Three months later, back home in Greer, when she could no longer hide her condition and was forced to confess, my grandfather vowed to make this Johnny LaRue take responsibility. But by then, he was on the other side of the world fighting communists. My mother’s letters to him went unanswered. Years would pass before she found out he’d been killed in action. She did not know if he’d learned that he was going to be a father before he disappeared. She knew only that she was about to become an unwed mother in a town where such a designation was a disgrace. My grandfather resolved to send her off until I was born and could be given up for adoption. He knew of a home for unwed mothers in Virginia that placed infants born to wayward daughters in good Christian homes. Everyone in Greer would be told that Bonnie had gone off to boarding school, which would soon enough be true: my grandfather had arranged to send her to a girls’ school notorious for breaking the spirits of privileged girls who had turned out willful or wild or “fast.”
My grandfather had not accounted for the fact that Bonnie had inherited both his temper and his stubbornness. One morning, she woke before dawn, packed a suitcase, stole all of the money her mother kept stashed in a coffee can, and hitched a ride to the Greyhound station. She had a cousin who had run off to Nashville to become a country singer—Beverly Poteat, who called herself Sunny Brown. A few months later, at Vanderbilt Hospital, I made my inglorious entry into the world.
These were the days when they stamped bastard on the birth certificates of fatherless children. Still, my mother decided to name me Charles, after her father, in the hope that this sign of respect would soften his heart, and that, perhaps, he might beg her to come home. When she called to give him the news, he said only two words to her—“Good luck”—and hung up.
Unwed mothers and absent fathers were not unusual in the Montague Village Apartments. In school, I suffered far less persecution for being a bastard than for being one of the few white boys in a black neighborhood and school. When I got old enough to start asking who and where my daddy was, my mother told me he was a soldier who never came home from the war. When I asked more questions—why we had no photographs of my father, where were my grandparents, where did we come from—my mother looked at Sunny.
“Well, honey,” Sunny said, “your daddy knocked your momma up, and your granddaddy kicked her out.”
By then, Sunny’s dreams of stardom had stalled in an airport bar, where she sang for tips. Her stage was a small riser equipped with a microphone and a PA system running a loop of country classics like “Crazy,” “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” and “I Will Always Love You.”
When I was old enough to be left with one of the neighbors, my mother started waiting tables. She worked at a diner until she turned eighteen, whereupon she moved up to cocktailing in a honky-tonk on Lower Broadway, which back then was all strip clubs, junkies, and hustlers. Eventually, she migrated to Café Cabernet, a dim restaurant in Midtown, also known as Café Divorcée for its popularity as a pickup spot. Every time I visited the place, the stereo seemed to be playing something by Steely Dan or Supertramp. My mother was a beauty, both sensuous and demure, with a curvy figure just on the right edge of plumpness. She was a bit heedless, but smarter and tougher than she looked. Tips were good enough for the three of us to upgrade to a three-bedroom apartment at Montague Village.
We children of Montague were passed around from mother to mother, depending on who wasn’t working at the time. None of them appeared to notice where we were or what we were doing. I spent most of my time with Terrence Robie, who lived across the hall with his grandmother Louella, a maid for a pair of families across the river in Belle Meade. We were raised from infancy in such close proximity that we might as well have been brothers. Though we were only a few months apart in age, by the time we reached middle school, Terrence had grown six inches taller and at least thirty pounds heavier than I. He began to protect me as if I actually were his brother. Terrence could not save me from all of the abuse I suffered for being the smallest and meekest of the few white students in the halls of W. E. B. DuBois Middle, but he made things less miserable than they might otherwise have been.
My mother never showed much interest in my education until, when I was in eighth grade, she received a hospital bill for eight hundred dollars after one of my regular beatings outside school resulted in a broken collarbone.
“We’ve got to get you out of that school,” she said.
One morning not long after, she woke me up early and ordered me to dress in the clothes usually reserved for Christmas Eve and Easter morning church visits.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“There’s something I want you to see,” she said.
The Yeatman School lay at the end of a narrow drive lined by hickory trees, such that it couldn’t be seen from the road; the only markers of its presence were two weathered stone columns, each with the letter Y engraved on flat concrete panels. The obscurity of this entrance suggested that one wasn’t meant to be able to find the school without being told where to look. The forest surrounding the campus—the Grove, they call it—was so dense that I felt, after passing through the shadowy woods and coming upon the white columns bathed in sunlight, that if I left and came back to the same spot, I might not find it there.
Coach Baldwin, a blond, lantern-jawed statue of a man with the stiff, erect posture of an antique nutcracker, toured us around. My mother blushed when he held the door for her and called her “ma’am.” It took me a while to process the fact that Coach Baldwin was, for lack of a more accurate expression, courting us, trying to persuade us of the school’s worthiness.
What I remember best about that day was not the school’s beauty or its expensive amenities, but how different my mother seemed while we were there. At home, she still wore jeans and T-shirts, short skirts and sleeveless tops, cowboy boots or spike-heeled shoes. In her work attire, she looked like what she was: a sexy cocktail waitress with a keen grasp of what an extra inch of exposed thigh or cleavage could be worth in tips. That day at Yeatman, however, she wore a prim short-sleeved, knee-length blue dress and a pair of tan patent leather flats I’d never seen before. Her hair, usually sprayed out, lay flat and neatly brushed. All of the men we encountered—Coach Baldwin, the teachers who stopped to greet us in the hallways, the coaches in the gym—treated her with polite deference. I’d never heard my mother referred to as “ma’am” before. The whole picture was jarring, and, I thought, more than a bit deceiving. But I had only ever seen one side of her—the waitress, the unwed single mother, the drinker and smoker. I had forgotten, or perhaps never really understood, that she had grown up around the kind of people who sent their boys to places like Yeatman. Indeed, in her life before my arrival, she’d been one of them.
At the end of our tour, Coach Baldwin led us back to the admissions office. My mother sat at a desk, filling out a form, while I flipped through a copy of the alumni magazine. When my mother was through, Coach Baldwin handed me a cellophane bag full of Yeatman Y-embossed knickknacks: buttons, stickers, a T-shirt, pencils and a sharpener, and a foam finger.
“How would you like to go to a school like that?” my mother asked as we began the drive home in her Chevy Cavalier.