Starting to Awaken

So many things began to change over the next few years. We got a color television set soon after my Uncle Billy got one. We took weekend camping trips frequently and my father bought a motor cycle, a 250 cc Allstate, from Sears and Roebucks. There was a war on the six o’clock news every night in <st1lace w:st="on">Asia</st1lace>. There was also a war brewing at home. Colored people all over the place had gotten very angry and started burning buildings down and rioting. I didn’t know many colored people, except for Fannie Mae, the old negro woman that helped out around the house with ironing and cleaning while my mother slept during the day.
My mother had taken a job at the Milan Arsenal, manufacturing ammunition for the war on the six o’clock news. She worked midnight until morning so they must have been making lots of ammunition. She seemed to either be at work, on the way to work, or asleep most of the time.
This one negro preacher, named Reverend King, got killed in <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Memphis</st1lace></st1:City> and my father had to leave his job and go with the National Guard to help the police there restore order. Someone threw a fire bomb on our house while he was gone on one of these trips and this scared my mother very badly and Fannie Mae couldn’t come to our house anymore even though she still loved us and thought we would all grow up to be fine young men and we should be very careful because the world was about to change forever.
I had been playing guitar at my Granny’s holy-roller church for a while now and my guitar teacher let me play bass with his rock and roll band while they were practicing in his garage. Then one night, he called and spoke to my parents and asked me if I would mind playing with them at the Moose Lodge that Friday night. I made thirty bucks that night and knew I was destined to be a rock and roll star. We must have played Louie Louie, Hold on I’m Coming, and Midnight Hour, ten times that night.
My sister was a year and five days younger than I and all of a sudden, her friends began to be more interesting to me, especially Johnny Sue, who seemed to live with us most of the time now. Johnny Sue was the little sister of my best friend, David, but his father drank and beat his mother so she stayed with our family most of the time.
My mother injured her back at work and had to go into the hospital for surgery. When she got better, it still seemed like she had to sleep way more than the average person. She was always running out of her medicine and sometimes would get really sick and would have to stop the car and vomit. She couldn’t drive very well sometimes because of the medicine and I had to get a special drivers license when I turned fourteen because Tommy Hollis, our policeman friend, said he would have to start giving me tickets if he saw me driving her around again without a license and the judge that my granny sold burial plots for, arranged it for me. The Milan Arsenal gave my mother a lot of money for her injured back to help her with the costs of her medicine and treatments.
[FONT=&quot]We began building a grand new house near Beech Bluff, actually building it, everything except for the brick laying. Ray Gregory did the bricks but he paid my brothers and I $2.50 an hour to mix the mortar and bring the bricks to him while he worked. We transferred to <st1lace w:st="on"><st1laceName w:st="on">Beech</st1laceName> <st1laceName w:st="on">Bluff</st1laceName> <st1laceType w:st="on">High School</st1laceType></st1lace>, where my father had graduated. Shirley Maes was still the principal there and he remembered my father well. It was a very small rural school with grades one through twelve only containing around 300 students. There was not much else in Beech Bluff except the cotton gin and Fowler’s Grocery but there were plenty of woods and the <st1lace w:st="on"><st1laceName w:st="on">Forked</st1laceName> <st1laceName w:st="on">Deer</st1laceName> <st1laceType w:st="on">River</st1laceType></st1lace> bottoms to hunt and fish in. Some Saturdays, we would drive down to the haunted bridge and shoot leaves as they drifted down the Forked Deer and nobody would think anything about it as they drove by. [/FONT]