The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963 Read online

  She’d bought books and puzzles and games too. She really did try to make the trip interesting. The most interesting part for me, though, was going to be Byron.

  Two days before we’d left, Buphead came by to visit Byron. The three of us were in my and By’s bedroom. They’d tried to bully me out of the room but I stayed. They were sitting in the upper bunk and I was in the lower one.

  “Man,” Buphead complained, “I couldn’t live with your ol’ man, we’d be comin’ to blows daily, Jack!”

  “What can I say?” Byron answered.

  “Not much. I can’t believe they gonna make you spend the whole blanged summer in hot ol’ Alabama. Shoot, I’d find somewhere else to stay. You gonna be black as the ace of spades when you get back, they got some sho-nuff sun down there!”

  “Yeah, but dig, I got a way to pay them jive old squares back.”

  “Yeah, what you gonna do?”

  “I ain’t even sure I’m gonna go but if I do I know how they is, they gonna try some of that Ozzie and Harriet TV show mess on the way down, you know, playing games and counting cows and guessing how many red cars we gonna see in the next two miles and all that kind of three-six-nine, but I’m ready for ’em.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, I got somethin’ that’ll mess that junk up for all of ’em!”

  “What’s that, Daddy-o?”

  Byron remembered I was still in the lower bunk and stuck his head over the edge, then pointed at me. “You say one word about this to anyone and I’m gonna jack your little lightweight behind up, you hear?”

  I said, “Awww, man …”

  By disappeared back into the top bunk. “Yeah, Buphead, if I do go I’m gonna go that whole blanged trip and, no matter what they do to me, I ain’t gonna say one single word!”

  “Whoa! How long that trip gonna take?”

  “Three days.”

  “Cool, that’ll show ’em.”

  They slapped palms and By said, “Yeah, you know it will.”

  But as soon as we got to Detroit, Byron said, “How we gonna work this record player?”

  Dad looked in the rearview mirror and said to By, “What do you mean?”

  “We gonna take turns?”

  “Well, Byron, I don’t think we’ll be playing it for quite a bit yet, we can carry CKXW all the way down into Ohio and they play some pretty good music.”

  “But when we do play it, we gonna take turns?”

  “Sure.”

  “Cool, am I first?”

  “Sure, we’ll go by seniority.” Dad was in the United Auto Workers at work so seniority was real important in our house.

  “Cool.”

  I couldn’t help myself, I leaned over Joey and said kind of quiet to By, “I guess you really showed them, didn’t you? Boy, they were really begging you to talk, weren’t they, Daddy-o?”

  Byron made sure Joey wasn’t watching, then flipped me a dirty finger sign and made his eyes go crossed.

  “On the left, kids, is Tiger Stadium!” Momma was pointing out all the important things we passed on the way.

  As the payback for giving me the dirty finger I said out loud to By, “How many cows you counted, By? How many red cars so far?”

  He gave me his famous Death Stare, then leaned over Joey and whispered, “No cars, no cows, but I counted yo’ momma six times already.”

  I couldn’t believe it! What kind of person would talk about their own momma? I said, “That’s your mother too, stupid!” I knew he didn’t care, though. But I had to get him back, so I called him the only thing that bothered him. I said, “You might have counted my momma six times, but have you counted your mouth lately, Lipless Wonder?”

  I got him! He showed his teeth and said, “You little …” and tried to grab me.

  Dad’s eye was in the rearview mirror.

  “All right, you two, I said no nonsense and I don’t mean maybe.”

  Byron used silent mouth language to say, “I’m gonna jack you up in Alabama, you punk!”

  So as we drove down I-75 headed for Birmingham I felt pretty good. Even though every time I looked at By his eyes were crossed I didn’t care because this one time I bugged him more than he bugged me!

  10. Tangled Up in God’s Beard

  “Ohio, about one minute away!” This was the first interesting thing that Momma had come up with since we’d been through Detroit. Just outside of Toledo we pulled over at a rest stop.

  Momma said, “O.K., who’s got to go to the bathroom? Who’s hungry?” We got out of the car and started scratching and stretching.

