The photograph on the cover of this book is of the author. It was taken in 1949 by a professional photographer in Marshall, Texas. You can’t discern from the photograph, but I was biologically a two-year old male child. My mother had dressed me in a light colored dress with pigtails, and it’s difficult to tell if I am male or female. My mother dressed me this way because she was old-fashion, and believed in making do with what she had. There were two girls born before the author, and she used their old hand-me-down clothes to dress him in. It saved her from buying clothes for a boy. It was easier since she already had the clothes, and didn’t have to bother with getting him a haircut. At that time things were scarce. The country had not long ago experienced the Depression, and was now exiting World War II. My parents experienced many of the ups and downs of the Depression and the war. Many things were hard to get during the Depression and the war, such as nylons and some other household items. Normally, we were only use to the basics anyway: something to eat, some clothes to wear, and a place to sleep. We didn’t have much more than that. My mother didn’t know much about psychology or human behavior, she could barely read and write. I must conclude also that she was probably a little ignorant, and never gave it one iota of thought about the consequences of her behavior. Obviously, If she had understood human behavior she wouldn’t have dressed me in pigtails and a dress until I was approximately three-years old. My youngest sister, Susan—after viewing the picture many years later, explains the situation by saying that most mothers didn’t dress their boys in boy’s clothes but dressed them in a dress because boy’s clothes were hard to find. I feel she was trying to patronize me. This is the same sister who once told me she enjoyed life on the farm. She even had the nerve to say the author looked pretty in that dress. Susan seems to see things through rose-colored glasses. I don’t believe that girl’s clothes were any easier to find than boys. Almost as many boys are born into the world as girls. I’m sure psychologists would expect such behavior by my mother to have some negative and lasting effects on my personality, and it probably did. I can infer from this picture that she probably dressed me in my sister’s old underwear, since she was so good at making do with what she had. She was so deep into just surviving.

You should better understand why my mother would behave in this manner as I tell you something of her background. My father was no different than my mother. He usually indulged her in whatever ways she thought best. My father had taken a job on the Gulf Coast. It was the only way he thought he could feed his family. I overheard a conversation once between my mother and father that indicated he left because he had gotten into a fight with a white man who lived down the road, over some inappropriate advances toward my mother. The white man threatened to kill him if he didn’t leave town. So my father moved to the Gulf Coast and took the first job he could get. He took a job at one of the oil plants and maintained contact with us the best way he could. He came home every two weeks on a regular basis, and spent his summer vacations fixing up the farm.

My earliest memory was of running through a freshly-plowed cornfield, barefooted in a dress and pigtails on a bright, warm, sunny day. I was three-years old. There was not a cloud in the sky, as was a familiar kind of day in those deep East Texas piney woods. The freshly plowed dirt felt good to my toes. There was no road leading to our house at the time, only a trail, and we were virtually isolated. Of course, there were houses at irregular intervals strung along this trail.
We lived in a clearing in the forest at the end of this trail; though a rarely traveled aspect of this trail did continue into the hills past our house. The trail continued beyond our house to intersect with another trail, about two miles beyond our house. Until I was in first grade what we lived on was indeed a path instead of a road. The path wasn’t graded for the three miles that led off the main highway. There were many trails that ran throughout the community; none of them had any maintenance except the work we did and maintenance caused by regular use. We lived way off the beaten path in the far corners of East Texas in an area known as the ARK-LA-TEX. This is an area in proximity to Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. The main highway was a curvaceous, hill-ridden, winding structure that led north and south to two small towns in either direction—approximately 20 miles away.

This memoir describes specific ways in which I was degraded but was able to hold on to my manhood, and was somehow able to tenaciously keep it, and become a better man through the grace of God. Maybe my manhood is not totally intact, but for the most part it’s fully operational.

Many events in my life are deliberately left out of this memoir. Some things I include only contributed marginally and indirectly to making me a better man; nevertheless they made a worthwhile contribution. I give a detailed explanation of how some of these events contributed to my development, others I leave to the imagination.

Many have tried to define what a man is, but the word defies definition. It’s up to the individual as to what he or she thinks a man is. There are many ways to define what a man is, but most of them are inadequate. Being a man is too complex of an idea to define, it must be demonstrated. I won’t here try to define it, but will leave the explanation to be contained within the entire body of this book.