We Were Brothers (7 page)

Tommy Moser in Baylor uniform, 1954

Our gray wool trousers had black stripes down the outside seams. The blouse was the same gray wool. Black chevrons on the sleeve of the blouse indicated the military rank: the two lowest ranks (private first class and corporals) wore inverted-V chevrons on the lower part of the sleeve below the elbow. The higher ranks (sergeants, lieutenants, and captains) wore chevrons on the upper part of the sleeve above the elbow. Polished brass cross arms were worn on the lapels of our jackets and blouses. The blouse was cinched at the waist with a black leather Sam Browne belt. Our blue Oxford shirts were always pressed and heavily starched, the collar points held down with “Spiffies,” wire apparatuses that fit under the tie and pinned into the collar points to hold them down and in place invisibly. Our shoes were polished until we could see our reflection in them. I used spit with my wax polish, touching the polishing cloth to my tongue to help rub the polish into the leather. They looked fine, but Tommy’s were always much better. He used spit and alcohol with the wax polish, and his shoes had the mirror perfection of patent leather. Some boys actually had patent leather shoes and Sam Browne belts that they wore for Wednesday inspections. Such accoutrements were well beyond Mother and Daddy’s means.

Tommy and I spent hours on Tuesday nights polishing our gear to stand inspection the following afternoon, hoping that nobody stepped on our shoes between now and then. I remember Tommy sometimes wearing one pair of shoes and carrying his inspection shoes in a cloth bag.

During inspection the cadet officers and military faculty reviewed the entire cadet corps, critiquing haircuts, the polish of brass and leather, the creases in trousers, and the overall cut of our appearance. If we did not measure up, we were given detention. Some particularly well-groomed cadets were given a red Neat Cadet ribbon. As hard as I worked at it, I never—not in six years—won one of those little red ribbons. But Tommy won several before he dropped out. Tommy was good at looking good—then, and for the rest of his life.

AN HOUR AND
A HALF
of mandatory athletics came after drill. For me it was football in autumn, wrestling in winter, and track in spring. I was not good at any of it. For Tommy it was football in autumn and track in the other two seasons. He dreamed of being a great athlete. He had talent and speed, but no matter what sport he went out for there always seemed to be boys who were faster or had greater endurance than he did, and that did not do his self-confidence and self-esteem any good. He played football all four years he was at Baylor but never played above the junior varsity level, the team called the Baylor Midgets, the team I would captain my senior year, yet another source of filial animosity.

I was playing on the Junior Midgets when Tommy was playing for the Midgets the last year he was at Baylor. Occasionally the two teams scrimmaged with each other. In one scrimmage Tommy was playing center on a T-formation offense. I was playing middle linebacker on defense. As soon as he snapped the ball to the quarterback I shot the gap between him and one of the guards. I fully enjoyed showing him up and embarrassing him even if I did get fussed at by the coach because I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to do. It infuriated Tommy because I was tackling the quarterback about one out of every two or three plays. He snarled at me,

“You do that again, goddammit, and I’m gonna cream your fat ass.”

Well, of course I kept doing it. We were under the watchful eyes of several coaches and I thought that that would protect me from his wrath. It didn’t. The next time I shot that gap he raised his elbow to meet my face. This was a few years before face masks were required, and his elbow found my mouth—and my two front teeth, and out they came—or
off
, I should say, right at the gumline. I’ve worn partial plates all but fourteen years of my life.

TO THE WORLD
OUTSIDE
Baylor and outside our family circle, Tommy presented himself in a brighter, if not completely honest, light. In one photograph I have of him he stands against a background of black walnut trees and a wire fence. He wears running shorts and a Baylor varsity track team jersey. In another, he’s down on one knee wearing a Baylor varsity football jersey without shoulder pads and the standard issue, padded football pants. A football is on the ground in front of him. It’s a classic pose that scores of Baylor players who went on to play in college or on professional teams copped, and whose photographs in that pose lined the halls of Baylor’s gymnasium. In a third photograph, Tommy is on one knee again. He wears blue jeans, a jacket, and a western style hat, and is holding a .30-.30 lever-action rifle in his right hand. In the left he holds a deer’s head by an antler. The deer appears to be lying dead in dense foliage.

