A lot of firsts that school year. First scrimmage, first JV game, first tackle, first passing yards made. First school dance, with an eighth-grader girl that was dead serious about it so, my first real date evidently. Angus and Sax went together dressed as Planet of the Apes, loser of their grade contest (Sax) being the human on a leash. This is Homecoming mind you, not Halloween, so. Not a date. But Angus took mine over, ordered the corsage from Walmart, took me to Goodwill where we found this dope white suit from the sixties. In my size, unbelievable. I’ve grown into my hands and feet by this point and am pushing six feet, thank you Mattie Kate.
First time going to the dentist. I didn’t see any need, but Angus said quit being a baby, it’s just to get everything cleaned off and fillings if applicable, all normal people do this. Which was a hurtful thing to say. I knew plenty of other kids that hadn’t been. It’s not like Mom didn’t try. Whenever I was
little she’d drive me to the free RAM clinic they have every year, but those things are a madhouse. People camping out in their cars for days to try and get in. Mom was afraid of me getting trampled and going home with less teeth than I started with.
First time carrying a grown man up a flight of stairs. This was Coach, passed out in his office. It wasn’t exactly a habit, but it happened. Fall wasn’t bad, spring would get worse. In the off season without games to think about, he didn’t have a lot to do back there, so he’d take a bottle for company. Angus just rolled with it, saying it was always something that
came and went. You try walking in his shoes, she said. Your wife dying on you, leaving you with a baby to raise. And a girl baby at that. He never even got to try for having his boy.
It was also my first time thinking school could be halfway interesting.
Coach Briggs for history was breather-pass, if you weren’t a corpse he gave you the benefit of the doubt. If you were on the team, extra credit. Mr.
Armstrong, not so much. He gave points for talking in class, this being
Language Arts, but Jesus. Ask where something is at, he’d say “Preposition crime.” Say you’re tired, he’d slump his shoulders and say, “And
feathered.” This was due to his accent, it can affect your hearing. “Tired” to him sounded like “tarred.” He tried without success to convince us on
things like subject-verb agreement, irony, etc., and spent the entire year explaining his opinion on “when” and “whenever” having two different meanings, which is just wrong, man. Give it up. The thing about Mr.
Armstrong though. He would sit on his desk, take off the glasses and set them down, rub his eyes, and you’d never know what in the holy bejesus might come out.
In seventh he assigned us this Backgrounds project of finding out what type of people we came from. What kind of work. If they came from some
other country, where was it. In fall we had to do interviews of old people in our families. In spring, writeups and presentations. The main old person I knew was Mr. Peg that had been a miner, but not my kin. Mr. Armstrong remembered my Melungeon question and said I should look into that. I
thought, “Fat chance.” The orphan habit dying hard. But! Now I had a scary grandmother. Better yet, Mr. Dick, that could probably write a book on any topic.
Mr. Armstrong pitched in some on his own backgrounds: first name Lewis, named after Kareem Abdul Jabbar, figure that one out. His dad being a basketball fan and doctor, his mom in charge of libraries. Both with the opinion he’d lost his mind whenever he moved down here and didn’t
come back to Chicago. He said after ten years they were still asking if he was going to quit fooling around with that banjo and come home. We’d not known of a guy like him playing the banjo. To be honest, we’d not known of a guy like him doing much at all, given there were maybe twenty Black people total in Lee County. He said guess what, the banjo was invented by
his people, it’s similar to a thing their great-greats played in Africa. He said there used to be a ton of Black people living here, that came for the coal jobs. Not being allowed decent pay down south, plus oftentimes getting killed down there for the reason of Blackness. It had mostly all along been more free around here in the back-ass end of Virginia, not slavery, due to
the farms being piss-poor tiny and not the big plantations. But then the mine jobs started petering out and they all went on to Chicago or someplace. For the jobs and also this thing of Great Migration, the far south being hell on earth with the Black-hater laws, and them wanting to put as much road as
possible between themselves and hell. We asked why didn’t the white
people go too. He said it was a different story for them, some left but most didn’t because of big families with relatives, already living here a long time and pretty dug in. Somebody said, “Ain’t nobody gittin me off’n this
mountain,” which got a laugh.
