Same Kind of Different As Me (6 page)
Aunt Etha used to love to make cracklins, which is somethin you don’t see much of no more. She’d light the fire under a great big cast-iron wash pot and fill it up with slabs of pork fat. Then she’d cook that down till the pot was fulla hot bubblin lard with crispy little curlicues of hard fat floatin on the top. Them was the cracklins, and the smell of em fryin up would cause folks to drop their hoes in the field and follow their noses to the smokin pot like ants to a church picnic. We’d eat em like they was candy and make cracklin corn bread with the scraps.
Them hogs gen’lly lasted us for mosta the year, ’cause we didn’t let nothin go to waste. Now the white folks was kinda picky about which parts a’ the hog they’d eat. Not us. We ate the pig snout and the pig tail and everthing in between—from the rooter to the tooter!
You can’t be wastin’ nothin when that’s all the meat you got to last you for a whole year. Even then, we had to stretch it out some, fillin in with other kinds a’ meat. I guess we’d eat about anything ’cept for a skunk. I drug a skunk in the house one time, and when Aunt Etha saw it she started hollerin, “You get that skunk outta my house, boy!”
Uncle James whupped my tail, but not right then ’cause I stunk too bad. I had to go back down to the creek and wash off that stink with some lye soap, then go
back
and get my whuppin.
I got my share of whuppins, usually with a switch off a pecan tree. Sometimes, I’d go way down the road past where I was s’posed to go, and talk to a little girl I liked, ’cause I thought that was worth the whuppin when I got back. I got more whuppins for that than anything else.
“The heart of a child is fulla foolishness,” Uncle James’d say with a stern face, quotin the Scriptures. “But the rod of correction will sure ’nough drive it out.”
Sometimes when I’d get in trouble, though, he’d get a little smile in his eye. “I ain’t gon’ whup you this time,” he’d say. “But do that again and I’m gon’ whup you good.” One time I had whuppins stacked up about four high. Uncle James was a good Christian man.
While he took care of our foolishness, Aunt Etha took care of our bodies and souls. Mostly, we never got very sick, but when we did, my auntie sure ’nough had the cure: Somethin she called “cow-lip tea.”
Now cow-lip tea was brown and thin, kinda like the Lipton tea the Man sold at his store, but a durn sight more powerful. Cow-lip tea come from them white toadstools that sprout up outta cow patties. But there’s a secret to makin it: You got to use the toadstools
and
part of the cow patty, too. That’s where cow-lip tea got its name. “Cow” from the cow patties and “lip” from “Lipton.” Least that’s what Aunt Etha always told me.
The way you make cow-lip tea is you get the toadstools and a little dried cow patty and grind em up in the sifter. You can’t use no fresh green cow patty to make no good tea, ’cause you can’t grind it. So you take that dried patty, and after you get it ground up like fine powder, you put it in a rag and tie a knot on top. Then you add a little honey to a boilin pot and drop that rag in the water till it bubbles up and turns good and brown. Now you got cow-lip tea.
If I was sick, Aunt Etha’d always make me drink a canful.
“All good medicine tastes bad!” she’d say, then put me in the bed under-neath a whole pile a’ covers, no matter whether it was summertime or wintertime. In the mornin, the bed’d be soppin wet and the sheets’d be all yella, but I’d always be healed. I was nearly grown before I figured out what I was drinkin.
I spent
every summer at Granddaddy and MawMaw’s until 1963, when I enrolled at East Texas State, which at the time was the cheapest college in Texas. By that time, girls, their pursuit, and eventual capture were pretty much the center of my universe. But the little college my family could afford was stocked mainly with farm girls. By contrast, my buddy Scoot Cheney and I had heard that Texas Christian University, ninety miles west in Fort Worth, was slopping over with Rich Girls. And while I’d grown up nearby, I’d never been on the campus.
In our fantasies, Rich Girls would jet around town in dent-free, late-model sports cars, belong to country clubs, and live in houses that didn’t have wheels on them. We were certain they would also be miles better looking than farm girls.
Though I never met one, I had etched in my mind an image of what Rich Girls looked like. When we were about ten and twelve, my brother, John, and I had a favorite game we played that went something like the card game slapjack. We’d sit on MawMaw’s porch, slowly turn the pages in the Sears catalog, and try to be first to smack a hand down on the prettiest girl on each page, who would then become the imaginary girlfriend of whoever slapped her first. Later, I was sure the girls at TCU would look like the girls in the Sears catalog.
