By John Matthew Walker
In Abilene, Every color was cut with grey. The sky there held the hue of a vagrants face, strangled and ditched. The soil was crushed charcoal; it was impossible to tell it from the crumbling street at any distance. What little foliage existed on Plum Street was doomed from the moment it sprouted, and it all hung like it knew it.
I was nine years old, dragging my supermarket tennies through it all. It was August and we’d been there since June. Mom married Rocky, who grew up in the area. He was a local high school football hero in his day. He had somehow wound up in Long Beach, California, free-basing and losing jobs. His great-grandmother, senile, needed a caretaker. She got five of them, and we got free rent. Soon after the nuptials we packed our things into the Pontiac, so tight we all had to cram up front. We drove east on 1-10, through lonely desert states, to Texas.
Sugar was ninety-two. A child of freed slaves. Her husband Charles, long dead, built the Methodist church across from the creaking wooden house at number 734 that we shared with her. Her life had been hard, and the language of her tired body spoke sorrow. She spent most of her adult life working at the meatpacking plant, still in operation three blocks east on Cottonwood St.
Though very slow in gait, and prone to dementia, She managed to slide out the back screen door from time to time. We’d usually catch her on the dirt alleyway behind the house, where the shacks on Plum backed up to the shacks on Mesquite. That day however, Mom and Rocky were having a scrap in the bedroom and we were all quite distracted by it. We hadn’t a clue how long she’d been gone. After checking the block, we each took a different direction, and began to comb the neighborhood.
I began trolling north on Plum St, checking porches and driveways. Everyone knew Sugar, as she had been there before any of them. As a young lady, She had rolled in the grass upon which their homes would be built. She had babysat even the greyest old coot. No one seemed to be any help though, any time she absconded. I’d see Miss Emma, futility in her eyes, watering her balding lawn; “You seen Sugar, Miss Emma? She got out again.” “ Naw!” she’d caw, “ I ain't seen’ah!” Or Mr. Lloyd, who once told me to “Get my white ass off his do’ step!”
Being nine years old, it hadn’t occurred to me that their response to my queries had less to do with what they’d seen, and more to do with who was asking, but I can’t take too much offense. Most of the white folk in that town lived on the other side of it. The Klan had been far less than neighborly in drawing these divides. Though by late summer 1983 most cities had begun to move on, in Abilene, it might as well have been the early fifties. And Even though my step-daddy was one of them, I was a white-boy, no escaping it.
North Ninth St. doglegged at Plum, on the right was the high school, and I always made sure I was on the left side of the street when I passed it. High school kids scared me.
I passed the covered bus stop there and saw an old woman I thought for a moment was Sugar, but it was not. She had on her head an old flowered scarf. She was holding a bamboo cane like the one Sugar employed. I knew it well; it always leaned against an old curio cabinet in her room. Once, my sisters and I were left alone with her. She used it to hook a pair of underwear in which she had had an accident. She chased us through the house with it, and drove us out the back door. We hid in the shed that day until Mom came home. And though we laughed about it to the point of tears, we were terrified at the thought of being alone with her from that point on. I would then after crawl home from school at a rate of speed that would shame a snail, if it meant not being the first home. There was no after-school special with enough Scott Baio , or any cartoon too cool. No Michael Jackson video was important enough to hurry me home to her, and her blank madness. Once, gassed-up on “lick-a-maid,” I forgot this doctrine, and too much hustle landed me home a half-our before anyone else. All the doors were locked, and Sugar stood , poised like a palace guard ,between the living room window and its curtain. “ I will shoot ‘choo good if you don’t get off my porch, boy!” aiming at me what she referred to as “ her pistol,” which was in actuality a rusty old Master-lock. I camped on the porch until Mom got home.
I had never really ventured to far past the high school and was disappointed my search hadn’t ended at the bus stop. I dreaded the unknown streets that lie ahead. All the houses looked the same to me, and landmarks were scant. I decided, first pay phone I saw, I’d call home and check if she’d been wrangled yet. I certainly hoped so. I really didn’t wish to be the one who found her. What then? Was it then my duty to corral her, convince her to follow me back home? Seldom did she even have a clue who I was.
After another little while I came upon a highway overpass I hadn’t ever seen. I didn’t know how far I’d walked, I’d been staring at my feet for quite a while. I could no longer bear the sight of the rotting homes and filthy yards of a town that had peaked a hundred years before I arrived.
Noticing a gas station at the far side of the road, I crossed . Not a single car to wait for. The attendant was kneeling, ass in the air. head underneath a pick-up. “ Do you have a pay phone sir?” I asked. No response, he kept scrutinizing the dripping radiator.” Do you have a pay…” he cut me off, ”Yeah…’round back, old lady’s been on it for an hour though.” I didn’t bother saying thank you. I scampered around the building ,slipping slightly in a grease puddle, painting one side of my left sock black.
