Cash: The Autobiography (5 page)

They got us down on our stomachs on the floor. I looked across at June, saw her trying to hide her watch and ring, and prayed they wouldn't notice. They didn't. I hoped with all my heart that Ray wasn't carrying his gun that night, because if he was, he was sure to try some- thing. The one with the pistol said, “We want a million dol- lars, or somebody's going to die.” I was very calm. I'd realized right away that if we were going to survive, a steady and reasonable attitude was what would do it. I raised my head and looked at the gunman. “You know your government wouldn't allow us to bring a mil- lion dollars into the country, even if we had it, which we don't,” I told him, “but if you don't hurt us, you can have everything we've got.” “You've got money!” he insisted. “Yes, we do,” I said, “but we don't have a million dollars.” In fact, we had several thousand dollars in my briefcase under our bed, and of course June had her jew- elry. These guys were going to make out okay if every- body kept it together. So far, our group wasn't doing very well in that regard. Desna was panicking noisily and poor Miss Edith, once revived, began screaming, “I'm going to have a heart attack! I'm going to have a heart attack!” Maybe she was, too. Our captors might have thought so, because they let her sit up and one of them told Desna to run to the kitchen for a glass of water. That was a telling moment, the first sign that perhaps these men weren't professionals, or at least they weren't killers. Real hard cases wouldn't have cared about Miss Edith's health or put up with her hysterics; they'd have used her

as an example to the rest of us and just shot her, or split her head with that hatchet. I'd noticed too that they were very young. The one with the gun might have been in his twenties, but the other two were just teenagers, and all of them were very nervous. That comforted me. Maybe it shouldn't have, but it did. I thought again, If we're cool, we might get through this. June started losing it, or at least acting as if she were, when they started taking off our jewelry and watches. She sat up and said she was having chest pains, she had a heart condition. I think that's when the gunman pulled young Doug Caldwell to his feet, stuck the gun right up against his head, and said, “Everybody do as I say, or John Carter is going to die!” Two quandaries there. First, should I tell him that he didn't have John Carter? I had no idea how to handle that. Second, was the gun real? This was my first good look at it, and I couldn't tell. I know guns—I grew up with them, and in my time I've owned hundreds—but this piece wasn't familiar to me. It was small and it looked pretty crude, but I knew enough to realize how lit- tle that meant: it could be a cheap but lethal junk gun just as easily as a convincing toy. That question was unresolved, then—I just had to assume the gun was real, and that the guy would use it if we spooked him too bad. Then the first issue settled itself. When we were ordered onto our feet to begin the second phase of our encounter, the gunman looked at John Carter and realized his mistake. He shoved Doug away, then grabbed my son and stuck the gun to his head. It was under those conditions that we began the real work, going from room to room through the house and transferring all our portable valuables to these scared, adrenaline-charged little thugs—and junkies, I was think-

ing. I knew even more about addiction than I did about guns. These boys had the feel. We spent the next two hours going around the house, with one of them keeping the gun to John Carter's head while the others went through our things. They were careful and even tidy, I noticed, not tossing the place as professionals would. They'd been pretty rough at first, particularly with the women, pushing Reba around until she was absolutely terrified and Chuck was dangerously angry; the one with the hatchet handled June so roughly that he took a clump of her hair off. By the time we reached the master bedroom, though, they were relaxing. They were almost chatty, in fact, asking us how long we were planning to stay this Christmas and so on. All along I'd talked to them quietly and told them the truth about where the valuables were, and that was pay- ing off; now they were calling me “sir.” At one point I'd asked the man, “Please take the gun away from my son's head,” and though he didn't do that, the message in his response was clear: “Don't worry about it, man.” It got really strange in the bedroom. The gunman, who was standing up on the bed with his muzzle an inch from John Carter's brains, started asking him friendly lit- tle questions: “What do you do down here? What do you like to do in Jamaica? Do you snorkel?” John Carter answered calmly and pleasantly, and when the truly weirdest thing happened, he handled him- self beautifully. He was just eleven years old. “This is a real gun I've got against your head, you know,” the wild boy ventured. “Yes, I know,” said John Carter. “I go hunting with my dad sometimes. I know guns.” “Do you want a feel of my gun?”

