Clear Springs (17 page)

But more than anything else, it was my mother’s energetic reach I emulated. Avidly I read about Amelia Earhart, Iceland, Australian aborigines, Abraham Lincoln. School—and more vividly, movies—told me about other human beings, worlds of them, in distant towns and cities and on alien continents. The postage stamps I collected were clues, the books and movies proof. I could do anything, go everywhere, have anything I wanted.

Secretly, I knew it might not be so. As I advanced through the grades, I realized that I might not deserve the privileges I desired. Down deep, I might be worthless; my heart sometimes felt like a vacuum. Sometimes when I went back to school after one of my long illnesses, I felt I hadn’t been missed. I wanted desperately to live near the stores and the library, yet I was so unsure of myself when I went to town that I didn’t know how to act. I wouldn’t talk to anyone or look anyone in the eye. One version of me was a little queen on a throne. But another was a clodhopper. At heart was the inferiority country people felt because they worked the soil. Making my small forays out from the farm, I began to feel the centuries of shame, the legacy from Adam and Eve, who had listened to the snake and lost their paradise—their capacity for childlike wonder.

In the 4-H Club at Cuba we made projects for the county fair. Granny helped me decorate one of Granddaddy’s cigar boxes to hold toiletries. We papered it inside and out with scraps of wallpaper. Decorating
a cigar box for a practical purpose was a traditional thing to do, something Granny had done when she was a child. A good cigar box was a precious possession—good for collections of bird eggs and feathers and butterfly wings and Indian arrowheads.

But the 4-H Club marked us as country kids, I thought. I longed to be a Girl Scout because the Girl Scouts were in town, which automatically made them an elite group. I acquired the Girl Scout handbook and studied all the rules for earning badges, which I was eager to collect. Most of them had to do with knowledge of nature—hiking, collecting, observing birds and bugs and tree bark. I was passionate about the way you could systematize and classify and learn definitions. Best of all, you could write your findings in notebooks.

Mama took me to see a den mother in town, Mrs. Williams. “My little girl wants to be in the Girl Scouts,” Mama said.

I frowned. “I’m your
daughter
,” I corrected. “I’m not a little girl.” Girl Scouts were sophisticated, I thought.

Mrs. Williams smiled indulgently. “All the girls want to be grown up,” she said. “They can’t wait, but they’ll be going off and getting married before you know it. I like to see them be little girls for a while.”

Mama agreed. “Bobbie likes to study,” she said. “I hope she won’t jump into getting married too soon, like I did.”

“Girl Scouts doesn’t have anything to do with getting married,” I protested.

“When can she join?” Mama asked Mrs. Williams.

“The girls are having a pajama party this Friday night. First they have their little meeting, and then they’re going to stay at the Joneses, where they have a big basement, and they’ll pop popcorn and play games—you know, act like kids.”

This was not what I wanted. I wanted to earn badges, not plunge into a group of giggling girls, all strangers. I knew then that I would hate the Girl Scouts, so I didn’t join.

“Your feathers just fell,” Mama said later. “You were so disappointed.”

At school I was ostracized for reading books. Most of the kids didn’t want to read anything they didn’t have to. And now it seemed that the girls in town didn’t take scouting seriously. I wished I could just have that uniform to wear to school with all my badges displayed on my carefully positioned sash.

“Now don’t be different,” Granddaddy always warned.

Music was my greatest passion. I couldn’t carry on a conversation without faltering, and I never spoke up in class, but music talked directly to me and repeated exactly what was on my mind. It reflected all my longings. Listening to music was like plugging my heart into a fifty-thousand-watt radio tower and tuning into the infinite.

But I hated country music. I didn’t want to be country. Daddy mocked the whiny fiddle strains and nasal voices of country music. He believed it wasn’t inspired genius, like the music of Fats Waller; it didn’t have the sophisticated polish of the Glenn Miller Orchestra, or the technical wizardry of Benny Goodman. My sister Janice Kaye was named for bandleader Sammy Kaye. Daddy loved quirky songs and eccentric bandleaders like Cab Calloway and Woody Herman. He’d spontaneously burst out with “Oh, Caldonia! What makes your big head so hard?” He liked Louis Prima and Gus Bivona, but he was exceptionally fond of Fats Waller. Daddy liked to sing “Your Feet’s Too Big.”

