Memoir of an incredibly difficult childhood | DON NOBLE
“With the Devil’s Help” is Neal Wooten’s memoir/true crime story of his childhood on Sand Mountain. A report from the interior, it is not a rags-to-riches story, although Wooten, now a successful writer, is well enough off. It is a survival story in the mode of Harry Crews’ brilliant memoir “A Childhood.” Crews concluded that for a “grit,” a redneck like him, survival was triumph enough. Wooten concurs.
In a shack in the woods outside of Blake, Alabama, Wooten and his family did not have indoor plumbing, were usually cold and only had electricity when his dad paid the bills. There were almost no Christmas presents, Christmas dinner was pinto beans and a rat crawled into his blankets for warmth.
It didn’t have to be that way.
Dad could have been a successful salesman, or pig farmer, truck driver, or a great many other things, but he refused to work at any job hard enough to make a go of it. He was always scheming for the big payoff, the get-rich-quick option.Travis Wooten was a big man, strong and it seems very bright. He neither drank nor took drugs but, nevertheless, was mean and violent, suddenly and often.
There are a dozen scenes in which his father beats Neal, his siblings and his mom. “Daddy was an artist when it came to punishment, his favorite medium being his belt, which he could remove with alarming speed and wield like a ninja handling nunchucks.” On page eight, Daddy beats Neal, driving him to his knees. One end of the belt slips. Neal is being beaten with the buckle which “tore into my flesh.” He is 4 years old.
Neal tries to achieve an out-of-body experience. Over time, he would learn to do this.
The family walked “on eggshells.” Mama “escapes” into Harlequin romances; Neal into Louis L’Amour Westerns.Daddy beat the children when they did anything the slightest bit wrong. Spare the rod and all that. He also beat them when he did something clumsy or dangerously stupid. He simply blamed them. After the beating, he would switch off as though it had never happened. Wooten writes, “I truly believe it would have made for a more stable childhood to have a father who was mean and violent all the time.”
In addition to being a memoir, this is also a true crime book. Besides the daily crimes in his house, Wooten’s grandfather was also a domestic sadist who beat and even stabbed his wife. That family also lived “in a pall of fear and anxiety.”’ We learn he killed another man with a shotgun.
This thread is artfully woven into the narrative for quite a while. Young Wooten wonders why men in suits in a black car follow his father everywhere. It turns out that granddad, Pete, escaped from Kilby Prison and the cops KNOW that Travis knows where he is hiding.
In his “Epilogue,” Wooten tells us he “locked away those demons.” He has written comedy and done some stand-up. This would fall directly into the “laughing clown with a broken heart” category.
He speculates that his father was bipolar or “manic-depressive” and in that sense COULD NOT control his behavior. He thinks of his father now not with “hatred and bitterness” but “with sadness and always with awe.” It is unclear whether Wooten has forgiven his father.
It is also unclear whether he wants his readers to. As is sometimes the case with these memoirs of painful childhoods, “The Glass Castle” or “Educated,” if the author has written effectively, powerfully describing the horrors, the reader, not related by blood, does not forgive.
Don Noble’s newest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson, and eleven other Alabama authors.
“With the Devil’s Help: A True Story of Poverty, Mental Illness, and Murder”Author: Neal WootenPublisher: Pegasus BooksPages: 303Price: $26.95 (Hardcover)
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Memoir of an incredibly difficult childhood | DON NOBLE
