Diary of a Misfit, page 26
When Oregon became a state in 1859, it did so with a caveat: No Black people, not even “mulattos” with one white parent, could move there. Oregon was the only free state admitted into the union with a constitution that forbade Black people from living, working, or owning property there. When African Americans did arrive, in the 1940s, to help build ships for World War II, they found that most landlords wouldn’t rent to them. For decades, real estate agents and city policies kept Black residents penned into one part of Portland—the North and Northeast neighborhoods I now covered at The Oregonian.
Most of my stories that year were about gentrification and the ways city and state policies had harmed generations of Black residents. Local leaders had used urban renewal to force African Americans out of North Portland. Now white people were moving in, and I myself was complicit. When I finished this trip, I planned to move into the two-bedroom house Frankie was renting in what was once Portland’s Blackest neighborhood. She’d chosen the house because it was the only place she could find when she first moved to Portland. She didn’t know anything about the neighborhood’s history or the future that developers were actively plotting. But she knew now. We’d considered finding a home in a different neighborhood, one that wasn’t gentrifying, but we couldn’t afford one, and anyway, the neighborhood Frankie lived in felt more like home than any other place in Portland. Over the years, I’d found that most Black Portlanders have some connection to Louisiana, a link that can be traced back to the train lines that led out of my home state during the Second Great Migration. People in Frankie’s neighborhood talked like I talk. One of her neighbors even sold gumbo out of a food truck. I wanted to live near him. But I knew, because I’d written articles explaining, that my moving there would push Black residents out—maybe not immediately, but someday. As I and other white people moved in, the rents and property taxes would go up. Coffee shops and white-owned bars would replace Black-owned businesses whose owners never could secure the loans they needed to maintain their buildings. Some Black people wouldn’t be able to afford to stay. Others would eventually look around and decide that the neighborhood they’d loved no longer felt like home. Somehow, they would become misfits on their own streets.
All of that to say, it didn’t matter that I’d never heard white people in Portland casually say the things Mark was saying without a wisp of fear in broad daylight. Real racism was more than a stray sentence. It was more than stereotyping, and in Oregon, as in Louisiana, it was baked into everything.
When Mark finished talking, Cheryl nodded at me, then she spoke in the same meek voice she’d used earlier.
“I remember your mother, Rhonda. I taught her PE.”
“Was she any good at it?” I asked.
“Yeah, she was pretty good. She did a lot of tumbling and so forth. She was a cheerleader.”
I’d seen pictures of my mom in the red Delhi Bears cheerleading uniform, but I’d never been able to imagine her jumping and turning flips on a field. She liked to dance, but as long as I’d known her, she’d shied away from everything else physical. She always made my dad drop her off at the front of a parking lot, and she never joined in when the rest of us played badminton in the backyard. She tried to persuade me to avoid physical activity, too. I was very small when I was young—I still remember my mom throwing me a party in second grade because I’d finally made it to forty pounds—and she worried if I moved around too much, I’d lose what little weight I had. When I was eight, she forged a doctor’s note, excusing me from PE for the rest of elementary school.
“Well,” Mark said, interjecting. “There it is, right there.”
He motioned toward a patch of grass just beyond the Cutlass. A blue tricycle stood in the yard. It looked like the three-wheeled bike every person we’d interviewed had described. Roy’s bike.
“That was her baby,” Mark said. His hands were on his hips, and he looked proud in a way I hadn’t seen before.
“Oh my god,” I said.
I’d pictured this bike for so long, and it somehow looked exactly like I’d imagined and also like something else entirely. It was a rusted, step-through tricycle with red and white “Free Spirit” decals peeling off the frame. Later, I looked it up and found that Free Spirit was a brand of adult tricycles that Sears sold in the 1970s. The bikes came with a basket attached to the rear, but Roy must have added a second one to the front, because his bike had two. It was originally a three-speed tricycle, but Roy’s derailleur was gone, and the shifter cable that changed gears was cut and tied in a knot around the front basket.
