Some people maintain that genetics are more important than environment in developing one’s personality. However, the more lucid school of thought recognizes that the sum of a person’s life experiences, both good and bad, is the primary driving force behind what an individual will do given a specific set of circumstances.
Enough time has passed since the impeachment so that we can now look objectively at the plethora of factors that made Billy Jeff the man he is today. Had we experienced similar events in our own formative years, who is to say that we would not have acted in precisely the same manner as Billy Jeff?
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Billy Jeff jaywalked across the macadam street in the middle of the block and took a shortcut diagonally through the weed-and-bug-infested vacant corner lot, chancing that he might wind up with his hand-knit argyle sox full of cockleburs and his cowboy boots full of grasshoppers. The sweet heady aroma rising invisibly from the two-foot-high stand of wild oats crushed beneath the soles and heels of his boots filled Billy Jeff’s nostrils, and he breathed in deeply in order to better ingest the fragrant perfume.
It was a typical Arkansas late Spring mid-afternoon. Overhead, the sun shone brightly. A few puffy cumulous clouds were spotted about a cerulean sky. The nearly torpid air—warm and heavy and moist, almost but not quite muggy—moved just slightly under a gentle, all but imperceptible breeze. It had been a good day for Billy Jeff—a very good day. And, at the same time, it had been a bad day—a very bad day.
It had been a good day because Billy Jeff had received four As and two Bs on his report card. Even more important, his music teacher at Hot Springs High School had praised him highly. Mr. Black told Billy Jeff that he was showing real talent and if Billy Jeff continued making progress he might even be able to qualify for a musical scholarship by the time he was graduated from high school.
It had been a bad day because during lunch period a bunch of the kids in his class had teased him. Again. Mercilessly. Cruelly. Sadistically. They rapped on his shoulder with their sterling silver death’s head ring-clad knuckles and twisted his arm painfully behind his back and snatched his books and baseball cap and black metal lunch pail with the green Thermos bottle inside and played keep-away with them. Worst of all, they taunted him by calling him Billy Peckerwood and Willie Whitetrash and even Fatso Niggerlover.
Billy Jeff resented the appellations immensely. It was not his fault that his family was dirt-poor. Shortly before Billy Jeff was born, his biological father had been killed in a horrible car accident. When Billy Jeff was just a few months old, his mother moved from the tiny town of Hope, in the southwest corner of Arkansas, all the way down to New Orleans to attend nursing school so that she would have a profession and in the future she’d be able to support her son.
During his mother’s lengthy absence, little Billy Jeff was raised by his maternal grandparents, who operated a small grocery store in Hope. He was four years old when his mother finally returned from the Big Easy with her degree. Shortly thereafter she remarried, a man from Hot Springs. Before long her new husband moved the family to that little city, where job opportunities were somewhat better than they were in Hope.
Despite the fact that both his mother and stepfather worked, money continued to be tight, especially after Billy Jeff’s half-brother Roger was born. There were never enough funds available after all of the bills were paid for Billy Jeff to go on skiing trips or to vacation in Florida like most of his classmates did. So, he swallowed his pride and choked back his envy and sufficed, making do (for the moment) with the gold-plated saxophone bought from the pawn shop and still being paid for by his mother at the rate of three dollars per week; his beloved history books and murder mysteries; his fifteen-inch black-and-white TV; and the extravagance of one glorious week each summer at a band camp in the Ozark Mountains, paid for mostly by the money he earned on his paper route and by doing chores for the neighbors.
The third epithet hurt the most because it was based on elements of bitter truth. The tag Fatso literally applied to him. Billy Jeff had always tended to be overweight and more than a trifle clumsy. As a small child, he was so fat that he was unable to keep up with other children on Easter egg hunts and so he always wound up empty-handed and crying. Once, klutzy Billy Jeff broke a leg attempting to jump rope while wearing his ever-present cowboy boots.
As far as the niggerlover part went, well, that was true, too, though Billy Jeff despised the highly offensive N word. He truly felt an affinity for all people. His grandparents had painstakingly instilled in him their strong conviction that everyone is created equal.
“Niggers come in all colors,” his grandfather had taught him. The lesson took. Billy Jeff sincerely believed that no person should ever be treated differently because of the color of his or her skin—an innovative idea which, in that part of the country and that time in history was not only an unpopular notion, but one that was downright dangerous for a young white man to espouse.
