His parents were Arkansas sod busters who couldn’t decide what to call him. One wanted to name him J____, the other liked R_____. As a compromise, they just hung J.R. on him and it stuck. So he ended up with no real name until he was a full grown man.
His mamma wanted him to be a preacher, but he was shy and already had a transgressive streak in him that he knew wouldn’t square with pulpits and polite Sunday potlucks. His daddy wanted him to try his hand at farming. To take over the family legacy of barely subsisting off the scraps a niggardly Mother Nature might toss his way. His parents were the opposite of ambitious; they were penitential. They lived in the shadow of a small coffin belonging to a son named Jack. One parent sought to continue his legacy through the younger son, the other parent labored to suppress the anguish by working to the point of exhaustion. Toiling until there was no energy left for grieving.
Jack was bright, kind, devout, and articulate, he was the one on his way to becoming the parson in the family. J.R. adored his brother who was older by two years, and would often sit at his feet listening to his stories and sermons as the older boy split wood or sawed lumber. Until the day that the table saw pulled the teenage boy’s body into itself and cut him nearly in half. Jack died about a week later of his wounds. But what J.R. remembered most was the way the boy’s face lit up at the end, “He said he saw the angels who had come to bear him up on high,” then he just closed his eyes and slept the sleep of the blessed.
On the morning of the funeral, the twelve year old J.R. was nowhere to be found. Then just as folks were becoming anxious, the boy walked through the front door. His feet were bare, one of them swollen and bleeding from stepping on a nail, and his ragged clothes were covered in dirt. He had been digging his brother’s grave.
And one supposes that right then and there he decided that was the last bit of sod he intended to turn of his own accord. Whatever else the future might hold, he wouldn’t spend his days blistering churchly ears with hellfire or bare-knuckling Delta dirt. So in 1950, as soon as he turned eighteen, he enlisted in the Air Force.
When the recruiting officer asked his name, he said, “J.R.”
“What’s that stand for?”
“It don’t stand for nothin’.”
“Well, that won’t do, son. You have to have a real name. Reckon you better pick one.”
“How’s about John? Call me John.”
“That’ll do. Now go on.”
They sent him through a series of lines until he finally arrived at the last one where some sergeant or other was sitting at a desk with a pen in his hand. Later, that man recalled the unsmiling, slick-haired boy from Arkansas introducing himself in a low, gravelly voice, “Hello,” he said, “I’m Johnny Cash.”
Of course, this would not be the last time J.R. would make a name for himself.
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No matter how many times I hear this story, it always takes me back to stories my dad would tell about growing up in Dyess colony along side the Cash family.
Love it.