Read Online Little Boy Blues by Malcolm Jones - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Malcolm Jones
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mother and father and I weren’t going anywhere. By the time I was nine, the neighborhood was nothing but families with tiny babies. Even then, for a little while longer, I trooped out to the backyard and acted out scenes from old favorites, but with no one to play with and the weight of my years on my shoulders, I soon gave it up.
In the summer of 1961, everything changed about the way I looked at movies. Mother and I spent July living in the house where she grew up in Kershaw, a tiny mill town “just a little bit south of North Carolina” she always sang as we approached the outskirts (passing the sign that said THE KU KLUX KLAN WELCOMES YOU TO KERSHAW—when I asked what the Ku Klux Klan was, she made a face like she had smelled something rotten and said, “White trash”). Mother loved Kershaw because it was always home in her mind. I loved it because it was nothing like Winston-Salem. Both town and city were products of the industrial Piedmont South. Kershaw had a cottonseed-oil factory on the north end of town, complete with a mill village where the white factory workers lived (black people lived on the south endand everyone else lived in between). Winston-Salem had tobacco factories and textile mills, and it was big enough to boast two modest skyscrapers when I was a child (the Reynolds Building was designed by the same architects who designed the Empire State Building). But the apartments where we lived, postwar constructions thrown up as affordable housing for GIs coming home from World War II and Korea, seemed a thin and depthless world. What few trees stood there were barely taller than I was. Going to Kershaw was like stepping into three dimensions. The houses weren’t all alike, and the towering trees, pine and live oak, cast everything beneath them in deep, green shadow. Even the soil was more interesting. Winston-Salem was all red clay. Kershaw, riding the cusp of the coastal plain, had soil so sandy white that it reflected the noon sun like a mirror, although in the shade, it was always cool and a little damp, and it gave off a pungent odor,sharp and sour, that hung in your nostrils like bleach. I should have hated it but I didn’t.
Mother’s family home, an old one-story wood-frame house with a wraparound porch, stood across the street from what was once the train station and was now a welding shop. I was cautioned constantly not to stare at the welder’s torch, so I sat in the porch swing and closed one eye when I stared across the street, having decided that it would be worth it to go blind in one eye. From the same spot, I could spend hours monitoring the diesel train engines shuttling their loads of cotton bales and pulpwood back and forth on the track that ran between the house and the stores uptown. Behind the house lay an unmown field that my mother told me had once been a garden that she worked with her daddy when she was my age. There was also a chicken coop without any chickens and an empty garage covered in wild grape and honeysuckle. Inside the garage I found a rusty sling blade that I took into the field, where I mowed—or pretended to mow—the weeds, without visible effect.
The best thing about Kershaw was that you didn’t need a car to get anywhere, except the town swimming pool and the graveyard, and by the time I was nine, I was allowed to roam wherever I wanted. Mostly this meant going uptown to the drugstore for a Coca-Cola at the soda fountain. The drink became of secondary importance once I discovered that if you had purchased something, they didn’t mind if you sat down at the magazine rack and read comic books all afternoon. Even the small chores I was assigned—bringing in the newspapers twice a day and hauling in wood for the kitchen stove—seemed somehow more grown-up than the sweeping I had to do at home. And once, after the smell of death had hung in the air for two days, I was the one sentunder the house to drag out the maggot-ridden carcass of a cat that had gone
In the summer of 1961, everything changed about the way I looked at movies. Mother and I spent July living in the house where she grew up in Kershaw, a tiny mill town “just a little bit south of North Carolina” she always sang as we approached the outskirts (passing the sign that said THE KU KLUX KLAN WELCOMES YOU TO KERSHAW—when I asked what the Ku Klux Klan was, she made a face like she had smelled something rotten and said, “White trash”). Mother loved Kershaw because it was always home in her mind. I loved it because it was nothing like Winston-Salem. Both town and city were products of the industrial Piedmont South. Kershaw had a cottonseed-oil factory on the north end of town, complete with a mill village where the white factory workers lived (black people lived on the south endand everyone else lived in between). Winston-Salem had tobacco factories and textile mills, and it was big enough to boast two modest skyscrapers when I was a child (the Reynolds Building was designed by the same architects who designed the Empire State Building). But the apartments where we lived, postwar constructions thrown up as affordable housing for GIs coming home from World War II and Korea, seemed a thin and depthless world. What few trees stood there were barely taller than I was. Going to Kershaw was like stepping into three dimensions. The houses weren’t all alike, and the towering trees, pine and live oak, cast everything beneath them in deep, green shadow. Even the soil was more interesting. Winston-Salem was all red clay. Kershaw, riding the cusp of the coastal plain, had soil so sandy white that it reflected the noon sun like a mirror, although in the shade, it was always cool and a little damp, and it gave off a pungent odor,sharp and sour, that hung in your nostrils like bleach. I should have hated it but I didn’t.
Mother’s family home, an old one-story wood-frame house with a wraparound porch, stood across the street from what was once the train station and was now a welding shop. I was cautioned constantly not to stare at the welder’s torch, so I sat in the porch swing and closed one eye when I stared across the street, having decided that it would be worth it to go blind in one eye. From the same spot, I could spend hours monitoring the diesel train engines shuttling their loads of cotton bales and pulpwood back and forth on the track that ran between the house and the stores uptown. Behind the house lay an unmown field that my mother told me had once been a garden that she worked with her daddy when she was my age. There was also a chicken coop without any chickens and an empty garage covered in wild grape and honeysuckle. Inside the garage I found a rusty sling blade that I took into the field, where I mowed—or pretended to mow—the weeds, without visible effect.
The best thing about Kershaw was that you didn’t need a car to get anywhere, except the town swimming pool and the graveyard, and by the time I was nine, I was allowed to roam wherever I wanted. Mostly this meant going uptown to the drugstore for a Coca-Cola at the soda fountain. The drink became of secondary importance once I discovered that if you had purchased something, they didn’t mind if you sat down at the magazine rack and read comic books all afternoon. Even the small chores I was assigned—bringing in the newspapers twice a day and hauling in wood for the kitchen stove—seemed somehow more grown-up than the sweeping I had to do at home. And once, after the smell of death had hung in the air for two days, I was the one sentunder the house to drag out the maggot-ridden carcass of a cat that had gone
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