When I'm 64

A CHANGE IS GONNA COME

WHEN I REFLECT on my childhood, looking to see if there was any one thing that made me the way I am, there is one day in particular that I return to. I was four years old, sitting on a log in the woods. I was hiding for the day, and I thought I had a pretty good spot picked out. That is, until I heard the screams. I heard my Uncle Jim shouting and my mother, Cecile, screaming for dear life; I also heard her brother Tommy, or maybe it was actually her brother Hill, running after them. Some of the details have gotten lost, but the picture that I can see is crystal clear: Jim coming into the clearing, dragging my mother by her hair. Jim had a gun.

He pointed it straight at me and said, I’ll shoot anyone who tries to stop me.

I stood frozen in the clearing, unable to move. The next twenty minutes aren’t as clear to me, but I remember the gist of what happened. Jim beat and raped my mother, while I watched. I stood there as he leaned the gun against a tree, mere feet away from me. I could have saved her. I could have stopped him. I could have saved us right then and there. Instead, I did nothing but stand there. What was wrong with me? Why didn’t I stop him?

When he was done, Jim grabbed his gun and looked at me. His eyes seemed to scream at me that I was a failure, worthless and powerless just like my mother. I felt my lower lip quiver and the tears started to stream faster and faster down my face. I used my fists to wipe away my tears when I felt a hand on my chin. My mother stood before me, her eyelid swollen shut and blood trickling from a cut on the side of her mouth. Her eyes had a different message. Instead of pain, I saw fire.

Put your chin up. You don’t let nothing that bastard does make you cry. You hear me? Crying doesn’t do any good except to get your shirt wet. You be brave now. We’re still alive, aren’t we? she said, grabbing my hand.

She squeezed it as we walked back toward the cabin. With her chin held high and her eyes straight ahead, Cecile showed me how to survive, one foot in front of the other, pushing on through her pain.

On September 20, 1946, on a beautiful clear morning, I was born to Cecile Belle Jordan and John Herbert Wagner Jr., in Fairfax County, Virginia. I was their first child and would prove to be the last living thing that their damned union ever produced. We lived not far from the hospital for the first few months of my life, but we quickly relocated back to Cecile’s family home in North Carolina, where I would spend the formative years of my youth.

Running water and electricity are both conveniences that existed long before 1946, both things that many people cannot imagine life without, but these were pleasures that the hill folk in Borea County, North Carolina, still did not have access to. That doesn’t mean that we didn’t bathe or cook; we just had to do things differently. This was one of the first lessons I learned as a child. I was different—different from my friends whose families weren’t as harsh, different from my cousins, and different from everyone I knew. I watched as other children got called in to wash up for supper. I, on the other hand, never got called to come in, and I avoided going home like the plague.

I lived in a log cabin with nine of my cousins and all of their parents. We gave new meaning to the term close family. You can’t get much closer than sleeping in piles, everyone on top of each other, in a small cabin with dirt floors, no electricity, and a lack of running water. We would walk to the river and fetch buckets of fresh water to bring home to boil for dinner and also to fill the washbasin. Each week, my mother would walk several miles into town to purchase food to feed all of us, a single five-pound sack of flour and sometimes a link of sausage. It’s easy to see how the youngest and smallest of the children would get left without much food. It was survival of the fittest, and at that point, I was certainly not the most fit.

Franklin D. Roosevelt had been president for more than twelve years and was in the midst of ending World War II and leading the country out of the Great Depression when he passed away, leaving Harry Truman in office in 1945. The western world was already on an upswing by the time I was born, but you wouldn’t have known by what went on in Appalachia; we were all still pretty depressed. Clothes were hand-me-downs, and you were lucky if you got a single pair of shoes to last you for the year.

My mother, Cecile Belle, was a hardworking girl of eighteen when she brought me into this world, maybe an adult by legal standards, but she hadn’t had the life experience of a typical adult. I cannot say for certain whether she resented me or not; I can only say that it sure seemed like it. The easiest way to explain my relationship with my mother is to attempt to understand her relationships with her family before I was introduced to the scene.

Rape, incest, and abuse were just a few of the defining characteristics of Cecile’s upbringing as a Jordan in North Carolina. My mother was born into a family with six children. Three boys, two sisters, and herself. Her brothers were all older and seemed to have been born bad. Jim, Tommy, and Hill still lived in the cabin with us when I was growing up there, all those years later. They had added some of their own wives and children to the brood, but none of them could afford their own place. That was how we all ended up in that cabin together, fighting for our lives.