Mom always made me keep two quarters in the sneaky pocket of my Tough-skins. Sometimes Rocky would lose it, and it was my job to haul ass to the Quickie-Pickie and call the law on him. Once I tried this from the kitchen phone. He broke it across the back of my head. From then on, she’d hide a couple in each pair of jeans on laundry day. I released George’s silver visage from its denim hideout just as I rounded the back of the ill-painted grey brick station.
Returning my line of sight ahead of me, my quick pace was stolen and replaced by a slow, unsure one. Standing before me in scarf and coat, under the awning of the ancient phone booth, was Sugar. Her fabled cane was on the oily concrete. She had her back to me, and I could see the vintage receiver pushed against her ear with her shaking, leathery right hand.
As I crept close, my ears began to receive the murmur coming from her decaying purple lips. I froze, somewhat terrified and somewhat mystified, a couple of paces behind her hunched frame. I tuned in deeper, I could hear a dial tone mixing with Sugar’s words; “ O.k., we’ll have potatoes then instead, Charles…But jus’ don’t be so late like las’ time…’else they gon’ get all dry. I love you.” She slowly set the phone back on the hook, and turned herself around and reached for her cane. Her dark pebble eyes met mine in the ether. Then, after a long, silent moment, she creaked; “ Oh…I was wonderin’ where you was. We gotta go get dinner together honey.” I squatted down and wrapped my pink fingers around her cane, rubbed a grease spot from it with the clean side of my sock, and handed it to her.
I called home and Rocky answered in a dissatisfied tone that only he knew how to produce. It made my ass sore the second it hit my ears. It was as if he kept every ounce of pain he’d ever felt within arm’s reach. He had an aversion to happiness. “ Yeah.” He sighed, “ Found ‘er, Rock!” I blurted out, expecting some form of verbal reward.” Where?” he grunted, like it was too much for him.” I don’t know, up Plum, I don’t know, a gas station by the highway.” I said, barely finishing before he hung up.
I wasn’t at all pleased that he came instead of mom, but when he pulled up in Sugar’s old Bellaire, I became almost excited. I always loved riding in the back. The huge windows let in such a breeze that it pushed the skin on your face back towards your ears. I stuck my head out the window, closed my eyes, and pretended I was back on the beach in California. I could hear Rocky, caterwauling from behind the wheel. Grossly inconvenienced and not at all cool with it. I felt the tone, but the sound of the wind drag shielded me from his words. I took a huge breath just as we passed the meatpacking plant and almost barfed at the smell of pig’s blood. I popped my head back in and covered my mouth. I turned and looked at Sugar. The dark features of her face drawn together at the stench, her tired old hand cupped over her nose and mouth. I stuck my head back out the window and watched grey streaks of Abilene go by.
I was nine years old, dragging my supermarket tennies through it all. It was August and we’d been there since June. Mom married Rocky, who grew up in the area. He was a local high school football hero in his day. He had somehow wound up in Long Beach, California, free-basing and losing jobs. His great-grandmother, senile, needed a caretaker. She got five of them, and we got free rent. Soon after the nuptials we packed our things into the Pontiac, so tight we all had to cram up front. We drove east on 1-10, through lonely desert states, to Texas.
Sugar was ninety-two. A child of freed slaves. Her husband Charles, long dead, built the Methodist church across from the creaking wooden house at number 734 that we shared with her. Her life had been hard, and the language of her tired body spoke sorrow. She spent most of her adult life working at the meatpacking plant, still in operation three blocks east on Cottonwood St.
Though very slow in gait, and prone to dementia, She managed to slide out the back screen door from time to time. We’d usually catch her on the dirt alleyway behind the house, where the shacks on Plum backed up to the shacks on Mesquite. That day however, Mom and Rocky were having a scrap in the bedroom and we were all quite distracted by it. We hadn’t a clue how long she’d been gone. After checking the block, we each took a different direction, and began to comb the neighborhood.
I began trolling north on Plum St, checking porches and driveways. Everyone knew Sugar, as she had been there before any of them. As a young lady, She had rolled in the grass upon which their homes would be built. She had babysat even the greyest old coot. No one seemed to be any help though, any time she absconded. I’d see Miss Emma, futility in her eyes, watering her balding lawn; “You seen Sugar, Miss Emma? She got out again.” “ Naw!” she’d caw, “ I ain't seen’ah!” Or Mr. Lloyd, who once told me to “Get my white ass off his do’ step!”
Being nine years old, it hadn’t occurred to me that their response to my queries had less to do with what they’d seen, and more to do with who was asking, but I can’t take too much offense. Most of the white folk in that town lived on the other side of it. The Klan had been far less than neighborly in drawing these divides. Though by late summer 1983 most cities had begun to move on, in Abilene, it might as well have been the early fifties. And Even though my step-daddy was one of them, I was a white-boy, no escaping it.
North Ninth St. doglegged at Plum, on the right was the high school, and I always made sure I was on the left side of the street when I passed it. High school kids scared me.
