We Were Brothers (11 page)

MOST OF THE PEOPLE
I mention in my response to Tommy’s letter you already know. You have not met Bernard Bagwell yet. Bernard was Wayland’s half-brother. He was born blind. Bernard’s wife, who was also blind, was Mary. When Bernard graduated from the Tennessee School for the Blind in Nashville, he and a friend, with less than five dollars between them, hitchhiked to California and back. He was a gifted singer and musician and made his living as a piano technician and as a soloist in churches and cathedrals in Memphis and Chicago. Jeanne is Jeanne Holmes Shepherd, Daddy’s daughter. Hitt is James Hitt, one of my teachers at Baylor. The
Scamp
was our uncle Bob’s very fast, red, white, and blue speedboat.

Dear Tommy,

Your letter came last Friday while I was in California. Cara called and told me that it had arrived. I asked her to open it and read it to me, which she did. I had her transcribe it and enter it into my journal.

Tommy, I can’t help but grade your letter.

I give you an A. A good solid A.

You write well and you should do more of it.

And, my dear brother, you weren’t the only one who was humiliated and made to feel stupid and second-class at Baylor. Do you think I escaped all that horseshit? Let me read you something I said in the speech I gave in California the morning I got your letter:

More than once I got into trouble at school for drawing naked women. One time was in the tenth grade. I was in a military school in Chattanooga. First Year Spanish. Winter term. Second period. Rain. The instructor was Señor Bazan. As usual, I was not paying attention to the lesson. Instead I was locked within my own mind, listening to the rain, and contemplating the roundness of breasts as I drew them on a blank page of my textbook. I didn’t see him approaching. When he saw what I was doing he snapped me up by my shirt collar like a dog and made me leave the class and go report to the commandant, who made me empty my back pockets, bend over, and grab my ankles, whereupon he took his “board of education” to my backside. But, alas, the lesson didn’t stick. I still draw naked figures.

And this from the same speech:

[Leonard] Baskin’s influence . . . took root in a new-found intellectual life—something I had always wanted but felt incapable of since I didn’t read much and since all through Baylor I was told, repeatedly, to keep my mouth shut and let people think I was a fool rather than open it and remove all doubt.

Tommy, I was called a moron, an imbecile, and an idiot. I was called slow and dim-witted. Hitt told me often that I was devoid of any intellectual curiosity and that I should never try to match wits with him because I only had half a wit.

I imagine that the only reason I have less feelings of anger and bitterness about Baylor than you do is because I was effectively asleep during my days there. Then again perhaps I was just slow and didn’t realize what was happening to me and what was going on around me. Today I recognize it for what it was—we, you and I and others like us, were bullied by little men who aspired to greater things than they were capable of. I have taught in private schools for thirty years, Tommy, and I know these people well. They get stuck in a velvet trap and can’t get out and then they vent their frustrations on their students. Damn them!

You are not stupid, Tommy. Never have been. No more than I am.

Your letter was not only well written and thoughtful, it was entertaining, humorous, and surprisingly lacking in anger. Not everybody can pull all that off in the same letter—especially when responding to a letter as vicious as my first one to you was. If you had written me the letter I wrote to you I would have been angry and vitriolic. I would certainly have been less graceful than you in my response.

You should try your hand at writing other things, Tommy—but if not, letters are fine. Just write them to me. Write me and tell me more about our growing up together because we certainly have different perceptions of that and that is the dirty linen we need to wash together and hang out to dry before one of us dies and the rift becomes eternal. Hearing your voice through your letter was a wonderful experience for me because I was able to go back and read a passage again, and to think on it, and to think about what I might say in response rather than just responding emotionally from my gut as I did on the phone last fall. And gut is the right word. I thought I was going to puke that afternoon.

Along this same line let me remind you of something, and this is something that you can go back and reread in my first letter and confirm for yourself. I did not say that you were an ignorant fucking redneck, I said that you “shouldn’t call me until you can act like something other than an ignorant fucking redneck.” “Act like” is the operative phrase there. And it is that “acting like” that causes me the pain and the embarrassment I spoke of. You got through seven pages of prose without ever using the word “nigger.”

Do you realize that you have never done that with me in a conversation?

