Johnny Cash - Cash: The Autobiography

Cash by Johnny Cash
Cash: The Autobiography
Johnny Cash with Patrick Carr
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To John Carter Cash The Gift. You have it. Never forget.Lyrics from The Ballad of Ira Hayes by Peter LaFarge, copyright 1962,1964 (renewed) by Edward B. Marks Music Company. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
Lyrics from Farther Along by Jack Fascinato, copyright 1990 (renewed) by Bayshore Music Corporation. All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission.
Contents Acknowledgments
Part I Cinnamon Hill
Part II The Road
Part III Port Richey
Part IV Don Aqua
Part V The Road Again A Recording Overview: A Johnny Cash Discography
Acknowledgements For encouragement and inspiration, Jack Shaw, June Carter, Lou Robin, Mark Chimsky, Patrick Carr, Tom Grady, W. S. Holland, Karen Adams, Kelly Hancock, Lisa Trice, Joanne Cash Yates, Louise Garrett, Tommy Cash, Reba Hancock, Jack Cash, Roy Cash, and George T. and Winifred Kelley.
To Billy Graham, who suggested this book in the first place, then continued to encourage me to do it. And a special thanks to Reba Hancock. You gave all for me, day and night, for forty years. And many, many more I'll regret not mentioning when I realize that I didn't.
Patrick Carr adds some others to thank for their work on this book: David Hennessy, Debra Kalmon, Terri Leonard, Kevin McShane, Ann Moru, Karen Robin, Joseph Rutt, Robin Sturmthal, Steve Sullivan, Kris Tobiassen, Lyn Wray, and Chris Wright.

Part I Cinnamon Hill 1 My line comes down from Queen Ada, the sister of Malcolm IV, descended from King Duff, the first king of Scotland. Ada's holdings encompassed all the land east of the Miglo River in the Valley of the Bran, in what is now the county of Fife. Malcolm's castle is long gone, but you can still see some of its stones in the walls of the church tower in the little village of Strathmiglo. The motto on my people's coat of arms was Better Times Will Come. Their name was Caesche; with emigration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it came to be spelled the way it was pronounced, C-A-S-H. The first American Cash was William, a mariner who captained his own ship, the Good Intent, sailing out of Glasgow across the Atlantic with cargoes of pilgrims for the New World until he himself settled in Essex County, Massachusetts, in 1667. His descendants migrated to Westmoreland County, Virginia, in the very early 1700s, before George Washington was born there, and then moved on to Bedford and Amherst counties. My direct line went farther south, to Henry and Elbert counties in Georgia, where my great-grandfather, Reuben Cash, was born. He fought for the Confederacy and survived the Civil War. His home didn't. Sherman's troops stripped and burned his Georgia plantation, so he moved his family farther west, homesteading across the Mississippi in Arkansas when his son, my grandfather, William Henry Cash, was six. William Henry Cash grew up in Toledo, Arkansas, a community that began disappearing as soon as the railroad came through nearby Rison. He became a farmer and a minister, what they called a circuit rider, a traveling preacher serving four widely scattered congre- gations. He rode a horse and he carried a gun, and never once did he take a penny for his preachingthough as my daddy told it, the yard and the barn and the stableswere full of animals people had given him, and there was always enough to feed his twelve children. Parkinson's disease sent him from this world at the age of fifty-two, in 1912. Daddy, the youngest son and the only child still at home, was just fifteen at the time, but he supported my gjandmother until her death three years later, after which he enlisted in the army. His first posting, in 1916, was to General John J. Pershing's command in Deming, New Mexico, and he was under Pershing when Pancho Villa came through and burned Columbus. I remember him telling me that for three nights he lay with his head in Mexico and his feet in Texas, waiting for Villa. Villa never came; Pershing had to go looking for him. Daddy's name was Ray Cash. He married my mother, Carrie Rivers, on August 18, 1920. I was their fourth child. Daddy had a lot, but he didn't have money. The Depression had ruined cotton farmingalready a hard, marginal living for people like him at the bottom of the systemand he had to take whatever work could be had. Sometimes none could, so he spent his days roaming with his .22 rifle after squirrels, rabbits, possum, whatever might feed his family. Given a shot, he didn't miss. He couldn't afford toin those days a box of shells cost twenty cents. He worked at the sawmill; he cleared land; he laid track for the railroad; and when no work was available locally, he rode the freights to wherever adver- tisement, rumor, or chance offered payment in cash. Our house was right on the railroad tracks, out in the woods, and one of my earliest memories is of seeing him jump out of a moving boxcar and roll down into the ditch in front of our door. Lots of men did that. The trains slowed near our house, so it was a popular spot for jumping to avoid the railroad detectives at the station in Kingsland. Those were certainly men to be avoided. I rememberDaddy telling me about a time when he'd been riding the rodsclinging to the crossbars under a moving boxcar, a terribly dangerous way of riding unobserved. When the train stopped in Pine Bluff and he crawled out, he found a railroad detective standing right there. He suffered a beating and a cussing out, which he just had to stand there and take if he didn't want jail or worse. But when the train started moving again and the detective began walking away as the caboose came by, Daddy jumped on and hung there, cursing that railroad bull until he was out of sight. He laughed about that: he got in a few licks of his own and he got to ride in style, out from under those boxcars. That same bull, by the way, picked on another hobo a while later. It wasn't his lucky day; the hobo pulled a gun and shot him dead. My name is John R. Cash. I was born on February 2.6, 193Z, in Kingsland, Arkansas. I'm one of seven children: Roy, the eldest, then Louise, Jack, myself, Reba, Joanne, and Tommy. We all grew up working the cotton fields. I married Vivian Liberto of San Antonio, Texas, when I was twenty-two and went on to have four daugh- ters with her: Rosanne, Kathy, Cindy, and Tara. Vivian and I parted, and in 1968 I married June Carter, who is still my wife. We have one child together, John Carter, my only son. June brought two daughters, Carlene and Rosie, to our marriage. Now we have a combined total of twelve grandchildren and so many sons-in-law, past and pre- sent, that June makes a joke of it in her stage act. My work life has been simple: cotton as a youth and music as an adult. In between I was an automobile factory worker in Michigan, a radio intercept operator for the United States Air Force in Germany, and a door-to-door appliance salesman for the Home Equipment Company of Memphis, Tennessee. I was a great radio operator and a terrible salesman. I hated the assembly line.My first records were on the Sun label, run by Mr. Sam Phillips in Memphis and featuring Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Charlie Rich, and others as well as myself. My first single was Cry, Cry, Cry in 1955, my first big hit I Walk the Line in 1956. I left Sun Records for Columbia in 1958, and shortly after that I left Memphis for California. My affair with pills had already begun. It quickly became all-consuming, eating me up for the next decade or so. Amazingly, it didn't completely ruin my career. During those years I made music I'm still proud ofpar- ticularly Ride This Train, Bitter Tears, and my other con- cept albumsand I had commercial success: Ring of Fire was a big hit for me in 1963. By that time I'd destroyed my family and was working hard on doing the same to myself. I survived, though. I moved to Nashville, kicked my habit, and married June. My career accelerated. The Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison album was a huge success, and in 1969 I began hosting The Johnny Cash Show on the ABC TV network. After Flesh and Blood in 1970, I didn't have a chart-topping single until One Piece at a Time in 1976, long after The Johnny Cash Show was history. Between the early '70s and the early '90s I didn't sell huge numbers of records, but again I have to say that I made some music I'm still proud of, and those years weren't dull. I wrote my first autobiography, Man in Bbck, and my first novel, Man in White. I teamed up with Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and Willie Nelson in the Highwaymen. I left Columbia, owned by CBS Records, and went to Mercury/Polygram. I got elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. I got addicted to pain pills, got treated at the Betty Ford Clinic, recovered, got addicted again, and recovered again. I just about died, got savedby heart bypass surgery, and just about died again. I worked hundreds and hundreds of shows. I kept my operation together, more or less, until the wheel of for- tune rolled around to me again. That happened in 1994, when I formed an alliance with Rick Rubin, producer of radically non-Nashvillian acts like the Beastie Boys and Red Hot Chili Peppers, and made my American Recordings album. According to the media at the time, that caused an overnight change in my status from Nashville has-been to hip icon. Whatever they called me, I was grateful. It was my second major comeback; the minor ones have been too many to count. I'm still on the circuit today, still recording, still writ- ing songs, still showing up to play everywhere from Midwestern auditoriums to Manhattan trend spots to the Royal Albert Hall. I'm in reasonable shape physically and financially. I'm still a