South was not kind to my mother. It lured her with what she could never be part of, a community of women that would always be closed. I look at the pale gossamer creatures with faces never threatened with sweat; and the lonelier I become the more I understand the texture of discrimination.
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Sometime around 1963, I began to feel angry and mean. I was just 13 years old, but my mother’s friends said I looked older. My wild, tangled hair and serious demeanor made me unpopular. Whether at home or in school, I never fit in. “You’ll be left holding the bag.” My mother looked at me with eyes dead as glass and warned: if I didn’t want to “end up behind the eight-ball,” which I always heard as “ape-ball,” then “you better stop talking politics. Men don’t like that. You look like a dried prune.” I was alone except for an odd little boy who used to whisper: “I would like to know” — a long pause here — “if you would like to go” — another pause — “to the woods.” To escape the lust of ladies and a little boy’s lure, I spent my time memorizing songs from Broadway shows. Years have passed, but I still remember every song. When I think back to that time, I realize how much my life was shaped and determined by words like “I wonder what the king is doing tonight,” “Let me entertain you, let me make you smile,” “Just you wait, ‘enry ‘iggins, just you wait,” “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette, till your last dyin’ day.”
Now, sometimes driving in the heat of Nashville, I begin to sing and think how much my confusion about the difference between real life and fantasy began in those lonely afternoons in Atlanta.
Not just because of a fair lady, street gangs in New York, or a good-hearted stripper — though I liked to imitate Natalie Wood as “Gypsy Rose Lee,” not quite taking off her clothes. Most of the time I pretended to be a dying swan like Margot Fonteyn, who soared with her pale, almost transparent arms rising high and coming down like wings in Swan Lake. Once in bed, late at night, I couldn’t stop thinking about Christine Keeler and her pale long legs in the backseat of a limo. “Profumo,” my mother whispered to her friend on the phone, as she reveled in the scandal that brought disgrace on Tory cabinet minister John Profumo. “He was nearly bald,” she laughed, and “any man who looked like that got what he deserved.” For the next few months, amid their drinks and laughter, I heard my mother and her friends talk about Keeler, as if she had once been their dear friend, a woman they admired for her naughtiness. They all agreed that she was too beautiful not to be destroyed by those who had wealth but no pity.
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,