The thing is, I took all three of those photographs. I took them with Daddy’s Kodak in various places around our backyard.

Unlike the misplaced and unfulfilled dreams manifest in the first two photographs I mention, the latter photograph was prescient: as an adult Tommy was a first-rate big game hunter. In his Hendersonville den he had the heads and hooves of every hoofed animal that lives on the North American continent, or so he told me. The trophies were truly abundant, so I don’t doubt his claim. At the time of his death he was well on his way to bagging all the hoofed animals that live on the African continent as well.

At his funeral, the officiating minister—a big man with a deep, mellifluous Mississippi accent—said,

“You know, ol’ Tom Moser wasn’t much of a church-going man, but I really did like him. I played football, long time ago, at Ole Miss and Tom played at Georgia Tech, so we had that in common.”

I remember nothing else from the preacher’s homily because I was thunderstruck. Gobsmacked.

Later in the day, as people gathered at Tommy’s place, I got to talking with my nephews, Todd and Tyson, and asked,

“You reckon that your daddy really did tell that preacher-man that he played football at Georgia Tech?”

A quizzical look came over Todd’s face. Then he asked,

“Well, he did, didn’t he?”

“No,” I said, and immediately felt like a shithead. Why couldn’t I just have kept my big mouth shut?

But instead of being angry, Todd chuckled.

“You know,” he said, “that’s just like Daddy. He’d tell a story and it’d be about this big” (his hands gesturing a smallish size), “and then he’d tell the same story again, and it would be this big” (his hands gesturing yet a larger size), “and then it’d be this big, and before long he’d get to believing it himself.”

THE INTIMIDATION AND
humiliation that Tommy endured for those four years at Baylor, whether real or imagined, or a combination of both, eventually drove him to quit. He had no desire to continue down that road, so he dropped out and went to work. He worked at menial jobs—washing cars, pumping gas, sweeping floors, stacking shelves—until he landed a well-paying job in Combustion Engineering’s Chattanooga foundry. He made, and saved, good money. He bought a sporty little MG convertible. A red one.

A few years later, our cousin Wayland helped Tommy find a job at American National Bank, where Wayland was, or had been, a teller. Tommy started as a runner, the lowest spot on the banking totem pole back then. But without the benefit of a college education—or even a completed high-school education—he worked his way up that totem pole. He became a teller, then a head teller, and eventually a branch manager. No one ever faulted my brother for lack of ambition, or determination, or for being stupid about money.

When Tommy died on July 19, 2005, he probably had twenty-five cents of the first dollar he ever earned stashed in a bank somewhere, or a coffee can. Our uncle Bob always said that Tommy pinched a quarter so hard that the eagle squawked.

The younger brother has never been frugal. Bob always said that money always burned a hole in my pocket.

THOSE OF US WHO LIVED
far away from the campus spent a lot of time on the bus. An hour each way for Tommy and me and the other boys who lived near us. Longer than that for the boys who lived up on Lookout Mountain. Unlike the public buses, the more senior boys—officers, noncommissioned officers, juniors and seniors—reserved the back of the Baylor bus for themselves. When the bus entered Stringer’s Ridge tunnel everybody ducked. It was a short tunnel, and the darkness, which came on suddenly, lasted only a few seconds. But the very brevity caused all hell to break loose—and furiously so. Only the boys in the back remained sitting up. Books and all manner of things not stowed or battened down flew through the air, hitting anybody who dared stay sitting up. Seniors turned the hefty part of their class rings to the inside of the palms of their hands and popped the younger kids on the backs of their heads. Hard. Cadet officers, under the pretense of maintaining or restoring order, meted out punishment by whacking kids upside their heads with their folded overseas caps. The caps themselves were limp, soft wool, and were harmless, but the officers’ metal pips that were pinned to the front of the cap could, and did, inflict pain.