“At one time, she was upset because she couldn’t fix it,” Mark said. “Royce was pretty good with fixing stuff. She really knew her way around a lawn mower, but this mechanism in the back is pretty tricky.”
Mark said his dad, a retired army sergeant who ran the motor pool in Germany during the Korean War, came over and helped Roy work on the bike. They repaired it a few times, but after the brakes went out, Roy just used his feet to stop.
I bent down and examined all the parts. Frankie volunteered as a bike mechanic, and she’d taught me a few things about the chain and the gears. I didn’t know nearly as much as she did, but what I did know suggested Roy’s tricycle was no longer operable. I peered at Mark.
“What made you keep the bike all these years?”
“Okay,” he said, beaming. “In a minute, I’ll show you something Royce wrote, and after you read it, you will see why I keep Royce’s stuff. Would you like me to get it now and let you look at it?”
I told Mark that would be great. He held up a finger, then walked toward the trailer. Once he and Cheryl were inside, Christopher whispered to me.
“So you know what I’m thinking about?”
“What?”
Christopher started to say something, but the screen door whacked open, and the Kings stepped back out. Christopher shuffled to the other side of the yard.
“Cornbread,” he said.
“Cornbread? I thought it was going to be something…”
“Related? Yeah, I’m sorry.”
I furrowed my brow. Christopher tends to say silly things, so I wasn’t that surprised by his random cornbread comment, but I was slightly annoyed. We were finally seeing Roy’s bike, and he wanted to talk about food? I knew he was doing me a favor, recording all the sound for free, but I wanted him to take the unpaid job seriously. I cut my eyes at him.
Mark held up a stack of eight-by-ten flyers printed on heavy, yellowed cardstock. He was still smiling the big proud grin he’d flashed when he first nodded toward Roy’s bike. He flipped one of the flyers over. It looked like an advertisement for the Cave Theater.
“Royce loved the Cave Theater, like everybody else did in this little town,” Mark said. “They’d mail these to you if you wanted to be on the mailing list. You could pick them up so you’d know the week’s shows. See? Real neat.”
Mark handed me one of the flyers from November 1966. Rock Hudson was starring in Blindfold, and Sophia Loren was in Lady L. Mark pointed to a sentence Roy had written along the top left corner: “Keep this to show your grandkids something different.”
It was the same handwriting I’d seen in Roy’s Bible, just a little messier. Mark turned the flyer over, and I could see that Roy had covered the back with a big, loopy cursive.
“I can read it to you,” Mark said. He held the flyer close to his face, and he read slowly:
I am the dead talking, and don’t throw away all my foolish books, papers, and things because if you do, I shall come back. You’ll see me some night when it’s dark, standing over your bed. Then you must explain why you threw my things away.
Mark lowered the flyer and explained that Roy had told him that once, after Jewel died, he’d seen her ghost standing at the end of his bed. Jewel’s ghost didn’t say anything, Mark said. She just stood there at the end of Roy’s bed and looked.
He raised the flyer back up, then finished reading what Roy had written:
If you keep all my foolish things, you shall have good luck. If you throw them away, you shall have very bad luck for my curse shall be on you.
Mark laughed a good-natured chuckle. I knew he must have read the note before, but he reacted as if he were reading it for the first time.
“I’m not worried about a curse, but I told Royce I’d keep her stuff, and obviously you see she meant it, so I do. I never have sold anything of Royce’s, and I’m not going to. I’ve been able to sell this bike probably a dozen times. This bike never is sold. It stays with me, and if I can keep it past when I’m gone, I’ll try to get my granddaughter to keep it ’cause I don’t plan on any of Royce’s stuff going anywhere.”
Mark didn’t mention the journals, but I suspected this was his oblique way of telling me he wouldn’t be giving or selling me those either. He seemed happy to show me the flyers, though. He leafed through his stack, looking for other notes. Roy mostly used the backs as scorecards. He’d written the results of a dominoes game on one—Susan, 105. Roy, 45—and tallied a card game on another, noting that he’d beaten Jimi, 4 to 3.
