Category Archives: Childhood

The beatings I received as child in South Carolina had a ritualistic flavor.  I was told to go into the living room, to drop my pants, and to stand in the middle of the room till my father arrived.  Sometimes out of forgetfulness or laziness or just plain meanness, I was made to wait for some time as, while picking at my nose, I worked myself into a frenzy of dread.

The three blows were usually administered by belt.  It could be applied two ways: one with the buckle out and exposed; the other with the buckle clasped in the hand.  I preferred the latter naturally and could find no rhyme or reason why one instead of the other.

Sometimes, I took the blows silently.  Sometimes I cried fiercely.  I don’t think this had to do with the pain of the blows, but from the way they were administered.  My father’s face would get red, his eyes would start to pop out, he would bare his teeth and hiss spit through them.  At those times, he was enraged.  That’s why I cried.  Perhaps I sensed the depth of his hatred of me, his desire, as I later concluded was the case, to kill me outright.  I can think of no other reasons for his having, in his last demented years, brought up to me so frequently the story of Abraham and Isaac.  He had wanted to kill me, yes, but because God had ordered it; and if I had lived, I should thank god.

When I cried, he would say, “If you don’t stop crying I will give you something to cry about.”  I didn’t know what to make of this saying except that if I didn’t stop crying I would get more beating.  Consequently, I would stifle the tears in my chest and pull myself together.

Once I cried out that I had not done it.  He said he didn’t care whether I had or not, for surely, during that week I had done something that had deserved punishment, and this was the punishment for that.

In California, any pretense to ritual was abandoned.  He struck me with whatever came to hand, most frequently wire coat hangers, and on several occasions a broom handle.

One day in junior high, as we undressed for gym class, a kid said, pointing to my ass:  What’s that.  Looking around I saw in a big mirror four deep blue bruises starting just above the knees, extending evenly across both legs, and ending in the middle of my buttocks.The kid asked me what that was.  I said I didn’t know.  At that moment I really didn’t.  It took a while for me to connect the blue welts with a beating I had received.

 The following year, the beatings stopped.  I asked my mother why, she said I was too old to receive beatings.  Who knows perhaps she had read something about beatings at a certain age causing sexual confusion and possible erections.  Deep in my heart, I have always hoped somebody in authority noticed my wounds and spoke to my parents.  But most likely my mother, realizing that people other than she and her husband would see the damage done, ordered the beatings stopped to avoid any possible public shaming.

I was a sickly child.  My parents worried I would be a runt.  At night I would wake up to find them rolling me over on my stomach and shining a flashlight up my a-hole to see if I had worms.  Apparently the worms came out at night.  We walked around barefoot all the time and stepped in manure and chicken shit, the kinds of materials that had worms.

 I had a part in a Christmas Pageant at the community center.  Halloween things were held there, apple bobbing and pin the tale on the donkey, and in the summer picnics.  Everybody brought fried chicken and potato salad.  Once at a picnic I looked up from a chicken leg to see little Tommy Byrd standing directly over a washtub full of ice tea with his pee-pee out.  I was not the only one, but it was too late, as little Tommy let his stream fly.

 I don’t remember my part at the Christmas Pageant.  I had a costume though, and I liked doing that sort of thing.  But this time, I knew I was sick.  My ear hurt like hell and I was pretty sure I had a fever.  But I didn’t want to upset the apple cart because that would upset my mother.  She had made my costume, and I didn’t want to let the other people down either.  So I didn’t say a word about my ear or my throat that was getting sore.

After the Pageant, a lady looked at me and said, “My, that boy’s color doesn’t look good.” And then she felt my forehead and said, “This boy is burning up.”  I was at 104 when they took my temperature; then it went up to 105, and by the time the local nurse arrived it was up to 106.  I don’t know if the local nurse had any nursing training or not, but I expect she did.  She lived by herself in a little trailer and was always there to help with a stomach ache or a burn or a cut off finger.

