faith. Jesus and all the stories I knew from the Bible were as real to me as my arms and legs. Santa and the Easter Bunny were things to believe in. Jesus just was.Uncle Tom was big and fleshy with a jowly double chin and a paunch. Except for a rather sharp nose that I always thought looked like it was sculpted out of wax, he had no lines to his body. He was all curves, like a man made of pillows. He did like to eat. If he had a vice, that was it. It was certainly the only thing I ever saw him do for fun. Mother called him fat behind his back, but he wasn’t fat, except around the belly. The word for such men then was
portly
. And a steady diet of my aunt’s cooking would have put pounds on anyone. She stuck to the Southern menu—ham, chicken, beef roasts, casseroles. There was nothing fancy about her recipes, but she had that knack that one in a hundred cooks possesses—the ability to make heavy food seem light. The best part of eating at my aunt’s table, though, was the mood. They never ate in the dining room unless there was a lot of company or it was Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter. Instead, we would crowd around the little table in a corner of the kitchen, where the smell of oyster stew and fried chicken and chocolate pound cake banished all unhappiness, as surely as the brightly lit yellow walls kept the night outside at bay. I had never felt safer than when sitting at that table, watching my aunt crumble a hard-boiled egg yolk over steamed spinach or patiently stirring custard on the stove.
My uncle looked relaxed only when he was fully dressed in a suit and tie, suspenders and a vest. If you put him in a bathing suit on the beach, he looked like he’d forgotten to finish dressing. He was one of the last men I knew to give up hats. His manner was as stiff as his wardrobe. He was not a dour man—he affected a jolly manner and he told more awful jokes than
Reader’s Digest
—but there was nothing easygoing about him. He was impatient, pious, more than a little close-minded and quick totake offense. He was also kind, generous, disarmingly naïve and transparently childlike. He took enormous pleasure in the simplest things—a blueberry muffin, a birthday card, a sturdy pair of wingtips. Small children and women, especially spinster women in his congregation, loved him, the men a little less. He didn’t care for sports and wasn’t much for small talk. If he found himself in a group of people where the conversation fell off, he filled the silence with one of his jokes, which just seemed to make everyone feel worse.
His father, Brother James Bryan, had been something of a local celebrity in Birmingham, Alabama, where he preached and ran a mission for the city’s down-and-out in the first half of the twentieth century (it was always easy for me to figure out how old my uncle was, because he was born in 1900). One of the handful of books in our apartment was a biography of Brother Bryan called
Religion in Shoes
. I think my uncle became a preacher because of his father, whom he revered, but he was otherwise singularly unqualified for the job. He wasn’t inspiring in the pulpit—I took my mother’s word for this—and he was tone deaf when it came to dealing with other people. He lacked, by any definition, the common touch, and as I grew older, I came to think of him as a man who was trying, not very successfully, to lead someone else’s life.
My uncle was not much of a father figure in any conventional sense. He was useless at games, knew nothing about cars or how to start a fire without matches or how to fish or fire a gun. To his credit, he never pretended otherwise. He never said so, but he let me know early in life that if I was going to hang around with him, we’d be doing what he did, not what I wanted to do. That was fine with me. I liked going on errands to the newspaper and the radio station or the dry cleaners, where you walked into a room that feltlike it was made out of heat, or the city
portly
. And a steady diet of my aunt’s cooking would have put pounds on anyone. She stuck to the Southern menu—ham, chicken, beef roasts, casseroles. There was nothing fancy about her recipes, but she had that knack that one in a hundred cooks possesses—the ability to make heavy food seem light. The best part of eating at my aunt’s table, though, was the mood. They never ate in the dining room unless there was a lot of company or it was Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter. Instead, we would crowd around the little table in a corner of the kitchen, where the smell of oyster stew and fried chicken and chocolate pound cake banished all unhappiness, as surely as the brightly lit yellow walls kept the night outside at bay. I had never felt safer than when sitting at that table, watching my aunt crumble a hard-boiled egg yolk over steamed spinach or patiently stirring custard on the stove.
My uncle looked relaxed only when he was fully dressed in a suit and tie, suspenders and a vest. If you put him in a bathing suit on the beach, he looked like he’d forgotten to finish dressing. He was one of the last men I knew to give up hats. His manner was as stiff as his wardrobe. He was not a dour man—he affected a jolly manner and he told more awful jokes than
Reader’s Digest
—but there was nothing easygoing about him. He was impatient, pious, more than a little close-minded and quick totake offense. He was also kind, generous, disarmingly naïve and transparently childlike. He took enormous pleasure in the simplest things—a blueberry muffin, a birthday card, a sturdy pair of wingtips. Small children and women, especially spinster women in his congregation, loved him, the men a little less. He didn’t care for sports and wasn’t much for small talk. If he found himself in a group of people where the conversation fell off, he filled the silence with one of his jokes, which just seemed to make everyone feel worse.
His father, Brother James Bryan, had been something of a local celebrity in Birmingham, Alabama, where he preached and ran a mission for the city’s down-and-out in the first half of the twentieth century (it was always easy for me to figure out how old my uncle was, because he was born in 1900). One of the handful of books in our apartment was a biography of Brother Bryan called
Religion in Shoes
. I think my uncle became a preacher because of his father, whom he revered, but he was otherwise singularly unqualified for the job. He wasn’t inspiring in the pulpit—I took my mother’s word for this—and he was tone deaf when it came to dealing with other people. He lacked, by any definition, the common touch, and as I grew older, I came to think of him as a man who was trying, not very successfully, to lead someone else’s life.
My uncle was not much of a father figure in any conventional sense. He was useless at games, knew nothing about cars or how to start a fire without matches or how to fish or fire a gun. To his credit, he never pretended otherwise. He never said so, but he let me know early in life that if I was going to hang around with him, we’d be doing what he did, not what I wanted to do. That was fine with me. I liked going on errands to the newspaper and the radio station or the dry cleaners, where you walked into a room that feltlike it was made out of heat, or the city
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