Terry KayGiving Way
The house sits on a knoll off Viola Winn Road leading to Beaverdam Creek, a half-mile or so from the home of my childhood. Viola Winn Road is names for my mother. Winn was her maiden name.
I knocked Martin’s tooth out one afternoon in an anger-fit. He had called my dog, Red, a son of a bitch, which was right, technically speaking, but sounded bad enough for a fight.
The cotton-mop giving way to the airplane duster. The field hand giving way to the cotton picker. The kerosene lamp giving way to the electric light. The radio giving way to the television. The row crop giving way to chicken houses. And the sharecroppers giving way to town houses, giving way to age, giving way to jobs in textile mills, or on the pipeline, or in repair shops, giving way to migrations that would carry them away from memories of long, sun-sapping days in worked-out fields. Sharecroppers giving way to the paycheck, knowing the paycheck—no matter how small—was not as risky as the summing-up of shares. In college, the professors gave it a word: Decentralization. It was one of the things of change, and it meant the breakdown of the unit system—family, community, region, state. (I always thought of it as being deboned, taking out the skeleton that held everything together.) Because of this decentralization, there were remarkable and possibly grave things ahead, the professors predicted. All you had to do was take a look at what happened since the start of World War II. The war, the professors declared, had given change a boot in the pants. All that new technology. The atomic bomb. People playing with rockets with thoughts of the moon in their mind. Everything. If the Great Depression had numbed people, the war had put a jolt into them. And I think they were right. Giving it a backward look, at an age when backwards looks have perfect vision or perfect illusion, I think they knew what they were talking about. During the war, we watched gliders being pulled across American skies by four-motored airplanes, and we wondered what would happen if one of the gliders snapped free of its tether and began to ride the wind above us. Would it circle peacefully like a buzzard and skim to a landing on the white runway of cotton rows? Or would it drop like a rock and splinter into a million pieces of balsa wood? At play, we fought the Japs and Germans with tree-limb guns and dirt-clod hand grenades, made rifle-firing, pinging-off-rock ricochet sounds in our mouth, held the enemy at bay from foxholes of gullies, and rushed machine gun nests through scrub pine and mountain laurel. Took hits ourselves, of course. Never fatal, of course. Just hits. Nicks. Barely enough to draw blood. Something a saw briar would make. We collected scrap iron—plow points, railroad spikes, tin cans—to be made into tanks and submarines and anti-aircraft shells the size of our legs. It was kill or be killed, and everyone knew it. The steel plow beam of a middle-buster from a Georgia field might be the very thing that turned the tide in a close fight with the Nazis somewhere in France, or with the Nips on a tiny Pacific island. The day that Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, I heard it from Cousin Allie Skelton, who came rushing from her home, wailing, “The President’s dead, the President’s dead!” We were playing in the yard, joyfully whirling in circles on a spinning jenny, and the shriek of that surprising news terrified us. The only picture more prominent than Franklin Delano Roosevelt in rural homes of the South was the picture of Jesus praying in Gethsemane. Ironically, the President has died while sitting for a portrait at the Little White House in Warm Springs. The Unfinished Portrait, it would be named. And in the gloom after his death, on the slow train crawl through Georgia, up to Washington, D.C., America also seemed unfinished. Like Moses, Roosevelt had led his people out of the wilderness of despair and, like Moses, he would die too soon, too soon. But the war that seemed to scorch the globe was ending even as a nation mourned. On April 30, 1945, eighteen days after the President’s death, the madman, Adolf Hitler, killed himself in a place called the Führerbunker in Berlin. In August, A-bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And then the war was over and the soldiers and sailors and war workers came home, and a kind of jubilation (or maybe it was a sigh, singing relief) hummed across the land. I was seven the year the war ended, a blurred-memory age. I have a dreamy sense of celebration, like spying on an adult party where glad-faced people preened with