Walter & Me (3 page)

Uh-oh. Better finish peeing right quick!

“Did you go into Reverend Hendricks’ garden and steal his plums?”

Walter stuck with the plan even though I was still in the bathroom. “Yes, sir, Daddy, I did,” he answered as instructed.

By the time I got my pants zipped up and made it back to the bedroom, Daddy had a belt in one hand with his other hand on back of Walter’s neck, pressing him into the mattress.

Now, before you go judging my daddy, you need to understand something. In the Deep South where I’m from, corporal punishment is not only accepted as a way to rear a child, it’s heralded as the
only
way. In fact, “rearing” a child has a whole different meaning where I’m from. Parents down there acted as if a whoopin’ could only be felt (and therefore effective) if the bottom being whooped was a bare one. The butt had to be nekkid. Not “naked,” as you might say it. N
e
kkid.

And it wasn’t just us black kids getting whooped, either. Down south, the belt was an equal opportunity means of discipline. The white kids were getting it, too, and it sort of linked us all up together in that way. It created a sort of unspoken (perhaps even unrealized) bond that transcended skin color. Whether your skin was black or white to begin with, after the belt, everybody’s skin was the same color—red.

Daddy was a God-fearing, sometimes-churchgoing man. He was a good man. He knew his Bible, and he believed in the King James Version. His favorite verse was Proverbs 13:24, which states, “
He that spareth the rod hateth his son; but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes
.” Daddy’s paraphrase: “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” My daddy was not one to spare the rod. No, sir.

To us kids, Daddy seemed as big as Goliath. In reality, he was a slightly built, thin man of 5'6" or so. So, maybe he was more like David than Goliath. I know one thing to be true: he sure could swing a belt like David could sling a rock!

The sound of leather flogging flesh filled the house that day, along with my daddy’s words. When he got going, it was sort of a conversation combined with the ass-whoopin’. A whack per word, if you will. My daddy was yelling and whacking on Walter, “I (WHACK) told (WHACK) you (WHACK) not (WHACK) to (WHACK) steal (WHACK)! We (WHACK) don’t (WHACK) steal (WHACK)!” There was always one more WHACK after the last word for good measure.

At that point, Walter sort of got off script. He wasn’t going down alone. During Daddy’s string of sage words, Bubba was screaming, “Edward Charles was there, too! Edward Charles was there, too!”

After that, I had to pee again. And I was wishing right about then, too, that Reverend Hendricks would’ve just shot me there in his garden!

I didn’t even have time to say, “Stop, it’s my fault!” before our plan was ruined. It was my plan, I know, but I still felt like Walter ratted me out since he’d agreed to go along with it. Didn’t really matter, though, because I knew that belt would soon be upon my nekkid butt, too.

Momma stood in the hall bawling and hollering at Daddy, “That’s enough, Edward! That’s enough! Stop now!” Momma was crying for what was happening to Walter. Walter was crying from the pain of child “rearin’.” I was crying for what was about to happen to me. Everybody was crying. Everybody except Daddy.

Then Daddy stopped on Walter, turned, and grabbed me. He slung me to the bed, and it was on. “Get them britches down, boy! Ain’t that plum juice on your pants?” Now, say that last sentence again with a WHACK between every word.

Those plums were good, but they weren’t
that
good!

My only strategy during a whoopin’ like that was to reverse the guilt, try to throw it back on Daddy. I’d always attempt to make Daddy feel guilty by bawling out things like, “Don’t beat me no more, Daddy, don’t beat me! I won’t do it again, I promise!” The “please don’t beat me” plan seemed to fail like all of my other plans on that day. Nothing was working right for me. To Daddy, this one wasn’t a beating, and he wasn’t going to feel bad about it. We had stolen (from a reverend, no less!), and this was a whoopin’ we had earned. We just had to take it.

All bad things come to an end eventually, and that plum whoopin’ finally stopped, too. The one-and-a-half-inch belt marks swelled into red welts that faded in a few days, but that whoopin’ is still imprinted on my soul nearly 50 years later. I will never, ever forget it. That was a defining moment of growing up in Columbia, Mississippi, with my little brother, Walter “Bubba” Payton.

