Desperado Days ...

A hideout, now there was a childhood treasure. They usually weren’t too far down in the woods, just far enough for a juvenile outlaw gang to gather out of sight from overly-inquisitive adults. They didn’t require a lot of preparation, at least ours didn’t. A few downed Sweetgum saplings and a space free of weeds and stickers. Over time, an industrious outlaw gang could pilfer some crude furniture and storage bins for the necessities of a life of adventure. The hideout was our little “postage stamp of native soil,” as William Faulkner would have phrased it.

Necessities were few. First, we needed a good supply of Genuine Bull Durham Smoking Tobacco. Too bad for us, my daddy possessed a suspicious nature. I was certain that he was keeping a careful count of all smoking material in his store. We didn’t dare risk it, filching a bag from him, that is. I did dare relieve him of some penny matches, though. There was nothing suspicious about that. A good hideout needed a good fire at times.

It needed smoking material too, and we needed to solve that problem. Robbing banks and trains required thought and thought required smokes. That’s all there was to it. Lucky for us, Boogie Shannon’s daddy came home drunk once too often. Everyone knows that drunk men tend to lose things. Boogie’s daddy, for example, lost a brand-new bag of Bull Durham. As we understood later, he had to go for a whole week without a smoke. They say that he cut down on his drinking after that, so some good came out of his bad luck.

We were set to be the baddest outlaw gang in or around Pine Bluff, Arkansas now. I guess we were the only one, and we really weren’t that bad. We mostly just worked on our hideout and sat around. Oh, we talked about how much fun it would be to rustle cattle, but none of us even owned a horse. We mostly just smoked and talked.

Then something happened that foretold an end to our outlaw days. It started when Mrs. Harkins had a baby. Of course none of us had a clue it was coming. Who could foretell something like that? Were we in for a surprise or two. Boogie said his mamma had mentioned it to him before it happened but he paid little attention. How had she known?

Some older boys let us in on it, to our everlasting confoundment. It was Jim Fletcher and Sonny Boy Nathaniel who enlightened us. They were two “colored boys” who joined our gang when they weren’t sent off chopping or picking cotton. They were a year or so older in age and maybe a decade older in maturity. When the discussion turned to babies one sultry summer afternoon, they proceeded to tell us the most disgusting things.

We listened in utter amazement. Our response was, “Ya’ll may do things like that but we sure don’t.”

They assured us that white folks did it too.

Boogie Shannon just shook his head back and forth.

The Hester twins, Robert and Bobby Joe looked at one another and almost started crying.

The rest of us just gaped in wonderment. Sure, the news made us nauseated, but there was some other sensation trying to work its way loose, one we had never felt before. It would ultimately lead us far away from our outlaw ways.

They’ve never developed that patch of woods where our hideout lay, where so much innocent thought took place. I sometimes wonder if some vestige of it might remain.

How we viewed ourselves.