The Prince of Frogtown (7 page)

The gentler townspeople of Jacksonville contemplated them at a safe distance, in awe, and fear.

With the books of science and logic closed to them, they believed in things, in signs and warnings that had no foundation in the wider world. They planned their days in the morning, “turning the cup,” when they would empty the coffee grounds into a saucer and examine the patterns on the porcelain. A teardrop shape meant sorrow. A streak represented a road, and meant that you would travel, or that someone would travel to you. A series of specks meant rain. They divined more of the future in cards. A jack of clubs meant a brown-eyed, handsome man would come to your door. A king of hearts meant a wise, older man, of fair complexion, would affect your life. The ace of spades meant death. They believed that a swarm of gnats heralded violent storms, that they could cure a sty in their eye if they stood in the middle of a darkened crossroads and chanted:

Sty, sty

Leave my eye

Catch the next

Who passes by

They believed it was an invitation to murder to bring an ax into a house, and the only way to undo it was to turn around three times and back out the door. They believed that a snapping turtle, if it bit their finger, would not let go until it thundered, that a coach whip snake could form itself into a circle, like a wheel, and roll down the trails after them until it caught them, and whip them to death. They believed if they killed a dove they would be punished by God, because the dove had been a sign of hope in a world drowned for its sins. They believed that the granddaddy longlegs, a delicate spider that moved on legs thinner than the finest wire, was good luck, and they would chant…

Granddaddy, Granddaddy,

Which way is your cow?

…until the spider would lift one threadlike leg, and point.

They believed that the presence of dragonflies, which they called snake doctors, meant a serpent lay nearby. They believed that they could cure warts by pretending to wash their hands over an empty washpot, and that old women could murmur worms out of the ground. They believed it was bad luck if a woman gave her man a knife, because it would cut their love in two.

The village had its own witch, an old woman who could breathe the fire out of a burned child’s wound, and simple-minded children wandered into houses two blocks away and climbed into chairs at the dinner table, expecting to be fed. Faith healers blew rabbit tobacco smoke into the ears of squalling babies, and pressed scraps of Scripture to the chests of dying men.

If you did not have faith, you trusted to luck. The men bet on game-cocks, cards, and which way a bird would fly off a wire when someone let fly with a chunk of coal or an empty bottle of booze. Between shifts, they pitched pennies in the bathroom, and gathered in a circle on the railroad switchback to roll dice. It was there, in the 1920s, that an unlucky man named Charlie Tune made the strangest bet of all. “Charlie Tune needed to roll a four, and he said, ‘If I don’t make this four with two deuces before I crap out, I’ll leave this town and you won’t ever see me again,’” Homer said. He cannot recall what it was Charlie Tune rolled, but it wasn’t a pair of deuces. “He got up, threw his coat over his shoulder and walked away, and nobody ever saw him again. Had a boy named Luther. We called his boy ‘Two-Deucey,’ on account of his daddy.”

They brought more than their customs to town. They brought their livestock. Every house had a cow lot in the backyard, and when your cow went dry your neighbor gave you some of their milk, to help you get by. There was a sprawling, communal hogpen, and tiny gardens, mostly tomatoes, squash, rattlesnake beans, pepper, cucumber, a few stalks of sweet corn, collards, turnip greens and pumpkins. Chickens roamed the streets. No one stole, because the ambrosia of a frying pullet could not be contained by such thin walls. Likewise, no argument was private, no betrayal secret. If a man hollered at his wife, you heard it three doors down.

“They were good, moral people,” said Homer Barnwell.

“But,” he said, “pretty much ever’body carried a pistol.”

A police officer was more likely to get hit with a brick and have his gun taken than serve a warrant. The hillbillies would kill you—that was a natural fact—so police usually left them alone to settle their arguments. When they did come, they came shooting.

Donald Garmon, who is seventy-two now, grew up in the village. “When you got up in the morning and put your shoes on, you was pretty sure you was going to fight somebody, before the sun went down,” said Garmon. “Somebody was going to hit you, and you was going to fight. I hate to say it, but it was one of the meanest places I ever been in.”

