Youth

Been thinking more about my parents buying that little grocery store on Highway 15 just south of Pine Bluff in January 1941. George would have been 27 years old at the time and Mabel was 23, just a couple of kids.

They didn’t always find it easy. A malicious shrew in the neighborhood announced to everyone who would listen that our parents were “so dumb that it took both of them to drink a Coca-Cola.” They prevailed despite her.

 A majority of their sales occurred “on-credit.” Collecting wasn’t hard. Our parents knew when “old-age pension checks” came in the mail and when paydays of local employers came around. It was just a matter of getting to the credit customers before something happened. Liquor was the chief culprit, followed closely by unemployment and crop failure. My parents were much more sympathetic with the latter two than the first.

My sister and I practiced our driving skills by driving out and bringing customers to the store. They would first pay their bill from the previous month, then purchase goods for the coming one. We would deliver them home, help carry the groceries in, and pick up the next customer.

It was a predictable life for the couple. They tended the store six days a week with maybe a Thursday afternoon off if it wasn’t time for cotton chopping or cotton picking.

If time allowed, they would take an evening off for a movie. That was before my time, but I’m told that they would haul folks in the neighborhood in the back of their truck for a small charge, maybe a penny. They usually attended the old Strand Theater on Main Street. The “coloreds” would walk around the corner to the Vesper, a theater operated for African-American patrons. They would all meet up after the double-feature and cartoon and head home.

I’m sure things changed in December of that year when the Japanese and Germans brought America into World War Two. I’m not sure if my birth was related to the draft, but I did manage to show up halfway through the conflict. Nonetheless, the Draft Board, influenced it is said by a competing grocer up the highway, had George ready to leave for induction when Germany surrendered. Thanks, Adolph Hitler.

I entered a strange new world. It was one designed to offer untold success to young boy of Northern European ancestry. Years later, I would realize it wasn’t so designed for my sister or my black playmates.

The little store in later years