I found out what it means when people say “my heart went into my mouth.” I couldn't breathe. John Carter didn't even miss a beat. “No, sir. I don't play with guns. I have a lot of respect for them. They're very dangerous.” The gunman nodded and grinned behind his stock- ing mask. “Hey, I like you, man!” “Thank you, sir,” said John Carter. The tension wound down quite a lot after that. I think we could all see things ending without bloodshed, and the robbers could see getting away with a pretty good haul. Reba was the only one still outwardly dis- traught; the rest of us were busy trying to keep her fear contained. When they'd got their loot bagged, one of the rob- bers told us, “We're going to lock you in die cellar.” At that, the women started screaming again, but I thought it was a pretty good deal. It meant they weren't going to spring some nasty last-minute surprise, like killing us to get rid of the witnesses. I don't know how well they thought their stocking masks disguised them, but over the course of more than two hours under varying light conditions, I'd concluded that the masks weren't up to the job at all; I could probably have picked each one of them out of a lineup. Ignoring the protests of the women, they marched us downstairs and, true to their word, locked us in the base- ment—or as June would have it, “the dungeon.” They wedged a two-by-four across the door, and then they left. Only for a minute, though. One of them came right back and slipped a plate of turkey under the door. "We

want you people to have your Christmas dinner after all,“ he said. ”We don't want to take that away from you.“ John Carter and Doug were already eating by the time we heard our dogs, who had been silent up to that point, barking as the robbers took their leave. It took us a while, but Chuck Hussey and I got that door broken down, and our sorry little group emerged from trie basement to call the police. Jamaican cops are action-oriented. They caught the gun- man that night, with his loot, and he died resisting arrest. They caught the others, the kids, a few weeks later during another robbery in Kingston, and after a short while in prison they, too, died, trying to escape. My understanding is mat the guards supplied them with a ladder for use in a work project, then happened to be waiting outside the wall when they came over. I wasn't very surprised when I heard about it. The police had been very closemouthed about the whole affair—they didn't even tell us about catching the first guy—but I remembered that on the morning after the robbery, a policeman had made it very clear that the rob- bers would be caught and they would be taken care of. ”Don't worry, Mr. Cash,“ he said. ”These people will never trouble you or your family again. You can count on it." Looking back, I realize he was saying more than I understood him to mean at the time. Or perhaps I understood him just fine, but preferred to imagine other- wise. So what do I think about all that? What's my stance on unofficially sanctioned summary justice in the Third World?

I don't know. What's yours? How do I feel about it? What's my emotional response to the fact (or at least the distinct possibility) that the desperate junkie boys who threatened and trau- matized my family and might easily have killed us all (perhaps never intending any such thing) were executed for their act—or murdered, or shot down like dogs, have it how you will? I'm out of answers. My only certainties are that I grieve for desperate young men and the societies that produce and suffer so many of them, and I felt that I knew those boys. We had a kinship, they and I: I knew how they thought, I knew how they needed. They were like me. I also knew, immediately, how I was going to respond to the threat they'd brought into my house. I wouldn't run from it. A reporter raised the issue right after the robbery: “Are you going to leave Jamaica now?” “No, we're not,” I told him. “This is our borne. This is our place. We have as much right to be here as anyone. We're going to keep coming. We're not going to let any- body run us off.” I meant every word, but that wasn't the whole pic- ture. Doubt, guilt, and fear were just as strong in me as defiance. For one thing, I felt I'd been naive and foolish, keeping my loved ones in a wide-open house when the evidence of danger was all around us—in the local news- papers with their accounts of murder, mayhem, and fighting in the streets of Kingston; in the eyes of the police and the Rasta men and all the other factions in Jamaica's political struggles and ganja wars; and even in our back-