Shot five times by the police, mill hand John Barnwell—Homer Barnwell’s father—was still drafted in ’16, and fought in France, across no-man’s-land. In the trenches, the mustard gas ruined his lungs, and he came home to work again, coughing, smothering, in the cotton mill. A world war had changed nothing here. It was still either the mill, the backbreaking uncertainty of the fields, or surrender.

They tried to unionize over time, to better themselves, and poor men burned rich men in effigy and fought each other at picket lines with pistols, knives and ax handles. But the mill bosses finally just locked all the doors, stopped taking credit at the store, and waited them out. It is hard to walk a picket line when the company owns your house.

The rich people bought them, really, for pocket change, but in their hearts they were still in the mountains, still up high. As the cotton mill used up its first generation of workers, new handbills fluttered from barns and fence posts in the foothills outside town.

WORKERS WANTED
MEN WITH FAMILIES
GOOD WAGES
GOOD WORKING CONDITIONS
GOOD HOUSING
ELECTRICITY
FREE COAL

Bobby Bragg rode past them on his mule, oblivious to the promises and the lies. He never learned to read. He was a young man by then, still sharecropping in the bleak economy after the First World War. Finally, the lure of year-round money and a ready-made house wicked out and found him, too. He rode his mule into town, to try and get on. That’s how they said it, “gettin’ on,” like it was a boat, or a train, and if you didn’t get on, you got left behind.

“You don’t drink, do you?” the mill boss asked him.

“Just on Christmas,” Bobby said.

The Boy

“R
ICK,” THE BOY ASKED,
“how do you punch somebody?” We were supposed to be taking a walk.

“You never punched anybody?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

I did not know what to say.

“Will you show me?” he asked.

I guess I should have told him there is rarely a good reason to punch someone, that it is better to turn the other cheek. I should have evoked Gandhi and King. I should have told him that the meek inherit the earth and all that razzmatazz.

“Make a fist,” I said.

I tapped the bridge of my nose.

“You hit here, one time, hard, and it’s over,” I said.

“Why?”

“’Cause it hurts real bad,” I said. “Their eyes will water, and they will cry.”

“Then what?” he said.

“Then they will run to their mommies,” I said, “and tell on you.”

“What if they don’t run away?” he asked.

“They won’t be able to see good after you thump ’em good that first time, right?”

He said he supposed so.

“Well, thump ’em again.”

He was named, this boy, for a man who wrestled an angel, but had lived a life free of contention, free of consequence. I wished I could tell him it would always be that way, but all I could do was teach him how to bloody another little boy’s nose.

“Repeat after me,” I said.

“Hurt ’em quick.

“Make ’em cry.

“Go home.”

Father of the Year.

“What if they try to step back when you swing?” he asked.

“You try,” I said, as I reached out to tap him on the head.

He lurched back but could not move.

I was standing on his foot.

“Oh,” he said.

I told him most little boys swing wild, from the side, and don’t connect with much of anything. I lost as many boyhood fights as I won, but I learned. I tried to show how to block, jab. “You punch straight ahead, like driving a nail,” I said.

I could hear my father’s voice in my head.

“Is it okay to cry?” he asked.

It’s not even okay to ask that question, I thought.

“Try not to,” I said.

I am not, usually, an idiot. I knew I was being a little careless with the boy, the way I was with everything else. It is easy to teach someone to throw a punch in abstract, hard to explain the sick feeling that precedes any violence, even playground violence.

So I told him to walk away when he could.

“Is that what you would do?” he asked.

“Not on your damn life,” I said.

He was confused now.

“I have run,” I explained, when I knew I couldn’t win, and the cause didn’t seem worth the pain. But I was always sick, after. You choose the sick feeling you can stand most, the one before you fight, or the one after you run away. But that was complicated, for a ten-year-old.

“Son,” I said, “I once ran away in a Mustang.”