Christian, as I have been all my life. Beyond that I get complicated. I endorse Kris Kristofferson's line about me: He's a walking contradic- tion, partly truth and partly fiction. I also like Rosanne's line: He believes what he says, but that don't make him a saint. I do believe what I say. There are lev- els of honesty, though. And there are levels of intimacy. I go by various names. I'm Johnny Cash in public and on record sleeves, CD labels, and billboards. I'm Johnny to many people in the business, some of them friends and acquaintances of many years. To June, I'm John, and that's my name among other intimates: my band, my sons-in-law, many friends, and people who work closely with me. Finally, I'm J.R., my name from childhood. My brothers and sis- ters and other relatives still call me that. So does Marty Stuart. Lou Robin, my manager, alternates between J.R. and John.June recognizes that I operate at various levels, so she doesn't always call me John. When I'm paranoid or bel- ligerent, she'll say, Go away, Cash! It's time for Johnny to come out. Cash is her name for the star, the egoma- niac. Johnny is her name for her playmate. Several names, several homes. I'm part gypsy, part homebody, so I live according to a rhythm alien to most people but natural to me, splitting my time on a semi- predictable basis between my big house on Old Hickory Lake just outside Nashville; my farm at Bon Aqua, far- ther outside Nashville; the house in Port Richey, Florida, that June inherited from her parents; an endless succes- sion of hotels all over the world; my bus; and my house in Jamaica, Cinnamon Hill. Today I'm sitting on my back porch, high on my hill, looking out northward over the Caribbean toward Cuba ninety miles away. It's peaceful here. The occa- sional thudding of an ax or buzz of a chain saw comes down out of the woods climbing up around my house, and behind me, somewhere back in the house itself, I can hear the little sounds of Desna, Carl, Geraldine, Donna, and Mr. Poizer, our Jamaican staff, preparing breakfast. Otherwise it's just the shifting clear light, the circling of john-crows and darting of hummingbirds, the soft rustle of tropical leaves in the trade winds. I love this place. I look over toward the front gate and see a guard walking the perimeter, one of our regulars, a wiry, grim-looking character toting a nickel-plated Remington 12.-gauge. All I can say about him is that I'm glad he's on my side. I've been thinking about the robberyI've had to for this book, otherwise I'd just as soon forget itbut I'm not in the mood to tell that story. I'd much rather address its antidote, the flip side of violence, tragedy, addiction, and all the other many trials and tribulations this world has to offer. So right at the beginning here, I'm going totake stock of my blessings and tell you what I'm thankful for. It always puts things in perspective. I'm thankful for a pair of shoes that really feel good on my feet; I like my shoes. I'm thankful for the birds; I feel like they're singing just for me when I get up in the morning, saying Good morning, John. You made it, John. And that first ray of sunshine; I'm thankful for living through the night to see it. I'm thank- ful I don't have a terminal disease, that I'm in fairly good health, that I can get up in the morning and walk down and have breakfast, then walk along the jungle trails and smell the flowersthe jasmine, the love vines, the orchids. I'm thankful that I have a good wife beside me, that I can trust her and depend on her in a lot of ways. I'm thankful she's a soul mate, that we can talk to each other sometimes without even speaking and have an under- standing on a lot of things. I'm thankful she loves my children. I'm thankful I don't have rambling on my mind, that I'm not thinking about other women, so long as I keep my heart and mind together. I'm thankful I don't have a passion for cars, like so many entertainers who blow all their money that way my car is almost nine years old and I have no intention of trading it in. I'm thankful that money is not my god, that for me it's a means to an end. I'm thankful for my familythankful for daughters and grandchildren and a son who love me, and thankful that their love is unconditional. I have a lot of good friends, and I'm thankful for them, too. I'm thankful for my giftmy mother always called my voice the giftand that even though I haven't writ- ten a song in quite a while, I've got a bunch of them rais- ing Cain in my brain, wanting to be laid down on paper. I'm thankful that God has inspired me to want to write,and that He might possibly use me to influence some- body for the good, if I can see the opportunities through the smokescreen of my own ego. I'm thankful I'm not the ugliest man in the world, that I'm not all that ashamed to go on stage and face a crowd. I'm no piaure, but if I were as ugly as some I've seen on stage, I wouldn't go. I'm not talking about phys- ical appearances especially, but ugly souls. Finally, I'm thankful, very thankful, that at this moment I have absolutely no craving for any kind of drug. I've been up almost three hours today, and this is the first time I've thought about it, and even then it's in the spirit of gratitude. So my disease isn't active. Last night I saw a bottle of wine passed around the table, and I never once thought about taking even a sip of it. (So why am I thinking about it now? Watch it, Cash! Gotta never be complacent. Never take anything for granted. Don't forget, great prices have been paid and will be paid again if you get too smug, too egotistical and self- assured.) I'm thankful for the sea breeze that feels so good right now, and the scent of jasmine when the sun starts going down. I'm a happy man. I'm thankful I was led to this place. Jamaica has saved and renewed me more times than I can count. Partly it's the isolation. It's not Nashville, or Tennessee, or even the United States, and the Jamaican telephone system has its own mysterious schedule beyond the influence of even the most important people. Sometimes it decides that I just don't need it. Usually it's right. That's nice enough, but I love Jamaica for deeper reasons. The lushness of the vegetation, the purity of the air, the rainwashed hills, the sparkling sky atnightthese are pieces of my childhood in Arkansas. Back then, back there, the air was so clear that even if the moon wasn't up, sometimes the stars by themselves would be so bright that they'd cast enough light for you to see your way. I loved that. I loved walking through the woods down the trail to the river where I'd go fishing long about May and June when the growing season was in its prime, whipping my fishing pole through the leaves ahead of me to expose the cottonmouth moccasins that would lurk just off the trail. I loved the greenery, the growing things in their seasons, the constancy and the dependability of it all. You knownext May, the fishing trail will be the same as it is this May. There'll be May pops, the little fruit that comes out in May every year. There'll be blackberries by the Fourth of July, depend on it. Pretty soon, it'll be warm enough to start going bare- foot.... At a very early age I looked forward to all that, to the seasons turning and nature taking its course. And while I didn't put such words to it at the time, I was very aware that I was part of naturethat I sprang from the soil, and as long as I followed the natural order of things, I'd be okay. I remember just how the earth felt under my bare feet, even the rocks in the road. I didn't wear shoes year- round, except to school, until I was about fifteen, and the soles of my feet were like leather. I remember the taste of green peas straight from the plant, the tantalizing differ- ence between the peas themselves and their sweet, crisp shells. I remember raw okraI'd pick pieces off the plants as I passed through the fields. I remember how wonderful it felt to sit down in the tomato patch and eat the ripe ones straight off the vine. In Jamaica I can come close to those days and those ways. Here, you can depend on the ackee trees to put out their fruit each year. During the rainy season you can count on runoff from the mountains rushing over thewaterfall near my house, just as you know it will slow to a trickle come January and February. Any night of the year you can walk out any door and look up, and there above you will be all the brilliance and beauty of the stars; I've looked through a telescope from here and seen as many as five of the moons of Jupiter. From here I can get in my car and go down to one of the local markets and buy tomatoes with their stems still on, potatoes still flecked with dirt from the fields. 