We Were Brothers (4 page)

ONE SUNNY DAY IN 1949,
Tommy and I were just home from school and were outside playing in the plum tree between our house and Floyd’s. We had tired of our game and were lying in the grass trying to find animal shapes in the scattered clouds as they scudded overhead.

All of a sudden, a North American B-25 Mitchell, a World War II medium bomber, came into view from the north.

It was on fire.

We watched the white smoke trailing from the burning plane. It was losing altitude fast. We watched as men jumped, their parachutes opening and then dancing white against the cobalt sky. We saw something small fall from the plane, but couldn’t tell what it was. Just before the plane disappeared over Missionary Ridge, the port engine fell off and we watched it drop, white smoke trailing after it. When the Mitchell passed from view, the smoke trails from the port wing and its lost engine dissipated in the early autumn sky. White parachutes bobbed and lingered below the scant, lazy clouds.

The plane was piloted by William E. Blair of Dallas, Texas, a thirty-year-old Army Air Force Captain. He had taken off from Augusta, Georgia, and was headed for Spokane, Washington. There were two other crew members, a copilot and a flight engineer. And there were six passengers aboard, all military policemen. An hour out of Augusta a fire broke out in an oil line inside the port wing. Blair dived to eight thousand feet trying to extinguish the flames, to no avail. At six thousand feet the fire had spread into the fuselage and Blair ordered everybody to bail out, which they did. Alone in the plane, Blair circled the city in an attempt to approach Chattanooga’s Lovell Field, the municipal airfield that was only a few miles from where Tommy and I stood watching the drama unfold.

Magazine and newspaper accounts reported that the copilot parachuted safely and came to rest tangled up in a tree; that one of the MPs, Robert Hamby, slammed into the side of a bank building before landing on the sidewalk; that another landed on top of a school; and that yet another got caught up in telephone lines. Another man, Norman Henson, jumped from the rear of the plane, but his parachute didn’t open. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but it seems likely that he failed to attach his parachute harness properly and when he bailed out it slipped off. He fell to his death in the playground of Ridgedale Elementary School on Dodds Avenue. Witnesses said that when he hit the ground he bounced six feet in the air and left a depression several inches deep in the playground. One horrified schoolboy who saw it happen reported that when Henson hit the ground there was a loud “pop” that sounded like a gun.

Henson must have been that small thing Tommy and I saw falling to the ground.

The disjunct engine fell on a house on East Twenty-first Street, tearing off a corner of the porch and part of the roof before hitting the ground six feet away. It was reported that it bounced ten feet into the air, and then rolled smoking into the street.

Blair’s shirt, his captain’s bars on the epaulets and identification cards in the pockets, was found on top of a car on Twenty-fourth Street. Both sleeves were burned. He must have ripped off his burning shirt and thrown it out the window. He stayed with the plane as long as he could, all the while desperately trying to find a field or some open space to set his dying aircraft down without killing a lot of people. He jumped at the last minute. The plane crashed into the east side of Missionary Ridge near the Bachman tubes on Highway 41. Captain Blair’s body was found a few hundred yards from the smoldering wreckage of his Mitchell, the ripcord of his parachute was still in his hand.

When he got home from work, Daddy took Tommy and me to see what was left of the B-25. On the way Tommy and I were excited about seeing a real bomber up close. But when we got there, there was nothing to see but the clear-cut swath chamfered into the local vegetation, and parts of the plane strewn all over the hillside, some still smoldering. I can’t say that either of us sensed the tragedy that all this implied, nor how much worse it could have been were it not for the remarkable courage of William Blair, but I can say that we were both very quiet as we surveyed the ravaged and blackened earth from which heat was still rising. Daddy tried to talk a cop into letting us get closer but we really didn’t want to get any closer.

RAIN WAS ABOUT THE
only thing that could keep Tommy and me from playing outside in the summer, though some rainstorms invited us to build small and unsuccessful dams to hold back rivulets of rainwater that flowed down our short gravel driveway.

The backyard of our house was tiny compared to those of Velma’s and Floyd’s, but since the three yards were fenceless and contiguous it was like one big yard. A big yard attendant to three small houses, a dilapidated garage, a chicken coop, a badminton court, a rose trellis, a dog run, and an enclosed chicken yard where our aunt Grace raised chickens for Sunday dinners. Tommy told me many years later that watching her wring the necks of those hens on Sunday mornings was what turned him against eating anything with feathers on it.

