In the 1950s we were still trapped in the poverty my Uncle Carl had escaped as a boy back in the 1920s. Mama told me he hopped a freight in Gadsden, Alabama, bummed around the country, begging and stealing food, sleeping in barns and hobo jungles before finally lying about his age to get into the Navy. After a tour as a sailor, he signed onto a merchant ship and sent letters, postcards, and pictures to my mother and his three brothers, depicting exciting adventures in exotic, faraway lands they had never even heard of. I saw one letter in which he told of his ship being torpedoed by a German submarine, and he had to swim like crazy to stay ahead of the fiery oil slick on the water. One of my mother’s fondest possessions was a black and white photo of him on a camel, wearing a fez, with waves of desert sand behind him.
His seagoing adventures ended in Los Angeles, where he landed a job in a government mental hospital and married a nurse there who had inherited a considerable amount of property in Santa Monica. My aunts, uncles, and cousins on my mother’s side spoke of him as the rich relative in California. I thought of him as a character from a Robert Lewis Stevenson story.
His wife, Ruby, was a crusading Seventh Day Adventist who became obsessed with saving her husband’s ignorant, backwoods relatives from their heathen ways. She sent us prayers, church pamphlets, and pictures of their possessions that she said were bestowed upon them because they were blessed. In the summer of 1956, she sent us money and bus tickets so we could visit them and learn how we could be blessed, too. My dad was a farm laborer. The words vacation and days off had never been in his vocabulary, so he could not go. Mama was so fiercely proud that she would rather starve than take handouts. But because she thought this might be her last chance to see her older brother again, she swallowed her pride, along with her deathly fear of traveling, and loaded me and a borrowed suitcase on a Greyhound bus in Fort Payne, Alabama.
I was ten years old, and had never been farther from home than Chattanooga, some 40 miles to the north, so the three-day bus ride with my mother was the great adventure of my childhood. The driver stopped in small towns to let us stretch our legs, go to the restroom, and grab snacks or meals. Some of the stops were at stations in big cities where we would wait for an hour or longer to change busses. I remember the stations as cavernous affairs that smelled of cigarette smoke and the green sweeping compound they used to clean the floors. This trip marked the first time I had ever been in a restaurant. While Mama used the money my aunt sent to treat me to cheeseburgers and pecan pie, I listened to “Don’t be Cruel” throbbing from every jukebox in every bus station diner across the country.
With the terrain changing from the forests and mountains of my home to miles of dry, treeless red earth, dotted with stunted brown shrubs, I imagined that I had made a trip to the moon. As the bus rolled through the desert at night, I could see the shadows of faraway mountains and the lights from houses and towns off in the distance, glowing like earthbound stars.
Uncle Carl came to pick us up at the Los Angeles bus station and swept my mother up in his arms. I would have felt embarrassed if it hadn’t been for the weary travelers trudging by, lugging their suitcases, and acting as if two grown people clinging to each other and crying like a couple of babies was an everyday occurrence. When they finally turned each other loose, he smiled down at me with tears in his eyes and said, “This must be Buddy.” And he tousled my hair the way grown men do to young boys.
If I saw Uncle Carl’s house today, I doubt that I would see anything remarkable. But at the time, I thought it was a castle. It had running water, a couple of indoor toilets, a stand-up shower, a television, and something I had never even read about in books, a patio. They mentioned their patio so many times Mama whispered to me one night, “Bud, what is a patio?” I didn’t know, but we finally figured out they were talking about the slab of concrete behind their house that held a wroght iron table, matching chairs, and a stone grill where they cooked meat outside. Aunt Ruby owned three or four houses around there, all of them with patios. Her daughter from another marriage lived in one of the nearby houses. Not only did it have a patio, it had a swimming pool.
Uncle Carl may have once been the romantic, seagoing hero I had pictured in my mind. In 1956, he was a bald, fat man who spent a lot of time sneaking around to smoke unfiltered Camel cigarettes behind a utility building. The first time I caught him, he made me promise I wouldn’t rat him out to Aunt Ruby. Thinking back on it, I figure that Aunt Ruby with her money, her property, and her Seventh Day Adventist religion had gnawed away all his wandering urges. The only remaining evidence of his swashbuckling past was his fierce tobacco habit and the tattoo of an anchor inked on his forearm.
Aunt Ruby was a tall, gaunt woman with short brown hair. She moved around with the confidence of someone who thought her next step could very well be straight through the gates of heaven. Even with all her preaching, she seemed to be a sweet lady who truly believed that all we needed to be blessed was a good dose of her Seventh Day Adventist gospel. Our first morning there, she asked what we wanted for breakfast. Mama said she could sure use a cup of coffee. Instead of coffee, Aunt Ruby gave her a steaming cup of a muddy liquid called Postum and a lecture on how God doesn’t want us to defile our bodies with stimulants.
Mama wasn’t only alienated by all the proselytizing, she was totally intimidated by the house. She had never been around so many nice things, and she couldn’t sleep at night from worrying that she would break something or soil something or say the wrong thing. I had no trouble at all. Aunt Ruby had been thoughtful enough to team me with two neighbor boys my age. They were glad to tag along with me to swim in Aunt Ruby’s daughter’s pool, splash in the Pacific Ocean, and hit all the attractions at the Santa Monica pier. My school back home concentrated more on memorizing Bible verses than the teaching of science, so the strange animals retrieved from the La Brea Tar Pits made one hell of an impression on me. I got my eyes stung by L.A. smog for the first time, ate my first Mexican food, and heard my first mariachi band on Alvera Street.
