in the same country, shepherds abiding in the field, . . . And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were sore afraid.”
The majestic language of the original King James translation awakens a cluster of powerful feelings of home, family, happy times during the delightful irresponsibility of childhood. Modern versions, which substitute “strips of cloth” for the magical “swaddling clothes” and the shepherds were “frightened” for “sore afraid,” trigger no emotion but regret. Mystery has been robbed to achieve a too-familiar accessibility. Important traditions are not improved by modern-day tinkering. It’s the faith of my father, King James, for me, and I never found any version of Dickens’s classic quite as satisfying as those old, scratchy recordings. I can’t explain why those Christmas Eves rank in my memory above the exquisite torture of the following morning’s anticipation—Dad’s interminable breakfast—which kept us from the treasures under the tree in the library.
Nostalgia plays funny tricks but it must know what it is doing. Its authority cannot be disputed
Turning twelve and entering sixth grade was a milestone. It meant leaving the familiar habitat of Woodstock School. My all-white grammar school was a place of happy memories, minor disappointments, and one great crime. Heroism and celebrity were near-misses in those years. I had a chance to score a touchdown during recess tackle football games—a signal achievement for a slow, chubby boy who was not a favorite receiver—but Jimmy Hannon’s bullet hit me in the mouth and I dropped the ball. Neither did I get the coveted appointment as captain of the Safety Patrol—the white cap and belt with the silver and blue badge—opening car doors as they delivered children at school and, grandly stopping tenth Street traffic for students crossing. I was merely fire chief, with a red cap and belt and red-rimmed badge.
Woodstock was also the setting for my brief and inept criminal career. The summer after graduation from Woodstock, Tommy Butler, Ronnie Hicks, and I were camping out in an army tent in the side yard. We relieved the boredom by egging neighbors’ houses—not very cleverly leaving my house untouched. Next, we targeted the school. We crouched behind a row of hedges separating the west side of the building from a rocky, unpaved alley where ammunition was plentiful, smooth throwing stones. Among the most delicious moments of childhood is that instant after launch when you wait to hear if your missile hit brick—or, ahhhhh, glass! Bold and invisible in the dark, we moved closer, concentrating fire on the office of the feared principal, Miss Meigs. She used switches on malefactors and always held a handkerchief in her hand—to cover a missing finger, clear evidence of sinister doings. Suddenly, a light flashed around the north side of the school. Like two dumb, frightened deer—one skinny, the other chubby—Tommy and I fled due south, up a rise where, at the front of the school, we were stabbed by a constellation of lights. We froze, while Ronnie smartly veered off to the west and escaped. The cops took Tommy and me to the station and put us in a cell while they made the fateful calls to our parents. Elise was at home and described the scene. Mother took the call, heard the news, and dramatically held the phone out to Dad, “Harry, your son is in prison!” Dad’s recommendation was to leave me there, which meant the police had to take me home. Among the physical and financial punishments that resulted was an audience with the Mayor Himself, the Honorable Ed Banks. Worse, Dad ordered our misdeeds exposed in the paper, which meant everybody in town, peeking through their blinds, spied Public Enemy Number One as he trudged remorsefully around town, bent under the weight of Cain’s crimes.
Sweeter memories of Woodstock begin at the beginning, when I fell in love with my first-grade teacher, Margaret Griffis. Miss Griffis was also our “Miss Manners,” teaching children the distinction between “excuse me” and “I beg your pardon.” “Excuse me,” is appropriate for a trivial offense such as brushing against someone. But for serious breaches of etiquette (her example, knocking a lady’s sable coat to the floor) “I beg your pardon,” is required—as in begging clemency from a king. She was not out of touch with the seamier side of life, but viewed it with droll worldliness. When a prostitute claimed a candidate for lieutenant governor had tied her up and done unspeakable things with her, Miss Griffis observed, “If that gul did all of the things she is supposed to have done, Ah think she sold herself too cheaply.”
My feelings for her didn’t achieve closure until the fall of 1998, when the still-slim and still-beautiful Margaret, in a white silk dress and spiked heels, had a birthday party. For herself. To celebrate her ninetieth birthday. In my toast, I invited the guests to go back with me fifty years and look in on Miss Griffis’s first grade class. The children were bent to their task—copying the alphabet, making vowels with great oval swoops—all but one boy. So smitten was he by the beauty of his teacher, he could do little but stare. That Christmas, his mother suggested cologne for the teacher. The boy protested, “Mother, that’s not good enough for Miss Griffis. We should give her an evening dress.” The mother prevailed, of course. I was that little boy, and the oversight so many Christmases ago had been a burden on my conscience—until her party—where, to her delighted astonishment, I whipped out a fire-engine-red sequined number. With tassels. Would she wear it? A friend asked her that and she gave a revealing reply, “Oh, it’s much too tight.”
She died in 2006, an original and, in our informal, unceremonial contemporary society, an unrepeatable heirloom—with just a dash of flirtatious devilment.
Inevitably, the day came when all twelve-year-old boys and girls were launched from their grammar schools and met in a war of the planets: eastside vs. westside, Venus vs. Mars. We were all white, but we had been formed by life into two separate and incompatible worlds. We eastsiders had been coddled and sheltered by the more spacious incomes of our parents. The westside kids had been toughened, made streetwise by growing up in blue-collar neighborhoods. One of the friendlier westside girls shocked me with an admission that seemed commonplace to her. The family would take Sunday sightseeing drives to Glenwood Terrace and other neighborhoods on my side of town: to see how the “rich” people lived.
Not all the westside boys were friendly. One of the tough ones roared back to life for me in the summer of 2000 when the Atlanta Braves’ ace reliever, John Rocker, launched some wild verbal pitches, sounding off about New York’s “foreigners,” “queers,” and welfare mothers. Rocker was for me a junior-high terror come to life. I recognized in him the feral breed. He drove a battered pickup on reckless Saturday nights up to and over the edge of danger. In his blood, a six-pack mingled with the genes of wild Celtic ancestors. He was a descendant of fearless Highland warriors, Irish rebels, Viking plunderers and lonely Southern pioneers pushing back the wilderness in solitary sorties—a familiar Southern type, a redneck. Anybody who grew up in the small-town South knows a John Rocker. I first met him in junior high school where boys from the “right” side of the tracks merged with their scary classmates from the “other” side. He was the tallest, most muscular, and scariest of them all. He knew the unprintable names of certain parts of the female anatomy and spoke them in a way that suggested he might actually have explored those secret, unattainable kingdoms. He was an object of fear and admiration.
In the universe of junior high and high school, he was Braveheart, with a mean streak, whom no paddling principal could tame and bring to heel. His independence was crafted by earlier generations that, in contrast with the westward exploration of Easterners in communal wagon trains, wrested the land from the wilderness as lonely, single pioneers. W. J. Cash in his classic Mind of the South wrote, “He had much in common with the half-wild Scotch and Irish clansmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries whose blood he so often shared . . .” A history he didn’t know or understand formed the John Rocker of my junior high: athlete, lover, king of his adolescent universe.
From an unlikely source, former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, came a tolerant understanding of how a small-town Southern tough felt on being stranded in an alien land—the sophisticated, urban, multi-ethnic planet upon which he had landed. When the two met, Young knew what it was like for Rocker to have exploded from a Macon neighborhood onto the national stage. In so many words, Young said that Rocker was an innocent
