Pug
I hadn’t really thought much about race until he asked me a simple question: “Damn, college boy, are you gonna be white your whole life?”
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“The big deal?” he went on. “Rolling bones is gambling! And gambling’s illegal! Goddam, college boy, are you gonna be white your whole goddam life?”
IT’S NOT CLEAR HOW it happened, but after a brief downgrade from “college boy” to “white boy,” I received from Maurice a nickname, Sponnie, and became his chief lieutenant at the Capitol. Maybe it was because I seemed as exotic to him as he was to me. I let slip that I’d gotten in trouble in high school for mooning a teacher, and that tickled him to no end. When we talk now—Maurice is 71 and living with his new wife, Larcina, in the East Austin home he grew up in—he always brings that up, plus another notable moment in traffic. “Yeah, Sponnie, do you remember that day we were driving to the post office and that rich white lady pulled up alongside of us, and she was digging in her nose? Had her finger in her nose up to here”—he points to the middle knuckle on his index finger—“and she was just digging. And you whispered to me, ‘Hey, Maurice, watch this,’ and you looked over at her and started digging in your own nose. Boy, that lady looked at you, diggin’ in that nose, and she took off, man. She didn’t know what to do. Those were some helluva times, boy.”
They were the days before FedEx was an everyday occurrence, and a big part of our work on the Run, as it was called, was to take packages to the Greyhound bus station for overnight delivery back to the members’ district offices. Every time, Maurice would get out of the Sub and go inside to fill out the paperwork, leaving me to load the packages onto the dolly and push it in myself, which usually meant a spill when I tried to negotiate the door and the dolly alone. By the time I’d regroup and get to the desk, he’d have every black employee in the place gathered around, and he’d laugh and point at me and say, “I think everybody ought to get ’em a white boy. Don’t you know my granddaddy is up in heaven right now givin’ his granddaddy some shit? Lemme give you a hand there, Sponnie.” And he’d help unload and then we’d be gone.
His favorite incident was the time I ran into an old girlfriend’s father at the main post office. Call this man Mr. Jones, and understand that he wasn’t crazy about me. I’d been a sophomore in college when I’d tried to date his daughter, but she was still in high school at that point and forbidden to leave the house with the likes of me. In fact, she was forbidden to leave the front porch with me. So two nights a week, and two nights only, we’d sit outside and talk. It was no good arrangement, but it was as close to a date as I could get, and I agreed to it.
But this encounter at the post office was a couple of years later, and I stopped to visit with Mr. Jones by the loading docks. Maurice was about twenty yards behind us, talking with a few guys who worked for the post office. Mr. Jones and I caught up for a minute, and then I got cute. I said, “Mr. Jones, you never got a chance to meet my father, did you?”
“Why, no, I didn’t,” he said and smirked.
“Hey, Pop,” I yelled without turning around. “Come here. I want you to meet somebody.”
Five seconds later Maurice put his left hand on Mr. Jones’ shoulder and his right hand out to shake. “How are you doing, white fella?” asked Maurice. Mr. Jones got the joke right away, which is not to say he thought it was funny.
It didn’t take long to fill in Maurice once we were back in the Sub. We had talked all about Mr. Jones and his daughter—we talked about everything in that Sub—and he did appreciate the joke. “I guess that man must have thought, ‘That’s how come I didn’t like this kid,’” said Maurice. “‘He got a damn black daddy.’”
We became inseparable. I got good at imitating Maurice, and during those semesters when I’d work afternoons, he could cut out of work early and I would cover for him. I’d make a phone call to the sergeants’ office from some remote spot on the Run and sound just like him. “This is the Mo-Man, and I need a sergeant with a flatbed dolly to pick some stuff up at the north door of the Capitol,” with “north door” pronounced to rhyme with “both know,” as in, “You and I both know Maurice has already left work today and won’t be showing up at any ‘north door,’ but does that have to be a problem?” No questions were ever asked.
There were a lot of favors like that. When I got crosswise with an Austin motorcycle cop who patrolled the lot where all the sergeants parked, and received a parking ticket a day for a week and a half, Maurice approached the cop and made up some story about my dad’s being a big-shot lawyer on the governor’s staff. The tickets stopped. And one day, when Maurice and I showed up for a free lunch being thrown for full-time staffers by some lobbying group or another, I was stopped at the door by our boss, who pointed out that while Maurice was invited, I was not. Maurice got hot and snapped at our boss, “Look here. He’s with me, and if he’s gotta leave, I gotta leave,” and our boss let me stay.
But then, when we found a table, Maurice looked at me. “Now you know what it’s like, white boy, and if it had been the other way around, would you have said the same thing? Or would you have just let me go and you stay? Because, John, I can remember when that was the way this shit happened.”
MAURICE ALWAYS CALLED me John instead of Sponnie when the talk turned serious. This was about the time the film Mississippi Burning came out, and I remember asking him if he was going to see it. There was some controversy around the film, a few critics who’d complained that Hollywood was incapable of producing such a movie unless heroes were made of the white FBI agents from up north rather than the black Southerners who actually suffered Jim Crow, and I wondered what Maurice thought about that. He had a different complaint.
“Man, John, I can’t watch that shit,” he said. “It’s just a movie to you, but that was my life. Like one time, when my son Leonard was a little boy, back in the fifties, I took him into town one day. And at the State or the Paramount, one of those theaters over there, Roy Rogers was playing. Leonard told me, ‘Daddy, let’s go see Roy Rogers. He’s a cowboy,’ and I had to say, ‘No, son, we can’t go see Roy Rogers.’ He said, ‘Why not, Daddy? Ain’t you got any money?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I got money.’ And he said, ‘Well, then how come we can’t go?’ Now you try to explain to your son why he can’t go see Roy Rogers. You got plenty of money, but he can’t go. You tell him he can’t go because he’s black.
“Or like my mother’s mother’s mother, my great-grandmother. She lived to be 108 years old, and she used to tell us some helluva stuff.” He thought about it, and for a moment, the memories were light. “Me and my older brother used to go see her, and I remember she used to chew tobacco and dip snuff—at the same time, man, spitting that tobacco into a little can she kept. And when she wasn’t chewing and dipping, she used to chew chewing gum, and she’d chew that gum until she got all the sweet out of it, and then she’d give it to me and my brother.” He laughed. “Boy, we chewed the hell out of that gum.”
But he couldn’t stay light. “You know, though, she used to get around pretty good, and she’d walk with us and tell us stuff, about back in the slavery time and the way things used to be. Her husband would be in the house in the mornings, and the boss would come and make him go into the field, and then the boss would have an affair with her. That was my great-grandmother, man. I knew her.
“She used to tell me stuff that made me cry, John. And when I was coming up, we used to visit my uncle and them in La Grange, and when my dad would stop at the service station and we’d have to use the restroom, they’d say, ‘No restroom. You gotta go out back.’ Or to eat, we’d have to go in the kitchen. Man, I saw some shit that’s unbelievable today. I tell my kids about it and they just start laughing. They say, ‘Ahhh, Dad.’”
THE RUN GREW beyond straight-shot drives from the Capitol to the post office, stretching to include side trips through East Austin, where Maurice would show me the places he’d grown up and the nightclubs he’d owned before he’d gone to work for the State. He introduced me to friends he’d had his whole life, some in their eighties, with names like Tailgate, Chili, Sarge, Scout, and Money Brown. Every time Maurice introduced me he’d say, “This is Sponnie. He’s that white boy I told you about, the one who shot the moon at his teacher in high school.”
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