As it turned out, that was pretty close to the truth. But my first encounter with such a delicious creature fell victim to a wardrobe disaster.
My dear mama, Tommye, had always made all our clothes, so when I packed my bags for college, they were full of shirts she had carefully and lovingly sewn from feed sacks. But when I got to East Texas State, I noticed that most of the boys wore khaki pants and madras shirts, the kind made with that natural dye from India. Feed sacks, apparently, were out.
Worried, I called my mama. “Everybody here is dressed different than me. They’re all wearing madras shirts.”
“What’s madras?” she asked.
I fumbled around for an explanation. “Well, it’s kind of like plaid.”
Now, Mama meant well, but to her plaid was plaid. She drove down to Hancock’s Fabric Store and bought several yards of it, and whipped me up a matching shirt-and-shorts set.
In the meantime, Scoot and I landed our first blind dates with TCU girls, a pair of Tri Delta pledges. We were taking them to Amon Carter Stadium to root on the TCU football team, the mighty Horned Frogs, before a sellout home crowd. The friend who fixed us up told me that my date, Karen McDaniel, looked like Natalie Wood.
Well, a date like that called for a new outfit, so on the way in from East Texas State, Scoot and I detoured by my house so I could pick up the one my mama had just finished. She beamed with pride when she handed it over, a pair of longish shorts and a short-sleeved, button-up shirt, both blue with black and green stripes as wide as highway centerlines. I knew it wasn’t madras, but I figured it was better than a feed sack. When I modeled it for Mama, she bragged about how handsome I looked.
Then Scoot and I headed over to the TCU freshman girls’ dorm.
“A movie star,” is what I thought when Karen McDaniel stepped out onto the dorm’s front porch: She had teased-up dark hair and big blue eyes that batted like strobe lights. I had never seen anybody who looked like that in Haltom City. As it turned out, Karen had never seen anybody who looked like me. Ever.
I had finished off the shorts set Mama made me with knee-high black socks and a pair of brogan-style, lace-up shoes. As I headed up the crowded dorm steps to introduce myself, another adorable brunette walked out of the dorm onto the porch. But when she saw my clothes, she screeched to a halt so fast it looked like she’d dropped a two-ton anchor. “Well, lookee here!” she blared, causing every head within fifty yards to turn my way. “It’s Bobby Brooks, dyed to match!”
She turned out to be Jill, Scoot’s date, a pixyish Tri Delt with eyes like Bambi. Having pronounced judgment on my mama’s handiwork, she then looked down at my shoes and wrinkled her perfectly upturned nose as though examining roadkill. “What kind of shoes are
those
?”
I shrugged, sweat beading up on my reddening face. “I don’t know . . . just shoes, I guess.”
“Well, the boys at TCU wear
Weejuns
,” Jill said.
Scoot thought that sounded mighty exotic. “What are ‘Weejuns’?” he asked me, leaning in close.
“I don’t know,” I said skeptically. “I think they’re those pointy-toed things the queers wear.”
“They are not!” the girls protested in unison, scandalized. “They’re penny loafers!”
We walked the two blocks to the stadium, and while most couples were holding hands, Karen maintained a mortified distance. Inside the stadium, the whole student body seemed to ogle me as if I were the victim of a fraternity prank. I don’t remember who won or lost that football game, or even the name of the opposing team. I only remember feeling as if Bozo the Clown had died and I’d inherited his clothes.
I got
my first cotton sack when I was about seven or eight. It was a big white flour sack. You prob’ly don’t know much about pickin cotton so I’m gon’ tell you how it was: hot. Lord-a-mighty, it was hot. Hot enough for the devil and his angels. Then there was the bugs and skeeters. Zoomin in off the bayou, seemed like they was big as gooses and twice as mean.
Ever day, we’d light out just about the time the sky at the edges of the fields turned a little pink with mornin, but you could still see some stars. I’d pick all the day long, pluckin me four or five pieces of cotton outta every boll I could find. When the bolls busted open, they was hard and kinda crackly. After a while, they turned my hands raw. The cotton was soft like a feather, but it got heavy mighty fast. Ever day, the Man say I had about twenty pounds in my sack. Seemed like no matter how long I picked or if my sack felt extra heavy that day, the Man say it was twenty pounds.
