Bobby, you're a bastard,,,,

Bobby, you're a bastard....

This sums up a series of revelations that were tossed my way in my twelfth year...the year that I ceased living one lie and began living another, the year I was robbed of my identity, the year I ceased to belong.

During my sixth grade school year, I had dinner with my Aunt Roberta and my two cousins, Mibby and Junie.

The Bowers family were big people, and they ate big. At no time in my life have I ever had someone allow six pork chops for each person..... That's a lot of pig!

After the dishes were piled in the sink, Roberta felt the need to share things with me that I was not ready to hear... things that did not help those half dozen chops sit very well on my stomach.

Aunt Bert had a way of dropping information the hearer would never choose to know if they were given the choice...the type of information that had huge, sometimes a devastating impact, information that carried for long distances. The type of information that could rock the very foundations of truth as it was understood by the hearer and create fallout that blistered people in a wide radius.

Roberta loved her work...mercilessly dishing out whole platters of bones that still had meat to be picked.....

Your meat, my meat... It was all good.

"Bobby, Wakeley is not your real last name." (She said this with a smile, like there was joy in me knowing this!)

Both Mibby and Junie smiled knowingly as I tried to wrap my head around that tidbit... It was like this was old news to them, and because they lived with Roberta, it probably was.

For twelve years of life, all through six terms of school, Robert Wakeley. I still have the report cards with comments from my teachers....

"Robert does not work well with others."

"Robert does not make good use of his time and materials."

"Robert daydreams a lot."

"Robert is not working up to his potential."

"Robert complains about not seeing the board. Where are his glasses?"

All of these report cards were signed by my mother Martha Wakeley or father Eugene Wakeley, when he was around.

"Your real last name is Baldwin."

"Robert Barton Baldwin is the name on your birth certificate." (It hit me, I had never seen this document.)

I do remember that every now and then, my school would request a copy of my birth certificate, and my mother would say she didn't have it.....and go get something from a notary that satisfied them for a while.

It could be that when having me in a classroom was more disruption or trouble than my teachers wanted, the birth certificate issue surfaced. Like, if my mother couldn't prove I was born, they could get rid of me....

"Your mother ran off and married a man named Alvin Baldwin when she was about 18, and she became Martha Baldwin." (Looking back, maybe Mom was bored and restless, and she married Alvin mainly to have some sense of change and movement in her life?)

Impulsive, that describes my mother, and just as impulsively, my grandfather, Joseph, talked her into leaving New Orleans and going to Philadelphia with him. From what I understand, this was after the newlyweds had spent only one night together in Alvin's cramped home, where he shared a bedroom with his mother.

Now, my father, Eugene Wakeley, was a real piece of work, believe me, but he had been around pretty much ever since I could remember. We had history, some good, some nightmarish.

What was all this about them not being married? (Roberta then moved quickly with surgical precision....)

"While in Philadelphia, your grandfather and your mother stayed with family, and that's where she met Eugene, her first cousin." (The follow-through was that my mother became pregnant for me with Eugene! This meant that Eugene was not only my father, but my cousin.... And the family connectedness that all this implied made me dizzy.)

"So, Bobby, after your delivery, the people at Philadelphia General asked your mother who to put on the birth certificate as your father. She used Alvin Baldwin's name."

I wasn't anybody's!

"And you have at least one half brother fathered by Eugene with another woman....."

My mother, my mom, was not married to my father? (At the time, I wasn't even aware that people did that!)

The street car ride home was not fun.

I went home that night heavy....heavy with a load I didn't want, a load that I could not lay down, a load that I was too confused and embarrassed to let anyone see I struggled with...especially my mother!

I felt dirty, guilty, ashamed.... a lot like I did when one afternoon Uncle Eddie took me on the levee in his '52 Plymouth and tried to touch me and get me to touch him. Alone and helpless.

After that, our little apartment on Iberville Street became an uneasy place where I felt cut off from my mom. In many ways, she felt like a stranger because I couldn't connect her with all Roberta had told me. I couldn't look her in the eye, but I studied her, wondering how this could all be true...wondering how the same person that drilled into me the importance of truth could have lived out this lie for so many years.

I learned that under pressure people do all sorts of things.

When asked what was true, some writer (maybe Steinbeck or Hemingway?) once said, "It's all true." ....and it was.