What am I to make of that if not that you do it, like my “big Ike” brother from childhood, just to piss me off? I hate that, and I don’t want you to do it anymore. It hurts because, as I said to you, it diminishes me to hear you say things like that and to then hear my silence. You are welcome to your politics. Just don’t rub my nose in them when you know full well that I think they suck. I have never done that to you, and I expect the same respect and consideration from you in return. I think that you have “acted” a lot throughout our lives together. Your good letter suggests that you are not as full of as much anger and spleen as you act like you are.

So let’s talk about that letter now.

In your letter to me you say that “Frankly the tone of your first letter has made me wonder if you deserve this letter.” You are right. As I have already admitted, the tone of my first letter was “viscious.” It was written in anger and frustration. Angry at you for rubbing my nose in that racist horseshit that I hate so much, and frustrated with myself because I don’t stand up to you when you do it. Abraham Lincoln said that a man keeping silent when he should speak makes that man a coward. I’ve been a coward with you for the sake of decorum since we speak so rarely and I ain’t going to do it any more. So understand the reason for my tone and try to forgive me for it. Try to imagine that you held some very sacred ideals and ideas and that every time we talked I belittled those ideals and ideas. That will explain my tone.

And speaking of that, what ideals do you hold sacred, Tommy? Love? Devotion? Piety? That is not a rhetorical question. I really want to know. Not that I plan on belittling them if you are willing to wrestle them into words for me. To the contrary. I would like, before one of us dies, to have a conversation with you about ideas and ideals. About the things we hold dear. Sacred things. To share these things with each other without the fear of being mocked or scorned because the other one does not share the same feelings. I would like, finally, Tommy, to know who you are, because as you quite rightly say, I know nothing about you. By the same token, though, you only
think
that you know “everything” about me. You don’t.

You speak of Helen as if you knew her. Again, you don’t. And neither do I. I take what she says to me with no more, nor no less, seriousness than I take what anybody else says to me, even perfect strangers. I am sure that you would offer the same advice to me about Jeanne Holmes, too. But both of these people have interesting things to say. Interesting perceptions of past history. Those perceptions, like yours and mine, may be flawed. Then again, they may be right on the money. I just try to listen and then separate the wheat from the chaff. And separating those two things cannot be done without bringing to the task, once again, our own perceptions and prejudices. For instance, neither you nor I want to think of Mother as a selfish bitch. But—what if it is true that, as Jeanne says, Mother simply did not want Daddy to bring her to live with us? That it was neither Daddy’s idea nor his mother’s as we have been given to believe. It makes sense if you remember the story that Mother herself told about not wanting to be pregnant with me. Hell, she had the good life, didn’t she? Rich husband. One kid. Maids. Why the hell would she want to fuck it up with another kid to have to take care of—especially after the money was gone, and even more especially if the kid wasn’t her own? Anyway, it’s all a matter of perception, isn’t it? All our personal histories are remembered and retold through the filter and prism of perception. What you and I need to do is to compare our individual filters . . . to talk and to share with each other without ridiculing the things we each hold dear.

I found what you said about Velma, the
Scamp
, and the Fort Sill money most interesting. Here again, you see, perception is at work. Along, in this case apparently, with some deception. I did not make up the story. Believe me. Velma told me that she had given you the money to come home if you got a furlough. I have a vague memory of overhearing her telling somebody about it in her living room. Maybe that’s the case. Maybe I overheard it. Either way, she lied about it. I wonder why? She also told me that she gave you the car and the boat. You can imagine how it hurt then, four years later—me with two babies and unable to pay my bills—when I asked her if I could borrow fifty dollars for groceries and she said, hesitantly, “Yes, but you’ll have to pay me back.” How it hurt to get Bob’s suitcase and table saw and you get a car and boat. If I had known that she had not favored you with the five hundred dollars, that it was Bob who gave you the
Scamp
and the Studebaker, I might not have felt so hurt. I don’t know what became of the clock and the statuettes, Tommy. I seem to remember Velma telling me that there was a break-in and that they were stolen, but I don’t know that for sure. She might have given them to that old fart that had the upholstery shop next door. I do know that she wouldn’t let me take the woodworking equipment out of her basement even though she said that she had given it all to me, said that Bob wanted me to have it. And I think, if I remember this correctly, that she ended up giving it all to him. What was his name? You’re so good at remembering details like that, whereas I am completely unable to.

