He was a nine year old child in the body of a forty-four-year-old man. Whether there were any social welfare programs for him or not, I don’t know. We never thought about it. It was the fifties and I earned an average of about three dollars a day selling “cokes” at Rickwood Field, home of the Birmingham Barons baseball team. Malcolm also worked there, as he had for fifteen years or more. He also made three dollars a day walking up and down the steep aisles of Rickwood selling cokes, peanuts, popcorn and scorecards. The rest of us boys were probably eleven or twelve years of age. All of us were mentally ahead of Malcolm. “I’m forty-four!” he would shout. “Y’all need to respect me!”
It still pains my heart when I think of the times that we treated him with anything but respect. Of course we said it was “all in fun”, but Malcolm was an easy mark. He would fall for anything. He believed anything that we told him. Many less-than-holy laughs were at his expense. Of course we never hurt him physically because, though he shuffled along with one foot dragging behind, he was quite strong, but we must have hurt him in other ways with our taunting, our “practical” jokes, and our tricks.
Malcolm had been watched carefully by his loving “Mama” for a long time, but after she died, he was on his own, somehow managing to live on his three or four dollars a day, vulnerable to twelve-year-olds and God knows who else.
A few years later when I was in high school, I attended a Barons game and there he was, still selling cokes. I bought one from him. He remembered me, though he never learned any of our names. He always just called me “Hey Bud”. “Malcolm” was the only name we knew him by. I still remember his twisted face, his slumped shoulders and his cracked voice. If I heard his voice today I would still recognize it as Malcolm’s, but I’m sure I won’t hear that voice again. Unless he lived to be over a hundred, he has probably been gone a long time.
Yet, after all these years I am still haunted by his memory; maybe because, just like all the others, I was far from kind to him. Perhaps it is because, looking back now, I greatly respect him for working so hard to make a living with what little ability he had. But mostly, I am haunted because I found a better way to live than by taunting people that are different. I have no desire to join in a group that accepts only those who look and act and think as they do. I found that these giants of “peer-pressure” only make us phony and superficial. I found that none of us has the right to look down on others just because they don’t have what we have, or they can’t do what we do, or they don’t know what we know.
Actually, when I said that I “found a better way to live”, that’s not exactly what I mean to say. What I really mean is that I met a man who really cares for each one of these people that others would never invite to their social gatherings. This man doesn’t care what you’ve done or where you’ve been, or what color you are, or how smart you are, or what your reputation is, or how much money you have. To him it makes no difference how nice your house, your car, or your clothing is. He is as willing and ready to put his arm around a beggar as a senator, governor, president, or king. Maybe even more so, because broken, guilty, weak, wounded people are often more ready to receive his grace than the self-reliant, the self-important, even the religious. In a most stumbling way, I am following a man who never met anybody he didn’t love.
I believe that one day in the past, probably several years ago, this same man put his arm around old Malcolm, and said , “Put down your tray of cokes, my friend, today I’m taking you home!”, and Malcolm left Birmingham and went to a place where he can see and talk and understand better than you or I ever could. His body, his mind, and his spirit are whole now. God might even somehow let him know that, after all these years, you are reading and thinking about him- and that I am remembering him and writing about him, with the respect that he wanted and should have had from me back in the fifties.
But I was only eleven, maybe twelve. Maybe in some ways I still am. And some bright day, Malcolm, if they will let me, I would like to buy you a coke, in a cup, with ice, just like we used to sell at Rickwood. I remember it well. They only cost a dime.
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