After several weeks, my mother confronted me with the whole thing. It seems that my Aunt Bert told my Aunt Selma about the "night of the pork chops", and then Selma told my mom.

Eugene was out of the picture at this point, and within the year he would die in one of the flop houses off of Camp Street, and that left Mom holding the bag. Mom worked hard for the little that we had, a two bedroom apartment in the Iberville Housing Project and furniture from Goodwill....or somebody's will.

Mom would come home from work exhausted, throw together supper and then take a long hot bath. There would be nights when she fell asleep over her plate of food and never make it to the bath. Sometimes, to spend as much time with me as possible, she would have me sit outside in the hall with the bathroom door open and tell her about my day...trusting me not to sneak a peek at her in the tub....and I didn't.

Well one night she called to me to come sit by the bathroom door...."Bobby, I hear Aunt Bert told you some things when you were at her house for supper...." (It was all true, just as Roberta had said.)

I did not handle this well and began to deconstruct......

I was on the street more...the Quarter, the Central Business District... watching people, especially families, parents with their kids shopping, eating, laughing.

I'd go all over the Irish Channel and the Garden District on my bike and scope out homes, yards...particularly homes that looked warm, fantasizing the lovely things that were going on in the rooms of houses.

I wanted in!

I wanted to belong and feel solid and whole.... I wanted a history, something that was good and true and right....tied in with a whole mess of family that had always been and always would be....solid.

When people get married, they share a lot of things...including a name....parents share a name with their children.... I had nothing to share that was really mine, and I never would....

Who was I?

My grades fell off, I began getting into fights with my very best friends.... I felt mean and angry,full of shame and anxiety. How could I ever begin to explain this to anyone when I didn't have a good grip on it myself?

Being able to talk about all of it would have been a gift, but there was a hard and fast rule in our family against doing this. (I suppose this rule was made by people who feared discovery.)

As I scraped through the rest of the school year, my mother and aunts fabricated a plan that would tear me away from my city and my name... My mother's brother, Clifford, agreed to take me up to Arkansas where he pastored a small independent Baptist church in DeQueen.

He coasted in one day in the early summer ready to assume the perceived need in my life for male influence, remove me from the damaging contagion New Orleans housing projects might bring my way, and move me into an environment where I could launch out with a new name, no questions asked. (Nobody really asked my feeling about being separated from my mother, the streets of my city, and my name. These were all I had....)

Clifford moved fast....so fast that it sometimes would take your breath away. If change was to happen, he saw no reason to dilly-dally around with it all. The best time for change was now...right now. As a young man, Uncle Cliff escaped the whole dysfunctional mess of our Irish Channel family and moved up North. He was a damaged person who turned to Jesus, got married and prepared to become a pastor at a small Bible college somewhere in New York State.

Things, and sometimes people, may get left behind, broken, or bruised, but he operated with the speed of a battle field surgeon... Maybe that's how he survived it all...?

And he was ruthlessly blunt.

He arrived at our place on Iberville Street, and within 24 hours, he had decided what I need to take with me....and what I didn't need, too....including what sheet music I carried in my cornet case. The only jazz that went with me to Arkansas was carried in my head. To whatever degree Cliff could control it, I was to leave worldly things behind...like anything with a back beat or a groove.

Ethnic cleansing combined with identity theft.

As we rode up to DeQueen, my uncle informed me I was too fat and would be put on a diet, requested that I calll him and his wife Mom and Dad because it would be easier on their children.... And as we cruised along somewhere between Shreveport and Texarkana, he approached the topic of the name change.

As i watched the movie of grass and trees out of my window, Cliff opened with, "Bobby, you're a bastard."

There went any legitimacy I ever had....gone.

