An Angel in Memphis

[Daveparts still]

An Angel in Memphis
By David Glenn Cox


There are many times I wish that I, too, could write about happy things, happy little stories of joyous events. I truly wish that I could. I admire those who do; I venerate their verse, but they are not me and I am not them. I am not really a morose person. I am actually quite jovial, quick with a joke, and outgoing.

But that is only the shell of my M&M life, for inside is a darkness and a sweetness that I have yet to understand myself, let alone taste. I was an odd little boy, beyond odd, past eccentric, near the point of insane. As a small child I refused to be potty trained, and I would hurl myself down steps and into walls in fits of anger.

I don’t know why. I don’t know what demons possessed me so, only that apparently I was much happier wherever I was from before Earth, and my soul, trapped in its tiny Earthen body, wished to return there. As I grew older my parents had to lock me in my room at night as I would get up at all hours and rummage around the hallways called home. I had a good childhood. Lesser parents would have beaten me to death or thrown my body off a cliff and claimed it suicide, and my track record would have supported them.

Some of my earliest memories were of sitting at the table with my butt planted on a foot-thick Webster’s hard cover dictionary as a shim. I’m sure that it was some premium from a book club membership that my father had earned. Strange though, I remember flipping through the pages of the book before I was able to read them and desiring to discern the knowledge inscribed on those pages. At the same time I remember listening to the radio, never to the music but always to the words. The music was but the wrapping paper for the verse and vividly I remember trying to guess the rhyming word in the chorus.

You ain’t nothing but a hound dog, crying all the time. You ain’t nothing but a hound dog, crying all the time. Well you ain’t never caught a rabbit and you ain’t no friend of mine. Mine, time, mine, time. We lived in Homewood, Illinois then and moved from there before I was six. But I remember it like it was yesterday. I carry snapshots of life like that inside me and because of it I have never been much for cameras. They always seemed superfluous to me because along with these images in my head I also carry the other baggage, the time of day, the season, the time of year or what I was wearing.

Now it is many years later and as I hear the song “Silver Bells,” I remember it was my father’s favorite and recall Christmas shopping with him when I was around ten. “Here Comes Santa Claus" was my mother’s favorite, and I always remember her turning around and looking back at me and smiling. Any of you who have the misfortune of having a birthday near Christmas understand the blur that it causes. It was just after my sixteenth birthday and five days after Christmas when my mother died. She clutched her chest in the middle of the night and just passed away.

My pampered, middle-class childhood ended then, as the family for all intents disbanded. Like a falling star in which the light has gone out, leaving a cold cinder to strike the Earth, it tore the family asunder and we all grieved in our own ways. It was a dark chapter for me because my father fled Chicago, as it had been her home, and he refused to stay there without her. I was, of course, taken along but I was excess baggage, scar tissue on a fresh wound. But it was my home, too.

I lost my family, my friends and a very good public school, and what I received in return was culture shock and a very bad public school. A school painted with prison paint, it was a school which dictated to us what we could read and found unapproved books very threatening. Inversely, while the staff and management found unorthodox ideas threatening, most of my classmates found them unfathomable.

It took me years to understand that the cauldron I was thrown into was one of the most valuable experiences of my life. I would have to make myself fit into their world as they would never have come around to mine. “Whatcha doing with all them books?”

By the time I turned seventeen, my father had consumed his life with alcohol and I was an internal scar that irritated his flesh. I tried running away back to Chicago, but it was too late. My life there was gone, and my relatives wanted me gone as well. So I took the train home back to a home that was no home and within weeks found myself living in a shed. I would sneak home during the day and do laundry and make a sandwich. Throughout the years I have always thought of the irony that most high school kids sneak out at night, but I had to sneak in.

There was no educational institution on the face of the Earth that could give me such an education. I went to counselors and government programs, I even had a Christian church tell me that because I wasn’t a member of their church they saw no obligation to help me. Of course I was angry, but it was an education. While coming home on that train, I had no money for food. An elderly African American woman, raised in the Jim Crow South and carrying the full brunt of all that means, gave me a sandwich.

