A lot of firsts that school year. First scrimmage, first JV game, first tackle, first passing yards made. First school dance, with an eighth-grader girl that was dead serious about it so, my first real date evidently. Angus and Sax went together dressed as Planet of the Apes, loser of their grade contest (Sax) being the human on a leash. This is Homecoming mind you, not Halloween, so. Not a date. But Angus took mine over, ordered the corsage from Walmart, took me to Goodwill where we found this dope white suit from the sixties. In my size, unbelievable. I’ve grown into my hands and feet by this point and am pushing six feet, thank you Mattie Kate.
First time going to the dentist. I didn’t see any need, but Angus said quit being a baby, it’s just to get everything cleaned off and fillings if applicable, all normal people do this. Which was a hurtful thing to say. I knew plenty of other kids that hadn’t been. It’s not like Mom didn’t try. Whenever I was little she’d drive me to the free RAM clinic they have every year, but those things are a madhouse. People camping out in their cars for days to try and get in. Mom was afraid of me getting trampled and going home with less teeth than I started with.
First time carrying a grown man up a flight of stairs. This was Coach, passed out in his office. It wasn’t exactly a habit, but it happened. Fall wasn’t bad, spring would get worse. In the off season without games to think about, he didn’t have a lot to do back there, so he’d take a bottle for company. Angus just rolled with it, saying it was always something that came and went. You try walking in his shoes, she said. Your wife dying on you, leaving you with a baby to raise. And a girl baby at that. He never even got to try for having his boy.
It was also my first time thinking school could be halfway interesting. Coach Briggs for history was breather-pass, if you weren’t a corpse he gave you the benefit of the doubt. If you were on the team, extra credit. Mr. Armstrong, not so much. He gave points for talking in class, this being Language Arts, but Jesus. Ask where something is at, he’d say “Preposition crime.” Say you’re tired, he’d slump his shoulders and say, “And feathered.” This was due to his accent, it can affect your hearing. “Tired” to him sounded like “tarred.” He tried without success to convince us on things like subject-verb agreement, irony, etc., and spent the entire year explaining his opinion on “when” and “whenever” having two different meanings, which is just wrong, man. Give it up. The thing about Mr. Armstrong though. He would sit on his desk, take off the glasses and set them down, rub his eyes, and you’d never know what in the holy bejesus might come out.
In seventh he assigned us this Backgrounds project of finding out what type of people we came from. What kind of work. If they came from some other country, where was it. In fall we had to do interviews of old people in our families. In spring, writeups and presentations. The main old person I knew was Mr. Peg that had been a miner, but not my kin. Mr. Armstrong remembered my Melungeon question and said I should look into that. I thought, “Fat chance.” The orphan habit dying hard. But! Now I had a scary grandmother. Better yet, Mr. Dick, that could probably write a book on any topic.
Mr. Armstrong pitched in some on his own backgrounds: first name Lewis, named after Kareem Abdul Jabbar, figure that one out. His dad being a basketball fan and doctor, his mom in charge of libraries. Both with the opinion he’d lost his mind whenever he moved down here and didn’t come back to Chicago. He said after ten years they were still asking if he was going to quit fooling around with that banjo and come home. We’d not known of a guy like him playing the banjo. To be honest, we’d not known of a guy like him doing much at all, given there were maybe twenty Black people total in Lee County. He said guess what, the banjo was invented by his people, it’s similar to a thing their great-greats played in Africa. He said there used to be a ton of Black people living here, that came for the coal jobs. Not being allowed decent pay down south, plus oftentimes getting killed down there for the reason of Blackness. It had mostly all along been more free around here in the back-ass end of Virginia, not slavery, due to the farms being piss-poor tiny and not the big plantations. But then the mine jobs started petering out and they all went on to Chicago or someplace. For the jobs and also this thing of Great Migration, the far south being hell on earth with the Black-hater laws, and them wanting to put as much road as possible between themselves and hell. We asked why didn’t the white people go too. He said it was a different story for them, some left but most didn’t because of big families with relatives, already living here a long time and pretty dug in. Somebody said, “Ain’t nobody gittin me off’n this mountain,” which got a laugh.
He said that was a stereotype. Big subject with Mr. Armstrong. He read us these things in history that were written about the mountaineers: shiftless, degenerate. Weird-shaped heads. We thought that was dead hilarious, with Brad Butcher making a whole big thing of his pointy head, and Mr. Armstrong saying, “Not funny.” He said they made us out to be animals so they wouldn’t feel bad about taking everything we had and leaving us up the creek. But Mr. Armstrong wasn’t from here, so we didn’t believe him. We said if that’s true, what all did they take? And he’s like, Oh, let me think. All the timber and coal that fired up the industrial revolution and made America rich? Look at the railroads, he said. Built to move out the goods, one way only, leave the people behind. And we’re all like, Okay, whatever. Brad Butcher has a pointy head, totally not deniable.
A lot of the time Mr. Armstrong would just cross his arms, sit back, and let us fire away. At each other, him, president of the fucking world, our choice. No such language allowed of course. He was okay on our sayings, though, like if we said somebody was crooked as a dog’s hind leg, or born on the wrong side of the blanket. Ugly as homemade sin. These counted for Language Arts. But no f-bombs, no “them guys,” and do not for the love of the Lord say you’re laying down if you mean lying down. The man blew gaskets on that one.
It wasn’t just the language factors, he was also big on history, for not being the history teacher. (Coach Briggs did worksheets only. Boring as death.) Like with the rebel flags, you see those around, nobody gives it a lot of thought. One of the times we saw them for instance was outside waiting for our buses, where this Chevy D/K pickup on lift-kit tractor tires comes roaring through the parking lot, tires screaming, bass thumping, shirtless high school guys hanging out the windows ripping loose a rebel yell. The truck tore a big U through the lot and back out to the highway, flapping its glory from two poles zip-tied to the bed: American, Confederate. A lot of guys around me laughed, some few didn’t. Some looked at Mr. Armstrong that was with us on bus duty, just standing over there in his button shirt, arms crossed, watching the whole yeehaw.
Then it got quiet. The ones getting on buses got on their buses. Everybody else found interesting shit to look at on the ground. Shoes, gravel, ABC gum. It was close to Halloween, I remember, because the pep squad had the front entrance all decorated up in pumpkins with bad faces drawn on in Magic Marker. So that was something else to look at. Most if not all of us being aware that this flag thing was kind of an oh shit situation. And wanting it to blow over.