You are right about my being different from everybody else, though I never perceived (there’s that word again) of it that way. And you’re right about my being lazy. Both of those things haunt me to this day.

Okay, I was different, but why was I different?

That was the central question in my last letter. Why, Tommy, were we (are we?) so different? We sucked the same sugar tits. We drank the same water, breathed the same air, listened to the same fucking chickens cluck and crow in the morning, everything the same, except food. At least as far as I can remember. And you are right—“Big fucking deal, if we were all alike we would be boring.” I am not looking for homogenization here. I don’t give a fuck if we are different, I just want to know what the factors are that precipitate the differences—especially the ideological differences that stand between us. Keep the differences. I am not trying to convince you to my way of thinking. Never have. Never will. Just explain to me, if you can (and if you can’t,
OK
, but tell me that you can’t), why we are so different—or
are
we, really, after all? What is your perception of that? It haunts me, Tommy. I am proud of who I am. Of what I’ve done. But this one issue truly haunts me because I think it has everything to do with who I am and what I have done and I don’t understand it and I
want
to understand it.

Lazy? Yep, I was. Might even still be for that matter. I can still hear you calling me that. And Mother. And Bob. Floyd. Everybody. I keep a journal today. Have been for nearly twenty years, and the reason for keeping it isn’t so much to keep a record of what I do (though that, too) as it is to have a document that I can go back to when I get to feeling like I’ve been a fat, lazy shit and that journal will verify the fact for me that I ain’t. I work ten to twelve hours a day seven days a week fifty weeks out of the year and I still sometimes feel like I might be lazy. Afraid that somebody’s gonna find me out. God help me! But even if I was lazy, it gave you no right of punishment, a right you
did
assume, an assumed right that you apparently thought granted you the freedom to whip me anytime you thought I needed to be whipped. So what if I didn’t clean out the gutters? Cut the grass? Big fucking deal, eh? And if you remember, you wouldn’t
let
me do anything in the yard. You were so fucking anal retentive you thought that anything I did would screw it up. Better I stay inside and help Mother with the laundry. How many times did you hang out the laundry, bro?

I sympathize greatly with your ordeal with Minnie Smith. And you are right—if she did that to you today she could be brought up on criminal charges. I can barely remember the woman today. I can’t even conjure an image of what she looked like, not like I can Grandmother. Maybe they did show partiality to me. I was more like Arthur Boyd than you were—as we have been told so many times. Maybe that explains it. I don’t know. Then again maybe they felt sorry for me because (as Wayland said to me when I visited him and Bettye) you were favored on Shallowford Road because you were “the son none of [them] ever had.” Those were Wayland’s very words. I stuck in the “them” in that sentence in place of his word—“us.” The difference between what you suffered at Minnie’s hands and what I suffered at your hands was that you didn’t live with her day in and day out. She was not a constant element of fear in your life like you were in mine. You could escape. I couldn’t. And correct me on this part of the story if it’s not correct (if it is, please don’t feel like it’s an indictment, because I am not after accusations here, I am after truth), but wasn’t the primary reason she did that to you was because she was punishing you for mistreating your baby brother? If that is true, it does not make her crime any less. It just makes connections.

I have always admired your industriousness, Tommy. Your ability to work, to focus on something (a red MG convertible for instance) and go after it was admirable. Then and now. I had forgotten about the money you put into my checking account when I was at Auburn. I cried when I read that part of your letter (I cried at lots of parts, but I won’t go into that—not now anyway). I just hope that you are not laboring under the delusion that you put me through school, or that you put more money into my account than Mother did. I may not have been as industrious as you when we were kids, but I did end up putting myself through college. As you remember I preached myself through the last two years. The salaries from Hixson Methodist Church and Newnan Springs Methodist Church and loans from the Methodist Church itself got me through. I didn’t pay off the church loans until 1968. And I can read my financial statement too, Tommy, and it’s pretty impressive, though not as much as yours is. But that does not make me superior to anybody, especially not most, and certainly not you.