I don’t remember how long we stayed—a week, maybe two. They begged us to stay forever. Aunt Ruby couldn’t understand how we would turn our backs on the blessings of California to go back to the primitive state of Alabama. I couldn’t either. But I later learned that the whole experience had left Mama feeling poorer and more ignorant than she had before we left home. She was dead tired from lack of sleep and weary from all of Aunt Ruby’s preaching, so we boarded another Greyhound bound for home. By the time we had rolled through Arizona into New Mexico, a lot of our fellow passengers had gotten off the bus. Mama was exhausted and saw the empty seats behind us as an opportunity to stretch out, and she left me on my own in the middle of the bus to gaze out at the passing desert and daydream. I kept seeing brown-skinned people with crow-black hair in towns and little settlements we passed through. “Are those Indians, Mama?” I said, feeling a little lonesome all by myself. My mother’s interest was in sleep, not Indians, so I got no reply. I had read a book about Apaches and wondered out loud if that was the tribe these folks belonged to. “Navajo,” came a voice from across the aisle.
The voice belonged to a young black woman. I couldn’t begin to tell you what she had on or how she wore her hair, but Mama later remembered her as pretty and thought she looked smart because she wore glasses. What I do remember is that there wasn’t even a hint of disapproval in her voice, and her correction of my error was accompanied by a sweet smile that told me she completely forgave this hillbilly kid whose ignorance obviously extended way beyond not knowing an Apache from a Navajo. I had a lot of questions, so she moved over next to me so we could hear each other better over the hum of the bus’s diesel.
She told me she was a teacher in California and had studied Navajos to learn more about a couple of her former students who were members of that tribe. Since I hated school and couldn’t imagine why anybody would ever want to hang around one when they didn’t have to, I asked her if she really liked being a teacher. She said she loved teaching because it was like flipping a switch and watching lights flash on behind little eyes.
Living back in the sticks in a valley between a couple of mountains didn’t seem like much of a topic of conversation to me. But she acted amazed that I roamed around for miles in the woods, hunting rabbits and squirrels, and fishing in a creek. She had a laugh that sounded like music, and I’m sure I told more than a couple of lies just to hear it again.
We became like old friends, completely comfortable to just to sit in each other’s company when the conversation dwindled. At this time in my life, I had been bombarded by racist jokes, had seen dozens of “For Whites Only” signs on buildings and water fountains, and had heard the “N” word used so promiscusiously I had become inoculated to the derision behind its sound. But that day, with miles of desert flying by the window, it didn’t occur to me that sitting with her was something I wasn’t supposed to be doing. In fact, knowing me, I was probably working on a huge crush for this young woman beside me and fanticisizing about sitting on the front row in her class with her calling on me for all the answers because I would be studying really hard to keep her smiling.
Static crackled over the bus’s intercom. The driver, sounding as if he were inside of a barrel holding his nose, announced that we had crossed into Texas. A moment later the bus pulled into a gravel driveway. The hissing brakes and jarring stop woke Mama behind me, and she asked if something was wrong with the bus. With passengers muttering and the bus’s engine moaning, the hulking driver stood and made his way down the aisle, his big hands gripping the tops of the padded seats on both sides as if he were pushing himself along. When he got to our section, he loomed over my companion, and his broad face flushed red as he fired off an angry volley of insults and profanities so loud even people outside the bus might have heard him. His tirade ended with a threat that if the lady didn’t get her “black ass” to the back where she belonged, he would put her off the bus right there.
I wish this were a profile in courage. But it isn’t. The truth is, we sat there, cowering in our seats. At that time, I had never heard the word dignity. It was only years later that I could put a name to the glow that dimmed from the teacher’s eyes as she wilted under that vile onslaught. After she retreated to the back, the driver lumbered to his place behind the wheel as if he were the authority over all things Greyhound, and we rolled on through the Texas panhandle.
Mama saw that I was upset and explained that the law in Texas required black people to sit in the back of a bus. She reminded me that our preacher told us from the pulpit that black people were cursed for some reason. We, being white, were blessed. Oh, we weren’t blessed enough to have a nice house with indoor plumbing, a swimming pool, and one of those patios, but we could sit any where we wanted on a bus. The burning in my throat didn’t feel like much of a blessing when the lady got off at an Oklahoma station and walked by me as if she had never seen me before.
Mama had not gone to school beyond the sixth grade. She had lived in the south all of her life, and her view on race had been passed down to her by the only people she had loved and trusted. So it isn’t surprising that she believed the teacher’s place was in the back of the bus like she believed Jesus walked on water. Still, as entrenched as she was in her prejudice, she knew something was terribly wrong with the thing she had witnessed. After she became senile in the last years of her life, the scene on that bus clung to her fading mind like a wound that wouldn’t heal. Though the California trip had been a significant emotional event in our lives, the long, exhausting bus ride, the grand way her brother lived, and how uncomfortable she felt staying at his house disappeared from the stories she told. I doubt that she even remembered her brother’s name because she didn’t know who I was or even what city she lived in. But if anyone mentioned going on a trip, Texas, buses, black women, or any number of trigger words, through the dark fog of dementia would spring the story of the belligerent bus driver and the pretty black woman who wore glasses. She would tell it over and over the same way, forgetting that she’d just told it five minutes before.
Every time, she ended the story by saying, “He talked to her like she was a dawg. Like she was a dawg.” And she would shake her head and grimace as if she were witnessing that horror all over again.