Jim and Tommy tortured their sister throughout her childhood. There simply was not much else for them to do, and while he was better, Hill was no saint either. Jim was the ringleader, the spitting image of their father, an abusive alcoholic who instilled twisted ideals in his children, especially the boys. Tommy was your typical sidekick, always there to chide and tease, and occasionally to twist the knife in a little deeper. With two brothers with a serious mean streak, there wasn’t much Hill could do to avoid being painted with the same brush. He had a soft spot for his sister, but if he let it show too often, he would quickly become the target of Jim’s aggressions.

Cecile was a beautiful girl, and she was the only one of them with the brains and work ethic to leave the countryside. Beginning at age fourteen, she would commute out of the hills for work and actually had managed to build a potential future for herself. She tried to rise above the madness of her brother Jim, striving to leave his brutality behind. Jim beat his siblings, his young wife, and their children unmercifully for any reason that presented itself. He would have them pick switches off the trees or use any other item he could get his hands on to inflict pain. If the physical abuse wasn’t bad enough, sexual abuse was also not uncommon, and Jim made sure that Cecile knew that she was not better than him or the woods in which they lived. He beat her down in every way imaginable, which was the main reason she left home for Virginia, where she met John Herbert.

I wish I could say things got better for Cecile when I was born, but my father was a womanizing drunk and had not planned to ever have a family. He was a traveling trucker and would leave for weeks on end with no word as to when he would return or for how long. When he did come home, it was to berate my mother and beat her. With a new baby, Cecile needed help, even if it was the worst kind of help. She packed our few things, grabbed me, and returned to the scene of what must have been a grisly childhood for her, only to begin to leave me vulnerable to the kinds of torture she herself had already survived.

After our return, Cecile again began leaving for work outside the area, and this did nothing but anger Jim more. He just could not understand what she did not get the first time. If leaving before had done nothing to better her, what did she think was going to happen now? Not only was she back drawing on the family’s few resources, but she had brought with her yet another screaming mouth to feed. The only difference was that he now had me to take his anger and aggressions out on in Cecile’s absence. I was the youngest and by far the smallest of the nine cousins who lived in the cabin, and therefore the easiest to catch. I would get beat from the minute Jim woke until Cecile returned from work. He would then turn his hatred toward her. You must be wondering why she left me there, seeing how I looked when she came home. You could also wonder why Tommy and Hill didn’t stand up to Jim, either. I can’t answer those questions. This was the only life any of them had ever known, and they had all survived it, as would I.

My mother did make one major attempt to see that I was safe during her absences. While she was working in town, she met a nice family who seemed trustworthy. Somehow, she arranged for me to stay in the safety of their home during the day. She would get to come visit me on her breaks, and she knew I was tucked safely away from Jim’s violent hands. It was strange to be a part of someone else’s home and see how they all functioned without hurting one another. In the mornings, I would arrive around breakfast time and get to feel a part of something that wasn’t so deranged. They had their own children and they actually let me play with them. This was the only place that I was not being used as a human punching bag.

Eventually, the family approached Cecile after I had been staying with them for about a year. They wanted to know if they could adopt me. My mother never took me to their home again. Looking back, I wonder how my life would have unfolded had she given me to them, but part of me feels it really couldn’t have been that different. To be honest, I believe that some people are born with suffering in their blood, and no matter how the circumstances change they will still be drawn to tragedy.

As I got older, I got a little bit smarter. I would leave when my mother left for work in the morning and try to stay hidden until she came home. This worked at times, but other times it just made Jim angrier when I did come back. As a child, it was very difficult to figure out what I had done wrong. I got beat when I stayed. I got beat when I left. I got beat when I was good. I really got beat when I was bad. You can’t expect to learn right from wrong if all of your consequences and rewards are the same. You lose the ability to differentiate between what is a deserved punishment and what will happen if you behave well. There was no consistency, no way to develop a sense of morality in such a hostile environment.

The thing about living in an abusive environment is that you can never rest; if you let your guard down for even an instant, it can come back to bite you. When I came home in the evenings I would approach the cabin slowly, hoping that Jim would be asleep. Some days I was lucky, but luck isn’t something to be counted on. One unlucky night, as I came close to the back door, I heard him moving around followed by a terrible screeching sound. Turning the corner, I registered that Jim had my pet opossum in his hands. While opossums aren’t typical house pets, we had to make due with the animals that lived around us. This opossum wasn’t afraid of me and he would sometimes follow me around in the evenings. That night, Jim seemed to be waiting for me to come home, and maybe if I hadn’t been there he would have let that opossum live. Jim told me to stand against the back wall of the cabin facing the woods. He took the opossum over to the tree where I picked my switches and proceeded to nail the opossum to the trunk. He made me watch as he skinned the opossum my only friend in the woods, alive.