He said that was a stereotype. Big subject with Mr. Armstrong. He read us these things in history that were written about the mountaineers: shiftless, degenerate. Weird-shaped heads. We thought that was dead hilarious, with Brad Butcher making a whole big thing of his pointy head, and Mr. Armstrong saying, “Not funny.” He said they made us out to be
animals so they wouldn’t feel bad about taking everything we had and leaving us up the creek. But Mr. Armstrong wasn’t from here, so we didn’t believe him. We said if that’s true, what all did they take? And he’s like, Oh, let me think. All the timber and coal that fired up the industrial revolution and made America rich? Look at the railroads, he said. Built to move out the goods, one way only, leave the people behind. And we’re all like, Okay, whatever. Brad Butcher has a pointy head, totally not deniable.
A lot of the time Mr. Armstrong would just cross his arms, sit back, and let us fire away. At each other, him, president of the fucking world, our choice. No such language allowed of course. He was okay on our sayings, though, like if we said somebody was crooked as a dog’s hind leg, or born on the wrong side of the blanket. Ugly as homemade sin. These counted for Language Arts. But no f-bombs, no “them guys,” and do not for the love of the Lord say you’re laying down if you mean lying down. The man blew
gaskets on that one.
It wasn’t just the language factors, he was also big on history, for not being the history teacher. (Coach Briggs did worksheets only. Boring as death.) Like with the rebel flags, you see those around, nobody gives it a lot of thought. One of the times we saw them for instance was outside waiting for our buses, where this Chevy D/K pickup on lift-kit tractor tires comes roaring through the parking lot, tires screaming, bass thumping, shirtless high school guys hanging out the windows ripping loose a rebel yell. The truck tore a big U through the lot and back out to the highway, flapping its
glory from two poles zip-tied to the bed: American, Confederate. A lot of guys around me laughed, some few didn’t. Some looked at Mr. Armstrong that was with us on bus duty, just standing over there in his button shirt,
arms crossed, watching the whole yeehaw.
Then it got quiet. The ones getting on buses got on their buses.
Everybody else found interesting shit to look at on the ground. Shoes, gravel, ABC gum. It was close to Halloween, I remember, because the pep squad had the front entrance all decorated up in pumpkins with bad faces drawn on in Magic Marker. So that was something else to look at. Most if not all of us being aware that this flag thing was kind of an oh shit situation. And wanting it to blow over.
“All right, let’s start with the obvious here,” Mr. Armstrong said. So, not blowing over. “The Confederacy and the United States were opposing sides in a war.”
Still quiet. Among our kind there is stuff not talked about, and stuff not done, including insulting people straight to their faces. We knew of words that were not proper-noun capital Black getting used, we definitely heard those, from older guys or parents or whoever, people ticked off over something they’d never met firsthand and knew nothing about. No real person. Which to us in that parking lot, Mr. Armstrong was. We’d all had him in class or as guidance counselor steering us through the juvenile
justice system, and nobody I knew disliked the man. I kept my eyes on the bad-faced pumpkins, wondering for the thousandth time how hard is it to understand, you put the eyes halfway down the face, not the top? Another
bus pulled up and people ducked their heads and got on, probably including a few that didn’t take that bus.
“People,” Mr. Armstrong finally kind of yelled, like he did whenever we were ignorant in class. “Are you following me here? A war. Opposite sides. Flying both those flags at once makes no sense. It’s like rooting for the
Generals and the Abingdon Falcons in the same game.” Whoah. We were all like, Crap. Because that’s unthinkable.
Some guys started mumbling heritage and nothing personal, and Mr.
Armstrong took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, looking as usual
somewhere between interested and flat-out flummoxed. “Whose history are we talking about?” he asked. “Because Virginia voted to join the Confederacy, that’s true. To support the plantation owners. But the people here in this county were not represented in that vote.”
Nobody wanted to tangle with him. Of all of us still out there that hadn’t yet got on buses or edged back into the building, I’m going to say not one person would have taken up a rifle for any plantation fat cats. We were actually glad of what he told us, that the mountain people of Virginia rounded up their own militias to try and fight on the other team, Union. He said we should feel free to pass on this info to certain guys, and we shook our heads like, Those assholes, regardless some of those assholes being
brothers or friends or dads. Because that was Mr. Armstrong. Even if you didn’t necessarily want to, you would end up on his side.
Melungeon turns out to be another one of those words. Invented for hating on certain people until they turned it around and said, Screw you, I’m taking this. These people were mixed, all the colors plus Cherokee and also Portuguese, which used to be its own thing, not white. The reason of them getting mixed was that in pioneer days Lee County was like now, with nobody having a pot to piss in. These folks being poor as dirt just had a good time and ended up with the all-colored babies. If they went anywhere else, these kids got the hate word, melungeon, which Mr. Dick said is some other language for mixed-up piece of shit.
