stopped at the main downtown intersection of 10th and Noble streets, where the elegant old Opera House had become the Noble Theater, venue for Roy Rogers cowboy movies and Batman serials. Riveted by the good-guy, shoot-em-up action of Roy and his horse Trigger, and by Batman’s weekly escapes from near death, we did not notice that the once-elegant Opera House, where Shakespeare had been performed, was now a derelict old lady, her velvet dirty, her ceiling murals caked with dust, her gilt cracked—genteel poverty at its most abject, vulnerable to the cocky, tasteless New South real estate economy soon to destroy her. She would be dismantled to make room for a furniture store—later closed. But in boyhood days, the Noble was the first of four downtown theaters with the Cameo, the Calhoun and the Ritz, one-to-a-block that lined the west side of Noble Street.
All are now erased, but then the Noble was the branch-head of the stream of ceremonial Saturdays in the happy, opaque, all-white world where we grew up. Every Saturday, as we exited the cooler darkness of the un-air-conditioned Noble Theater into the bright humidity of Noble Street, we speculated excitedly about Batman’s fate. Then we might get a cherry Coke at Wikles or Scarborough drug stores, but a necessary part of the ritual was to walk the two blocks up tenth Street to view the treasures of Carnegie Library. The library then housed the Regar Collection, beautifully mounted native birds in their natural habitat. A favorite was the steely-eyed eagle, its noble head capped in white, perched high on a limestone outcropping. In its claw was a lamb, a realistic drop of blood on the little animal’s white fur. Next, we mounted the stairs to the balcony to stare at the case with the Ptolemaic Period mummy, its colored wrapping faded by the centuries. But underneath, we knew, was the deadness—a dark, scary concept, beyond our imagination or experience. We regarded the dead Egyptian woman with silent respect.
There was one delicious year during construction of Memorial Hospital that the walk home took us by irresistible cliffs and valleys of red dirt. On dry days, conditions were just right for painless dirt-ball combat. Painless because the red clods crumbled when they struck. The year of the great mud-ball civil war, however, was real combat, with real casualties. The eastside was divided into two rival armies of boys, one defending in the woods above Governor Kilby’s house. When the invaders approached our roofless log fort, commanded by the governor’s grandson, George Kilby, I at first threw mud balls fearlessly—until one struck me in the chest. From that moment on, I was a cautious soldier. The battle was a formless affair, boys running through the woods tossing and ducking mud balls with high anxiety, as if there were real danger. Our side caught and briefly imprisoned a few invaders in the pool house but there were no real victors or losers; just boys excited by imagining we were real soldiers.
Casualties of similar skirmishes today might still face the unpleasantness of the Saturday bath, but their battle-soiled clothes would be dropped in the washing machine. Back then, dirty clothes were collected and taken to Jensie’s house in the Southside colored neighborhood. In her backyard was a giant black iron pot where the clothes were boiled (perhaps, I imagined, while Jensie uttered black-magic incantations as she stirred). Within the week, they would reappear, starched and folded in a wicker basket and giving off a neutral scent, the smell of clean. Jensie’s house was one of the stops on the Christmas delivery route, too. Mother insisted I deliver her present personally, which I did awkwardly, not knowing what to say to an older person who was owed respect but who also had to endure the humiliation of washing other people’s clothes. She always greeted me warmly, with self-confidence rooted in the belief that the service she performed was not demeaning but a way to make a few extra dollars.
A real war came to us mud-war veterans on the radio with the shocking news that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. The most immediate and visible sign of threat to me was Dad on Civil Patrol with a World War I helmet a size too small and a flashlight as long as my six-year-old torso. The blackout—shades lowered and no outside lights—lasted only a few days. Adults concluded that the Japanese weren’t going to bomb Anniston. Ritual summer Saturdays and the winter walks to Woodstock School, hated corduroy knickers marking time—swish, swish, swish, swish, swish—rolled on with little sense that people were actually killing each other way over there in Europe and Asia, wherever those distant galaxies were. One summer during the war, when I had been sent off to Camp Yananoka in North Carolina, Mother committed a famous malapropism. Chatting cheerily on the phone with a friend, she said, “Oh, yes, Brandy’s having a wonderful time—canoeing, riding horseback. Where? Okinawa.” The friend was puzzled and horrified.
Those great and terrible years when the world was on fire, when American heroes were white knights in khaki pushing back the evil hordes, Nazis and Japs, are compressed in child-time. The war years are a cadenza of memories: my victory garden that yielded only radishes, war bonds in Christmas stockings, “America the Beautiful” sung joyously off-key in the Woodstock School cafetorium; Mother playing “There’ll Always Be an England” with anthem solemnity on the baby grand in our living room; the “essential occupation” gas rationing stamps on Dad’s Chevrolet; playing French Resistance fighters with George in the fields behind the governor’s house; pictures I drew of P-50 Mustangs with grinning shark’s teeth on their noses and of GIs mowing down Nazis. All these and the Movietone newsreels narrated by a doomsday bass are the ways a boy remembered a war that didn’t touch his family directly—minutia interrupted by two dramatic jolts and the first smack of cynicism to adolescent idealism.
The first shock came when Marian Huey and I were doing something that might have earned us a spanking if we’d been caught. We’d sneaked into Mr. Acker’s car to listen to music on the radio—not to deliberately run down his battery, but that could well have been the result, which would have brought with it the consequence favored in that time. Those were the days when spanking was as American and Southern as fried chicken on Sundays. Marian usually had it a little worse than I did judging from the sounds of her yells and her mother’s smacks ringing from the pre-air conditioning open windows at the corner of Glenwood and Highland. Mother gave me a few light lickings and Dad’s one performance was a bit comical as he searched for a hairbrush that had not been used for its original purpose in decades. On this occasion, however, it wasn’t corporal but God’s punishment we got. We had scarcely taxed Mr. Acker’s battery when the music was interrupted to announce . . . president roosevelt is dead! It was as devastating as if a parent had died. He had literally been father to the country, the only national father we children had known, who drew even Dad and Mother to the sound of his voice coming from Dad’s old shortwave radio by his red leather chair in the library.
Less than four months later, I was at my good friend Lloyd Brinkley’s house across the alley, a second home, when the second surprise shook our world. Lloyd’s father, Bill Brinkley, was managing editor of the Star and, because of our dads’ occupations, Lloyd and I had passes to all the Anniston Rams home baseball games. We were allowed to climb the wooden ladder, straight up on top of the bleachers, and lie on our stomachs right under the radio booth and behind the screen, where we would involuntarily reach for an occasional foul ball inches away. Heedless of our station as children of privilege in that all-white cocoon long ago, from our perch under the WHMA announcers, we were fascinated by “Cotton” Hill’s curve balls and hump-backed sinkers.
Evidently, Lloyd’s dad made just enough at the Star—about $100 a week—to support his wife, Ida Lee, two sons and a daughter. The Brinkley kitchen did not have a refrigerator. It had an icebox, whose top compartment held a block of ice, delivered weekly by a muscular man wielding a large pair of iron tongs. There was a wide income and power gap between the two families that the adults understood but that had no meaning to their pre-teenaged children. I looked up to Lloyd, a year older and adolescent handsome, with slicked-back dark hair, whom the girls called “Id’n” (for idn’t he cute. I would have done anything short of treason to be called “Id’n.”) Mrs. Brinkley seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of sandwiches for Lloyd and me, the boss’s son. It was on her screened back porch one morning in early August when the voice on the ubiquitous radio announced in sepulchral tones that a “device” of indescribable destructive force had been dropped on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. (Many years later pictures in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum portrayed for me the instant of horror and the piteous aftereffects,
