Character Driven Read online

  I can’t remember why Larry was at our house, but because he was with me, and my mom had to do some grocery shopping at the Kroger nearby, Larry came along with us. I slid into the front seat, and Larry got in the back from the driver’s side also. But when we got to the store, Larry opened the passenger door to climb out. My mom hadn’t explained to him about the door, and he did what you’d normally do—get out on the side closest to where you’re sitting. When my mom saw Larry standing there trying to close that door and it was not quite catching properly, I saw a look of “Oh my God!” on my mother’s face. She’d done something wrong by not following my dad’s rules about not using that door. He seemed to be the only one who could shut it properly, and the rest of us had no business messing with it. My mom stepped around the car and Larry bucked the door shut with his hip and then my mom checked it. Satisfied that it was fully shut, we went into the store and my mom did her shopping.

  My mom explained to Larry about the door and apologized for being so flustered earlier. Larry said he was sorry and that if he’d known, he wouldn’t have opened the door. I don’t know if it was because my mom was feeling bad about things or not, but she bought Larry and me each a can of Dr Pepper from the machine just inside the door before we exited. I was pretty excited. Dr Pepper was a sweet treat and I loved it. We helped my mom put the bags in the trunk, then got in the car, avoiding the passenger-side door. I was still small enough that I couldn’t really see over the dashboard, but I was happily guzzling my soda. I heard my mother say something about all the traffic, then I felt myself lurching forward and bouncing a bit as we exited the store’s parking lot, crossed a lane of oncoming traffic, and made a left turn. I could hear the tires squeal just a bit as we made that turn and I jolted to my right.

  The next thing I remember I was tumbling along on the pavement. The first thing I did was look for my can of Dr Pepper, but then I felt something warm and wet and sharply painful on my knee. I looked down and saw that my pants were torn open, and I imagined I saw blood and bone. I started howling, then when I looked up, I thought I was in a Road Runner cartoon. I could see a semitrailer tractor truck bearing down on me. I looked at the wheels and then turned my head to see that my mom had completed the turn to get out of the way of traffic in that lane, and I could hear her screaming out my name, panicked and tearful.

  I had the good sense to get out of the road, and I sat on the shoulder crying and crying. I was upset about being hurt, but I was even more upset about seeing my mother borderline hysterical and sobbing. A bunch of cars had stopped, and all these people were looking at us as my mom hugged me and rocked me and looked over my leg. After a minute or so, she scooped me up and put me back in the car, making me sit as close to her as I could. I was probably more scared than hurt, but I could not stop crying. I was practically screaming at the top of my lungs. The whole time, Larry was just staring at us wide-eyed as if we were the craziest family he’d ever been around. As we drove home, I kept staring at that passenger door. It wasn’t fully closed so it was rattling, and I could see just a bit of daylight between the edge of the door and the car’s rear quarter panel.

  We dropped off Larry, and my mother carried me in the house and straight to the bathroom. She found some gauze pads and a washcloth and dabbed at my wound, and that set me to howling again. Blood was still oozing, and my mother didn’t have what she needed to properly clean and dress the wound, so she loaded me back in the car and we went back to the Kroger, which also had a pharmacy. It may have been my being back at the scene of the accident, but I was still crying hysterically. Later on I thought that maybe it was as much over the loss of my Dr Pepper as it was over my leg—after all, my body could replace the blood I lost but not that treat. My mom initially wanted me to go in with her, thinking that maybe the pharmacist would recommend what to do for the wound. I was still chest-heaving crying, and either she didn’t want to aggravate my injury by moving me again or she didn’t want to haul a crying child through the store, so she left me in the car. I can still picture the wide-eyed stares of people as they passed by the car and saw me in there with my leg propped up, a bloody bit of cloth pressed against my leg, and me bawling like a newborn baby.

  Eventually my mom got me back home and poured some hydrogen peroxide on the wound, which had finally stopped bleeding, then put a bit of Neosporin on it and a gauze pad and wrapped it with tape. Though no longer crying, I was still breathing hard and whimpering, hoping I guess to earn some sympathy points that I could use to my advantage. The worst part was the anticipation of the searing sting from that hydrogen peroxide. I didn’t know what it was, but it sounded nasty, and the only thing I’d ever had put on my cuts and scrapes before was a bit of Bactine or some Mercurochrome. When that hydrogen peroxide bubbled, I was scared, thinking that it was going to eat away at my skin, but strangely it didn’t hurt.

  My mom told me to keep my leg elevated and propped some pillows behind me and one behind my knee so that I could be comfortable and rest. I was exhausted from all my crying, not from the trauma of having fallen out of the car. I wanted to get outside and play, and I spent most of my time “resting” scheming about how I could manage that. I also thought about how I didn’t like seeing the lines of worry etched across my mother’s forehead. Normally she was happy and upbeat, and seeing her downcast made me sad. She had given me all kinds of hugs and kisses on the head and face while she was tending to me, and I liked all that attention.

