Growing Up Southern: October 17, 2017

I started writing things down about 30 years ago. I haven’t changed the world or produced greatness. But it’s been rewarding.

For one thing, it makes me happy. I love the discipline and imagination required. Two, it keeps me out of the bars. Three, it gives me a change to remember things I’ve done as well as things that other people have told me. I think that last thing is the most important, that and the supper table.

The supper table was the place where I heard my late father-in-law tell the stories of his life as a farmer and former rifleman with the 79^th Infantry Division in World War Two. It was also where he inserted stories about growing up in the rural South, like being a child and having an old, old man tell him about remembering the last indigenous Indian Family living along Baker’s Bayou not far from the family’s farm. How they lived all alone along at the edge of the forest, and one day were “just gone.”

Around a meal, we learned how farmers in the area used to put skulls of long-departed hunter-gatherers in their chicken nests in hopes of scaring away snakes and varmits. We heard the sad story of a teenaged girl, known only by the name “Geehaw” who once became so frightened of something after dark she ran over a harrow-handle and flattened it, apparently without lasting harm.

It was at that supper table we heard about artillery bombardments during which “you just wanted to live one more second, just one second.” We heard how, during the last days of the war, it was mostly quiet except for an occasional round falling as the Germans lazily depleted their munitions, and how one round landed near a chow line and killed the shortest man in the squad.

We heard, more than once, of how a young soldier, discharged from the horrors of war, came into town on the late-night train and walked the five miles to his family’s farm, arriving just as his parents were sitting down for breakfast.

We heard how a couple of neer-do-well teenage boys in the community once caught a buzzard in a steel trap and decided how funny it would be to tie a “coal-oil rag” to a rope, attach it to the buzzard’s legs, and set the rag afire. The fire bouncing through the dark night convinced the entire neighborhood that the “Second Coming” had occurred and folks headed for the churches, some still in their bedclothes. We learned how, “They almost sent those boys to the penitentiary on account of it.”

About my writing? As I say, one day I decided that I would use some of these tales, heard around the supper table, as inspirations for short stories so that the memories shouldn’t be lost. That got me started and I’m still pecking away in my spare time.

I’ve always felt that one of the reasons the South has produced so many fine writers—such great story-tellers—goes back to the supper table. It’s largely disappeared in this age of fast foods and, anyway, those stories could never compete with a cell phone. Hell, we don’t even call it “supper” anymore. In a great cultural transgression, we began to ignore the traditional stricture that "one has supper at home and dinner away from home." Decorum has fled our modern world.

And who would care to record a story heard around a “dinner” table?

Could this table have produced
a William Faulkner or aWillie Morris?