 She decided to take direct and vigorous action to break the fever.  They were worried about potential brain damage.  So she decided to give me an ice water enema.  I had never had an enema and didn’t know what that floppy red bag full of water was for or the tube either.  But I soon did and was astonished.  The adults whispered to me, “Now hold it as long as you can.  Hold it.”  Because the longer I held it in the more effective it would be.  I thought I was going to burst open right there on the spot.

I jumped out of the bed and, covering my nakedness as best I could, I sort of ran and sort of shuffled behind a curtain where the chamber pot was.  After that all was darkness.

They said they found me still sitting on the chamber pot and fast asleep.  The dump must have taken it all out of me. But the enema broke the fever.  I didn’t suffer any major brain damage that I know of; though that night my left ear drum ruptured, but with only the slightest loss of hearing.

Eventually I had to have my tonsils taken out.  I was getting strep throat and was infecting myself over and over again in a way that somehow involved my tonsils.  We went up to the hospital in Greenville. The doctor said count backwards from ten.  I don’t think I got to eight.  All was darkness.

I woke up feeling pretty shitty.  My mother stuck her head in the door acting all cheery and asked did I want some ice cream—like I would be all overjoyed by that—and did I want chocolate or vanilla. I said, “Go to hell!”  My mother denies I said that, but she lives in denial, so who knows.  I know for sure it’s what I said in my head.  I also knew it was a bad thing to say because the first time I had told them to go to hell, they grabbed me and washed out my mouth was soap.

As Freud says, civilization progresses with a sword in one hand and a bar of soap in another.  That’s civilization for you.

The Ford School was built by the Mill for mill kids who lived in places built by the Mill for people who worked at the Mill and who, as tenants in mill homes, were charged an arm and a leg.  The Ford School somewhat lacked in amenities.

I don’t remember that we had recess proper.  Rather we were sort of released, after lunch, especially, to run around in the large field adjacent to the school.  The big kids had a baseball diamond if they wanted to use it.  They had a backstop and three bases, not tied down, a couple of bats, so if somebody brought a ball they could have a game.  The little kids had nothing much to do but stand there or play tag.

 Occasionally one kid would knock down another kid in the middle of the grassy field and yell out, “Nigger pile.” And the kids would all go and jump on each other, making this sort of mound of kids.  I was in it sometimes though I made sure I wasn’t on the bottom because I didn’t want to rip or stain my clothes.  That would upset my mother, who said daily that money didn’t grow on trees.  We would all be there wiggling like worms, saying get your elbow out of my face, or who farted, and then somebody would yell here he comes, and this big fat kid, who saved himself for last, would come and jump on top of the pile.

 One day after school, while we waited for the bus, we were playing tag.  I was “it” and I tagged this other kid who tripped as I tagged him and fell right over just as a bicycle with a number of spokes hanging out passed the kid’s head.  I didn’t put it all together, the bicycle and the spokes, till I saw this jet of blood shoot a foot in the air from the kid’s temple.  One loose spoke had gone straight in there; and given the tiny size of the puncture and its neatness, the blood shot up and out with each beat of the heart as if coming from a squirt gun.

My bus was there and I had to go, but I saw enough to know that an adult had taken over the situation.  I didn’t know anything about anatomy and thought maybe I had killed the kid.  He would die of too much bleeding or maybe the spoke had gone right into his brain.  I was scared to death. But even before I got home, I knew I would just have to wait till the next day to see if the kid was alive.  And if he didn’t show up the next day, I would have to ask somebody where he was, though I didn’t know who to ask.

I couldn’t tell my parents that I thought I had killed the kid. I couldn’t even really imagine the repercussions of that.  Mother would go into frenzy.  Father would become furious.

“Boy Upsets Mother by Killing Mill Kid in Freak Bicycle Accident.”

“Mother Testifies:  I did all I could.  You don’t know what I have to put up with.”

 “Father Reports:  He wasn’t right from the very beginning.”

 I had a pretty restless night.  The next day I was overjoyed to see the kid with this huge bandage attached to the side of his head.  They had even had to shave off some of his hair, which stuck out every which-away, to make sure it stuck.