It was the highest act of divinity that I have ever encountered in this life. She had every reason to look away and every reason to ignore my plight. On a train loaded with white people, only one person took pity on me, the one person who had traveled the hardest road and been treated the worst and as the least. I view her as no less than an angel sent from God and I will adore her memory all the days of my life. She taught me a lesson and burdened me with a cause, a mission if you will.

That lesson is you will find the most good in the people who have had the least; that if you have been kicked or knocked down a peg or two, it is with them you’ll find solace. They won’t tell you to pick yourself up by your own bootstraps. They won’t say “Shit, you ain’t had it so bad,” because even though they might have had much worse, they know that you don’t want to hear about it. Not now and maybe not ever, because the wounded don’t need to compare wounds to understand each other.

But these things changed me; that sandwich was no less than the heavenly host served up by an angel. So I threw my lot in with them, the poor, the working poor, the struggling middle class. I fell in love with Woody Guthrie, his energy and his spirit and his spit in your eye vigor championing the working class. He walked the walk and he talked the talk, passing up millions just to be Woody. Unwashed, hair uncombed, but always ready to fight the good fight and maybe to lose and maybe get his head busted, but always ready to let them other fellas know that we’ll be back again tomorrow. An aging Winston Churchill was once asked to step aside so that younger men could advance in the party, and he responded, “I fight for my corner and I stay until the pub closes.” I love that motto and I keep it with me in my heart.

I believe that these things which have happened to me are all for a reason. A reason why a little boy was obsessed by words even before he could read them. A reason that he would go from one of the best high schools in the country to one of the worst. A reason why I can’t write happy little stories but obsess myself with the travails of a struggling people. It is me, that is who I truly am, and I was anointed so by an angel in a railroad car outside of Memphis, Tennessee.

So, from my tiny redoubt without employment or wages, I ask that you worship the God of your choice but seek the divinity that is within each of us. That is where it should live and will do the most good for us all when we keep those doors open.

They said there'll be snow at Christmas
They said there'll be peace on earth
But instead it just kept on raining
A veil of tears for the virgin's birth
I remember one Christmas morning
A winter's light and a distant choir
And the peal of a bell and that Christmas tree smell
And their eyes full of tinsel and fire

They sold me a dream of Christmas
They sold me a silent night
And they told me a fairy story
'till I believed in the Israelite
And I believed in Father Christmas
And I looked at the sky with excited eyes
'till I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn
And I saw him and through his disguise

I wish you a hopeful Christmas
I wish you a brave new year
All anguish, pain and sadness
Leave your heart and let your road be clear
They said there'll be snow at Christmas
They said there'll be peace on earth
Hallelujah, noel, be it heaven or hell
The Christmas we get we deserve

Lyrics by Greg Lake & Peter Sinfield

[Frosty1]

1. In the words of Will Wenstrom

"Never go to a church looking for a handout. You'll find more charity in a whorehouse than a church."

He was speaking about being hungry during the depression.

[DemReadingDU]

2. You bring valuable wisdom to your writing. Thank you.

[Joe Chi Minh]

3. Wow! One of the most beautiful anecdotes and moving commentaries

I've ever read. I must print it out keep a copy of it.

This post should top the bill of fare.

[cilla4progress]

4. Just beautiful...

and I can completely relate to the moments of grace you describe. One particularly resonant was when I was picking cherries one financially desperate summer (my ONLY summer picking cherries, since I couldn't make a living at it!), and, at the lunch break, as they registered my half-full box, a sweet, timid family of migrant Mexican farmworkers dumped theirs into mine to fill it. I'll never forget that act of kindness, generosity, and union, from strangers who, like I, were working hard for everything they had.

[Jane Austin]

5. Beautiful -

Thank you for that early Christmas present.

[southernyankeebelle]

6. Thanks for reminding us what is really important in life. You are walking the

way Jesus would want us all to walk. Keep spreading your word.

[Uncle Joe]

7. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Daveparts and Merry Christmas to you.

[Caretha]

8. Please don't stop!

I'll be looking for your book....or you, for the rest of my life.

Pax

[emilyg]

9. Thank you.