Dear Brother Joe:
I just finished your book Deer Hunting with Jesus, and Praise Gawddd! I believe, as in that great title of an album by Weissberg and Fogelberg, that we are "Twin Sons of Different Mothers". Mama was from way Western Kentucky, around Eddyville, home of the State Pen. It was called "'Tween the Rivers" (Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers ran parallel) in those days before the TVA.
There were feuds. Mom's brother, Adolph (I'm not making this up) blew a guy's head off with a shotgun. Some time later, the dead guy's brothers whomped Uncle A real bad with clubs. He expired a few weeks later. There is a wonderful old cemetery back in those woods, now faithfully maintained by my cousin Ben. The stone of the guy done in by Uncle A actually says "MURDERED" on it. His people are all buried around him, and "our people" are a hundred yards away.
The TVA made everybody move out, and all of the buildings were torn down. They wanted to make the area into a National Park, but they made a fatal error, by importing "fallow deer", which carried a nasty tick, which is devastating to dogs and humans. Locals don't like outlanders going in, so they all tell you if you do go, to wear heavy long pants, high boots, and a heavy long sleeve shirt, duct-taped at all the cuffs, else you'll damn well regret it. Winter or summer!
Dad came from southern Ohio, and left home for good at the age of 15, in 1932. He rode the rails, did all sorts of odd jobs, joined the CCC, and all of that great old Woody Guthrie stuff. I honestly feel like I grew up in the Depression, even though I was born in '45, because my dad told me thousands of stories about his life in those days (many repeats, with embellishments). It was the best of times, the worst, etc.
My parents were completely unsuitable for each other, but there was no "eharmony.com" in those days to keep such tragedies from happening. Dad was a boilermaker and shipyard worker. He worked on the nuclear plant at Aiken, South Carolina in 1951, and we all lived in a gigantic trailer park in a recently cleared red dirt field outside of Augusta, Georgia. All trailers were identical, and none were longer than 30 feet. Hot as hell, no A.C., no shade. We lived in trailer T-27. Dad drove a fairly new Kaiser that was a total lemon. Looked like something a Soviet commissar would drive.
Dad kept chasing jobs, and we moved a lot. He was not cut out for family life, nor staying in one place for very long. We ended up in the "Irish Channel" section of New Orleans, where they split up. Most of my buddies' families were in the same low end situation, living in and around the St. Thomas Projects. We didn't know we were poor. I got into a fight once with another boy. Neither one of us were fighters. I ran inside the house where one of the local World War Two veterans was paying a call on my mother, having a Jax and relaxing. He told me to "get back out there, and kick his ass, or I'll kick yours!" What choice did I have? I went back out, and fought through the fear.
On rainy summer days, the streets would always flood, and we would play happily in the foul water, making dams and splashing each other with the filthy water. Hot days would find hundreds of us down at the city pools, where every kid there would pee in the water at least once. There was a lot of polio going around in those pre-Salk/Sabin days.
We played endless variations of war games, sometimes with "live rounds" from Red Ryder BB guns. Every kid had at least one or two "cap guns". We all had bikes, and we all "ran the streets" day and night. At the age of ten, I was allowed to take the bus (fare: $.07 cents!) anywhere in the city, and nobody worried about where we were. Maybe they should have. It was far from the Age of Innocence.
We were nominally Southern Baptists ("Bab-tists"), not an easy thing to be in a Catholic town. The Catholic kids were let out of school every Wednesday afternoon to go to "Cat-a-kism". They would share such Mysteries of the Church as "Fawthuh says we gotta eat a peck of dirt before we go to Heaven." Nobody seemed to know what a peck was.
I was "saved" at the age of 12, swept up in a Jesus fever after a rousing revival week at our church. Brother Buck Donaldson helped me to form a picture of a God of Infinite Love and Compassion, a Jealous and Vengeful God, Who, knowing our sinful predilections, would allow Satan, the Tempter, to lead us down the broad Highway to Hell, filled with such Roadside Attractions as Booze, Wimmin, Fornication (!!), Dope, Gambling, etc., playing out more than enough rope to hang ourselves with, as most would. Not I! I would be a Missionary to Darkest Africa, or at least Kill Commies for Christ.
My problem was, I became overly aware of hypocrisy in the adults within and without the church. I noticed too soon that nothing changed after I was saved. Life was still as tough as ever, and there was always some guy wanting to kick your ass, just like before. My biggest problem,and my ultimate salvation, was my love of reading. I haunted the New Orleans Public Library. They gave out certificates for every eight books read, and I had a big pile of those. They still had stereopticon viewers, and thousands of 3D shots from the 19th Century, of faraway places and scenes of vanished life. It filled me with a hunger for escape. The movies finished the job. I watched every movie that ever came to the third run house on Magazine Street (The Happy Hour Theater!) for five years running.
We also had a huge Motorola TV, and I was addicted to whatever flickered across that evil screen. Fortunately, in those days there was only one channel.
I didn't mean to go on and on, but I loved your book, and I'm going to be handing them out to all of my fellow "Borderer" descendants for Christmas.
That will be my way of "Keeping Christ in CHRISTmas". Thank you so much for expressing so well the mindset of working class America. If you were "born into This!" as Charles Bukowski says, there is No Escape. I live in a bastion of liberalism now, and politically I am far left (proudly so), but that old stuff is still in there, and that ain't all bad.
Your Brother in Christ,
Lawrence
Seattle
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Lawrence,
Whew! Are you a classic or what!
While the younger set would find our backgrounds bizarre by modern standards, we happened to be born long enough ago that we actually span two eras of redneck working class history. We saw the tail end of the Great Depression, not because we lived during that famous depression, but because it never ended in our neck of the woods.
Some other people the same age as us grew up on the green lawns of post-war suburbia twirling batons and such while their daddies smoked pipes and carefully put away money in college funds for them. The interesting thing is that they actually think they are the majority in this country. I suppose it is the result of never socializing with people of a different class, which can make you blind to even a majority. I find this majority everywhere I go, Oregon, New York State, Missouri, Michigan ... The fact that we never see it in the media, to me at least, is proof of this country's deep denial and brainwashing about America being a nation of "middle class" people.
Anyway, thanks for the letter and sharing the memories.
In art and labor,
Joe