Same Kind of Different As Me (4 page)

That is not to say my granddaddy’s place outside Corsicana, about seventy-five miles southeast of Fort Worth, wasn’t pleasant in a rural way. My brother, John, and I spent our summers there by choice, an option we considered far superior to three months of hunting down our daddy at the Tailless Monkey Lounge. Nine months of that a year was enough for us.

So every June, when Mama drove us out to the home place, we leaped out of her Pontiac and ran toward Granddaddy and MawMaw’s green-asphalt-shingled farmhouse with the joy of soldiers on furlough. Raised in the 1920s, the house was built like a box. I don’t remember when they got indoor plumbing, but while I was a boy, a cistern squatted by the back door to catch rainwater running off the roof. MawMaw had a white porcelain pan sitting on the back porch. When we came in for supper, we’d draw some water out of the cistern and wash our hands with a bar of Lava soap, which is about like washing with sandpaper. But Lava is the only kind of soap that’d get the dirt off a man who’d been working the fields on a blackland farm.

Granddaddy worked like a mule and was a true redneck. That’s because he wore khaki pants and a long-sleeved khaki work shirt and work boots six days a week. His entire body was snow-white, except for his bronzed, leathery hands and, of course, his neck, which was covered east to west with thick wrinkles colored Indian red like plowed furrows on more gracious land. He was a decent, honest man who would help anyone who needed helping. He was also the hardest-working man I ever knew.

My uncle Buddy tells the story about my granddaddy as a poor young man heading back to Texas after World War I. After kicking the crap out of the Germans in France, Granddaddy, in his twenties, had to try to figure out how to keep a wife, raise four kids, and pay for a little farm. Along the way, he asked a neighbor, an old farmer named Barnes, how he did it.

“Jack, you watch me,” Mr. Barnes said. “You work when I work and go to town when I go to town.”

As you might expect, Mr. Barnes never went to town. And seldom did my granddaddy. During the dust bowl and Great Depression, he hung on tight, so skinny he had to carry rocks in his pockets to keep from blowing away. At a time when even banks had no money and a man couldn’t get a nickel’s worth of credit even if his name was Rockefeller, he made it by picking cotton all day and hauling it on a mule wagon to the gin at night. He slept on the cotton till it was his turn to get ginned, drove back to the field at sun-rise, and repeated this cotton waltz until the harvest was done.

Most summer days, John and I were with Granddaddy in the fields, picking cotton or riding shotgun on the tractor. When we weren’t with Granddaddy, we leaned toward trouble. MawMaw kept a big peach orchard near the road that passed by the farm. I loved the smell of the orchard when the fruit hung ripe and sweet. Ripe peaches also make mean grenades. One day John and I had a contest to see who could lob one far enough and hard enough to nail a passing car.

“Betcha I can hit one first!” John called from his battle station, high in a tree loaded with ripe fruit.

In another tree, I lined up squishy ammo in the crotch between two branches. “Betcha can’t!”

It took us several tries, but one of us, we still don’t know which, finally managed to bust out the windshield of a 1954 Ford Fairlane. The driver, a woman, pulled over and marched up to the farmhouse to lodge her complaint with MawMaw. To hear her tell it, you’d have thought we’d shelled her with field artillery. When Granddaddy got home, he cut a switch out of one of those peach trees and wore us out. He also tanned our hides the time we, without permission, repainted the entire chicken house, including the tin roof, a frightening shade of baby blue.

Still, Granddaddy himself loved to pull pranks. When I think back on it, I guess some of his pranks weren’t pranks so much as him teaching boys to be men. Once, he threw John and me in the stock tank to teach us how to swim before he remembered he didn’t know how to swim either, and couldn’t rescue us. Both of us learned to swim real quick.

