Title: Walk to Beautiful
Author: Jimmy Wayne (Barber)
Date: 2014
Publisher: W / Thoams Nelson
ISBN: 978-0-8499-2210-7
Length: 280 pages
Illustrations: color photo insert
Quote: “We moved a lot when I was a little boy...every time Mama ran out of rent money.”
Jimmy Wayne Barber’s father disappeared when he was born. His mother was one of those lovable but badly drug-damaged hippie chicks; she let her homes fill up with freeloading “friends” who usually ate up most of the food Mama used her monthly handouts to buy, and let her children try to make it through the rest of the month on a box of cereal and a box of powdered milk apiece. Mama Barber tried to give her children a home, as she drifted from party to party, slum to slum, man to man, and in and out of the institutions social workers undoubtedly thought might have helped her, but it was just too difficult. Once she started to take little Jimmy with her; but then, when he and her boyfriend of the season didn’t get along, she set him out at a bus station.
So he learned about the foster care system and, as a rebellious teenager, about the juvenile correctional system. Being unable to afford a lot of drugs might have been good for Jimmy Wayne, on the whole, because he was sober enough of the time to remember his adolescence as being worse than average. He describes his early adventures rolling and selling marijuana cigarettes with just a few real marijuana seeds rolled up in tomato leaves. The primary effects of marijuana are psychological so his mother’s hippie friends paid for the “high” they got from much less marijuana than they were paying for, and little Jimmy felt good about being a fake drug dealer because he sent some of the money to Mama in the mental hospital. You might suspect that this early success as a fake drug dealer inspired Jimmy to try to make even more money as a real one, but he doesn’t describe doing that, if he ever did.
Foster parents, and state institutions for children in between foster parents, did not provide the sort of supportive adult young Jimmy knew he wanted. As a teenager looking for odd jobs he found a pair of supportive adults, Bea and Russell Costner. Disqualified by age and self-employment from being official foster parents, they’d been unofficial foster parents to many children. Jimmy was the last. He came to identify the word “beautiful” with the name “Bea,” idealizing this foster mother who was probably older than his real grandmothers.
He sang in a rock band. Then he studied law enforcement and worked as a prison guard. Then he had some success as a country musician, but--...
Y’know, although I think it makes this “celebrity memoir” an awkward read, I can relate to Jimmy Wayne’s level of musical talent and success. Musicians who are described as “great” are usually obsessed with music by or before age four. Then there are those of us who can carry a tune, can learn to play instruments and harmonize and even perform classical pieces competently, but for whom music is just one of several things we enjoy...who are usually advised not to try making music our primary source of income. We may be competent musicians but we’re not obsessive enough to make music a career; we want normal lives too. We’re good enough to be in backup bands, may even sell a few recordings; as long as we perform cheap or free, at churches, hospitals, prisons, or at local events, we have enough fans to justify recordings. If the lyrics are timely or clever, or the video is brilliant, we might even monetize a YouTube post now and then. We’re not magical musicians, though, and most of us are likely to be better rated at the other jobs we also do competently and enjoy doing.
It’s not painful to be the kind of musician Jimmy Wayne describes himself as being in this memoir. He was in this band, they recorded an album and sold five-dollar cassette versions to all their friends, they broke up. He performed in contests and usually didn’t win. He auditioned for this and that industry mogul, most of them said “Don’t call me, I’ll call you,” but some of them tried marketing his records. It’s not bad to be that kind of musician. It’s not even uncool to write about it, later—if the memoir is about how you then moved on to your real career, or how music remained part of your life along with your real career. I think it’s extremely cool to be a good music-store manager, or writer, or bus driver or whatever else, who has sold a few records and still sings on weekends. Most of my school friends are in that category; many of my favorite writers are, and The Rock Bottom Remainders are an excellent idea and a decent, if self-parodic, band. But it is pitiful to be that kind of musician, not know it, and package your memoir as a celebrity musician’s memoir, at an age when you’re too young to write a memoir as such, in any case. In this book Jimmy Wayne never seems actually to come to terms with the fact that he’s neither Elvis Presley nor Shel Silverstein.
