Anarchist to Abolitionist: A Bad Quaker's Journey
Itching For Kentucky
By the spring of 1971, the already shaky American economy began to show signs of a dollar collapse. This terrified my father because his memory of the Great Depression was still crystal clear. Dad began making preparations to move his family back to Kentucky and back on the farm, where he knew he could feed us if things turned bad. My oldest sister, Judy, and her family had already moved to Kentucky, so my dad put my other sister, Cheryl, on an airplane to join Judy. I stayed with Mom and Dad while we packed up everything that we didn't sell in yard sales, repainted the house, sold it, and headed east.
Dad bought the old family farm, or actually 160 acres of what remained of the original 500 acre land grant. The land grant was given to Tom Stone, in lieu of payment for service in the Virginia Militia during the War of Independence. The farm had mostly stayed in the family, slowly having a chunk cut off from time to time, as it was split between brothers or sold in desperation during hard times.
When I saw the family farm for the first time I couldn't believe it. Standing in the spot where Dad planned to build our house, I pointed to the hill in front of me, "Who owns that hill?" I asked.
Mom answered, "We do."
"What about that hill?" I asked as I pointed to my right.
"We do." said Mom, "And that one and that one," she said, as I pointed to each surrounding hill, "We own everything you can see from here."
"Where can I ride my bike?" I asked, almost too excited to get the words out.
"Anywhere you want, sweet heart," Mom answered.
"Anywhere you want."
Wow! What a wonderful world!
The Little League Lesson
Here I was, a nine year old city/desert kid, suddenly dropped into Appalachia, where I was the one who talked funny. There were cousins and aunts and uncles in every direction. I didn't know any of them, but they all knew me. I was the cousin from California. They all wanted to take me places and show me more cousins, or show me tiny graveyards on the tops of mountains where my ancestors were buried. I thought the graveyards were pretty cool. I'd never seen a real graveyard before.
One day, that first summer in Kentucky, a truck load of my cousins showed up and asked my mother if I could go with them to watch a Little League game that one of my cousins was playing in. My sister, Cheryl, said she would go along to keep me from getting into trouble, so Mom agreed.
Trust me on this one, Cheryl never once kept me out of trouble.
I wasn't really interested in the game, but it was fun hanging out with cousins. One cousin, Jimmy Potter and I, got along particularly well. So, we were looking around for something to do, when one of Jimmy's sisters came running up and told us that two bigger boys were throwing rocks at them. The parking lot was covered in fresh, coarse limestone gravel, perfect for bullies to throw at little girls. About that time, the two boys came around the corner and we were all in a face off. I spoke up and told the boys they'd better stop throwing rocks at my cousins. The biggest of them took the toe of his shoe and scraped a line in the gravel. "I dare you to cross that line." he growled.
I popped right across that line, and as I did, he caught me square on the nose with his fist. Then, he jumped back a couple steps. I was not expecting that, but I came at him again, anyway. Of course, he popped me again. I had more blood coming out of my nose than I thought was in my whole body, but I went for him a third time. This time, he turned and ran. That infuriated me.
My knife flew open and, with it clinched in my right fist, I went after him as hard as I could run. The problem was that he had two advantages on me.
- He was at least a year older than me, and maybe two, and
- He was wearing shoes. I was barefooted on that sharp limestone gravel.
That said, I still almost caught him before he shoved some kid off of their bike and stole it. By this time, there was a herd of cousins coming to my aid. I had to stop running because the blood was flowing backwards in my sinus cavity and into my throat, choking me.
I bent over to let the blood flow out of my nose, while Cheryl and my cousins gave chase. They caught him and returned the bike to the kid, but I guess by the time they caught him, he was crying and terrified. They gave in to his begging and didn't beat him.
My take-away lesson from this was multifaceted. First, never let anyone hit you in the face. As a matter of fact, never let anyone get the first punch in on you. Expect their movements, watch for a tell or a body movement that telegraphs a punch. Recognize the conflict before it turns violent and either head off the violence, or be the first to strike.
The second point was that I had to learn self-control and not go to my knife out of anger. As a matter of fact, anger has no place in a winning strategy when it comes to a street fight or any situation where violence can occur. Anger fogs the mind and will cause you to make bad decisions. I had to develop self-control and I had to learn how to shut emotions off in emergency situations. This would become incredibly important later in life.
