We Were Brothers (5 page)

ON AN EARLY JUNE MORNING IN 1950,
Aunt Grace’s old leghorn rooster woke me up. He might have awakened Tommy earlier in the morning because he was sleeping with a pillow over his head. It was a cool summer morning—a happy morning, too, because we were on summer vacation, and any morning that I didn’t have to go to school, vacation or not, was a happy morning. The air was clear as though there had been a hard rain during the night. The tall oak and black walnut trees growing alongside our house cast dark green, sun-dappled shadows over most of the dewy yard outside our windows where Tommy and I played. The chicken coop was on the far side of the yard in full morning sunshine. The white hens pecked and scratched at gravel, shit, and watermelon rinds, clucking all the while, and that cantankerous old rooster broadcast his authority to all in earshot.

Our bedroom windows were thrown open to the cool morning air. Soft, early breezes wafted the sharp, pungent odor of walnut husks rotting on the ground into our room. Through the window screen, with my chin in my hands and my elbows on the windowsill, I watched yellow and black caterpillars on the trees, some as big as your thumb, going up and down about their silent business while that nasty old leghorn went noisily and self-importantly about his.

My brother was thirteen that summer, old enough for Mother to trust him to take me downtown to see a movie and buy ten-cent hamburgers at the shiny white and stainless steel Krystal restaurant on the corner of Seventh and Cherry Streets. For thirty-five cents a person could get a cup of coffee and two tiny square hamburgers, a welcomed and affordable restorative at the beginning of the Great Depression. It is the oldest hamburger chain in the South. When I go back to Chattanooga I make it a point of eating a half dozen Krystal burgers in a single sitting, and I usually regret it.

After lunch Tommy and I went to a matinee at the Tivoli or the State movie theaters. I don’t know what movie we saw this particular day but it was probably a Roy Rogers western or maybe an Abbott and Costello comedy. Mother gave us fare for the bus and money for hamburgers, the movie, and popcorn and candy.

When the movie was over we always walked up to Martin-Thompson Sporting Goods on Cherry Street, catty-corner from the Krystal. That was where Daddy worked, and if he was in town in the afternoon we usually caught a ride home with him. Sometimes it was a couple of hours before Daddy was ready to go. When that was the case Tommy whiled away the time trying out the new baseball mitts and gloves and admiring the hunting gear, especially the rifles and shotguns. I’d go around the corner and stare at all the model airplanes in the window of the hobby shop on Seventh Street, or I’d go back to the stock room and tear off large pieces of brown Kraft paper and draw. If Albert or Harvey, the two black deliverymen who worked for the store, were around I’d sometimes sit and talk. Daddy said Albert was a high yellow nigger who was too uppity for his own good. Daddy didn’t approve of Albert’s penchant for snappy clothes, his cocky attitude, or his shiny hair that was straightened and kept in meticulous place with a stiff pomade. But Albert was nice to me and told me stories about himself and his family. He aspired to become a podiatrist.

“Black folks always on they feet . . . you know what I mean, little man? Porters, conductors, maids, cooks. They always needin’ somebody to take care of their feet.”

But this particular Saturday Daddy must have been on the road selling or delivering football equipment down on Sand Mountain, Alabama (where the black delivery men did not go, afraid that they might not come back if they did), so Tommy and I caught the Eastdale bus and headed home.

It was hot and the bus was crowded. The seats in the front of the bus were all taken, so we stood, my brother hanging onto the overhead handrail and I, too short to reach the handrail, was hanging on to him. Every time the bus stopped and started I was thrown off balance and jostled against the other people who were hanging on to the handrail like Tommy was. We’d not gone far when I saw an empty seat at the back of the bus. It was directly beneath the rear windows and a sign that read,
THIS PART OF THE CAR FOR THE COLORED RACE
. The empty spot was in the middle of the bench between two rather large black women. I pulled away from Tommy and made my way to the back and sat down.

One of the women was cooling herself with a cardboard fan that had a picture of Jesus on it 
.
 
.
 
.
 that 1941 Warner Sallman portrait of an Aryan Jesus that by then was making its saccharine way into every protestant church in America. Every now and again this woman’s fanning tempo picked up as she tilted her fan a little toward me, inconspicuously. The extra little breeze was cool and welcomed. So was her smile.