There were other, more sadistic, torments on the ride home that made the mayhem of Stringer’s Ridge tunnel seem tame by comparison.

Sometimes a boy was forcibly stripped to the waist and held down while two or three other boys—all at the same time and in unison—slapped his naked stomach hard and fast until the boy’s belly was red and raw. Other times a boy was stripped and pinned down while other boys rubbed the hair on his belly enthusiastically until it was all twisted up in small, tight pills of hair that had to be shaved off. Sometimes a boy was stripped of his trousers and forced off the bus in his skivvies to stand helplessly on the curb watching his trousers dangle out the bus window until they were dropped off a block or two from the unfortunate cadet’s point of disembarkation.

Neither Tommy nor I was immune to these kinds of cruelties, but they befell us less often than they did some of the other boys, especially the ones considered odd or strange for one reason or another. I was more or less accepted into the clan because I accepted the established pecking order and I wasn’t a wiseass—and perhaps because my fear of the bigger boys was mistaken for respect.

I was a short, chubby kid. Tommy was a tall, skinny kid. But apparently neither of us came across as being funny looking—a condition that was a certain invitation to abuse. I think that Tommy’s being older probably played a part in his being mostly excluded from the assaults, but for whatever reason, we Mosers suffered the humiliation of being put off that bus half-naked on Brainerd Road less than some.

When Tommy was in the tenth grade, his last year at Baylor, he was attacked on the way home. And who knows if this incident contributed to his making that decision or not? It was a Wednesday afternoon, and since neither of us were on varsity athletic teams we were free to catch the 4:00 bus that left campus right after inspection and go home. The early bus did not take us back to the point where it picked us up but made a straight shot east on McCallie Avenue, through the Missionary Ridge tunnels, and then went straight down Brainerd Road, stopping at designated stops to let boys off at whatever point was most convenient for them. We usually got off at either Seminole Drive or at Tunnel Boulevard and walked the mile and a half home.

This day Tommy, as always, was in his meticulously groomed and polished dress uniform. I remember that it was spring and we were in our white dress pants. Tommy was accosted just before we got to the tunnels. Those tunnels, unlike the tunnel through Stringer’s Ridge, are long, and going east there is a slight grade. The old International Harvester was chugging along slowly and dutifully, and by the time we came out into the light at the other end Tommy had been stripped of his blouse, his pants, and his shirt and tie. At the next stop he was physically put off the bus. He stood there in his underwear watching his pants dangling out of a bus window. They dropped to the street along with his wool blouse and polished Sam Browne belt just as the bus shifted into first gear and continued on its way.

Given Tommy’s penchant for grooming and his growing hatred for Baylor and the boys in it, he must have been hurt, indignant, and convulsed with rage. I did not get off the bus with him. I stayed on and got off at the next stop and walked home alone. I didn’t want to be with him after that. I didn’t want to give him the chance to take it out on me. I hated seeing him treated that way, but on the other hand I did take a little bit of enjoyment seeing him bullied.

EARLY IN MY
SOPHOMORE
year a funny-looking seventh grader playfully slapped me upside the head in the brief darkness of Stringer’s Ridge tunnel. He was a short, fat kid who had an unruly head of black hair that grew down his forehead, terminating in the neighborhood of his eyebrows. He wore thick Coke-bottle glasses. Obviously he did not understand the hierarchical dynamics at play when he slapped me. I was in a bad mood because the juniors and seniors in the back of the bus wouldn’t let me sit with them and it was the first year that Tommy wasn’t on the bus with me, though I don’t know what that might have to do with anything. Anyway, I hauled off and slapped him back. I slapped him
hard
. Really hard. Hard enough to break the bridge of his thick, black, horn-rimmed glasses.