Mr. Dick got into my Backgrounds project in a big way. It would have taken three or more kites to hold everything he wrote down. He explained how in those times a person would get called the n-word if they were even the smallest tad of not-white. Meaning they couldn’t vote, have their own farm, etc. So these mixed-ups that everybody called melungeon went to the courthouse and said okay, that’s what I am. Write it down. (Proper noun,
capital M.) The courthouse people probably studied on it but couldn’t find a thing in their books to say a Melungeon couldn’t do this or that, so. Nice trick.
Those were my people. Mr. Dick and Miss Betsy’s father moved away from here to find Jesus, but mainly to stop being one of these people. If his kids ever wondered about aunts or cousins, they’d get leathered for asking. They never heard the word Melungeon. But they still got wind of these dark-skinned, green-eyed people back in Virginia. My dad grew up asking if it was true. At the time he ran off, he and Miss Betsy were hurt at each other so not speaking. She never knew if he’d made it back here till he
wrote the letter saying he was in Lee County with a girl, fixing to have a baby. The little green-eyed Copperhead he’d never see.
Mr. Dick wrote all this up and gave it to me in an envelope and said to read it later, by myself. And I’ve never been one to get choked up or weepy, even as a small kid. But after I read about my people and my dad, I shoved my face in the pillow and cried like a baby.
Angus said I’d better start a little notebook on my girlfriends, to keep them all straight. This was just Angus being Angus, not mad, more like she’s proud of my success. I never had that many at one time, or for long. To be honest, the most interesting female type of person in my life right then was Ms. Annie, art teacher, obviously out of the girlfriend running. Also I might have been pretty far gone for Linda Larkins, the big-sister math genius and killer flirt from the homework club, but ditto, not a real thing. She was seventeen.
As far as these others that actually liked me, they kept me busy. We were too young yet to do anything in cars like normal kids, but where there’s a will there’s a couch and blankets or my bedroom, if everybody else in the
house was asleep. Study sessions that ran long. It got to where if I wasn’t doing something with a girl, I was thinking about doing something with a girl. My body went on wishing even if I managed to get the brain on something else. Exactly like it does if you’re hungry. I’d been a no-toucher person for a lot of years. I vaguely recalled Mom being a big hugger, but then came Stoner, and family life turned into a whole other kind of contact sport. This skin-on-skin was all new. I did get nerves over not knowing what I was doing or what was allowed, these middle school girls being dead set against going all the way, like they’d made a girlwide agreement. But I knew where all the bases were now. I got tutored.
Once in the blue moon I’d go with the Peggots to see Emmy, but over and out on that onetime romance. Maggot swore she was dating Hammer Kelly now, which she denied. She made fun of Hammer’s countrified haircut, and said the only person in love with him was Mr. Peg, that took him hunting. So Hammer was not the problem, Emmy was just not that hot on me anymore. I was hurt at first and then wasn’t, because like they say, plenty of fish in the sea. Jump in there wearing your football jersey to school on a Friday and my Lord, it’s like that Bible miracle. Fishes coming out of everywhere.
For the record, gifteds can and do play football. Some of the guys found me out, but they didn’t give me that much grief over it. I never missed a
practice. These guys were solid, future Generals all. Cush Polk for one, our JV quarterback, decent as milk, a preacher’s kid from way the hell over by Ewing. Tall, blond, actual red cheeks, the type that still said “Yes ma’am” to teachers. He claimed he got his speed from being youngest in a family of nine, and his mom only ever cooked for eight. And Turp Trussell for another, that once drank a shot of turpentine for purposes that remain unclear. Big clown, built like a brick shithouse, boldness of a bull in rut.
Brain of a deer tick, but that’s not something to hold against a running back.
My main gifted thing was twice a week after lunch riding over to the high school with Fish Head and the Vo-Ag crowd. They did auto mechanics, I got an hour with Ms. Annie in her art room. I thought she would make me do fruit pictures, but no. If it’s cartoons I cared about, she said, draw them. I just had to use the different media to see how they worked. One day she sat still and let me do her portrait. Which I’d been doing secretly anyway. She didn’t always wear long skirts, sometimes it
was these big balloon pants with all the pockets full of brushes, rulers, paint knife, pocket knife. Hippie food items like cereal bars. Always the scarf on her long blond hair, and the dangle earrings. She was a small lady in big, swishy clothes.
