Mother (No Secrets to Conceal)

NOTE: The following is the second chapter in a memoir that I may write whose working title is No Secrets to Conceal.

When I was four or five, one day my parents, older sister, and I got into our Nash Rambler to go to town. We rarely left our small farm on the outskirts of Little Rock, so this excursion was special. I was excited.

At one intersection, we had to wait for an African-American woman to cross before we could turn. I yelled out the window, “Get out of the way, nigger.” My mother turned to me and forcefully told me, “Don’t ever let me hear you say that word again.”

There weren’t many anti-racist whites in Arkansas in the 1940s. So far as I know my mother was the only one in our family. But as do many hillbillies who get away from civilization so they can do their own thing, she had the courage of her convictions and was determined to shape me accordingly. Nothing she ever said had such a long lasting impact on me.

That incident illustrates her greatest strength and her greatest weakness. She was a very moral person, and she was very moralistic and judgmental.

My sisters and I had nicknames for all our close relatives. Our father was Daddy. Mother’s father was Gan-Gan. Our grandmother was Ma-Ma. But our mother was Mother. Period. She was soft and tender, and also strict.

She was very loving and expressed it physically. She’d often scratch my back, for instance, which I loved. But my warmest memory is sitting cuddled next to her on the porch swing watching the lightning bugs or listening to her read a story with my sister, Sally, on the other side.

She’d often say, “How much do you love me?” and I’d reply, “A bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck.” And then we would hug.

But as I got older, she’d ask, “Do you love me?” and if I didn’t reply, “Yes, I love you,” she’d pressure me to say it, leaving me forever conflicted about uttering that phrase.

Her father, Heywood Presley Marsh, had wanted a boy, so when Mother, his first child, was born, he named her Willie, short for the William they were going to name their son. Fortunately, they called her by her middle name, Corrine.

When their second and last child was also a girl, Gan-Gan had to wait for me to be born to have a son. He spent more time with me than my own father did.

My grandmother, Sallie, was very quiet. I hardly remember her at all. Mother told me more than once that she had “Indian blood” (and that the family had roots in the President Andrew Jackson family). Given that some photographs of Ma-Ma indicate Native American features, I have often wondered if her heritage contributed to the fact that we never had any contact with the families of either grandparent, who lived just north of Little Rock. I thought maybe prejudice led to an estrangement.

When we were adults, my younger sister, Mary, my father, and I took a road trip from Dallas to Arkansas to explore our Arkansas roots.  We looked up Marshes in the phone book, visited some, and showed them photographs. They identified some of the people in the photos, all of whom were strangers to us. We learned that so many Marshes lived nearby on top of a large hill that the area was known as Marsh Mountain. The town now has a Marsh Mountain Road. But we knew none of the other Marshes.

In recent years, a DNA test concluded that I have no Native American ancestry. Nevertheless, if the rest of the family and the neighbors believed that Ma-Ma had Indian blood, they still could have discriminated against them because of it. Regardless, so far as I know, my mother lost all contact with her family other than her parents and her sister, who did occasionally visit us with her husband and two children.

More likely, however, the separation from her family may have been due to the fact that my mother did not consider them morally worthy and wanted to protect me from them – like she protected me from the rest of the world. I had no friends when we lived on the farm other than my older sister. Later on, she wouldn’t let me join the Boy Scouts. Or maybe Mother just wanted me all to herself.

After Gan-Gan, who groomed me to be a professional baseball player, died, she repeatedly told me, “Wade, you’re going to be a great man some day.” She had her dreams of her own.

Years after Mother died, I asked my father why she rarely went to church. He immediately said, “She never met a preacher she didn’t consider a hypocrite.” Daddy also once referred to as a “saint,” which was probably more than stereotypic Southern chivalry.

More than anything else, she beat into my head, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

The small farm we lived on belonged to her father. Mother bought it for him as a retirement gift with the money she earned working as a secretary before she got married at the age of twenty-five. He grew lots of corn and other vegetables and raised rabbits, which he sold at market. Once I counted 114. But my favorites were the strawberries and the homemade ice cream that we made after picking them.

