Memphis, 1955 or so, my father opened a can of Corn beef hash and heated it, and I remembered it smelling like dog food; I refused to eat it. My father was determined I would eat or sit at the table all night. After some time, he became angry at me and took the spoon of hash and prayed my mouth open, and shoved the hash into my mouth. I spit it out as soon as he removed his hand from my mouth. This infuriated him, and he slapped me across my face. My mother screamed that is enough; he pushed her aside And slammed me into the chair. Eat it now, he said; I took the tiny bite and tried to chew and swallow, but I couldn’t. He knocked the bowl away, and my mother swept me to bed. My mother told me years later that I was only five years old and would not give up easily.
This, for years, was the earliest memory I remembered, only to realize I remembered my sister Margaret coming home from the hospital with mom, so I guess I was only three or so for that. My mother had five kids in five years; she had a miss carriage and two more. Incredibly, she knows my father had loose wires and limited morals why she would keep having babies. My father believed having kids was a sign of man. My family was in total kids that were known were seven from my mother, three from my father’s second unmarried wife; he had at least three kids from other women and at least one in the Panama canal zone. He had this crazy notion that kids made the man a man; I never figured out why.
My father; was a strange man with some intelligence with little to no work ethic. He was an inventor with five patents that earned him no money. He started Gibraltar fence company (1953) in Memphis, Tennessee; we lived across the border in Southaven, Mississippi. He was making money hand over fist. He hired his brother Gene and his father-in-law, Old man Mac to work in the fence company. I was named after old man Mac, Richard Warren. My memory of my father when I was young was that he was a very violent man with mood changes that changed with the wind. The downturn in the economy, I was told, caused the fence company to go broke.
Fence company story; my father placed a half-page ad in the main Memphis paper showing a house with a brand new chain link fence, stating that this could be your house with a new Gibraltar fence around it. The only problem was it wasn’t a Gibraltar fence at all; it was Mr. Chaffee’s private house \owner of Chaffee Fence company.
The newspaper and television covered the story for a couple of weeks. My father would tell me later that he sold very few jobs with the original ad but sold thousands of dollars worth of fencing with the media circus. Dad had to place another half-page ad showing this wasn’t his fence; he laughed all the way to the bank.
During the fall of the Gibraltar fence, dad had ordered semi-loads of chain link fencing; he would post-date the checks to give him time to finish and collect jobs. The end game was when a post-dated check cleared and took all the money out of his bank account and causing 30 or so thousands of dollars worth of bills to bounce. Dad had terrible reviews all over Memphis and warrants for his arrest coming from West Memphis, Arkansas. He was warned that he was going to jail for a good while.
My grandmother said that my father was always crazy and would do the dumbest stuff. He never knew when to shut up and got many spankings from his dad for running his mouth. All his brothers and sisters thought he was smart because he always came up with new ideas. (I believe he was lazy and didn’t like to work, so he came up with these grand plans to be rich by Christmas. He would talk of all this grandeur, and until I was twenty-five, I would fall for it each time). Dad was the kind of man that could talk and talk and talk, he was a terrible salesman, and he had no confidence in his sales ability because he would have three appointments and spend hours upon hours talking to the first customer and never getting to the other ones. He believed it didn’t matter what you sold it for, and that volume fixed everything. I have known him to sell a fence for lower than the cost of material to get half down. I never knew him to sell anything for a profit, and I mean anything. He was a half-ass inventor and designed some products that did sell, and the only problem he was never around for the payoff.