  Later that afternoon my dad came back with my sister, and I could hear some murmuring from the kitchen. The sound reminded me of the wasps that had taken up residence in the eaves of our roof—an agitated kind of buzzing. I never knew if my mom told my dad what happened. As an adult, I can see her being upset about our having an unsafe car and him being upset that we’d violated one of the rules he’d laid down about not opening that door. We were the type of family who kept things to ourselves, so it doesn’t surprise me that I have no recollection of my dad coming in to check on me. I also realize today that things could have turned out far worse than they did. My mother didn’t lecture me on being careful or talk about what might have happened. The incident was quietly filed away. In my family we didn’t speculate much, at least out loud, on what might have been or expend much energy on what-ifs. The here and now and what to do about it took precedence over pondering unproductively.

  The next day I was back up and around, and I didn’t really give the incident much thought. The car door continued to be a problem, but none of us needed to be reminded that we had to be careful. Sometimes, you have to take one for the team, and that may have been my role that day. While I still have a scar on my knee, it’s barely noticeable. I wasn’t scarred psychologically either. Within the next week or so, I was back to doing daredevil tricks on my bike. I can’t say that I’m an overprotective or worrywart parent as a result of my experiences and knowing what could happen to my kids. Tatum’s cancer put a scare in us, but at least it happened at an age when she won’t have any memory of it. I know from psychology classes that the brain is a pretty amazing tool and that a lot of people who have gone through bad things have no conscious recollection of them. The brain knows what to protect us from without our telling ourselves to forget unpleasant or painful experiences.

  Larry and I got along after that as if nothing had happened and he hadn’t played any part in what could have been a serious accident. The next time I saw him he did ask how my knee was, and I said I was okay, and that was that. No grudges held. No banishment of Larry from the house. I can see a lot of positives from that incident and our response to it. We kept things in perspective, and despite my hysterical crying, I think my mother knew that nothing was seriously wrong with me, that I had only a nasty bit of what I’ve learned cyclists call road rash. While we didn’t just rub some dirt on it and send me back in the game, we did keep moving forward. My mother did say that she offered up some prayers of thanks at Sunday services and also asked God to keep His eye out for me.


  The only time I can recall testing that protection, but not realizing it at the time, was when a few years later during winter I was out with my cousin Byron and my friend Todd. My grandmother lived in an area of Little Rock that we all called Granny Mountain. We didn’t know its official name was Granite Mountain, because of a granite quarry that bordered the area. We loved to play there because of all its mounds and hills of dirt that had been scooped out and piled up. It was a little bit of kid heaven on earth, a great place for hide-and-seek and war games, with a steady supply of rocks and pebbles as ammunition. Part of the quarry had flooded, forming a lake. After we had been out messing around for a few hours, we decided to head back inside. None of us felt like taking the long way around, so we walked across the ice on the quarry’s lake. Didn’t give it a thought. We made it safely home, but having been back there as an adult and seen that lake, I get the shivers.

  We’d get a bit of snow each winter in Little Rock, but it never stays very, very cold for long—not long enough for a solid sheet of ice to have formed on that quarry lake. I also realize now how deep that lake was. If any of us had fallen through what had to have been thin ice, we wouldn’t have survived. There’s the old statement about ignorance being bliss, and I guess that someone was watching out for us that day since we made it across safely. But I was thinking about that walk across that lake the other day in light of this idea of protection. Obviously we all want to keep our loved ones free from harm. One of the things that I wonder about with my stepson Marshall and with Tatum and Drew and Chloe is how much to warn them about the dangers in the world. As I sit here writing, a gunman in Alabama opened fire and killed ten people—some family members and others—before ending his own life. The headlines in the papers also told of a school in Germany where a former student opened fire in several classrooms and later in town. He killed fifteen others before he was shot and killed by police.

  I wonder how you balance keeping your kids safe, letting them be kids, and making them alert to the possible dangers lurking out there. I grew up in Little Rock at a time when we could play outside and our parents didn’t worry about our being kidnapped, wounded, or killed in a drive-by gang-related shooting. We were pretty free to just roam around, and just as I crossed that quarry lake without thinking that something bad could happen, I went about my business every day kind of carefree. Only now when I look back do I realize that some of those dangers were lurking in the Little Rock of my era, and probably in every other community. The media have made us more aware of those dangers, and you can’t turn on any news program without being warned about the potential dangers of something, whether it’s the lead in toys, some cancer-causing agent in plastic, or some food. We as parents can make all kinds of rules and guidelines, but just as with that car door, something unexpected can come along when you think you’ve got things in control and it can all still go wrong.

  I know that my parents did their best to protect us from some of the harsher realities of life. As I got older, I sometimes wondered if maybe we were too sheltered. As I said, we weren’t the most openly emotional and communicative of families, but we had one another’s back.

  Neither of my parents grew up in Little Rock, which may explain why they never talked to me or my siblings about race and the history of Little Rock and desegregation and the civil rights struggle. I don’t know if my parents struggled against any kind of discrimination as they grew up. Not until I was in school and we studied the civil rights movement and later at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, when I took some African-American studies classes did I really learn about the role my hometown played. One of the first things we all learned about was the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that separate but equal facilities and in particular segregation in public schools was illegal. We lived in a fairly racially mixed area, my high school had about the same number of black students as white students, and even at UALR the students were almost one-third black, so the idea that at one time schools were legally all-white and all-black seemed almost unthinkable and definitely outside my experience.