I made conscious choices to make friends away from home, but even that was difficult because I never wanted anyone to know where I came from and how little we had. There was one place where you did not need much money to play or fit in, and it was on the dunes on the side of the roads. Local kids would take anything they could get their hands on and play trucker by rolling their toy trucks up and down the large brown dirt piles on the side of the road. I would sit and watch the kids play most days since I did not have a truck of my own.

I can’t remember if I finally got the truck for my birthday or Christmas, or maybe even just because somebody had a bit of extra cash. Whatever the case, I got a truck of my own. A twenty-five-cent plastic truck with wheels that did not spin, but they were wheels nonetheless. The very next day I woke early, excited to take my truck down to the dunes. Finally, I was going to be able to play. I rolled my truck up to the top of the dune and started to make my first pass when one of the older kids snatched it out of my hands.

Give that back! I shouted at him, but he just kept on running.

At the top of hill, he placed my truck at the end of a line of similarly pitiful excuses for toy trucks. There were other smaller kids gathered around, whining for the big boys to give their toys back. I watched as he pulled out his BB gun and began firing away. He shot all of the trucks, including mine, full of hundreds of tiny holes. He laughed as he threw the remains back to their distraught owners.

Crushed, I grabbed my truck and ran home. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why I thought that would be a good solution to the problem. I ran through the front door, crying as I came in. My mother was home, despite the fact that it was the middle of the day and she should have been at work. She asked me what happened and I told her all about the boys with the BB guns and what they had done to my truck. She listened and I could see the fury rising up in her eyes.

Within the span of five minutes my mother had dressed me in one of my cousins’ dresses. She marched me, dressed like a girl, down to the dunes where all the other boys were still playing. If I had thought she was going to help me in a normal maternal sort of a way, I had thought wrong.

Which one of you turned my boy into a sissy, crying baby? Cecile shouted.

The boys took one look at her and they all took off running before she could get to them. Their fear of her wasn’t enough to keep them from laughing at me on their way or reminding me of the incident every time I went down to the dunes. Eventually, I stopped going there, too.

John Herbert, my father, had not been around much, but apparently one of his usual routes changed and brought him through our neck of the woods. It must’ve occurred to him that he had an estranged wife and son, so John drove over to our cabin and found me home alone. Rather than wait for my mother to come home, John Herbert decided to pull me up into the front seat of his rig and set off to make his round of deliveries. Seeing my dad pull into the area in front of the cabin brought a strange mix of emotions. While I was happy to see him, life had taught me to be wary of adults, especially those I was related to.

That week I got to see the country from the front seat of my dad’s big rig. I practiced being invisible. If I could just keep from bothering him, maybe he would let me stay and I could cash in my ticket out of the woods. I felt an odd sort of pressure that if I behaved a certain way, I could convince Dad that my mother and I were worth saving. On the second night of my trip, my father was talking to some of his trucking buddies while we were all stopped for a bit of a break at a diner. And me, I had developed a lot of questions in my time away from home.

How far can the truck go? I asked excitedly. How fast can you drive it? Have you ever been in a race?

No response.

Dad, why is the front red and the back silver? Did you have to paint it yourself? I wondered aloud, walking the length of the truck.

As I got closer to my dad, he finally seemed to hear my questions and looked down at me. As I opened my mouth again, he picked me up and tossed me to the side.

Christ, shut up already, he jeered.

He turned away quickly, laughing with his buddies. I landed hard on my chin, and the impact drove my eyetooth far up into my gums, lodging at an unnatural angle. Not that I had much to smile about before, but that was when I began to make sure my teeth were covered whenever I had to crack a smile for a picture. One more thing for me to be ashamed about. Overall, I must have been too much trouble for him, too, because he dropped me back off at my mother’s house a week later. I did get a pretty good ass-kicking out of it, which I’m sure I deserved since my mother had been so close to being rid of me and I’d blown it.

Cecille Belle Jordan and John Herbert Wagner Sr.—Fairfax, Virginia, 1946

I’LL NEVER SMILE AGAIN

DAYS TURNED INTO weeks, and weeks turned into months. The months turned into years and we were still living in the woods with Jim, Tommy, Hill, and the gang. Around the time I was seven my mother started seeing someone new: Frank Hardee. Frank was not a bad man—not a good one either, mind you, but at least he didn’t have it in for me like Jim. He was hardworking and loved my mother, so I really couldn’t have asked for much more. When Frank got out of the Navy, he and his brother Leroy began working in the booming Miami construction business down in South Florida. I am not sure exactly how it came to be, but the decision was made that my mother and I would move with Frank down to Miami.