glad-faced smiles and behaved in a way that a child could not understand, but felt good about anyway. The soldiers and sailors and war workers had stories and memories and ideas. They knew a thing or two about bravery. And tyranny. They knew a lot about tyranny. They weren’t so easily bought by old promises of charge accounts at the fertilizer and feed store. No sir. They’d played that game. Or their parents had. And if they were old enough to fight, they had suffered the Great Depression first-hand, knew too well how long that belly-gnawing bad time had lingered. Enough was enough. They had the G.I. Bill and maybe some trade they’d picked up in the war—mechanics, welding, cooking. It didn’t take them long to assess their options. Going back to the ass-end of a mule on someone else’s place gradually gave way to getting on with their lives. It was the true beginning of the thing called decentralization, especially for the sharecropper. Poetically, I think of it as an exodus of slow-moving people—farm to town, town to city, one state to another, generation following generation, leaving behind gravestones that carry the codes of a personal, yet dim, history. I have always been intrigued with that period of time—the post-war years. Two of my novels are set in that period. I was at the right age, in the right place, for developing memories that are still clear and certain, and the clearest, most certain sensation from that period is the opposite of decentralization. It has to with belonging to the units of a place and a family, of having boundaries. In my first novel, The Year the Lights Came On, I wrote about it, and offer here an excerpt to describe it as I first realized it: The Great Depression and World War Number Two had been our only experience with the Larger World, and we had inherited—through some curious process of osmosis—a possessed sense of belonging. Belonging was our constant defense, our way of warding off the suspected Great End. The Larger World had issued messages that we lived in a temporary time, that we, ourselves, were temporary. (The atomic bomb was one thing; now, in 1947, there was rumor about a bomb of such unpredictable destruction that certain international scientists were afraid it would create a molecular reaction and Earth would disintegrate in a series of explosions, like a string of Chinese firecrackers.) Because of the Larger World, and what it said to us in the voices of the Radio Evening News Network and eight-point type of the Anderson Independent, we had been mightily influenced and had adopted the habit of clustering, as though clustering was an affirmation of our existence: if we saw one another, spoke with one another, then it must be true—we had survived. In clustering, we became isolationists; in isolation, we assumed identities; in identity, we were assigned value; in value, we learned of imperative; and, in imperatives, we realized perspective. To the members of Our Side, perspective was conditioned by boundaries. Boundaries gave us reach, held us, dared us; boundaries tutored us in the deeper significance of belonging. Wesley and I lived by the boundaries of Black Pool Swamp, circling us in a horseshoe from the south and east and west. To the north we were somehow contained by Banner’s Crossing and Rakestraw Bridge Road. There was a sense of being centrifugally leashed to the center of our north and south, east and west boundaries; the center was Home and Home would spin us out, but only to the invisible, protective edges of where we wandered, and then Home would draw us back again. We could not mark those boundaries by stake and flag. They were not taught by a line drawn in shoe-edge, or plotted on some map from the Official Office of Official Boundaries. Our boundaries were established by instinct. We knew. We simply knew. We could chase after laughter and echoes of laughter until we were exhausted with exhilaration, and we could wander farther and farther away, safe, protected, until that one step—that one step too far, too threatening—and then we would retreat. No one told us to return. We knew. We simply knew. We knew when we had ventured too far, as though our sense of equilibrium had been savagely attacked. But the Highway 17 Gang did not understand about boundaries. Highway 17 was alive with people moving, going great distances, and once having passed, whizzing in their automobiles, they were not likely to return that way again. The Highway 17 Gang watched those passing people and believed directions—north and south, east and west—were gray concrete roads drawn in heavy lines on service station maps.
