Chapter 5: Got Love For The People Who Got Love For Me: Shared Practices and Public Schooling

I entered high school in 1980, barely five foot tall and 97 pounds, soaking wet. My dad had been killed 3 years earlier, and I felt that the world forever owed me something. He was the center of my orbit, the son of cotton pickers with herculean strength and a foul mouth. He hunted and fished, swallowed tobacco juice “for the hair on his nuts,” and fixed his “own goddamn cars.” They tell me he played football with the heart of a giant, and I witnessed him trace out countless baseball diamonds with startling agility for an older man of 27 and a 44-inch waist. He loved me and Momma, and “them two other young’uns of his,” he’d say, but his self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy fueled a short temper that often sent me and Momma literally running for our lives. So, my 11-year-old fragile sense of reality and all the promise that my papa portended for me as a growing young man were lowered into the ground with his charred body. My momma remarried an earring-wearing, nuts and bolts salesman only 8 months after Daddy died. Feeling betrayed, I resented her and the pot-smoking lounge lizard she married, which only increased my sense of loneliness at a time when I needed her most. I couldn’t understand it then, but I’m sure now that at 28 and with three kids under the age of 11, her need for stability and the lure of a counter-culture style were most pressing to her. So it was that I began high school fatherless and emotionally volatile. Greer High School assigned me a father who inspired a love of disciplined excellence and forever changed my life.