Thread: Josh

As best I can recall I was five years old. I ran behind the garage with my dad's pliers in my hand, sat down in the grass, and cried. I had ruined one of his tools, broken it so it could never be used again.

Daddy had been working on the engine of our '36 Ford coupe. While he worked I had looked into his tool box and pulled out the pliers, and began to play with them. I liked how I could push the handles close to one another and make the other ends squeeze together. I played with the pliers for a while, opening and closing the handles, when suddenly the pliers broke. The tips would no longer meet. Instead, the handles came all the way together and the tips stayed apart. That's when I ran behind the garage. I wasn't ready to face my dad with pliers I had broken. He would be hurt and angry and would set me down and talk to me about not meddling with what was not mine.

As I sat in the grass, crying and broken hearted, eaten up with guilt, my best friend Joshua came through the back gate. Josh was the same age, but way smarter. He could figure things out, complicated things. I remember standing with him beside the railroad tracks as a switch engine moved back and forth shifting cars. Josh pointed to the rods and levers on the side of the engine and explained as best he could how they worked. I didn't understand, but I believe he had figured out the basics of the steam engine just by watching the way the parts moved.

He asked why I was crying. I handed him the pliers and explained the problem. He took them, sat down, looked at them, moved the handles back and forth, then pointed to a hole near the tips that I hadn't noticed. He pushed the handles apart, closed them, and the tips came together perfectly. He worked them several times, showing me how the tips could be close together or far apart, and after some thought decided they were made that way so you could hold something very small or something a bit bigger.

Josh was a candidate for being written up one day as the youngest person ever to earn a First in mechanical engineering from some world famous technical university. Except he was the wrong colour.

This was Mississippi, 1945. With any luck he would get a job one day as a mechanic's helper doing fetch and carry for the white mechanic. His innate ability to grasp mechanical principles and his far-above-average intelligence would forever be hidden behind the fact that his skin was too dark by far.

I sat in the grass that day and thanked Josh for showing me that the pliers were not broken after all. His comment was that I shouldn't have been messing with daddy's tools to start with, one five-year-old offering grown-up advice to another five-year-old. That was Josh.

I have no idea what became of him. Less than a year later we started school, 'Separate but equal' schools in the Jim Crow language of the day. All children must be educated equally, but some children must be educated more equally than others. Something to that effect.

The next year my family moved and I never saw Josh again. Many times I have tried to figure out how I might find him, or at least find out about him, but I've never succeeded. I hope he did well. I would wish that he did as well as he deserved, but I'll never know.

hello Garza

You fully participate in the site so I wanted to comment on this piece.

I enjoyed the story, a small slice of life, a lesson, and the ugliness sometimes hidden beneath.

There were a few things I thought could be tightened or worked around. One was the use of your pronouns(never an easy thing to do in 1st, but when too many 'i' come out, they stand too proudly.

One other things I was curious about was your switch in title with your father from

dad/daddy - this threw me a bit, a bit the same with Josh/Joshua

you use the longer names only once so they caught my eye.

when you mention about him receiving an award, i actually thought you had contact with him or at least heard about him later in life so was surprised near the end when you mentioned you never seen him again.

In a way I wanted the time you had with josh on the lawn and at the train yard to be all together, and then his and your future at the end rather than broken up. but that may be just my mind.

***

enjoyed this read, feel free to ignore my suggestions.

Sync

Sync - Thanks for your comments. The pronoun issue in first person is difficult. The story could have been cast in third person, but I wrote it too hurriedly, not bothering to consider that possibility. A post in another thread triggered the memory, and I typed out 'Josh' and posted it raw. During my life I've written very little in first person, so how to get around the frequent use of 'I' is something I've yet to learn.

'Dad' was how I referred to my father to people outside the family, 'daddy' was what I called him when speaking to him or about him with other members of the family. Frankly I didn't notice until you pointed it out I'd used both instead of settling on one or the other.

'Joshua' was the kid's name. Everyone but his mother shortened it to 'Josh'.

When I said he was a candidate for such recognition, I meant that if he had had the opportunity to fulfill all his potential, that could very well have been the result. The kid was a mechanical genius. I remember him having conversations with my father about things like how automobile engines work and how clocks work. He asked questions I never thought of asking; questions I didn't understand. Sometimes my father would sit with him at the kitchen table making sketches on notepaper and explaining them.

Josh was the cause of me not using the 'n' word for the past 65 years. We quarreled about something one day, and I called him that. It was a word I'd heard other, older, boys use. Josh went home crying. My mother heard what I said. She sat me down and explained why the word was bad, then took me around the corner to the railroad section houses and made me apologise to Josh and his mother. She was a lady of ample dimensions. She reached out, pulled us in, one under each arm, then got up and fixed us lunch. I've not used that word since that day.

Joshua's father worked on the section gang for the L & N Railroad. I think he may have been the foreman, but I'm not sure. The section gangs were all black, and the section houses were provided by the railroad and built along the railroad right-of-way. Each section gang was responsible for maintaining 40 miles of track, roughly 20 miles in each direction. During the first seven years of my life almost all of my playmates were section kids, so I grew up speaking two versions of English.

Hellp

I understood about the Dad/daddy and the Josh/Joshua but since it is the mc's narrative, it should be kept in one title for both, especially in such a short passage.

