The Prince of Frogtown (11 page)

I love Christmas, and have since my big brother used to wake me, standing all serious with a big flashlight in his hand.

“Has he done come?” I always asked, the light blinding me.

“He done was,” he said.

My baby brother was too small to fool with. We let him sleep.

What did he know about Santy Claus?

We had to sneak to the tree, past my mother sleeping on the couch. It was forbidden, to peek before dawn.

We never waited on dawn in our lives.

The simple act of wrapping a present always pulled me back in time, shut out everything else, and sometimes, if I forgot myself long enough, even made me sing.

Old toy trains, little toy tracks

Little toy drums, coming from a sack

Carried by a man, dressed in white and red

Little one don’t you think it’s time you were in bed

It probably sounded pretty bad. I sing like an angel drunk, but do not drink anymore.

I looked up to see the woman smiling.

She walked over and whispered.

“He’s in there on the couch, just grinning.”

“Why?” I said.

“Because he thinks you’re singing to him.”

My father believed it was wrong to treat a boy, even a boy just five years old, as a helpless thing, so he rarely held my hand. He would carry us sometimes, Sam and me both, like a carnival ride, but when we walked he walked at his pace, and now and then he would wheel around, grin, and tell us, Come on, boys, come on. I remember a sidewalk in the mid-1960s, remember running to keep up when I was four or five years old. Sam, never helpless, matched him step for step. He would have killed himself, had his heart burst, rather than let him know he had won. Me, he had come back to retrieve, his face red.

But my legs were shorter.

We don’t talk about him a lot, Sam and me.

I went home to see him later that Christmas season. The ring still felt hot on my finger then, and I pulled it on and off as cars passed us on Highway 21.

We were driving to Anniston, the county seat, to look at a used truck. You look at a million over your lifetime, and buy four. It’s just good, somehow, to go look. There might be a magic truck out there. We walked round and round one that day but it was just a truck, and on the way home we stopped for a barbecue at a place called Dad’s.

“Tell me one good thing about our daddy,” I said.

“I don’t remember one,” he said.

“There had to be something,” I said.

“He didn’t even buy no groceries,” he said.

We left there in a cold rain, so he drove slowly—even slower than usual. He says I drive too fast, but most people who drive like him are wearing pillbox hats and pearls. I hope when we are old he does not drive me to the hospital when my heart begins to fail. I would have to get right with God as I crawled in the cab, because I would never see the emergency room.

“There has to be one good memory,” I said.

Four red lights and an eternity later, he nodded.

“One,” he said.

“Well?”

“It was that Christmas he got me that red wagon, and bought you that big tricycle,” he said.

“Daddy never bought me a damn tricycle,” I said.

“He did. He got drunk, and when him and some others left they run over it in the driveway,” he said. “Momma took it in the house, and hid it in the closet. We moved, it was still there.”

CHAPTER FIVE

The Bootlegger’s Rhythm

T
HE DITCH CLEAVED FROGTOWN
into two realms, and two powerful spirits held sway, one on each side. One was old, old as the Cross, and the other had aged only a few days in a gallon can. Both had the power to change men’s lives. On one side of the ditch, a packed-in, pleading faithful fell hard to their knees and called the Holy Ghost into their jerking bodies in unknown tongues. On the other side, two boys, too much alike to be anything but brothers, flung open the doors of a black Chevrolet and lurched into the yard of 117 D Street, hallelujahs falling dead around them in the weeds. In the house, a sad-eyed little woman looked out, afraid it might be the law. When your boys are gone you’re always afraid it might be the law. But it was just her two oldest sons, Roy and Troy, floating home inside the bubble of her prayer, still in crumpled, cattin’-around clothes from Saturday night, still a little drunk on Sunday morning. They were fine boys, though, beautiful boys. They were just steps away now, a few steps. She would fry eggs by the platterful and pour black coffee, and be glad they were not in a smoking hulk wrapped around a tree, or at the mercy of the police. She thought sometimes of walking over to the church to see it all, to hear the lovely music, but that would leave her boys and man unsupervised for too long. Her third son was eleven or so then. He could hear the piano ring across the ditch, even hear people shout, but he could smell the liquor that was always in the house on a Sunday and even steal a taste of it when no one was looking, so it was more real.