This makes the packaging of Walk to Beautiful as a musician’s memoir a source of pain. That’s a pity because Jimmy Wayne does have something worthwhile to say, and in this book he says it well; it’s just a disappointment for those who like to read the memoirs of celebrities who moved quickly through that garage-band stage into long, glamorous careers. As the musician’s memoir the professional writer Ken Abraham tried to make Walk to Beautiful, it’s pathetic. As a fundraiser for a cause—the cause of helping foster children become independent adults—it’s excellent.
One of the things that put people off Jimmy Wayne’s songs is their emotionality. Emotionality worked against him as a prison guard too; nobody is paying those men to befriend convicts, as Jimmy Wayne wanted to do. When you realize that this book is really about how awkward and difficult it is for 19-year-olds without money or connections to start functioning as adults, that emotionality is appropriate. He makes a strong case that 19-year-old boys, not all of whom have even reached their full height, have a hard time acting like men when they don’t have a living, supportive father to guide them, by presenting his life as the way such boys’ lives can go if they’re very lucky. He gives mostly statistics, and not enough to make a chart, about the ones who are not lucky.
The dramatic climax of his story so far is thus his pledge to walk “halfway across America,” from Nashville to Phoenix, as a fundraising demonstration. He walked 1700 miles in seven months—all well publicized, with some sort of “support vehicle” and often an entourage of fans bollowing. During the last month his heel bone cracked so he walked on an increasingly swollen and painful foot. He limped into Phoenix in a padded support boot, with two sticks, doped to the gills on heavy-duty painkillers. He sang for his fans that night. Then he was flown back to Nashville and rolled off the plane in a wheelchair. Then he lobbied in the Tennessee legislature and got the legislation he wanted in his own state, at least.
Was it good legislation? Do nineteen-year-olds want to be wards of the state, of their schools, or of their parents? Given the inadequacy of state foster care to connect Jimmy Wayne to the Costners before he was seventeen, how helpful to the young Jimmy Wayne would it have been if the state had retained custody of him for another eight years? Is it healthier, generally, to classify nineteen-year-olds as normally independent adults, some of whom may revert to dependency due to temporary disabling conditions? We need to talk about these things. Fiscal conservatives’ opposition to the idea that foster children should be dependent till they’re 25 is not merely a matter of not wanting to disburse the money. Fiscal conservatives, who tend to be sturdy, resilient, cheerful souls and expect everyone to loathe anything that sounds like “Oh you poor little helpless useless thing, of course you can’t be expected to take care of yourself!”, often feel genuine concern about social workers who try to “rescue” children from things like growing up in conservative families—and sometimes succeed, often by aggravating devoted, hardworking parents’ financial problems. This is a serious concern for some people who have been foster parents or foster children. I share the concern. I think that, as always, flexibility, with all final decisions left to the individual of principal concern (in this case the foster child over age ten), is the central rule to which any satisfactory solution must adhere.
It won’t hurt the fiscal conservatives, though, to read Walk to Beautiful. Jimmy Wayne missed so much school, due to family and welfare-system drama, that at eighteen he’d only just moved in with the Costners—one of whom died later that year—in order to be able to attend eleventh grade classes. He was almost twenty when he finished high school, not quite twenty-two when he earned a two-year degree in “criminal justice,” basically a trade school course for prison guards. He’d been working—doing yard work and other legitimate odd jobs, as well as selling fake marijuana cigarettes—for years before he struck it lucky, getting the Costners as yard work clients. He had not been able to earn enough, from honest work, to have much chance at a decent adult life if he hadn’t stumbled into the Costner home just before the Costners died.
Such stories aren’t typical, but what is typical for foster children as a group? If we know one foster child, we know one foster child. Jimmy Wayne offers fiscal conservatives much to think about.
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