13 Crybaby

From the night of my last spanking in 1957 when I was fourteen it took over ten years for me to like my father. As I was growing up, Dad addressed me in only two ways, angry and stern. I have talked with my brother Richard about Dad and the years of my whippings.

On his way to a spanking of his own Richard had questioned Dad.

"This hurts you more than it hurts me, right?" Richard asked, repeating something he had heard on TV.

"No, I like this," Dad had answered.

"From that moment on I hated him," Richard told me. "I don't know why he was that way."

Richard's words comforted me.

Corroboration.

In the 1940s and '50s I was afraid of Dad. When I first began thinking on this subject my memory was of being spanked almost every single day. Until the day in 1957 when I refused to cry I had no other image of Dad. He was twenty-six when I was born on March 27, 1943. While Dad was in the army I had been cared for and raised by my mother and by her mother and father Vera and Ray Anderson. The first man I remember is my mom's dad, Grandpa Ray, R. J. Anderson, the most lovable man who ever walked the earth.

My first memory is of Grandpa pointing up the block to a burning bridge.

"Look!"

Each morning on his way to work in Emerson I walked Grandpa to the curb at the corner beyond which I was forbidden to go.

The next man I knew was Dad.

Hurting me.

But my mother says Grandpa Ray was the first man to spank me. I had learned that if I made a scene Grandpa would take me home from church even in the middle of the service. This time he took me outside, spanked me, and brought me back in to stay till the very end.

I don't remember this.

"Everyone spanked in those days," Mom said. "Swats, hand slaps, and I would—"

With her thumb and middle finger she made the snapping gesture that Dad used on my head.

"On your hand to keep you from touching something."

My mother believed that I was being unfair to Dad to bring this subject all back up now that he was dead. Twice before Dad's death my brothers Ronald and Richard and I talked with him about his whippings. My first memory of being spanked is of Dad, furious, whipping me with his belt. Dad physically punished me from as far back as I can remember, more than once for giggling with Ronald in bed when we were supposed to be sleeping. I remember distinctly a whipping in the bedroom of our apartment on West Valley in Shenandoah when I was five. For punishment Dad marched me to the bedroom and closed the door so Kathryn couldn't see me scream—being deaf she couldn't hear me—and took off his belt. Gripping its two ends in his right hand and raising it about his head he whipped my naked butt, swinging as hard as he could, striking me more than two dozen times.

To make me behave, be quiet, or sit up straight, Dad thumped me on the temple, stoutly, with his middle finger, the way I snap an insect off my leg. He pinched the tendon between my shoulder and my neck, hard, and the tender bone right above my knee.

With the end of his thumb he jabbed me in the ribs.

"You knucklehead!"

"You little rummy!"

"You dumb bunny!"

"You knothead!"

"You dimwit!"

"You ninny!"

"You crybaby!"

"You big sissy!"

These epithets accompanied the powerful knocks and squeezes which I felt on a daily basis for over eight years and which made me jerk, lurch, cringe, squeal, and cry both from physical pain and from the just plain meanness of it. For crying from fear or from loneliness I was ridiculed, taunted, and threatened with physical harm.

"Do you want something to cry about?"

Many times I received a second whipping more furious than the first for not being able to stop crying when Dad demanded.

"Stop that sniveling!"