He started the World Fence News, a fence publication with an excellent format. He needed investors to start a magazine, so he brought two men. Palmer and I don’t remember the other man’s name. He had made a dummy paper and placed twenty or so fake ads he said he had, and then they put in money. They bought a computer and sent the billing out to the fake ads. The fireworks when they found out that the ads were bogus were intense. (the funny thing is a third of them sent in a check for the ads, they discovered that dad knowingly ran ads that were not real, and then he called them and gave them two months for one month if they would pay the bill). There was another publication called the Fence Industry News run by David Duke, and he hated dad and would refuse to talk to him. Palmer made a deal to sell the World Fence News to David, and the only stipulation was that dad could have no part of it. Dad came over the night before the negotiation, and we talked all night about what to do and what amount to ask for; dad was thinking they would want him to work for a year to get everything going; I told him Palmer said that Duke wouldn’t be at the meeting and didn’t want him involved at all. I told Palmer to call me when the meeting was over and let me know how it went. Three days after the session, I still had not heard anything, so I finally talked to my brother Gene and found out that he ended up with less than $4000.00 and traded for a printing company. My brother Gene that only owned a couple of shares of the corporation got that much. I was so mad at him that when we talked again, I called him an idiot.
Years earlier my dad designed a fitting for attaching wood 2x4s to steel post he called it wac-brac. He had no money to produce this so he took what little money he made as a fence man and built a proto type and took it to a machine shop in Houston to see how much it would cost to build the tool and die and to produce 5000 parts. I was very young and for the life of me I can’t remember how old but I think I was 7 or 8. Dad talked to the machine shop owner and dad convinced the man that fence companies across the nation will order millions of these fittings. He said they will produce the tool and die and produce 5000 parts for a dollar apiece and that was with him sending them to the galvanizers to get galvanized. The agreement is made and a month and a half later dad gave the man a $5000.00 check for the wac-bracs. We loaded these in the back of a trailer and truck and they were so heavy that two tires blew out on the way home. Dad had to spend his last money on tires. He was excited, even without any money that he has all these fittings which he hoped to sell in just a week or two. Gibraltar fence was owned by George (I can’t remember his last name) and it was the first company dad went to and he was very gung-ho to go into business with dad on the wac-brac. He gave dad a five-hundred-dollar check and took 1000 wac-bracs for .50 cent apiece, a net loss of 500.00 dollars.
I asked dad in the truck how he could lose so much money, he told me that it didn’t matter that after everyone was using them, he would just raise the price to where it needed to be. That sounded good to me, I didn’t know for sure. Two weeks later the man at the machine shop was at our house with the police. He wanted to kill my dad. We told the policeman that dad was out of town getting money from a man that bought all the wac-bracs and that he would bring the money to man at machine shop. The policeman and the shop owner talked for a few minutes and the shop owner told us that he was giving us 4 days to get him his money or he will have a warrant. Dad called and told us that he is going to get the money from George and that they will pick up a check on Friday. Dad sold another 1000 wac-bracs for another $500.00. He now only had 3000 parts left and still owed $5000.00 to the machine shop. Dad and George got home Wednesday night and made coffee as they talked about how to raise the money for paying off the parts. George told dad that he could sell his life insurance policy for 6 or 7 grand but it would take a few weeks to accomplish. The next night dad was talking to us about how George had taken his life insurance policy to the bank to see if he could borrow $5000.00.
It was now Friday and we were putting clothes in bags and we were loading them into the car. I sent Gene to load up some silverware, some plates and towels. We had just about loaded the whole car up when the police showed up and they knew something was up. The one policeman asked me if we hade a phone in the house. I told him yes and he went in to use it. It seemed like just a few minutes and there were five police cars and the machine shop man showed up. The man in charge told the other cops that the kids were not the ones that wrote the check to let them go anywhere they wanted. He then turned to us and said, “if we catch you with your dad you will be held as accomplices.” The girls came to the drive away and all of them were crying. After an hour or so George and dad showed up with a cashier’s check for $5000.00. Dad told George to take it to the machine shop and to pick up the bad check. When George got back, he told dad that the man would deal with dad only. Then he said for George and dad not to come back to his business for any reason. George told dad they had to start selling the rest of the parts and get some money before they went broke. Dad laughed and said they will all be sold in a week or less.
