Black Folk Could Fly, page 4
The rural North Carolina world in which I grew up has largely gone. Farms were small and plentiful, and country boys like me learned so much about life from livestock—especially, in North Carolina, from hogs.
My cousin Norman lived directly across the dirt from my mother and me. Along with his other farm concerns—tobacco, corn, soybeans, chickens—he raised scores of hogs, killing a number in December for their meat, and selling the prized ones a bit later for cash money. An old man when I was born, he had the air of an Old Testament figure, and seemed to know everything there was to know about coaxing plants from the ground and the feed and care of animals. His grandsons, Harry and Larry, were daily fixtures on his farm, and my best buddies in the world.
Then in high school, they were a few years older than me, and they were my educators about all those things grown-ups were never going to explain to me. Grown-up things. The birds and the bees sorts of things. Subterranean, hidden things were our major topics, after basketball and comic books. So much of the good stuff about adult human society seemed off limits to me, which made me even hungrier to know about it. The world was an endlessly fascinating, alluring, deadly, promising place, and they had the vocabulary to describe it all, and the opinions to make it make more sense. They had a knack about making the salacious seem routine, yet still somehow magical. As far as I was concerned, they knew everything.
Their grandfather kept his hogs in a two-story barn: It held corn in a great room and had an open cavity where the tractor slept. Above that was the tall, wide room with the large double doors in front—the belfry, where the dried tobacco was stored. To the south were stalls for the hogs. Their pens extended from their wooden chambers out into the fenced-in cornfields where they rooted and rutted and went about their hog business.
One early spring afternoon after school, we awaited the arrival of a particular hog star the way a crowd of fans awaits the arrival of the UNC basketball team after winning an away game. There was much talk of what would occur betwixt the boar and the sow—between the boar and many sows in fact, one by one. About how that boar was a right lucky fellow: a true stud. I had a vague notion of what was about to happen: a boar hog was to impregnate each sow so that Cousin Norman could have more hogs to raise and butcher or sell. This part made sense. The fuzzy part, in my eight-year-old mind, was the act itself. Thanks to Harry and Larry’s impeccable tutelage, as well as the R-rated films they took me to, I had learned about the congress between a man and a woman. But the mechanics of hog sex boggled my mind. I kept trying to figure out how it was done, and I was too proud to ask the right questions: What went where? Does the boar ask permission? This was an event I had to witness to complete my education as a North Carolina farm boy. For my cousins—well, this was basically country-boy porn.
The headliner boar hog arrived in a massive wagon towed by an oversized truck. The hog itself did not disappoint. When the slats were removed, he lumbered out like a creature from a nightmare. He was huge in every direction, dark brown and much hairier than the workaday porkers I slopped in the twilight after supper. I’ve never seen a hog that big. He stood taller than me, almost as tall as a grown man. The wideness of him, the heft of him, the length of him . . . he was a real-life monster. His head was the stuff of horror movies; its giant size was matched with mean eyes and the woolly mammoth tusks. (Who knew that domestic hogs grew tusks?) I’d never seen such a thing. His cavernous mouth dripped white, frothing ropes of drool. When he snorted I could see the air, like steam but thicker, heavier: the hog looked like pure evil. And, yes, his testicles were outrageous—mighty, pendulous, bulging, spherical things, clearly potent.
But he did disappoint with his seeming indifference to his first intended. A few attempts were made—now I saw how they did it: The impossibly large beast clambered on top of the female hog, herself no sylph, his hooves insistently drawing his great weight across her back, and then his red business attempted to invade her red business. The entire activity was clumsy yet riveting to behold. Suddenly the word “hump” had an entirely new meaning. Piglets were to be the outcome, by and by, by some mysterious process that I still accorded to magic. How else could you explain it?
We leered. Me, Harry, Larry, Cousin Norman, who had the most interest in seeing that the deed was done, for what seemed several hours, until boredom overtook us, and we retreated to watch something far less titillating: Charlie’s Angels.
But all night my curiosity pricked at me like fire ants. Are they doing it? What does it look like?