Third, I needed to be able to run faster. It's that simple. I had to push my body to move faster. And this rings back to the first thing: my hands needed to be faster than any opponent. I could have blocked that first punch if I were faster. So I determined to do these things. That decision came back to sting me a couple times, but overall it has paid off in spades.
The fourth thing I learned is you don't allow a cousin to arrive at his mother's house covered in blood. I learned this part the easy way. The cousin who drove us to the baseball game, Darlene Potter, Jimmy's mom, took me to the Laundromat, where she washed my clothes and made sure I removed every drop of blood before we headed home. She said to me, "If I take you home to Aunt Gladys’ (pronounced like "Ain't" Gladys) covered in blood, I'll be in bigger trouble than you ever seen, boy!" And she was right. My mom would have come unglued. My cousin's grammar skills were lacking, but when it came to wisdom, Darlene made up for it. We lost Darlene in 2018, along with Jimmy and Barbie, the little girl the bully was throwing the rocks at. It all happened very suddenly and I never got to say goodbye to any of them. That's how life works.
As DPR said, "Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something."
None of these lessons came to me right away. This incident rolled around in my mind for years as I dissected it and analyzed it. I recognized it as a failure on my part right away, and then I committed myself to find out how to prevent such a failure from ever happening again. Over and over I remembered the humiliation, the helplessness of having to have my sister defend me. Of standing there, covered in my own blood, as everyone looked at me. I remembered the feeling of others showing pity for me.
I think pity was the thing that hurt the most. The fact that my cousins looked at me as a helpless child attacked by an older kid, burned deep in my mind. You can't be strong, you can't be tough, and you can't be a leader when people pity you. Pity is what a better person places on a lesser person. Pity is what the strong feels for the weak. Pity is why the strong have mercy on the weak. Pity is a good human emotion that drives us to be kind to our weaker fellow humans. Pity, along with curiosity, saved humanity from the extinction that swept over the other members of the megafauna during and after the last ice age. But when you are a person of pride, a person of honor, and when you have dignity, pity is the worst pain that can be foisted upon you.
All this pain came from my failure to recognize the event before it happened and my failure to manage the event as it transpired. This, I could change. This I would change! Honest self-evaluation is the key to self-improvement. If you can't be honest with yourself, you have no hope of being a better person. That doesn't mean self-loathing, it means self-evaluation, and it means you improve on your weaknesses until that weakness is a strength.
Speed became my first goal, and almost an obsession. I began running rather than walking, any time the situation allowed. If my dad was working on a car and would ask me for a tool from his box, I ran to get it. In the morning I would run to the school bus stop, even when I was early. Iwould take Shorty out into a field and just run with him. I would chase rabbits with Shorty, and eventually I got fast enough to catch them! By the time we moved back to California, Shorty was dead, but I could catch a cottontail rabbit in an open field. I've fed myself rabbit dinner more than once when I was out exploring the Mojave Desert. I once jumped from a moving tractor and, after a chase, caught a pheasant in flight as it exited a wheat field. Then I roasted him and ate him. From the time I was eleven years old, I raced anyone who would run against me and I never lost a single race until the age of thirty, when my weight began slowing me down.
The same was true with hand speed. I became obsessed with it. The mantis-like ability to reach out and snatch an object, was my goal. I worked on it over and over. I practiced grabbing objects at different distances. I practiced grabbing things without looking at them. I practiced touching a window screen as fast as I could without touching the glass behind it. I played the hand-slap game (also called slapsies or slap jack) with anyone who would play against me, and I almost always won. I slap boxed anyone who would go against me, and by the time I was eleven years old, no one was able to slap me in the face. I always won.
Years later, when I lived in the Mojave Desert, I could draw my knife and cut the head off of a sidewinder before he could strike. I did that once in front of a cop. It unnerved the cop, and I laughed at him. He didn't like me before that, and he really didn't like me laughing at him. But that's a different part of the story, let's get back to Beechy, Kentucky.
The human body can be pushed to extraordinary limits when it's young, but the most important thing to me was that I never allowed anyone to punch me in the face again, and after that summer day in 1971, to this very day no one has, though many have tried.
First post & table of contents
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