plums with Anna Laurie was something I had done for several years, but this was the summer I fell in love with her. I noticed myself noticing her in a different way. When she leaned over me to reach a cluster of plums, I inhaled deeply, loving the human smells of skin and sweat and something else, something not perfume but better than that, something clean and deserving of a deep breath.
This was the summer that it hit me in a decisive way that women were more beautiful than men. It was a couple more years before I noticed that girls were more beautiful than boys, but I knew that Anna Laurie was something unlike and better than anything that was male. Anna Laurie had a way of reaching forward for a bunch of plums and her blouse would loosen at the top and there would be the very top beginning of a swelling of her breasts. Her skin was the color of the chocolate milk I still preferred to white milk. It was not so much sexual desire that I experienced, but more of a dizziness, an enchantment with that very moment. To this day, if I notice damson plum jam on a grocery shelf, I can experience the identical dizziness, a desire to lose myself in the moment. Sometimes Anna Laurie would notice me looking. She would reach up and adjust the top of her blouse, all the while giving me the biggest, most wonderful smile.
One day we returned to their house and Joe asked me if I wanted to go to the movies with him on Saturday night. I knew that Joe often went into town on Saturday nights, while Anna Laurie stayed home with the children. She may have had her own night to go into town while Joe stayed with the children, but that was one of the details I didn’t bother to get straight. There was a Tom Mix cowboy movie scheduled to be shown at the Trigg Theater. Of course, there would also be a B grade movie in addition to the feature, newsreels, cartoons, previews of “coming attractions,” and perhaps a “short subject,” as they were called. I was really excited the whole next day. It seemed very grown-up to be going to a movie with a friend, instead of with parents.
Joe drove an old car purchased by my grandfather (who either didn’t or couldn’t drive), so that Joe could drive my grandfather around and run errands for him. We drove the five miles up the Burkesville Pike into Glasgow. Joe bought the two tickets at the window outside the theater, then he bought me some popcorn. Then he said something to me that still stings each time I remember it.
“Tommy, you go on in and find you a seat. After the movies are over, you come right back to this spot, right here, and I’ll be here.”
I blinked up at him. “Aren’t you going to come with me?”
Joe shook his head. “I’m going up into the balcony to find a seat with the other coloreds.”
“Can’t you sit down here with me?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “That’s just the way they do things. You go along now. Do you need to go to the bathroom first? I’ll be right here when you come out.”
He gave me a little shove and I walked into the big, dark theater. I don’t remember anything about the Tom Mix movie that night, though I could describe the plots of dozens of other Tom Mix movies. I sat there trying to figure some other things out.
Later that night, Joe was indeed waiting for me. He asked if I had had a good time and I nodded. I didn’t say a word driving home with him. There are many questions I wish I had asked him, but that night I simply sat there thinking. I had discovered that summer that the world is a strange place, filled with both some wonderful mysteries I was just beginning to explore and with some craziness I was determined to change.
4 ABYSS
THE ULTIMACY OF INSIGHT
I had been begging my father to let me look down the well at my grandmother’s farm, which we visited a couple of times a year. In the 1940s, only the first floor of the old farmhouse had electricity. We had kerosene lamps to read by in the bedrooms on the second floor. Chamber pots and an outhouse were more of a curiosity to me than an inconvenience. And water from the well was brought into the house in big buckets. We all used a shared ladle to help ourselves to a drink. It was coldest and tastiest when a fresh bucket had just been hauled up.
The well itself was a few yards from the back porch. The concrete platform was raised a foot or so off the ground and a top made from wooden planks covered the hole. A bucket would be attached to a rope and gradually lowered into the water by turning the wooden handle of the round bar that was over the hole. I watched the grownups turn the handle to lower the bucket, then turn it to raise the filled bucket. I wanted to see what it was like down there.
I don’t remember how many times I had begged to be able to look down the well. Finally, my father gripped my legs and let me rest my body on the platform. I couldn’t see anything; it was just dark. Dad let me move a few inches closer to the hole. He told me to look straight down. I still couldn’t see anything. One more inch and the instruction to straighten out my body and to look straight down. And there it was: it was round and shiny. Dad told me it was the sky reflecting up from the water. It was bright and beautiful. I couldn’t believe anything could be that far down. It was the first time I ever experienced awe.
I was informed that if I ever moved the top and did that on my own, I would get a spanking I would never forget. It took a few days before I found a good time to go back and do all that on my own.
In a very different mood, Helen Vendler discusses the attempts by the poet Emily Dickinson to define the indefinable, such as dreadful, unremitting pain. This kind of pain consumes a person’s very substance and can only be described as an abyss of pain.6
I have never endured this kind of abyssal pain, having experienced only sharp, sudden pains that were relieved within a bearable amount of time by medical intervention. However, I have spent hours over the years visiting people in pain treatment centers of hospitals and other specialized facilities. In the rooms sealed off from sound and light, I said trivial things, offered clumsy prayer, listened carefully to almost inaudible responses, and always asked if the person in the abyss wanted me to return or to leave them free of having to deal with me. Always, from the abyss, they said they wanted me to return. Even though my presence must have added to their disturbance and pain, they chose the presence over the abyss.
Today, the word “abyss” more often points to an existential emptiness, the oblivion of death or the vacuum of meaning. It is possible for us to see ourselves as surrounded by emptiness, rather than as surrounded by the presence of God.
Jorge Luis Borges writes that Blaise Pascal was perhaps the first modern human to sense the ultimate implications of the early revolutionary discoveries in astronomy. If astronomers such as Giordano Bruno were liberated by these discoveries, Pascal found the “deep space” and “deep time” that were being revealed to be frightening. The awesome space “became a labyrinth and an abyss for Pascal. He abhorred the universe and would have liked to adore God; but God, for him, was less real than the abhorred universe.”7 The human sense of an abyss or a “deep” may have originated with the sea, and continued into the implicit world-perspective of Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, but Pascal already knew that same fearful, fascinating dizziness could now also be experienced by simply looking at the sky. Perhaps for the first time, a human found himself torn between looking at the abyss in the sky and seeking after God.
Christian Wiman writes of the tension involved in exploring his recently rediscovered faith in God, while also trying to explain to himself and to others that all the doubt, all the uncertainty, and all the anxiety about his cancer, remains.8 He writes of a beginning of a poem on which he has worked: “My God my bright abyss / Into which all my longing will not go / Once more I come to the edge of all I know / And believing nothing believe