He and I loved Tommy Dorsey’s “Opus One.” One morning we played a joke on Janice, who was fast asleep. Daddy crept up to the phonograph beside the bed and placed the record on the turntable, right next to her ear. He set the needle in the groove and turned the volume up full blast. “Opus One” began with a tremendous clatter of percussion. Pleased, we watched Janice burst from her dream. This was Daddy in high form, an old Scots-Irish prankster streak erupting gleefully from his brain. “Get out of that bed and rattle them pots and pans!” he’d yell at Mama. Or he would warble “Flat Foot Floogie (with the Floy Doy).”

It was always the sounds of the songs, not the meaning, that had magic. Daddy and I enjoyed the nonsense sounds of songs like “Three
Little Fishes” and “Rag Mop.” We’d turn up the radio and sing along. “M, I say m-o, m-o-p, m-o-p-p!” Words in songs, like colors and sounds, were abstractions, pure form. “Jambalaya and a crawfish pie and fillet gumbo!” was delicious gibberish.

Our grand radio resembled a jukebox, with a mile-long dial, giant control buttons, and textured brown upholstery stretched over the sound box. The radio’s rigid, upright arms seemed to hold me as I sat on the floor, pressed up against the sound. I ordered a radio log, a list of all the stations in the United States, and I checked off the ones I could get—an astonishing number. At night they crowded the dial. WOWO–Fort Wayne and KLRA–Little Rock and KDKA–Pittsburgh barked out their call letters like ships in distress. Our wonderradio could get New York and Wheeling, West Virginia, and New Orleans—all those clear-channel, fifty-thousand-watt stations. And mysterious Texas stations with call letters that began with an X would broadcast late-night evangelism with exotic mail offers for prayer shower caps or miracle elixirs.

Mama wanted me to take piano lessons because she never got to. After I began the lessons, a traveling salesman rattling off a syncopated patter conveniently arrived at our doorstep with a set of Scribner’s Radio Music Library books—nine large red gold-embossed volumes containing “the world’s treasures,” ranging from Bach and Beethoven to Stephen Foster. They were expensive—eighty dollars—but Mama wanted to hear me play the world’s treasures. It took her two weeks of work at the Merit to pay for those books. I wanted to play popular tunes like those I heard on the radio—Blue Barron’s “Cruising Down the River,” Del Wood’s “Down Yonder,” and Kay Starr’s “Wheel of Fortune.” The classics bored me. My piano lessons were wasted—money thrown down a hole. I wanted to play like Johnny Maddox, a recording artist whose piano had thumbtacks on its hammers to give it a special ringing sound. I didn’t know at the time that it was only thumbtacks.

“I want a piano like Johnny Maddox’s,” I said plaintively.

Daddy mocked my tone. “A piano like Johnny Maddox’s!”

What hurt was that Daddy
liked
Johnny Maddox records. It was as if he knew the limits of his aspirations while my eyes were bigger than my stomach; I had bitten off more than I could chew. Food clichés applied to almost anything. And I hadn’t even heard Jerry Lee Lewis yet.

When I quit my lessons, Daddy got rid of the piano. I was sure he did it because I had been so spiteful. He sold the piano to a Mr. Smith
for a hundred dollars. Mr. Smith hauled the piano away, but he never paid for it. That has not been forgotten in my family. Nor has it been forgotten what those music books cost.

My parents wanted to send us to high school in Mayfield, where the teachers and facilities were superior to those at the county schools. Daddy paid county taxes, not city taxes, so he had to pay tuition to send us to the city school—about ninety dollars a semester. Dairy farms typically brought in little cash, so my father took an extra parttime job at a filling station; Mama worked for seasonal stretches at the Merit, leaving LaNelle with Granny. After school I often saw my little sister playing by herself, with mud on her face. Twice she wandered away, and I remember running frantically through the fields and creeks, calling her name. We found her meandering down the railroad track.

Looking back at my teen years, I see that this was a difficult period for my family. My grandfather was often ill and in the hospital. My parents sank into a routine that seemed to consume all their energy and keep them unreflective. Daddy grew more reserved. Having three girls and no son to carry on the farm must have overwhelmed and distanced him. I thought he treated Mama badly, mocking her and telling her she was dumb; he rarely made kind remarks or offered praise. By the time I was a junior, Mama was pregnant again. This time, at last, the baby was a boy—my little brother, Don. But after Don arrived, Daddy went into a yearlong depression. The son he had wanted to carry on the farm had come too late. He could see that the family farm in America was dying out as a way of life. But I paid little attention to my parents’ troubles at the time; I was busy being a teenager. The house was full of silences, except for music. It saved us all.

