There’s a body of water near where I grew up that is of some
local interest. It’s Bayou Bartholomew, the longest one in the world. They say
it is, anyway. It runs from Pine Bluff, Arkansas all the way to South
Louisiana. It’s the meat of legend and song.
I say “runs” with a fair degree of hyperbole, for bayous don’t
really run. They merely slug along, catching and preserving whatever flows into
them, much like the South itself. But anyway, what’s a Southerner without
hyperbole? We feasted on the concept long before it reached the Borough of
Queens, in New York. It matches the tendency of our minds to take sharp turns.
Our hyperbole, though, tends to favor the harmless variety. For
example, our mosquitoes are so big that they can stand flat-footed and [have
sex with] a turkey, or keep a person awake at night as they crack “hikker-nuts”
(Hickory nuts) with their beaks. We have snakes that are so mean that one can
kill a tree by coiling around it and stinging it with its tail. We had a
banker once who was so crooked that it took three grave plots to bury him. And
I personally knew a man whose cousin’s postman told him of a fallen woman so
attracted to “group sessions,” that she had to buy thank-you notes by the case.
So what if we would, as William Faulkner observed, cut down
a 100-year old oak tree to get at a squirrel’s nest? It would be like Joseph
and Mary clearing a spot in the manger for the little Galilean baby, wouldn’t
it? Well maybe not, but what’s a little exaggeration among friends? Can’t hurt
anyone, can it?
What if we are tending more and more toward electing our
politicians for their entertainment value rather than potential benefit to
humankind? It allows us to say, “Did you hear the one about the one senator
that was so mean the other senators started noticing it?” What about funerals?
Would one of the Northern Tribesmen, when asked to say something grand about
the deceased, ever stand and say, “Well, I always heard his brother was worse?”
The South, after all, originated what the late columnist Richard Allin called
the act of “filibustering the deceased into Heaven.”
Are there people anywhere other than the American South that
are so “hard-featured” that their face would “make a freight train take a dirt
road?” It might even be a face that closely resembled a “mule’s ass sewed up
with a logging chain.” Such people thrive here, bigly.
But back to Bayou Bartholomew. It was once what they dumped
raw sewage into, but they stopped that back in the 1950s, I think it was. We
might expect them to start the practice again. We’ll just have to wait and see.
The tornado of 1947 generally followed the course of Bayou
Bartholomew as it ravaged a huge area south of the city of Pine Bluff. There
were, if I remember correctly, 32 people killed as a result of the damage. Six
young men shooting craps of a Sunday afternoon died in the storm. This happened
in an abandoned house less than two city blocks distance from our little country
grocery store. To the East of us, an entire family died when their house was
lifted, turned upside down, and deposited into Bayou Imbeau, a black-water body
near Bayou Bartholomew.
The houses on both sides of our house and store were totally
destroyed. The store was undamaged. My father gave away its entire inventory to
survivors, asked no money, and went bankrupt. The local newspaper suggested
erecting a monument to him. They never did. The small town of Lonsdale, Arkansas did send him a check for $45.00.
In 1957, the bayou flooded. I could watch it from our front
porch rise a couple of feet above the highway. They built a major “big box”
development at that location a few years ago. When it floods, if there is a
functioning government then, we’ll all pay for the recovery. Such is life.
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| There's not a huge demand for "Bayou-side Mansions," but it is possessed of a certain charm. |
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