Atlanta

My family lived on the northern frontier of Atlanta in the late 1950s where my father taught at a small college. I went to Jim Cherry Elementary School a few blocks off of Peachtree Street. I could have walked to school through the woods and made it there in ten minutes, but like all children I rode a yellow bus to school through neighborhoods shaded by towering Georgia pines. The school was located across the street from a dirt poor African-American neighborhood, and of course, none of the children from there attended all-white Jim Cherry. I never saw the people who lived there.

My second grade teacher, Miss Moore, was an ancient, unsmiling, skeletal woman. Our desks were arranged in perfect alignment and there were portraits of Southern generals on the classroom walls. She kept us cowering with slaps and by threatening that the principal would remove his belt and lash us if we disobeyed again. She always draped herself in black and even shaded herself with a black umbrella during recess where she presided over the playground with grim disinterest.

Those were the years of nuclear attack drills, and when the sirens sounded, we ducked under our desks and crouched into fetal positions until the sirens sounded the all-clear. I had a friend named Jerry Craddock in that class, a hyperactive boy with rotten teeth, who loved the bomb drills. One time when the drill ended, Jerry looked out the window to across the street and shouted, "Them niggers is gonna get blown to smithereens!" Miss Light rushed over, grabbed his shoulders with both hands, and shook him like his neck would break. She scolded him, "It's NEEgroes, Jerry. Say, those NEEgroes will get blown to smithereens! NEEgroes."

"Yes, ma'am," sounded Jerry, his eyes wild and wet.

Courtesy and Southern gentility were stressed at all times. Miss Moore always said that we should grow up to act as "fine ladies and gentlemen", and a deserving boy and girl were designated each week as the class's "master and mistress." It was a great honor on a Monday morning to be thus dubbed as masters and mistresses got to be first in line, were seated first at the cafeteria table, and led the prayer at lunch. Masters and mistresses monitored proper table manners and if a classmate failed to wipe jelly from their mouth or laid an elbow on the table, the masters were entitled to deliver a sharp rebuke. No one could rise and leave the table until their masters did so. Jerry, of course, never became a master, but was often left alone after lunch to scrape trays into the garbage.

Whenever I witnessed a teacher hitting or shaking a child, as in Jerry's case, my face flushed hot and I became sick to my stomach. Sometimes I couldn't hold it and would puke on the classroom floor and be sent home after a visit to the nurse. With time I learned that vomiting could keep me safe. Every morning after breakfast, I would retreat to the bathroom and gag myself into regurgitating breakfast down into the toilet and call for my parents to witness the evidence of my illness as scrambled eggs or oatmeal floated there.

For several days, I was able to stay home until that fateful morning when my father walked in on me with my fingers down my throat. He dragged me off to school in spite of my screams and I took a seat at my desk with my face buried in my arms. Jerry soon acted up, and Miss Moore sent him out into the hall. She grabbed her pointer stick, exited the classroom door, and a beating echoed down the hallway. Later when her back was turned, I slipped out the classroom, exited the outside door by the cafeteria, and ran all the way home through the woods, gulping tears. I burst through the front door where my mother was having coffee and a cigarette with our neighbor. 

My parents were able to put two and two together, and in a few days I was transferred to the other second grade classroom where the kindly Mrs. Howe never raised her voice. During recess from then on, I would see Miss Moore under her black umbrella, staring at me from across the playground without expression.

I was seven years-old. In those woods between home and school, the Cohen twins and I would strip naked and smoke cigarettes two or three at a time and dance around like marionettes with our butts sticking out. In summer, cicadas screamed bloody murder in those woods, an unyielding background noise when we got chigger bites and ticks and tore up our hands picking wild blackberries. We built lean-to forts from pine limbs, dug holes in the red clay dirt, and stabbed at bugs with sticks. I don't remember feeling oppressed by that southern summer heat, although I do recall huddling by the window air conditioner after emerging from those woods, filthy and parched.

One afternoon, I encountered an enormous snake slithering along a fallen log. I hadn’t realized it was a rat snake until after I barged through our front door hysterical with fright. My father took out the "S" volume from the World Book Encyclopedia and my family gathered around the pages showing pictures of different snake species. I recognized the bright yellow rat snake as the one I saw, but I stayed silent after my father said that the rat snake wasn't poisonous. But when we came to the copperhead and he identified it as very, very poisonous, I announced with a shriek that I came a few feet from that very snake, the deadly copperhead, which had come at me. My little lie was worth all the attention and allowed me to tell a tale about a close getaway for weeks to come.

On a summer day when I was six, I was following the lead of my older sister and brother as we marched through the woods at our yard's periphery. Those were piping hot and eye-squinting days, and my custom was to play the day away in a pair of baggy shorts, barefoot and shirtless. We marched along entranced by my sister's directorial imagination when we came upon a large box turtle which startled and withdrew into its yellow-checkered shell.  The turtle became somehow incorporated into our play's ever-changing narrative, and I, Tommy at the Rear, was commanded to hold it, keep it captive, and whatever I did, not to drop it.

I was staring down at this peculiar box when its hatch opened and its nose appeared. I had not known that I was carrying the animal in reverse, that its tail now pointed forward with its eyes taking an interest in my navel. I supposed that was natural. My belly button is an outie, and to a turtle, it must have resembled a curled worm poking from a hole. The head withdrew and began to extend. Its neck stretched from its shell as slow as warm tar and the head got closer and closer. The thing had me mesmerized and as I stared down, the head now extended by a full four inches, it came to face my bare stomach skin. The beak began to open and with a sudden lunge and snap, bit into my belly with all it could hold.

I howled from the bottom of my lungs and a red trickle ran down to my pants. The beast would not release. My sister flayed about in a frenzy, my brother stood agape, I pulled and shrieked, and yet the beast would not abate. With the shell in my outstretched hands, and turtle jaws anchored to my gut, I ran across the yard and up stairs onto our porch. My father bolted out the door and for a moment stood bug-eyed and helpless at the sight of his hysterical child with reptile attached. He grabbed at the mouth and he squeezed at the neck, but the turtle was cemented in its lock. He dashed back into the house and returned with a pair of pliers which he applied to the head, but what could he do? He couldn't twist or squeeze or yank without tearing away a chunk of flesh.

He withdrew again and this time returned with a screwdriver. He jammed it between the animal's jaws until finally, as his wedging force pried apart the crackling grip and with blood drenching the surgical site, the turtle surrendered. And with a thunderous grunt, my father hurled it high from that elevated porch and it bounded in slow motion like a ball into the tall weeds down below.

A nuclear strike never blew Atlanta to smithereens, but I fled the violence at Jim Cherry School. I learned the rat snake is benign but not so the jaws of the box turtle.