Tommy was glaring at me as he clung on to the handrail with one hand. His free hand gestured what his lips were silently ordering me to do,

“Get your fat ass back up here with me, you little shit! Get it up here—NOW!”

When Tommy got really mad his eyes changed color, from the hazel color we shared, to a sour, yellow-brown like the color of the Beech-Nut tobacco juice Daddy spat. Tommy’s anger made his bad eye worse, causing it to cross and to squint. I saw the fury in those eyes of his ordering me to get off my ass and come stand with him. But I did not. I stayed where I was because I was perfectly happy wedged comfortably between two big women, my feet dangling, not quite reaching the floor.

When the bus turned west off Tunnel Boulevard and onto Shallowford Road Tommy reached across and pulled the cord that rang the bell letting the driver know he wanted to get off at the next stop. In the few moments it took us to reach our stop, I considered not getting off at all. I was afraid of Tommy when he got mad, and I could just as easily get off at the next stop since it was only a short block farther up the road, right in front of Velma’s house. I could have avoided my brother altogether had I done that. I could have gone in and visited with Velma for a while before going home. For all I knew Mother might have been visiting, as she often did, sitting out on the big screened-in front porch sipping iced tea and shelling peas or stringing beans.

When the bus stopped Tommy got off at the front. I got off at the back. The doors were sliding shut when he hit me. A right to my head. He hit me again as I was falling to the hot pavement. I sprawled into gravel and dusty grass, bleeding from my nose and mouth. Then he kicked me. I curled up in a ball and he kicked me again. And again. Through the ringing in my ears I heard him say,

“Don’t you never sit with niggers again, you hear me, you little morphadite? You hear me? DO YOU HEAR ME?”

I lay whimpering, and did not answer him.

Then THUD! Another kick.

When he turned and walked away, I saw—through squinted eyes and tears—that his fists were still balled up. I sat up, tasting the iron of my blood mingling with the salt of my tears and the smells of hot summer tar and the diesel exhaust of the bus pulling away.

I heard Tommy whistle for our dog. Like nothing had happened.

I NEVER HEARD THE
R
IN
Verneta’s name when I was a child. What I heard was
V’nita
—with a long
e
sound—and to this day when I say her name I pronounce it as I heard it when I was a little boy. The friendship between her and Mother never diminished over the years. In the privacy of our living room or sitting at the kitchen table they were equals and my mother treated her as such. Verneta called Mother “Billie” and Billie called Verneta “V’nita,” just like everybody else did, even my brother and I. In the cooler months they sat and drank coffee; in the summer months they sat on the screened-in front porch and drank iced tea. I wish that I had listened to their conversations and could remember what they talked about, but I did not. I do remember that they got into arguments sometimes, but it never got heated and they never got angry with one another. I never heard Mother say, as she did to Tommy and me,

“Now you listen to me
. . . .
”

On the other hand, if there was a car in our driveway that Verneta didn’t recognize, or if she knew that there was a stranger visiting—a preacher, say, or maybe a salesman trying to sell Mother a new vacuum cleaner, or a Christian Science practitioner, Verneta would go to the back door and knock. She waited politely for “Miss Billie” to come let her in. She would not sit, nor was she invited to sit. In front of white company, Verneta would neither argue nor disagree with anything my mother said. It was always,

“Yes’m, Miss Billie” or “No’m, Miss Wilhelmina.”

509 Shallowford Road, c. 1958

ONE SUMMER NIGHT
IN 1957
, Verneta did come to the front door while Mother and Daddy had company. They were playing canasta with family and friends and debating whether or not Jesus was really a Jew—the consensus among them was that he was not—according to Mother he was just a “dark, Mediterranean type.”

Tommy, now a twenty-year-old with a red MG convertible and an endocrine system raging at full throttle, was out on a date with a woman named Maxine, who worked for our cousin Wayland and was ten years older than Tommy. We didn’t see much of my Tom-catting brother in those days.

The living room windows and the door that opened to the front porch were propped open to let out the cigar and cigarette smoke, and to let in some fresh air. An old reciprocating fan grumbled on the floor and kept the smoky air circulating. The screen door of the porch was latched tight to keep out mosquitoes and moths. Lightning bugs blinked on and off in the front yard.