For those never receiving the business end of a deserved ass-whoopin’, you won’t understand what I’m talking about here, but Walter and I both had a great relationship with our father despite the pain of his belt. He cared about us. He got angry at us because he cared. Show me a father who doesn’t get mad when his kids do something wrong, and I’ll show you a father who just doesn’t care about his kids. But our daddy? He was our hero. He was our nekkid-butt-whoopin’ hero. Walter and I did everything with him. It was kind of like he was a sibling at times, an older brother to both of us. He taught us to fish and hunt, and he taught us how to appreciate the outdoors. That’s a gift that is still giving to this very day.

Walter, Daddy, and I were about as close as father and sons could be. It was like he compartmentalized his roles as friend and disciplinarian, and we did the same. When he was hanging out with us, he was our homeboy, that’s for sure. But when we were messing up, well, Daddy was definitely the enforcer.

Momma set the rules, and Daddy made sure the rules were followed. Momma would set a rule, we’d break it, she’d tell Daddy, and he’d make us pay. From the time I was about seven until my senior year in high school, I’d often go to bed fully dressed because we’d do mischievous things worthy of a whoopin’, and I knew my momma would tell Daddy when he got home. Right before I started going to bed fully clothed, I noticed that sometimes, when my momma told Daddy we’d been bad, he’d wait until about 10:30 or 11:00 at night, when we’d be in the bed half-nekkid, to come in and whoop some behind. Many nights I thought I’d gotten away with something, when all of a sudden, Daddy would rip off the covers with his belt in his hand. Each of our beds was in a corner, wedged against the wall, so we were sitting ducks. Sitting nekkid ducks. So, anyway, after a while, I figured out when my momma was gonna tell Daddy I did something wrong, and that’s the night I’d go to bed fully clothed. You know, so I wouldn’t be nekkid and so that it hopefully wouldn’t hurt as bad.

Of course, if Daddy was using a switch, it wouldn’t matter if you had your clothes on. You’d need armor to not feel the sting of that thing! If Daddy had time to think through how exactly he was going to whoop us, he’d make us go get a switch from the “switch tree” growing in our front yard. That tree was a willow that we swore was planted solely for supplying whoopin’ switches. Between the plum trees and our switch willow, it’s a wonder I don’t cringe every time I see a tree!

Now, I know all of this probably sounds bad to you. Whoopin’ and pain and switches and nekkid butts and all. But I can tell you that if it weren’t for my parents’ heavy-handed discipline, there’s a real good chance Walter and I would’ve been juvenile delinquents. There’s a good chance the world would’ve never known Sweetness. We were curious little boys, always getting into trouble, and without discipline, we would’ve just gotten into more and more instead of less and less. Really, we were explorers, adventurers, and lovers of the outdoors and all it had for us, just like most boys, but we’d push it to the edge. We were always staying out too long, going farther than allowed, swimming in fordidden mud puddles, and yes…stealing fruit from trees that belonged to men of God. (What, you never did that when you were a kid?) And I guess we weren’t very good at it, because we were always getting caught…and whooped. And as much as whoopin’ hurt, it worked. It was exactly what we needed.

Dr. Spock wrote a book about talking to kids, making them understand what they’ve done wrong instead of whooping them, blah blah blah. Well, that’s all fine and good and might work for some kids up north or something, but it wouldn’t have worked for Walter and me. If my daddy had tried that, we would’ve figured out from day one that we could just play along, and we would’ve gotten no whoopin’ and probably would’ve ended up criminals. Other kids might have remorse and all of that, but Walter and I didn’t. That Dr. Spock stuff wouldn’t have worked on us. What we needed was
Mr.
Spock’s Vulcan nerve pinch.

