Birmingham Raw

Stories about real people from Birmingham's Past and Present

A Multi-Generational Perspective

Where we came from, and where we can go, through the eyes of a father-daughter storytelling team in the city that has represented our darkest instincts and our greatest hopes.

Raw Day 19 ‘If you move, you’ll die’

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I was five, and flat on my back in my bed at 4601 Seventh Court South. No TV; I wasn’t allowed to sit up and watch it.

Courtesy of @karlaarcher

Courtesy of @karlaarcher

There was only one, and it was in another room anyway. For three days, I lay there with my right arm taped to my chest. It itched. I was confused. All I knew was that if I moved, I would die.

They weren’t just being mean. There was a blood clot, and the doctor was worried that if I dislodged it, it might go to my heart and kill me. No Howdy Doody or Mickey Mouse Club. Or Benny Carl, the host on an afternoon show for kids.

All because of the cat food on a wet porch on a rainy day.

Rain was pouring down, and my sisters and I were across the street at the Smiths’ house for a birthday party. I’d guess it was either late 1958 or early 1959, and I stepped into the cat’s food, which slid across the wet floor and caused me to fall, catching myself with my right arm. It snapped, and moments later I was sobbing on the glider, asking over and over, “Is it broken?”

Everybody but me knew it was. Not just broken, broken badly, above the elbow. Somebody kept looking in a big book. I never knew what it was, whether a phone book to find who to call or maybe a medical book. My parents eventually appeared and took me the emergency room.carlbrokenarm

“See how hard you can blow, over and over again,” the doctor said to trick me into inhaling the gas.

I can’t remember if I stayed overnight, but soon, I was back home – hurting, scared and bored as I stared at the ceiling. I hated the bed pan, and I feared that even moving to use that might kill me.

After three days, I was allowed to get up, and I wanted a sling. All the kids with broken arm got a sling, but I was the only one who had the shame of walking around with my cast taped to my body.

I spent seven weeks with that cast, and for most of that time, it was taped down. I couldn’t wear a shirt, but at least I could watch Howdy Doody. At last, we went to the doctor and he announced I could have my sling.

It’s possible that might have been one of the happiest days of my life.

 

Raw Day 18: A confession, now that the statute of limitations has run out …

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The kitchen was burning, and I was missing. In my mind, that seems like a perfectly normal thing to about the afternoon in the life of a kid who was maybe four or five.

Let’s call it five, because that sounds less horrible. But in, say, 1958, the world was a little different. I had been playing with some neighborhood kids and had ended up at a place I didn’t usually go and probably wasn’t supposed to, with somebody I didn’t usually play with, on the street that adjoined ours in Avonwood (an area sort of wedged in between Avondale and Woodlawn).

I have no idea exactly who I was with or what we were doing, but I was completely lost in it, and it was getting dark. Back home, my parents and sisters were in full panic mode. They ran up and down the block calling “Carl!! Carrrrrlllll!!!,” but I didn’t hear them.

Mom left the stove on, and while she was roaming the neighborhood looking for me, the kitchen caught fire. Presumably, I eventually hear them, and as I walked up toward the house, there was smoke pouring out of the kitchen window. Mom had put it out with the garden hose.

I only have a few memories of our life in that home, and about half of them involve my being lost, or pretending to be. I wasn’t the kind of kid who threatens to run away, then disappears for 10 minutes while Pa hangs back a few yards to make sure everything’s OK. I just vanished.

And the time it got me in the worst trouble, I hadn’t even gone anywhere. I had simply vanished behind my bed. I was actually just playing and daydreaming, and when Mom called, it simply never occurred to me to answer her.

She kept calling, but by then it struck me as funny, so I just didn’t answer. Soon, she was running up and down the street calling, as I watched her out the window of my bedroom.

It was a fun game, and I kept thinking surely somebody’d think to look behind my bed, but they didn’t. Mom rounded up my sisters and called my dad at work, while I just sat there and listened. Soon, all three were running up and down the street calling my name. I just kept watching out the window.

They came back through the house, and Mom said, “Well, I don’t know where he is, but he’s gonna get a spanking.”

I looked up over my bed and said, “I’m right here!” And somehow, I sold her the story that I just hadn’t heard her. I didn’t get a spanking. And there wasn’t even a fire.

Hardly anybody has ever heard this story. I think I’ve been waiting for the statute of limitations to run out.

 

 

 

Copyright 2017 by Carl Carter