One Christmas we spent at the home place, John and I opened up two shiny packages and each found a pair of boxing gloves. Right there on the spot, Granddaddy loaded us both in his 1947 Chevy pickup and took us into Barry to the filling station, which in those days doubled as a place for old men to play checkers, drink coffee, and talk about the weather and cattle prices. Secretly, Granddaddy had already called the daddies of every kid in town within three years of our ages, and that morning they came barreling up to the filling station on clouds of yuletide dust, and formed a pickup-truck boxing ring. John and I had to fight every kid in town, and both of us had bloody noses before breakfast, which we thought was great. Granddaddy wore himself out laughing. That, and riding new calves every Christmas morning, their warm breath carving curlicues in the daybreak chill, are my favorite Christmas memories.

On the farm, MawMaw did her part milking cows, raising kids and a garden, putting up peaches, green beans, and squash for winter, and cooking Granddaddy two chocolate pies a day. He ate one at dinner and the other at supper and remained a six-foot-one, 140-pound string bean his whole life.

Folks used to say Granddaddy looked like Kildee, the black shoeshine man who worked in the Blooming Grove barbershop. Old Kildee was a beanpole, too, and didn’t have a tooth in his head. He used to entertain folks by squinching up his chin to touch his nose. Granddaddy once gave John fifty cents to give Kildee a kiss, which John happily did, not only because he earned four bits to spend on candy, but also because everyone loved Kildee.

To this day, Kildee is the only black man buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in Blooming Grove, Texas, laid to rest right there amid the expired ancestors of the finest white families in Navarro County.

In other parts of the country, maybe dead folks didn’t worry so much about the color of neighboring corpses. But the civil rights movement that began to gather steam in the 1950s hopped right over Corsicana, Texas, the way a soaking spring rain can skip over parched land despite a farmer’s most fervent prayers.

In the 1950s, the Southern social order was as plain to the eye as charcoal in a snowbank. But from the perspective of a small fair-skinned boy, it was about as much a topic for considered thought as breathing in and out. White families in Corsicana lived mostly on farms or in neat rows of freshly painted homes in town. Colored folks had their own section across the rail-road tracks near the cotton gin and the commission company’s cattle pens. I don’t know if the area had a proper name, but I never heard it called anything but “Nigger Town.”

At the time, that didn’t seem to be a bad thing because these were nice folks who lived there, and many of them worked for my granddaddy. As far as I knew, all their first names were “Nigger” and their last names were like our first names: Bill, Charlie, Jim, and so forth. Some of them even had Bible names like Abraham, Moses, and Isaac. So there was “Nigger Bill” and “Nigger Moses,” but none of them were ever called by a proper first and last name like mine, Ronnie Ray Hall, or my granddaddy’s, Jack Brooks. And really, there seemed no reason in those days to know their last names as no checks were ever written to them, and for sure there were no insurance forms to fill out or anything like that. Not that I thought about it in such detail back then: That was just the way things were.

Nigger Town was made up, row upon row, of one- and two-room shacks built of gray plank lumber that looked like it had been salvaged from a ship-wreck. Some people used to call them “shotgun shacks” because, I found out later, they were so small that if you stood in the front door and fired a shotgun into the house, the blast would blow straight out the back door. The houses were all lined up like cars on a used lot and stuck so close together that a really fat person coming out the front door would have had to walk all the way around the block to get in the back.

Maybe they had been built somewhere else because there wasn’t room enough between them to swing a hammer. It seemed as if someone had just craned them in and plopped them down on sawed-off bois d’arc stumps, so you could see all the way underneath them. But that was a good thing as those open cellars made a perfect place for mongrel dogs and chickens to take cover from the scorching Texas sun.

Granddaddy hired lots of colored folks, and a few white men, to help farm his cotton. Every morning before light, we’d drive a truck into Nigger Town and start honking the horn. Anybody—man, woman, or child—capable of chopping weeds and wanting to work that day would stagger from their shacks, dressing as they came, and climb aboard. There weren’t any safety rails or rules about hauling folks: Granddaddy just tried to drive slow enough to keep from throwing anybody off.

