Little Boy Blues: A Memoir - Hardcover

Jones, Malcolm

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307377725 ISBN 13: 9780307377722

Publisher: Pantheon, 2010

Synopsis

From one of our most astute cultural observers, a piercing memoir about a family’s breakup and the need simultaneously to embrace and distance ourselves from the people and events that shape us.
 
North Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s:  A child surrounded mostly by grandparents, aunts, and uncles born in the previous century, Malcolm Jones finds himself underfoot in a disintegrating marriage. His father is charming but careless about steady work, often gone from home and often drunk. His mother, a schoolteacher and faded Southern belle, clings to the past while hungering for respectability and stability. Jones vividly describes their faltering marriage as it plays out against larger cracks in society: the convulsions of desegregation and a popular culture that threatens the church-centered life of his family. He also recalls idyllic times and the ordinary, easy moments of an otherwise fraught childhood: discovering an old Victrola, attending a marionette show—experiences that offer a portal to other worlds.
 
Richly evoking a time and place with rare depth of feeling and a penetrating, often bittersweet candor, Malcolm Jones gives us the fundamental stories of a life—where he comes from, who he was, who he has become.

About this title

About the Author

Malcolm Jones has written features, reviews, and essays for Newsweek’s culture section since 1989. Prior to that he was a newspaper reporter in North Carolina and Florida. He lives with his family in the Hudson River Valley.

Reviews

Jones, a veteran cultural reporter for Newsweek, writes with muted confidence about his difficult childhood, during which the emotional ups and downs of his mostly-single mom seemed monumental, and his undependable, alcoholic father kept him in a state of disorientation. This at-times touching self-portrait depicts a quiet, quirky, self-contained little boy suffering quietly while surrounded by indulging elderly relatives, as well as a mother who hides her disappointment with a middle-class sense of superiority. Unfortunately, little happens in this memoir beyond a taboo-broaching divorce, and Jones fails to make anything significant out of everyday moments of love and tension; curiously, the prospect of engaging the big cultural issues, when it arises, is often set aside. (Though Jones grew up in the South during the turbulent 1950s, he tidily encapsulates "race and bigotry": "they were everywhere and nowhere, like an odorless, tasteless gas"; similarly, religion to him was "as water is to a fish.") Though admirably straightforward, Jones's portrayal is so flat as to give readers little to hold onto. 22 b&w photos.
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Newsweek critic Jones dwells upon his childhood and adolescence in this subdued but keenly observed memoir of growing up in 1950s and ’60s North Carolina. The expected fireworks are absent—there’s no abuse, no fantastic blowups, no premature life of crime. Instead, it’s the roughly chronological tale of Jones’ mother, a southern woman made increasingly spiteful by the long absences of her husband, a lackadaisical journeyman given to drink. Cornered by his mother’s rules and indulged by an endless stream of relatives, Jones grows up sensitive and frightened. This is brought to life most vividly with his collection of marionettes, which quickly turn into burdens of performance (entertaining his mother) and defense (having to rebuff the accusation that he plays with dolls). But it’s movies that were my way out of the narrow world I grew up in. Epics like Lawrence of Arabia and Gone with the Wind draw sharp contrast to the mediocrity of his family’s existence. It’s a scrutiny some will find unwarranted, though even they won’t be able to deny Jones’ striking recall. --Daniel Kraus

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Prelude

On certain autumn days in New York City, the light seems to come from every direction. Maybe it's because there is so much glass, so many reflections and so many ways a beam can be fractured and redirected, but by the time sunlight reaches street level, it can appear even brighter than the sky. There are moments, particularly at midday, when people and objects take on a peculiar, almost hallucinatory clarity, and those days have a way of fixing their events in our memories with remarkable, almost excruciating detail.

With no effort at all, I can recall a day like that from four years ago. A friend and I were walking back from lunch, heading east on 57th Street. Just as we came abreast of an apartment building halfway down the block between 8th and 9th Avenues, a frail old woman emerged from the building, tottered toward the curb and collapsed at our feet. The doorman who had been holding the door for her saw it happen and rushed to her side, yelling over his shoulder for someone to call an ambulance. A nurse ran out from a doctor's office on the ground floor of the apartment building. In less than a minute, the crisis was under control. It was one of those small, miraculous moments when, for once, everything goes exactly right. So, with nothing left for us to do but gawk, I drew my friend away, and we walked on, talking about what we had just witnessed. Then, half a block down the sidewalk, I stopped at the window of an optician's shop and pointed out some sunglasses I liked. After a moment or two, she moved away, muttering that she really wasn't in the mood to look at sunglasses. Hearing that, I felt immediately ashamed and apologized for my callousness. My friend assured me that it wasn't callous, and we dropped the subject and turned in at our building. But I could not stop thinking about what had happened. Though not nearly as kind as my friend, whose first impulse was to climb into the ambulance and ride with the woman to the hospital, I, too, had been concerned about that old woman. And then, unconsciously, I had turned that feeling off as quickly and absently as you would turn off the tap. Back at my desk, going over and over the episode, I tried to fathom how I could stare at someone so helpless and in need one minute and window shop for sunglasses a minute or two later. It took me the better part of the afternoon to figure it out-and even before it came clear, I saw that some part of me did not want to understand it-and by mentally tracing my steps back to that disturbing scene on the sidewalk, and forcing myself to look down again, I saw at last what had so frightened me. It was my mother.