  The Ohio rest stop was really cool! It was chopped right out of the forest and had picnic tables made out of giant logs. The bathrooms were made out of the same kind of log cabin wood. The only thing about them was that they looked kind of small from the outside.

  Momma looked in her “Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963” book and told us, “O.K., just a sandwich, some fruit and some Kool-Aid here. Daniel, could you open the trunk so I can get the things out of the cooler?”

  While Momma got the food and Dad looked under the hood of the Brown Bomber I went to the door in the little log cabin that had “Men” carved on it.

  As soon as I opened the door I gagged! The toilets in Ohio weren’t anything like Michigan toilets. Instead of a white stool with a seat there was just a seat on a piece of wood with a great big, open, black hole underneath with the sound of flies coming out of it. No flusher, no water, no nothing. It looked like if you sat on the seat you might end up getting sucked down under Ohio somewhere!

  I breathed through my mouth and spent only enough time in that log cabin bathroom to unroll a bunch of toilet paper. The woods outside looked like a whole lot better bathroom.

  When I was done in the woods I passed Byron, who forgot again about his promise not to talk. He told me, “Man, they must be crazy if they think I’ma set my behind on that hole.” By’s hands were full of toilet paper too.

  We ate our lunch on one of the picnic tables and Momma made a jug of Kool-Aid with water that me and Joey pumped. Only Momma liked it, though. The water seemed like it had metal in it and made the Kool-Aid taste like grape medicine.

  Me, Dad, By and Joey dumped our Kool-Aid when Momma wasn’t looking, but I had to ask for seconds and plug my nose and drink it because Day One was my day to have peanut butter and jelly and Momma always puts too much peanut butter on the sandwich and you’ve got to have something to wash it down in case you start choking.

  When we finished eating Byron asked, “What’s the word on them toilets?”

  Momma and Dad cracked up.

  “So you like those, huh?” Dad said.

  Momma said, “You better get used to those, Byron, that’s an outhouse and that’s what Grandma Sands has.”

  “What?” If you try to be cool all the time and something surprises you you sure do look stupid.

  “Uh-huh,” Dad said, “that’s where you’re going to be taking care of your business for a while.”

  By said, “Wait, let me dig this, you mean if I gotta go to the bathroom I got to go outside into a little nasty thing like that? Ain’t they got no sanitation laws down there? How you gonna have a hole for a toilet and not get folks sick? Don’t them things attract flies?”

  Momma and Dad laughed again. Momma said, “Your grandma Sands always says it seems a lot nastier to her to be doing that in the house. The way she looks at it a house is a whole lot nicer place if the facilities are outside.”

  “Ooh, I remember those outhouses!” Dad said. “I remember when we used to go visit my grandmother in the country and there would be a Sears catalog in the outhouse and when you were done you just tore a page out of the catalog and—”

  “We get the point, Daniel.” Momma stopped Dad. After lunch By went back into the log cabin outhouse and came back with his pockets bulging with toilet paper. He told me, “Man, they must be on dope if they think I’ma wipe my butt on some rough ol’ catalog paper.”

  We lo
aded the cooler back in the car and got back on I-75.

  When you’re ten years old, like me, some of the time no matter how excited you are, or no matter how hard you try, you just can’t help falling asleep in the car. I did a lot better than Joey, though. She was out before I’d even sucked all the leftover peanut butter out of my teeth.

  She stretched out across the backseat and me and By argued about who would hold her head and who would hold her feet. Joey drooled a lot and so it was the worse job to hold her head.

  We had teased Momma so many times about planning everything so much in her notebook that By decided to be cute, and asked, “Uh, could someone check that ‘Watsons Go to Birmingham’ book and see who’s supposed to be holding Joey’s leaking head for the first hundred miles in Ohio?”

  Momma and Dad looked at each other and laughed, and I did too. I really don’t know why bullies have such a good sense of humor.