  I can’t say that I was outraged to learn that Little Rock Central High’s decision to desegregate voluntarily (as if they really had a choice) was so contentious and divisive in the community, but it definitely made me think. That it took three years after Brown v. Board of Education for this to happen surprised me. I also wondered why the Little Rock Nine wasn’t a group that I had heard of and been told about in great detail somewhere along the line. Thanks to the efforts of the Little Rock Nine Foundation, the contributions of those nine individuals who braved angry mobs in September of 1957, who were turned back by Arkansas National Guardsmen under the order of Governor Orval Faubus (under the guise of protecting them), and who ultimately entered the school escorted by members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division on September 25 won’t be forgotten.

  It took until 2005, but a memorial statue was finally dedicated to the Little Rock Nine, who withstood ongoing harassment, with the governor ordering all Little Rock schools shut down in 1958 (only to be reopened following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1959). The Little Rock Nine Civil Rights Memorial stands on the grounds of the state capitol. Nine life-size figures are accompanied by inscriptions of inspirational words they provided. Only when I read some of their statements did I realize that without coming out and stating it, my parents had been telling me about the Little Rock Nine and what they represented. Carlotta Walls was very much speaking for me when she wrote, “Hard work, determination, persistence, and faith in God were lessons learned from my parents, Cartelyou and Juanita Walls. I was only doing what was right.”

  The words Melba Patillo provided pretty much sum up my parents’, and in particular my mother’s, message regarding race: “The task that remains is to embrace our interdependence—to see ourselves reflected in every other human being, and to respect & honor differences.” That was communicated to me loud and clear, but at times static interfered and the message was lost.

  I inherited one other thing from my parents along with my penchant for basketball—a tendency to internalize things too much. I wish that I knew more about my parents’ experiences, particularly my dad’s experiences, because I think that they had a direct effect on me and my family. When I was in high school, my father stopped going to work at the post office. I never knew exactly why, but my mother did tell me that he hadn’t been fired. He quit. Every now and then after that, I’d hear my dad make some passing and vague reference to being passed over. He had worked there for twelve or thirteen years, and from what I could piece together, he hadn’t been promoted and, with the exception of a cost-of-living increase, hadn’t even received a raise. I guess he just got fed up with that and quit.

  Being out of work did not agree with my dad—he was the driving force in our have-to-be-occupied, have-to-be-productive lives. So, when he left his job with the post office, we all figured that he’d get on somewhere else as soon as possible. That didn’t happen. In some ways fortunately and in other ways unfortunately, I was getting older and more involved in school activities, so I was able to distance myself from the home front a bit more. But it was sad to see my dad just hanging out at home, looking defeated. I didn’t want to think about it, but on those rare occasions when I did, I wondered what had happened to the guy who’d preached to me and who’d demonstrated to me all the value of hard work and who had once embodied the idea that you don’t give up. I think that was the hardest thing for me to deal with, but even in seeming to give up, my dad was teaching me a lesson.

  My mom stepped up and did the best she could. We had gone from being a two-income family doing fairly well financially to a family with two incomes but only one person employed. My mom shouldered the burden and got another job part-time in the evenings to supplement her bank income. Through it all, she never complained, at least not to me, and though some of the extras we’d once enjoyed became a little more scarce, we definitely never went hungry, and my
parents definitely never stopped supporting my siblings and me. If my parents didn’t always sit right next to each other during my games, they were both very much a presence in my life, and continue to be, and for that I’m grateful.

  My dad stuck around for my sister and me—Duane was long since gone and on his own—until she graduated from high school. My parents split up officially and divorced many years down the line. They clearly weren’t in a productive relationship while I was in high school and college, but I still believe that I wouldn’t be where I am today without them both. My dad has always been a presence in my life. On more than one occasion, as I was walking to class while at UALR, I heard footsteps coming up behind me. There was my dad. What I didn’t know was that he had talked to the coaches at UALR and told them, “Anything going on with Derek, you call me.” So if I had a semester when my grades weren’t as good as they should have been, or if I was spending too much time socializing or chasing girls or whatever, he’d show up. His “Look here, man, you need to straighten this out” talks always had the desired effect on me.

  Like any man, I want to have my father’s respect, and I believe I do and that I’ve earned it. Still, neither of us seems all that willing or capable of ending that bit of disconnect between us. Candace encourages me to reach out to him, and my dad and I do talk, but something is still between us, this unspoken lack of understanding, because we haven’t talked about the breakup of my parents’ marriage and what went on with his job. I don’t mean to trivialize this, but sometimes I wish that this whole thing were as easy as going to a zone defense and forcing the other team to beat us from the outside. I think my dad and I are wired that way—see a problem, fix it. Focus on a solution. Unfortunately the kinds of defenses we put up as humans when it comes to relationships and emotions aren’t that easy to master.