We Were Brothers (2 page)

VERNETA WAS A BLACK WOMAN.
Mother called her a “nigress” (accent on the first syllable, which rhymes with
fig
) when she had to call her by something other than her name. She lived in the large green-and-white farmhouse at the top of the hill across the street from us. It was very rare for black and white families in the South at that time to live that close together. Rarer still when the black folks’ houses were on the higher ground. Be that as it may, there was always a pleasant harmony between our families because, as my mother often said, we all knew our places, both black and white. Knew and respected them.

Verneta helped take care of Tommy and me after Arthur Boyd died, but not in any formal capacity as a nanny or a maid. She did make her living as a domestic, but she took care of us boys because she loved Mother and was Mother’s closest friend. Tommy and I both adored Verneta.

She and Mother grew up together in the 1910s and 1920s, a scant fifty years after Appomattox. These were the days of forced segregation when black and white children could not learn together, worship together, or eat or drink together in any public place, but they could run barefoot together in the summertime and play and laugh and become lifelong friends, as these two little girls did.

One of the places they played together was in the family grocery store.

Will Haggard, Mother’s father, owned and ran the store until he died in 1931. Her sister Velma took over and was running the store when Tommy and I were little boys. It had a wide front porch and double screen doors with metal push plates declaring that
COLONIAL BREAD IS GOOD BREAD
. All that remains of that store today is a slab of concrete at the corner of Shallowford Road and Rockway Drive.

The porch was where men gathered to sit on benches and drink Cokes and swap stories. It was dark inside the store, especially when you came in from bright sunlight. Up front, near the screen doors, was a candy case that had a lot of nose prints on the glass that Tommy and I left. Behind the candy case were two wooden counters. An ornate brass cash register sat atop one, a small roll of brown wrapping paper on the other.

The interior walls were shelved from the uneven wooden floor to the stamped-metal ceiling. They were full of provisions that needed no refrigeration: Krispy saltine crackers; Ovaltine; jams and preserves; cans of coffee, fruits, and vegetables; PET Milk; patent medicines; and cartons of cigarettes. Green pendant lamps hung from the ceiling in two evenly spaced rows. There were small windows up near the ceiling that let in a little light that was often hazy from Velma’s cigarettes.

Farther toward the back of the store was a refrigerated case where fresh cuts of meat, wieners, cheese, and eggs were kept. Sticky yellow flypaper hung here and there, each one blackdotted with its emerald-eyed victims.

Behind the meat case was a walk-in cooler. Sides of beef and pork hung inside as well as a few bins for produce that needed or benefited from refrigeration, watermelons in particular.

Next to the cooler was a storage room. It had a single double-hung window that looked west across a hay field toward Missionary Ridge. A light bulb hung from the ceiling by an electrical wire that was tied off in a bowline knot and looked for all the world like a hangman’s noose. You turned the light on by pulling a cord that had a bus token tied to the end of it. This was where Will Haggard kept his bulk stores: cracker barrels, flour barrels, salt.

One day in 1918 or 1919, my mother, who was always called Billie, and little Verneta were playing together at the store as they often did. Mother’s older sisters, Velma and Annie Lee, came slapping in through those two big screen doors and announced that they were going downtown to see a moving picture show. They wanted to know if little Billie wanted to come along.

Well, of course little Billie wanted to go along—and so did little Verneta. They both got all excited about it, and in my imagination I see them jumping up and down and squealing. But then one of the older girls reminded Verneta that she couldn’t go. I can hear Annie Lee saying something like,

“V’nita, don’t you go bein’ silly now. You know you caint go. Why, you know better than to even ask.”

Verneta commenced to cry. But then, with a sudden jolt of inspiration, she ran to the back storage room. She pulled the cord and turned on the light. She threw the lid off the flour barrel, climbed up on a chair, bent over as far as she could, and stuck her little face into the flour. Then she ran back out to the front of the store and took Billie by the hand. The white dust made her little black eyes seem all that much blacker. I see motes of flour in the air and a trail of it on the floor. And I hear her hopeful question,

“Now can I go? Now can I go?”

It would have been like my mother to put her arms around Verneta and to try to wipe away the caked-on tears when she was told, once again, no, she couldn’t go. Would have been like my mother to hold her friend and console her, because even though both of them had been taught what their proper and correct places were, it didn’t mean that they couldn’t love and comfort each other, as Verneta loved and comforted my mother when Arthur Boyd died and she helped take care of Billie’s two baby boys.

Will Haggard’s grocery store, c. 1930

AS I SAID,
Tommy and I adored Verneta. She was in our lives nearly every day. She changed our diapers and made sugar tits for us to suck on. She took us to the park, and up the side of Lookout Mountain on the Incline, one of the steepest incline railroads in the world. But even so, Tommy and I grew up deeply racist. Why, I wonder, with such a woman in our early lives, a woman we spoke well of, and for whom we had deep affections, did we feel the way we did toward black people? Three black families, all kin to Verneta, lived right across the street from us, and no harm ever came to anybody in our family or theirs. There was never an unpleasant confrontation of any kind. There was no enmity. No animosity. Nevertheless, Tommy and I were taught that black folks were not—check, make that
never
—as good as we were. Not even the black dentist who lived in a fine stone house on the West Brow of Missionary Ridge that overlooked the city.