Late on Saturday nights the radio blared out strange music: “John R here, way down South in Dixie, 1510 on the dial, fifty thousand watts of joy! WLAC, Nashville, Tennessee.”

John R played raunchy, stomping-and-shouting blues numbers by black singers like Big Bill Broonzy and Memphis Slim and Little Junior Parker. John R was white, but he sounded black. From the time I was a child, Daddy and I had been in the habit of staying up late and turning the radio up loud, staring in amazement at our huge console.
John R played what he called “droopy-drawers songs” (the slow stuff) and “mean, low-down songs.” The mean ones sounded dangerous. I could feel the power of big men stomping into their houses and dragging out their women when they’d been untrue. In the droopy-drawers songs, they cried their hearts out. John R talked through the songs: “Have mercy, baby!… Come on, honey.… Man, don’t that tear you up?” Ruth Brown’s “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” tore me up bad.

Gene Nobles, another white disk jockey, played the same music on an earlier show, and he also played some bland white imitations of these risqué rhythm-and-blues songs—especially cover versions from Dot Records. Dot’s artists included Pat Boone and the Fontane Sisters, but their star group was the Hilltoppers.

The Hilltoppers, I decided by the time I was fourteen, represented everything I had ever felt and dreamed about my life. As I picked blackberries or hoed vegetables in the scorching morning sun, Hilltopper music playing in my head made me feel there was a way out—some release from the cycle of the seasons. The Hilltoppers’ style wasn’t exactly Big Bill Broonzy and it wasn’t rock-and-roll yet either—it was sort of like what would happen if Perry Como got hold of some Big Bill Broonzy material—but it grabbed me and shook me up like a religious vision, a calling. My passion for music transmuted to simon-pure hero worship. This was mainly because the group was from Kentucky. The Hilltoppers were students at Western Kentucky State College, in Bowling Green, where the sports teams were called the Hilltoppers. A Kentucky singing quartet had achieved national fame! The only famous person from Kentucky I had ever heard of besides Abraham Lincoln was Arthur Lake, who played Dagwood in the Blondie and Dagwood movies.

The Hilltoppers’ first hit was “Trying,” a ballad written by one of the original members of the group, Billy Vaughn. Later on they were awarded a gold record for an old Johnny Mercer song, “P.S. I Love You.” Jimmy Sacca, the lead singer, had a strong, distinctive baritone that strained to be a tenor—a cross between matinée-idol crooning and big-band swing. He was a dreamboat.

I started a Hilltoppers fan club, and the day that the package of membership cards, autographed glossy eight-by-ten photographs, and buttons (
I AM A HILLTOPPERS FAN
) arrived seemed like the turning point of my life. Now, linked to the greater world, I felt special and important. I advertised for members in Betty Burr’s fan-club column in a
New York fan magazine, and for a time my whole life revolved around the mailbox and the radio.

Over the next year, I worked diligently on the fan club and carried on a correspondence with the Hilltoppers’ secretary at Dot Records. I was dying to meet the pre–Fab Four. This seemed to be so much more significant than making an impression at school, where I sat quietly, immersed in Latin or science. At last the secretary—persuaded by my fanaticism—appointed me National President of all the Hilltoppers fan clubs, and my joy was boundless. At Mayfield High I was a nobody—an outsider, a country girl. But in my new high post I had important duties. I wrote and mailed a newsletter to three hundred fan-club chapters on an addressographed list—mostly addresses in the exotic environs of New York City. I wrote to d.j.s in all the big cities. I prayed for the Hilltoppers’ records to be hits. After reading Norman Vincent Peale, I applied the power of positive thinking to a tune called “Searching” so that the Hilltoppers might earn another gold record. The Hilltoppers were stars, brilliant presences, and my function was to promote their fame, so that their glow would rub off on me, like the luminescent stuff from lightning bugs.

In time, Mama and I traveled to see the Hilltoppers perform. I was growing adept at manipulating my parents. I pestered Mama until she couldn’t say no; I persuaded her of the specialness of my fan-club role. Daddy seemed to acquiesce to our travels out of some kind of inertia, as if he knew I was already pursuing my own authorities and he was powerless to stop me.