As soon as he got off the bus he reported me, and rightfully so. First period had just begun when I was summoned to the commandant’s office. I stood at rigid, chin-tucked attention while he upbraided me for responding to that innocent, playful act with such undueness. I was a cadet corporal when I went into the commandant’s office, but I left it a cadet private—the same humiliating rank as the kid I slapped.

AS I GREW
OLDER AND BIGGER,
and as I increased in rank, both militarily and socially, I, too, became part of the hazing tradition, gleefully inflicting these traditional torments on the younger, more feckless, bus-riding day boys. Naturally, it was always done in fun—for the perpetrators anyway, as had always been the case.

Barry Moser in Baylor uniform, 1957

As a cadet officer I was a seventeen-year-old fascist, having been well indoctrinated and initiated by five years of other young, dilettante fascists. I barked and hollered and screamed and prodded and poked and slapped my troops upside their heads just like I had been barked at and hollered at and poked and prodded and slapped upside my head when I was their age and of their rank and in their position. I can only wonder how my brother might have acted had he stayed the course and had become a senior cadet officer.

As the years went by the militaristic animus that Baylor instilled in me faded, just like the racism my family instilled in me. Less so with Tommy, though he did actual military service. I did not.

He joined the National Guard in 1960 and did his basic training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He did not join for patriotic or chauvinistic reasons. He joined to avoid being drafted, because he had no deferments. He was not in school nor was he married, so he was in a precarious situation vis-à-vis the Selective Service System. So he took the least risky route available to him and joined the National Guard and avoided being cannon fodder in Vietnam, where he most certainly would have ended up had he been drafted.

I was fully invested in the military imperative when I left Baylor. Six years of military school coupled up with a family who wanted nothing more than for one of the sons to go to West Point (or, that failing, to become a doctor, lawyer, or minister) and you have a solid martial foundation that I was eager to build on. I wanted to be a fighter pilot more than anything I could think of, and would have joined the U.S. Air Force had I good eyesight. But I had poor eyesight. And if I couldn’t be a fighter pilot, I didn’t want to be anything.

In June 1966, one of my best friends from Baylor, Parks McCall, a radar systems operator in the backseat of an F-4C Phantom jet, was killed in Vietnam. And with his death all the spit and polish that the Baylor School for Boys and my family had put on the face of things military became tarnished.

And my life’s direction shifted dramatically.

I found myself siding with the antiwar movement, though I did so mutely, wary of familial and societal repercussions. And at the same time I found myself sympathizing with folks who were sitting in at Woolworth’s. Again, mutely. My obvious cowardice would not have served me well in military service.

I MANAGED TO
STAY
a step ahead of the draft, though not by virtue of any kind of plan. I had been a preacher in college as well as a student, so I was deferred. After college I was no longer a preacher but I was married and had started teaching and both of those conditions were deferments. Then the babies came along. Eventually I was too old for the draft.

I was a student at the University of Chattanooga when I first began examining my family’s teachings about race. I was the second person in my family to go to college (Albert Moser being the first), and that opened up worlds hitherto unknown to and unseen by me. It was while I was at university that I received my license to preach in the Methodist Church. I embraced Christianity with a fundamentalist’s zeal, and as I read and reread and reread the Gospels, paying particular attention to the teachings of Jesus, especially the Beatitudes, I began to seriously question the values of my family, the values of the society in which I lived, and the values of my church community. And as I reexamined those values, I was being exposed to new values and ideas, primarily under the guidance of Bill Brockman, the director of the Methodist Student Center at the University of Chattanooga. Under his influence, and that of the students who gravitated to him, the scales of prejudice and bigotry began to fall from my eyes, much as the scales of blindness fell from St. Paul’s eyes on the road to Damascus.

Tommy, on the other hand, stayed faithful in the racist tack that both of us had been harnessed with. Or, perhaps, so he would have had me think. Toward the end of his life I began wondering if the abusive racial slurs he threw at me in every conversation were really as malevolent as he wanted me to think they were. When he spoke well of the Ku Klux Klan, was he really of that mind, or was he putting me on knowing how much I despise them?