T
HE HOLY GHOST MOVED INVISIBLE,
but they could feel it in the rafters, sense it racing inside the walls. It was as real as a jag of lightning, or an electrical fire.

The preacher stood on a humble, foot-high dais, to show that he did not believe he was better than them. “Do you believe in the Holy Ghost?” he asked, and they said they did. He preached then of the end of the world, and it was beautiful.

They were still a new denomination then, but had spread rapidly in the last fifty years around a nation of exploited factory workers, coal miners, and rural and inner-city poor. Here, it was a church of lint-heads, pulpwooders and sharecroppers, shoutin’ people, who said amen like they were throwing a mule shoe. Biblical scholars turned their noses up, calling it hysteria, theatrics, a faith of the illiterate. But in a place where machines ate people alive, faith had to pour even hotter than blood.

It had no steeple, no stained glass, no bell tower, but it was the house of Abraham and Isaac, of Moses and Joshua, of the Lord thy God. People tithed in Mercury dimes and buffalo nickels, and pews filled with old men who wore ancient black suit coats over overalls, and young men in short-sleeved dress shirts and clip-on ties. Women sat plain, not one smear of lipstick or daub of makeup on their faces, and not one scrap of lace at their wrists or necks. Their hair was long, because Paul wrote that “if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her, for her hair is given her for a covering.” Their hair and long dresses were always getting caught in the machines, but it was in the Scripture, so they obeyed. Some wore it pinned up for church, because of the heat, but before it was over hairpins would litter the floor.

They listened as the preacher laid down a list of sins so complete it left a person no place to go but down.

“They preached it hard, so hard a feller couldn’t live it,” said Homer Barnwell, who went there as a boy.

The people, some gasping from the brown lung, ignored the weakness in their wind and pain in their chests and sang “I’ll Fly Away” and “Kneel at the Cross” and “That Good Ol’ Gospel Ship.” A woman named Cora Lee Garmon, famous for her range, used to hit the high notes so hard “the leaders would stand out in her neck,” Homer said.

Then, with the unstoppable momentum of a train going down a grade, the service picked up speed. The Reverend evoked a harsh God, who turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, and condemned the Children of Israel, who gave their golden earrings to Aaron to fashion Baal, the false god. “I have seen this people,” God told Moses, “and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. Now therefore let me alone, so that my wrath may wax hot against them.”

As children looked with misery on a service without end, the preacher read chapter 2 of the Acts of the Apostles:

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues…

The congregants’ eyes were shut tight.

“Do you feel the Spirit?” the Reverend shouted.

Their hands reached high.

“Can you feel the Holy Ghost?”

They answered one by one, in the light of the full Gospel.

“Yeeeeesssss.”

Then, as if they had reached for a sizzling clothesline in the middle of an electrical storm, one by one they began to jerk, convulsing in the grip of unseen power. Others threw their arms open wide, and the Holy Ghost touched them soul by soul.

Some just stood and shivered.

Some danced, spinning.

Some leapt high in the air.

Some wept.

Some of the women shook their heads so violently that their hair came free and whipped through the air, three feet long. Hairpins flew.

The Ghost was in them now.

They began to speak in tongues.

The older church people interpreted, and the congregation leaned in, to hear the miracle. It sounded like ancient Hebrew, maybe, a little, and other times it sounded like nothing they had heard or imagined. They rushed to the front of the church and knelt in a line, facing the altar, so the preacher could lay his hands on them, and—through the Father, in the presence of the Holy Ghost—make them whole.

One by one, they were slain in the Spirit, and fell backward, some of them, fainting on the floor. The services could last for hours, till the congregants’ stomachs growled. “If it’s goin’ good,” Homer said, “why switch it off?”

A
S STRONG AS IT WAS,
as close, it was as if sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal, across that ditch.