It was in those yards that Tommy and I and the occasional friends, James Hoyt and Marlowe Mayfield, or Jimmy and Dickie Livingood, played dodge ball, passed footballs, and where I learned how to ride a bicycle. It was where, in summer, we captured June bugs, tied a piece of thread on a hind leg, and flew them in circles around our heads like tiny model airplanes. It was where on summer evenings Tommy and I caught lightning bugs, put them in mayonnaise jars with holes punched in the lids, and went to sleep with their eerie phosphorescence pulsating in the darkness of our room. We played cowboys and Indians and jumped out of Floyd’s plum tree with bath towels tied around our necks pretending to be Superman or Captain Marvel. We rode our bikes up and down, and threw sticks and balls for Lady, Velma’s German shepherd, and our runty bulldog, Pinocchio. They were buddies, Lady and Pinocchio.

I wish my brother and I had been buddies, but we weren’t. Now that I am old and Tommy is dead, I wish more than ever that we had been close when we were kids. But the fact is that my older brother played with me when he had nobody else to play with.

In the hottest part of the summer we ran a garden hose out to the side yard and filled a big galvanized washtub with water and splashed around in it. We hunched our thumbs over the end of the hose and squirted each other. We ran back and forth squealing through the spray and jumping in and out of the tub. If we got the grass too wet it turned sludgy. And if he happened to be home and noticed, Floyd came out and yelled at us.

“Go play somewhere else, goddammit! You’re making a mess of my yard!”

One summer afternoon a little black kid stopped and watched us. He stood on the gravel shoulder of Shallowford Road, peering over the top of the privet hedgerow that grew at the top of the yard, alongside the street. He must have been standing on tiptoe because all we could see was his head bobbing up and down, kind of peekabooing us.

And then he was gone.

I have often wondered what that little boy was thinking when he walked along our stretch of Shallowford Road. I don’t know if he ever encountered Lady, who was rarely indoors or contained in any way, but if he did, he was apparently not afraid of her. Bob and Velma were proud of Lady, not only because she was a handsome dog, but also because she didn’t like black people—or so they said. Or so they thought. And apparently the black folks who had to walk past their house thought so, too, because when they approached the Cox house they crossed to the other side of the street and stepped lively.

But if this little kid felt threatened by the dog he didn’t show it. He could have stayed at home where it was safe, but he didn’t. He could have taken the long way around our block, up and around on Haymore Street, but he didn’t. He chose to walk on the same side of the street as our houses and to risk Lady’s menace.

And then one day he was there again, peering over the privet hedgerow. He ventured—cautiously—into our front yard and stood next to the forsythia bush for a few moments, watching, weighing his move. Then he hollered at us,

“Hey! What y’all doin’ down there?”

“Takin’ a shower bath. What’s it look like we doin’?”

“Can I come play wit y’all?”

Tommy and I looked at each other for a moment, not knowing what to say.

“I dunno,” Tommy said. “Maybe. Lemme go ask Mother if it’s
OK
.”

I just stood there looking at this little kid, and he just stood there looking at me. We were both six or seven years old. Maybe a little older. We said nothing to each other, just looked. Kicked a little at the grass. Spat. It wasn’t long before Tommy came out and told us that Mother said it would be
OK
, but that he couldn’t come in the house.

So down to the side yard he came with us. Tommy and I had on bathing trunks but our new friend was fully dressed, so he took off his clothes, all except for his white underwear—a stunning contrast to his dark skin. He was not as sable skinned as Verneta, nor as light skinned as Arthur Boyd’s tailor, Nap Turner. I had never before seen a black person so close to being naked and I wanted to touch him, to feel the texture of his skin that looked soft and satin, like he had been powdered with cocoa, but I did not.

We played until it was time for him to go home. As he was leaving Tommy hollered at him,

“Say, what’s your name?”

“Tommy. What’s yours.”

“Tommy. He’s Barry.”

Our new friend Tommy came back a few times that summer, and the summer to come. It wasn’t too long into that first summer when we had to make some distinction between the two Tommys. We all agreed that henceforth, little black Tommy would be called Nigger Tommy and that my brother would be just plain Tommy.

Nigger Tommy was a very pleasant kid, happy and good looking, too. Mother liked him and was glad that he came to play. He was always clean and dressed as well as we did, maybe even better. Mother explained to us that his clothes must be hand-me-downs from white people, or else his mama or grandmama must make them for him.