1 can pick bananas from the trees in my own yard when they're perfectly ripe, just exactly right, and no banana in the world ever tasted as good. I can go barefoot, even if my sixty-five-year-old soles aren't nearly as tough as that Arkansas country boy's. I can feel the rhythms of the earth, the growing and the blooming and the fading and the dying, in my bones. My bones. When we clasp hands around the dinner table every night and I ask God to grant us rest and restoration, that's the kind of restoration I'm talking about: to keep us as one with the Creator. To rest in nature's arms.2 Inside me, my boyhood feels so close, but when I look around, it sometimes seems to belong to a vanished world. In the United States in the late 1990s, is it really possible to imagine whole families, boys and girls of eight to eighteen at their parents' sides in the cot- ton fields, working through the July heat from dawn to dusk, driving away exhaustion with songs of the spirit? Are there still places where a young boy can leave his house after breakfast with just a fishing pole and spend the whole day rambling and adventuring alone, unsu pervised and unafraid, trusted and un-feared for? perhaps there are. I hope so. But I suspect otherwise. I think that even if such places do exist, our televisions have blinded us to them. I was talking with a friend of mine about this the other day: that country life as I knew it might really be a thing of the past and when music people today, perform- ers and fans alike, talk about being country, they don't mean they know or even care about the land and the life it sustains and regulates. They're talking more about choicesa way to look, a group to belong to, a kind of music to call their own. Which begs a question: Is there anything behind the symbols of modern country, or are the symbols themselves the whole story? Are the hats, the boots, the pickup trucks, and the honky-tonking poses all that's left of a disintegrating culture? Back in Arkansas, a way of life produced a certain kind of music. Does a certain kind of music now produce a way of life? Maybe that's okay. I don't know. Perhaps I'm just alienated, feeling the cold wind of exclusion blowing my way. The country music estab- lishment, including country radio and the Country Music Association, does after all seem to have decided that whatever country is, some of us aren't.I wonder how many of those people ever filled a cot- ton sack. I wonder if they know that before I became not country in the '90s, their predecessors were calling me not country in the '50s and the '60s, and the '70s too (I was invisible in the '80s). But that's a minor irritant. It doesn't even come close to the happiness I feel about being given a new lease on a creative life I thought might be drawing to a close, or the thrill of playing to eager young audiences. Sometimes that feels like '56 all over again, out there on the road in the first days of rock 'n' roll with Carl, Roy, Jerry Lee, Elvis, and all those other Memphis rabble-rousers. But yes, before rock 'n' roll there was country, and before Memphis, for me anyway, there was Arkansas. The first song I remember singing was I Am Bound for the Promised Land. I was in the back of a flatbed truck on the road to Dyess, Arkansas, from the first house I remember living in: the place next to the tracks out in the woods near Kingsland, Arkansas, where my family had ended up after a succession of moves dictated by the rig- ors of the Depression. That was a real bare-bones kind of place, three rooms in a row, the classic shotgun shack. It shook like the dickens every time a train went by. It wasn't as bad as the house I'd been born in, though. I don't remember living in that one, but I saw it once when I went to visit my grandfather. It was a last resort. It did- n't have windows; in winter my mother hung blankets or whatever she could find. With what little we had, my par- ents did a lot. The new house toward which the flatbed truck was taking us was something else, a brand-new deal of the New Deal. Late in 1934, Daddy had heard about a new program run by the Federal Emergency Relief Adminis- tration in which farmers like him who had been ruined by the Depression were to be resettled on land the gov- ernment had bought. As he explained it in later years,We heard that we could buy twenty acres of land with no money down, and a house and barn, and they would give us a mule and a cow and furnish groceries through the first year until we had a crop and could pay it back, and we didn't have to pay until the crops came in. That's exactly what the deal was, and more: in forty-six different places in the agricultural United States, these colonies were being created on a cooperative basis. In the settlement toward which we were headed, we and all the other families would have a stake in the general store, the cannery, the cotton gin, and other facilities; we were all responsible for them and we all shared in their profits, if any. The cotton we produced would go into the com- munal crop to be sold higher up the line for better prices than small individual crops could be. So as I've said in the past, I grew up under socialismkind of. Maybe a better word would be communalism. Our new community was named after the adminis- trator of the FERA program for Arkansas, W. R. Dyess. All in all, it covered about 16,000 acres of delta bottom- land in Mississippi County. It was laid out like the spokes of a wagon wheel. Our place was Number 266, out on Road Three, about two and a half miles from the center. I remember coming to that house so clearly. It took us two days to travel the 250 miles from Kingsland, first on gravel roads and then on dirt roads turned to mud by a hard, bitterly cold rain. We had to stop overnight by the roadside in the truck the government had sent for us, and we kids slept in the back with just a tarpaulin between us and the rain, listening to Moma cry and sing. Sometimes Moma would cry and sometimes she'd sing, and sometimes it was hard to tell which was which. As my sister Louise put it later, that was one of the nights when you couldn't tell. It all sounded the same. When we finally got to Dyess, the truck couldn't get up the dirt road to our house, so Daddy had to carry meon his back the last hundred yards through the thick black Arkansas mudgumbo, we called it. And that's where I was when I saw the Promised Land: a brand-new house with two big bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, a front porch and a back porch, an out- side toilet, a barn, a chicken house, and a smokehouse. To me, luxuries untold. There was no running water, of course, and no electricity; none of us even dreamed of miracles like that. The house and the outbuildings were simple and basic, but sound, and identical to all the homesites in the colony. All of them were built to the same plan by the same thirty-man construction crew, who'd complete one site every two days, then move on to the next. I vividly remember the sight of their empty paint buckets, five of them, sitting in the middle of the living room floor, the only objects in the house: green for the trim, white for everything else. We settled in as best we could that first night. I don't remember how we stayed warm. The next day, Daddy put on a pair of hip waders and went out to take stock of our land. It was jungleI mean real jungle. Cottonwood and elm and ash and hickory as well as scrub oak and cypress, the trees and vines and bushes tangled up so thick in places that you couldn't get through, some of it underwater, some of it pure gumbo but Daddy could see its potential. We've got some good land, he said simply when he came back, with an air of hope and thanks we could all feel. That was a significant remark. The land was awfully hard to clear, but Daddy and my oldest brother, Roy, then almost fourteen, went at it from dawn till nighttime six days a week, starting on the highest ground and working their way downward foot by foot, cutting with saws and axes and kaiser blades long-handled machetesand then dynamiting and burn- ing out the stumps. By planting season the first year they had three acres ready. Two went for cotton, a cash cropDaddy would use to make his first payment to the gov- ernment, and the other went for animal feed and food for our table: corn, beans, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and strawberries. The crops came in well that first year, and the Cashes were on their way. The following spring I was five and ready for the cotton fields. You often hear Southern musicians of my genera- tion, black and white, bluesmen, hillbilly singers, and rockabillies alike, talking about picking cotton (and doing whatever it took to get out of the cotton fields), but I've sometimes wondered if the people listening to us, who are usually younger and/or more urban than we are, have any real grasp of the life we're talking about. I doubt if most people these days even know what cotton is, beyond being a comfortable kind of fabric. Maybe they'd like to know. Maybe you would, if only as musi- cological background. Huge swatches of the blues and country music do after all come from the cotton fields in a very real way: many a seminal song was actually cre- ated there, and even more were spread from person to person. Here, then, is how it went with cotton and us. We planted our seeds in April, and if we worked hard enough and our labors bore fruit and the Big Muddy didn't rise and the army worms didn't come through and no other natural disasters were visited upon us, the first blooms opened on plants that were four feet high in October. We began picking soon after that, though we couldn't pick efficiently until a killing frost had stripped the leaves off the plants and made the bolls easier to see. Picking lasted on through December, when the winter rains started coming and the cotton started turning dark, descending in quality and losing its value as it did so. These days they spray the plants with chemicals so the leaves will fall off early, then harvest withmachines. They're polluting the groundwater and ruining the land. We never used any chemicals on our landnot that I have anything against fertilizers when they're prop- erly used; we just couldn't afford them. Our cotton was of the Delta Pine variety, so called because its long fibers, much longer than most commer- cial cotton grown in the United States at the time, reminded whoever named it of pine needles. Our rich, virgin Delta land supported it well, and in our first few years, before the soil got tired, our yield was outstanding. I remember Daddy bragging about two bales to the acre, which was unheard of in other parts of the country: neck- high plants just covered up with bolls, and Strict High Middlin' cotton all the way. Which I guess calls for an explanation. Strict High Middlin', like the everyday expression fair to middlin', was a grade of cotton. When we got our crop to the gin, they'd take a knife and cut into the bales. The expert would pull the fibers out and fool with them