Without pain, we would’ve figured out that touchy-feely stuff and thought,
I ain’t gonna get nothing but a timeout.
A timeout? Really? Shoot, timeout for us was that period of time right after Daddy whooped us. We’d go to our room with red welts on our nekkid butts, and we’d be in timeout. Maybe some other kids might go into the closet, sulk and think about it, and then they might come out and be sorry or whatever. Not Walter and me.

All kids need positive reinforcement, but positive reinforcement can mean different things to different kids. And you can’t raise a black kid from the South with an instruction manual for a white kid from the North. It’s just different. Walter and I needed positive reinforcement, that’s for sure, but the best motivator you could’ve given us was pain. We remembered pain.

A lot of our activities (you know, to keep us out of trouble) involved pain. My mother figured the two best ways to keep us out of trouble were to get us in church and to keep us busy with yard work. Both of those things can be painful experiences depending on where you are spiritually or physically, but I have to admit the yard work was on a whole other level.

Every year, my momma would have a truck dump a whole load of topsoil in the driveway by the front yard. This started when I was about 10 (Walter was seven), and it continued for at least five or six years. I started playing Little League baseball when I was 10, but when I wasn’t ballin’, our job for the summer was to take that topsoil and level off the yard. The operation was sort of like when a prisoner moves a rock pile from point “A” to point “B,” then back to point “A” again. It seemed futile to us, but we did it. Futile was always better than a whoopin’ from Daddy, ya know?

All we had was one shovel and a really small, wobbly wheelbarrow. It would take all summer—every summer. Walter would load it; I’d roll it down and dump it. I’d push; he’d load. When it got wet, we’d lay down boards all the way to where we were going, and I’d push the wheelbarrow back and forth on the boards. It took all I had to push that heavy load, and the same for Walter to load it. And it got worse every year. In fact, after a couple of years, the shovel’s wooden handle broke off near the blade. The broken shovel wasn’t replaced, either. Oh no, Walter just had to make do with the stump of wood and the rusty old metal blade. It was hard, hard work.

Now, I said earlier that our momma would assign this work to keep us out of trouble, and that’s true. We couldn’t plan how to steal plums from a reverend if we were working hard in the yard, right? Well, we didn’t know it at the time, but she was also assigning us that work to make us strong. During those summers, Walter developed a huge upper body, and I built up my lower body pretty good. Slowly but surely, we were becoming men. We were becoming athletes. We were becoming who we were meant to be.

When Walter and I finally got into organized sports, I understood what our momma was doing. It was kind of like
The Karate Kid
. Daniel-san would “paint the fence” and do “wax on” and “wax off” over and over in what he thought was an exercise in futility, but it turned out to be great karate training. In the same way, our grueling summer work gave us the bodies we’d need to compete in sports at the highest levels. Until then, I could never understand why my momma would have us build up that yard every year. I mean, every summer we’d be building up that dang yard by the sweat of our brow. It was like the curse of Adam playing out right there. And it was the front yard, too, so think about how that looked. By the time we stopped doing it, we had a yard halfway up the bottom of the house for all to see. Years of pain and sweat for that? No, it wasn’t for that. And it wasn’t for nothing. It was for us—her sons.

My momma wasn’t just trying to keep us boys from poaching plums, and she wasn’t trying to keep us from getting whooped by Daddy. Momma wasn’t just having us do all that work for nothing, and she certainly wasn’t doing it to build up the yard. No, my momma never meant to build up the yard at all. She was building up Walter and me.

3. Movin’ On Up

George Jefferson was one bad dude. But what do I mean by that? “Bad” is such an interesting word. You hear someone saying it these days, and they could be talking about something bad or something good. The one phrase, “I’m bad,” can have two entirely different meanings. Makes no good sense. And even when you’re actually talking about bad behavior when describing someone, there’s further complication of the subject when you throw in acronyms like ADD, ADHD, or any other combination of letters that makes a kid go bonkers. None of that stuff existed back in the day. Or at least, we didn’t know about it. I wish we did ’cause I’m sure I could’ve gotten out of a whoopin’ or two by blaming it on some personality disorder or whatnot. But no, there was no confusion about the term “bad” when I was growing up with Walter in Columbia, Mississippi. If you were misbehavin’ where I’m from, it had nothing to do with ADD, and it certainly wasn’t anything good. When some kid was acting up, it was just “He bad.”