Cowboys and Mardi Gras Indians

Cowboys and Mardi Gras Indians
My attempts at being a cowboy were not good... No gun and holster set, no bandanna, no hat....nothing would ever make a little chubby boy with Coke bottle glasses look like Gene Autrey, Roy Rogers or Hop Along Cassidy.
Mirrors don't lie, and I was terribly disappointed about what I saw in mine....disappointed and frustrated about my failure to come up with an image for myself that fit. But it did push me to look inwards and search for something I could do well.
I have always loved running my hands over something to feel its lines...its form. There's pleasure to be had as a surface undulates under a light touch.
Steel, clay, wood, flesh, glass, stone.... A form, no matter what the material, can be seamless, endless...go on and on...
At some point I wanted to imprint myself on to something that would give that kind of pleasure. First I wanted to experience my hands on something I had done...and to feel the swelling pride of achievement...and then I dreamed of sharing my work with others, bathing in their admiration.
Eyes can be hands, floating pleasurably over a surface... Thoughts can be like that too....the stuff we gently stroke and caress as we dream and recreate ourselves in a desire to be more...to be happier.
Ears, in a very cerebral sense, can slide over rhythm and sound and transport us...
I wanted that, all of it. As a boy, I worked very hard to project myself into another place, another time, where I could be more...more to myself and more to others....
I have always been a dreamer....
I wanted to produce something that would grab at the senses...something that would announce my worth. Frustration consumed me as I tried to come up with a means of presenting my magic, my wonder, my soul to a world that seemed unappreciative, unresponsive....a world unaware of what I was and what I was about.
One summer morning I decided to see how many people noticed me... after I had already decided that nobody really did. I put a huge red sticker in the middle of my forehead and then waited for someone to say something, anything. Nobody said a word, and that made me really pissy...in such a foul mood that by supper, I had gotten a whipping for being sulky.
What does a half blind, short, chubby kid do?
God knows, there had to be some way for me to let the world know about the richness I could feel flowing through me! Where could I aim the gush in me that wanted out.... quickly and violently.
I wanted to be valued....noticed....heard....
Everyone wants to be heard.... right?
My quest took me all over New Orleans...the parks, up and down the avenues that bisected Magazine and St. Charles, the Central Business District and Canal St., through the French Quarter and its shops and galleries, office buildings and libraries, onto the campuses of Loyola and Tulane, into churches and museums.....even hospitals. Where did I fit?
In New Orleans, music seems to transcend the physical, the economic... all that limited me.
The people I most admired, loved, valued...they were connected to music in some way...even the singing cowboys. Music energized me in a way that nothing else did.
Music had the ability to give me chills... or to zap me with a bolt of something this little white boy couldn't explain. In New Orleans, music is both....so beautiful and true...so physical and full of funk.
I wanted some of that!
The people of New Orleans have always treated kids like me with understanding and generosity. They see to it that music is something everybody can have a taste of...a swinging jam that anyone and everyone can sit in on.
There are enough churches, Mardi Gras parades, clubs...endless venues for kids to be bad until they get good. And there's always a sympathetic audience that will boogie to anything with a beat.... I got some of that love and encouragement.
My city loved me and was willing to pay me some attention...even if I was a flop as a cowboy.

