Land of Eternally Tranquil Light-DIGITAL EDITION

By Robert Donaldson

In this memoir, the author recounts some of his experiences as a black male growing up and living in the America's Deep South where discrimination has evolved into classism at its worst. Undaunted by the pervasive nature of racism and classism in America, the author goes on to embrace the principles of Buddhist thought and comes to understand that people behave in a particular way because of what they believe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Donaldson
• Release date: Mar 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301409198

Robert Donaldson

Robert Donaldson is a writer living in Reno, Nevada. He has written articles on gardening, social commentary and technology. He also has written and self-published two novels.

Book preview

PART 1

CHAPTER ONE

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

----Francis Bacon

I was born on February 13, 1951. I was given the name Robert Gregory Donaldson. A cousin on my father’s side of the family named me. My parents were Nathaniel Bud Donaldson and Mary Lou Nance Donaldson. I was the last born of eight children.

Humboldt, Tennessee—a small town in West Tennessee—is my hometown. I can recall much of my early childhood, even from say, the age of about two. At that time, the US was involved in the Korean War. One of my older brothers was in the US army at that time, serving in South Korea. I remember my mother getting gifts of silverware and dishware from him. He also sent money to buy a television for the family. We were one of the first families in our neighborhood to have a television.

The kids in the neighborhood were so fascinated by this new technology that they often stood in the yard outside our living room window that summer night in 1953, trying to watch whatever show might be on. My mother noticed this and decided to turn the set around and position it in front of the window so they could watch. I and the neighborhood kids sat on the grass in the front yard, enjoying the spectacle of this new and captivating technology.

Because this was low-lying area crisscrossed by streams and quite humid in summer, Humboldt and all of West Tennessee has always been plagued by blood-sucking mosquitos. Whenever the kids watched television from the front yard, my mother took an old cooking pot, filled it with rags and lit it. She then extinguished the flames so that only a billowing cloud of smoke remained. The smoke held the mosquitos at bay enough that we could watch in relative comfort.

The Howdy Doody Show was a favorite for all the kids. This was a weekly television show featuring a ventriloquist and his dummy named Howdy Doody. It soon became quite popular with the neighborhood kids and with kids around the country.

On Friday nights, the television was re-positioned so that the adults could watch boxing from inside on The Friday Night Fights broadcast. Every Friday night, a neighborhood couple, Mr. John and Mrs. Penny Gaines from the next street came over to watch television. I sat quietly in the back of the room watching, my young mind trying to understand why two grown men would viciously pummel each other while the adults watched and shouted with glee.

CHAPTER TWO

I was born and spent much of my early childhood during the era of Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow laws were the norm in most of the southern part of the US. Jim Crow laws were state and local laws set up between 1876 and 1965. Basically, these laws and the practices they engendered mandated racial segregation in all public facilities. They enforced a separate but equal policy that effectively relegated black Americans to second-class citizenship.

Most businesses, except for the local Kroger or Piggly Wiggly grocery store, would not allow black people to enter through the front door. In Humboldt, local restaurants, the Greyhound Bus Station and the doctor’s offices were segregated. There were often separate entrances for black people—usually in the rear or on the side of the building. Black people accepted this because, for the most part, they needed to do business with those places.

I remember that when I was sick with the flu or some other relatively minor illness, my parents took me to the doctor’s office. Dr. Davis was our family physicians. In fact, I was told, he had delivered me at birth at St. Mary’s Hospital in Humboldt.

Whenever I or one of my siblings went to Dr. Davis’s office we had to use the side entrance. The Colored waiting room had much of the same furnishings as the white waiting room. There were even toys for the children to play with. I recall sitting in the doctor’s office feeling miserable from the flu. I had a fever and chills. We had to wait so long that I finally laid my head on my mother’s lap.

"Ma, why is it taking so long?’ I asked her.

Just hush. He’s probably busy. She told me.

I knew the doctor was probably busy with some other patient, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were made to wait an inordinately long time for some other reason. It seemed to my young and impatient mind that this was deliberate. Years later I learned that black patients, when visiting that office, were only attended to after all the waiting white patients had been taken care of.

