I Lived to Tell It All Page 3

  Brokenhearted, I bawled for hours.

  A man lived in a cabin about a mile behind ours. He found out about my wanting a wagon and made one entirely out of wood. He might have carved the wagon out of a log, I don’t know. But it had a wooden tongue and even wooden wheels. There is no telling how long it took him to cut and carve that wagon. He wouldn’t take a dime for it, and it gave me a million dollars’ worth of pleasure.

  I came into this world on September 12, 1931, inside a homemade house of logs in Saratoga, Texas, near Kountze and Beaumont, as the last of eight children. I was delivered by Dr. Roark, who dropped me because my twelve pounds and some odd ounces were too heavy for him. He came to our house to deliver a baby and also got to treat its broken arm, although I was too small for him to set the arm. He had been with our family for years and delivered the first of the eight kids, Ethel, who died. Then there was Herman, Helen, Joyce and Loyce (twins), Doris and Ruth (also twins), and me.

  Folks said Ethel was killed by congestive chills, and there is no telling what that means in terms of modern medicine. She might have had simple pneumonia that could have been cured for the price of penicillin. If he had known, Daddy would have found a way to raise the money.

  But Ethel was never taken to a hospital. The nearest one was in Beaumont, where Ethel would have been a charity case. That wouldn’t have set well with Daddy, so he and Dr. Roark treated Ethel at home. Mama and Daddy gave medicine from the doctor’s bag, but most of the treatment was not much more than wrapping Ethel’s shivering body in sheets and holding her close to them, Helen has told me. Ethel stopped shaking one day just as she closed her eyes. They never reopened.

  That’s the kind of primitive medical treatment there was for Texas’s rural poor during the Depression. My daddy taught himself to set bones out of necessity. He set Herman’s broken arm when he fell off a horse and got so good at setting the bones of injured lumbermen that Dr. Roark used to send for Daddy when he had more patients than he could handle. A man came to our house on a horse once during the night because there had been a bad car wreck and Daddy was needed at the scene and later at the hospital to help set the bones. Helen almost tore her nose off her face once, and Daddy sewed it back with nothing to kill the pain. He used a sewing needle and household thread.

  Daddy could swing an ax with the accuracy of John Henry swinging a hammer. He could fix or build anything. I guess he had to learn because there was no money for workmen. He made each piece of furniture we owned and kept every clock in the house running on time. I can still remember his taking apart a complicated clock and putting it back together perfectly.

  Not everyone had Daddy’s touch.

  A family who often had no food lived behind us. Because of bad diets and outright malnutrition, their bodies were often covered with giant swellings. Their mama would coat her children with sulfur and tell them to lie on the front porch in the sun. The risings would get to be as large as potatoes before their mama would take an old house knife or razor and cut her children’s skin. As the blood and other fluids drained, we could sometimes hear cries of pain. But their mama didn’t know what else to do, so she just did her best.

  We raised or made almost everything we used, even our soap. Mama used to take fat off a hog and boil it in a pot over an open flame until it became hard and dry. The result was called cracklings. She then poured lye into the cracklings and cut the cracklings into bars. That was our soap, and we used it to wash ourselves and our clothes.

  Our clothes would get so dirty in the hot Texas dust that Mama would have to wash them through two or three hand cycles in a number-three washtub. She never owned a washing machine.

  My folks knew how to make do for their own about everything. We heated water for baths by drawing it from a well in the morning and setting it in a washtub all day in the sun. The water was outright hot in the summertime by sundown. Then three or four filthy kids would use the same water and lye soap.

  I never saw an electric iron until I was a teenager. So Mama or Helen would take a solid steel iron and set it on the woodstove. It would get hot enough to press our clothes, which were stiff as boards after Mama soaked them in homemade starch.

  One of the most effective tools Mama and Daddy had was their children. Each of us had a job, and we knew to do it right. Herman and Helen had to cut and stack wood, the hardest job, because they were the oldest. There were so many kids in our family that not one blade of grass grew in our yard. We kept it worn down. So the kids had to rake it and sweep it. It was never mowed.