One day I was visiting Velma when she and a friend were drinking coffee in Velma’s spacious kitchen. I was sitting at the table, too, just listening. They were talking about that dentist and I heard Velma say,

“Law, I’d never let that nigger put his hands in
my
mouth.”

“Hmmph. He could buy and sell you, Velma.”

“I don’t give a damn. I still wouldn’t let him put his fingers in my mouth.”

“Yeah, but you let niggers cook for you.”

“Well, that’s what they’re supposed to do.”

“Your sister lets one of ’em take care of her babies.”

“That’s different.”

“How’s it different?”

“It just is.”

This was the sort of exchange that we grew up hearing from our family and from friends of our family. “Nigress” was the kindest word I ever heard applied to a black woman, and that only came from Mother when she referred to Verneta. Occasionally I would hear the more polite term, “colored,” but more common was “coon,” or “jigaboo.” I don’t think I heard the word “Negro,” pronounced properly, until I was in high school. I certainly never used the word, nor did anybody else in our family. I remember one time referring to a black woman as a “lady,” it could have been Verneta, and was soundly rebuked.

“There aint no such thing as a
nigger
lady, Barry. Don’t ever forget that.”

The word
nigger
was used as casually as the word
butter
in our family. Brazil nuts were “nigger toes.” Black-eyed Susans were “nigger heads.” A hard storm rained “cats, dogs, and little nigger babies.”

Despite this environment, Tommy and I were brought up to respect, even like, an individual black person. But as far as our family was concerned the black
race
was slow, shiftless, and ignorant.

Very
smart
individual black folks were an exception. They were relegated to a place of out-of-the-ordinary loathing: Booker T. Washington. George Washington Carver. Ralph Abernathy. We had never heard of Paul Laurence Dunbar or W. E. B. Du Bois, but if we had, they, too, would have been dismissed as uppity niggers who thought they were as good as white folks. Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson held special places of contempt in the Shallowford pantheon of negrophobia as did Jackie Robinson and Nat King Cole.

I walked in on Velma one time while she was watching TV. She and Bob had the first TV set on our block and she was watching some program where Nat King Cole was singing. She was standing, wringing her hands when I walked in. When she saw me she said,

“Law, honey, you caint even turn the tee-vee on anymore without there being some black nigger on it.”

I thought she was going to have a stroke when she spied a black family looking at a house that was for sale across the street from her backyard. Why that bothered her, and having Verneta and her family across the street in the other direction didn’t, I don’t know. Familiarity, perhaps. Or maybe because the Gholstons’ houses were farther away. But all she could say standing there peeking through the curtains was,

“What am I gonna do? Law, law, what am I gonna do?”

Verneta Gholston, c. 1955

MOST BLACK MUSICIANS,
however, escaped our white reproval: Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton were particular favorites, as were the Ink Spots, Cab Calloway, Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, and our fellow Chattanoogan, Bessie Smith.

We approved of the movie actor Stepin Fetchit because he was shiftless, slow-witted, and knew how and when to hold his hat in his hand. That’s the way we liked our black men. He knew his place—on the screen. And my family liked him. A lot. Had they known how wealthy and influential he was offscreen they would have hated him, too.

As I look back with the perspective of a much older man, I see that my family’s loathing was not strictly reserved for black folks. All of us were sensitive (perhaps overly so) to percieved slights from strangers who we assumed thought that they were better than we were. Or who, indeed, did enjoy a higher social status. We assumed that they looked down their noses at us—as we looked down on the white folks who lived near us who were not as prosperous as we were. My brother carried that chip of inferiority on his shoulder most of his life. And struggle with it as I may, I sometimes find myself in restaurants and other public places sizing up strangers with those old senses of base inferiority and outward enmity.

MOTHER REMARRIED ON
May 5, 1943, to Chesher Holmes. Tommy was five. I was two.

Chesher was a popular man in Chattanooga, especially in the sporting community. He was commodore of a couple of boating clubs on Lake Chickamauga, he refereed football and softball games, he judged diving competitions, and he organized youth basketball in Chattanooga in the 1950s. Even though he couldn’t swim himself, he taught Tommy and me how to. He had a weekly radio show on WAGC called
The Sportsman’s Hour
, where he interviewed people about hunting & fishing, guns & lures, and boats & motors. He mostly broadcast from a sound booth on the top floor of the Hotel Patten that stood at the corner of Ninth Street (now Martin Luther King Avenue) and Georgia Avenue. We sat and watched from the other side of the big glass window and were always tickled with delight when he told his listening audience that his two sons were with him in the studio that night.

