The Broken Child - Chapter Seven
Life In The Garden
In the world’s cultural mythologies, a recurring theme is the gods' creation of men and an idyllic world for them to dwell in. In the Abrahamic cultures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, this idyllic world was a garden, a testament to Gods' power, benevolence, and love for his creation.
God created man and placed him in a garden where the trees offered up their fruit to man’s waiting hand, and all the beasts shared his time. The lion velveted his claw, and the eagle sat on Adam’s shoulder.
While in the garden, Adam could not help but believe this was what he was made for. God knew something Adam didn’t. He was not yet complete. God created the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, commanding Adam to eat freely of one but avoid the other.
We’re led to believe that Adam should not eat from the tree of knowledge, as it would make him mortal. However, can you imagine a humanity that never chooses to taste the fruit of knowledge? The role of knowledge in our evolution is so significant that any God capable of creating us would have known our choice from the beginning.
“So, Mr. Abraham, why don’t we live in the garden anymore?”
“It’s that Bitch I tell you! We NEVER should have trusted her!”
Clearly, Mr. Abraham had issues before he even started telling the story. I don’t believe a loving God would make us male and female to destroy us, although sometimes it may feel like it. Milton went to elaborate lengths to explain why the bringer of light deceived us and why man’s help-mate allowed it, but he overlooks the most obvious answer. He was supposed to do it.
Ultimately, Adam and Eve leave the garden because childhood ends, and the only ones who remain innocent forever are the ones who don’t survive.
My mother brought a baby boy to a home that already had two. Our little house on Northside Drive had three bedrooms and one bathroom. It was built after the war in Europe when Jackson started growing north instead of west as it always had. It’s more profitable for developers to start with farmland or forest than to rehabilitate older neighborhoods. For forty years, I’ve said that we should probably use the tax code to correct this, but so far, nobody is listening.
My mother’s father died of cancer at a time when all they really could do for it was give them morphine. Even with that, she told tales of hearing him moan and scream in pain toward the end.
My grandmother was a woman living a nineteenth-century lifestyle in the twentieth century. She never learned to drive. Her father, who was in Learned, Mississippi, had a buggy. Her husband, a plumber, had a truck, and Mississippi Power Company promised to keep building street cars to wherever you wanted to go.
The only paying job she ever had was selling books and wrapping packages at Christmas at my uncle’s Office Supply Store. She could tatt, knit, and sew just about anything. She could cook and clean and learned to do the laundry in an iron pot. When Grandaddy Joe died, it was decided that my grandmother, who we called Nanny, would spend six months with one daughter and six months with the other, as they both had young children and young children require looking after.
Our little house had one room for my parents, one for my grandmother and my crib, and one for my brothers, who slept in bunk beds that were converted to twin beds. They’re at my sister’s house now, although the pins that turn them from twin beds to bunk beds have long since disappeared.
Life in a crib isn’t much fun. In those days, toddlers were often retained in what they called a “play pen” but was actually just a cage. I had a reputation for discovering creative ways out of the playpen, including tearing off my diaper and throwing it around the room until someone picked me up out of my cage.
My memories of those days are dim. Mostly shadows. What I can visualize from that time was the position of everyone moving around me and me not having liberty among them. I suppose I’m still a bit resentful of the cage thing.
One day, a momentous event happened: my crib was moved from my grandmother’s room to my brother’s. A crib is still a cage, but suddenly, I was surrounded by the most amazing things. I especially remember my brother’s Johnny West action figure and two horses. I knew what horses were from television and the company farm in Raymond, but these were horses actually IN the bedroom. It was then that I realized my older brother held the keys to the mysteries of the universe.
I’m sure I was aware that a little girl had moved into my spot in Nanny’s bedroom, but who cares? I was in an amazing, entirely new world. Babies are smelly, and they don’t do much anyway. Something magical happens when you’re around them, even when you’re technically still a baby, too, but aint nobody got time for that.
My sister was fresh and pink. I was three, Joe was five, and Jimmy was nine. Nine seemed like the most amazing thing in the world. He could do anything and go anywhere.