If Nigger Tommy was around at lunchtime, Mother made sandwiches and brought them out for the three of us to eat in the shade of the trees that bordered our little backyard. Mother would bring out a quilt or a chenille bedspread and smooth it out on the grass beneath her clotheslines. Sometimes she would set up a card table and bring out folding chairs for us. She brought us ice-cold Cokes or iced tea or sometimes freshly made lemonade. She made fried bologna sandwiches, or tuna salad, but usually it was peanut butter and jelly because my brother was such a picky eater, though I have to say that we were all pleased when she brought out Vienna sausages and saltine crackers.

The other Tommy, c. 1947

The three of us ate and laughed. Sometimes we laughed so hard that food and Coke spewed out our noses, and that just made us laugh all that much harder. We had fun, unaware that there were any differences between us other than the color of our skin and the fact that, as much as Mother liked the boy, he was the only one of our playmates who was never allowed in the house.

Then one day in that second summer he went away and we never saw him again. There were no good-byes. No last waves. No information about where he was headed or with whom. He just disappeared from our lives as suddenly as he came into them.

FAST-FORWARD TO DECEMBER
1962. Kay Richmond, a fellow student at the University of Chattanooga, and I were married. By the time we moved to New England in 1967, we had two small children, one of whom, Romy, was still in diapers and the older one, Cara, was barely out of hers. Our third daughter, Madeline, would come along a few years later.

I was teaching school in Massachusetts and over Christmas break we drove back to Chattanooga to visit family, though my family had broken apart after Mother died in January 1964. Tommy was living outside Nashville with his young family. Daddy had remarried and was living on Lookout Mountain. Christmas get-togethers were now a thing of the past for our Shallowford Road family.

In December 1969, Kay and I and the kids were home for Christmas and had a hankering for some honest-to-God barbeque, something that’s all but impossible to find in New England, so we drove over to the Sportsman’s Bar-B-Q Drive-In on Brainerd Road. I had been eating their sandwiches since I was a kid when their joint was out on Highway 58 just before you got to Lake Chickamauga.

It was a warm evening despite being late December. The sun was going down as we pulled our Kombi bus in and found a parking spot. Kay was holding Romy, and Cara was playing in the back. I beeped the horn to get the attention of a carhop.

A young black man about my age came over to the car to take our order. I recall that he looked a little like Cuba Gooding Jr.

I don’t remember what Kay ordered, nor what we got the kids to eat,
but I ordered what I almost always order: a pork sandwich with coleslaw and hot sauce, some beans on the side, and a tall glass of sweet tea with fresh lemon. As we waited for our food, we listened to Creedence Clearwater Revival, Neil Diamond, and Otis Redding playing on loud speakers. When the carhop brought our tray, it was balanced on one hand over his right shoulder and was overflowing with food and drinks—and a whole mess of napkins. I rolled the window up a few inches so he could anchor the tray over the glass.

I parceled out the food and we ate.

When we finished eating I beeped the horn and the carhop came to take away the tray. He hoisted it to his shoulder and turned to walk away. But then he stopped and turned back. He looked at me, adjusted the tray on his shoulder, and said, “You don’t remember me, do you, Mister Barry?”

“No, I’m sorry. I don’t.” I answered.

“I’m Nigger Tommy.”

This is, in fact, the end of the story as I recall it. I’m certain that I didn’t just sit there like a knot on a log and say nothing, but I cannot imagine my responding with some kind of cordial inanity like,

“Oh, hey, Tommy, how you been? What you been up to, buddy?”

Given the way I feel about this story as I tell it today, I must have felt like I had just been punched in the gut. Tears well up every time I think about it, and I don’t think that I’m all
that
different today from who I was then. The primary reason I expatriated myself from the South in 1967 was to escape the racism around me. My family. My church. The private school where I taught. I didn’t have the personal, physical, or moral courage to go down to Alabama or Mississippi to help register voters, so I did the only thing I could. I left.

I never saw Tommy again. Nor did my brother. Many years later we were talking on the phone and this story came up in our conversation. Tommy told me that he thought, or had heard, that our friend Tommy had gone to medical school somewhere and was now practicing medicine. I would like to believe this, and perhaps it is true. But my brother was an errant—and arrant—storyteller who made things up when he wasn’t privy to the facts or when the truth didn’t suit him. I can’t imagine why he would make up such a story, unless, as I came to find new layers to my brother’s personality in our last years together, he was, like me, a recovering racist but never admitted it. Then again, perhaps he simply wished the very best for our childhood playmate of those summers long ago.