“Aha,” Mark said, pulling out one flyer that had been ripped in two. The bottom half was missing, but the top showed that in May 1963, the Cave was hosting a midnight screening of Elvis Presley in Follow That Dream. Roy had gone through the listings with a red pen, noting which ones he wanted to see. He’d marked Guns of the Black Witch as a maybe and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in CinemaScope as a no. Next to Too Late Blues, a John Cassavetes film that stars Bobby Darin as a struggling jazz musician, Roy had written, “Song by Roy Hudgins.” Mark motioned for me to turn the flyer over. Roy had written, then crossed out, a few lines in blue ink:
It’s to late for me to think about living.
Old father time, my life I’ll soon be giving.
I’m wearing out the souls of my shoes
and singing these To Late Blues.
Underneath, in black ink that he hadn’t crossed out, Roy had penned an addendum:
Sept. 1979
I’m still living
OLD
FAT
AND
WRINKLED
Mark handed me the pile, and I scrutinized each flyer. On another, next to a May 1965 screening of The Back Door to Hell, Roy had written, “The front door to hell is on Hell Street.” Roy was wry, I thought, funny in ways people didn’t often describe when I asked about him. I nosed through the other flyers, but I didn’t see anything else beyond a few dominoes scores.
“I used to go to the Cave Theater,” Mark said, “and for twenty-five cents, I got to see two motion pictures, a cartoon, the commercials, and still have enough money to buy a Coke. We had a cry room. That was so nice. The babies got to cry, and the mamas got to take them to the cry room, and you wouldn’t hear them. To be truthful about it, they had an upstairs like a balcony area, and that’s where the Black people sat. They didn’t sit in the bottom with us. That was a rule. I never saw a Black person sitting down in the bottom, all of the years I went. I was like seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. I never saw a Black person. We went in the front door, and they had a little side door. They had stairs. They went up to the balcony and watched the movies in the balcony. I don’t know if they really cared that much. I imagined, truthfully, it probably irked them. But I never saw any problem with it.”
Mark shrugged, then ducked into his trailer to look for more of Roy’s stuff. Christopher shuffled back over to me.
“I don’t think we need to pressure him,” he whispered.
I looked at the flyers. They weren’t the deep, revealing tomes I wanted to read, but they were something. Mark seemed to be opening up. Maybe patience was the best strategy for now.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think this is enough. He didn’t have to give us this.”
“That’s what I was going to talk about when I talked about cornbread earlier. But I botched it.”
Christopher laughed and did a little dance. I was grateful he was with me. In some ways, Christopher and I are very different people. He plays concerts and picks up other gigs when he needs money, and he lives part of the year on a sailboat in Panama. He never seems to need to control life. He just sways along with whatever forces rock him. I like to control everything. I spend most of my waking hours working, and at night, when I’m trying to fall asleep, I fret about every dollar I’ve spent. It didn’t occur to me to use my vacation time to relax in Panama or anywhere else. The Oregonian gave me three weeks off each year. I spent them working on this film.
However different our personalities are, though, I sometimes think that I have more in common with Christopher than I do with anyone else. Some nights, after a few beers, we talked about our mothers. He understood how complicated my relationship with my mom was because he had the same strained connection to his. We backpedaled through their histories, trying to sort out exactly when they’d been damaged. I suppose any of my cousins might have been able to relate in the same way—all our mothers suffered from something unnameable—but I never felt comfortable hanging out with any of my other cousins. One was in prison. Another, a rodeo rider, had died the year before at thirty-two. I hadn’t seen Christopher’s sister in years, in part because I’d heard she’d joined a Christian cult and didn’t like gay people. But Christopher is the kind of guy I would have wanted to pal around with even if we weren’t related. In Delhi, after we’d interviewed people, Christopher and I talked about documentaries we’d seen or new albums we loved. We never tired of hearing other people’s stories. I turned those stories into articles, and he channeled them into songs, but we were both always listening.