The next morning, while everyone else chewed their bacon, I slipped outside. I couldn’t stand it anymore; I had hog sex on the brain: I had to see. I walked across the road, under the great oak, to Cousin Norman’s big barn, past the tractor and corn crib, to the rear stall where the great boar hog entertained his hog lady—wow! He was atop her. Penetration had not only been achieved but was occurring right before my prepubescent eyes. His sighs and grunts sounded like the air being slowly released from a great engine. And the motions he was making were, frankly, obscene. Like a shot I ran back across the road, into the house, into the dining room—the eight-year-old herald of pig fornication.
“They’re doing it!”
I ran back to the barn followed by two horny teenagers whose interest in the matter held different curiosities than my own. We witnessed. Larry made some nasty, Rudy Ray Moore–like observations. Harry told me something then that I did not believe but have come to learn is true: male hogs have a corkscrew-shaped penis, and their sex act goes on longer than most mammals’. And for me, something momentous had occurred. My mind had been expanded in some mysterious way. I was seeing through a glass a little more darkly.
We sauntered back across the road to finish breakfast, our eyes and ears satiated by having witnessed something primordial, something that felt even forbidden to have beheld.
My mother stood on the porch. Arms akimbo. A look upon her face: I imagined Jack’s mother looked the same when he told her he had sold their only cow for some dad-gummed magic beans.
“Don’t you ever—ever—do something like that again!” she said. I had never, nor have I since, remembered her so close to apoplectic rage. Her fury seemed to loom above her like a towering phoenix afire, her tone like a pissed-off biblical prophet. “You just don’t do things like that! You don’t talk about such things! Have you lost your mind?” Her disappointment, her disapproval, bewildered me, and I felt dirty and ashamed. “That’s not information you broadcast to people. Polite people don’t speak of such things. What kind of person do you want to be?” She retreated into the house to get ready for school. Harry and Larry slapped me on the back and laughed.
“Don’t worry about it,” Larry said to me. “It’s natural.”
___________
When I studied playwrighting in college, I remember distinctly my first encounter with the great American writer Sam Shepard, for that was the first time I didn’t need anyone to tell me that what I was reading was great. His subject—the American male—was fundamental and ready to be re-thought, re-invented, de- and re-mythologized. I almost came to worship those plays, for they felt so new and vital and alive. One of my favorites was Curse of the Starving Class, and in particular a fairly famous speech in that play.
In the scene, a character, who once shepherded lambs, tells a younger man the story of castrating lambs. Of how one day he absently threw the detached glands up on an old tin roof, and of how an eagle that had been eyeing him would swoop down and snatch up the lamb testicles. The eagle eventually gets into a tangle with a greedy cat that covets the balls equally. They both perish, eagle and cat, crashing from the sky. That speech always haunted me and goes to the core of what makes Shepard such a powerful artist: he captures something about Americans and manhood, indelibly, with organic nuance, understanding the vulnerability bound up in testosterone.
I knew and felt that experience personally. Not from lambs, but from hogs.
In my teenage years, on certain spring days, Cousin Roma would recruit me to help him geld the shoats. He did it with a razor blade and an aerosol can of some type of disinfectant. My job was to hold the few-months-old (or younger, I don’t really remember at what age the violence was committed) pigs by the legs; they weighed less than 50–60 pounds at the time. Poor things. Uncle Roma would razor out their sacs and spray the violated area amid the unholy squeals. Each year I helped, now older, now gleaning more deeply the mystery of porcine fornication and impregnation of the anatomy and the imperative that moved both the hogs and us humans—though aspects of that mystery are still coming into focus, still growing, still being added onto.
I looked down upon what I was doing, what my uncle was doing to the shoats, and my first response was always a squeamish empathy, thinking how painful such a thing must be to endure. Even then, years before I came upon Sam Shepard and his parable of lamb, eagle, and cat, I envisioned something priestly about the act. Something that went to the soul of men and hogs, to the root of us.
So much of it all remains a mystery.
5
Chinquapin
Elementary Particles
1
The There There
The Kenan Family Farm; Chinquapin; Duplin County; North Carolina; United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God.
34.8 degrees N latitude. −77.82 degrees W longitude. 39 feet above sea level.
The Northeast Cape Fear River. Creeks and brooks like lacework across the land, defining fields and forests. The northernmost edge of the Angola Swamp—home of Venus flytraps.