a while, then make his decision, write down the grade, and tie it to the bale of cotton. He'd be looking mostly at the length of the fibers, their strength, and their color, and the grades he had to work with, if I remember it right, were Strict High Middlin', High Middlin', Fair to Middlin', Middlin', Low Middlin', and Strict Low Middlin'. Those grades mattered a lot, too: when you got the bales to market, a bale of Strict Low Middlin' would go for, say, twenty-eight cents a pound, whereas Strict High Middlin' would get you thirty-five cents. After the first few years of spectacular yields, Daddy's hope was that he could get Fair to Middlin' from our land, even if the yield kept going down. By the time I was into my teens, we were really lucky to get a bale to the acre; usually it was more like ten or twelve bales of cotton from twenty acres. Finally it got down to where an acre wasn't giving us more than three-quarters of a bale. That was when a lot of the farmers in Dyessstarted selling out. Daddy kept going, though. He went to the Farm Home Administration and signed up to start making payments on the farm next door to ours. That helped, but the land wasn't as good as ours, so it didn't help much. Daddy got the best from it, though; he was a really hard worker, and he was smart and careful about rotating his crops and keeping his land well drained. I think he even experimented with other kinds of cotton, but he always went back to Delta Pine. That's the only kind I remember, anyway. We couldn't afford fertilizer, as I've said, so we were limited to crop rotation as a way of getting minerals back into the soil. After the first seven years or so, when I was about ten, we started having to turn a patch of cotton land to soybeans here or to corn there. We had to sacrifice one piece completely, early on, for an alfalfa patch to pro- vide winter feed for our cow and our mule, both of which were absolutely essential to our livelihood. Wherever you plant alfalfa you can forget about planting anything else, because the alfalfa comes back year after year and you can't plow it under. I started out in the fields as a water boy, which is just how it sounds: you tote drinking water to the grown-ups and older children. By the time I was eight, though, I too was dragging a cotton sack. We didn't carry those nice baskets like you see in the movies; we used heavy canvas sacks with tar-covered bottoms, six feet long if you were one of the younger children, nine feet long for big kids and grown-ups. We'd fill that sack up to near the top, and then we'd shake it, pack the cot- ton down good and hard, and start picking again. By the time you were ready to haul your sack to the wagon, you'd have about thirty pounds of cotton in there, or forty or fifty pounds if you had a nine-foot sack. Going at it really hard for ten hours or so, I could pick about three hundred pounds; most days it was more like two hundred.It wasn't complicated. You just parked the wagon at one end of the rows and went to it. If there were two of you together, maybe you'd pick three rows at a time, with both of you sharing the picking on the middle row. If you were Daddy, you'd always pick two rows at a time. Myself, I'd pick just one row. It looked like you were making more progress that wayto the others of course, but, more importantly, to yourself. Believe me, I needed all the encouragement I could get. It's true, there really wasn't much to recommend the work. It exhausted you, it hurt your back a lot, and it cut your hands. That's what I hated the most. The bolls were sharp, and. unless you were really concentrating when you reached out for them, they got you. After a week or two your fingers were covered with little red wounds, some of them pretty painful. My sisters couldn't stand that. They got used to it, of courseeverybody didbut you'd often hear them crying, particularly when they were very young. Practically every girl I knew in Dyess had those pockmarked fingers. Daddy's hands were as bad as anyone else's, but he acted as if he never even noticed. Of course, planting and picking wasn't all that cot- ton demanded of us. The real work came in between. Once you'd planted the seeds, you had to keep the weeds down, and that was some job: the vines that had been cut off to ground level when the land was cleared came charging back up come late March or early April, and from that point on they grew faster than we could cut them down. We'd be out there working our way through the eight-acre field, everybody with a hoe and a file for sharpening it every hour or so, and by the time we approached the end of the rows we were weeding, we'd look back and see new growth already covering up the cotton plants. By the first week in June the cotton plants would be a foot high, but the weeds would be eighteen inches or two feet. Crabgrass was one of the worst ene- mies, and then there were what we called cow-itch vines,long creepers that wrapped themselves around the cotton stalks and tried to choke them down. So we just worked and worked and worked. We'd get a break now and again when it rained too hard for us to get to the fields, but that was no bargain: the weeds kept growing without us, and they grew even faster after a good rain. Come August and its doldrum heat, we had what we called laying-by time when it seemed that God let up a lit- tle on making the grass, vines, and weeds grow, and for a two- or three-week period we'd work only three days a week in the cotton fields. That, though, was the time for digging potatoes, cutting hay and hauling it to the barn, and all that stuff. So there was never really any end to it; the work just went on and on. We did get those weeds chopped, though. We did get ahead with the cotton, and that was the thing: whatever else happened, you stayed ahead with the cotton. There were of course forces against which we were powerless. The Mississippi was foremost in that regardmy song Five Feet High and Rising came from my own experience, not some storybookbut other acts of nature could and did wipe out a whole year's worth of your work and income. For instance, although we didn't have boll weevils where we were they were more of a problem in Texaswe did once get in the way of army worms. They moved in massive con- gregations, millions of them, and had an effect on the land in their path just like Sherman's boys had on Georgia. You'd hear about them coming, first from farm- ers miles away, then from those closer and closer until the worms were on the land right next door, and finally there they were, all over your own crops. They went from field to field, eatingeating fastand then moving on, and there was nothing you could do about them. You could stomp them all you wanted, all day and all night too if it made you happy, but that wouldn't get you anywhereeven close to making a difference. They ate the leaves off the plants first, and then the blooms, and then the bolls, and then that was that. Army worms were the bane of every cotton farmer in Arkansas. Now, wouldn't you know, they barely cross any- one's mind; you just spray for them and forget about it. That's not to say that modern farmers don't have plenty to worry about. They sure do, and they always will. But I bet they also have some of the same great plea- sures that lit up my young life. When the cotton began to open in October, for instance, it was just beautiful. First there'd be lovely white blooms, and then, in about three days, they'd turn to pink, whole fields of them. What a picture that was. That wasn't all, either. Under those pink blooms there'd be tiny, tender little bolls, and they were such a sweet treat. I used to pull them off and eat them while they were still tender like that, before they began turning fibrous, and I loved them. My mother kept telling me, Don't eat that cotton. It'll give you a bellyache. But I don't remember any bellyache. I remember that taste. How sweet it was!3 You know what a smokehouse is? Well, ours was a plain board building about twelve feet by twelve or maybe fourteen by fourteennot a shack, a good, tight, solid structureand that's where we smoked our meat. You had to smoke any meat you wanted to keep; without refrigeration, which of course we didn't have, it would spoil otherwise. Everyone who lived in the coun- try had a smokehouse if they weren't too poor. Apart from whatever meat we had hanging, there were only two things in our smokehouse: a salt box for salting down the meat that would be sugar-cured, as we called ithams, pork shoulders, baconand, in the opposite corner, a little hot box Daddy had built. We'c keep strips of green hickory smoldering in there day anc night when we were smoking meat, and in summer we had it going all the time, keeping out the insects anc killing bacteria. The scent of hickory smoke always in the air around the homestead is another memory gone deep in my bones. And the smokehouse is where Daddy, grim anc strange to me in grief and shock, took me and showed me Jack's bloody clothes. Jack was my big brother and my hero: my best friend, my big buddy, my mentor, and my protector. We fit very well, Jack and I; we were very happy together. I loved him. I really admired him, too. I looked up to him and I respected him. He was a very mature person for his age, thoughtful and reliable and steady. There was such sub- stance to himsuch seriousness, if you like, or even moral weight, such gravitasthat when he made it known that he'd felt a call from God to be a minister of the Gospel, nobody even thought to question either hissincerity or the legitimacy of his decision. Jack Cash would have made a fine minister; everybody in Dyess agreed on that. When I picture him at fourteen, the age at which he died, I see him as a grown-up, not a boy. Jack had a very clear and steady understanding of right and wrong, but he was fun, too. He was a great