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an excerpt from
Leaving Home for Home*
The house in which Mama was dying was layered with the smell of food: the quick touch of coconut cream pie, the fleshy fruit of ambrosia, the heavy, rich, overcooked odor of standing rib roast, and the thick sweet taste of honey-cured hams. Every surface that could hold anything was covered with fruit and cheese and meat and pies without end, all of it brought by townspeople and blood kin who were arriving now more quickly than I could count.
A discreet murmur barely above a whisper washed over the living room, the front porch, the den, the back porch, the backyard under the pecan tree that Mama had planted when this house was built. I, who had quit smoking, was burning one unfiltered Camel behind the other and obsessively thinking about going in search of a bottle of Jack Daniels, I, a recovering alcoholic, who had not had a drop of alcohol in nearly ten years. I felt made of thin rubber and overfilled with air, pumped so full that at any moment I might explode and splatter myself over every wall in the house.
My brother’s voice, soft as a whisper, solicitous, loving, thoughtful, and vicious, came from behind me over my shoulder.
“Why don’t you git on outside if you gone smoke like that?”
I didn’t kill him or explode or even look over my shoulder at him. Rather, I started easing my way through the crowded room toward the front door when it occurred to me that I ought to at least tell him that the woman dying in the back room had never told me I couldn’t smoke in this house, and it still belonged to her and not to him the last time I checked.
But I didn’t because the front door opened at that precise moment and through it came a tiny, fragile old woman, moving slowly, her eyes bright as a bird’s behind the flashing lenses of her glasses. Her high sharp cheekbones flushed with the lovely color a young girl might show from the heat of the day.
A fullness in my chest, the heat of tears in my eyes, tears whether of joy or sadness, I did not know. My Aunt Eva, ninety-three years old, mother to eight children, wife of Mama’s youngest brother, Uncle Alton, long dead now, and matriarch to the extended family. I went straight to her. Her eyes never left my face, but I saw no flash of recognition either, and I remembered suddenly how little those bright eyes really saw.
When I was close enough that I could lean forward and touch her cheek with my lips, her old velvet-smooth voice said: “Harry?”
I felt the start of tears now, I moved to embrace her, her bones insistent under her nearly fleshless body.
“Yes, Aunt Eva,” I said. “Harry.”
And with the sound of my name came the surge of memory, quick and awful, of me and Mama on another June day, this very time of year and every bit as painful. 1945. I was carrying the clothes I would be taking with me: a pair of drawers, one shirt, a pair of overalls, and a pair of socks, all of it stuffed into a pillowcase that had the neck tied off with string. The whole thing could not have weighed more than five pounds, but it seemed to get heavier with every step I took.
It was early but Mama’s thin print dress was already sticking to her back between her shoulder blades because we were nearing the end of a six-block walk. That was as close as the city bus went to the Greyhound station on Bay Street, which ran parallel to the St. Johns River, at that time probably the dirtiest river in the country. I, along with every boy I knew, swam in it anyway during the summer months. The fact that we often came out of the water with human shit in our hair did not bother us at all.
Or at least we were quick to say it didn’t. We made a point of laughing about it. Diving into a sewer filled with waste from ships and the flushings of hundreds of thousands of toilets, all of it cast slightly blue with a thin film of oil—diving into such a mixture of filth was the mark of a man. It meant that you had balls and that you were tough, so tough that nothing could ever bother you. Not only were you a man and tough as leather, but you were brave too and always ready to put it all on the line anytime, anywhere, for any reason. Or even better than that, for no reason at all.
But there was not a boy among us who did not, more often than he would ever admit, dive right back into the water so he could puke without the other boys seeing him. That was another thing: men didn’t puke. Men would swim in shit but they would never puke. Except maybe on a weekend from drinking too much cheap whiskey. Boys my age were still too young to get seriously into whiskey, and they wouldn’t have been able to stand the whiskey even if they could have afforded to buy it, but they knew all about it from watching their fathers and uncles and brothers, and better yet from watching the really old men and the rare woman or two who wandered around the neighborhood to drink and puke and pass out behind billboards where they could be pissed on and occasionally raped if they weren’t too dirty. More than one old drunk would wake up in the morning with a hole cut in the seat of his bloodstained pants.
Strange to say, and I was perfectly aware it was strange, crazy even, walking down Bay Street in the heat of that summer morning, glancing now and again at the dead river, spotted with faint patches of blue and yellow oil, I knew how strange it was that I was going to miss it. And I knew why I was going to miss it even if I could not have then put what I knew into words.
In that time and in that place, there were so few chances to lay any claim at all to manhood, so few places for a boy to think he was worth something despite what everybody around him was saying to the contrary, so few ways to snatch to himself the tiniest bit of self-esteem, that he would literally eat shit out of a totally befouled river if the opportunity presented itself. The nature of manhood and our search for it was never pretty.