  I was still pretty small when Mama and Daddy decided I needed to help with the family load and develop a sense of responsibility. It was decided that I would get up in the morning before everyone else and start the woodstove.

  The first time I built a fire I stacked the stove to the top with kindling. It was a thick, black iron stove with a black sheet-metal pipe to the chimney.

  I saw that black steel turn bright red. I had overloaded the stove so much that it began to glow and crackle from the heat. The noise actually woke up Mama, who leaped from the bed waving her arms and screaming that I was going to burn the house down. Daddy and some of the kids jumped up and began to throw water. It hissed and made steam, and smoke rolled through the house. We had to open the windows and doors to let it out as everyone ran around in nightshirts and underwear fanning their hands to push the smoke outside. Daddy showed me how to build a fire after that.

  Since there was no money for fun, we were a family who knew how to entertain ourselves the way modern young people can’t. The simplest things were big deals. I can remember us sitting next to the half light of coal oil or kerosene lamps and listening to “Gangbusters” and “I Love a Mystery” on the radio. We kids would cling to each other on the floor around the old Zenith. We’d be totally silent one minute and screaming the next as the broadcast sound effect of a squeaking door or heavy footsteps came over the air. We took it totally seriously. One or two of us probably thought that what we heard was true. Then we’d go to bed, afraid to close our eyes because a villain we had heard on the radio might find his way to our house in the woods.

  Age and prosperity can sure damage a poor child’s imagination. And our imaginations were a rich source of entertainment.

  Even Ethel’s funeral, the best Mama and Daddy could afford, was simple. She was buried in a plain sundress that she sometimes wore to sing and dance and parade in for the family. From what Helen remembers, and from what I’ve been told, I think Ethel might have grown up to be a movie star.

  But her dreams, and much of Daddy’s spirit, were covered by the East Texas clay. Daddy lived another forty-one years after Ethel died. But he never got over the death of his seven-year-old daughter.

  Family was the most important thing to most people during the Depression. Folks today can’t imagine the kind of closeness that came from kinfolk wrestling those hard times together. Nothing was closer than blood. And nothing brought blood closer than going through hard times with each other.

  You sure can’t replace blood with alcohol, but folks said Daddy seemed to try. He took his first drink at thirty-one, a few days after Ethel’s death.

  He drank with heartbroken vengeance. He drank more in a month than several men together did in a year. Alcohol became the liquid balm for his splintered spirit. Eventually, Helen and Dub committed Daddy to a rehabilitation center for alcoholics. He never drank during the last four years of his life.

  The Jones family makeup just doesn’t set well with liquor. Daddy never got crazy except when he was drunk. Years later neither did I.

  Daddy was an unusual drinker. He drank to excess but never while he was working, and he probably was the hardest-working man I’ve ever known. He wouldn’t take a swallow during the week, even though he sold homemade beer and bootleg whiskey when the logging slowed down. Folks came at all times of the day or night to walk with Daddy back into the woods to his still. He’d take their money, but he wouldn’t take a drink with them if they c
ame when he had to work the next day.

  I’d see him meet Mama on Friday evening in front of the H&H grocery store. He’d go inside, pay his bill, and charge groceries for the next week. He made sure his family would be fed and that his responsibilities were met. Then he took the tidbit that was left and bought a bottle.

  He’d stay drunk all weekend, but at three-thirty Monday morning he was sober and heading back into the woods to haul logs.

  As a boy I rode many miles inside the long, wide toolbox on the old truck that Daddy used for logging and making wood staves. The truck had no suspension, and I bounced all over those solid steel chains inside the box. I actually believe that’s why I have hemorrhoids today. Daddy would sail down a dirt road and spit chewing tobacco juice from his open window. It often hit me squarely in the face.