Longleaf Pines and oak and sassafras. Maple, sweetgum, cedar. Laurel, magnolia, myrtle. Shortleaf pine, pitch pine, pond pine, Eastern white pine, loblolly pine. Sycamore. Cottonwood. Chokeberry. Hemlock. Elm. Pecan and walnut trees. Orchards: apple, pear, plum, scuppernong grape arbors. “Weeds” and wildflowers and grasses. Poke salad. (The American chinquapin tree was practically wiped out by the chestnut blight between 1905 and 1940.)
Raccoon, opossum, squirrel, field mouse. Insects. Frogs (tadpoles). Crayfish (crawdaddies). Lamprey eels. Catfish. Bats. Rabbit. Deer. Bobcat. Muskrat. Black bear. Alligators.
Chicken snakes, Rattlesnakes, king snakes, black racers, coachwhips, hog-nosed snakes, green snakes, garter snakes, coral snakes, milk snakes, corn snakes. Cottonmouth moccasin.
Corn. Soybeans. Cotton. Cucumbers. Strawberries. Sweet potatoes. Peanuts.
Hogs. Cows. More hogs. Lots of hogs. Chickens. Turkeys. Even more hogs. Indeed, more hogs than people. Mules (already so few by now, in the 1970s).
Tobacco. Tobacco barns. Tobacco packhouses.
Tractors. Combines. Plows. Discs. Trucks. Truck beds.
The billboard: “You Just Missed It!”—1/2 mile back, Miss Sally’s Diner.
Churches: First Missionary Baptist Church. St. Lewis Baptist Church. Sharon Baptist Church. Chinquapin Presbyterian Church. St. Mark Church of Christ. Mt. Horeb Pentecostal Church. Church of Deliverance and Restoration Pentecostal Church. (Known affectionately as “Holy Rollers.”)
Cemeteries . . . and sparrows and thrushes and robins and cardinals and the occasional egret or heron. Quail/bobwhites. Hummingbirds, hawks, bluejays, mockingbirds. Woodpeckers. Turkey buzzards.
Stores: Speaker Thomas’s Grocery Store. Billy Brinkley’s Grocery Store. Parker & Sons’ General Store and Supply. M. L. Smith & Sons (at Mills Swamp), known by everyone as “Luther Jim’s.”
The glorious ruins of a nineteenth-century train station: two stories, paint gone and dun and slowly falling down, the top balcony stubbornly holding on, defying gravity, the physics of collapse . . . burned down by the Chinquapin Volunteer Fire Department in 1981. The long-abandoned rails of a train created to haul lumber at the turn of the nineteenth century. Rusty, overgrown, yet still there, even now . . .
Bank: United Carolina Bank. (Closed in 1987.)
United States Post Office.
Schools: Chinquapin Elementary #1 (formerly the Black school); Chinquapin Elementary #2 (formerly the white school). Football. Basketball. Baseball. (Mascot: the Indians.) 4-H Club.
My mother’s garden: snap beans (Kentucky Wonders), pole beans, butterbeans, field peas, okra, cabbage, collards, mustard, Irish potatoes, carrots (sweet, sweet, sweet like candy; best straight from the earth—the dirt is good for you!), beefsteak tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, garlic, cayenne pepper, bell pepper, sweet corn, beets. Watermelon. (Begonias, wandering jew, dahlias, zinnias, geraniums, roses, sunflowers/black-eyed susans, snapdragons, azaleas . . .)
___________
. . . There is more. Much, much more. Scents and tastes. The color of things. The sounds of laughter. The sound of dirt landing upon coffins. Hymns. Pop tunes on the radio. First loves. Vacation Bible School in June. Murders and talent shows. The time the carnival came to town . . . and for me Star Trek and Charles Dickens and Batman and The Swiss Family Robinson and Spider-Man and Treasure Island and The Hobbit and the intense desire to be elsewhere. (How could I have forgotten blueberries?) And yet a funky good allegiance and gratitude. “Chickenpen, Nawf Cackalacky—smile when you say that, fella . . .”
Memory is a Polaroid.
