In Love with Defeat. H. Brandt Ayers
folded in a wicker basket and giving off a neutral scent, the smell of clean. Jensie’s house was one of the stops on the Christmas delivery route, too. Mother insisted I deliver her present personally, which I did awkwardly, not knowing what to say to an older person who was owed respect but who also had to endure the humiliation of washing other people’s clothes. She always greeted me warmly, with self-confidence rooted in the belief that the service she performed was not demeaning but a way to make a few extra dollars.
A real war came to us mud-war veterans on the radio with the shocking news that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. The most immediate and visible sign of threat to me was Dad on Civil Patrol with a World War I helmet a size too small and a flashlight as long as my six-year-old torso. The blackout—shades lowered and no outside lights—lasted only a few days. Adults concluded that the Japanese weren’t going to bomb Anniston. Ritual summer Saturdays and the winter walks to Woodstock School, hated corduroy knickers marking time—swish, swish, swish, swish, swish—rolled on with little sense that people were actually killing each other way over there in Europe and Asia, wherever those distant galaxies were. One summer during the war, when I had been sent off to Camp Yananoka in North Carolina, Mother committed a famous malapropism. Chatting cheerily on the phone with a friend, she said, “Oh, yes, Brandy’s having a wonderful time—canoeing, riding horseback. Where? Okinawa.” The friend was puzzled and horrified.
Those great and terrible years when the world was on fire, when American heroes were white knights in khaki pushing back the evil hordes, Nazis and Japs, are compressed in child-time. The war years are a cadenza of memories: my victory garden that yielded only radishes, war bonds in Christmas stockings, “America the Beautiful” sung joyously off-key in the Woodstock School cafetorium; Mother playing “There’ll Always Be an England” with anthem solemnity on the baby grand in our living room; the “essential occupation” gas rationing stamps on Dad’s Chevrolet; playing French Resistance fighters with George in the fields behind the governor’s house; pictures I drew of P-50 Mustangs with grinning shark’s teeth on their noses and of GIs mowing down Nazis. All these and the Movietone newsreels narrated by a doomsday bass are the ways a boy remembered a war that didn’t touch his family directly—minutia interrupted by two dramatic jolts and the first smack of cynicism to adolescent idealism.
The first shock came when Marian Huey and I were doing something that might have earned us a spanking if we’d been caught. We’d sneaked into Mr. Acker’s car to listen to music on the radio—not to deliberately run down his battery, but that could well have been the result, which would have brought with it the consequence favored in that time. Those were the days when spanking was as American and Southern as fried chicken on Sundays. Marian usually had it a little worse than I did judging from the sounds of her yells and her mother’s smacks ringing from the pre-air conditioning open windows at the corner of Glenwood and Highland. Mother gave me a few light lickings and Dad’s one performance was a bit comical as he searched for a hairbrush that had not been used for its original purpose in decades. On this occasion, however, it wasn’t corporal but God’s punishment we got. We had scarcely taxed Mr. Acker’s battery when the music was interrupted to announce . . . president roosevelt is dead! It was as devastating as if a parent had died. He had literally been father to the country, the only national father we children had known, who drew even Dad and Mother to the sound of his voice coming from Dad’s old shortwave radio by his red leather chair in the library.
Less than four months later, I was at my good friend Lloyd Brinkley’s house across the alley, a second home, when the second surprise shook our world. Lloyd’s father, Bill Brinkley, was managing editor of the Star and, because of our dads’ occupations, Lloyd and I had passes to all the Anniston Rams home baseball games. We were allowed to climb the wooden ladder, straight up on top of the bleachers, and lie on our stomachs right under the radio booth and behind the screen, where we would involuntarily reach for an occasional foul ball inches away. Heedless of our station as children of privilege in that all-white cocoon long ago, from our perch under the WHMA announcers, we were fascinated by “Cotton” Hill’s curve balls and hump-backed sinkers.
