The Good Times

Cousin Edwin proved that words could take you to places so glorious and so far from the Virginia sticks that your own kin could only gape in wonder and envy. When my mother saw that I might have the word gift she started trying to make it grow. She was desperately poor, but she found money to buy me mag- azine subscriptions to Boy's Life and American Boy, and later The Atlantic Monthly and Harper's. She signed up for a book deal that supplied one volume of "World's Greatest Literature" every month at a cost of thirty-nine cents a book. Poe, Haw- thorne, Shakespeare, Thackeray-the full panoply of English literature piled up unread, but treasured, under my bed.

I respected those great writers, but at the age of ten, eleven, twelve, my heart did not sing when I opened them to read. What I read with joy were newspapers. I lapped up every word in newspaper accounts of monstrous crimes, dreadful accidents, and hideous butcheries committed in faraway wars. Accounts of mur- derers dying in the electric chair fascinated me, and I kept close track of last meals ordered by condemned men.

Though I did not realize it at the time, I was preparing myself to challenge my mother's cousin Edwin in newspaper work. This was such a preposterous idea that I kept it secret even from myself during all the years of my growing up. What was oddest about this was that I had never met Edwin, that my mother had not seen him since before the First World War, that Edwin did not know I existed, and that he probably remembered my mother only as a little girl he had once liked to tease.

"Edwin James was the worst tease I ever knew in my life," she often said. This grievance, like most of the others, dated from their childhoods.

"Conceited," she called him.

"Mean."

"Gave himself airs."

"Always acted like he thought he was smarter than anybody else."

"Edwin James was no smarter than anybody else,” she told me so often I believed it.

I had a glimpse into the depths of her anger when we first moved from New Jersey to Baltimore. That was in 1937. I was eleven. She was just a notch above abject poverty, unemployed,