  He came home from work at a decent hour during the week and the family sang together. Our old walls, virtually hidden inside the Texas woods, almost shook to our singing of Pentecostal hymns. Daddy played the harmonica, what we called the French harp, I played the guitar, and the sun went down as our voices raised. We were usually in bed by seven-thirty. By that time it was dark inside the woods, and we had no electricity.

  But our schedule wasn’t so predictable when Daddy was drunk. That’s when he came home late and woke up the whole house, demanding that everybody get up and sing, especially my sister Doris and me.

  As a boy, I was a dreamer. I sat for hours and stared silently into space. Even amid my big family I sometimes felt alone. Years later I still felt alone, especially during my drinking and drugging days.

  My family might be in the middle of a big sing, and maybe neighbors would come by. I’d be having a great time, then somehow I’d seem to drift away. I wondered how I could feel so much by myself around so many people. Years later I felt the same way in front of thousands.

  I went to the seventh grade twice before my folks finally let me quit school for two reasons. First, I had no interest in anything that school had to offer. Second, Mama and Daddy got tired of me playing hooky. Helen never told on me, but she knew I missed school in spells, some as long as a month. I’d sneak away and go into Beaumont, where I walked the streets barefooted with my little guitar, singing and dreaming with a mind that no school could hold. Without telephones no one could call my folks to ask why I wasn’t in class.

  I was interested in music as far back as I can remember. Helen said I used to try to play an old guitar with a missing string when I was three by laying it horizontally across my lap. And I remember the battery-operated radio we had that Mama and Daddy played on Saturday nights during the Grand Ole Opry from faraway Nashville, Tennessee.

  In our small house my sisters had to sleep three or four to the bed. But when I was small I slept between Mama and Daddy. The purr of the radio static and the lateness of the hour were too much for a sleepy little boy. I often fell asleep to the music that I strained to hear across the miles.

  “But you wake me up if Bill Monroe or Roy Acuff come on,” I told Mama.

  My dad saw my enthusiasm for music and one day surprised me by saying I could go with Mama and him on their weekly trip from Kountze to Beaumont. I lived my young life in houses near Saratoga and Kountze and then inside the Maritime project house in Beaumont.

  We rode the Doodle Bug, the train that ran directly to Beaumont and made nothing but milk stops. We got off and went straight to the Jefferson Music Company. I suspected nothing.

  I must have thought I was in musicians’ heaven. Guitars hung from the ceiling, and my mouth was wide as I gaped at more instruments than I knew existed. I’m sure I was spellbound.

  My mood was interrupted when Daddy talked to the salesman. Over the counter the man handed Daddy a shiny Gene Autry guitar with a horse and lariat on the front. I can see its glow to this day. Then Daddy handed it to me. I can’t count the number of Martin D-45s and other expensive guitars I’ve owned in my life. But none ever meant any more to me than that little ole Gene Autry.

  I took it home, and it hardly ever left my hands. I slept with it a time or two. I began to play note by note and could play melodies long before I learned how to make a chord. It soon paid off for me.

  I was eleven when I first sang for pay, and it happened by accident. I rode a bus from Kountze to Beaumont on a Sunday morning. I could always ride for free if I had my guitar and sang the driver and passengers a tune. Barefooted and wearing my usual bib overalls with one leg rolled up to the knee, I carried that Gene Autry guitar to a penny arcade on Pearl Street. A shoeshine stand sat in front of the arcade. I got on it and began to play and sing.

  People were beginning to get out of church, and soon a half dozen gathered in front of me. Then ten, twelve, fifteen, and maybe as many as twenty came and went. I just kept singing and playing.

  Somebody threw a nickel, and I was astonished. I didn’t know whether to pick it up or keep playing and try to keep the coins coming. So I played on. The change continued to fly, and someone placed a cup near my feet. I would have brought one from home if I’d had any idea people were going to pay me. I continued singing and continued to hear coins hitting the side of the cup. That was the true music to my ears.