yard, virtually, at the scenic waterfall where James Bond capered in Live and Let Die and every day a loose feder- ation of souvenir sellers, ganja dealers, and potential home invaders gathered to do business. I'd been coming to Cinnamon Hill long enough to feel like those charac- ters were almost part of the family; I'd first seen some of diem when they were six- or seven-year-olds. Maybe the criminals who came to my house, and died for it, were boys I'd watched grow. If they were, it would explain a lot of things: why the dogs didn't bark at them, how they'd known just when and where to catch us all together, how they were famil- iar with both the house and its occupants. The other two likely theories, that they were either total outsiders or intimate insiders, didn't wash. The local bad boys would have run outsiders off when they saw them scoping us out, and our insiders, Miss Edith and her family, were totally beyond suspicion. It was a long time before I arrived at some sort of peace about the robbery. For quite a while I brooded, I felt victimized and guilty, I took sleeping pills, I carried a gun. In time, though, those reactions faded, leaving only my most sensible response: professional twenty-four- hour armed security. I could live with that. Living with the loss of trust and innocence was harder, but I could do that, too. I'd always known how it goes when your safe place turns dangerous. The other victims of the crime reacted variously, ranging from Reba's flat refusal ever to set foot in Jamaica again (she hasn't) to John Carter's apparent cool. “Yeah, that was quite a night” is about all he's ever said on the subject. June, I think, has found relief in the telling of the story. Today I can look back and see that some good came from it all. When I take my walks and golf-cart rides down to the sea, I'm often stopped by local people who

greet me warmly—“Respects, Mr. Cash, respects”—and I can't count how many times I've heard gratitude for my decision to stay in Jamaica. And since the robbery I've been more involved in Jamaican life in various ways that have been very good for me. Today I feel truly at home in this beautiful country, and I love and admire its proud and kindly people. Here I sit in the gloaming, as my Scots ancestors would say, watching the gentle afterglow of sunset behind the hills above my house and listening as the sounds of the night creatures chase away the early evening's silence—nature's shift change, in progress here just as it is in New York and Washington, D.C., and will be in Memphis and Little Rock in another hour or so. I'm remembering my childhood again. I'm back on the front porch of that government house in Dyess Colony, with my mom and dad and brothers and sisters, all of us together, while my mother sings her sacred songs and plays her guitar, banishing fear and loneliness, bringing the black dog to heel, drowning out even the screams of panthers from the brush. Those are sounds I'll never hear again, neither the panthers nor my mother's comforting voice. I still have the songs, though.

I have a home that takes me anywhere I need to go, that cradles and comforts me, that lets me nod off in the mountains and wake up on the plains: my bus, of course. I love my bus. I've had it a long time, and it rides bet- ter now than when it was new, probably because of all the weight we've added to it over the years. It's been very reliable: other than one new engine, it hasn't needed any major repairs in seventeen years, and it's taken us all over the United States and Canada without once stranding us on the highway. We call it Unit One. It really is my home, too. When I make it off another plane and through another airport, the sight of that big black MCI waiting by the curb sends waves of relief through me. Aah!—safety, familiarity, solitude. Peace at last. My cocoon. I have my own special space on Unit One, about midway between the front and rear axles, a comfortable place to ride. I sit at a table with bench seats on both sides, like a diner booth, with my newspaper or book— June and I both consume reading matter at a very high rate, everything from the Bible to pulp fiction—and when I need to sleep, the booth converts into a bed. All the amenities are at hand: bathroom, kitchen, refrigerator, coffeepot, sound system, video setup, and seating for company. Curtains on the windows let me keep out the world or watch it pass; a Navajo dream catcher and a St. Bridget's cross guard me in the world I can't see. The rhythms of life on the road are so predictable, so familiar. I've been out here forty years now, and if you want to know what's really changed in all that time, I'll tell you. Back in 1957, there was no Extra Crispy. Other than that, it's the same.