After a morning chopping cotton, we’d load up all the workers and haul them to the filling station, which doubled as a grocery store. The colored workers would line up before the glass front of the white-porcelain meat counter and choose a thick slice of baloney or pickle-loaf and a chunk of cheddar cheese. Granddaddy, standing by the cash register, would pay the bill, throwing in a box of saltines and a couple of raw onions for everyone to share. They’d all take their lunches, wrapped in white butcher paper, and go sit on the ground behind the store. There was a cistern out there for drinking, with a can strapped with black tape so they wouldn’t make a mis-take about which one to drink from.

With the coloreds taken care of, we’d hop back in the truck and carry any whites who were working that day back to the farmhouse for dinner. MawMaw always put on a spread, stuff like fried chicken, fresh black-eyed peas, homemade rolls all hot and buttery, and always a pie or a cobbler. Even as a little boy, it bothered me that the colored workers ate lunchmeat on the ground behind the filling station while the white workers gathered like family for hot, home-cooked food. Sometimes I had the urge to do something about it, but I never did.

At the end of every workday, Granddaddy paid all the workers the same, three or four dollars apiece, and carried them back to town. He always gave them a square deal, even making no-interest loans to colored families to carry them through the winter when work was scarce. Jack Brooks made these loans on a handshake and didn’t keep books, which made it hard for MawMaw to know who owed him money. But the Negroes in Corsicana respected him so much that after he died in 1962, several came unbidden to pay both their respects and their debts.

From the time I was six or seven, I worked out in the fields, chopping cot-ton beside them.

One day when I was about fourteen, some of those fellows and I were chopping a long row, pouring sweat and fighting off grasshoppers the size of small foreign cars. Grasshoppers on a blackland farm are evil creatures that cling to your clothes like burrs and spit a foul brown juice at you when you try to peel them off. That day, the air buzzed and sweltered around us till it seemed like Granddaddy had planted his cotton on the surface of some bug-ridden alien sun.

To pass the time, two men chopping on either side of me began to dis-cuss their social calendar for the evening. A man everyone called Nigger John—he had worked for Granddaddy since I could remember—hacked his hoe into a fresh patch of johnsongrass and bull nettles. “When the sun gets low,” he told his friend Amos, “I’m gon’ get on up outta here and go down to Fanny’s Place and get me a beer and a woman. Wish I could go right now ’fore I burn up.”

“I’m goin with you,” Amos announced. “’Cept I can’t decide whether to get me one woman and two beers, or one beer and
two
women.”

John shot Amos a sly grin. “Why don’t you get two women and give one of em to Ronnie Ray here?”

Now I knew Fanny’s was what the coloreds called a “juke joint,” which by legend meant a dark, smoky den frequented by persons of questionable character. But at age fourteen, it had never occurred to me that a man could simply “get him” a woman, much less two. I put my head down and listened close, pretending to bear down on a particularly stubborn clump of weeds.

John wasn’t buying. “What you so quiet for, Ronnie Ray?” he teased. “You mean to tell me you ain’t never had a warm beer and a cold woman?”

At that juncture of my young life, I was obviously no man of the world. But I wasn’t stupid either. I straightened up, tipped back my straw hat, and fixed John with a grin of my own. “Ain’t you got that backward, John? Don’t you mean a
cold
beer and a
warm
woman?”

For the next minute and a half, it seemed John and Amos might require medical attention. They fell on each other howling and gasping, hoots of laughter floating like music out over the fields until John finally recovered enough to lift the corner on the curtain of my innocence.

“Nah, Ronnie Ray, I ain’t got nothin’ backward!” he said. “The women at Fanny’s so hot, they got to sit on ice blocks to cool em down enough so they can get down to business. Miss Fanny don’t be wastin no ice on no beer.”

Well, that busted open the dam. John knew Granddaddy and MawMaw were teetotalers and came to regard it as his solemn duty to make sure I didn’t see another birthday without having experienced the pleasure of a warm beer. After several days of ribbing, he and Amos finally threw down the gauntlet.