I listened to Carter on NPR the other day as he discussed that time. His familiar soft drawl — a sweet voice, with that undercurrent of regret and wonder that signals a southerner's nostalgia drifting back over a considerable distance — called back in my own mind a summer in southern Maryland many years ago, when I was a nine-year-old white boy and my best friend was Charles, the son of a black tenant farmer.
It's a familiar memory to people who remember the South in the days before Brown v. Board of Education — the days of Jim Crow racism (I have thousands of memories of that) accompanied by the bittersweet, paradoxical business of real, exuberant friendships between black children and white children: innocent intimacies, prelapsarian. Those friendships have the quality of Mark Twain boyhoods — not entirely a matter of Tom Sawyer's rapscallion innocence, but something of boyhood bitterly shadowed, as "Huckleberry Finn" was, by violence, alcoholism, hatred, vicious stupidity and the precocious knowledge of evil. Harper Lee had the atmosphere in "To Kill a Mockingbird."
My 10-year-old brother, Hugh, and I had been, in effect, exiled for the summer, in the care of our teenage Aunt Sally, to a small vacation cottage (no electricity, no running water) on a backcountry farm absentee-owned by a friend of my father's. You went a mile down a dirt road crusted with crushed oyster shells until you came to the cottage. The yard was overgrown with tall grass, and if you weren't careful you might fall into the small, empty cracked-concrete swimming pool. A path led down to Charles Creek, a tributary of Chesapeake Bay. There was a ramshackle dock with many planks missing, and a skiff, from which we caught crabs by trailing knotted twine behind us in the weedy, brackish-green water. We were impressed by the stupidity of the crabs, which clung stubbornly to the twine as we hauled them up to die in the skiff.
Hughie and I preferred to live with the tenant farmer's family in their unpainted, weathered house half a mile down the road. My brother, Charles and I stayed up reading the Montgomery Ward's catalog by the coal oil lamp, fantasizing over the cowboy boots that were available for $5.95 (an impossible sum of money), and falling asleep in sleeping bags on the living room floor. (The news the other day that Montgomery Ward's had gone out of business bumped in my mind against Jimmy Carter's voice and memories — all items from a lost world.)
Charles aspired to be a jockey, and he would gallop from place to place, slapping the back of his thighs with his hands to make the sound of a horse's hoofs. His father had a plowhorse named Bill, a long-suffering white mare. The three of us boys would climb aboard the broad acreage of Bill's back and ride her down the oystershell road to the blacktop and then on to Chink's roadhouse, where we would go in by the "Colored" entrance and there, in a barroom twilight amid the stale beer and dead cigarette smells, Charles would with utmost deference approach the owner Chink and place our morning's bets on the numbers. We never bet more than 10 cents, all in pennies, money collected from Aunt Sally and Charles' mother, Leola, and from our own stash. We never won, never hit the number, though we tried elaborate systems (jumbled birthdays and the like). But the trip to Chink's remained all summer a hopeful ritual, an adventure.
I have not revisited this memory in years. It represents, I think, a sort of private racial Eden, previous to the knowledge of color differences and all the ugliness in America that has always proceeded from those.