February 29, 2012

I don’t know where my father got his love of clothes. No one in his family seemed to give a second thought to what they wore, with an exception I’ll get to in a moment or two. My grandfather and grandmother were country folk. She was Irish, illiterate, religious, stout but pretty as a red-haired girl and in her later years she could have posed for a Dorothea Lange photo from the Depression. In fact, as long as I knew her, from infancy until my mid-twenties, when she died, she wore nothing that could not have been ordered from a Sears catalog in 1936. She had never traveled outside of East Texas/West Louisiana; the farthest away from home she got was one trip to the beach at Galveston. She raised three boys and a girl and any number of working men and women who gravitated to her warmth, including Scobie, a young Black boy who came to live with the family when my dad was just 10 and was like a third brother to him. My grandfather loved Scobie and so, years later when Scobie had grown and moved away only to be caught up in some crime and sent off to the state penitentiary in Angola, a dreaded place, it broke my grandfather’s heart. For a couple of years Grandpaman, as I called him, went once a month down to the pen to see Scobie. He eventually stopped, my dad said, because it was too painful. Scobie vanished from their lives.

My grandmother even put up with my grandfather’s friend, Blackie, who had stabbed his wife to death over in Waskom, Texas, and had been sent to jail for many years at Sugarland, the Texas state penitentiary. Blackie was a drinking man and, in his company, so was my grandfather, more, my grandmother was certain, than was good for him, so she was glad to see the last of Blackie. For a while, that is, until Grandpaman decided to get Blackie out of prison.

My grandfather at that time was running a small house painting and wallpapering trade; he had a panel truck and some ladders and extension boards and when he got a job, he’d round up his friends and pay them what he could. These were all rough-hewn, angular ex-farmers, piney-woods loggers, and turpentine men, like my grandfather, and like him, they were a taciturn lot, not given to much talk and, except in song from time to time, not much given at all to what you would call verbal play. My memories of my grandfather contain very few words, just pictures. He was about five foot six or seven, thin, and the color of old leather when I first began to really notice him. He was in his fifties then and had been working hard all his life. He, too, seemed to have stepped out of a Farm Bureau photo file. It was if the Depression had locked his generation forever in place, a place that by the early 1950s, no longer existed, a rural America closer to the 19^th century than the 20^th in its memories and its expectations. To visit my grandparents was literally to step back in time, to eat food that “our” people had eaten for generations, to sing the old church songs that carried tired hearts “over Jordan” Sunday after Sunday, to hear stories of logging camps and cotton fields and catfish caught, frogs gigged, horses traded.

I don’t know how long Grandpaman and Blackie had known each other, but Blackie was, Grandpaman claimed in the letter he wrote to the governor of Texas, the best interior trim man he had ever seen and if my grandfather didn’t get him back, the house painting business was going to fall apart. From what I heard from my dad, it was a pretty straightforward letter, about how Blackie had been drinking and had, for sure, stabbed his wife, but those days were gone forever. Apparently my grandfather promised the governor that they would both stop drinking and that my grandfather would see Blackie everyday and give him a job and vouch for his behavior. I can’t believe that that was all there was to it but before long Grandpaman drove over to Sugarland and got Blackie from the prison and brought him back to Shreveport. Now because Blackie was a Texas felon, he couldn’t live out of state, so Grandpaman got him a little house over the line in Waskom and drove over there every morning to get him and bring him into Shreveport for work. Blackie was so beholden to my grandfather that he spent every moment he could with him, took his meals at the house and, much to my grandmother’s irritation, even dressed like him. I’m not sure why this upset her so, but it did. Clearly there was something in the sight of two middle-aged rawbones in identical white shirts buttoned at the collar, paint-spattered overhauls and half-boots, and little grey straw fedoras tilted back on their bald foreheads, sitting on the porch swing after breakfast smoking tailor-mades if they had them, that really irritated her, as I can attest to of many a Sunday morning.

So, if my dad didn’t get his love of fine clothes from his folks, or from his brothers, who pretty much preserved Grandpaman’s sartorial practices as if in amber, I wonder how he came to it. Pictures of my dad in high school don’t suggest much beyond the possible argument that a fellow as good looking as he was probably figured out how to make the best of a good thing. Dad was the best looking of all the Suggs boys but even he didn’t hold a candle to Ruth, the baby and the only girl. She was good looking in that way some have that makes the question of what you have on totally irrelevant to the moment. Dad was handsome but clothes helped him a lot; when he was dressed up, he was pretty impressive. But blonde, blue-eyed Ruth, who did love nice things, was beautiful from the moment she awakened ‘til she fell off to sleep, and then some. Then when she grew older she married a man as beautiful as she was, James. James was six foot two or thereabouts, had black hair, broad shoulders, and blue eyes too. James was a plumber and loved motorcycles and once he and Aunt Ruth rode all the way to Las Vegas and back just for fun. When they came to visit on their Harleys, they always offered me a ride. Dad let me go only once.

It wasn’t that Dad mistrusted motorcycles; interest in them sort of ran in the family. His uncle, the one who went to jail for armed robbery, was known to us all as “Uncle Bootsie” because he wore knee-high lace-up boots to ride his big Indian all over the Ark-La-Tex (that 50 mile circle centered on the point where Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas come together). No, Dad didn’t trust Aunt Ruth. For all her beauty, there was, it turned out, something desperate in her, something that drove her easily over limits. Despite all that James and her brothers and her sons could do, Ruth slid off into self destruction and despair, to prostitution and drug addiction. In her last years her schizophrenia was diagnosed and medication eased her way for a while. Dad and Mom took her in to live with them but at the end, at her own insistence, she lived alone in a motel apartment in Bossier City, where she died.