Evidently, Lloyd’s dad made just enough at the Star—about $100 a week—to support his wife, Ida Lee, two sons and a daughter. The Brinkley kitchen did not have a refrigerator. It had an icebox, whose top compartment held a block of ice, delivered weekly by a muscular man wielding a large pair of iron tongs. There was a wide income and power gap between the two families that the adults understood but that had no meaning to their pre-teenaged children. I looked up to Lloyd, a year older and adolescent handsome, with slicked-back dark hair, whom the girls called “Id’n” (for idn’t he cute. I would have done anything short of treason to be called “Id’n.”) Mrs. Brinkley seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of sandwiches for Lloyd and me, the boss’s son. It was on her screened back porch one morning in early August when the voice on the ubiquitous radio announced in sepulchral tones that a “device” of indescribable destructive force had been dropped on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. (Many years later pictures in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum portrayed for me the instant of horror and the piteous aftereffects, but outside, when I found that a sports bar occupied ground zero, the museum’s gloom was lifted.)
Three days later, August 9, a second “device” was dropped on Nagasaki, and within a week of the introduction of atomic warfare by the United States, World War II was over. When V-J Day was announced, my older sister, Elise, was home. She was to me, eleven years her junior, a wondrous being who lived away from us in Tuscaloosa, a romantic place of such Wagnerian heroes as Harry Gilmer, the All-American halfback for the Alabama “Crimson Tide.” She would be a senior at the University that fall. She and a contemporary, Anne Gambrell McCarty, decided to drive downtown to observe the spontaneous celebrations of V-J Day. In the front seat, I was happily wedged between actual college girls. Downtown we saw a good deal less than a Times Square celebration: happy people greeting each other on the sidewalk, and some honking of horns. Anne Gambrell viewed the scene unsmiling, and deflated my sense of celebration when she said the strangest thing: “The war’s over; the breadlines start tomorrow.” Her cynicism, uttered with quiet but impressive certainty, was strange to my ears, like nothing I had heard at home. Her worldview was foreign to her place and time. Anne was a liberal, a real left-winger for whom the flaws and evils of our “way of life” were more obvious and detestable than the gracious speech and manners with which they were camouflaged. She would later get in trouble in Louisville for the mortal sin of helping an African American couple buy a house in a white neighborhood—prima-facie evidence of communism in those days. Neither she nor I suspected at the time that one day I, too, would be branded a liberal and our family newspaper derisively called, principally by racists, “The RED Star.”
In 1945, downtown was just as it had always been. Hidden economic forces—wheels within wheels within wheels—had not yet engaged to signal the economic takeoff point of the Southern economy, marking its long-delayed recovery from the Civil War. Not yet risen were the winds of social change that would turn “our way of life” upside down. On Noble Street, stood the magical kingdoms, Kress’s and Woolworth’s five-and-dime stores. The warm parfait of scents from the candy counter tantalized children as they entered Kress’s to shop for Halloween masks and hats or inexpensive Christmas presents for friends and teachers. Of course, there were also the twin, hospital-white drinking fountains, one marked “White” and the other “Colored.” The wife of an Air Force officer, Rosalie Reynolds, was home on leave in the early 1950s from Germany where her seven-year-old son, “Studie,” had been born. She took the boy shopping at Sears and Roebuck, the fabulous, large store at 17th and Noble. Studie confronted one of the drinking fountains for the first time, and he was charmed. “Look, Momma,” he said excitedly. “They’ve got colored water!”
It was just such innocent discoveries that made my generation aware of the parallel universe where “colored” lived behind a barrier that read, “Do Not Enter.” I was about twelve when I first noticed the barrier as an inconvenience. I was buying a ticket at the Calhoun Theater simultaneously with a boy who’d played touch football in our unselfconscious, interracial games. He was on the other side of the glass ticket box. Inside, I waited for him to come in, but there was no door. It was then I understood why there was a red velvet rope blocking the stairs to the balcony.
Thoughts