  Two hours later, after I had sung every song I knew two or three times, I counted my funds. I had more than twenty-four dollars! That was more money than I had ever seen, and my young mind actually thought it was all of the money in the world. My family could have eaten for a week or more on that much money in 1942. But they never saw it. I was walking on air when I stepped inside the arcade. I’m not sure I left with a cent.

  That was my first time to earn money for singing and my first time to blow it afterward. It started what almost became a lifetime trend.

  Helen worked all day cleaning a woman’s house, raking her yard, doing her laundry and more for twenty-five cents. She did that fifty-two weeks before her salary was raised to fifty cents. She was ten years older than me, and I had made as much money in two hours as she would in a year.

  I guess I could have returned to that same arcade and done the same thing again. Maybe I could have made it a weekly event and even advertised myself. But I never went back, and I never knew why. At eleven years old I was already doing, and failing to do, things for no apparent reason.

  * * *

  Singing that day in Beaumont wasn’t my first time to sing for strangers. I first sang outside the family in church when I was about nine years old. That didn’t pay anything, but I wasn’t doing it for money.

  I had met a Pentecostal preacher and his wife, Brother Burl and Sister Annie, and they preached and sang the Gospel. They let me sing with them in church and in revival gatherings around Kountze. I stood next to a wooden pulpit and looked across the congregation at farmers with red faces and white foreheads from where their caps had shielded them from sunshine. Those poor Pentecostals would raise their hands, close their eyes, and open their hearts before the Lord.

  I did all the great old Pentecostal songs, such as “Jesus, Hold My Hand,” “Farther Along,” and “Canaan’s Land.”

  I remember one time we went somewhere to preach and sing and it was raining. They had a loudspeaker on top of their car. We sat inside, where Sister Annie and I sang through the speaker before Brother Burl took the microphone to preach. The water pounding on the car roof did nothing to dampen our spirits. The joy of Jesus went forward.

  I became a part of their lives and grew to love them.

  I don’t remember how old I was when Brother Burl bought a used car made in 1942. But I remember that I taught him how to drive. He didn’t know that the only car I’d ever driven was his.

  We went onto the dirt road, where I can still remember that kindly preacher grinding the gears, unable to shift from first to second. I sat in the passenger’s seat and rolled with laughter. Fun came easily back then.

  Before I met Brother Burl and Sister Annie, I was just a shy country kid who had trouble looking anyone, much less a crowd, in the eye. Working with
Brother Burl and Sister Annie in those fiery Pentecostal meetings, I developed a little self-confidence as I sang the time-proven hymns.

  The training I received in church was shown about two years later when I was singing in Beaumont in front of the Excello Café. I had a shoeshine box and shined shoes awhile, then played and sang awhile. By that time I had my own cup.

  I was singing “Precious Jewel,” a Pentecostal standard that I had sung many times in services with Brother Burl and Sister Annie.

  Then, like something out of a movie, a long and bright yellow Cadillac convertible pulled up to the curb on a street otherwise lined with old cars. A man and woman sat inside. From that moment on I pretty much ignored the other folks standing around me. I couldn’t take my eyes off the rich strangers. And each time I looked at them, they were looking at me.

  Between songs, the woman asked me to join them in the car. I’m sure I hesitated. As I slowly walked to the car, I noticed it had California license plates. That made the experience even more mysterious.

  I sat down beside the couple and seemed to sink to my waist in the leather on the softest seat I’d ever imagined. Back in those days, a little boy could get into a car with total strangers and not be afraid.

  Then the man asked me if I’d like to go to California and be in the movies!

  At that point in my life, I hadn’t even seen many movies, much less thought about being in one. He asked if I thought my mama would let me go, and I told him he’d have to ask her.

  I think you could have heard her yell all over the Big Thicket when those town folks asked if they could take her boy out west.

  “No way is my boy leaving here!” she yelled. “No, sir!”

  The strangers didn’t stay around long.

  Mickey Rooney had already been a big childhood star, and maybe I could have been just like him. I’ll never know. The strangers drove away, and I saw the dust of East Texas rise behind their bumper.