Dinosaurus

1960 found us living on Iberville Street, one block off of Canal.... I was 12.
It was the year Joseph, my grandfather, died after being hit by a car. He was on his way home from buying some Carter's Little Liver Pills, a bottle of One-A-Day vitamins, and some Brown Mule chewing tobacco at a drug store on North Robertson Street, right off of Broad.
I always thought that Joseph would live forever...that his mean, sadistic ways would go on and on.
The wake of brokenness he created in the lives of his children went on for decades.
Joseph made his drug store run at the beginning of every month when his check came in, and then he would go to the grocery and buy a whole case of Borden's evaporated milk...and that's what he lived on...canned milk and wheat bread.
If something was precious to you, Joseph would find a way to mock it, spit tobacco juice on it, steal it or destroy it... and then laugh....
When I was three, I hit him in the head with a fire truck while he was sleeping. When I got older I was glad I had done it..... Somehow it evened the score.
I remember my Aunt Selma commenting on the fact that they found the bottle of vitamins unbroken in his coat pocket after he was run over.... And I remember thinking that we never know what things in our lives will remain unbroken and whole and which things will be shattered.
There seemed to be no logic to it.
1960 was the year the Joy Theater, across from the Krauss store, showed the movie Dinosaurus.
The theater put a huge dinosaur on top of it's marquis... and there were loudspeakers that I could hear two blocks away in our apartment, on the fringe of the Iberville project.
Over and over...day and night..." DINOSAURUS!" (dinosaur sounds) "DINOSAURUS!" ...again and again....for weeks.
My mother did a lot of things to "make me happy"...and the majority of times, this involved her spending money she didn't have... (Mom was bringing in about twenty-five bucks a week at the time.)
I never knew how to tell her that money couldn't fix what was going on inside of me... that taking her money only made me feel worse....
The guilt!
What was wrong with me? Did I look so bad that it prompted her to give me money so that I could be happy?
Well, one Saturday morning, she handed me fifty cents and told me to go to the Joy.... When I asked if she could really afford it, she told me not to worry about it because she wanted to "make me happy" ...and "have a good time".
I took the money, went to Woolworth's and got some popcorn (two jumbo bags), and bought my way into the Joy for the first showing.
Dinosaurus! Seven times....
I left after the last showing of the night and walked home...numb.
That day, as I sat in that dark theater, I did a lot of crying. I felt bad about taking my mother's money, and I cried because I wasn't happy....and there was nothing to fix it...
Not even seven showings of Dinosaurus.
I felt alone...so alone....I cried...because of the loneliness...because I didn't like myself...because I wanted a real family, like on TV...because a movie is a poor substitute for a family.
And it was completely out of my power to make any of this better.
The T-rex that is accidentally unearthed kills a lot of people before the hero hops onto a bulldozer and pushes the creature off a cliff....and then the screen is filled with a big "The End?"
For the dinosaur, it took a bulldozer... for Joseph, it was a white, '59 Caddy.
The End?
I think about Joseph... His children have all died, except for my mother. Roberta, Clifford, Selma, Sydney....all gone. And I am the only grandchild who grew up around him in New Orleans that is left.
I hope that monster never returns to cause more pain.... I hope that it is now safe for us to have something precious....
Mom, that would make me happy.

Memories and Value

The strangest things from my childhood have stayed with me.... I carry odd snapshots and movies around in my head....
Odd notions, smells, clips of conversations....

The bloody slush that remained when a street car ran over a dog and how I couldn't eat ketchup for a long time....
I started noticing the labels of ketchup bottles more.... Ketchup could be written as "catsup"... which I read as "cats up" and saw as something bloody spewing from a cat...and this reminded me of the bloody slush on the track....
All this may be why I tend to choose brands that go with the "ketchup" spelling... even today.

Before I came to New Orleans, I had never seen a dragonfly...never experienced how lovely they are in the sun.
I remember roaming around the beautiful grounds behind the Sara Mayo Hospital on Jackson Avenue with my cousin Mibby (Mary Ida) capturing these lovely creatures.
Mibby said that her mother, my Aunt Roberta, would beat her if she found out that we were tearing their wings off...
Dragonflies don't cry out....but helplessly cling to your fingers with their sticky legs and curl their long tails. I remember their silence.
Mibby and I shared our feelings of guilt and swore we wouldn't do it again....but we did.

One afternoon, on the way to the Kingsley House on Constance Street, I cut across a lot, kicking through the remains of a demolished building.
Among the old bricks and trash, I spotted a crushed metal box....sure that I would find treasure.
But there was a tail sticking out of one end of it. I had to know.....
With a stick I was able to flip the lid open....and see a huge black and white rat...smashed.
How did a dead rat get inside of that box? Did someone smash the metal box to kill the rat?
Good questions....
And some questions stay with you... and many times they are questions that were never asked or properly answered. Questions like....What gives something value?
You see, Kingsley House had an after-school program for kids in the Irish Channel. I think it came about right around the time the the St. Thomas Housing Project was built.
Behind the safety of huge brick walls, there was a playground, a sheltered area with a jukebox and board games, and workshops. The soundtrack for Kingsley House would be Buddy Holly and the Crickets....
Can you imagine 5-6 elementary school boys in a workshop full of electric saws? Well, neither could they...
There was a middle-aged man with a carpenter's apron. He promised to make each of us boys something to bring home if we would just watch and be quiet....and not touch anything.
The smell of the wood being cut, planed and sanded was wonderful....but I hated the shrill sound of the saws....still do.
We each left with an unfinished whatnot shelf made up of two wooden squares that fit together.
The man told us to bring it home, and our fathers could help us stain and varnish it.
Yeah sure... Most of us had no fathers...or stain...or varnish...
Walking home swinging the wooden thing around, it meant nothing.... I didn't make it, and I had no hope of seeing it finished and hanging on the wall.
An old woman sitting on a stoop called to me... She asked to see what I had and where I got it.
She offered me a quarter for it.... It was hers!
The value of things was something that kids in the Channel had to work through. Many of us spent our lives selling things too cheaply....or spending what little we had on trash. The important things seemed way beyond our reach....or we were totally unaware of them.