I told him that the rules of conduct, from the school, the church, his beloved mom, didn’t matter much in the dirt, if you were getting hurt.

“You bite,” I said.

He looked amazed.

“It’s fine to gouge,” I said.

Then his mother walked up, and I was in trouble again.

She would raise a gentle boy if she had to lock me in a shed.

“He doesn’t need to know,” she told me.

I nodded my head, hoping that might spare me.

It never has.

“He’s ten years old,” she hissed.

I told her, yes, he was getting started late.

“You are twelve,” she said.

Still, I tried to modulate my behavior around the boy. Once, he asked me how to defend himself against a bigger boy.

“Kick him in the…” and I searched my mind for a Baptist word.

“Kick him in the scrotum,” I said.

“What’s a scrotum?” he asked.

He walked around giggling for an hour and a half.

So, when his mother was not looking, we boxed in the living room, and sparred in the yard. But the boy wanted to be a fighter like I wanted to be a fat Italian opera singer. He smiled when he punched, he giggled, and I knew he might live his whole life, a complete life, and never strike another man in anger.

“How did you learn?” he asked me.

I told him it was in my blood.

I saw my father fight. He barely took time to cuss a man before hitting him in the face. I remember he fought moving forward, almost dancing. At every reappearance, he schooled me. He baby-tapped me in my shoulders and gut as I swung so hard I fell. By the time I was six years old he smacked me upside the head, harder, when I dropped my guard. It was still just a tap, but it was like being hit with the end of a post. “The boy likes it,” he said, as my mother snatched me up and put a stop to it. I know I will never forget feeling like a big boy, fists clenched in front of my face.

I was six, in my last fight he knew about, on the playground at Spring Garden Elementary. A boy shook loose of the hold I had on his neck and punched me in the eye. The teacher sent me home on the big yellow bus with a note folded in my coat pocket.

My father read it, and tossed it in the trash.

“Who whupped?” he said.

I told him we didn’t finish.

“Finish it tomorrow,” he said.

I tried to tell him it was Friday, that we didn’t have school the next day. I waited, miserable, sad and nervous, to pick a fight with that little boy.

The woman tells me I am a throwback, that children settle differences now with lawyers, guns and money.

But you can’t do right all the time.

A boy needs to know how to make a fist.

You know that, being stuck on twelve.

CHAPTER THREE

Bob

B
OB NEVER MET
a man he wouldn’t fight at least twice, if insulted, and he intended to slap all the pretty off Handsome Bill Lively’s face. It happened in a weed-strewn clearing at the corner of Alexandria Road and D Street, around the time of the Second Great War. The village gamblers liked to gather there, where the thick hedges, honeysuckle and possum grapevines screened them from their wives, the rare police car, and the Congregational Holiness Church. A man named Doug Smith got cut across the eyes there, “and there was always somebody fightin’, cuttin’,” said Jimmy Hamilton, who grew up in the mill village with his friend Homer Barnwell, and was just a boy then. “I remember Bill Lively as a nice-looking man, dark-haired,” said Jimmy. “If he’d had one of those pencil-thin mustaches, ain’t no tellin’ how far he could have gone. Well, Bill liked to pick at Bob when Bob was drinkin’, and that day, Bob come down to the poker game, drunk. Him and Bobby got to fightin’, and he worked Bob over a little bit.”

Bob limped home, beaten.

“Well, about fifteen or twenty minutes later, here come Bobby back,” Jimmy said.

Bob was naked.

“For God’s sake, Bob,” said Handsome Bill.

“You whupped me with my clothes on,” Bob told him. “Now let’s see if you can whup me nekkid.”

I would give a gold monkey to know what Bill Lively thought, standing there looking at Bob’s little-bitty, sweat-slicked, naked body, everything pretty much fish-belly white except the red on his arms and face and neck. Where do you grab a solid hold of a naked man? We just know that Bob balled up his little fists and flung himself on Bill Lively for revenge I guess, because I am not sure if you can fight for your honor with your parts exposed.

What a wonderful story it might have been.