Us kids weren’t the only bad things back home, though. I can tell you this: we had some bad-ass grass in our front yard. Momma was keeping Walter and me out of trouble and building us up with all that topsoil work she had us doing, but there was another unintended benefit to all that. We had the best grass around. Period. I’d put our grass up against anybody’s. Boatloads of rich topsoil over the years can do that to a lawn. I’m actually surprised our neighbors weren’t coming around every day to offer Walter and me wads of cash to make their grass as lush as ours. In fact, if our careers hadn’t gone the professional sports route, I bet we could’ve started Payton & Payton Landscape Contractors. Our motto would’ve been: “Bad-ass grass…with style and class.” Or something like that.

Of course, all this talk about how good our lawn looked could give you the wrong idea. We didn’t always live in a house with an ever-present “yard of the month” sign out front. Walter and I grew up on what the folks back home called “Korea Alley,” which is basically an alley (go figure) that goes off Orange Street between Hilton Woodson’s place of business, which was a juke joint, and about five shotgun houses lining the street. I was born in one of those houses.

What’s a “shotgun house,” you ask? Well, let me start by saying the shotgun house floor plan is, in my view, an important part of African American history, especially in the South. For a house to be a shotgun house, you should be able to open the front and back doors and fire a shotgun cleanly through from front to back without a single pellet touching anything but air, assuming nobody dumb or with a death wish is occupying the house at that particular moment. This was all in theory, mind you. Neither Walter nor I (nor Daddy, for that matter) actually tried to prove it, but our first house was a shotgun house nonetheless.

The long, rectangular floor plan of our house was one room wide and had four rooms in a row with doorways lined up on the same side of the house. The front door opened to the front room, my parents’ bedroom, then another bedroom for the kids, and then to the kitchen. There were no indoor bathroom facilities. Houses nowadays are built with three, four, even five bathrooms. Seems we take indoor plumbing and shiny, porcelain toilets with easy-flush levers for granted. You’d be hard-pressed to find a house in America these days without a bathroom, and you’d be even harder-pressed to find kids who wouldn’t mind living in a house without a bathroom. It didn’t bother us none, having no bathroom in the house. That’s all we knew and we thought nothing of it. We had the typical outhouse with two holes (one adult size and one kid size) situated about 100 feet behind the house. When the wind was blowing just right, everyone in the next neighborhood sniffed off a little more than they should smell, so to speak. In other words, they’d have a good idea of what we had for dinner that night. The greasier the food, the worse it was for the neighbors. And if Walter was heading out there, well, you’d better close your windows. “Shoo-wee, that ain’t sweetness I’m smellin’!”

The smell from our outhouse wasn’t the only dangerous thing about Korea Alley. There was also Hilton Woodson’s juke joint just across the street. A bunch of seedy characters were always hanging around that place. Lots of drinkin’, fightin’, and commode huggin’. I remember most of those cats drinking beer, but I also saw a lot of brown paper sacks concealing who knows what—probably not beer. There were good people running the place, and some of the people going in were good, too. But it didn’t matter much if the people entering Hilton Woodson’s joint were good. Good people plus good alcohol equals “He bad.”

My aunts and uncles who lived in Smith Quarters, next to the Pearl River, now they were some good people. My Aunt Sister owned a duplex out there, and one day that duplex provided a chance for us to move out of Korea Alley and away from the bad influence of Hilton Woodson’s joint. My aunt told Daddy that her tenant in the duplex had moved out. I was only four or five years old at the time (Walter was a toddler), but I still remember how quickly Daddy jumped on that. I know it must have taken longer than this, but it seemed like the very next day Daddy had packed up everything and moved us to Smith Quarters. We were like one of those old cartoons, impossibly folding up all of our belongings into one suitcase in a matter of minutes. We were also a lot like George Jefferson with his bad self, movin’ on up!