As a young adult, I returned to the area and visited the neighbors across the road. I arrived at dinnertime and they invited me to partake in their meal, which included six or seven excellent dishes. They told me they always thought Gan-Gan was “half crazy” the way he worked so hard in the field, which was very rocky and not very fertile.

Their impression did not surprise me. He was very hyper. Watching a boxing match on TV, for example, he’d sit on the edge of his seat throwing punches into the air empathizing with his favorite boxer.

Shortly before the stroke that killed him, he stood up and yelled at my junior high school principle and who had loudly criticized me, “Don’t you tell my grandson how to play baseball!”

On the surface, growing up on the farm was idyllic. Riding the workhorse, making sand castles in the driveway with my sister after a rain, playing with the rabbits, catching lightning bugs and putting them in a jar, sitting on the swing with my mother, listening to the Grand Ole Opry, The Lone Ranger, and other shows on the radio.

But like a David Lynch movie, below the surface, there was trouble, like the danger that lurked in the nearby woods that Mother forbid me to visit.

I would often walk in my sleep and once I stepped on a scorpion. Another time, after a storm, my family found me walking in the snow in the front yard. And my sinuses were chronically congested. After a number of trips to the doctor that involved having a tube stuck down my nostril to painfully suck out the mucous, we finally had an operation to “clear my sinuses.”

But worst of all, in retrospect, was the isolation and the fact that I had no friends of my own age with whom to interact other than my sister who was 16 months older. My social skills surely suffered as a result.

Then when I was four or so, my mother went back to work! Separation anxiety to the max. Nightmares involving the death of my father. And driving to the highway to eagerly, desperately await her return on the Greyhound bus.

To whatever degree life on the farm was idyllic, the bubble burst when I had to go to first grade, Landmark School, which included all twelve grades. Those big, angry boys who were fighting all the time scared me to death.

Having no bathroom, the boys had to stand around a hole to urinate. One day, another student pushed me. While gathering my balance, I peed on the boy standing next to me, who got angry and caused a scene. I was taken to the office of the principal, who did not believe me when I told him what happened and called my mother to tell on me.

I was crying when I went back to Miss White’s classroom. When the girl sitting next to me, whom I liked, asked me what happened, I was too embarrassed to tell her. But even worse was that once home, I learned that Mother didn’t believe me either. A bond of trust between us was forever broken.

The next year we moved into town for the first semester of my second grade and began a series of more or less annual moves until high school that left me without any close childhood friends. Mother was unhappy and hoped that moving would help.

I don’t remember much about that semester in Little Rock or any of my grade school years. One clear memory is getting angry at a friend of my sister and hitting her on the head with my baseball bat. Or at least that’s the way I remembered it for decades until Sally told me she didn’t remember the incident at all. So it was probably more like a light tap. But it scared me and got me into big trouble with Mother.

Then we moved to Dallas, where Daddy had grown up and Sally had been born. We lived on the edge of a Black ghetto where Daddy managed a movie theatre and I became best friends with a Black boy slightly older than me. Mother probably nurtured that friendship.

Less than two years later, my younger sister, Mary, was born. The story was that it was an accidental pregnancy. But I have my doubts. I suspect Mother wanted another child to fill the vacuum in her life.

When I was in high school, Mother encouraged me to get in touch with my friend from the South Dallas ghetto after not having seen him for eight years to say goodbye before he went away to college in Colorado. I declined.

Mother knew about his college plans because she hired his grandmother to help around the house. Mother wasn’t employed and Ma-Ma lived with us, but still she needed help. Maybe it was because she was so depressed. Or maybe she was already feeling the effects of the emphysema and bronchial asthma that would eventually kill her at the age of 55.

She was often emotionally agitated, which was probably aggravated by the fact that her doctors treated her lung ailments with cortisone – a drug that can cause “unusual behavior or thoughts, severe depression, anxiety, and mood changes.”

Once I entered the bathroom not knowing she had just finished a shower. She was naked and screamed to high heaven.

Our relationship was very symbiotic. She was too much for me to handle. I needed my independence.

Once I bought a diary that had a small lock and key, but she managed to open and read it, which infuriated me. Still we were close.