fish- ing buddy and all-around playmate, and he was very fit and strong, just about perfect physically, a powerful swimmer and fast runner. All we country boys climbed trees like squirrels, of course, but he was exceptional: he was strong enough to climb a rope without even using his feet. That impressed me, because I was the weak one, scrawny and skinny and not very strong at all, and by the time Jack was fourteen I'd decided I liked cigarettes. I started smoking regularly when I was twelvestealing tobacco from my Daddy, bumming cigarettes from older kids, and very occasionally buying a package of Prince Albert, or sometimes Bull Durham or Golden Grain, and rolling my own. I was pretty adept at that; I was a tal- ented smoker. I knew it was wrong and self-destructive, both because the preacher said so and because it made sense. Even back then, no matter what older folks say now, everybody knew that smoking hurt you, but I've never been one to let such considerations stand in the way of my road to ruin. Jack knew I smoked and didn't approve one bit, but he didn't criticize me. Putting it in today's terms, he gave me unconditional love. The year he died, I'd even started smoking in front of him. It was May 12, 1944, a Saturday morning. My plan was to go fishing. Jack's was to work at the high-school agriculture shop, where he had a job cutting oak trees into fence posts on the table saw. He kept stalling. He took one of the living-room chairs, balanced it on one leg, and spun it around and around and around. I had my fishing pole leaned againstdie porch. I started out the front door and said, C'mon, Jack. Come fishing with me! No, he said without much conviction. I got to work. We need the money. He'd make three dollars for working all day. I don't remember my father being in the house, just my mother saying, Jack, you seem like you don't feel you should go, and him saying, I don't. I feel like something's going to happen. Please don't go, she said, and I echoed herGo fishing with me, Jack. Come on, let's go fishingbut he kept at it: No, I've got to do it. I've got to go to work. We've got to have the money. Finally he set the chair down and very sadly walked out the front door with me. I remember my mother standing there watching us go. Nobody said anything, but she was watching us. She didn't usually do that. The silence lasted until we got to the crossroads where one branch went into the town center and the other went off toward our fishing spot. Jack started fooling around, imitating Bugs Bunny, saying What's up, Doc? What's up, Doc? in that silly voice, which was very unlike him. I could see it was false fun. I kept trying: Go fishing with me, Jack. Come on, let's go. He wouldn't. No, I've got to go to work, he said again. That's what he did. He headed off toward the school, and I went on down toward our fishing hole. As long as I could hear him, he kept up with that goofy, unnatural What's up, Doc? What's up, Doc?At the fishing hole I spent a long time just sitting there, not even putting my line in the water. Eventually I cast, but I just played, slapping my line in the water, not even trying for a fish. It was strange. It was as if I knew something was wrong, but I had no idea what. I wasn't even thinking about Jack; all I knew was that something wasn't right. After a while I took my line out of the water and lay down on the bankjust lay there. I stayed like that for a long time before I got up, picked up my fishing pole, and started back home. I remember walking very slowly, much slower than usual. I saw my father coming as soon as I got to the inter- section where I'd left Jack. He was in a car, a Model A I believe it was, the preacher's car. It stopped by me and Daddy said, Throw your fishing pole in the ditch and get in, J.R. Let's go home. I knew something was very wrong. I wanted to hold on to my fishing pole, but Daddy had such a desperate air that I obeyed. I just threw the pole in the ditch and got in the car. What's the matter, Daddy? I asked. Jack's been hurt really bad, he said. He didn't say anything else, and I didn't ask. When we got home, about a mile from the crossroads, he took a brown paper grocery sack from the back of the car. Come out here to the smokehouse, he said in a quiet, dead voice. I've got something I want to show you. The bag was all bloody. In the smokehouse he pulled Jack's clothes out of that grocery bag, laid them on the floor, and showed me where the table saw had cut Jack from his ribs downthrough his belly, all the way to his groin: his belt and his khaki government shirt and pants, all of them slashed and bloody, drenched in blood. Daddy said, Jack's been hurt on the saw, and I'm afraid we're going to lose him. Then he cried. It was the first time I'd ever seen or heard him do that. He only cried for a little while. Then he said, I came home to find you. Jack's in the hospital in the Center. Let's go back there and see him. We may never see him alive again. We did see Jack alive. He was unconscious when we got to the hospital, knocked out with drugs for the pain, but he didn't go right ahead and die. On Wednesday, four days after he'd been hurt, all the church congregations in town held a special service for him, and the following morning he had an amazing revival. He said he felt good, and he looked good. There he was, fine as you please, lying in bed reading his mailhe'd gotten a letter from his girlfriendand laughing happily. My mother and father and I thought we were seeing a miracle. Jack was going to live! Old Dr. Hollingsworth knew better. He'd operated on Jack when they brought him in, and he kept telling us, Don't get too much hope, now. I had to take out too much of his insides, and ... well, there's nothing left in there, really. You'd better get all the family home that wants to see him before he goes. We did thatRoy was in Texas, I think, and my older sister, Louise, was in Osceola, Arkansasbut we still hoped. Not for long. On Friday Jack took a turn for the worse, and that night we stayed at the hospital in beds Dr. Hollingsworth had arranged for all eight of us: Daddy, the three girls, the three boys, and Moma. I woke up early on Saturday morning to the sound ofDaddy crying and praying. I'd never seen him pray before, either. He saw me awake and said, Come on in to his room. Let's say good-bye to him. We went in there. Everyone was crying. My mother was at the head of Jack's bed with my brothers and sisters all around. Daddy took me up to the head opposite my mother, and there was Jack talking crazyThe mules are out, don't let 'em get in the corn, catch the mules! But suddenly he grew calm and lucid. He looked around and said, I'm glad you're all here. He closed his eyes. It's a beautiful river, he said. It's going two ways.... No, I'm not going that way .... Yes, that's the way I'm going.... Aaaaw, Moma, can't you see it? No, son, I can't see it, she said. Well, can you hear the angels? No, son, I can't hear angels. Tears came from his eyes. I wish you could, he said. They're so beautiful.... It's so wonderful, and what a beautiful place that I'm going. Then he went into a rigor. He had intestinal poison- ing, and that stuff came out of his mouth onto his chest, and he was gone. Losing Jack was terrible. It was awful at the time and it's still a big, cold, sad place in my heart and soul. There's no way around grief and loss: you can dodge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and, hopefully, come out the other side. The world you find there will never be the same as the world you left.Some things in this world don't change, though. I look around me in Jamaica at the poverty, the harshness of life for many of the people, their endless toil for little reward and even less hope in their lives, just dreams and fantasies, and that puts me in mind of what still depresses me the most about Jack's death: the fact that his funeral took place on Sunday, May 2.1, 1944, and on the morn- ing of Monday, May 22., our whole familyeverybody, including the mother who had just buried her sonwas back in the fields chopping cotton, working their ten- hour day. I watched as my mother fell to her knees and let her head drop onto her chest. My poor daddy came up to her and took her arm, but she brushed him away. I'll get up when God pushes me up! she said, so angrily, so desperately. And soon she was on her feet, working with her hoe. Lest you get too romantic an impression of the good, natural, hardworking, character-building country life back then, back there, remember that picture of Carrie Cash down in the mud between the cotton rows on any mother's worst possible day. When they talk about how cotton was king in the rural South, they're right in more ways than one. After Jack's death I felt like I'd died, too. I just didn't feel alive. I was terribly lonely without him. I had no other friend. It got worse before it got better. I remember going on a bus to Boy Scout camp that summer of '44 and talking about nothing but Jack until a couple of the other kids shut me up: Hey, man, we know your brother's dead and you liked him, so that's enough, okay? I got the message. I quit talking about Jack alto- gether. Everybody knew how I felt and how my mother felt; they didn't need us telling them. So yes: terriblylonely. That says it. It eased up a little when some of my classmates started making special efforts to befriend me, especially a boy called Harvey Clanton, who became my best friend all the way through school. His friendship began the process of pulling me out of my time in the deepest dark- ness I'd known. What really got me moving, of course, was sex. By about fifteen I'd discovered girls. They did a pretty good job with my loneliness. When the hormones started mov- ing, so did I. Jack isn't really gone, anyway, any more than anyone is. For one thing, his influence on me is profound. When