Being with him is the one time I ever feel like my two worlds exist in the same place. I can be Southern, descended from my grandmother, but also worldly in a way that doesn’t appeal to my other relatives.
Mark emerged from the trailer holding several dozen records. He handed three Hank Williams albums to Christopher, then he held up a few others, one by Mickey Gilley and another by Flatt and Scruggs. These were Roy’s favorite records, Mark said, the ones he spun over and over again on a big box player.
“Royce would ask me sometimes, ‘Am I playing my music too loud?’ I’d say, ‘Look, Royce, I love country music. Play on.’ ”
Mark looked down Chatham toward a group of young Black boys playing basketball without a hoop. He held up a Merle Haggard album for me to see.
“I thought it was kind of funny she’d play it around here because people would go down the street playing something unknown. I don’t like rap much. And Royce really didn’t like it. She didn’t even see it as being music, and neither did I. We agreed on a lot of stuff.”
Mark’s words surprised me. I hadn’t realized how much of myself I had projected onto Roy. I loved rap, so I assumed Roy would have loved it if he ever heard it. It’s good storytelling, full of the same kinds of rhyming techniques Roy used in his own music. But what if Roy did think rap was unknown noise? Did that mean he’d also said the kind of breezy racist things Mark and my relatives did? Did he grumble when the other white people left Chatham, leaving him with only Black neighbors? For years, I’d been thinking that my grandmother was wrong to cast Roy as an angel. Real people aren’t perfect, I wrote in my journal. But that afternoon, I realized that I, too, had turned Roy into what I wanted him to be.
Mark scanned through the records one last time, then he carried them back into the trailer. Christopher fiddled with the audio recorder knobs, and Cheryl stared at me.
“I appreciate you letting us come to your house multiple times,” I told her.
“You’re quite welcome.”
She said it matter-of-factly, almost stern. She wasn’t mean, but she wasn’t Southern friendly.
“I know you don’t know me,” I said. “I know you don’t have any reason to trust me, so I appreciate that y’all are going out on a limb and letting us see this stuff.”
Cheryl laughed.
“I know I don’t,” she said. She crossed her arms, and she softened her voice. “Just do it right.”
Mark reemerged from the trailer, and I repeated what I’d said to Cheryl. I thanked him for letting Christopher and me come over.
“That’s okay,” Mark said. “You’ve made your big promise that you won’t portray Roy in any bad light, Casey, so if you can help anybody else from being bullied and mistreated like that, good. That’s one reason I became a special ed teacher, because I wanted to make sure special ed kids were not bullied. And boy, I fought some battles on that line.”
My legs shook. I wanted to tell Mark why I kept returning. Maybe he wouldn’t even care that I was a lesbian. After all, his brother Keith, the man who’d taken my mother and me to see Roy’s tombstone four years earlier, was gay. Maybe Mark already suspected that’s why I was interested in Roy. But I hadn’t even articulated that connection to myself, so I stuttered as I tried to explain what about Roy’s life interested me. Watching the video now, I can see that I was just starting to piece together my own role in the project.
“I definitely have no interest in portraying Roy in a bad light,” I said. “My grandmother told me about this when I was a teenager. I’m about to be thirty now, so that’s twelve years.”
I said a few mumbled words that didn’t add up to a sentence. I almost hoped Mark would interrupt me, but he didn’t.
“I have never wanted to be a man or dress as a man, but I felt different growing up in Monroe. My grandmother told me that everybody in town loved Roy. I don’t think that’s as true as she wanted to believe it was. But I think she told me that because it was her way of accepting me, and showing me that she grew up somewhere where people are different. At the time, it was really antithetical to what I thought about Louisiana. I thought everybody would bully you if you were any kind of different. I couldn’t believe there was a place where you could be different, and people would love you and accept you. That’s really how I got started on it.”