 Our eyes met, however briefly.  He recognized me as the kid who had pushed him, but he didn’t care really.  He had an air of weary impassivity about him, as if he knew that having to contend with errant bicycle spokes would always be part of his life.

I believe my earliest memory goes back to when I was 2.5 years old or thereabouts.  My sightline is about a foot off the floor; I must be lying on my belly.  Feet enter the picture; they are attached to the legs of a person who drops his shorts and sits down on my potty to take a dump.  I feel that fist of rage knotting somewhere beneath my diaphragm.

It’s my cousin Skipper.  Not skip, mind you, that’s what girls do; but Skipper as in Gilligan and the Skipper. He’s the son of my mother’s older sister, Aunt Susan, who fell on hard times and has come from California to be near kin, and she has left Skipper with us while she goes up to Greenville to get a job as a telephone operator and a place for them both.

Later she went back to California, and that’s one of the reasons, apparently, that we moved to California.  The other one was as the my father put it, “I can’t compete with the niggers.”  My mother said she wanted to be near her sister in her time of need.

That’s probably bullshit; the two hated each other. But Skipper was dying.  About the time he was ten or eleven, he just shot up to a full six feet or better.  Then cancer was discovered in his knee; so they cut his leg off above the knee.  But the stuff spread, everywhere and into his lungs.

 He was just a year or so older than I, so sometimes on a Saturday morning, they would drop me off at my Aunt’s place where I was supposed to play games with Skipper.  He smelled funny.  That was when to kill the cancer, they aimed a radiation cannon at you and blasted away.  He was six feet of skin and bones with a child’s head attached.  And on the right side of his chest were concentric circles that got fainter as they moved away from the center which was bright red and from which I had seen a drainage tube hanging.

 I don’t know what we played.  Board games I guess, probably checkers; and he had to win of course.  Not that I let him win; he was pretty good.  But I just didn’t give a fuck. Still, he was annoying because he had to shout out, “Mommy, mommy, I won again.  I won again.” Like every time he won, which was every time we played.  “Mommy, Mommy, I won.” Again and again and again.

 When he died, my Aunt just had to have an open casket funeral.  So we all had to tromp by and take at look at him all pasty white with rouge on his cheeks.  And dead as a doornail.

For years I had this repeating dream.  I would be driving on a two lane country road with red dirt gulley on each side and pines all around and I would head around this corner, and as soon as I went around it I knew I would see my grandma’s house back in South Carolina.  But sometimes in the dream I would tell myself I was just dreaming and sometimes I would just wake up because there was no way to actually see grandma’s house in a dream.  It was a painful, frustrating, and somehow heartbreaking dream.

About forty years later, I went back to South Carolina, reconnected with my relatives and saw the remains of my grandmother’s house.  I have not had that dream since.

As usual, when we moved from South Carolina to California, my parents didn’t bother to explain anything to us kids, like where we were moving, or why we were moving, or that we shouldn’t be upset about moving.  Given my mother’s pathological inability to see her children as separate people maybe she figured we had picked up all the answers to our questions by telepathy.

Looking back I can see that dream as a scar or as a scab covering a sore—something that really didn’t have to be but was nonetheless.

I was sitting on the front porch of a bed and breakfast in Madison, Georgia with a cup of coffee and a cigarette, smelling the honey suckle, watching the sun sink behind the trees, feeling the soft breeze and I was filled with peaceful sense of being Home.

Little kids absorb their environment; it goes directly into them.  They don’t have the psychological padding of “reason” yet, that gives me all sorts of stupid answers to why this or that is happening.  We moved to a place that was mountainous, where the air was always dry, where the sky was a pale blue, where there was no honey suckle, where the heat and humidly didn’t turn you into a limp rag, where storms did not come up out of nowhere, drop their fury of rain and then leave, where there were no blackberry patches, and no woods.

My parents just picked us up and ripped that place right out of us.  It took me forty years to understand that the message of my painful dream was:  you can’t see your grandmother’s house in a dream.  You have to go there.