She had unheard-of things in her art room, watercolor, gouache. I got to try them all. She made me use perspectives, vanishing point, etc. She gave me human body charts to copy out for learning the muscles, because a cartoon isn’t a realistic person but there’s a real person under it. Like the skull and the face. That room, those hours. I can still smell them. I would be just getting into something before it was time to put away the paints and get on the bus back to middle school. Never in my life have I known time to fly away like that.
Angus got on a tear that year to start an academic team, which nobody
knew what that was. She explained to me that it’s like a sport, only between teams trying to know the most of all the different units like math, literature, etc. A victory of smartness type of thing. She was in high school now, with her big crazy dreams. I said it’ll never fly, that bird has got no wings. She said it’s already flying. They actually did this in other high schools. She heard of it from her friend Sax’s cousin that lived in Northern Virginia. Kids up there evidently had brains coming out their ears, to the extent of needing to meet up with other kids for brain-to-brain combat.
I said what Mom always did if I wanted to do something extra like make my bed: Why make life harder than it is? Angus ignored me and wrote a proposal that Sax’s cousin’s teacher helped her with, over the phone. She had this whole presentation she practiced on me prior to giving it to a teacher’s meeting. I said maybe tone down the outfit, which was a DC
Brainiac shirt and giant glasses she found at Goodwill, but other than that, perfect. So she gave it for the teachers and then the PTA. Next, the freaking school board. I’m sure they thought, this weird girl is getting no dates, fine, let her fill her empty life. Then snoozed till the word competition came up, which meant going to other schools, on buses. Meaning money. They all said the same thing: This category is already covered in the budget. Gifted kids got to take a school trip in sixth or seventh. By high school, evidently if you’re still gifted, you just need to get over that.
Defeat only made Angus more determined. I didn’t get it. I asked if she was jealous over me getting all my art attention, and she said art, was I
kidding? If I wanted to discuss unfairness, let’s talk about football. Uniforms, equipment, buses to away games, state championships. The school board threw money at all that like water on a house fire. And I was like, Angus. It’s football. Take that out of high school, it’s church with no Jesus. Who would even go?
Sax had helped hatch this plan, but wimped out under pressure. Angus was on her own. You’d think at least teachers would back her up. This girl that aces everything she looks at, and reads books for actual fun. But they waffled. Granted, it’s Angus, of the full metal clothes closet and opinions not kept to herself. Plus Coach was always pulling rank on teachers to keep his flunk-ass players eligible. Not Angus’s fault, but complicated. Finally
she went to her old Jonesville Middle pal Mr. Armstrong, that helped her get an assembly set up to present the idea at the high school. Which ended up being a small meeting in a classroom of any kids interested, aka wanting to get out of class for that period. Sax called in sick, aka gutless. It was my art time, so Ms. Annie and I went to the assembly of Angus. She gave her talk about improving skills, school pride, etc., all boss in her black T-shirt with green-skin Brainiac, plus combat boots, hair in fifty little ponytails representing nerve ends. (No hats allowed in school. The girl could push
dress code to an inch of its life.) The only nervous part of her was her eyes. She gave examples of what some teams did, like making team shirts with math equations on them or the names of books they’d read, and wearing
these to school. “Like football players wearing their uniforms on Fridays,” she said. “But we could pick Monday or Tuesdays, so smart kids get their own day to be lords and masters of the high school social pyramid.” That got a pretty huge laugh.
Only two teachers were there, plus the principal to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. He looked like he was napping. One of the teachers frowned the entire time and took notes. Angus finished up, and Mr.
Armstrong said he applauded Ms. Winfield’s initiative and believed her project could notch up the culture of academics at their school. He had knowledge of how these teams functioned, and was there to answer any questions they might have.
Frowny teacher had questions, all right. Who pays for this. Are these kids taken out of class, and how is that made up. Are teachers expected to put in time after school. This lady looked like she’d gone to prom in the eighties and got frozen, big hair, big shoulders. Scary. But Mr. Armstrong stayed on his even keel, talking about cost-benefit ratio, teachers volunteering to prep students in their subject areas, making good use of resources we already have.
Miss Shoulder Pads wasn’t sold. “I heard her say it involved having
meets at other schools. You can’t tell me you’re not going to want a budget allocation for this activity.”
Mr. Armstrong said yes, probably. Shoulder Pads asked what the school board said about it. The principal woke up and said they’d already made their decision, so we really had no say. He said it’s not like we have any
new information here, that those men don’t know.