When I wrote those words, in the early ‘70s, I had recently experienced the death of my mother, and a yearning for my youth—for the joy of those sparkling discoveries of the child-who-once-was—had become an unshakable obsession. I wanted to be that child again. From my fingertips, striking the words, the child returned. Magically, he returned. North and south, east and west, the child again roamed the boundaries of his boyhood, protected from the flood of change that would erode everything except memory. But the writing of books is often as much an illusion as the magician’s trick. I think now that the Highway 17 Gang was better prepared for change than Our Side. They understood the meaning of people moving, going great distances. A great distance for us—Our Side, the dirt-road farm youngsters—was a Saturday afternoon trip to Royston, a hard-earned quarter allowance in our pocket, and a system for spending it: nine cents for admission to The Royce Theater, a penny left for a penny pack of Kits. Best buy for the money anywhere. If you weren’t piggish with them, a penny pack of Kits could last through a cowboy movie and a serial (The Phantom, or Batman and Robin, or The Green Arrow, or someone else equally remarkable). After the movie, maybe an ice cream come from Wray’s Drug Store, with a nickel or dime left for the collection plate on Sunday. A Saturday afternoon in Royston was familiar adventure. Going to Elberton, or Hartwell, or Athens, was almost unimaginable. You might as well set your sights on Atlanta, or Miami, Florida, or New York City, New York. Elberton and Hartwell and Athens were miles away, and if you ever got there you never really felt good about it. All those strangers looking at you, funny-like, wondering who you were and why you were in their town, and if you had even listened to rumor, you knew there were plenty of reasons to beware of such places. You couldn’t expect a bargain in Elberton or Hartwell, even if they were advertising one with a carnival barker and a clown, and in Athens there was the University of Georgia, which turned normal people arrogant and sometimes rowdy. In Athens—the older boys vowed with wide-mouthed grins—there was a famous brothel. Everyone knew someone who had been there, or bragged that they had. If you had a lick of sense, you stayed in Royston. Royston was good enough. Everything a person could want could be found in Royston. I think of those years fondly, as the best years, years of my Age of Innocence, before innocence gave way to experience, before I began my own exodus. We bobbed along with the times, like fishing corks on a two-acre fish pond. On the surface, all seemed peaceful and serene, but things were rolling down where the fish lived. Odd things. Funny things. Frightening things. In Roswell, New Mexico, a flying saucer supposedly malfunctioned and crashed to Earth, leaving little human-like creatures scattered over the ground. Jackie Robinson, born in a Georgia sharecropper’s house, showed up in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform, the first black man to play baseball in the white man’s major leagues, and in Royston, hometown of the great Ty Cobb, tongues clucked in disbelief. In Walton County, four black people were assassinated, but the details were pretty much hushed up. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in Wadi Qumran, and revivalists bellowed “Amen!” over more hard proof of what they had been preaching. Henry Ford, who gave us the automobile from the assembly line, died in 1947. So did Al Capone, who gave us crime to remember. Joe Louis, the great Brown Bomber, was still heavyweight cham-peen of the world. An electronic brain was put together at the University of Pennsylvania and people grinned at such nonsense and muttered, “Wonder what they’re going to do with that?” A United States airplane flew at supersonic speeds, as if getting some place was more important than the pleasure of the trip. Everything was moving so fast that it made your head spin if you tried to take it all in at one sitting. Yet, safe within our boundaries, little of it mattered, more than talk. Some of it even seemed senseless—a doctor named Benjamin Spock writing about raising children. My mother had given birth to eleven children at home, one in the hospital. What could this Dr. Spock teach her? In Vanna, the community of my childhood, we crept along cautiously, following the philosophy my father once recited as advice: “Be not the first by which the new is tried, nor yet the last to lay the old aside.” In summer, the canning plant operated on the grounds of Vanna Junior High School, where crowds of women and children gathered to shell peas, snap beans, peel peaches, and to talk of how things were among the people they knew. Dennis Harris, who sold Watkins products, still drove the backroads with his goods stuffed in his vehicle, bringing the aroma of vanilla and spices to linger invitingly in the