As Mama and I walked, she had her hand clamped on my shoulder so tightly she was hurting me and my arm was starting to go numb. Each time she had to put her weight on her bad leg the viselike grip convulsively dug more deeply into the place where she held me. I had glanced at her face several times and it showed no sign of pain, only a kind of resigned indifference. But I knew the kind of hurt she had to be feeling from the way she held my shoulder and leaned into me as we walked. And in all the long years that followed that morning she never talked to me about the trip to the bus station or about the hideous ordeal that would begin for her as soon as I was gone.
She had to have been scared, terrified even, but no more than a dozen words, if that many, had passed between us. And that has seemed passing strange to me ever since I got old enough to think about that morning and what was happening, not only the enormity of what was ahead of her, but how distraught she must have been over what had already happened. She was looking at the prospect of having her hip and thigh ripped open like the belly of a butchered hog and then having most of her body encased in hard plaster during the hottest months of the year, but besides that, her worst nightmare had already come true.
She had always feared not being able to keep the three of us together, to earn enough money to keep me, my brother, and her under the same roof. And now we were being torn one from the other, and only God knew what the future held, whether or if we would ever get back together. The night before, after my brother had been gone to his job at the box factory for the better part of an hour, she said in a quiet, bemused voice, not so much to me, it seemed, as to herself: “I’m gone bring us all back together if I can, but . . .” She did not finish the sentence.
Now not only was my brother back at the apartment wrapped in an exhausted sleep, but she was taking me to the bus station to make the trip alone to stay with Aunt Eva and Uncle Alton in Bacon County just north of the Okefenokee Swamp in south Georgia, and from the bus station she was going straight to the hospital to submit herself to the surgeon’s knife for the first time in her life. Her incredible courage that had been born of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives had not been enough to hold together that which she loved most in the world.
What she had so precariously held in place with little more than sweat and prayer had broken apart that morning as quietly as a coffin being lowered into the ground. My brother, his hands still ragged and raw, had come in from work and gone straight to his bed without a word to me. I wanted to say goodbye, or if not goodbye then something, anything, to him. But he wore his night of bloody labor like a sickness.
Every morning when he came in he walked as though carrying an enormous weight. The expression on his face was the lack of any expression at all, and the pallor of his skin looked as though he had somehow managed to live his entire life without ever seeing the sun. There was no way for me to break through to wherever he was. I would have no more tried to speak to him of what I felt than I would have spoken such feelings to a stone. And so we left each other in silence. And if he and Mama said anything to each other I didn’t hear it.
The Greyhound bus station on Bay Street was a monster of a building, so huge that the buses could drive right through it to load up with passengers. There was an enclosed part where customers bought their tickets and sat—black folks in one part, white folks in another, with only an aisle separating them—waiting for their buses to be announced over a pa system. The whites sat in a stunned and what seemed an exhausted silence, looking neither to the left nor to the right. With the exception of a whispered, isolated conversation here and there, and somebody getting up to wander over to the pinball machine now and then, the whites sat like well-behaved, if a little sullen, schoolchildren.
In contrast, the black, or colored section as it was universally called, always looked as though it was getting ready to have a party, a lot of laughing and loud talking, the kids racing about. (Why did all the white kids look as though they had just been slapped, or at least sit unnaturally still, apparently frightened as though they might expect to be slapped very soon? I’ve wondered about that a lot over the years and never found an answer.) And from the colored section came the smell of freshly cooked food. Lids were constantly being taken off and put back on shoe boxes of fried chicken and biscuits and cold grits and a lot of other stuff that I couldn’t make out. Old fat ladies, all of whom looked to me like grandmothers, peered down into the open tops of greasy, brown paper sacks, looking up from time to time to call good-naturedly to one of the kids running about in their confined space. (Why did these old, fat, pleasant ladies seem to be the ones in charge of the children, children they were obviously too old to be the mothers of? A mystery then, but no longer.)
In my short life, I had burned up some serious time in and around bus stations and I’ d had plenty of time to wonder about the difference between the white folks’ way of waiting and the black folks’ way. I had even wondered more than a little if other people were as curious about the same thing as I was. But I had never asked anybody. I knew that such a question was outside the boundaries of what was considered acceptable to talk about and would be met with disapproval.
Mama still had a death grip on my shoulder even though we had bought my ticket and she was sitting grimly and silently beside me. Sitting down, she could not possibly need to hold on to me for balance or partial support or anything else. But God knows that morning she had reason enough to sit grim and silent while we waited for my bus to be called. But I knew the circumstances of that particular day, as traumatic as they had been, were not the cause for the stony silence and the deadly expression. Just the mention of a Greyhound bus was enough reason for her to fall into grim silence, as it was for me and my brother, too.
For us, the Greyhound bus was synonymous with crises, and whatever the crisis, it always meant running from or running toward a time of deprivation. . . .
____
*From “Assault of Memory,” Harry Crews’s unpublished autobiography, a portion of which is in the Harry Crews Collection, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia.
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