Chapter 7

When JC’s family moved to Jackson, Tennessee, he fell in love with the town. He would be in the sixth grade this year and the landlord’s fifteen year old daughter was just bursting with ripe sexuality. On top of all that, her name was “Honey”. JC got to call this beautiful dream girl, “Honey”. How sweet could it get? She also loved to get in quiet corners with him and swap dirty jokes. He never knew whether she was aware of how terribly much he lusted after her, but made no effort to hide it.

If this reminiscence were written in a different country, perhaps, or in a more enlightened culture, certain details of her sweet compassion for his pains could be properly reported. However, since the PC police are ever vigilant, let us assume that they followed the letter of the law, with no illegal contact or “inappropriate contact”. (God! How I hate that word and concept. In my less than humble opinion, those who truly prey on the ignorance and weakness of others at any age deserve to be locked up. This does not mean that the perhaps well-meaning but ridiculous strictures of modern American culture deserve respect. <End of rant>)

For whatever reason, JC was chosen to be a school crossing guard. The heady elevation in status was extremely welcome, but mystifying to him. The job came with a white “Sam Brown” belt as a badge of his office and authority. He could stop traffic and stand in the middle of the crossing with arms widespread over his subjects as they scurried across. Never before had he been honored in such a manner.

He found it amusing that the mothers who drove their children to school were so cautious until their own were dumped safely onto the school grounds, but generally tore out of there twice as fast after fulfilling their duties.

One morning after all his classmates were inside, JC was waiting for the early bell to signal that he should leave his post and head for the classroom, when he saw something that brought fear to his heart. In 1945, it was unusual to see an old black man walking down the sidewalk in front of the school, clearly drunk out of his mind. What made an indelible impression on his memory was that the man’s fly was open and his dick was flopped out, hanging nearly to his knees, flapping in the breeze. “Oh shit!”, was the first thing that crossed JC’s mind.

The second thing crossing his mind was, “Double shit!”, when he saw the police car approaching. Although he had never witnessed violence of any type between the races throughout his entire life, he was also well aware of the reputation of the police in not taking any shit from anybody. This was clearly blatant shit and from a member of an oppressed minority. JC braced himself for a truly violent confrontation.

He was dumbstruck when the white policemen approached the old man very calmly, acting toward him as if he were a family member who had perhaps overdone the ‘shine a bit. One of them held the old man up while the other tenderly guided the foot-long missile back where it belonged and zipped him up. Then they helped him into the police car and drove slowly away.

There have been times when JC wondered whether he was hallucinating on that day, but it remains clearly burned into his memory. [True story, by the way.]

JC was soon to learn that the woman who was the Principal of his school also lived across the street from him, with her sister. They were spinsters, or “old maids”, to the folks living around there. Apparently, the Principal had taken a liking to him and was probably the basis for his being selected for the school crossing guard position. She approached him with an offer of work.

At first, they only asked him to sweep the leaves off their porch and yard and carry their laundry across town to the washer woman. He loaded their weekly wash into his bicycle basket and rode the few miles while balancing the load with one hand, to keep it from falling out. He was paid fifteen cents per week for his efforts.

When the leaves were gone, his duties changed. At the time, coal was the primary heating fuel. It was reasonably cheap and burned very hot, but left clinkers that had to be hauled out, and also left a coating of coal soot on everything. Now his job was to haul in fresh coal for the stove and haul out the clinkers, then sweep the coal soot off the porch.

He appreciated the spending money. It allowed him to purchase the components for building a crystal radio. All it took was a piece of Galena crystal, some wire, an earphone, a piece of spring wire bent into a “Cat’s Whisker” shape and an empty cylindrical oatmeal carton.

After using some of the wire as an antenna and winding the rest around the empty oatmeal cylinder, he could tune in radio stations by painstakingly probing the Galena crystal with the point of the Cat’s Whisker. It was a tiresome task, but worth the effort because it allowed him to hear the radio transmission on something of his own manufacture. It was heady stuff!

The YMCA allowed the boys to swim on Saturday mornings. It was boys only, since they didn’t have bathing suits. The doors to the pool were kept locked until time for their use, so the boys waited at the door in a mob until they were unlocked. JC was always at the front of the pack and couldn’t wait to hit the water. As soon the door was opened, that day, he sped across the tile as quickly as possible and hit the water in a flat dive. It usually only took him three strokes to reach the other side of the pool.

On this particular day, whoever was assigned to heat the pool had failed in his task and the water was barely above freezing. All JC could think about was getting out of the freezing water, but he was already at the far side of the pool before he realized how cold it was. There was no way to get out on that side. It was just a vertical wall, with a hand rail a few inches above the water.

After a couple of minutes of trying unsuccessfully to keep his entire body out of the water on the hand rail, JC bit the bullet and stroked for the other side as fast as he had ever swum. That day taught him a valuable life lesson: Never assume somebody else has done their job right.

Some time later, one of JC’s buds showed him how easy it was to steal candy at the A&P grocery. There was nobody watching at the candy aisle and all he had to do was to stuff his pockets full of candy bars, then saunter innocently past the cashier. JC knew it was wrong, but he liked candy so much and it was so easy.

He repeated it a few times, until one day the manager followed him out to the street and asked to see what was in his pockets. JC was mortified at having been caught doing such a dishonorable thing. Until he was caught, he had rationalized it to himself as harmless fun. Now he had to face the hard facts of his sin and also realized what kind of punishment he had coming at home,