We studied flyer saucers together, which prompted me to give that speech in high school on why I believed in flyer saucers. One night that year we thought we saw one through the back window. We ran into the back yard to get closer, only to discover that the UFO was a red light on a telephone poll.

When she told me that we were related to Andrew Jackson, I assumed she was living in a fantasy world. I felt the same way about her beliefs in extra-sensory perception and other psychic phenomena.

She was a lousy cook. Lots of fish sticks, macaroni and cheese, pot roasts that would last for days, grilled cheese sandwiches, canned tomato soup.

She insisted that I eat every thing on my plate at dinner time. When I refused, she made me sit at the table until I finished. Some times I never relented. Once I threw the food in the garbage while she was watching television. She caught me and gave me hell. Another time I managed to flush it down the toilet.

While watching television at night, she and the others would talk incessantly. I’d complain, “Why are we watching if you don’t want to watch?” but they kept on talking.

But at least I got to see some shows that planted seeds of rebellion in the 1950s mainstream culture, like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Have Gun Will Travel, and The Naked City.

Mother definitely smothered me with her love. By the time I was an adolescent, it was like I was breathing for air. One afternoon, she got very excited about a beautiful sunset, but I had to keep my distance. Unable to share the experience, I remained indifferent.

When “Picnic,” the somewhat racy movie with William Holden, was released and my father showed it at his theatre, she wouldn’t let me see it. Like so much in her world, that film was too sinful.

Still I loved her and appreciated much about her, including some of our conversations, like discussing how much she hated “Texas men” after seeing the movie, “Giant.” And her taking me to listen to Father Tollifer!

When I was in high school, she told me that she wanted to divorce my father and I panicked. I told her not to do it. I probably sensed that she would’ve had a very difficult time making it as a single mother.

During my first few years in college, I often wrote her long letters telling her about my life in Berkeley, leaving out my obsession with sex. When I fell in love with Bob Dylan, she listened to his records and was blown away when on “The Les Crane Show” he performed “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” She didn’t care for his references to drugs and sex, however.

She pretty much supported my involvement in the civil rights movement, though she felt Dr. King and his associates should be more patient.

She did let me take a job as a paperboy in junior high school, which gave me a glimpse of liberation. She persuaded Daddy to buy me a Volkswagen bus in 1967 when that was the rage with the hippies. She loved “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

One day home alone with her in the kitchen, I was lying on the couch listening to Frank Sinatra and feeling affectionate toward her, and I briefly got an erection, which freaked me out.

After I started taking LSD, she invited her fellow spiritualists over to the house for me to report on my experiences and lead a discussion.

Throughout her later years, our relationship remained strained, leaving me feeling somewhat angry toward her. I don’t recall specific arguments, just an overall feeling of being pressured to be what she wanted me to be.

But when I visited her in Will Rogers Hospital in upstate New York where she was being treated for her tobacco-induced lung disease, she seemed really happy for the first time. She loved the mountains and had taken up painting again, which she loved as an adolescent. I think she was quite good. My sister framed some of her work and I have a watercolor of hers in my “altar” at my desk.

When I went back to my student co-op to celebrate the 50th anniversary of my liberation from Dallas at a fundraising event, I read through the old binders that had members’ profiles. I read over other’s comments in response to standard questions, which tended toward efforts at humor. Then I looked at one of my own pages, saw my own attempts to be funny which I read out loud to others standing around, and suddenly read, ”My mother castrated me.” Shocked, I stopped reading and quickly put the book down.

So with all her positive qualities and the many gifts she passed on to me, Mother was also half-crazy like her father and she seriously stunted my emotional development. As discussed by Karl Jung and R.D. Laing, I eventually went completely mad and regressed to an infant-like state in order to grow up again. Finally, when I turned 60, I felt that I had finally grown up.

I can’t help but wonder what our relationship would have been like if those doctors had not pumped her full of cortisone.

We remained close to the end and she never stopped telling me I would be a great man (which I consider to have been a mixed blessing). I did finally read Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain that she had recommended, liked it, and read several of his books, while thinking about her.

When she took her last breath, I held her hand and felt that a circle had been completed.