That might give you an idea of what's really impor- tant in road life, and why things never really change. They get a little faster and bigger, and a fair bit more comfort- able (if you keep selling concert tickets), but they always come down to the same old questions: “Where are we?” and “Who ate all the apples?” and “What's the show tonight?” and “How far to the next frozen yogurt?” It's fun to imagine young musicians discovering all this, just beginning to learn the ways of a world that'll be theirs, if they're lucky, well into the twenty-first century. Myself, I've lived out here so long and know it all so well that I can wake up anywhere in the United States, glance out the bus window, and pinpoint my position to within five miles. Somebody told me that that's a talent, akin to the way I can remember a song I heard just once or twice long ago—back three or four decades, even five or six— but I don't believe talent has anything to do with it. I think it's just lots and lots of experience. Like the song says, I've been everywhere, man. Twice. Today I'm in Oregon, rolling southwest out of Portland through close dark greens and soft misty grays in my cocoon of comforting bus noise, heading toward the open hills and wide, gentle valleys of northern California. I know exactly where I am, of course. In this country it's the trees that tell you. My mind wanders off, gets caught on a problem the band and I are having with our stage performance of “Rusty Cage,” the Soundgarden song I recorded for the Unchained album, then resumes reflection on the story of my life. I begin thinking about Pete Barnhill, a friend I made when I was about thirteen. Pete lived two or three miles from our house, down on the drainage ditch near the spot where I went fishing the day my brother Jack got hurt, and he had a guitar, an old Gibson flattop. He also had what we called infantile paralysis, later known as polio, which had crippled his right leg and withered his

right arm to about half the length of his left. He'd adapted well. I wrote about him in the liner notes for American Recordings: With his left hand he made the chords as he beat a perfect rhythm with his tiny right hand. I thought if I could play the guitar like that I'd sing on the radio someday. I was at Pete's house every afternoon after school and stayed until long after dark, singing along with him, or singing to his playing Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb, and Jimmie Rodgers songs. Pete taught me my first chords on the guitar, but my hands being too small, I didn't really learn to play them. The long walk home at night was scary. It was pitch dark on the gravel road, or if the moon was shining, the shadows were even scarier. The panthers sounded closer, and I just knew that in every dark spot on the road was a cottonmouth snake ready to kill me. But I sang all the way home, songs Pete and I had been singing, and with the imaginary sound of the Gibson acoustic I sang through the dark, and I decided that that kind of music was going to be my magic to take me through all the dark places. Pete was an inspiration in more ways than one. I'd never been close to somebody playing the guitar except my mother when I was very small, and I thought he was the best guitar player in the world. To me he was won- derful, the sound he made purely heavenly. One day I said to him, “You know, Pete, you've got infantile paralysis, but you sure can play that guitar.”

His reply made a deep impression on me: “Some- times, when you lose a gift, you get another one.” From then on I didn't think of him as a cripple; I thought of him as having a gift. It hurt me when the other kids made fun of him. They'd see him hobbling the two or three miles from his house into town, and they'd start imitating him. I imitated him, too, of course, but not that way: he's where I got my guitar style, playing rhythm and leading with my thumb. Pete was crazy for music the way I was—he was the first person I knew who was that way—and we were both crazy for the radio. It meant the world to us, liter- ally. It goes without saying that we had no television, but neither did we have a record player or any other means of hearing music we didn't already know. The radio was vital, indispensable. I clearly remember the day we got ours, a mail-order Sears Roebuck with a big “B” battery, bought with money from Daddy's government loan the year he and Roy began clearing our land. I remember the first song I heard on it, “Hobo Bill's Last Ride” by Jimmie Rodgers, and how the image of a man dying alone in a freezing boxcar felt so real, so close to home. I remember tuning in WLW from New Orleans, WCKY from Cincinnati, XEG from Fort Worth, XERL from Del Rio, Texas. I remember the Suppertime Frolics show at six o'clock in the evening from WJJD in Chicago, the Grand Ole Opry from WSM in Nashville on Saturday nights, the Renfro Valley Barn Dance and the Wheeling Jamboree from WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia. I remember listen- ing to Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Eddy Arnold, Hank Williams. I remember tuning in all kinds of pop music— Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters—and gospel and blues, everyone from the Chuck Wagon Gang to Pink Anderson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. I remember being allowed an extra fifteen minutes on my midday break from the fields to listen to the Louvin Brothers' High

