True story:
Martin Luther King Jr. came to my hometown as a boy on an exchange program from his home church. He spent his summer working beneath the hot nets of our then and still thriving tobacco farms. Culbro Tobacco. Just a child then. With a mind full of girls and prayers and duffle bag full of clothes that wouldn’t fit at the end of the summer. He worked the fields just a few miles from Dad’s house, back when this neighborhood was the only game around. Where a Barbershop on the edge of the world marked the end of civilization as they knew it, and saw the beginning of cornfields, tobacco fields, and a series of deep woods forest where the latest in bomb technology went to pieces. Martin Luther King Jr. awoke before dawn to ride into town with the other boys on Sundays and pray inside a big white church while the big white eyes in town finally saw them blackfolks they keep reading about. Martin Luther King Jr. liked Connecticut. He liked working the fields and singing with his friends from home. He liked getting his hair cut at Ray’s Barber shop. He liked the smiles they got on the way through town. He even liked the way white people sing in church. The program took Martin Luther King to Hartford, where he was allowed to sit anywhere he wanted in the restaurant.
That summer, Martin Luther King Jr. says, that summer
was the dream. He returned home, but something inside of him never let go of the tobacco nets. Every time he passed a restaurant or a church he remembered the time and the town where ten o’clock Sunday morning wasn’t the most segregated hour in the country.
The Barbershop still sits there.
Growing up we had our hair treated by the half blind owner/operator of Ray’s Barbershop, itself once the only game in town. The ghosts of Ray’s old war buddies squinted into the sunlight from the old, super-sepia photos on the walls. The one story barbershop that time and The Archie and Jughead comic subscription forgot. You could go there before school and (without fail) wait in line, reading up on what Jughead and the gang were up to thirty years ago, while the next old man in line tallied up the bodies on the wall for the old man in the chair. “That one there, number 27. He’s dead. So’s he. And he. The umpire never made it through the season.” Ray the Barber, always Ray. Stuck in that neighborhood like Barbershop itself, no matter how many public schools and swimming pools they put in. Ray The Barber—the fullest name god could give him or us teetered in there at six every morning from his house a block and a half down. First by foot, but by the time I stopped using the booster seat, by moped. The last I heard he still came it at six, parked his pickup in the closest spot and closed for a long lunch. A lunch that might just last until the morning.
In the eighties—when the picture quality of televisions increased and the quality pictures decreased, Ray would brush your neck with powder, wrap a paper bib around you and synch the apron around it. In the middle of asking you about how many girlfriends you have and how many homeruns you’ve hammered out—same answer, whether the truth or the lie—Ray would glance at the jittery, color-separated images of the world tearing itself apart. The guns and the drugs and the ketchup-as-vegetable in school lunches; those angry young men with the pink hair and those angry young men who should be in chain a gang, not in gold chains and gangs. Ray could cut your hair blindfolded, and he might as well because even with the TV off he couldn’t get it even. But with the TV on Ray watched the walls come down and the others go up. He watched as these funny little men in funny little hats fought each other in deserts for funny little reasons. (“Maybe you could cool off them A-rabs with Ray’s shave. Looks too hot in the desert for them thick beards. Think the Navy might call you up, Ray? Get you back in action?”) The wars. Ah, the wars we had back then. Cold Wars, gang wars, media wars, drug wars, cola wars. Not a single Simsbury bomb went off. Not a bunker-buster, nor a Patriot. With the end of mining, and no more major highways to blast on through with, the hypothetical wars kept the industries going on TV and in the factory. The war had come home now as the refugees from the cities huddled inside of giant, three story houses and waited for the news to come in on the TV as the popcorn came out of the microwave. The news of muggings and car jackings and that, that disease Gay-Related Immuno Deficiency Syndrome. Ray would look at you in the mirror and clink-dry his straight razor and shears and comb, clinking them free of the blue, debugging power of Barbasol. Typical Navy man, that Ray. With the instant cure for crabs, and only the thinnest hope that it might kill whatever else you picked up.
“It all started right here,” he would say to all of us and none of us. “It coulda ended here too. All I had to say was, Sorry, we don’t serve your kind here.” Before I even knew what he meant, Ray would sidle up to his ancient cash register and squint at the buttons as if they tended to move around on him. Poor Ray, with his touch tone phone and his press-button cash register. Why did they have to flip the numbers on these damn things? Hard enough as it is. Ray would punch in the numbers—with the timid caution that anyone of his Archie readers might use when putting a needle to a record— take your four dollars and send you home with a dried, hardened piece of Bazooka Joe.