Dad went to New Orleans and sold 1000 wac-bracs to the West side fence and two thousand to Scott fence for a grand total of $1050.00 which equals .35 per part, he now has no more parts and owes $5000.00 to George and has spent the other thousand he had collected. Dad told a joyful George that he has sold all the wac-bracs and was headed back. He was patting himself on the back for a quick trip and a good sell. The next morning, I went with him to Georges fence company and dad gave him $600.00 dollars that was left from the New Orleans trip. George asked what is this, dad explained what he had done and told George that the next orders would be huge. George told dad, “we can’t sell these at or below cost how are we going to make any money?” Dad told George that the next production will be 50,000 parts which will bring the cost to .60 cents and we can sell them for a dollar.
To bring this to a close George went bankrupt and lost his fence company. He lost his life insurance, and owed Mimi $58,000.00. They agreed to take the remaining wac-bracs for half the amount that they were owed and George gave dad his truck which was repossessed two months later. Mimi had to pay twenty thousand dollars to buy the tool and die set. They produced 50,000 parts I was told later in life and sold them for 1.25 apiece which was way too expensive. It took over four years to sell the first batch and it was never as big a seller as dad envisioned.
My dad’s first chain link weaving machine was a money maker for him and only him. I can’t remember the city we were in but I think somewhere in Florida. Dad talked the fence company owner into investing a thousand dollars to build a chain link weaving machine that dad would build in the man’s building after work. After about a month, my father and I were in the company building on a Saturday and were working on machine when the owner pulled in with a hand full of unpaid invoices amounting to over $2000.00. He was very mad and screamed at dad. The man wanted to see the receipts for the thousand dollars that he had already given dad. Dad told the owner that he would bring them in on Monday and show him all the money he has spent plus some of his own. The man sped out of the drive and you could told that this was going to be over.
Mom and dad were talking and I heard dad told mom that the fence owner was going to steal the weaving machine from him and have someone else finish it and get all the money, but they would rent a trailer and pack all the belongings we had and leave Sunday with the machine. Dad rented a trailer and we went to the fence company and he tried to open the gate to get in but the lock has been changed. We were all in the truck with all our belongings and dads’ tools. He took a breaker bar out of the truck and broke the lock and opened the gate. It took us over an hour before we got the machine onto the trailer. It was very unstable and fell on its side and punctured one of the trailer tires. Dad took one of his come-alongs and jacked the machine to the front of the trailer which made the punctured tire come off the ground a little. We drove off into the sunset to nowhere.
Dad was driving north to get out of Florida. He and mom were talking about where to go, dad thought Atlanta, mom wanted Mobile but the biggest problem we had at the moment was money. We pulled into a “fillup with billup” service station and dad and I went to the bathroom and they had ten machines and only one man working at the station and he was at least a hundred. Dad told mom to keep the old man checking everything in the car and to keep him away from the bathroom. It was late at night and sound carries much further in the night than in the day. I stood outside the door of the bathroom and dad went in and got all ten machines prepared to be broke into. He opened the door and asked me if everything was all right?” “just do it” I told him. He broke the cash box of each machine and it sounded like a rifle went off each time, I looked each time to see if the man heard anything and he showed no sign of hearing anything. Dad broke five machines and stuck his head out the door to ask if everything was still ok, which I just nodded and he broke the other five. I could hear him turning the cash boxes over and the money poured out so I knew they were loaded. Dad came to the door and said he had only to clean out three more machines, how was everything going? I told him ok, he said that he needs to go to the car and empty his pockets and come back and get the rest. He left and went to the car. I looked around and saw no one so I went in and emptied two machines before he got back. My pockets in front and in back were all bulging and I couldn’t hold another quarter. Dad only took a few more minute to empty all the rest of the machines, when I saw the old man coming to the bathroom. Two knocks on the door means trouble, I heard dad unlock the door just a second or two before the old man showed up, I was sure that we were in big trouble. The old man grabbed the door knob and threw the door open and walked in on dad washing his hands. He looked at dad and said” sorry I am an old man and when I have to shit, I have to shit.” Dad just laughed and patted him on the shoulder and walked out. We were laughing all the way to the car. Mom counted the money and it was over $350.00 in one haul, a good twenty minutes of work.