When we first got to Florida, I found a new feeling replacing the fear that dwelled in the pit of my stomach. It was light, airy, and springy. I had never felt anything like this before; it was so new I had a hard time defining it. Over time, I learned it was called hope. For the first time, I did not have Jim lurking in the shadows of my mind. I could sleep without wondering what I would wake up to, and my mother seemed happy, almost. Mom and Frank got along well enough, but I couldn’t help feeling that there was something keeping them apart.

Since I had never experienced a regular childhood and, with that, the feelings of love and safety, I began to believe that what was keeping my mother and Frank apart was me. Here they were, young and in love with their whole lives ahead of them, but then there was me. My existence was a constant reminder of the dark days in the woods, of the beatings, the hurt, and the pain that she experienced. I represented everything that Cecile was trying to leave behind but couldn’t because I was always going to be there. I tried to disappear, to ask for nothing, to require nothing, but that would only last for a few hours and then someone would remember me.

Abuse is one of the evils of this world that’s effects last much longer than the actual event. What I didn’t understand at the time—and still don’t truly believe even now—was that those beatings and the violence were not my fault. The family I lived with early in life knew no other way to function. They had all been abused and, therefore, all became abusers. It would be up to me to decide whether or not I would continue the cycle of violence as I got older.

Growing up in the Miami area was infinitely better than life in the woods in so many ways. There was more to do, more people to see, and many more places for me to go. Money was an issue again, but at least Frank had a decent job. On the first day of school in our new town of Dania, I was enrolled in second grade. My mother decided to walk me in and fill out all the forms that go along with starting at a new school. Getting up that morning, I realized all I had to wear was my hand-me-down overalls from one of my older cousins in the woods.

Cecile told me it was fine and to hurry up so she could still get to work on time. As we walked through the front door of the Dania school in my overalls and two-year-old shoes with holes in the soles, everyone stopped what they were doing and stared. The clothes the other children were wearing shocked us. They didn’t look a thing like the children who lived in the woods. This is when I first realized we were in a city now and that the backwoods were a very different place. Here I was again, different from everyone around me, starting off on the wrong foot.

A few weeks later, my Uncle Hill came down to visit. Frank, Hill, his girlfriend, and my mother went out for drinks at the local bar. They were having a good time out together, drinking and dancing until about one o’clock in the morning, when Frank went to the bar and asked for another drink.

No, sir. You’ve had quite enough, the bartender replied.

Who do you think you are, telling me what I can and can’t drink? Frank roared, teetering back and forth on the balls of his feet.

The bartender grinned. I think I’m the one running this place, and you can take what I say or you can get the hell out of here.

Frank turned away from the bar, long enough for the bartender to reach over and grab his empty glass, and that’s when Frank turned around swinging. He clocked the bartender clear across his jaw. He must not have hit him very hard because the bartender was still standing. The bartender reached back over the bar and shoved Frank. He fell backward, tripping over a stool and hitting his head against one of the tables.

My mother was just a few stools away and was watching this whole interaction. She reached down and pulled her high-heeled shoe off her foot. Brandishing her weapon, she charged the bartender, knocking him in the head again and again until he hit the floor, unconscious. She grabbed Frank and, with the help of Hill, got him out to the car, and together they all left for home.

They came in and were all excitedly discussing the fight. I had been asleep, but with my room right off of the living room I always woke up when someone came home. My Uncle Hill was trying to keep the mood light and was doing a few simple hand tricks with razor blades. He’d pull them out of his pocket, take the paper off the blade, and then place them in his mouth and pretend to chew on them without ever cutting himself. I was watching this from my bedroom; I had pushed the door open a little more than a crack and had a decent view. My mother was putting on a pot of coffee when she noticed me in the doorway. She came to me to tell me to go back to sleep when Frank saw us talking.

Bring him out. Let the boy watch Hill’s tricks, Frank slurred.

No, Frank. He needs to be in bed, she replied, and she began to close the door.

That was more than Frank could handle. He exploded out of his chair, came barreling into the bedroom, and pulled me through the doorway so I could watch the tricks. My mother tried to grab me and pull me back into the room, and that’s when all hell broke loose.

Frank shoved my mother hard back through the kitchen, knocking her down. Then he grabbed me and pushed me past my mother. He went to the closet and pulled out a .22 caliber rifle and carried it to me. He held it pointed in my direction, which made my mother go crazy. She ran at him, and he reached back and hit her in the face, knocking her into a little chair in the corner of the room. He smacked her in