Noon Roundup show from WMPS in Memphis. I remember how Daddy would go to bed every night at 8:05, right after the evening news broadcast, then yell at me and Jack: “Okay, boys, time to go to bed! You won't want to go to work in the morning. Blow that light out! Turn that radio off!” Jack would turn his oil lamp down and hunch over his Bible. I'd lower the volume on the radio and put my ear right up against it. The music I heard became the best thing in my life. Daddy didn't like that. “You're wasting your time, listening to them old records on the radio,” he'd say. “That ain't real, you know. Those people ain't really there. That's just a guy sitting there playing records. Why d'you listen to that fake stuff?” I'd say, “But it's just as real as when they sang it and put it on the record. It's the same thing.” “But it ain't real, it's just a record.” “I don't care. It sounds good. I like it.” “Well, you're getting sucked in by all them people,” he'd conclude. “That's going to keep you from making a living. You'll never do any good as long as you've got that music on the mind.” I hated hearing that, but maybe it served a purpose. I badly wanted to prove him wrong. I wanted to prove Moma right, too. She saw that the music was in me just as it was in her and had been in her father, John L. Rivers, who taught the shape-note system and four-part harmony singing and was the song leader in his church. They say he was a great singer, good enough to be a pro- fessional; people came from all over the county to hear him. I remember him as a kind man. He and my Grand- mother Rivers were both sweet souls, the salt of the earth, well loved and respected in their community. Long after Grandfather Rivers died, I went back to Chester-

field County, South Carolina, where he was born and raised. Though I really didn't expect to find any trace of him, when I walked into the office of the Rivers Cotton Gin and asked, “Is anyone here any relation to John L. Rivers, who migrated to Arkansas when he was a young man?” everyone there answered, “We all are.” Then they sent me down the road to the local genealogist, Edgar Rivers, and Edgar sat me down on his back porch and told me a story. Several years after he'd been settled in Arkansas, Grandfather Rivers got a letter from back home telling him that the farms in Chesterfield County had been stricken by a blight and the farmers had no seed corn for next year's crop. If he had any extra, could he get it to them somehow? He could. He scraped together all the seed corn he could spare, hitched up his wagon, made the trip from southwest Arkansas to South Carolina—a brutally long, hard journey in those days—and delivered the seed in time for spring planting. The farmers of Chesterfield County had a successful crop that year. Edgar went into his kitchen when he'd finished the story and came back out onto the porch with a fresh ear of corn in his hand. He'd just picked it that morning, he said, the first corn of the year from his garden. He shucked it and showed it to me. It looked good: a big, long, healthy ear, bright yellow. “That's John L. Rivers Yellow,” he said, “the same corn your granddaddy brought from Arkansas. We still eat it today.” That was a good moment. Moma inherited Grandfather Rivers's talent and his love for music. She could play guitar, and fiddle too, and she sang well. The first singing I remember