Mom told dad that we should get a motel it is getting late and there is nothing but truck drivers and cops on the road right now, dad said we first have to get out of Florida. We drove another two or three hours. I woke up with dad pulling into a shamrock service station, we all got out of the car and this young guy came up and asked how much gas, he was not very friendly at all. My dad made a couple of jokes, he wasn’t interested. It is 3 or 4 in the morning and he looks it. I went to the bathroom and they only had one machine but should be quick and easy. Dad came in and told me to go outside to watch, I protest and he said ok just listen. When the machine broke, a man on the other side of the wall that was asleep screamed out “what the f–k are y’all doing?” Dad had already flipped the cash boxes so there was no reason to leave money it would be seen. We went outside towards the car when this older guy came from out of the back of the service station, he ws headed to our truck.
Mom is at the coke machine when dad told her to come now to the truck, he told my sister Margret to get in and lifted her on to the back of the flatbed truck. It looked like mom and the man are having a race, she got onto the running board and into the truck, the man went to the driver side and got on dads running board and tried to get the keys out of the truck. Dad knocked the shit out of him and almost ran over him with the trailer getting out of station. The young guy had put the gas nozzle into the tank, but it got knocked off, so it wasn’t pumping any gas while mom had him checking the oil. When dad pulled out, we only had less than a quarter tank of gas and he had yanked the nozzle out of the pump. Dad pulled onto the highway to leave when mom said, “oh my god, I left my purse on the coke machine with all our money,” dad was super pissed he turned the truck and trailer around and drove up to the station and pulled up to the coke machine and grabbed moms purse. You could hear the man on the phone telling the police that they were back. We drove off and only went less than a mile when dad saw red lights coming down the road from a great distance, he turned off our lights and turned onto this dirt road and a few minutes later from the back of the truck you could see the cop cars go by one, two then three. Dad looked at the gas gauge and was horrified that we had less than a quarter of tank of gas. He said we will have to drive on this dirt road all the way to Georgia and that we were only sixteen miles from it when we got gas. We drove and drove on these dirt roads turning one than another we came up to a fork in the road, he asked mom which way should we go, mom said to the left, so he went to the right and laughed at mom as we drove away. Dad is now very worried the needle is not moving at all and the truck started missing, he pulled over to the side of the road and pulled out a one gallon can and poured what was in it into the tank. He told mom about a half a gallon. We hadn’t driven more than a mile when we could see in the distance a service station, the sun was coming up not to long before daylight when dad said, “come on baby make it to the station on the gas.”
Dad told mom that we must be in Georgia by now and he named some highway that he thought we were coming up to. He pulled the truck up to the pumps and to our surprise and not to mention the stations we were back at the same station. The man ran to the station to get the phone dad jumped out and pumped gas. It was taking forever. The man was telling the police that they were back again. He was standing in the door of the station, when I guess the policeman told him to get our license plate number. He went inside to get a pen and paper I guess and it took him a few minutes, by this time dad told me to put something over the license and he put the nozzle into pump and we drove away again.
We went down the same dirt roads and when we got to the fork in the road again, we went left this time. In about 5 or six miles we were in Georgia.
My dad decided that we will go to Atlanta and he will raise some money for his weaving machine or at least get a job at a fence company. I can’t believe that dad is passing every place that has machines and won’t stop, it drives me mad. He said that we don’t need to do it anymore but I think he has just turned yellow. We arrived and it is pouring down rain. Mary, Margret and I are up against the cab but it is not helping any, the rain is just pouring down. We finally got a motel and got out of the truck, all our clothes are wet even the one we have in bags, I mean every single thing we owned was wet. I went straight to the shower (one of the few times) and the girls are mad since they wanted to go first, but I beat them to the punch. Dad told mom that I did it to get out of unloading the truck. If you think a single bed in a motel is comfortable with seven people you are crazy! To save three dollars, Dad didn’t get a tv, and we were just miserable.
The next morning dad and mom went out to look for a house to rent, they came back about noon with lunch and to pay the motel bill. Which the people had been to the room four times to collect after 10 am. They told us that they put a deposit on a house this morning and that dad was going to try and raise some money so we can pay the rent and get you kids into school. Mary laughed that school has been going on for over three months and we have gone to school less than two weeks and that was two schools and this one would be the third.