Sometimes he’d give us a token to spend at his store. I’d go in there and buy me a piece a’ candy or a hunk a’ cheese.
That’s how I met Bobby. The Man’s store was kinda on the front half of the plantation, and I had to walk by his house on my way back to Uncle James’s. It was a big white one with a black roof and a great big ole shade porch all the way around it. One day, I was walkin down the red dirt road that ran by it, when this white boy about my age wearin overalls like me come out and started walkin with me.
“Hey,” he says to me, traipsin along.
“Hey,” I said.
“Where you goin?”
“Home.”
“Where’s home?”
“Over yonder,” I said, jerkin my chin in the gen’l direction.
“Wanna go ride bikes?”
Well, that stopped me in my tracks. I turned and eyeballed this fella. He was kinda regular lookin, about my same size with some freckles on his nose and a curly mess of brown hair with some red in it like somebody’d dusted his head with cinnamon. While I was lookin at him, I was sizin him up, tryin to figure out what did he want, and why was he tryin to take up with somebody like me.
Finally, I gave him an answer: “I ain’t got no bike,” I said and started walkin again.
“You wanna go shoot BB guns then? You can use mine.”
Now, that was an invite. I didn’t have no BB gun, but I wanted one real bad so I could get out in the woods and bring me down some blackbirds or maybe a possum.
“Yeah, I’ll go shoot BB guns with you. You sure your mama won’t mind?”
“Nah, she don’t care long as I’m home ’fore dark. You stay here; I’ll run get my gun.”
From that day on, me and Bobby was partners in crime. Turned out he was the Man’s nephew come to visit. He didn’t know he wadn’t s’posed to be my friend.
When I wadn’t workin, I’d slide over to the back porch of the Man’s house and whistle. Bobby’d ease out the back door and we’d meet up. We was purty tight. If he had somethin to eat, I did, too. Sometimes at dinner, he’d eat some a’ his food and slip the rest in his pocket and sneak out the house. Then we’d walk down the road where the Man couldn’t see, and I’d eat me a chicken leg or a sandwich or somethin that he brung me.
Purty soon his people figured out we was friends, but they didn’t really try to keep us from associatin, ’specially since I was the only boy on the place right around his age and he needed somebody to play with and keep outta trouble. They detected he was givin me food, so they put a little wood table outside the back door for me to eat on. After a while, once Bobby’d get his food, he’d come right on out and me and him’d sit at that little table and eat together.
When I wadn’t workin, me and Bobby was in business, workin on bikes, swimmin, or makin slingshots outta tree twigs and inner tubes. Sometimes Thurman’d go with us, but mostly it was just me and Bobby.
We’d go huntin and kill us some birds with his Daisy Rider BB gun. I was a purty good shot and could drop em right out of the sky. I had a rope belt that I wore round my overalls, and ever time I killed me a blackbird, I’d tuck his feet up under the rope and let him hang there upside down. Once we’d shot a bunch, I’d take em home to Aunt Etha and she’d make a pie.
Now the next year that Bobby come to the plantation, I got up the courage to ask the Man if I could pick scrap cotton and earn me a bicycle. Up to then, I’d just been ridin old heaps me and Bobby built outta junk parts. Didn’t even have no tires on em, just rode em on the rims. I needed a
real
bicycle so me and Bobby could do some serious ridin.
Now scrap cotton is the little pieces danglin off the cotton bushes and also inside the dirty bolls that’s layin on the ground after the fields done been picked. Since Uncle James and Aunt Etha wadn’t makin no money, I had to scrap cotton if I was gon’ get me a bike.
I was ready to pick that scrap just as long it took, but Bobby had a plan. He’d come out and pick with me, scrapin the last wisps off the picked-over flowers, actin like he was gon’ keep some a’ that scrap for hisself. But all the cotton he picked, he put it in my sack. And when the Man wadn’t lookin, he’d go in the cotton shed and fill up his sack with the
picked
cotton, the good cotton, then come out and empty it into mine. We’d hide it under the scrap.
Ever summer, me and Bobby had a new project, but that scrappin went on for a
long
time. Ever year, we scrapped them fields and the Man weighed what we picked—and what Bobby stole!—and ever year, the Man put me off, tellin me I ain’t scrapped enough to get no bike. Went on like that for three years, till finally, right around Christmas, the Man come down to Uncle James’s and said for me to come up to his house, only he never did say why.
“Just come on up and you’ll see,” he said.