Family

Raw 24: A hot meal, a changed life

Posted on October 25, 2013 Written by Carl

Thelma Carter was worried about her baby brother. Jack was living at the Downtown YMCA, broke, having been expelled from the Birmingham Schools.

Like many of the Harwells, Jack was fiercely independent, stubborn and brilliant. And it seemed like he’d been in trouble all his life. “Go down there and see if you can help him,” she asked Dad.

Jack always seemed to be in trouble

I’ll relate the rest of this encounter, as best I can recall, in Dad’s own words:

He was living in the Y, starving, didn’t have a job, so I took him out and bought him a good meal, and I thought maybe the Navy could straighten him out, so I talked him to joining. He went down and enlisted, and the first thing they did was ship him off to Adak, Alaska. Jack never spoke to me again.

But it did change his life. I’m not sure if it happened in the Aleutian Islands (the 2000 Census of Adak showed a population of 316) of sometime afterward, but Jack began to get his act together. He got his diploma, then went on to college and grad school.

By 1965, he was married, and he and Joan were living in Castro Valley, just outside San Francisco, where they had a one-year-old daughter, Jacqueline. He and I had exchanged some letters, and he called Mom to invite me to visit them in California. Mom agreed to let me go, along with my grandmother.

By then, Jack was working as a juvenile probation officer, and continuing to study. From the stories I’d heard, I figured he knew a thing or two about juvenile delinquents. I stayed with them for 12 days, making friends with some neighborhood kids who taught me to ride the horse in the field behind them bareback, seeing San Francisco, and camping under the stars in Yosemite National Park.

But Jack still had a rebellious streak. He smoked, drank beer, and hosted weekly dice games. (He said poker was too slow, but by the time I went home, I was getting pretty good at a dice game called Liar’s Dice.)

“You’ll have a lot of new things to teach your Mama, won’t you,” he said, and he winked.

Jack went on to become a respected sociology professor and textbook author.

We stayed in touch. Years later, when I was covering a convention in Los Angeles, I made arrangements to stay over a day or two and visit him. He was excited about my coming, and had arranged to have his son Clifford, whom I’d never met, there to visit with us as well.

But by the time the convention was ending, I was exhausted, and not feeling well. “I think I just need to get back home,” I told him, and I flew back to Alabama.

The next morning, back home, my phone rang at 7. It was Aunt Ginny, Jack’s sister.

“Jack died during the night,” she said. “They think it was a brain hemorrhage.”

So far as I know, Jack never did speak to Dad again. Harwells can be stubborn. But I know Dad loved him. It was impossible not to.

Raw Day 23: Mother and her siblings

Posted on October 24, 2013 Written by Carl

This is the only photo I have of my mother with all her siblings. From left, Albert, Ginny, Thelma (my mother) and Carl (for whom I was named). In front with the bow is Jack.

My mother was a Harwell, and we were a tight-knit family. In the photo are the three siblings who settled within a three-block area of what is now called Crestwood North. The tall guy at left was Albert, father of Bert and Jim Harwell. Next was Ginny, who lived about a block away, and whose kids were Johnny and Jane Schmick. (I have a granddaughter named after Ginny.)

Then there’s my mother, Thelma, who had three kids — Linda, Anne and me. On the far right is Carl, who died before I was born and for whom I was named. His daughter, Susan, was about the only cousin in the Birmingham area I didn’t know well growing up. The rest of us often seemed more like siblings.

Oh, that little kid in the front? Nope, not me. I wasn’t even thought about. It was the youngest of the siblings, Jack. More about him tomorrow. Looks like trouble, huh? Oh, you have no idea …

Raw 22: A treasure I didn’t know how to mine

Posted on October 22, 2013 Written by Carl

A couple of weeks ago at the “Light up the Lyric” street party downtown, I met a young fellow named Darrell O’Quinn. He was chatting it up with my friend, local journalist/blogger Andre Natta, and I wanted to introduce the missus to Andre, so we sort of butted in, hoping street parties have a relaxed code of etiquette.

My grandmother, who lived us for years, and my grandfather, whom I never met.

Darrell, it turned out, is the current president of the Crestwood North neighborhood, which I gather is the part of Crestwood north of Crestwood Boulevard. I’m glad it has a name now. When I was a kid, we weren’t sure if it was Crestwood or Woodlawn. If you wanted to sound like you had money, it was Crestwood. Otherwise, it was Woodlawn.

Our home across the street from Crestwood Park was a massive place with five or six bedrooms. depending on how you count them. There was an enormous front porch with a glider that my sisters made excellent use of at the end of their dates. (I know, because the front steps – 16 of them – came up next to my bedroom window. I’d hear everything as I sat on my bed listening to the Braves games on my little a.m. radio. My sisters don’t know this, of course. Please don’t tell them.) I’m going into some detail on this because it really was a fascinating place to live, and because a fair number of people who read this were in that house at one time or another.

The main floor of our house had a huge living room, a dining room that housed a baby grand piano used by my mother, a piano teacher, for her recitals, a kitchen, a back bedroom (my dad’s office for his freelance tax business), and my parents’ bedroom.

Up another 16 steps was the apartment where my paternal grandmother lived. At either end of a U-shaped hallway were my sisters’ bedrooms.

Grandmother had her own little kitchen, and prepared her own meals. She had to share a bathroom with my sisters, but nobody complained. She had been born in the 1880s (that meant nothing to me at the time), and she told stories.