we were kids he tried to turn me from the way of death to the way of life, to steer me toward the light, and since he died his words and his example have been like signposts for me. The most important question in many of the conundrums and crises of my life has been, Which is Jack's way? Which direction would he have taken? I haven't always gone that way, of course, but at least I've known where it was. In other words, my con- science has always functioned just fineeven through all my years of inflicting destruction on myself and pain on others, even with all my efforts to shut it up. The black dog in me went ahead and did what he wanted (and sometimes he still does), but he always had that clear little voice of conscience harassing him. Something else about Jack. When I was growing up, older people talked about how this new generation is going all to hell, just as modern grown-ups do about today's kids and my generation did about the kids of the '60s. I never believed it, now or then. I went by the evi- dence of my eyes and ears: Jack was right in front of me, and I knew there were a lot more boys like him. I don'tthink that's changed. It hadn't in the '60s when I wrote and recorded What Is Truth? and it hasn't today. So I simply don't buy the concept of Generation X as the lost gen- eration. I see too many good kids out there, kids who are ready and willing to do the right thing, just as Jack was. Their distractions are greater, though. There's no more simple life with simple choices for the young. Jack has stayed with me. He's been there in the songs we sang at his funeralPeace in the Valley, I'll Fly Away, How Beautiful Heaven Must Be, all of them and those songs have sustained me and renewed me my whole life. Wherever I go, I can start singing one of them and immediately begin to feel peace settle over me as God's grace flows in. They're powerful, those songs. At times they've been my only way back, the only door out of the dark, bad places the black dog calls home. Jack comes to me in person, too. He's been showing up in my dreams every couple of months or so, sometimes more often, ever since he died, and he's been keeping pace with me. When June or John Carter or other members of my family appear in my dreams, they're usually younger than they are now, but Jack is always two years older than me. When I was twenty, he was twenty-two; when I reached forty-eight, he was fifty already; and the last time I saw him, about three weeks ago, his hair was gray and his beard was snowy white. He's a preacher, just as he intended to be, a good man and a figure of high repute. He's still wise, too. Usually in my Jack dreams I'm having some sort of a problem or I'm doing something questionable, and I'll notice him looking at me, smiling, as if to say, I know you, J.R. I know what you've really got in your mind.... There's no fooling Jack.4 Cinnamon Hill has its own spirits, pres- ences, and very personal memories. From the spot where I sit at this moment, on the veranda at the north end of the house, shaded by jasmine, z8o feet above sea level, I'm just a few feet away from the quiet, gentle room in which I recuperated from my most profound encounter with the medical profession, emer- gency bypass surgery in 1988. It's the room through which people have been going to ground during hurri- canes ever since the house was built in 1747, and what's now its bathroom was designed as both a hurricane shel- ter and a windbreak. Constructed of limestone four feet thick in the shape of a round-edged, slope-roofed wedge pointing north, into the hurricane winds, it directs the fiercest forces of the storms down the sides and up over the top of the house. It's very effective and, as far as I know, unique; I've never seen another like it anywhere in the world. John Carter's young wife, Mary, has painted the interior walls with tropical fishes. Even closer to me, right at my feet, is another mem- ory, the skin of the rogue crocodile I killed back in 1976, eleven feet and 560 pounds of very tough, dangerous old creature, One-Eyed Jack we called him in his prime. I put three bullets from a rusty .30-30 into his braingood shooting, even if I do say so myself, over open sights in the darkuntil he quit thrashing around and we were able to drag him into the airboat with us, where of course he came right back to life. Not a good moment, that. My friend Ross Kananga, a full-blooded Seminole and the professional in the affair, had to shoot him another five times with a pistol before he went quiet forever. We did the local wildlife a big favor that night, and we, too, benefited. Crocodile tail meat is delicious whenyou cut it in thin slices, roll it in meal and spices, and fry it like fish. I don't regret killing One-Eyed Jack, but I don't kill anything anymore. I just don't want to. A lot has been created on this veranda, in this spot. Billy Graham wrote parts of three of his books here, and it's one of my own favorite writing places. And then of course it's possible that some of the descendants of the Barrettsdie Barretts of Wimpole Street, the family of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the original owners of the propertywrote some of their journals, prose, and poetry here. Certainly they experienced life here, and death; many of them are entombed in their own private cemetery in a lovely spot down the hill from the house, one of my favorite places in the world. Every one of the men, women, and children buried there lived and died in the house I now call mine. On John Carter's first visit to the cemetery, when he'd just turned four, he said something to June as she opened the gate that she didn't understand at first: Moma, my brother Jamie is here. She was mystified, but then, as she was looking around, she bent down to read the smallest of all the tombs, one of those heartbreakingly tiny memorials you always know at a glance marks the grave of a young child. The stone was worn on one side, so she couldn't make out the last number in the birth and death dates, but the first three numbers of both were 177-, and die young Barrett's Christian name was James. She still didn't understand, but there it was, and there it is today. Perhaps we were meant to come here. I certainly felt a powerful tug when I first saw the house in 1974.1 was rambling around the hills in a four-wheel drive with John Rollins, who owned the house and all the landaround it, including Rose Hall, the greatest of all the great houses. As soon as we came up on Cinnamon Hill I fell in love with it. It was in disrepair but basically sounda playboy was living there in just one room, with one electric light and one maidand immediately I got the idea that I could renovate it into a wonderful vacation home. John thought that was a good idea, too, but he wouldn't consider selling it to me; he wanted it for himself in later years. If I wanted to fix it up, he said, I should go ahead and do that, and I could use it when- ever I wanted. I went ahead, and by the end of 1975, ** was ready for our first Christmas in Jamaica. I'd never liked the idea of living in someone else's house, though, and at that point I really didn't like it. I badly wanted to own the place myself. By that time John Rollins and I had become good friends. We'd taken to each other on first meeting, being of like mind and similar rootshe too came from the cot- ton fields; he'd had the same kind of life in Georgia as I'd had in Arkansasand so he'd shared some of his secrets with me. The relevant one was about his approach to closing a really big deal, which is something he does well. He was already a very successful businessman in 1975, and he's come a long way since then. He operates in a financial sphere way beyond mine; last time I checked, his umbrella company owned about two hun- dred enterprises, everything from billboards in Mexico to truck lines in the United States to security services all over the world. For a while he was lieutenant governor of Delaware, his home base today. I'm godfather to his son Michael. To close a deal successfully, he told me, he'd put on his dark suithis sincere suit, he called itand make his pitch, and when he was done he always said, And if we can do that, I sure would appreciate it.Now, I don't own a dark suit, and didn't then, and all-black outfits in the Benjamin Franklin or riverboat- gambler style, my favorite kind of dress-up outfit at the time, are anything but sincere suits, so I left out that part of the formula when I sat down on the porch with John right after Christmas. You know, John, I spent a lot of money on this place this year, I began. I've got more invested in it than I should for just a place to come once in a while for a nice vacation. We've hired people to work here, got the place fixed up, got the grounds fixed up. We're about to put in a swimming pool. I think it's time you sold me this place. No, he said. I can't do that. He still wanted it for himself. I pressed. Well, we've just about got to have this place. Still no deal. You've got it every time you need it. Just come on down, he said. Look, John, you know better than that. It just wouldn't be right to do it that way. I wouldn't feel right, fixing it up and having it still be yours. We've got our hearts here now. We've gotten dirt on our hands around here. We love this place. We need to buy it from you. I don't know.... he said. Well, say you sold it. If you did, what would you have to have for it? He told me his figure. Bingo. We were into it now. I was halfway there, at least. I thought about his price, concluded that it had some give in it, and made him myoffer. Then I looked him straight in the eye and said, as soberly and sincerely as possible, If we can do that, John, I sure would appreciate it. He stared at me for a second, then started laughing. All right, he said, we've got a deal. And so we did, and so June