I like this story in 1st.

an interesting story, sadly too many people suffer from such bars before their lives. I remember those types of pliers as a kid, used to get my fingers and inside of my palm caught in them often. My dad once used them to pull out loose teeth instead of taking me to the dentist.

sounds like you have more to write about this time in your life

thanks for your reply

Sync

Sync - Fixing the references would be one of the changes that would need to be made if ever I were to use this. Changing to third person would solve the pronoun problem, and by reworking it altogether as a fiction piece it could possibly be turned into an interesting short story.

Thank you for your interest.

A simple story about every day folk, but one with a message.
Soft. Gentle. Makes you want to smile.
Life.

I read it through and nothing jarred - why change it.

Dv

Thanks Divus. 'Every day folk' are the only kinds of people I know how to write about. I could make up a fictional life story for Josh, manufacture a biography for him, maybe even write a book about him, but he would still be Josh. I lack the imagination needed to create whole new characters.

Same with places. If I made up a life story for Josh, not only would he be the same person all the way through, allowing for the natural changes that life brings, but the world he would grow up in would have to be the world I have lived in for 70 years. I don't know how to do what the fiction writers do and create a new world. I could follow Josh all the way until he's an old man like me, but the old man Josh would still be same Josh I knew when I was five years old.

That's the problem I have writing fiction, which is why I suppose I will always have to stick with non-fiction.

Hi Garza,

Brilliant piece, unassuming, honest and poignant. You give the reader an opportunity to feel the presence of mindless racism so close to the love you felt for your friend. That's how it is.

Compulsory military training, South Africa. Langebaanweg, 1200 miles from home. "Coloured" lad sitting on doorstep of the "servants quarters" playing an old box guitar. Sat with him awhile and he let me have a strum. Felt like heaven in that harsh military world. Next day two massive military policemen take me to a security center where I am harshly interrogated (blinding spotlights and threats of bodily harm) about my political affiliations and my "preference" for fraternising with "coloureds".

Great crits above although the introduction of "Joshua" and immediate adoption of "Josh" worked great for me. More importantly, it didn't work for everyone and that's what makes these crits so darn valuable.

Using this post as an example of removing "I"s...

I always go through everything, including this post, and seek to remove all the "I"s and "me"s. 95% of them come straight out and there is almost always a more interesting subjectival intro to replace self-refs.

Agreed, always seek to remove "I"s and "me"s. Most come straight out or there is a more interesting replacement.

Best,

Ian (smile)

Ian - All my professional experience has been third person. Can you use the first few sentences of 'Josh' to show me how to take out the 'I's and 'me's and still maintain first person point of view?

Garza

You write: "I will always have to stick with non-fiction" as though this is a secondary path to take. It is not.

You and I are much of the same age. You well know, as do I, that there is as much emotion such as hope, laughter, pain, guilt, envy, sadness, distress, in real life as there is in any fiction. If the writer has the knack to see and then to describe in words that which goes on in another's mind then the author's work is easily as moving as any piece of fiction.

Which is exactly why we must try to describe in words, life as we see it happening.

Many writers, professionals or amateurs alike, like to think of themselves as artists and indeed we are, since what we try to portray in words is the picture of what we see in life.

I never demean "non fiction" but sometimes I have a problem in accurately defining it.

Dv

Ian, I think that you as a writer may feel one day an obligation to write about Sth Africa - but maybe you might be wise to write it as 'fiction'.

Divus - Non-fiction has been very good to me for some 56 years. I've never had to go out and look for a job. The money to pay the rent and buy the groceries has always been there. My motive in wanting to learn to write fiction is nothing more than the desire to add that to my list of things I can do.

So to get to the question, how do I 'pop out' the first person personal pronouns and stay with first person pov? You'd think I would know that, but I'm having trouble with it. The sketch 'Josh' is a personal memory, and the version posted here is the first draft written off hurriedly. How can it keep the first person pov, the inside look at the incident, without a lot of 'I's and 'me's. Can you show me how some of them, many of them, can be eliminated? Or can it be shifted to third person and retain the close contact with my feelings and thoughts?

I'm going to re-read Faulkner's 'As I Lay Dying' and pay close attention to how he does what he does. In the meantime if you or Ian have any specific suggestions regarding 'Josh', let me know.

Garza what a wonderful piece this was. The flow was outstanding and I enjoyed it very much.

Thanks
Mark

Hi Garza,

Loved it as is and did not mean you to change it.

Well, here goes nothin' ...aaargh:

I ran behind the garage with dad's pliers in hand, sat down in the grass, and cried. The pliers were ruined. Broken, so they could never be used again and it was all my fault.

While Daddy was working on the engine of our '36 Ford coupe, I pulled the pliers out of his toolbox and began to play with them, liking the way those handles could be closed to make the other ends squeeze together.

Reduction 7:2 but at the expense of style. My bad, original please.

Your new and lowliest friend,

Ian (smile)

Hi Divus,

Believe it or not, despite initial intros, I am no crusader. Hmmmm, maybe?

.......deleted original text with sincere thanks to Divus (per reply page 2) for pointing out sensitive issues therein. Thanks Divus, you are absolutely right.

Ian (smile)