Lots of stories. I know she had a lot more, but I was too young and ignorant to ask the right questions. I had no idea what a treasure I had, right there in my own home. But still, I spent many afternoons up in her little apartment. She always had some dried apples or Chips A’hoy Cookies (yes, they’ve been around that long) for snacks. Now and then, there was fudge. We’d watch some TV, and sometimes we’d play a little board game called Carom,where you thumped circular pieces of wood trying to hit the corner pockets, billiards style. Years later, Santa brought my kids a Carom board, but they didn’t see the attraction. Its time had come and gone.

Some of Grandmother’s stories have found their way into this series – notably the one about my dad, as a kid, sitting on the curb waiting on a car to come by because he’d been warned not to cross the street until all the cars had gone by. And there were a lot of stories about my grandfather, Alonzo, her first husband.

I hadn’t known Alonzo (or Lon, as they called him). I didn’t even know his name. But she made him come alive, with stories about how she hated the smell of his cigars so much she made him stand out on the curb to smoke them. She never mentioned it, but in his later years, my father told me that Alonzo also played a mean fiddle, which was a hit at the church gatherings. They were Methodists, but Dad had drifted away and started hanging out with the Baptists. Grandmother wasn’t too happy about that.

(She really was Grandmother. I always felt cheated that that we didn’t have any pet names for any of the grandparents.)

So back to the present — here, on Third Avenue, downtown, this kid (about my son’s age, actually) turns to me and says, “You lived in that big house across from Crestwood Park?”

Uh, yeah.

“Next to the school?”

Yep.

“Your mother taught music, right?”

OK, that’s getting either very cool or borderline creepy. I wasn’t sure which, so I went with cool.

Apparently, stories are still circulating, and there’s no escape.

Day 9: On the other side of the pain, I began to find myself

Posted on October 9, 2013 Written by Carl

I lost myself in 1966. That was the year Mother died, after a prolonged and losing fight with cancer. She spent her last days alternating between home and East End Hospital, taking nourishment from a glucose bottle, passing waste into a colostomy bag and vomiting into a little bucket. At the end, her stomach was bloated and she weighed maybe 80 pounds. I was 12, and didn’t exactly have the emotional tools to deal with it.

Courtesy of Karla Archer. Please visit her fascinating blog, www.livingthelifefantastic.com

That’s all I can say about that chapter in my life, except that I fell through the cracks. Depressed, lonely, making lousy grades and pretty much friendless. My social skills were lousy anyway, and I wasn’t much fun to be around.

Now, at Banks, I had a chance to try again. I didn’t really see it coming. We never do. But I had bottomed out, and the depression (for which I didn’t have a word) seemed to lift a little. I was a junior. The new kid, but it was the first year zoning was enforced, so there were a lot of new kids. That made it easier. I’d been living in Roebuck for a well over a year, and had already made a few friends there.

It didn’t have everything I wanted. I had always dreamed of being a Warbler – a member of the boy’s chorus at Woodlawn, which was well known for its Minstrel Shows, which ended with desegregation, because white boys wearing Al Jolsen blackface makeup and pretending to be ignorant blacks no longer had a place. The Minstrels were replaced by the Hobo Show, a thinly disguised version of the same thing, but it never felt right. It was like the Warblers were trying to hold onto something whose time had passed.

At any rate, while I had passed muster on the Warblers tryoffs going into my junior year, I would never be a Warbler. I never endured the Machine (the ultra-secret initiation ritual). Instead, I became a member of Banks’s Chancellors, which were a fine group of fellows themselves, but nondescript and devoid of tradition by comparison to the storied Warblers.

I was OK with that. I began to look for my own niche. The “approved” pursuit of the Carters was music – Mom taught piano and oldest sister Linda was an exceptionally fine pianist and organist who has spent her career in sacred music. More to the point for the short term, she had been the accompanist for the Warblers, making me a legacy.

Prom night. I was finally figuring out who I was.

The truth is that I had little talent or interest in music at the time. The love of music returned later. Despite years of piano lessons by Mom’s best friend Myrtle Jones Steele, I learned next to nothing. That’s how it works when you never practice. Nor could I sing. I could stay on pitch, but there was no tonal quality. Singing wasn’t our thing; even the gifted Linda didn’t have a great voice. It was on the keyboards that her talent showed.

So I sang with the Chancellors. And I got involved with the drama group – an extension of my work during earlier years with with Birmingham Children’s Theater. That crossed school boundaries, so I already knew some people in the Banks theater group.

Most importantly, though, I signed up to write for Banks Notes, the school newspaper, and was named editorial writer. One of the other writers was a fellow named Rick, with whom I ushered for a dollar an hour at the old Plaza Theatre at Roebuck Shopping Center. It had been the summer when Catch-22 was showing on our only screen, and Rick was obsessed with the gory scene where a guy gets shot up in an airplane and his guts spill all over the place. Every time that scene came on, Rick found a way to be in the theater watching. He went on to become a famous horror novelist. Go figure. There will be more about Rick later.

I was discovering quickly that my future had nothing to do with music. At my core, I was a writer. I had realized this at some level for a while, but I hadn’t begun to believe in myself. The previous year at Woodlawn, I had one of those special teachers who make a difference. Her name was Elizabeth Woodard, and I don’t believe she was even at Woodlawn for long, but she saw something in my essays that made me worth an investment on her part. She laughed at the humor, and felt the pain the darker ones. There were a lot of those, because it was a dark time in my life. She read them aloud to other teachers in the Teacher’s Lounge, and they would compliment me on it when they saw me in class or in the hallways. It was pretty much the only time anybody had an encouraging word for me, and I held onto it.

Mrs. Woodard invested in me when everybody else had given up, and I carried that seed of confidence with me to Banks, finally beginning to understand who I was. I wouldn’t be another Carter as the world knew us.

I would make my living as a storyteller, and I always have.