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Ten days from now, it will be Xmas, 1995. Please ask your mother to let me know when and where to call you on Xmas morning. Last year, I was thrilled during our Xmas call when the wind-up rhinoceros I gave you invaded the doll house your mother gave you, turned over the crib and threw the dining room table out the window. "Win' he up, win' he up again!" you cried gleefully, wanting the havoc to go on.
Though we were living in Virginia Beach at the time, my mother and I spent Xmas of 1973 in Shreveport. I called my father and made plans to see him Xmas Eve. My sister Heloise dropped me off at the end of his driveway, and I walked down it toward his garage apartment.
By this time, you see, my father was in the last phase of his life, back in Shreveport living in a series of garage apartments, most owned by Arthur Sr., on whatever funds he could earn with a deservedly horrible reputation and a small monthly subsidy from his father. The lengthy list of Arthur Jr.'s accomplishments and abilities was overweighed throughout his hometown by his equally well known habits of heavy drinking, dishonesty and abrasiveness. In late 1973, this genius, who had at various times been Louisiana's top life insurance salesman, an engineer in charge of inspecting nuclear missile silos throughout the Southwest and an Economics professor at a respected university was reduced to collecting weekly rent door to door in "the bottoms," a term that refers to the district in a town closest to a river, thus most likely to flood and therefore subject to the lowest rents. Here, along the Red River in Shreveport, weekly cash sums of $5 to $10 were collected from tenants of "shotgun houses."
Shotgun houses are one room wide and several rooms deep with doors connecting the rooms in a straight line and no hallway. Their descriptive name, according to Southern urban legend, is based on the fact that a shotgun blast fired straight into the open front door, with all interior doors and the back door also open, would pass completely through the house without hitting a wall. It may be that they are actually descended from traditional West African sho'gun dwellings, but the urban legend persists. Similarly, "Shanty Towns" are supposed to be collections of "shantys," from the old Quebecois carpentry term, "chantier," meaning "trellis," but may have originally referred to "Ashanti Town," meaning a neighborhood where one would find a high concentration of residents of African (as in the Ashanti tribe) descent. Your grandmother Helen, who wrote her freshman college English term paper on the question of whether black Southerners had acquired their speech habits from white Southerners or vice versa, would know more about this. However, she never collected weekly cash rent in these perpetually depressed, oppressed, crime-ridden areas, as did your grandfather, Arthur F. Shuey, Jr.
Walking past the main house toward the garage, above which was my father's apartment, I heard shouting, and reached the back yard to find my father, massive hands on hips, neck craned back, and bald head gleaming in the wintry sunset, weaving slightly, talking to a woman who was weaving more impressively than he, possibly because she was weaving on his roof and threatening to jump. "Merry Xmas, Dad," was my cheery greeting as I walked up to him.
He turned and sized me up, having not seen me in a year, and grimly rumbled, "I don't let hippies in my house." I took my shoulder-plus length hair and trudged three miles back to 1030 E. Kings Highway, where my mother and the rest of the family shared my distress at my father's reaction to his only child, regardless of hair length. I didn't tell them about the woman on the roof, who had, of course, had a great deal to do with his behavior, but correct Southern decision making at that time always sacrificed the character of a man completely before questioning that of a woman. The family's unanimous suggestion that I wait an hour or so and then call my father back was appropriate under any circumstances, however, and I did so. He picked me up in a wheezing old Chevrolet shortly thereafter.
Without referring to our earlier meeting, he said that he was very happy to see me and that he had some job-related errands to run. Explaining first that there would be a certain amount of danger involved, he asked if I would like to accompany him, and I said I would. Seeing my father and being in danger at the same time provided all a boy could want out of an evening, so, with a great belch of exhaust smoke, the Chevy pulled out and headed for Cuban Liquor, one of Shreveport's busiest retail establishments to this day. We went into the store, and I watched my father tell the counter clerk that he was to pick up three cases of muscatel for his boss, the man who owned all of those damn shotgun houses in the bottoms. Somehow, he convinced the clerk that it was okay to hand over 36 bottles of cheap wine, which we loaded into the back seat and trunk of the car.
As we drove toward the bottoms, he explained that we would be distributing the wine to tenants door to door as a public relations gesture; that they would appreciate it a great deal, and that their appreciation would make them both pay their rent on time and not rob the rentman, who walked their streets on an evil errand each Friday with at the same time with a bag of money. As we pulled up to the first shotgun house and stopped, my father told me to stay in the car and to drive away if there was any trouble. Wine bottle in hand, he walked through the dirt yard and past the chinaberry tree, knocked on the front door, and literally sang out, "Rent man, at your door / Pay me right now or I'll be back at four."
A thin, antique voice quavered through the cracks under the door and windows, saying, "Ah done paid you earlier today, Mistah Arthah, an' you give me a receipt. Doan you 'membah?" My father said that he wasn't really there to collect rent, but to bring a gift instead. The suspicious woman inside asked what the gift was, and he told her that it was a bottle of wine.
"Ah doan drink, Mistah Arthah. The Devil gits in wine bottles an' ah doan want nuttin' to do wid it," said the pious crone.
"Well, I thought you might want to serve it to company, or pass it along as a present to somebody, or cook with it, and it's good for rheumatism, they say," my father wheedled, determined to perform this goodwill gesture regardless of religious obstacles. At the last suggestion, the resident allowed that she, too, had heard that wine was good for rheumatism, and that she would keep it for medicinal purposes. My father set the wine bottle down on the porch and came back to the car.
We sat for almost a minute before the door creaked open and a wizened black arm cautiously emerged at about knee height, made contact with the bottle neck, and then quickly whisked it inside. The door locked again and we drove to the next renter's abode. Variations on this scenario (including the singsong introduction, similar to the street calls of vendors in Porgy and Bess and a traditional part of direct business dealings in the old Deep South) occurred during our public relations mission through the bottoms, as when a burly, Stetsoned, 300-pound man in his late fifties, tears streaming down his cheeks, proclaimed that was the only Xmas gift he would get. When all 36 bottles were distributed and a brief period of goodwill and holiday celebration achieved in these wretched, hopeless shacks, my father drove me back to 1030 E. Kings Highway, where I spent the next day's Xmas with my maternal relatives.
I learned a few weeks later that my father had been fired for charging that wine on his employer's account. I learned two years later that the woman from the roof was passed out drunk in my father's apartment, and that her presence there had necessitated his getting rid of me early in the evening and keeping me away from his apartment later.