“Location pertains to feeling; feeling profoundly pertains to place; place in history partakes of feeling, as feeling about history partakes of place,” Eudora Welty writes in “Place in Fiction.”
2
Struck by Lightning
Her: There was something about her that rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe it was the way she looked at me. Maybe it was the dip of snuff that never, ever, never left that place between her bottom lip and her gums; the way she spat the brown juice like a laser beam with enough accuracy and force to bisect a horsefly in mid-flight.
I got along with her sons; one was a grade ahead of me in school, one was a grade behind me. One was out of school. One was a lap baby. Her daughter, Trisha, my age, never had a good word to say about me, and teased me without mercy. Her older daughter, Anne, looked upon me as if I had escaped from the pound, and wondered where the hell the dogcatcher was when you needed him most.
But with Miss Ella, it was a matter of indifference, impatience, disregard. Maybe I wanted her to like me, and, once I sensed I was beyond any sort of such affection, I retaliated by disliking her more.
She was a large woman. Dark of skin. Lips large. Eyes deer-round and sad. She fancied sundresses of the brightest hue. She complained often of the pains in her oversized feet, sandal-shod, toes painted fuchsia.
Their family was the poorest of the poor, which was mighty poor indeed in Duplin County. Tobacco season was the only time, truly, when they could augment government cheese and garden food with more store-bought food, when everyone could get day wages and the light bill would get paid. And everyone in the family worked. The baby was more often than not at the workplaces along with her. I don’t remember much, if anything, about her husband. He never came to church. I wonder now if I ever laid eyes on him. Not that she ever came to church too often, except on those occasions when they served fried chicken, barbecue, slaw, potato salad and ice tea afterwards. She never seemed to miss a funeral.
Nonetheless, when it came to tying tobacco, she was highly prized and sought after (also as a grader of cured tobacco). Her skills resided in her speed and in her accuracy. When she handed tobacco—a deceptively simple activity: three or four good-size leaves, the stems evened out with a pat of the heel of the palm, and backhanded to the tier—she accomplished the feat with Henry Ford–like automated precision, always the fastest hand in the South. When she tied—standing over a stick, suspended on a wooden and spindly “horse,” grabbing the backhanded bunch of leaves, looping them in cotton twine, once, twice, and over, onto the stick, snug, one packet of bound leaves tight against the next, and the next, until the length of the wooden stick was full and tied off at the end: pop—she became a blur, a musician: zip, whir, zip, whir, zip, whir. God help you if you made her wait too long. And when the stick was complete, loaded down with big bunches of green leaves like oversized praying hands pointing downwards, she would grunt, “Stick!” This was my cue to come grab the done-thing and take it to a pile, which grew from nothing in the morning into a rectangular mountain of emerald by the end of the day. Her contempt for my slowness (or at least by her standards) was one of the burrs between us, when she would spit out the brown juice and say, “Come on, boy. Ain’t got all day. You slow as Christmas coming. Where you at? Ham mercy.”
I had been raised to respect my elders, to be courteous and gentle with all, to never sass back, and all that good Gospel Jazz. I did not enjoy the company of this woman.
That fateful day we were putting in tobacco for my cousin Seymour, who owned a small farm, but who also leased a great many acres from the bigger landowners. This certain field was remote from his farm, and the original barn there had long ago burned down. So we went about our toil on the edge of a copse of trees on the edge of this particular fifty acres of bright leaf. Under longleaf pines and oaks. A tarp had been strung over our heads to keep out the sun and the rain, but more important to give some protection to the stacked tobacco. It was a fairly flimsy setup, and the ground beneath our feet was uneven and rough and root-interrupted and grass-jagged and leaf-strewn. As much as I hated working in tobacco, not being under the proper shelter of a tobacco barn made this adventure even more hateful.
When the fields had been primed, we would load the pile of tied tobacco sticks onto a flat-bed and haul it to one of Seymour’s flue barns and hang it all there, high in the rafters, ready for firing—a hard day’s work.
There was no Doppler radar or Weather Channel in those days. For all of us, the day had begun before dawn, so not even Cousin Seymour had heard a weather report, not that anything short of a hurricane would have stopped the day’s work. Cropping tobacco went on regardless the temperature or precipitation. The show must go on.