and I began the process of merging our lives with that of our new home. The past is palpably present in and around Cinnamon Hill, the reminders of other times and other genera- tions everywhere, some obvious, some not. For more than a century this was a sugar plantation worked by thousands of slaves who lived in clusters of shacks all over the property. All that remains of those people now, the metal hinges from their doors and nails from their walls, lies hidden in the undergrowth on the hill- sides or in the soil just below the manicured sod of the golf course that loops around my house. I doubt that the vacationers playing those beautiful links have any idea, any concept, of the kind of life that once teemed where they walkthough perhaps some do, you never know. I've been out with a metal detector and found all kinds of things. A lot has happened here. There are ghosts, I think. Many of the mysteries reported by guests and visitors to our house, and many that we ourselves experienced, can be explained by direct physical evidencea tree limb brushing against the roof of the room in which Waylon and Jessi kept hearing such strange noises, for instance. But there have been incidents that defy conventional wisdom. Mysterious figures have been seena woman, a young boyat various times by various people over the years. Once, a woman appeared in the dining room when six of us were present. We all saw her. She came through the door leading to the kitchen, a person in her early thirties, I'd say, wearing a full-length white dress, and proceeded across the room toward the double doors in the opposite wall, which wereclosed and locked. She went through them without open- ing them, and then, from the other side, she knocked: rat- tat-tat, rat-tat. We've never had any trouble with these souls. They mean us no harm, I believe, and we're certainly not scared of them; they just don't produce that kind of emo- tion. For example, when Patrick Carr was staying here, working with me on this book, he was awakened in the middle of the night by a knock on the door next to his bedrat-tat-tat, rat-tatand was struck by the thought, Oh, that's just the ghost. Don't worry about it. Go back to sleep. He didn't even mention the incident until the fol- lowing evening, after we'd told himfor the first time about the lady we'd seen in the dining room and that same knock we'd heard. At that point his wife revealed that she'd had the identical experience: same knock, same reaction. They'd both interpreted the event as such a nat- ural occurrence that they hadn't even told each other about it. So we're not frightened. The only really frightening story about Cinnamon Hill belongs in the realm of the living and serves to remind me that some of themjust a few of them, a tiny minorityare much more dangerous than all the dead put together. The dark comes down. Here I sit in the Jamaican twilight with sad memories, somber thoughts. Every night about this time, as dusk settles in, we go around the house and close and lock all the doors. Carl does it, or I do it myself. The doors are massive: thick, solid mahogany from the local hills of two and a half cen- turies ago, mounted into the limestone walls in 1747. They've survived a lot: hurricanes (by the dozen); slave rebellions (including the general uprising in 1831 that destroyed most of the other great houses on the island);even the occasional earthquake. They're secure. The pres- ence of the guards, always at least two of them during the hours of darkness, makes them more so. The guards aren't family, but I trust the private security company they work for. One call to their headquarters from the walkie-talkie I keep at my bedside, and we could have an army up here. After our house was robbed we did have an army up here, literally. The prime minister was very upsetand of course concerned that we might flee Jamaica for good and create tourist-discouraging publicityso he ordered fully armed units of the Jamaican Defense Force into the woods around our house until it was time for us to go back to the United States. I've never talked at length about the robbery in pub- lic, or even among my friends. June has told the story in her book From the Heart, and she's been the one to tell it on other occasions. The way she and I are together, she does most of the talking when we're in company; I listen. It's interesting, isn't it, how two people's recollection of the same event can differ in so many ways? I don't know how many times I've heard June and the others talk about the robberywell, it wasn't just a robbery, it was a vio- lent home invasionand I've found myself thinking, / didn't know that, I didn't feel that, I don't remember it that way. I'm not saying that June's wrong and I'm right, just that people's experiences and memories are so subjective. It makes you wonder about the whole idea of historical fact. I mean, I just finished reading Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose's wonderful account of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and I really enjoyed it. But I was aware of how the other works I've read on that subject, some of them very authoritative and most of them based on Clark's journals, differed not just in detail and interpre- tation, but in matters of basic chronology and geography:what happened where, when, in what order, to whom. And once you get into the writings of other Lewis and Clark expedition members, events start slipping and slid- ing even more energeticallybut everybody, every jour- nal writer out there on the plains in i8zo or back in Washington or talking out his memories in his parlor, is quite certain of his facts. Which of course is only human. Sitting down with pen and paper (or tape recorder and Microsoft Word), the words I don't remember and I'm not sure one way or the other don't seem adequate, even if they do reflect reality more accurately than what- ever you're about to write. This isn't an original thought, but I do like to keep it in mind. The robbery as I remember it began at exactly six o'clock on the evening of Christmas Day, 1982. The peo- ple at home with me were my wife, June Carter; our son, John Carter; his friend Doug Caldwell; Reba Hancock, my sister; Chuck Hussey, then her husband; Miss Edith Montague, our cook and housekeeper at the time, now deceased; her stepdaughter Karen; Desna, then our maid, now our cook and household manager; Vickie Johnson from Tennessee, working specially for Christmas; and Ray Fremmer, an archaeologist friend of ours. There were no guards; we didn't have guards back then, or locked doors. We were in the dining room, a long, nar- row space that runs the entire width of the house and is almost filled by a table at which twenty people can dine in comfort. We were just sitting down to dinner, about to say the blessing, when they came bursting in: a synchronized entry through all three doors. One had a knife, one a hatchet, and one a pistol. They all wore nylon stockings over their faces. Their first words were yelled: Somebody's going to die here tonight! Miss Edith fainted dead away.They got us down on our stomachs on the floor. I looked across at June, saw her trying to hide her watch and ring, and prayed they wouldn't notice. They didn't. I hoped with all my heart that Ray wasn't carrying his gun that night, because if he was, he was sure to try some- thing. The one with the pistol said, We want a million dol- lars, or somebody's going to die. I was very calm. I'd realized right away that if we were going to survive, a steady and reasonable attitude was what would do it. I raised my head and looked at the gunman. You know your government wouldn't allow us to bring a mil- lion dollars into the country, even if we had it, which we don't, I told him, but if you don't hurt us, you can have everything we've got. You've got money! he insisted. Yes, we do, I said, but we don't have a million dollars. In fact, we had several thousand dollars in my briefcase under our bed, and of course June had her jew- elry. These guys were going to make out okay if every- body kept it together. So far, our group wasn't doing very well in that regard. Desna was panicking noisily and poor Miss Edith, once revived, began screaming, I'm going to have a heart attack! I'm going to have a heart attack! Maybe she was, too. Our captors might have thought so, because they let her sit up and one of them told Desna to run to the kitchen for a glass of water. That was a telling moment, the first sign that perhaps these men weren't professionals, or at least they weren't killers. Real hard cases wouldn't have cared about Miss Edith's health or put up with her hysterics; they'd have used heras an example to the rest of us and just shot her, or split her head with that hatchet. I'd noticed too that they were very young. The one with the gun might have been in his twenties, but the other two were just teenagers, and all of them were very nervous. That comforted me. Maybe it shouldn't have, but it did. I thought again, If we're cool, we might get through this. June started losing it, or at least acting as if she were, when they started taking off our jewelry and watches. She sat up and said she was having chest pains, she had a heart condition. I think that's when the gunman pulled young Doug Caldwell to his feet, stuck the gun right up against his head, and said, Everybody do as I say, or John Carter is going to die! Two quandaries there. First, should I tell him that he didn't have John Carter? I had no idea how to handle that. Second, was the gun real? This was my first good look at it, and I couldn't tell. I know gunsI grew up with them, and in my time I've owned hundredsbut this piece wasn't familiar to me. It was small and it looked pretty crude, but I knew enough to realize how lit- tle that meant: it could be a cheap but lethal junk gun just as easily as a