Reconstructing the moment in which the woman fell and then lay there on the concrete, small and pale in that ginlike autumn light, I broke open a door kept locked since my mother died, a door behind which hid every image of her steady decline into helplessness and senility and finally death. I saw a woman who for the last year of her life had come unmoored in time, a woman for whom the past now formed only a continuous present: one moment she was a child in a tiny South Carolina mill town, then a middle-aged single mother in Winston- Salem, North Carolina, then a happy single schoolteacher just out of college and dancing in the moonlight on the beach in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. In her mind, it was all the same, compassless and clockless. When she slept, her face was like a dozing child's, blank and slack, but sometimes, even in sleep, some emotion, faint as breath, would ripple across the surface, light and quick, like a little breeze across a glassy lake. Most wretched were the infrequent moments when she did break through the fog, when you could catch, behind the doll's-eye blankness of her gaze, some brief kindling of terrified awareness signaling that she knew where she was and what was happening. A month before she died, she woke up in the hospital and realized that her leg had been amputated. "Oh God," she cried, "please let me die. Don't take me a piece at a time." And it wasn't just her helplessness I saw but my own as well: all those moments staring down into a bed-beds in the nursing home where she lived out the last years of her life, or beds in the hospital where she would be taken occasionally, each time returning a little more disoriented. I remembered standing beside her, listening to her talk and trying to decide from moment to moment who she thought I was-her father, her husband, her son? Faced with the fact that the one person who had known me longer-and yes, adored me more-than anyone else now no longer knew who I was, I felt almost as lost as she was. Being with her eased the sadness. The worst times came when, driven by some kind of perverse optimism, I picked up the phone in New York and called her room in the infirmary in Winston-Salem and then sat there gripping the receiver, willing her to answer-the phone was right there within easy reach of the bed she never left. Sometimes I let it ring for a minute, and a minute can seem like a long time when no one is taking your call. I felt like a man trying to drill through a rock with a feather. As long as she was alive, I never had the phone disconnected, but she never picked it up again.

I can't say what surprised me more: the vividness of those memories or the unconscious ruthlessness with which I had buried them. Until the moment when that woman collapsed on the sidewalk, I would have said "banished," not "buried." But now I understood that those memories had never gone away. They had been there all along, waiting for the right moment to erupt.

When my mother died, I was not sad, only relieved. She would suffer no longer, and neither would I. There would be no more emergency plane trips for me when she went to the hospital, no more making decisions for her and hoping I was choosing wisely. There would be no more bills to pay or doctors to interrogate. I felt little guilt. But there was doubt. When my mother's considerate friends assured me that I had done all I could for her, I believed them, because I wanted to agree with them, and because "all I could do" was not necessarily the same thing as "all that could be done."

It sounds fanciful to say that after that afternoon I allowed my mother back into my life. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I acknowledged that I could no longer keep her out. I had been trying to do that for my whole adult life, without much success. When I was a child—her only child—we were inseparable. After that, I retreated, while she laid siege to my defenses in a battle that continued until she died. Each of us tried, at various times and in very different ways, to bridge the gap that lay between us. My mother wanted her little boy back. I wanted her to see me as I saw myself, not as the idealized child she had lost. Until she died, I nursed the hope that things could be better between us, and I believe she did, too. But both of us were stubborn. We each wanted the reconciliation on our terms, and neither of us gave an inch.

When my father died, six years before my mother, the ground felt like sponge beneath my feet for a few months, and then things righted themselves. My parents had divorced when I was twelve, and after that, my father and I rarely saw each other. We loved each other, but we were never close. When my mother died, it was as though a planet had suddenly been removed from the solar system, and not some marginal, Pluto-like dwarf planet but one as big as Jupiter or Saturn. It threw my whole life off balance, not for just a few months but forever. Even now, I find it hard to admit how much of my life was defined by her, how I lived-no matter how far away I got-with respect to her, and how much remained unchanged even after she was gone. Nothing about her dying surprised me much. It's how fiercely she stayed alive after she was dead that caught me unaware.

Pulling Strings

When I was five, my uncle took me to a marionette show. At first I did not want to go, because it meant missing a morning of kindergarten, but also because the show was in the elementary school across the street, and as an only child who spent most of my time alone, I was vaguely frightened at the thought of sitting with a lot of big kids I didn't know. But Uncle Tom explained that we would go together, and that was fine. I was used to going places with my uncle, a Presbyterian minister. Several times a week—and sometimes almost every day, now that he was picking me up at noon from the kindergarten at the First Presbyterian Church downtown—I accompanied him on his errands to the hospital, the newspaper, and sometimes to people's houses for what I learned were called pastoral visits. I liked it when things had special names that not everyone knew.

The big brick elementary school-built between the two world wars, when the architecture of schools was still as stolidly handsome as that of banks or post offices-sat across Patterson Avenue from my uncle's church and the manse where my aunt and uncle lived. (Manse was another one of those secret words I liked, but it was troublesome, too, because no one else I knew had any idea what I was talking about except the grown-ups in my family, and with them I just felt foolish if I asked, "Are we going back to the manse now?") Every afternoon I would stand in the yard and watch the big kids as they came out of school to walk home. I never beheld the broad, brick two-story building without feeling both eagerness and trepidation in equal measure. Then and for a long time thereafter, hope and fear were the two guiding polestars in my life. On the one hand, I was an incorrigible optimist. I had no reasons for this, never figured out where this notion that things were bound to get better came from, but nothing could extinguish it. At the same time, I spent a good part of every day being terrified of something-anything from mayonnaise in sandwiches to batting against the older kids in backyard baseball games. I was like the boy who confronts a roomful of manure and becomes convinced that som...

Edition details

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0307377725
• ISBN 13: 9780307377722
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240