heavy, hot air. We still fished Beaverdam Creek for catfish, still raided watermelon patches, still played pasture baseball and football, still had our petty, temper-triggered fights, still smoked rabbit tobacco, still took our walks to Royston, still wondered about the carryings-on of people in such faraway places as Elberton and Hartwell and Athens. And then, in 1947, electricity came to the farm families of Vanna, and nothing was the same. In the fields, my brothers and sisters and I were singing “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah,” “Shoo-Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy,” and “Doin’ What Comes Nacherly.” Dancing kind of songs. Loose-limbed kind of songs. We had electricity and an indoor toilet, a wringer washing machine on the back porch, vegetables in the garden, meat on the hoof, a Sears and Roebuck catalog to order from, if we couldn’t find what we wanted at Gallant Belk, or Thornton’s, or Blumenthal’s, or one of the other enterprises located in Royston. We were giving way, all right. Yessiree. Giving way to good times after bad. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-a. Me, oh my, what a wonderful day… That is how we lived. But we were not sharecroppers. We owned our farm and our home. The Careys did not. They were tenants, sharecroppers. Every bale of cotton we picked was ours. Every bale of cotton the Careys picked was only partly theirs. The rest they surrendered to the landlord. The same with corn and wheat and oats. I do not remember ever hearing the Careys singing in the fields. Maybe they did. I simply don’t remember it. I think the Careys, like all tenant farmers, were balanced between giving way and giving up. If the house could talk, I would ask it to tell me stories of the night-whispering that must have taken place among the Careys and the Cromers and the Harts and the Carters and the Humans and the Crafts. But the house has lost its words, and in its silence, I can only invent. “Don’t know what we’re going to do.” “Look for a second job somewhere.” “Doing what?” “Whatever’s out there.” “God help us.” "If He’s planning on it, He’s taking his own sweet time getting around to it.” “Don’t talk about God like that.” “Next time He plows a round for me, I’ll tell Him I’m sorry.” I know there was talk. Had to be. Sometimes the words did slip out. I remember a conversation between two sharecroppers at the Vanna Cotton Gin, two men old before their time, smoking finger-rolled cigarettes from Prince Albert tins, two men lamenting the boll weevil and the dry weather and the short staple of the cotton packed in their wagons and the bill at the store. One of them said, “We ain’t much better off than niggers.” The other wagged his head in agreement. Today, much would be made of the comment. It would be called racist and mean-spirited. Critics would put a spin on it by talking indignantly about the “N-word.” And they would be so wrong, so very wrong. It wasn’t a racist comment, not even mean-spirited. It was merely a point of reference, a hard and despairing truth. Class-to-class reality. The white sharecropper’s family lived, in many ways, exactly like the black sharecropper’s family. Being not much better off simply acknowledged that blacks were treated even worse—Colored Only water fountains, sitting in the balcony of The Royce theater, buying from the side door at Wray’s, getting the throw-away meat at hog killings. In college, I would read clinically cold studies from those sociologists who were examining the nature of decentralization—studies where every sort of human behavior and condition could be explained to some degree of satisfaction by the clever use of theory and conclusion—and it occurred to me that, again and again, the sociologists were pointing their scholarly fingers at the word economics and fixing the blame. The economics of the South created sharecropping, they declared, just as it had created slavery. They were right, of course—those sociologists, with their theories and conclusions. It was a matter of economics. There were those who had and those who didn’t have, which seems to me to be the bottom line of human history. Haves and have nots. The only thing left out of the conclusions of the sociologists was a sense of the drudgery of life suffered by the have-nots. Yet, it is not a deliberate omission. Only those who lived it could understand what it meant to be not much better off than anyone else. That is why I would like to hear the stories of the house. I am not interested in the economics of the people who lived there. I would like to know about the trembling moments—the uncertainties, the fears, the anger, the rage, the bullying, the begging. I want to hear the prayers that were offered up to God-beyond-the-ceiling-and-roof. I want to hear the voices of sometimes-joy. I want to know what caused the joy. I want to know how the giving way took place. It would be a story worth writing. |