What if he had somehow beaten down the bigger man, and gone home with his head high and posterior in the breeze?

Instead, Lively worked him over again, snatched a pine sapling from the ground, and whipped Bobby’s bare behind down D Street.

Velma was there—she was always there—on the stoop, standing as Bob climbed the steps, not ducking inside to hide her face and leave him to walk the last few steps alone. She glared out the door to let any busybodies know they could all go straight to hell, and stomped off to get the salve. “I ought to knock you in the damn head, Bob,” she always said to him, in times like these.

There are some people in the world who are not necessarily good at life if you see it as a completed work, but who are excellent at it one daub of bright color at a time. Bob, when drinking, lived in the twitch. He might never be respectable, in a Methodist kind of way. But the way he saw it, and raised his sons to see it, he could be free as a bird on a bunk in the city jail, as long as he showed some guts and left some blood on the ground—his, or somebody’s. Bob, with a bottle, would wreak mayhem in disproportion to his size, and go find his angel, to hear his story, and bind his wounds.

He was kind to her, when sober, but would forget to be kind when he was not. She just took it, and walked miles to bail him out of jail with money she made in that stifling mill. People recall that his dark red hair went white early in his life, as if he wanted it that way, because she had loved it so.

The nature of their story, really, is that you laugh at Bob and cry for her, for her goodness and long suffering. But it is the nature of men that it is easier for us to laugh at Bob than cry for Velma, which is why women loathe us so.

I laughed as Jimmy told that story, burnishing one more legend of a tin-pot god. There have been a hundred drinking stories told on Bob, more, if you count the lies. But it wasn’t always that way for my grandfather. Once, he was just a citizen, just a fella, of regular behavior, and reasonable dreams.

A
S A YOUNG MAN,
Bobby was sober, ramrod straight. He was a man who could sense promise in the dirt, who could sift it through his hands and feel good things, feel the potential of okra, squash, tomatoes, and make it come true. He worked his shift in the cotton mill and sharecropped, too, and grew an oasis in his little village garden.

He could not just stand by and watch another man work. He reached for the pick. When other men sat around to drink or gossip, he slept, resting his body for the next day. There wasn’t any foolishness in him, and he would only go so far into the twentieth century. He built traps and snares and walked the streets loaded with heavy stringers of fish and carcasses of squirrels and rabbits. He greatly distrusted automobiles and would not even sit behind the wheel of one, and if he needed to travel, he saddled a horse.

In his twenties, he still took care of his momma, Frankie, and his siblings, and people believe he lived a lifetime without being mean to her. In a time when most people had to stay inside on wash day because they had one pair of underwear, Bob’s two full-time jobs gave him a largesse, enough to save a dollar or two most months in a coffee can, for his one dream. He liked to tell it to people, tell how much cotton he could bring in, how many mules he would stable, when he finally bought his own land. He lived for it, and nothing would distract him. If a man approached him with a bottle when he was a young man he would just tell them, No thank you, Slim, but I’ll catch you in December.

Then, working a corn crop for a man named Sam Whistenant in 1919, he saw his angel. He stopped for a sip of cool water, and as he tipped the dipper to his lips there she was, hair black as the bottom of a well and so long it almost brushed the red ground. It was poetry that he found her there, next to a field, a girl with the gentlest heart in the world, a selfless, lovely, patient girl, with rows of green corn framing her beautiful face.

And like that, he was dreaming again.

“Velma’s mother and father didn’t want her to marry Bobby,” said Velma’s niece, Shirley Brown. “They were hoping for an officer in the cavalry.”

They had a picture of a dashing young cadet on the mantel, and assumed it was only a matter of time before their daughter married the man. They knew she was sneaking off to see him. She climbed up behind him on his government-issue horse and they would ride, thundering through the pines, her hair trailing behind her. The young officer must have felt like the luckiest man in the world, till he found what she really loved was the horse.

The same day Bob’s heart fluttered at the edge of that field, she noticed him, too, by the well. She was about seventeen, and she did not fall in love with the boy so much as with the hair on top of his little head. It was kind of auburn, but darker than that, and shined.

