The Broken Child - Chapter Eight

A New Home. The duck and the hornet’s nest.

It’s five in the morning.  Fingers of pale blue stretch from East to West and bleed into the steel grey night.  The horizon glows purple and orange.  If I’m quiet, I can sit in the corner of my father’s room and watch him while he smokes a cigarette in the dark, toilets and then shaves.  It might be the only chance I’ll have to see him all day.

Last week was my birthday. I’m five now. We’ve lived in the new house for almost a year. For my birthday, I got a red bicycle with training wheels, an Aurora Cro Magnon Man snap-together model kit with paints, and the matching Saber-Toothed Cat.  Martha Hammond gave me an illustrated book on Elephants.  She’d continue to give me books for quite a while.  

Because summers are very busy, I didn’t always have birthday parties, but this year we did. We went to the Jackson Zoo. I don’t have many friends yet, but a girl cousin and two boy cousins go along, my brothers, my baby sister in a stroller, even though she’s walking pretty well, my Nanny, who was really my Grandmother, my Hattie, who was really my sister’s nanny, and my mother.  My father bought some land not quite a mile away and would soon begin construction.  He said he would try to come but didn’t.

My mother makes a movie of all of us watching monkeys dancing on a red sandstone castle, catching peanuts thrown by awkward children, and fighting over the ones that land close to the water.  There aren’t many movies of me as a child, but there is this one.  

Many years later, I asked my mother why there were so many movies of my brothers and sisters and hardly any of me. “The camera broke,” she said.  When I pointed out that most of the movies she made were of my little sister and her friend long after the period when the camera was supposed to be broken, my mother began to cry.  No one ever intends to overlook the middle child, but there are so only many hours in the day, and four children can be quite a lot.  Besides, making movies of a child who rarely spoke and preferred to be alone was probably pretty hard.

Once Daddy was off to work, I had cereal and watched the captain. Then, my day could start.

Our house, and every house on our side of the street, had a drainage ditch behind it that everybody called “the creek.”  Before Mayor Speed turned a bunch of wooded hills into a neighborhood, most of Eastover was laced with small creeks.  There were small creeks all over North East Jackson.  Bobcat Creek is the most famous.  They emptied into the Pearl River, but ours emptied first into Eastover Lake, which was artificial and then emptied into the mighty Pearl.  

Without supervision or much care in the world, I could travel the length of our creek and end up in Eastover Lake, which was good for swimming.  The creek exposed several deposits of milk-chocolate-colored clay, where I would stop and make things.  Some days, I would come home so dirty that Hattie made me strip off in the backyard and washed me down with the hose before letting me come in her clean house.  

We were among the first people to build in our neighborhood. After we got there, other lots started to fill in. One was my Cousin, Ben McCarty. Next to him was a dentist named Walker, who was a big game hunter. I learned that his father was very good friends with my grandfather, and he became a pretty important figure in my life based on some advice he gave my grandfather, who then passed it along to my father.

We were in the school business, so clearly I had to go to school.  I went to Mrs. Nelson’s kindergarten with a bunch of kids who were the children of my parent’s friends, and one girl who one day became Miss Teen USA, and was given a white Chevy Monte Carlo that said “Miss Teen USA” on the side, which she never drove.  I probably wouldn’t have either.

In Mrs. Nelson's Fairy Tale Pagent, I played a hunter with a duck decoy, and my cousin Margaret played Little Bo Peep.  Mrs. Nelson wrote my mother a note that said I refused to pay attention–ever.  I knew my letters but refused to read words.  I talked a lot sometimes but wouldn’t speak when spoken to.  I probably would need speech therapy when I got older.  

A popular toy was balsawood airplanes with a propeller and a rubber band that drove them.  If you used your finger to turn the propeller, it would twist the rubber band and store potential energy in it so that the plane would fly a short distance when you released the propeller.  

I decided to see how much I could wind my propeller, hoping it would fly far.  Turning and turning the little propeller, I saw the rubber band knotting up.  “This was going to be so cool!” I thought.  Suddenly, the balsawood body of the plane broke in half, and the wing cut both of my eyes.

My cousin Ben was an ophthalmologist and had an office near St. Dominic’s Hospital.  Since the cuts were in the white part of the eye, and not the vision parts, he thought I would make a full recovery, but I had to bandage both eyes until it healed, it could take as long as three weeks.

For a child who didn’t like to talk very much, not being able to see was like a little death.  One day, my mother curled my sister’s hair.  It doesn’t curl naturally, even a little.  Everyone talked about how pretty it was.  I just said that maybe it would last until my bandages came off a week later.  It didn’t.

The entire family, including Nanny, went to see my brother in a play.  Mother hired two teenage girls from down the street to watch over me.  They were very nice and tried to get me to talk.  They laughed a lot and told my mother how good I was when she got home.

School was coming.  Everyone mentioned it.  You have to be a big boy in the first grade.  “I am a big boy!” I insisted, but not really.  I preferred mud to people.  I probably still do. First grade in 1969 portends quite a lot.  I didn’t realize how much.  Brown vs Board of Education was decided in 1954.  The Mississippi Citizens Council was formed two months later to try and organize a fight against it.  

Considering the violence that happened in Little Rock, Kirby Walker Sr., Superintendent of Jackson Public Schools and the father of the dentist who lived down the street, was determined to desegregate Jackson Public Schools without violence.  He accomplished this.  Every school in Jackson had at least one black pupil, and there was no violence.

