiots, actually counting the leaves, arranging them neatly in our hands, then holding the cluster somewhere in the general vicinity of Mama Joyce. That changed quickly. 

After a while, we learned how the right amount felt in our hands – say, four small leaves or three regular leaves or two large leaves with one small one – and we were able to pounce on them, then stylishly slap the leaves against our thighs as we passed them back to Mama Joyce. We got that rhythm going: grab, slap, hand off to Mama, who, always a knot of intensity, would snatch them from our hands while she chomped on and popped her Juicy Fruit chewing gum. She still wasn't 94 years old.

Tobacco in the field

More than anything, we wanted the grownups, especially Van, to refer to us as “good workers.” No one wanted to be called “lazy” or “dreamy” or “half-assed,” or, worst of all, “sorry.” 

We knew if we pleased Van, we could soon be making $4 a day, and I knew that if I made a good impression by good naturedly doing everything he asked me to, quickly and correctly, I could be promoted to cropper (croppers picked the ripe leaves off their stalks) and get to hang out with the big boys in the field -- better yet, I could be one of the big boys.

Becoming a cropper was a country boy's rite of passage, allowing him to take another step up the ladder of manhood. No guy wanted to be a hander for long, or he would be called a sissy. No guy ever wanted to be a stringer: Even though it was strenuous and stressful work, that job was just for women.

These were wonderful days, but sometimes they were too long. By the time we actually started working, it was daylight. It got hot in a hurry; we kept a thermometer under the barn’s awning and we’d watch it crawl up toward 100 degrees day after day. We only got breaks if we happened to finish a table full of tobacco before the next sled came in. That rarely happened.

“Dinner” was at noon. When I worked for Van, we all just found a shade and ate our sammiches. I usually had two: a baloney sammich and a PBJ made with Welch's Concord Grape Jelly. 

Other favorites were Vienna sausages, sardines, and banana sammiches (recipe: bread, banana slices and mayonnaise). For dessert, one guy always brought a honey bun he bought at Hanson's general store, and I always craved it. Van’s wife Elizabeth, also my third-grade teacher, brought us sweet iced tea to wash down our food.

After we ate, just as we began to feel the sweet urge to nap, it was back to the fields, and sometimes we didn’t stop until it was too dark to see, and workers would say stuff like this:

“Somebody ax Mr. Hinton when quittin’ time.”

“Tommy Lee done axed him. He say at least two more sleds, so y’all might as well get yo’ mines off goin’ home."

Let's stop here for now, so y'all might as well get yo' mines off readin'!