The next morning dad was up and gone looking for money or a job. The motel people again were looking for their money, dad got there about 3 pm and has had no luck at all. He only has about thirty dollars left and the knock on the door is the manager who said, “today he needed twenty-eight dollars for the night” dad told him we are leaving so we don’t need the room. He told dad that check out was 10 am and that he owed for another day weather you stay or not, and that he had more people than he had stated on when he rented the room, that either way he had to leave tomorrow. There went the rest of the money. Dad told mom “let’s go get our deposit back for the house.” Mom went into the realtor company and came out mad as hell. She told dad that if they don’t rent the house, they lose their deposit. Dad told her she must have heard them wrong and he got out of the truck and went in and stayed for over thirty minutes and came out very dejected and with no money. He told mom that they were going to sue the realtor company. Mom just shook her head.
The next morning, we headed out to Mobile (I think that is left again) and now we have no money and rubber machines are back on our list. We ran out of money in Montgomery, the machines had no money in them, a dollar, .50 cents, 3.00 dollars. Just enough to keep us driving but no food or drinks. (I told dad that we would have money if he wouldn’t have passed up all the places going to Atlanta that we know had money) We are now out of gas at a truck stop, no money no food and nothing to hock or sell, the baby is sick and mom is pregnant and can’t keep anything down and is driving dad insane. She told him that she is very tired of traveling and wants to settle down with the kids going to school.
Back to the problem at hand, we have to get some money and food dad said all the kids are hungry and the baby needs milk, “damn, how did I get into this mess?” Dad went off to find some money and was gone for a long time. We were not far from the bathroom of the truck stop and it had a machine. The only problem was that it has a man at a cashier two feet from the bathroom door and you can hear him breath. I went to the bathroom with the tool in my pants and bent down the outside flanges and smashed the inside part of the machine and then walked out. I looked around and the cashier was outside talking to a man and no one is in the store. I went back into the bathroom and broke the machine. It was completely full, I loaded up my pockets full of fifty cent pieces. I walked out the bathroom door and a man walked in right behind me and the cashier was headed back into the store. The timing was perfect!
I walked back to the car and dad was still gone. Mom had just started driving so she was very nervous pulling up to the pumps and the car died as we pulled up, it has run out of gas. I had them fill up the car with gas and I paid them 8.00 dollars in fifty cent pieces and we drove off to find dad. We passed a church and I saw him working cutting grass. We pulled in and he was surprised “where did you get gas?” he asked, mom told him “Rick broke the machine at the truck stop,” he said “that’s impossible it is right behind the man’s back.” He said that he only has a little more to cut and they are going to give him 10.00 dollars so we waited for the big money. Mom told dad that the fifty-cent machine that Rick got had 78.00 dollars. He was very impressed and wanted me to told him how I had done it. We all are full and happy; dad is in a very good mood and is joking around a lot.
Mobile was the new paradise, my mother’s father (Richard Warren McNeil, I was named after him but had never seen him before) and my grandmother on my mother’s side (who was a huge women) who hated my dad very much and wasted no time in telling him that she thought he was a good waste of time. She started to sit on a chair at the table and dad grabbed another chair and told her she “should put a loaf in each chair, that it made no sense to put all that weight on a single chair.” She told him to “drop dead, that she has had a weight problem all her life but that at least she was human.” Old man Mac (my grandfather) told dad that he needed to learn to keep his mouth shut and he would stay out trouble. We stayed at their house (a very little house) for two nights and it was not good.
Dad got Hagen fence to front him some money to rent a house, and he started working on a fence truck the next morning and they were thinking of investing in the weaving machine. Mom rented a house and it was a big one-off Government Street. The yard was big and it had lots of big trees. The house had wood floors and they were fun to run and slide on, it was just a great house. Dad decided that he would make garbage can holders on the weekends to help pay the rent. He bought some half inch rebar and bent them into a half round and set them into concrete which made it imposable to turn over a trash can. I would take two of them on my wagon during the week and sell them, I was selling at least a hundred dollars’ worth a week.