Occasionally he did his broadcast from a federal courtroom on the second floor of the post office building with a live audience. Tommy and I loved going with him on
Sportsman’s Hour
nights; we enjoyed the show but mostly loved going because we stopped for ice cream or milk shakes on the way home.

Chesher was a superb horseman, especially at jumping and playing polo. Tommy and I saw all his (mostly blue) ribbons one time at his mother’s house. We were there for the usual Christmas breakfast, and she brought out the large box full of ribbons for us to admire. If he had not been diabetic he would have been a cavalryman in the U.S. Army. Since he couldn’t join up he became an instructor of horsemanship for the Sixth Cavalry stationed at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, near the Chickamauga battlefields.

He and Mother met horseback riding in the woods on a Sunday morning. Chesher was a real sweet-talking charmer, so Mother invited him to come home with her for some breakfast and to meet her two little boys. According to Chesher, he accepted the invitation, came for biscuits and gravy, and never left.

When he came to live with us in our little house he came alone. He brought nothing with him other than his clothes and his horse, Tony.

Chesher became Daddy, the only Daddy we ever knew. He was good to Tommy and me. I think that he was afraid of being seen as the stereotypical mean stepfather, and thus he never struck either of us, other than the rare paddling with a harmless hairbrush. When he got really angry, he had a peculiar way of looking above and just to the right of our heads, avoiding direct eye contact. I asked him one time why he did that and he said that if he ever did look us in the eye when he was mad at us, he’d probably smack us.

Daddy took us to the movies. He took us to the Golden Gloves. He took us to see the Harlem Globetrotters when they came to Memorial Auditorium and played the black team from Howard High School. He took us fishing and taught us how to handle a rod and reel and how to pilot several kinds of boats, from flat-bottomed trolling boats to inboard cruisers and high-performance speedboats. He took us to the baseball games when the Chattanooga Lookouts played at home. He took us to softball games under the summer lights at Warner Park—women’s slow-pitch and men’s fast-pitch. He took us to the sulky races at the county fair, after which we climbed the steps to the top of the motordrome and watched motorcycles race up and around the cylindrical “Wall of Death.” He walked with us down the midway, holding our hands, as we gawked at the sideshows and listened to the barkers hawking their goods. On Sundays he took us on long boat rides down the Tennessee River or on long car rides down the length of Lookout Mountain.

One Sunday afternoon we took Daddy’s Chris-Craft runabout through the locks of Chickamauga Dam and rode all the way down to Williams Island, about fifteen miles downriver. Tommy was at the wheel when we passed an upriver cruiser that was throwing a heavy wake. Tommy crossed the wake at such an angle that we were momentarily airborne, and when we slammed down hard, I swallowed my wad of chewing tobacco. It wasn’t long before we turned around and headed back because I was sick. Daddy and Tommy were laughing their asses off as we passed the cruiser and left it in our wake. I haven’t chewed tobacco since.

Chesher Holmes, c. 1950

Another summer Sunday we were in Daddy’s car, a four-door 1948 Chevrolet Stylemaster, headed out in the general direction of Lake Chickamauga, taking a route we often took, though we were headed nowhere in particular. Tommy and I had been fighting, as usual, and when he thought he couldn’t be seen, he’d hit me. Not hard. Just aggravating me, was all. I hit him back because I knew that if Tommy got seriously mad at me and started hitting me really hard, Mother or Daddy was there to stop it before it got out of hand and I got hurt. We were still pestering each other when we turned off onto Lightfoot Mill Road, a little-used road that for a short way ran between Chickamauga Creek and a fertilizer plant that gave off a smell that registered somewhere between being oddly pleasant and sweetly nauseating. I had come down with a bad case of the hiccups right after we left home and Daddy was getting irritated with me, or so it seemed. We were right there between the creek and the fertilizer plant when he suddenly stopped the car. He got out, came around to my side, opened my door, and made me get out. He got back in and drove away. I could hear Mother yelling at him to stop. Tommy was yelling at him, too, I could tell, because I could see his anxious face mashed against the chrome-trimmed rear window.

Standing on the side of the hot road, smelling the repugnant odor of fertilizer, I started screaming and jumping up and down. One of my Buster Browns was untied and flew off. Tears were rolling down my dusty face. I yelled at the top of my little voice,

“Daddy! Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me! Please! PLEASE DADDY!”

He hadn’t gone ten yards when he stopped the car, kicking up a cloud of dust and gravel. He opened his door, ran back to me with a big smile on his face, picked me up, hugged me tight, and asked,

“Where’d your hiccups go, li’l buddy?”

They were gone.

Daddy kissed me—smooched me, actually—several times, put me down, and opened the back door. I snuffled my way back up onto the backseat behind Mother. Tommy wouldn’t look at me. He was crying. Daddy picked up my shoe and put it on my foot before he closed the door and drove on.