In 1969, I had been a Hattie Casey Elementary School student for one month when the verdict in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education came down. In it, simply desegregating schools was no longer enough. Schools had to reflect the racial makeup of their district, and the language was changed from “all due haste,” as it had been in Brown, to “immediate.”  Control of the Jackson Public Schools and other districts in Mississippi was placed under the auspices of the Justice Department.  Nixon swore to fight against this but didn’t.  Whatever would become of Jackson Schools was in the hands of federal lawyers, not Mississippi Educators.  

To be fair, every educator in Mississippi knew that the goal was integration, not simply desegregation, but the pressures to keep the schools white were enormous, and politicians with no sense but a lot of rhetoric were ruling the day.  There are people in this story that I judge and people who I forgive.  Everybody has to make their own decisions about that.  With sixty years of retrospect, I can think of a thousand ways they could have made things better, but in 1969, I was six years old, and this is how that went.

When school ended, nobody knew what the next year would bring.  There were forces at work that would change the shape of Mississippi forever.  I, however, was six years old.  School being over meant that my day was my own again, and that meant the creek.

One day, Mother and Daddy were at the Young President’s Organization meeting in Boca Raton, Florida.  The following summer, they would start having family meetings.  My Aunt Jorene came down from Atlanta to help my grandmother and Hattie take care of us for the week, and at the end of the week, she’d take my grandmother back with her to Atlanta to live for six months.

I never let who was taking care of me affect my daily schedule. I had things to do–important things—and grown-ups just didn’t matter that much. I started off the day in short pants, Converse shoes, and a stick in case anything needed to be stuck.  My route was the creek bed from my house all the way down to Eastover Lake and back.  Lunch was a tuna fish sandwich and tomato soup, and then the adventure begins.

Starting off a little after one, I had to be home by five thirty in case I had to be hosed off before supper at six.  That gave me enough time to do all the important things I had to do.  

That day, I captured two baby turtles and cornered a dozen tadpoles who were starting to grow legs.  I made soldiers out of clay who were sadly stomped upon by Godzilla.  I waved to a black man mowing somebody’s lawn and sucked the honey out of honeysuckle growing along the way.

I could tell by the sun that it was getting time to head back.  I wanted to be pretty close before Hattie started to ring the school bell in the carport, which meant I was late.

Passing the Dentist Dr. Walker’s house, I saw a mess of honeysuckle vines and blackberry bushes.   

There are seven different kinds of wasps in Mississippi.  There’s the dirt dauber, which is harmless.  There’s the Velvet Ant, which is beautiful but very painful.  The most aggressive are the yellow jackets, which build a nest in the ground.  Their nests can be home to 1,500 to 15,000 individual black and yellow balls of hate.

I could see Hattie in the carport with the bell.  She could see me, but she wasn’t ringing it yet.  I stopped for a few sweet blackberries and a few trumpets of honeysuckle before docking at home.  She wouldn’t have to hose me off this time.  Well, maybe my shoes.

I felt the stings behind me, so I ran forward–into the blackberry bushes.  We later would find out that the nest itself was hidden in the bushes.  Blackberries have a thick, woody stem covered in thorns.  The thorns began to catch on my clothes.  The more I struggled to get free, the more thorns became entangled in my shirt and pants, and the more I struggled, the more I stomped on the yellow jacket nest.

Realizing I was in trouble, Hattie came running.  Hattie was over fifty.  Five feet, six inches tall, she weighed over two hundred and fifty pounds.  Her arms were bigger than my dad’s.  “Run! Run!” she shouted, barreling across the two backyards from our carport to where I was trapped.  

“Mr. Boyt! You got to run!” she shouted.  She only called me “Mr. Boyt” when I was in trouble.  I think she replaced the “d” in my name with a “t” because she had a little lisp.  If I could have legally changed my name from “Boyd” to “Boyt” to please her, I would have.

The more I tried to run, the more trapped I became.  Suddenly, a black hand made of iron gripped one arm and one leg and ripped me free of the blackberry bushes, leaving most of my shirt behind; she ran with me in her arms all the way to our house and through our backdoor.

Hattie was stung six times.  My brothers swatted the yellow jackets that made it into the house.  My sister cried in confusion.  

My aunt called Dr. Alexander, my pediatrician, who came over rather than having her deliver me to the emergency room.  They stripped my clothes off so he could examine me, picking off the still living and squirming yellow jackets in my clothes, hair, and ears.

They counted over a hundred and forty swollen red spots where the stingers went in.  Yellow Jackets don’t always lose their stingers when they attack, but a few did, so they used tweezers to pull them out.  There were over a hundred red marks where the wasps bit me but didn’t sink their stinger in.

Dr. Alexander gave me a shot, just in case.  My aunt, grandmother and Hattie covered me with calamine lotion three times a day for the next four days until my parents came home.  They were terrified to call my parents and tell them what happened, but other than a life-long fear of flying insects, no permanent damage was done.

The next school year would change not only our lives but change the course of Mississippi forever.

Even though Dr. Walker and my Cousin Ben McCarty used gasoline to burn out the yellowjackets, my daily adventures on the creek would forever avoid that spot.  

I didn’t really understand the forces at work around me, or in me.  I always felt different from other kids. Soon, we’d know why.  I survived the yellowjackets, but there would be much greater challenges ahead.  

Sitting in the dark, in the corner of my father’s bedroom, while he shaves, I listen to Farmer Jim Neal talking about feist dog and giving us the farm report.   He played a song by an English woman.

Those were the days, my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way