I guess us going to school again felt good, mom had a time dealing with the schools all the time about our records and school attendance and lunch money. I will give it to Mobile schools they wanted to be paid for lunches but would not let a kid go hungry. Dad was working on his weaving machine in the garage at night and on weekends trying to perfect it. We had a great time going to the beach with cousins we had never met and uncles and aunts. We were always doing something there. We had been in the house for about three months when dad got fired for stealing fence material. When he would come home, he would drop some wire and top rail and fittings so when he got enough material together, he would sell a fence job and have most of the material to build it. The police come out to the house and a Hagen fence truck picked up the material at the house and they drove away.
We started building a lot of garbage can holders but the sale of them is not like it was, we had to almost give them away. Things were going very badly and we couldn’t pay rent and dad couldn’t find a job. He had put an ad in the paper for an investor for building his weaving machine and he had a few bites but no takers yet. Putting the ad in the paper cost dad, and the man in Florida that financed the weaving machine was in Mobile on vacation and read the ad and called dad and talk to him for a few minutes and told him he will be over in an hour. Dad had no idea that it is him, none at all. This big black car pulls up with Florida plates, the man got out with dark sunglasses on and walked over to dad and said hello Walter. Dad turned white. He and the guy started talking, you can tell that dad is lying his ass off and the man keeps telling him that he is lying and that he was going to have him arrested. He got into his car and drove off. Dad got everyone loaded into the truck and we left everything and headed to New Orleans.
Most people would not go to New Orleans from Mobile by the way of Memphis. We had no money and we weren’t able to get machines, either they were too touchy or had no money when we did get them. Dad put kids on both side of the road and he drove the truck a couple blocks ahead and we picked up coke bottles. We only got 2 or 3 cents per bottle but we picked up a couple hundred of them, enough to get gas money and a box of grits to eat. I think that most of my early nutrition came from grits gravy, grits butter, fried grits and if we had any money some meat every now and then.
We finally made it to Jackson Mississippi. It had taken three days of bottle picking and a machine every now and then that produced very little money. The truck was running so badly that it can’t go more than 30 miles per hour and people are passing us left and right blowing the horn as they go by. The black smoke when we start out looks like a small rain cloud. We pulled into a Baptist church and the truck died. I heard dad and mom talking, “what we do now?” mom said “I surely don’t know.” We were in the very corner of the church parking lot and it was late in the afternoon and we were the only car there. Us kids were playing next to the truck when cars started showing up at the church. I noticed that it was black people so I assumed we were at a black church. Just dads’ luck. We could hear the music playing and the singing, it seemed that as we kids sat on the back of the truck it was like we were in church. You could hear the preacher talking about sin and love your neighbor, we had an hour of hard preaching and we all said nothing and listened. I guess the church people noticed us out at the end of the parking lot and it was very obvious that we had trouble. Two black men came to the truck to ask us about our problems and dad explained that he was down on his luck and the kids where hungry and the truck was not running and that mom was very close to having a baby. They told dad to bring the kids and wife into the church, the women all gathered around us and asked us our names and they seemed very concern about our well-being. The older man which I assume was the preacher told a couple of women to fix something to eat for our new friends, and he took us to the ice box and gave all of us a coke. He told dad to give him his truck keys and he would look at his truck and see if he could fix it, that his real job was a mechanic. Those women must have cooked everything in that place. I have never before or after had so much food on one table to eat and they had everything. The black kids were looking at us as if we were from mars, not one kid had said anything up until we had eaten all the food we wanted. One girl asked her mother wither we were poor people, she told her to be quiet. The girls went off with the black girls and I went outside with some boys and played football, it turned into a good day. The preacher told dad that he would have to take the truck to his shop and that he had the women making up cots so we could spend the night in the church, we could make our self-welcome to any food in the pantry. Joe was one of the black guys I was playing with, he was close to my age and asked his dad if I could spend the night at his house. You could see the surprise on his face, and when I asked my dad it was much worse. But he said its ok so off I went. Joes’ dad lived by the garage of the preacher where they had taken the truck. Those guys worked over half the night making that truck run better than it had ever run. We could hear them start it up and rev the motor up and drive around and come back. I had no clothes except the ones on my back and when it came to take a bath Joe’s mother brought me some pajamas which up to that time, I had never worn pajamas.
