The Birdman of Alcatraz was really a man named Robert Stroud. He had been in several prisons including Alcatraz in San Francisco and then later moved to a prison hospital in Springfield,Missouri, when he got old and sick. The reason he became known as the Birdman of Alcatraz is that while he was in prison, he got interested in canaries when some showed up at his cell window and later got sick. Somehow or another he managed to figure out what was causing their sickness and began treating them. Supposedly he was some kind of a bird genius because Hollywood made a movie about him starring Mr. Burt Lancaster.
A little while after Mr. Stroud went to the hospital in Springfield, my daddy decided to get into the nursing home business with some of his buddies. His first nursing home had been a hotel before he bought it, and one time a man traveling through killed himself on purpose up in his room right there in Azalea Heights. I thought it was eerie that Daddy was turning a place with such a sordid past into something like a nursing home where people were supposed to live out their remaining days peacefully and in cheerful surroundings with freshly cut flowers on the dining room tables and cardinals singing in the pine trees outside their bedroom windows. You could hardly feel peaceful when the place was infected with suicidal memories.
Another thing you need to remember about all this is that Shelby County was the poultry capital of the world. You couldn’t drive through town without seeing five or six big trucks loaded up with hundreds of crates full of chickens, and all the highways and byways passed through miles and miles of property dotted with big, long chicken houses. We had two poultry processing plants right there in Azalea Heights itself, not to mention all the ones scattered all over the rest of the county. Since both chickens and canaries are birds, and Mr. Stroud discovered some important cures for bird diseases, and he was in the hospital on his last leg anyway, Daddy thought it would be a nice gesture to see if he could get the parole board to let him come live out his days right there in Toledo Lodge. (I wondered if Daddy told the parole board that a man had committed suicide in one of the rooms; I bet he just conveniently left out that little tidbit of information. )
For a while, Daddy and the Birdman wrote letters back and forth about what life would be like if he got to come here. The Birdman in all those years locked up had also gotten pretty handy with leather, so he made Daddy a billfold with his name engraved on it. Daddy worked on this project for about two years and even made a couple of trips up to Springfield and visited with the Birdman, but in the end— just about the time Daddy had almost worn down the authorities—the Birdman decided he’d just rather stay there where he was than to venture over to East Texas where he didn’t know anybody. Pretty soon after that, he died, so he wouldn’t have gotten much use out of Toledo Lodge anyway.
Daddy was all involved in this and other projects so much that I guess he just never had time to do things like teach me how to fight, but there was a new girl in town whose daddy spent as much time teaching his girl how to fight as mine did getting us ready for the Russians and trying to spring murderers from prison. Her name was Kate Bloomberg, and she was taller than any fifth-grader and most sixth-graders too. Kate wasn’t all that mean; she was really pretty quiet, but she was different — folks called her a Yankee — and I decided she needed to learn how to act more like the rest of us, so I challenged her to a fight in the woods one Saturday. She had managed to make a friend — also quite a bit bigger than the rest of us- and all I had on my side was a bunch of unskilled, untrained pipsqueaks with big mouths. Still we were scheduled to fight in the woods behind Delia Brown’s house the next Saturday afternoon at two o’clock sharp. We were even charging 25 cents admission, even though it never occurred to us what we would do if somebody ventured up through the woods to watch and didn’t want to pay—just like the woods weren’t open to everybody in this whole free country.
The day of the fight, a few clumped around me and even fewer clumped around Kate, and then the next thing you knew we were both hearing some kind of imaginary bell and jumping into the ring to do whatever kind of damage ten-year-old street-stupid girls can do to each other. The funny thing was that this fight just didn’t have the fuel it needed to get us worked up into enough malice to fight with any kind of heart. She was about three heads taller and about twenty pounds heavier than I was, and it was true that she did know a few things about yelling those karate kind of words and throwing her body into stiff poses totally foreign to anything remotely related to East Texas.
But she didn’t really care a whole lot about beating me up, and I wasn’t really mad at her about anything enough to compensate for all she was in the fighting world that I clearly was not, so after a little while of bouncing around with clenched fists like I had seen Floyd Patterson do at the Rio and dodging her high kicks and flat-palmed, knifelike hands that sliced through the air close enough to cause my eyelashes to flutter in their breezes, I lost my steam and just kinda eased out of the ring. I was pretty much finished with this activity and was ready for all of us to become friends and go down and take turns tightrope-walking the pipe across the sewer, but for some reason, I’ll never understand, Mary Nell Bobbitt was just getting interested.
As I stepped out, Mary Nell stepped in with her mouth all twisted up and her eyes all tightened into little slits and her fists throwing her arms around into wild gyrations as she yelled at Kate, “You come over here to me, you Yankee smart-alec fightin’ machine you!”
It was bizarre. Nobody had ever seen Mary Nell act like this, and it just didn’t make any sense. For one thing, Mary Nell cared too much about her hair to be entertaining notions of anything of such a windy nature as fighting. Everybody there fell into a silent trance as we waited breathlessly for what would happen if Kate took Mary Nell up on her nutty threat. Then, as though it were all in slow motion, Kate just took a couple of steps closer to Mary Nell, forgot all about her fancy Yankee technique and socked Mary Nell right in the eye with her doubled-up right fist. Mary Nell went off crying, and Kate threw her hands up over her mouth in shock at herself. I suspect that her Karate antics up until that time had been more about dancing than demonstrating violence, and now, whether she liked it or not, she had been duly baptized into the Piney Woods martial arts system.
Even though “prejudice” was a word I had heard only occasionally on channel twelve out of Shreveport, I had no idea that I was a proponent of it; after all, when our colored maid’s daughter, Cornelia, invited me to come spend the night with her on Neuville Street down in East Azalea Heights, I had my suitcase completely packed and was raring to go until Daddy came home and told me I might better wait until another night. But after the fight in the woods that day against somebody who didn’t do a thing to me but talk a little different and come from “off,” I thought about how maybe I was one of those very people they were talking about on channel twelve.