We kids had zoned out, waiting for something to happen, which finally it was. Mr. Armstrong was getting ticked off. We could always tell by his accent getting stronger. He said with all due respect to our school board, we all know who those gentlemen are. Which honestly, we kids did not. Miss Shoulder Pads probably did. She was in the back of the room, and Mr.
Armstrong in front, with all the kids turning back to front, watching. You could actually hear the action. She asked him what he was implying. (Turn, shuffle.) Mr. Armstrong said, Only that most of the men on the school board were experienced in the corporate world and coal business. (Turn back.)
She said, And is there something wrong with business experience.
He said, All he meant was that these men weren’t trained in education per se. They came up in another era when mining labor was the end game, and
college was not on anybody’s radar.
Angus meanwhile is looking at me like, Help! But what did any of us
kids know? As far as school board, college, radar, our general thinking on that topic was: So what and who cares.
Mr. Armstrong made a point of asking who among us kids had participated in any school activity other than football that brought us into competition with other schools. Which was ridiculous. We had Science Fair once that some few kids had wanted to do, girls and nerds. But not in state competitions obviously. We said duh, no. We’d get creamed. Everybody
knows this.
And he said that’s right, we would. Because every school district to the east of us in this state has AP classes and science labs and other things our students have never had here.
That’s where the bell rang, fight over. The principal had already slipped out with nobody noticing, Shoulder Pads packed up her business and left, but some few kids stuck around to disagree with Mr. Armstrong, remembering the fun times of seventh-grade Language Arts. No, they told him. Wrong. We’d get creamed because the kids in Northern Virginia and those places just have more brains. But outside of a schoolroom, we could whip their asses.
And Mr. Armstrong rubbed his eyes and shook his head and said, “Oh, my effing God.” Which we felt was walking a fine line, languagewise.
I was sorry for the crushed dream of Angus, but art time with Ms. Annie was all the extra I needed. Other than it being another thing to want more
of, Demon and his cravings: for food, for love and touch, and now her lit-up face seeing something I’d done right. I didn’t really care about the main gifted thing, the spring trip over school break. All year we had to study on
this certain place and write our papers so we’d be all wised up whenever we got there. Which makes no sense. I mean, why not just go? Whatever.
Sixth-grade trip I couldn’t, being not yet up to par on my grades. It was just science museum in Charlotte, no overnighter due to budget cuts, so. Rip- off. The teachers promised they’d make it up to us the next year, which I didn’t believe for one minute. Angus said wait and see. Her failed victory of smartness thing was a setback, but in better days she was always one to tell me I should start trusting the wild ride, meaning life or whatever. Because it’s not one hundred percent fucked up, once in a while it delivers.
And in seventh grade, holy God, it did. They said we were going to Colonial Williamsburg, plus an afternoon at Busch Gardens amusement park, and one entire day at Virginia everloving goddamn Beach. The ocean. For my paper I didn’t even know where to start, but I narrowed it down eventually. Currents. They travel around the earth in gigantic circles, you seriously would not believe it. Then March rolled around and the school said there wasn’t money after all for a bus. No trip. And I was the idiot for listening to Angus, trusting the damn ride.
But then came a last-minute save: some volunteer moms would drive us.
Hot damn. The car I got assigned to was a Plymouth Eagle wagon of me, driver-mom, her daughter Lacey, and her two bffs Gleanna and Pristene. All being mad Christian from the same church, so they knew all these Jesus
songs they sang back-to-back from the minute of pulling out of the school parking lot. Hand motions. This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine (hold up a finger like a candle), don’t let Satan blow it out (PHWOOF!). I thought of Mr. Peg saying a man can get used to anything except hanging by the neck. Fine. I was going to see the motherfucking ocean.
Then Gleanna said she didn’t feel so hot, and without further ado puked all over herself and the two of us in the back seat. Sudden death on the
songs of praise. We pulled off at a truck stop where Gleanna was issued a ginger ale and her victims took our overnight bags to the rest rooms to get cleaned up and changed. Then we headed out again, one carload of worse- for-wear Christians with Gleanna up front now, where she supposedly wouldn’t get carsick. I had my hunches though on it being some other kind of sick, because this is I-81 we’re on. The one straight highway between
Jonesville and anywhere.
Sure enough, halfway through “I Have Joy Like a Fountain in My Soul,”
Gleanna hurls again, nailing Driver Mom. Who by now is disgusted with
the whole business, and tells us at the next exit she’s going to go find a pay phone and call the Super 8 Motel where we were supposed to stay. To let
the others know our carload was turning around and going home.
My ocean quest ended in a rout, at Exit 114. Christiansburg. Irony