We stayed up unto early in the morning talking about everything, his dad finally arrived home around three in the morning and made us go to sleep. The next morning with a good breakfast in my belly, the lady gave me two set of clothes that she said Joe had out grown them even though I think we were almost the same size. They fit perfect and looked better than any clothes that I had left in Mobile. It was about noon and we all got into the car and headed to the church, with the preacher driving the truck in front of us. Some of the women at the church that had girls got all the girls some clothes and some shoes. Dad received two green jump suits and they looked almost new. (he wore these two suits for years any time he was working on something) We hugged and shook hands with everyone, of course the girls were crying, both black and white. We loaded into the truck and the preacher got on the running board and told dad that the truck is full of fuel and gave him four twenty-dollar bills. Dad thanked him and off we went.
I don’t know why but I had a feeling of loss, an empty feeling.
We now have enough money and gas to drive straight to Memphis, dad being his self decides to pass up every place that could have a machine. He always seemed to think when he had a dollar, he won’t need more in the future, insane thinking. We arrived at my dad’s mothers house, a little white house on top of a hill. Her dad was living in the middle bedroom and he looked to be at least two hundred years old to me, his hands had an orange looking color and he was always making smokes out of Prince Albert in a can.(we were told that the last time he had a job, he was working on a street car in Memphis with horse drawn trolleys and he would be in the back of the trolley motioning the driver to go. He was sixteen and when he quit, he never had a job making money again.) My mother and grandmother did not like each other at all. I remember my grandmother telling my uncle that she thought my mother was the worst mother a child could have and to keep having kid after kid with no home and not to mention they are not in school. We had two Uncles, Johnny and Charles and one Aunt Mary that lived there.
To say we were unwelcome was an understatement. I felt more welcomed at the church in Jackson Mississippi. We were woken up at about 5 am in the morning every morning we were there to eat breakfast with our aunts and uncles. After two or three days I noticed that the scrambled eggs had a meaty taste different than we were used to eating. I ask her what was in the eggs, as I was eating my last bite, she told me pig brains, I stop chewing and start spitting out eggs, she got mad and sent me outside. The girls stopped eating and she sent them outside also, we all say that we won’t eat eggs again ever.
Dad and mom come home from somewhere and my grandmother said she can’t take these uncontrollable kids, “when we were planning on leaving?” Dad just laughed his stupid laugh and told her we were leaving tonight. It was getting almost dark and we hadn’t loaded up to go yet and mom asked dad “should she start putting kids into the truck to go?” He became furious and told her “we have no money to go anywhere did she want all of us on the side of the road?” Mom told dad that he was the one that said we were leaving tonight. He knocked her to the floor in front of my grandmother and uncles. My grandmother seemed horrified and she told him to leave her house, he told her “I have no money to go anywhere,” she told Johnny to go to the store and cash a fifty-dollar check, then told dad to follow him. I was helping my mother up; and the girls were in the yard playing.
Dad half kicks mom as if she was the cause of all his problems. The tension was unbearable, dad now was completely out of control; throwing things and calling mom all kinds of names. My uncles and aunt were crying, grandmother crying, my mother was trying to get up and I was helping her when he kicked her hand that she was using to get up with. I was crying and mad I tried to kick him and he slapped me so hard that I hit my head on the hard wood floor and was dizzy and not just a little dizzy.
I don’t remember anything after that slap except waking up in the truck crossing into Mississippi. I had a huge bump on the back of my head the size of a large egg. My dad was still mad at my mom and told her that “see what she had done, you caused all this trouble, if you would have just kept your mouth shut this wouldn’t have happened.” He went on and on like a crazy man and he just wouldn’t shut up. I wished that he would die.