The Jim Crow laws of Tennessee were applied to almost every facet of our lives. The schools were segregated. The movie theater was segregated. Blacks had few opportunities to work in factories or at the post office or at local department stores. Black teachers taught in the only black school in town, Stigall School. The jobs available to black people were for the most part domestic labor and agricultural jobs—working in the homes of white people and in the cotton and strawberry fields in and around Humboldt, Tennessee. My mother worked as a cook and housekeeper for Mr. and Mrs. Tommy Dunlap, who lived in a huge ante-bellum mansion about five miles outside of town.

My father worked for a while at the local fertilizer factory. He had to lift and load one-hundred pound sacks of fertilizer onto a truck. After a while he developed a hernia and couldn’t do the job any longer and had to quit. Back then, there were no worker’s compensation laws in the state of Tennessee to protect or to help injured workers. After that, he worked in the fields like most other black people in the area.

It was quite a blow to my father to not be able to adequately provide for his family. He made little money from field work. He soon resorted to drinking heavily and his frustrations were apparent to all members of the family. He would often get drunk and tell us about the years he spent as a coronet and trumpet player in some of the big bands of the swing era. When he got drunk he often told us about performing on ships headed from the US to Europe. Later on, in my teens, I was told by one of the local old-timers that my father had been a better trumpet player than Louie Armstrong.

Sometimes when my father was drinking pretty heavily he’d pull out his old and tarnished trumpet and start to play. My mother did not like it very much when he was drunk and trying, with little success, to perform some complex piece on his old trumpet. I liked it when he played. I didn’t tell my mother this, though. I didn’t want to anger her when she was already having a fit about the noise he made.

My father often regaled the family with stories of his travels and exploits as a road show musician. One story he told quite often and that particularly delighted me was when he told about his experience on a ship headed to Europe.

The musicians were below decks sleepin’. He said. When all of a sudden all we could hear was a, Whump! Whump! Whump! My heart raced. Fear gripped me. I held my breath in anticipation. My father looked at me and smiled the self-assured smile of a man who had been places and done things.

What was it? I asked, my heart thudding in my chest.

Sharks! He said after a long pause, then pulled out a cloth bag of Bull Durham tobacco and started to roll a cigarette. Sharks! He said again, a faraway look in his eyes. He seemed to be reliving the experience and wanted to convey the gravity of the situation to me through his expression and tone.

Boy, He said. Them sharks was just a’slammin’ into the side of that ship. We was in their territory and they didn’t like it a ’tall. He lit the roll-your-own cigarette with a wooden match.

No. Not a’ tall.

I stared at him, amazed. In my mind I saw the sharks slamming themselves against the hull of the ship, their mouths twisted into a rictus of angry, sharp fangs. This image was probably called up from watching too many Saturday afternoon horror movies on television.

CHAPTER THREE

On the nights when there was nothing particularly interesting on television, the family sat in the living room and talked. At those times my mother usually crocheted while my sisters embroidered. I learned to do both when I was about four years old. My father usually sat reading the newspaper or just smoking his roll-your own cigarettes. This time was often devoted to discussing our relatives—both living and dead.

The story was that our grandmother was so ornery the she refused to buy an ice box in which to keep perishables. One night she ate some bologna that she had been saving all day on the kitchen table. Her husband, my grandfather, was on a trip to Jackson, Tennessee, about seventeen miles away, visiting relatives. When he returned the next afternoon, he found her in bed dead. Discussion about how my grandfather died never came up. It remains a mystery to me even to this day.

My grandfather on my mother’s side of the family had succumbed to asthma. My grandmother had died of natural causes later at the age of sixty-five.

It was during those evening family discussions that I learned that my family had lived and worked as sharecroppers on a farm outside of town. The family had moved to Humboldt and bought the house we then lived in on McLin Street. The house had been a simple three room affair with a living room, one bedroom and a kitchen. We did not have an inside toilet, but rather we had an outhouse in the back yard. The property had a small front yard and, as I recall, the house had a fairly large back yard that was overgrown with weeds.

I remember that in the summer of my second year, I, my mother, my father, an older brother and two of my older sisters embarked on a project to reclaim the back yard from the weeds. We used several hoes and sling blades to assault the overgrowth. It had been an all day job, but when we finished hacking and raking, we found that the back yard was almost perfectly level. My parents later paid a neighbor to smooth out the grass using a gasoline powered mower. The back yard became the playground for me and my sister, Juana, who was three years older than I.