Our backyard abutted the backyard of Martha and Arnold Hammond. They were a few years older than my parents, and their children were correspondingly older than us. One of the Hammond boys built a one-room treehouse accessible by some two-by-four boards nailed to the tree. My brothers and the Hammond boys could access it, but I was too little to reach the first step on the board ladder. My brother tried to lift me up to the first step so I could see the inside of the treehouse, but he got yelled at, so it would be a while yet before I could experience the liberty of more grownup boys.
My uncle died in the months before I was born, so I never knew him. For some reason, I always imagined Uncle Boyd with a long white beard, even though he never had one. He was old, I suppose, and old people had beards.
I didn’t understand what a family business meant. I knew “The Company” was where Daddy went, and Grandaddy had an office (whatever that was), but none of the details meant anything to me.
My father did everything with my brothers. He loved being a dad. There were even pictures in the paper with my grandfather, father and two brothers doing little boy things. I didn’t understand that, with my uncle’s death, my father’s life was about to change in major ways, and the time he had for little boys before would soon evaporate. It took a while for me to understand how much things would change. It took fifty years for me to come to terms with it. Missing somebody who is still alive and living with you is a complicated thing for a little boy.
A baby’s life is measured in milestones. His first poop, turning over, sitting up, crawling, and then walking. Earning the right of locomotion is a big deal for a baby, but learning to speak is a bigger one.
At some point, everyone started trying to get me to speak, but I resisted. Finally, when Mother and Father were at a YMCA baseball game with my brothers, A sixteen-year-old Laurie Hammond was babysitting and somehow coaxed “daddy” out of me. She was nervous about telling my parents when they got home, but when she told her mother, they both came over the next day and coaxed me to say it again in front of my own mother.
Martha Hammond was my first friend. Even now, she’s probably the most significant. Even though I was speaking, it soon became evident there was a problem. All babies struggle to say some words. My struggle was different. I would get stuck on some sounds and reflexively would start to repeat them. Unable to use the words I knew, I became angry and cried in frustration. I was a stutterer. In a world that fully expected me to be the next Boyd Campbell, President of the US Chamber of Commerce, and all the things my uncle had been, I was, instead, a broken child.
For some people, stuttering is a constant thing. Every word comes out broken. Fortunately, I was never like that. In a few years, they would discover that I had ADHD, although they knew little about dealing with it. I’m convinced that my stuttering and my ADHD are connected. I’ll be trying to say a word, but something distracts me, interrupting the word creation process. Frustrated but determined, I’ll try to force the word out, but it sounds br-br-br-broken.
Frustrated with speaking, I often just wouldn’t. Most kids with ADHD are little chatterboxes. I was too, but the conditions had to be right.
Meeting new people was a problem because I never knew if my words were reliable. My mother tried to drop me off at the Nursery at Church. In a room full of kids I had never seen before and grownups I had never seen before, I looked at my mother like, “If you leave me here, we’ll be enemies forever.” She did it anyway. I found a corner between a bookshelf and the wall and stayed there until they came to get me.
My mother was not the stay-at-home type. She was in ten clubs, including something called the Junior League, which ran Jackson for a while. At home, she had my grandmother and a black woman full of nothing but love and peppermint hired to do light housekeeping and laundry and help look after the new little girl.
Martha Hammond was my friend. She was the first to notice that, even though my words were broken, I knew quite a lot of them. She began teaching English at Mississippi College when her children flew the coop. She was the first person of letters I ever knew. Martha Hammond’s kitchen became my place of refuge. She was the first to notice that there might be something more to my words than their brokenness.
A new baby meant that there were now seven people living in a house built for three. My father’s new job meant new money. A friend of my grandfather had been turning forest land down by the Pearl River into a new neighborhood called Eastover in an attempt to sound like people in Jackson had the same kind of money as people in Dallas. They didn’t.
Visiting this new place with lots of trees and a house still made of just sticks, I didn’t yet understand what it meant to move to a new house. I would find out. Having eaten from the forbidden tree of knowledge, it was now time for me to leave the garden and move into the world.