We pull into a park and dad gets me to get some fire wood and he got the grits and some bacon out to cook some supper. Mom is too bruised up to do anything she is black and blue and sore all over, her arm that he kicked looked broke. (He was still ranting like an idiot) He cooked the grits and bacon and took mom a plate to eat. She told him she was not hungry and he blew up again and threw the plate of food at her head. It went all over her.
We all scream at him to leave her alone; all the kids came to her rescue. The girls to their credit didn’t trust dad and refused to sleep on a pallet he had made, they stayed in the truck with their battered mother. (Words sometimes can’t express the horror of seeing your mother beat this badly, seeing a man that looks completely out of control and feeling helpless but not willing to do anything) The next morning no one was talking to dad when he asked a question he would get a head shake or a nod but not one word from any of us kids. It was not planned and we were all had a disgusted with him. He fixed breakfast and the girls took mom a plate of grits she could only eat a few bites because her mouth was all torn up. All the kids say very little all day long. Mom mostly slept, her arm was purple and she looks worse today then the day before.
Dad pulled into a hospital and took mom in to check her arm out. She could hardly walk. She had peed on her dress and it was completely wet. I had to help dad to walk her into the emergency room. There was a lot of people there but the nurse looked at my mother and she knew what had happened and ran over and took moms arm away from dad and helped me take her to the back room. She got the doctor to come in and see her immediately, he looked at her bruising and arm, about this time dad walks in and told the doctor that she fell into a ditch. The nurse told dad that he was a fucking liar and that it was plan to see he beat the shit out of her and to get out of this hospital. That her husband was the chief of police and if he wanted to hits someone try him. Dad turned and walked away with no defense of what he has done or said. Mom stayed in the hospital till after midnight, they put IV’s in her arm and x-rayed her arm, she had two small fractures. Her dress was ruined so the nurse went and got mom a new dress. The chief of police showed up and told dad to follow him to the outskirts of town and for him to never come back to this town, it would be better if he left the state of Mississippi. We drove away headed for New Orleans, mom looked better and she is now next to dad and they were holding hands and her head is on his shoulder. What the hell? We arrived in New Orleans and right off the bat we got a machine with a hundred dollars and within two hours we have over eight hundred dollars. We stopped at this big service station truck stop and they had only one machine. When dad broke it, it sounded almost empty but when he turned over the cash box it had four one hundred-dollar bills and five quarters, we were rich.
Dad rented a house in the Gentilly area. It is a mixed-race place and dad wonders if it is where we should be living in. We were only there an hour or so when the rental company came and told dad they made a mistake that the owner had taken house off the market and was moving back in town and that they had a house in Kenner. Dad asked them where is Kenner the lady told him. He said no we will find another house just give him his money back, the lady asked him for his mailing address that it would take two weeks to return money. Dad say we will take the house in Kenner. The house in Kenner was everything the house in Gentilly wasn’t.
The house in Kenner was small. The houses were very close to each other and were very dirty. The people had just left and no one had cleaned it up. Dad put an ad in the newspaper for an investor to build a weaving machine and he got some calls, but no one going to put money in something you don’t have anymore. Dad went to work with Scott Fence Company in Kenner LA as a salesman. He buddied up with one of the crews and before long he would sell a job for Scott fence and then sell one for himself. This worked out fine for a while but the crew got caught stealing material and they left town before they were arrested so dad didn’t get caught.
The phone rang and this man wanted to meet dad about building the weaving machine. He came over and dad and mom talked to him all night. The next day the man brought a bunch of checks and printing things and dad, mom and he made a bunch of different checks. They worked into the night making ID cards. The next day they left and then brought in a lot of cash and groceries. The man took all the money and groceries receipts and added them up. He told dad in couple days they would have fifty percent of what they needed, excluding the groceries which they kept. They cashed checks for three more days, the last day they cashed checks on Scott fence (this would haunt Scott fence for years, there were stores that wouldn’t cash their checks). When dad and mom gave the man his half of the money for the day, he realized that dad was holding out three hundred dollars, dad tried to say he made a mistake on the amount of the check and the man called him a liar and for dad to give him the money, which he did.
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