Johnny Cash: The Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

claiming agriculture jobs—but no one in Dyess wanted anything further to do with harvesting crops. Henson was the first of the three to make the break. While J.R. and J.E. returned to school, A.J. joined the Army.
    On the outside, things were good at school during J.R.’s last year, though his grades, as usual, were only a little above average in most classes, even his favorites, English and history. He was elected class vice president, appeared in school plays, and was chosen to sing at the commencement exercises—not a country song, but “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” an expression of faith with lyrics from a seventeenth-century poem by Ben Jonson. In the yearbook, the editors made a special mention of him: “It was in this year that one of our number showed so much talent on the stage, both as an actor and with his voice, that we think he should be publically recognized: this boy was J.R. Cash.”
    But the good feelings of his final school year didn’t last long. Deep inside, J.R. couldn’t shake the fact that he had no idea how to break into the music business. He thought about heading to Nashville, the home of country music, but he knew he didn’t have the courage to do it, and that left him despondent. By graduation day, even the joys of his solitary walks had faded.
    Desperate to demonstrate his independence from his father, J.R. heard there were some jobs available in west Arkansas picking strawberries, and, despite all his years of dreading picking cotton, he headed for the town of Bald Knob. The trip proved a bust; the strawberry crop was too small for him to make any money, so he headed home after three days. Not knowing what to do next, he happened to bump into Frank McKinney, a barber in Dyess. McKinney was thinking about taking the bus to Michigan to try to find a job in the auto industry, and he invited J.R. to go along. J.R. agreed so quickly that he spent much of the bus ride wondering if he was making a mistake.
    In Michigan, J.R. got a job the first day as a punch press operator at the Fisher body plant in Pontiac. He walked a mile and a half to work each morning, but this wasn’t like the gravel road in Dyess. He couldn’t sing on the city streets, and he didn’t have enough spirit left to daydream. He felt trapped. The only thing to keep him company was his chain-smoking. From the first day, he found the work tedious and repetitious—far worse than picking cotton back home, because he wasn’t surrounded by the love of his family and community. For the first time, he also felt the sting of being branded an outsider, someone who was considered inferior—and this experience led him to begin to question some of the racist attitudes prevalent in Dyess.
    While J.R. was working on a Pontiac one day, the fender slipped and cut his arm. When he went to the medical office, a doctor looked at his file card and smirked when he saw the words “Dyess, Ark.” “All you Southern hicks are always just looking for a way to get off work,” he said. J.R. tried to explain that it was an accident, but the doctor was unbending. Cash recalled the doctor’s response: “How long you gonna work here? You gonna get yourself a good paycheck or two and then split like they all do?”
    A few days later, Cash came down with stomach flu, but he wouldn’t go back to the doctor; he didn’t want any further abuse. The landlady at his boardinghouse gave him a big glass of wine and told him to get some sleep—he’d feel better in the morning. He did feel better the next day, but he decided he was going home. Between the monotony of the work and the anti-Southern bias, after a couple of weeks he’d had enough of the car factory. He hitchhiked back to Dyess.
    His mother was thrilled to see her son, but she was also alarmed by how skinny J.R. was. He had always been slender, which is why he hadn’t joined the sports teams at school with most of his pals. But he was now down to 140 pounds, low for a six-foot