Why, she thought, it looks just like syrup candy. Back then, women made candy by heating a greased skillet and pouring in dollops of dark, reddish sorghum. As it cooled, they pulled it, like taffy, till it glowed, and when it cooled it set up hard as rubies. He was a little runty, true, but “he was the prettiest little man I ever seen,” she said.

She told her mother, Emma, she liked the boy. It was like she walked into a party and flung dirt on the birthday cake. Emma was heartbroken, and forbade it. How could the foolish girl swap an officer and a gentleman for that little dirtdauber? Her father, Samuel Hampton Whistenant, told her she would die a wretched spinster before she would marry a sharecropper, and they kept a close eye on her, to keep her from running off. They were from Switzerland, the Whistenants, and men in their line had fought in the Revolutionary War and Civil War. Samuel Whistenant was not rich but he was proud. He farmed his own land and ran a little café in the mill village community of Blue Mountain, south of Jacksonville.

To keep her close, he put Velma to work in the café, as a waitress. She was still single when she turned nineteen, old to be waiting for a husband, a beautiful, lovelorn girl.

It was there in the café that Bobby got to see her. He came in and ate a thousand hamburgers, drank a bathtub of coffee, just to see her fill his cup. Sam always ran him off if he even tried to hold her hand. So he sat on the counter stool, stiff-backed, the starch in his overalls and shirt quietly rustling as he stared at the back of her.

A year passed, more. On June 4, 1920, for the first time in as long as anyone could even recall, his stool was empty. For the kin who followed this forbidden love story, it looked like the boy had finally taken more than he could stand.

In the afternoon, a horn sounded on the street outside.

Sam peered out the window.

A Chevrolet idled at the curb.
FOR HIRE
was stenciled on the door.

Bob could not drive, so he had come to get her in a taxi.

She snatched off her apron and was out the door. They raced south to the Oxanna Church, where a preacher named Williams pronounced them man and wife.

“He stole her from her parents, and the cavalry,” said Shirley. It is a pattern in my family. Velma, who could have been the wife of an officer, chose the village. My other grandmother, Ava, married a roofer and a whiskey maker and lived in the dark woods. My mother married the man who once stole the keys to the county jail. Some people would say they didn’t pick well, that they gave up a chance to move up in their class, or even move out of it. How wasteful, to marry for love.

T
HE MILL WHISTLE BLEW
in the pitch black of four-thirty to get Bobby and Velma up. It blew again at five forty-five to start them walking, and again at six, to restart the machines. There were no clocks on the bedside tables in the mill village. There was no need. If you laid out, the hiring boss gave your job to one of the new arrivals who lined up outside the office. Bobby and Velma never laid out. They worked sick, and she worked when she was with child. Velma worked in the spinning room, Bobby in the carding room. They breathed white air, and at the end of the day, when the machines finally slowed and died and the teeth-clacking vibration finally ceased, they walked home arm in arm.

They saved as much as they could in one-dollar bills and pocket change, working for the day they could walk out of that smothering heat and noise for good, and be something more than a set of expendable hands. It took longer than he expected. His farm was still just that, a dream, when the children came in the twenties and early thirties, the boys Troy and Roy, and the girls Clara, Fairy Mae and Ruby, and then the Great Depression sank its teeth deep into the village and mountains. People struggled to hold to what little bit they had as the mills slowed and finally closed, but Bob even outworked the Crash. “They were not some raggedy Depression family,” said Shirley Brown. “Bobby killed hogs, and there was pickled pig’s feet, beef tripe, beef stew, chili, fried chicken.” He butchered livestock for halves or the parts other people didn’t want, and pushed a plow in ground that others gave up on, to grow food.

He sent visitors home with sacks of tomatoes, baskets of okra. “I reckon Bobby never did sell nothin’,” said Carlos. “He gave it away.”

But some of Velma’s people did suffer. Store owners had no customers, and the farmers had no market. Cash was short.