The duplex was an upgrade for sure. Looking back, it probably wasn’t as big of an upgrade as it seemed. Basically, being a duplex, it was just a bigger version of a shotgun house. Kind of like two shotgun houses in one. A double-barrel shotgun house, if you will. There was a group of shotgun houses leading up to our double-barrel shotgun house. My other aunt lived on one side of our place, and we lived on the other. My uncle was in another duplex on one side, and my land-lady aunt was on the other. Another aunt was on the hill right behind us. I guess it was an “aunt hill.”

Our double-barrel shotgun house had a front room, two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom. Though it was still nothing compared to the bathrooms most folks have today, it was a big step in the right direction for us, being that it was indoors and all. Well, sort of indoors. To get there, you had to go out the back door and cross the porch, but at least it was attached to the house. And it had a real toilet. Like I said, big step in the right direction. Still, it was a community bathroom for both tenants of the double-barrel shotgun house, and it wasn’t heated in the winter or cooled in the summer. I’m not sure where the waste went after flushing, but at least you could flush it. As long as it didn’t sit there and bake during the summers, we didn’t care much where it went.

We were living the life in those days. We had chickens, a pig pen, and yes, an indoor bathroom. We’d come a long way, baby! Or so we thought. Walter and I actually had no idea just how little progress we’d made. We had no clue that this big step up was only a big step from the perspective of little toddlers with such little legs. We thought we were out of the ghetto, but looking back, we were really just in a new ghetto with new things to do.

The facility at the top of the hill was a place locals went to get a job. It was a processing plant for the neighborhood cucumbers, and it had some official name, I’m sure. To Walter and me, it was simply the pickle plant. Right across the tracks that ran in front of the pickle plant and across from our new front yard was an old abandoned brakeman’s hut. It lured Walter and me in a time or two (or a hundred) to play. We’d build fires and roast marshmallows in that old building. No one would bother us in there, and we had the time of our lives. That brakeman’s hut wasn’t but 30 yards back from the house, so it was Momma-proof, too. That was the best part, actually. When she’d get home, it was close enough that we’d know it and could get back before she’d have to come out calling for us from the front porch.

That old building must’ve been an eyesore to all the adults who could see it. Thinking back on the view from our front porch, it was something awful. In addition to that abandoned brakeman’s hut, the city dump was a measly 80 yards away. We traded the smells of an outhouse for the smells of the city dump. Eighty yards! Shoot, I’ve returned footballs in NFL games longer distances than that (in fact, I returned a kickoff and a punt for touchdowns in the same game once, both over 80 yards). So, basically, we’d go out the back door, down the hill, and BAM…we’d be in the city dump, right there with all the smelly and unsightly mess that goes with it. Ironic, too, that right up next to the dump was the Pearl River. It was only about 200 yards or so from the backside of the house and seemed to press right up against the dump. The EPA would have a fit over anything like that today and rightfully so. Walter and I played down there all the time, and we even saw a bulldozer push garbage right into the water. And you know, I’m not even sure it was wrong to do stuff like that at the time. Funny how some types of “right and wrong” (“black and white,” too, maybe?) can change over time.

Anyway, the Pearl River is where Daddy took us fishing, so we’d catch a little junk to go with our fish. Still, even the junk and nasty smells of the dump are fond memories in my heart. Actually, as a kid, the whole area was amazing. To Walter and me, it was sort of an oversized playground and the perfect place for playing hide-and-seek, army, or any other active, outdoor, crazy-fun game that kids just don’t play anymore. A lot of kids these days have much nicer things than Walter and I had growing up, but they don’t have any good places to play. That’s the truth.

Walter and I had no time as kids to think about what we didn’t have. We were too busy running around and enjoying what we did have. There were certainly other families back then that had more than we did in terms of material things, and the kids in those families had nicer toys and such, but Walter and I never noticed the difference. Today kids have to have the latest gadgets, video games, iPads, etc. They don’t seem to care much anymore for trees, mud holes, old abandoned buildings, and yes, even city dumps. “The best things in life are free” is a cliché for a reason. Walter and I didn’t spend time wanting what the other kids had, because we just wanted to have fun, and we had the most fun with all the free stuff outside our back door.