The quiet laziness of the card game conversation was suddenly interrupted by noise from the street. The Ku Klux Klan was parading up Shallowford Road in a “klavalcade,” the term Klansmen use for a convoy of their cars and trucks, fond as they are of alliteration. It was a show of presence and power that typically preceded a cross burning somewhere. Everybody put down their cards and went out on the front porch to watch and wonder aloud where them good ol’ boys there were goin’ to go burn their cross that night. Somebody said,

“Be damned if I know, but I sure hope it’s in some Jew’s front yard.”

I had come from my room at the back of the house to watch the show myself. We watched scores of beat-up cars and sorry-looking pickup trucks pass by, punctuated now and again by a shiny Cadillac or a new Lincoln. They were all in a slow procession up the street heading toward Missionary Ridge where several Jewish families and that well-to-do black dentist had fine homes overlooking the city.

The interior lights in the cars and trucks were on, or at least they were on in those that had interior lights that worked. Each car was full of Klansmen and Klanswomen in their hoods and sheets. There were children, too—Klanskids, I suppose they’d be called—dressed in miniature Klan regalia. One was riding on the hood of a car, leaning back against the wraparound windshield. Everything was moving so slowly the child wasn’t likely to fall off, and even if he had he probably wouldn’t have been seriously hurt. One of the lead trucks had a loudspeaker mounted on top of the cab. It amplified a man’s gravelly, nasal voice that chanted, over and over—a harping drumbeat of rampant hatred, disguised fear, and ignorance.

“Nigga! Don’t you never fergit yore place.”

“Don’t you never fergit yore place.”

“Nigga, never fergit yore place.”

“Never fergit yore place.”

“Never fergit
. . . .
”

If there was more to the chant than that, I don’t remember what it was. It eventually died out altogether. Diminuendo.

Everybody settled back into the card game. I was headed back to my room and stopped in the kitchen to browse in the refrigerator for something more to eat when I heard the front screen door slapping frantically against its latch. I heard someone crying, wailing, and trying desperately to get in.

It was Verneta. But before Mother could unlatch the screen door, Verneta pulled it apart from its hook and eye and burst into the brightly lit living room, blind with fear, and sobbing a litany of terror:

“Oh, sweet Jesus, Billie, what’m I gonna do? What’m I gonna do? What’m I gonna do? What’m I gonna do?” Mother took her in her arms.

Verneta’s sable skin was ashen, drawn, and streaked with tears.

Mother held Verneta tight and soothed her with gentle whispers and consoling pats and caresses on her back and shoulders.

“They’re not after you V’nita,” Mother whispered. “They’re not after you. You’re all right. It’s gonna be
OK
. Gonna be
OK
.”

Floyd laughed condescendingly. Never looking up from his hand of cards, he said, “Billie’s right, V’nita, they ain’t after you. Them ol’ boys there ain’t got no problem with good niggers like you and your mammy. Now, that brother of yours, Leonard
. . .
he gets a mite uppity sometimes. You might wanna talk to that boy.”

Everybody at the table grunted and nodded in agreement.

Then Floyd told Verneta to “go on back home, now.
. . .
You heard me. Go on.”

She did as Floyd told her to do, and Mother went with her, across the street and up that long, steep hill in the dark.

Everybody else played canasta.

I WENT BACK
TO MY ROOM
and lay down on the bed and stared at the model airplanes that hung from the ceiling. Whatever I had been looking for in the refrigerator was still in the refrigerator. I couldn’t eat anything. Verneta’s face, distorted by terror and ashened by fear, was burned forever into my memory. I can see her face to this day, fifty-eight years later. Can see her mouth drawn down and terror struck, and I can’t understand how she could have been as articulate as she was with her mouth so contorted. Can see her face nuzzled into Mother’s neck as Mother tried to comfort her—and I imagine it looked much like it did when she was that little girl who stuck her head in the flour barrel so she could be white and go to a picture show with her little friend Billie, who was now holding her and comforting her again.

It may very well have been that night, it may have been that very event—the slapping of the screen door, the wails of terror, the gaunt pallor of despair—that began a series of awakenings inside me that initiated my ongoing recovery from racism. Had Tommy been home I don’t know how he would have reacted. Would he, like Floyd, have laughed at Verneta and belittled her fear? Would he have shooed her out of the house so the card game could proceed without the unwanted distraction? Or would it have been an epiphany for him as it was for me?