convincing toy. That question was unresolved, thenI just had to assume the gun was real, and that the guy would use it if we spooked him too bad. Then the first issue settled itself. When we were ordered onto our feet to begin the second phase of our encounter, the gunman looked at John Carter and realized his mistake. He shoved Doug away, then grabbed my son and stuck the gun to his head. It was under those conditions that we began the real work, going from room to room through the house and transferring all our portable valuables to these scared, adrenaline-charged little thugsand junkies, I was think-ing. I knew even more about addiction than I did about guns. These boys had the feel. We spent the next two hours going around the house, with one of them keeping the gun to John Carter's head while the others went through our things. They were careful and even tidy, I noticed, not tossing the place as professionals would. They'd been pretty rough at first, particularly with the women, pushing Reba around until she was absolutely terrified and Chuck was dangerously angry; the one with the hatchet handled June so roughly that he took a clump of her hair off. By the time we reached the master bedroom, though, they were relaxing. They were almost chatty, in fact, asking us how long we were planning to stay this Christmas and so on. All along I'd talked to them quietly and told them the truth about where the valuables were, and that was pay- ing off; now they were calling me sir. At one point I'd asked the man, Please take the gun away from my son's head, and though he didn't do that, the message in his response was clear: Don't worry about it, man. It got really strange in the bedroom. The gunman, who was standing up on the bed with his muzzle an inch from John Carter's brains, started asking him friendly lit- tle questions: What do you do down here? What do you like to do in Jamaica? Do you snorkel? John Carter answered calmly and pleasantly, and when the truly weirdest thing happened, he handled him- self beautifully. He was just eleven years old. This is a real gun I've got against your head, you know, the wild boy ventured. Yes, I know, said John Carter. I go hunting with my dad sometimes. I know guns. Do you want a feel of my gun?I found out what it means when people say my heart went into my mouth. I couldn't breathe. John Carter didn't even miss a beat. No, sir. I don't play with guns. I have a lot of respect for them. They're very dangerous. The gunman nodded and grinned behind his stock- ing mask. Hey, I like you, man! Thank you, sir, said John Carter. The tension wound down quite a lot after that. I think we could all see things ending without bloodshed, and the robbers could see getting away with a pretty good haul. Reba was the only one still outwardly dis- traught; the rest of us were busy trying to keep her fear contained. When they'd got their loot bagged, one of the rob- bers told us, We're going to lock you in die cellar. At that, the women started screaming again, but I thought it was a pretty good deal. It meant they weren't going to spring some nasty last-minute surprise, like killing us to get rid of the witnesses. I don't know how well they thought their stocking masks disguised them, but over the course of more than two hours under varying light conditions, I'd concluded that the masks weren't up to the job at all; I could probably have picked each one of them out of a lineup. Ignoring the protests of the women, they marched us downstairs and, true to their word, locked us in the base- mentor as June would have it, the dungeon. They wedged a two-by-four across the door, and then they left. Only for a minute, though. One of them came right back and slipped a plate of turkey under the door. "Wewant you people to have your Christmas dinner after all, he said. We don't want to take that away from you. John Carter and Doug were already eating by the time we heard our dogs, who had been silent up to that point, barking as the robbers took their leave. It took us a while, but Chuck Hussey and I got that door broken down, and our sorry little group emerged from trie basement to call the police. Jamaican cops are action-oriented. They caught the gun- man that night, with his loot, and he died resisting arrest. They caught the others, the kids, a few weeks later during another robbery in Kingston, and after a short while in prison they, too, died, trying to escape. My understanding is mat the guards supplied them with a ladder for use in a work project, then happened to be waiting outside the wall when they came over. I wasn't very surprised when I heard about it. The police had been very closemouthed about the whole affairthey didn't even tell us about catching the first guybut I remembered that on the morning after the robbery, a policeman had made it very clear that the rob- bers would be caught and they would be taken care of. Don't worry, Mr. Cash, he said. These people will never trouble you or your family again. You can count on it." Looking back, I realize he was saying more than I understood him to mean at the time. Or perhaps I understood him just fine, but preferred to imagine other- wise. So what do I think about all that? What's my stance on unofficially sanctioned summary justice in the Third World?I don't know. What's yours? How do I feel about it? What's my emotional response to the fact (or at least the distinct possibility) that the desperate junkie boys who threatened and trau- matized my family and might easily have killed us all (perhaps never intending any such thing) were executed for their actor murdered, or shot down like dogs, have it how you will? I'm out of answers. My only certainties are that I grieve for desperate young men and the societies that produce and suffer so many of them, and I felt that I knew those boys. We had a kinship, they and I: I knew how they thought, I knew how they needed. They were like me. I also knew, immediately, how I was going to respond to the threat they'd brought into my house. I wouldn't run from it. A reporter raised the issue right after the robbery: Are you going to leave Jamaica now? No, we're not, I told him. This is our borne. This is our place. We have as much right to be here as anyone. We're going to keep coming. We're not going to let any- body run us off. I meant every word, but that wasn't the whole pic- ture. Doubt, guilt, and fear were just as strong in me as defiance. For one thing, I felt I'd been naive and foolish, keeping my loved ones in a wide-open house when the evidence of danger was all around usin the local news- papers with their accounts of murder, mayhem, and fighting in the streets of Kingston; in the eyes of the police and the Rasta men and all the other factions in Jamaica's political struggles and ganja wars; and even in our back-yard, virtually, at the scenic waterfall where James Bond capered in Live and Let Die and every day a loose feder- ation of souvenir sellers, ganja dealers, and potential home invaders gathered to do business. I'd been coming to Cinnamon Hill long enough to feel like those charac- ters were almost part of the family; I'd first seen some of diem when they were six- or seven-year-olds. Maybe the criminals who came to my house, and died for it, were boys I'd watched grow. If they were, it would explain a lot of things: why the dogs didn't bark at them, how they'd known just when and where to catch us all together, how they were famil- iar with both the house and its occupants. The other two likely theories, that they were either total outsiders or intimate insiders, didn't wash. The local bad boys would have run outsiders off when they saw them scoping us out, and our insiders, Miss Edith and her family, were totally beyond suspicion. It was a long time before I arrived at some sort of peace about the robbery. For quite a while I brooded, I felt victimized and guilty, I took sleeping pills, I carried a gun. In time, though, those reactions faded, leaving only my most sensible response: professional twenty-four- hour armed security. I could live with that. Living with the loss of trust and innocence was harder, but I could do that, too. I'd always known how it goes when your safe place turns dangerous. The other victims of the crime reacted variously, ranging from Reba's flat refusal ever to set foot in Jamaica again (she hasn't) to John Carter's apparent cool. Yeah, that was quite a night is about all he's ever said on the subject. June, I think, has found relief in the telling of the story. Today I can look back and see that some good came from it all. When I take my walks and golf-cart rides down to the sea, I'm often stopped by local people whogreet me warmlyRespects, Mr. Cash, respectsand I can't count how many times I've heard gratitude for my decision to stay in Jamaica. And since the robbery I've been more involved in Jamaican life in various ways that have been very good for me. Today I feel truly at home in this beautiful country, and I love and admire its proud and kindly people. Here I sit in the gloaming, as my Scots ancestors would say, watching the gentle afterglow of sunset behind the hills above my house and listening as the sounds of the night creatures chase away the early evening's silencenature's shift change, in progress here just as it is in New York and Washington, D.C., and will be in Memphis and Little Rock in another hour or so. I'm remembering my childhood again. I'm back on the front porch of that government house in Dyess Colony, with my mom and dad and brothers and sisters, all of us together, while my mother sings her sacred songs and plays her guitar, banishing fear and loneliness, bringing the black dog to heel, drowning out even the screams of panthers from the brush. Those are sounds I'll never hear again, neither the panthers nor my mother's comforting voice. I still have the songs, though.