Jennings - Mamas boy, preachers son: a memoir of growing up, coming out, and changing americas schools

For Claudette,
who has always been family

One persons truth, if told well, does not leave anyone out.

PAUL MONETTE

The first thing I remember is the oxygen tent.

Its 1966. Were living in North Carolina, where my dad has chased a job in construction. Im three and a half (halves are important when youre three) and in a hospital in Roanoke Rapids because I have whooping cough, a disease that nobody getsnobody, that is, who isnt poor, so poor that you dont get vaccinated, so poor that you dont have health insurance, so poor that you dont go to the hospital until your fever breaks 102 degrees and your mom thinks shed better take you now because, if it goes any higher, you might be brain damaged for life. Were that poor.

The oxygen tent is made of plastic and is large enough that my entire three-and-a-half-year-old body fits comfortably within it. I can sit up without hitting the top, stretch out my legs without hitting the wall at my feet, and spread my arms out without touching the sides. I love tents: my cousins and I make them when playing indoors in my familys trailer, draping blankets and sheets to create hiding places, using flashlights to illuminate them from within, delighting in the idea that we are invisible to the outside world. But this isnt a fun tent like those. Inside this tent, I dwell in the land of the sick. My body is wracked with coughing fits that end with the characteristic whoop from deep inside my lungs that gives the disease pertussis its common name. The fits are so powerful they make me vomit. On the other side, through the wrinkled plastic that distorts and blurs my view, is the real world. The room outside the tent seems enormous, like a cavern, making me feel even more tiny than I already feel. Occasionally hands reach in from the real world, those of nurses dressed in white and wearing cupcake hats, who give me yet another injection. I receive so many injections that I begin to cry and scream when I see a nurse enter because my arms and legs are so swollen they are starting to give them to me in my stomach. I will learn later that the nurses told my family that they waited too long to bring me here, that theres a good chance I wont get out, but even though I dont know this at three and a half I can sense the deep concern on the other side of the tent and their fear only magnifies my own. I am small and imprisoned in an oxygen tent, cut off from everyone and everything, with troubled adults on the other side of the plastic curtain peering in, trying unsuccessfully to mask their worry. I am terrified.

Theres only one constant, reassuring presence in this world, a small woman who is there whenever I wake up. She doesnt seem small to me, of course, because I am only three and a half, but she barely breaks five feet and a hundred pounds. She feeds me, she smiles at me through the plastic, and she comforts me when I have my coughing fits, and when my cousin (who is in an oxygen tent on the other side of the room) has his fitswhich, as I watch him thrash and vomit and gasp, terrify me even more than my ownshe makes sure I know I am never alone. She is, of course, my mom, Alice Verna Johnson Jennings.

Im not supposed to be here at all. As Mom would tell me repeatedly throughout my childhood, I was not a wanted child. She had her first kid, my sister Carol, seventeen years before I was born, in 1946, the war having ended barely a year before. Her fourth child, my brother Paul, was born in 1956, nearly seven years before I was. At thirty-eight, she wasnt planning on a fifth in 1963, during Camelot, with a bright and shiny John F. Kennedy in the White House and the Vietnam War just getting underway. She was done. But I came anyway and, preachers wife that she was, Mom would say, The Lord works in mysterious ways, believing that I must have been sent for a reason. I was supposed to be reassured that my birth was part of Gods plan, but when the troubles and misery of the years to come struck and I witnessed my mothers struggle to take care of this unplanned, unwanted childof meknowing this story only made me feel like a burden who should never have been born.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, was the family mantra I heard in my childhood whenever death occurred. Everything was the Lords will, and we were to give thanks or at least understand it was what He wanted, no matter how disastrous the event might be for us. But Mom must have thought the Lord be damned in that hospital in Roanoke Rapids in 1966, because she wouldnt let me die.

She prays and she feeds me and she doesnt sleep andbacked by her iron willI dont quit (she wont let me quit). I fight my way out of that hospital, I get better, and I go home to my familys two-bedroom trailer in Weldon, North Carolina. I live through the upcoming winter and my first snowfall and I make my first snowman. Then its Easter and I get a live little yellow chicken and a live baby duck dyed blue like most Southern children get on the day our Lord rose from the dead. I love them, theyre my babies until the next-door neighbors dog eats them and I cry and my brothers tell me not to be such a baby. But the whooping cough incident marks me: when your first memory is of fighting to live, you feel fragile, you develop a fear of being struck down unexpectedly, and you have a deep sense of being different from the normal, healthy kids. My mother is left paranoid after the whooping cough attack; she fusses over me, fiercely protective of this fragile child who had been so unexpectedly brought into her life and just as unexpectedly nearly taken away. I become Mamas boy, which is, of course, the worst thing any self-respecting Southern male child can be. I cant remember a time when that wasnt my name.

So I guess there was never a time when I felt like I was a normal boy.

I figured out early on that my dad cared about two things: God and sports.

When it came to sports, I never had a chance. My sister, Carol, had it even worse, being a girl in the preTitle IX era, meaning she didnt even register on Dads radar screen and never got any attention at all. She married at nineteen, when I was two, mainly to get out of a house where she was always the moon to her brothers suns. She grew into an adult who craved attention, provoking it with outrageous behavior when necessary, determined to get herself noticed some way, any way. Once free of our parents home, she stopped going to church and dyed her hair blonde and wore halter tops and short shorts, all behaviors that scandalized Mom and Dad. I had to give her one thing: she found a way to get their attention.

My brothers had it easier. The one family commitment I can remember Dad always keeping was attending any sporting event in which my brothers competed. Alan, the oldest, was the handsome, responsible kid who ran relay on a high school track team with two guys who later won Olympic gold medals. Alan was always my favorite. While my relationships with Mike and Paul were characterized by long spans of inattention interrupted by bursts of terror and mockery, Alan always paid me attention. He gave me the only nickname I ever likedChampand he actually tried to teach me to swim rather than throwing me in the deep end of the pool to see if I would literally sink or swim, as Mike and Paul did. He was my hero.

Mike, the middle boy (I was too young to really count), suffered from the same problems as many middle kids; he was always overlooked a bit, always overshadowed a bit. He ran track too, but he was never quite as good as Alan. He played football too, but he was never as good as Paul, which must have especially galled him as he was the older of the two. Skinny and nervous, he would bite his fingernails to the quick, so I remember them as only nubs. He was often angry, and he scared me.