“We could have by God stayed longer if you’d have brought some damn money,” griped Roy, as they meandered toward the house. It is unclear where they had been that weekend, but apparently they had a real good time. Roy, the prettiest of all of them, leaned against the car for balance, and cussed his older brother a little more. Roy’s eyes were just like my father’s, a bright blue, and his hair was black. He was tall for a Bragg, and the meanest when he drank. He was not a dandy and just threw on his clothes, but was one of those men who would have looked elegant standing in a mudhole.

Troy cussed him back, but cheerfully. He always wore snow-white T-shirts, black pants and black penny loafer shoes, and as he blithely dog-cussed his brother he bent over, took off one loafer and dumped several neatly folded bills into his hand. Then, hopping around on one foot, he waved the bills in his brother’s face.

“You lying son of a bitch,” Roy said.

Troy, his shoe still in his hand, just hopped and grinned, trying not to get his white sock dirty.

He sniffed the money, like it was flowers.

“I’ll kill you,” Roy said.

But they were always threatening to kill somebody.

Troy, in a wobbly pirouette, laughed out loud.

In seconds, they were in the dirt, tearing at clothes and screaming curses, and rolled clear into the middle of D Street, in a whirl of blood and cinders.

The commotion drew first Velma and then Bobby from inside the house. Velma, unheard and ignored, pleaded for them to stop. Bobby, on a binge and still dressed only in his long-handles, cackled, hopped, and did a do-si-do.

My father banged through the door and into the yard, and, like a pair of long underwear sucked off a clothesline by a tornado, was carried away by the melee.

In the rising dust, they clubbed each other about the head with their fists, split lips and blacked eyes and bruised ribs. My father, smaller than his brothers, was knocked down and almost out. Velma bent over my father, to make sure he was breathing, and yelled at the older two: “I’ll call the law.” Then she left walking, to find a telephone.

How many times did Velma make that walk to a borrowed telephone, having to choose between her sons’ freedom and their safety? My Aunt Juanita, driving through the village, remembers seeing her walking fast down the street. “Her heels was just a’clickin’ on the road,” she said.

She stopped and, through the window, asked Velma if she was all right.

“The boys is killing each other,” she said.

In the yard, the boys were staggering now, about used-up. The neighbors watched from their porches, but no one got in the way. The distant scream of a police siren drifted into the yard. Velma had found a telephone.

By the time the police came, the street was empty and quiet in front of 117, the brothers inside, ruining Velma’s washrags with their blood. Bobby had enjoyed himself immensely, and gone a half day without pants of any kind. Velma walked back, her flat shoes clicking slowly now. But her boys were safe, and nothing mattered next to that.

In the aftermath, she cooked a five-pound block of meat loaf, a mountain of fried potatoes, a cauldron of pinto beans, and dishpans of squash and okra—nothing special, just the usual supper for the kin that, every Sunday, trickled in to eat.

It was nothing special, either, that fight, nothing to get all worked up about. The brothers regularly fought in the middle of D Street. “I watched ’em fight,” said Charles Parker, who lived next door.

Or, as Carlos put it: “You didn’t never ask about that big fight Roy and Troy had, you asked about which one. It happened regular.” It was just part of the rhythm of the week, the rhythm of their lives.

Most lives move to one kind or another. On the coast, they move to tides, and in a factory town they move to an assembly line. For Carlos, a body and fender man and wrecker driver, life moved to the rhythms of the highway, to the voice of the dispatcher on the radio. In the week he cruised slow and easy, but on Friday nights, when drinkers hit the roads, the dispatcher’s voice crackled with possibility. He stomped the accelerator and raced from ditch to ditch, his winch cable whining, yellow lights spinning, mommas crying, ambulances screaming away or, if it was a bad one, not screaming at all.

For his cousins on D Street, it was the bootlegger’s rhythm. “The boys and Uncle Bobby all worked, and only dranked on weekends. They’d get goin’ real good on Friday and still be goin’on a Sunday. Of course, sometimes they could still be going on a Tuesday, depending on how much liquor they had. They were the best people in the world, gentle people, when they were all right. But all your daddy’s life, on a weekend, there was liquor there in that house.”