was hers, and the first song I remember myself singing was one of the songs of faith she'd learned as a child. I was about four years old, sitting on a chair right beside her on the front porch. She'd sing “What would you give”—and I'd chime right in with my part, continu- ing the line—“in exchange for your soul?” We sang in the house, on the porch, everywhere. We sang in the fields. Daddy would be by himself, plowing, and we kids would be with Moma, chopping cotton and singing. I'd start it off with pop songs I'd heard on the radio, and my sister Louise and I would challenge each other: “Bet you don't know this one!” Usually I knew them and I'd join in well before she'd finished. Later in the day we'd all sing together, hill- billy songs and novelty songs, whatever was going around at the time—“I'm My Own Grandpa,” “Don't Telephone, Tell a Woman”—and then, as the sun got about halfway down toward the west and our spirits started flagging, we'd switch to gospel: first the rous- ing, up-tempo songs to keep us going, then, as the sun began to set, the slower spirituals. After Jack died, we'd sing all the songs we sang at his funeral. We closed each day in the fields with “Life's Evening Sun Is Sinking Low.” Moma had faith in me. She wanted me to have singing lessons, so she took in schoolteachers' laundry to pay for them. A whole day's work earned her three dol- lars, the cost of one lesson. I didn't want any part of it, but she insisted, and I was glad she did. When I showed up for the first lesson I found a good reason to go back for a second: the teacher was young, kind, and very pretty. She wasn't meant for me, though. Halfway through my third lesson, after she'd accompanied me while I sang “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” “I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” and all those other popular

Irish ballads, she closed the lid on her piano. “Okay, that's enough,” she said. “Now I want you to sing to me, without accompaniment, what you like to sing.” I sang her a Hank Williams song—I think it was “Long Gone Lonesome Blues.” When I was through, she said, “Don't ever take voice lessons again. Don't let me or anyone else change the way you sing.” Then she sent me home. I regretted not being able to see that pretty lady any- more, but I followed her advice, and now I regret that, too, in a way. It would have been good to have known more about the voice, how to protect and strengthen it over the years instead of abusing and damaging it as much as I did. That puts me in mind of the day my voice broke and my mother heard my new bass tones for the first time. I was singing as I walked in the back door, and she wheeled around from the stove in shock and said, “Who was that?” I sang some more for her, exploring my new range, and as I found out how deep I could go, her eyes teared up and she said, “You sound exactly like my daddy.” Then she said, “God has His hand on you, son. Don't ever forget the gift.” I don't think Moma really wondered who was singing; she knew it was me. And that was the first time I remember her calling my voice “the gift.” Thereafter she always used that term when she talked about my music, and I think she did so on purpose, to remind me that the music in me was something special given by God. My job was to care for it and use it well; I was its bearer, not its owner.

I'm in San Francisco—we rolled in late last night from Portland across the Bay Bridge—and so far I've had a busy day. This morning a team from the BBC interviewed and photographed me in my suite, and that was draining. I don't enjoy answering questions about myself for more than a couple of minutes, let alone an hour. Then I ate with some people involved in a project with me—a working lunch, I guess you'd call it, or a “lunch meeting”—and that too was long and draining. I kept looking out the window, wondering how the air s.nelled, how the breeze felt, how good it would be if I could just walk down the street. Wage slaves get boxed up in offices and factories and workshops, away from their loved ones. Fame slaves like me get boxed up in hotels and studios and limousines, away from strangers. Now it's time for my nap. I'm working tonight, and if I'm not rested, it will be a mess. I'll feel bad, I won't sing well, and the people won't get their money's worth. Billy Graham taught me that: if you have an evening con- cert, he said, take yourself to bed in the afternoon and rest, even if you don't sleep. It was the most valuable advice I'd had in years, maybe ever. The show tonight is in Santa Cruz, a college town about two hours through the hills south of San Francisco, and I expect a very different crowd from the one back in Portland. That was about as close to an “average” audi- ence as I get: mostly working people, mostly in their mid- dle years. Tonight there probably won't be anyone over forty who doesn't have a Ph.D., and I won't be totally surprised if things get a little rowdy. Tomorrow I'll be shocked if they don't. We're playing the Fillmore, and it'll be nuts: rock 'n' roll, raunch and rave. We need to have “Rusty Cage” together by then; it'll be a “Rusty Cage” kind of crowd. It'll be exciting.