Soon after, my father bought a car, a used 1949 Ford. The car was blue-gray in color. It was a coupe with a chrome-plated, five point star on the left side on the door covering the gas filler cap. The tail lights were oblong and had a blue dot in the center. The car had gray mud flaps all around and a white suicide knob on the steering wheel.

My father built a freestanding garage in the back yard. He salvaged some 2 X 6 pieces of lumber and some corrugated tin and assorted odd-shaped scraps of plywood and boards from where, I did not know. I just know that one day he started sawing and nailing and a few days later he had a garage. Almost even before the garage was finished, Juana and I had chosen it as our playhouse.

When the car was in the garage, we spent hours on end in the back yard playing. We played in and around the garage, even on top of it. We climbed the rickety boards on the side and jumped to the ground below. The sensation of flying through space was exhilarating. Luckily, we never got hurt jumping off the roof of that garage.

CHAPTER FOUR

The back yard was our playground. What I didn’t realize, then, was that there were dangers that lurked there. In the summertime, most of the kids in the neighborhood went barefoot. We tried to save our shoes for winter. One of our favorite pastimes was stamping bumblebees with our feet. The bees would land on the clover blossoms that grew in the yard. As soon as the bee landed we’d slowly approach and kill it. Your timing had to be perfect, otherwise you’d get stung.

One day Juana and I were having a high old time killing bees until I miscalculated and my food landed beside a bee. I screamed in pain when the bee sunk its stinger into the side of my foot. It was the first time I’d ever been stung and it hurt terribly. I retired from stamping bees after that. I took the safer route of using a glass canning jar to capture bees.

The area of the back yard at the foot of the stairs that led to the back porch became barren as summer wore on. The dust rose in a cloud as we skittered and danced on the bare earth. One day while I danced in the dust I suddenly felt a sharp pain on the ball of my left foot. I hopped over to the edge of the porch and sat down. I lifted my foot to see what I’d stepped on. All I saw was a puncture wound and something black embedded deeply into the flesh. Juana came over to see what I was doing.

What’s wrong? she asked me.

Nothing. I told her.

I put my foot down onto the dusty packed earth. The pain was excruciating. I was suddenly afraid. I didn’t want my mother to find out that I had stepped on something. At about that time my mother called us to supper. The pain soon became much worse, but I resolved that I would not tell my mother. I was afraid that she might whip me for stepping on something and getting hurt. She had warned us enough times about walking around bare footed.

We were very poor and I knew she couldn’t pay for another doctor’s visit. It was bad enough that she had to pay for a doctor when one of the kids got the flu. I was very timid at that age and I tried to avoid drawing attention to myself so I kept quiet.

When I went to bed that night my foot was throbbing so much that it was hard to get to sleep. I hardly slept at all. When I awoke the next morning, I found that my foot had swollen to almost twice its normal size. I stepped onto the floor and almost collapsed. I had to tell my mother.

I limped into the kitchen for breakfast. My mother noticed me limping. She gave me one of her patented stern looks.

"What’s wrong with your leg?

I stepped on something. I said sheepishly. I grit my teeth through the pain.

Let me see.

She looked at the bottom of my left foot and frowned. It was almost seven o’clock and she had to go to work soon.

William Earl. My mother called to my brother who was watching the television in the living room.

Here! Look at this boy’s foot.

My brother, William was seven years older than I was. He looked at my foot and then up at me. He had never particularly liked me, but had more or less tolerated me. And the feeling, for the most part, was mutual.

Get the wire pliers and see if you can get whatever that is out of his foot.

The blast of an automobile horn cut through the morning air. It was time for my mother to go to work. As soon as she went out the door, my brother got a pair of needle nosed pliers and went to work on my foot. After a few minutes of digging and prodding, he stood up. He held an inch-long piece of rusty wire in the grip of the pliers.

Boy, you’ lucky you ain’t dead. You coulda got lockjaw or somethin’.

I shrugged. The pain began to abate almost immediately. That was all that mattered to me.

CHAPTER FIVE

The first four years of my life were divided between playing with my older sister in our back yard on and around the garage and watching television. By the time I was four, I had developed into a timid, frightened kid. I seldom spoke until I needed or wanted something. My timidity came more from unease with people in general than from any real fear. I just never really felt comfortable around people. I always felt out of place everywhere.

