The Sunday morning worship service at the Bainbridge Church of God was over and most of the congregation—everyone except the blind man, my two friends and me—drifted toward the double doors where my Daddy, the pastor, waited to shake their hands. Brother Roy, the blind man, sat on the third pew from the front, gripping his cane, waiting for the aisles to clear. My friends and I stood behind him and to his right.
“Pinch him,” said Daniel.
“I ain’t pinching nobody,” I said.
Brother Roy cocked his head our way.
“Go ahead. He can’t see you,” said James.
“Pinch him yourself,” I said.
“It’s your turn. I took his hat last week,” said James.
“I dare you,” said Daniel.
I heard the word “dare” and something clicked. I eased over to Brother Roy who sat stock-still, listening for any disturbance of air in his vicinity. A feeling of self-satisfaction swept over me like a religious experience: I felt cleansed, sanctified, superior. I got chill bumps. My buddies snickered in the background. I reached forward…
The blind man’s hand shot out like a snake seizing its prey. He grabbed my wrist and raised it high. “Look here, everybody! You want to see what kind of boy pinches a blind man? Look here, folks! It’s Randy Reynolds!”
Everyone turned to look except my friends--(who had disappeared faster than Elijah in his chariot of fire.) I fought to get free but Brother Roy was able to hold me until Daddy got there…
…(no need to go into further specifics here)…
In Bainbridge (in the late ‘50’s) when working in the sewing factory paid more than being a maid, my mother worked in the sewing factory and hired a maid to take care of the parsonage and the five little Reynolds children. Both Mother and the maid worked long hard hours, but at the end of the week, Mother paid the maid and still had a small profit left over, so it was a good deal until she had to quit the job to give birth to baby number six. Having the maid was a good deal for Ricky and me, as well, because the maid had two sons, Jo-Jo and Charlie, who came along most days to play. And Jo-Jo was a daredevil.
When Jo-Jo jumped headfirst off the roof of the shed in our backyard, I had to do it, too. We held our arms in front of us, took a running start and flew from the roof into a stand of bamboo. We held onto those canes for dear life as they bent beneath our weight and set us on the ground. What a rush!
A couple of years later in Louisiana, my daredevil friend Richie fell out of his tree house backward onto some springs and a mattress on the ground. After I saw him do it, I did it, too, and had a religious experience in mid-air.
Richie picked up a snake that crossed our path in the woods. I thought it was the bravest act I’d ever seen so I began to pick up snakes, too.
It became a competition. Which of us would do something the other wouldn’t? Richie stuck a straight pin in his leg at church, as we sat on the back row. It went all the way into the bone, I presumed, because nothing remained visible except the pinhead. Although, I was afraid of needles (I fainted when I took a shot) I did what he did—licked the pin to make sure it was clean and stuck it into my skin, then tapped it with my finger until it was all the way in.
I’m the one who elevated the competition to carving girls’ initials in our arms. While a church service was going on, I used a pocket knife to carve scratches into my arm—scratches shaped like letters of the alphabet, letters that comprised a girl’s initials. It made a bloody mess, but after scabbing over it was a lovely tribute to a girl.
At 15, when I got my first radio job but didn’t have a car, Daddy would take me to work on Sunday mornings and drive back to his church in the country. After church, he’d loan his ’64 Chevy station wagon to guys from church (usually Richie, Willie and Rodney) and they’d drive the 8 miles to town to pick me up. On one such occasion, on our way back home with me at the wheel, we were doing over 90 miles per hour when one of the boys dared me to put it into reverse. I don’t know what possessed him to do that, but there was no dare that Randy Reynolds wouldn’t do. I dropped it into reverse and I’ll never forget the sounds and the smell, both human and mechanical. The car shimmied and shook the rest of the way home. Our story was that we were driving along and the car just started “acting up.” Daddy had no reason not to believe us.
At Lee Road Consolidated School, our principal allowed the junior high grades to get out of class to watch World Series games on a small TV set that he placed on a stool in the gym. I, a lowly seventh-grader had somehow gotten involved in a discussion with ninth-grader and star basketball player Joe King, who favored the Yankees. I bet him a quarter (that I didn’t have) that the Pirates would win. Shortly afterward, Mazerowski hit his grand slam and Joe owed me a quarter. When I went to collect he wanted to make it double-or-nothing that I couldn’t throw a Coke bottle from the bleachers on one side of the gym to the stage on the other side without breaking the bottle. I told him I thought it could be done without the bottle breaking, depending on how it was thrown, but I didn’t want to do it. I just wanted my quarter. Then he said, “I dare you.” If it was a dare, I had to do it. The gym was filled with people, but no one was on the stage. I stood up and heaved the bottle in such a way as I hoped would cause it to sail to a soft landing on the hardwood stage. The bottle broke to smithereens in front of a gym full of witnesses and I was hauled to the principal’s office. I tried to explain that it was an experiment, but the only experiment Mr. Fitzgerald was interested in was the one he applied to my backside with the paddle with the holes drilled in it.
At 17, my baseball career was ended by a dare. CHS Coach Royce Whittington had hauled us out to our practice field at the fairgrounds and told us to warm up easy. “Everybody pick a partner. Don’t throw it hard. Just warm up. Throw it slow.” We paired up to toss a few. Coach strolled around watching us play catch. “Just loosen up. Nice’n’easy.”
“Burn one in here,” said my partner Jerome.
I lobbed it to him.
He tossed it back. “Come on. Show me whatchou got! I dare you!”
He dared me?
I wound up and threw the ball with all my might. Instead of trying to catch it, he ducked and let it go over his head. Someone yelled, “Coach, look out!” Coach Whit turned just in time for the ball to hit him in the eye. He dropped like a sack of feed.
I was among the group that gathered around him, waiting for the ambulance. “Coach, it wasn’t my fault! Jerome dared me! Then he ducked!”
My throw splintered several little bones around his eye, but his vision was eventually saved and the bones were pieced back together until he looked almost normal again.
When it came time for our first game—a road trip—he said, “We have eighteen players, but we’re only taking seventeen, so someone will have to volunteer to stay.”
His eyes settled on me. I thought, Oh, no, you wouldn’t dare.
He smiled as if reading my mind. “Reynolds, thanks for volunteering."
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BAMBOO
by Randy Reynolds
Shed deserted, to club converted. We were proud, No Girls Allowed!!! From roof, bamboo to leap into. Again, again bamboo would strain under me and my chum, and then succumb with swishing sound and set us aground. Though life today has me down to stay, though now there's such little cane to clutch, I'd love once more from that roof to soar, hit scared and queasy, and go down easy.
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JO-JO AND CHARLIE
by Randy Reynolds
Black folk voted Republican. White folk voted Jim Crow.
I guess their daddies had done it, which was all they seemed to know.
Our only contact with black folk was to hire one as our maid.
And with her came Jo-Jo and Charlie, her sons, with whom I played.
I invited them once to our church, stirring talk of Little Rock.
The deacons went into a frenzy and the membership went into shock.
Christians ran off the intruders. Saints stood guard at the door.
And I was admonished to never invite them back anymore.
Those boys and I drifted apart as our childhoods drifted by.
We all knew we couldn't be friends; we just didn't quite know why.