  It didn’t matter who won the argument ’cause the car started rocking me to sleep. Maybe someone could say the Brown Bomber was old and ugly, but you could never say anything bad about its seats, they were the best things in the world. I leaned my head back and watched Ohio go zipping by.

  I couldn’t keep my head from sinking deeper and deeper into the Brown Bomber’s seat.

  I woke up and got real nervous real fast. I felt something wet in my pants starting to run down my leg. I opened my eyes and said, “Whew!” It was just Joey drooling all over me. I complained and Momma made By take Joey’s head for a while.

  I took her shoes off for her, and inside one of her shoes was a kind of worn-down picture of a little white boy with a girl’s hairdo and a smiling dog. In a circle around both of them it said, “Buster Brown.”

  As I drifted back to sleep I wondered what a little white boy would think if he knew he was getting stepped on every day by my sister. Then my neck got rubberized again and my head nodded down.

  It nodded back up when I heard Momma say real soft to Dad, “How you doing? Cincinnati’s just ahead.”

  “Oh, I’m fine. I’ve still got a lot in me. I think I’ll just stop in Cincy for a stretch and some gas.”

  “Really?” Momma didn’t sound too happy.

  “Sure, why not? The kids are all asleep and you looked like you were about gone yourself.”

  Momma didn’t say anything, but I knew she’d have to change her plans if we didn’t stop for the night in Cincinnati. Dad kept trying to make it seem O.K. He smiled and said, “Don’t worry, Wilona, we might as well go just a little further.”

  I wanted to lean up and whisper to Momma that I knew what Dad was planning, but the last time I was asleep Byron had put Joey’s head back in my lap and I was just too lazy to move her. But I knew if I wasn’t so sleepy I could tell Momma what I’d heard Dad and Mr. Johnson saying before we left.

  Mr. Johnson knew a lot about cars so Dad asked him to take a good look at the Bomber before we went to Alabama. I was sitting in the car pretending I was driving and Dad and Mr. Johnson were under the hood.

  “Oh, yeah, Daniel, this baby’s sound as a dollar.”

  “Well, let me ask you something, Theo,” Dad had said. “Do you think she could run it to Alabama straight?”

  “Hmmm.” Mr. Johnson thought for a minute. “I don’t see why not. As long as you keep your eye on the oil and the water it shouldn’t give you a lick of trouble. The question isn’t the car, the question is could you do it straight?”

  “Well, the most I’ve done before is eight hours and Wilona says this will take about fifteen, but I’ve talked to some people in the shop and they say it shouldn’t be too tough. A couple of them are from Texas and they say they’ve driven it straight. Alabama’s closer, so … why not?”

  “This Plymouth can do it if you can, Daniel.”

  “Good. Besides, think of the money we’ll save. I’ma give it a shot, but I’m not going to tell Wilona, she’d die. She’s got this whole trip planned down to the last minute.”

  Dad made his voice go kind of high and Southern. “And Daniel, between Lexington and Chattanooga you will inhale 105,564 times and you’ll blink 436,475 times—that is, of course, unless you see something exciting, in which case you’ll inhale 123,876 times and blink 437,098 times!”

  Dad and Mr. Johnson cracked up.

  As we were going into Cincinnati I wanted to lean up and whisper to Momma, “Hang on, Momma, you’re going to blink and inhale about sixty-two zillion more times before you get out of this car!” But the warm air and the highway noise and the Brown Bomber’s seat and the way Joey was breathing all pushed me back to sleep.

  I was out through most of Kentucky even though we stopped at some more Ohio-style rest stops. I was so tired that I even used a couple of outhouses, but I kept the door open and made Dad stand outside so in case I fell in he’d be able to pull me out.

  The next time I woke up we were pulled over at a Tennessee rest stop. There were no bathrooms and no outhouses or anything, just a pump and a picnic table. When Dad turned the headlights off everything disappeared into the blackest night anyone had ever seen.

  As we looked out of the windows Momma checked her notebook, then announced, “This is the Appalachia Mountains. We’re over six thousand feet above sea level, this is higher than we’ve ever been before.” And she didn’t sound real happy about it either.