I passed the covered bus stop there and saw an old woman I thought for a moment was Sugar, but it was not. She had on her head an old flowered scarf. She was holding a bamboo cane like the one Sugar employed. I knew it well; it always leaned against an old curio cabinet in her room. Once, my sisters and I were left alone with her. She used it to hook a pair of underwear in which she had had an accident. She chased us through the house with it, and drove us out the back door. We hid in the shed that day until Mom came home. And though we laughed about it to the point of tears, we were terrified at the thought of being alone with her from that point on. I would then after crawl home from school at a rate of speed that would shame a snail, if it meant not being the first home. There was no after-school special with enough Scott Baio , or any cartoon too cool. No Michael Jackson video was important enough to hurry me home to her, and her blank madness. Once, gassed-up on “lick-a-maid,” I forgot this doctrine, and too much hustle landed me home a half-our before anyone else. All the doors were locked, and Sugar stood , poised like a palace guard ,between the living room window and its curtain. “ I will shoot ‘choo good if you don’t get off my porch, boy!” aiming at me what she referred to as “ her pistol,” which was in actuality a rusty old Master-lock. I camped on the porch until Mom got home.
I had never really ventured to far past the high school and was disappointed my search hadn’t ended at the bus stop. I dreaded the unknown streets that lie ahead. All the houses looked the same to me, and landmarks were scant. I decided, first pay phone I saw, I’d call home and check if she’d been wrangled yet. I certainly hoped so. I really didn’t wish to be the one who found her. What then? Was it then my duty to corral her, convince her to follow me back home? Seldom did she even have a clue who I was.
After another little while I came upon a highway overpass I hadn’t ever seen. I didn’t know how far I’d walked, I’d been staring at my feet for quite a while. I could no longer bear the sight of the rotting homes and filthy yards of a town that had peaked a hundred years before I arrived.
Noticing a gas station at the far side of the road, I crossed . Not a single car to wait for. The attendant was kneeling, ass in the air. head underneath a pick-up. “ Do you have a pay phone sir?” I asked. No response, he kept scrutinizing the dripping radiator.” Do you have a pay…” he cut me off, ”Yeah…’round back, old lady’s been on it for an hour though.” I didn’t bother saying thank you. I scampered around the building ,slipping slightly in a grease puddle, painting one side of my left sock black.
Mom always made me keep two quarters in the sneaky pocket of my Tough-skins. Sometimes Rocky would lose it, and it was my job to haul ass to the Quickie-Pickie and call the law on him. Once I tried this from the kitchen phone. He broke it across the back of my head. From then on, she’d hide a couple in each pair of jeans on laundry day. I released George’s silver visage from its denim hideout just as I rounded the back of the ill-painted grey brick station.
Returning my line of sight ahead of me, my quick pace was stolen and replaced by a slow, unsure one. Standing before me in scarf and coat, under the awning of the ancient phone booth, was Sugar. Her fabled cane was on the oily concrete. She had her back to me, and I could see the vintage receiver pushed against her ear with her shaking, leathery right hand.
As I crept close, my ears began to receive the murmur coming from her decaying purple lips. I froze, somewhat terrified and somewhat mystified, a couple of paces behind her hunched frame. I tuned in deeper, I could hear a dial tone mixing with Sugar’s words; “ O.k., we’ll have potatoes then instead, Charles…But jus’ don’t be so late like las’ time…’else they gon’ get all dry. I love you.” She slowly set the phone back on the hook, and turned herself around and reached for her cane. Her dark pebble eyes met mine in the ether. Then, after a long, silent moment, she creaked; “ Oh…I was wonderin’ where you was. We gotta go get dinner together honey.” I squatted down and wrapped my pink fingers around her cane, rubbed a grease spot from it with the clean side of my sock, and handed it to her.
I called home and Rocky answered in a dissatisfied tone that only he knew how to produce. It made my ass sore the second it hit my ears. It was as if he kept every ounce of pain he’d ever felt within arm’s reach. He had an aversion to happiness. “ Yeah.” He sighed, “ Found ‘er, Rock!” I blurted out, expecting some form of verbal reward.” Where?” he grunted, like it was too much for him.” I don’t know, up Plum, I don’t know, a gas station by the highway.” I said, barely finishing before he hung up.
I wasn’t at all pleased that he came instead of mom, but when he pulled up in Sugar’s old Bellaire, I became almost excited. I always loved riding in the back. The huge windows let in such a breeze that it pushed the skin on your face back towards your ears. I stuck my head out the window, closed my eyes, and pretended I was back on the beach in California. I could hear Rocky, caterwauling from behind the wheel. Grossly inconvenienced and not at all cool with it. I felt the tone, but the sound of the wind drag shielded me from his words. I took a huge breath just as we passed the meatpacking plant and almost barfed at the smell of pig’s blood. I popped my head back in and covered my mouth. I turned and looked at Sugar. The dark features of her face drawn together at the stench, her tired old hand cupped over her nose and mouth. I stuck my head back out the window and watched grey streaks of Abilene go by.
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