Dead dogs and ketchup, tortured dragonflies, crushed rats, and what remains unfinished with no worth.
Memories....

Knowing

Emma, my grandmother, wanted everyone to be clear on one thing....
There was a time before she married Joseph Wallace when things were different, very different.
She had not always lived in the squalor of the Irish Channel.
Emma spoke of being brought up in a household where the table was set for each person to have an individual bread plate and butter knife..... The vision of this blew me away.
First, we had no butter.... The oleo-margarine was kept at room temperature in an old Blue Plate jar.
And our table service was just a mish-mash of chipped china and cheap stainless.
The bagged Sunbeam bread never left the table....or the bag.... until we ate it.
Emma would look at me with her big watery-blue eyes....eyes that watered up as she spoke of studying piano, Latin, and German as a girl in upstate New York. How she was drug from there to funky, Irish Magazine Street in New Orleans....it still remains a very foggy story.
And I listened because I was hungry to know....
I had a huge need for knowledge....
There were also things I would have been happy not to know, and I got a lot of that from my mother's sister, Roberta.
Roberta, was a family historian of sorts.... She collected the scandal, the dirt, the failures, the short-comings, the weakness that can be found in any family....and she fed it to me in doses too large for me to wrap my brain around whenever she got the chance.
"Bobby, don't tell anyone I told you this....." My mother would have been furious.
It was like something she was called to do....
At eleven, I was not ready to hear that my mother and father never married....that they were first cousins....that this made my grandfather my uncle....
All this and more just shook me....hard.
Roberta thought anything that was really important, God would reveal to her or give to her as a gift.....the same went for Mibby and Junior. So, she let my two cousins ditch school fairly early.
No diplomas, just tongues and healing services under a revival tent.
It's too bad she didn't take the same view concerning the education I was receiving in her living room.
I hurt when I think of Bert's kids.... As adults, they struggled many times in brutal poverty.
I wanted the world to open up for me....I had so many questions....and I searched without a clue of where to look.
I just knew it was out there.....
We called my sixth grade teacher "Prof", and he was full of all sorts of bits and pieces....none of it organized. And that may have made it even more interesting.
Our class would bounce from fact to fact....one subject over-running another....maybe bleeding over one another....
And then at home there were the Readers' Digests...magazines with little blips of information that teased and taunted me.....between corny things like "Humor in Uniform" and "Life in These United States".....
The library....something on a very large scale was there that I wanted.....
Nobody in my family ever went to the library.... not my mother, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins.....nobody. Nobody checked out books.
Nobody but me....
I wandered that library the same way I went through the tall, downtown bank buildings whose upper floors housed the offices of doctors and lawyers.....
The whoosh of the elevators as my stomach dropped out on the floor....and then the long hallways with names painted on the doors.
Behind those doors were the sounds of typewriters, people talking, dentists' drills, coughs....a hum of importance that I felt a part of just because I was there....close.
At about 10 or 11, I wandered into all the chrome and glass of the main library branch on Loyola Avenue for the first time.......the information desk that offered me no information seemed endless.
The main branch of the New Orleans Public Library....multi-storied. (Some puns come out of nowhere.)
Cold....
The elevator went to the basement with doors indicating periodical storage, rare books.... and the upper floors with endless open stacks. Thousands and thousands of books.....
And that was the frustration.
I knew that these shelves, somewhere, held important things for me, but I had no idea where to begin the search....or who to ask for help.
It took years for me to figure all this out.
I got a library card, and for a time, just checked books out....just to check them out....just to be able to leave the library holding books.....to be seen holding books.
People would know that I thought books were important.....would know that I wanted to know.
And there was the sense of importance I felt in returning these books.
Emma remembered bread plates and individual butter knives.... For me, it's my memories of trying to function, trying to pull together a world out of dysfunction.
And maybe Aunt Bert had something...maybe anything that really is important, God will reveal to us or give to us as a gift....like the hunger I had to know.