  All four doors of the Brown Bomber opened and the Weird Watsons got out. As soon as everyone was awake enough to look around we all bunched up and hugged up around Momma and Dad, even cool Byron.

  Dad laughed. “What’s wrong with you guys?”

  “Daddy, look how scary it is here!” Joey said, pointing at all the giant shapes in the darkness.

  “Nonsense, Punkin, those are just the mountains.”

  What Dad was calling “just the mountains” were the scariest things I’d ever seen. On every side of us were great big, black hills, and behind these were even bigger, blacker hills, and behind these were the biggest, blackest hills. It looked like someone had crumpled up a pitch-black blanket and dropped the Weird Watsons down into the middle of it.

  The air up this high didn’t seem right either. It made you feel like something bad was going to happen. If this was a movie there would be loud, scary organ music playing right now.

  “Mommy,” Joey asked, sounding real scared, “where did all these stars come from?”

  We all looked up and instead of seeing the normal amount of stars it looked like there had been a star explosion. There were more stars in the sky than empty space.

  “That’s because the air is so clean here. This looks like the sky in Birmingham.”

  Up close to us in the rest stop all we could see was the pump. It looked like a deformed, evil, one-armed space robot. As our eyes got used to the dark we could also see the picnic table and behind it that black woods.

  Most of the time Momma and Dad don’t like arguing in public but Momma was real hot. She said, “Well, do you see what your nonstop driving has done? Do you see? Instead of being in a motel you’ve driven us straight into Hell!”

  That got everyone’s attention because Momma almost never cusses. This really scared me. I know it’s stupid, but before I could stop myself I said, “Hell? I thought you said this was Tennessee!”

  Joey started boo-hooing right away.

  After we nervously nibbled on snacks (everyone sat on the same side of the picnic table), me and By had to go to the bathroom in the woods.

  We found two trees where we could keep our eye on each other and I said, “By, do you think there are snakes out here?”

  “Snakes? I ain’t scared of no damn snake, it’s the people I’m worried about.”

  I stopped looking at the ground and began watching the black woods. “What people?” I wished I’d picked a tree closer to Byron.

  “Didn’t you hear Momma say this was Appalachia?”

  “So?”

  “Man, they got crackers and rednecks up here that ain’t never seen no Negroes b
efore. If they caught your ass out here like this they’d hang you now, then eat you later.”

  “What’s a redneck?”

  “A hillbilly. Only worse. Some of ’em don’t even speak English.”

  We made a break for the Brown Bomber. If Byron was trying to scare me he was scaring himself too. I went too fast, though, and I felt a couple of warm drips dribbling down my leg. This time I couldn’t blame it on Joey’s drooling either. But I didn’t care. Having a little pee in your pants had to be better than being dinner for some redneck.

  We loaded the car back up and no one really relaxed until Dad drove back out on I-75 and turned the headlights on. The lights knocked some of the darkness out of the way and we felt safe again. Everybody was better and laughing and talking a mile a minute.

  “I can’t believe how this air feels!” Dad said.

  He was right, everything smelled light and green.

  “Whose turn is it on the Ultra-Glide?”

  “Mine!” I yelled. I handed Momma “Yakety Yak” and they all moaned.

  Dad stuck his hand out of the window just as the song came on and said, “Feel that coolness. It feels like you’re running your fingers through silk.”

  Me, Momma, Joey and even Daddy Cool all did what Dad told us to do, and Dad was right, it felt great.

  “Wiggle your fingers in it,” Dad said.

  We all did, and the air seemed slippery and cool as it blew on your hand.

  “We’re so high and the air is so perfect that do you know what I think we’re doing?” Dad asked.

  “What?”

  “I think we’ve got our fingers in God’s beard and as we drive along we’re tickling him.”

  Byron acted like he was going to throw up.

  As we drove down the mountain with our arms sticking out of the windows and our fingers wiggling in the breeze, I thought the Brown Bomber must look like a bug lying on its back with four skinny brown legs kicking and twitching to try to put it back on its feet.