Another uncle of ours lived a few houses down. Between our uncle’s house and the city dump was a little pond that seemed like Toledo Bend Lake to Walter and me. It was huge in our little eyes, and we just knew there had to be a world-record bass swimming under the surface. Though we never found that elusive giant fish in the water hole, I can tell you a couple of things that for sure lived there: leeches and snakes. Saw plenty of those. Or were they slimy blood-sucking monsters and man-eating anacondas? Well, that’s what “Edward Charles” would’ve said, so let’s just go with it.

Walter and I were blessed to grow up when playing outside was all a kid could do to have fun and stay out of trouble. There was no Internet, no cell phones, MP3 players, no Xbox, or any other electrical doodads kids are distracted by today. Even television wasn’t a distraction back home growing up. It was a while before we even got a little black-and-white unit. And when we finally got that, it wasn’t like there was a whole lot on the thing to pull us in from the outdoors. When I was allowed to spend time in front of the TV, all I really wanted to watch were the Ole Miss football highlights. I’d sit there and dream of playing for the Rebels. Looking back, it was appropriate that those highlights were trapped in a box…and even more appropriate that they were in black and white. The reality was that I wouldn’t be able to play for the Rebels in Oxford, Mississippi, because of the color of my skin. I knew it, too. Playing for Ole Miss was a dream I had that couldn’t be realized until Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. realized his. Perhaps that should’ve bothered me, but as a kid, I guess it didn’t. Back then, things were just how they were, and that was that. We could focus on what we couldn’t do in Oxford, or we could focus on what we could do in Columbia. We chose the latter.

Our momma and daddy likely had no idea just how much they had given Walter and me by moving us all to Smith Quarters. Their goal was to provide something better. They simply wanted to give us the best they could. As should be clear, they gave us so much more than that, and it took me a while to realize just how much they sacrificed, how hard they worked for us. And it truly was for us.

In the current day and age, it seems a lot of parents work two jobs out of want rather than out of need. Some mothers say they would love to stay home, but that they have to work to make ends meet. Make ends meet? Really? I think that phrase has lost its meaning a bit. As a society, we now have all these things. All this nice, expensive stuff. Phones, cars, TVs, cable, houses, two- and three-car garages, multiple indoor bathrooms, you get the point. A lot of families need two incomes, not to make ends meet, but to maintain the current American lifestyle of having too much stuff. But back in the day, in Columbia, Momma and Daddy worked day and night, two jobs each, for a much greater purpose. It wasn’t to maintain a lifestyle of want; it was to provide a step up (however small a step up) for our family and to give us kids what we needed. Momma and Daddy each worked two jobs, not so we could have three TVs and 400 channels, but to get us out (and to keep us out) of Korea Alley.

It’s important to point out, too, that the two-income family in the Payton house didn’t start until all of us kids were in school. A step up was important, but not so important to allow a step back in our connection with Momma. She wanted to build a very strong bond with us while we were small, and it sure worked. We definitely felt close to her in a way that we wouldn’t have had she worked outside the home and let someone else watch us during those years. There’s no way to replace time spent with family, especially when we’re talking about a momma who could cook.

Momma baked up the best-tasting, from-scratch, hand-squished Southern biscuits ever! Walter and I chipped in for breakfast, too. Momma would have us hunt a wooded area at the end of the street for some squirrels to go along with her biscuits. We loved doing that so much that sometimes we’d get up before Momma, walk to the woods, kill us a mess of squirrels, get back home, and have ’em cleaned and ready for Momma to cook before she even got out of bed. I’ll always cherish those memories of hunting with Walter and helping Momma with breakfast, memories I wouldn’t have if Momma hadn’t been home when we were kids. And though the squirrels were tasty, it was those handsome, orangey-brown, candy-crispy, crunchy, firm-but-tender biscuits from Momma’s oven that we savored in the morning. And that just set the stage for a day with her.