I was never really afraid of the dark. My sister Juana, though, was genuinely frightened of the dark and the possibility of being attacked by what she called the Greasy Man.

I never believed in this so-called Greasy Man. During summer, the younger kids slept on the floor at night on pallets made from folded blankets and quilts. Because we were just kids, my mother assigned Juana and me to a pallet on the floor in the middle room of the house.

One night, when Juana had to pee, she shook me awake. I was dead tired from a full day of play. We didn’t have an indoor toilet so we had to use what was called a, slop jar to relieve ourselves at night. The slop jar was a porcelain pot that we used to urinate in.

Bobby. Juana whispered to me. Come go stand by the slop jar while I pee.

I was awake almost instantly. I couldn’t believe that she had wakened me just when I was starting to sleep so comfortably.

What? I murmured, unwilling to let go of the comfort of sleep.

I gotta pee.

Don’t tell me. Tell Ma.

Ma’s sleep. The Greasy Man might be out there.

Although Juana was three years older than I was, she somehow had this deep-seated fear of the Greasy Man. I had always thought that it was just something she imagined, or just an excuse she used to bug me.

Go ahead. Ain’t no Greasy Man. I’m right here.

The rustle and tug of the covers told me she had gotten up. Soon I heard her stumble and crash into a chair.

Shhh! I said, fearful that she might wake everybody.

In a few seconds, I heard the tinkle and splash of urine in the slop jar. I rolled over, seeking to return to the contentment that sleep would offer. Just as I started to doze, a scream pierced the darkness.

Aye! Aye! Juana screamed, panicked. The sound reminded me of a scene from the movie, Cry of the Banshee that we’d watched on the Saturday afternoon Horror Show the weekend before.

Bobby! Ma! Daddy! Her screams were followed by the crash of glass on the linoleum-covered wood floor. A wooden chair skittered then slammed against the wall. Outside, our pet mongrel dog, Trixie, started to bark. A dog barked in the yard next door, then another, somewhere in the distance. Soon it sounded like every dog in the neighborhood was awake and barking.

Aye! Aye! Aye! The first thought I had was that Juana had lost her mind.

Girl, what’s wrong with you? Ma was awake now, and everybody else in the house, it seemed. A light went on. I looked up to see my father standing in his long underwear in the center of the room. Two of my older brothers stood beside him. Juana scurried back to the pallet.

I saw the Greasy Man She said, breathing hard. We all stared at her in disbelief.

On the floor, a trail of urine led from the slop jar back to the pallet. My mother got up and cleaned up the mess. She got the mop and cleaned up the broken drinking glass and the urine.

Ya’ll shut up and go to sleep! Ma told us. I laughed uncontrollably. I covered by mouth to muffle the giggles. Ma looked scornfully at me. I shut up quick. In a short while things quieted and we all returned to bed and to sleep.

CHAPTER SIX

The years from four to five were spent at home. For the most part, I played and watched television. Juana had gone off to elementary school and I stayed at home with my father while my mother worked.

My mother left for work at seven in the morning. She worked as a domestic and got off at about one in the early afternoon. While she worked I stayed home, bored. There were few cartoons on television to keep me entertained during the middle of the day. My older brothers usually went off to work delivering wood for Mr. Troy Lacey. Mr. Lacey had a business where he delivered firewood to the homes in town. His next door neighbor and business partner had a huge wood cutting saw which he used to cut downed trees into shorter pieces for sale.

You have to understand that many of the people living in the black neighborhood at that time had only wood- and coal burning stoves for heating and cooking; some did not even have electricity. Wood was a very important commodity. We had a big coal burning stove in the living room for heating and a flattop cast iron wood burning cook stove in the kitchen. There was no door between the living room and the middle room. There was only one interior door that led from the middle room to the kitchen so the heat traveled throughout the house in winter. The coal burning stove heated the entire house.

My father went fishing quite often in summer and hunted rabbit, possum and raccoon in winter. One spring day, my mother contacted the owner of the property just behind ours and was allowed to plant a garden there. She canned lots of vegetables so we had jars of corn kernels stripped from the cob, green