GETHSEMANE

 Last week I travelled through the forgotten part of our state, the Arkansas Delta. I passed through a community named, of all things, Gethsemane. Folks there pronounced it “Gessymane,” as in, “He’s from over ‘bout Gessymane.”

Years ago while travelling through I would see homes scattered around and even two grocery stores. One would see neighbors visiting, children playing, and machinery serving family farms. Over the years the stores disappeared, then the homes and people, and then the farm equipment as corporate farming reduced the work force and equipment required to feed the world. Eventually, all that was left was a road sign noting “Gethsemane.” On this trip through, the sign had disappeared.

The Garden of Gethsemane holds deep significance in the Christian religion as the place where Jesus Christ experienced profound emotional and spiritual struggle.

It is important in the Christian religion as it represents anguish, sorrow, resolve, human weakness, but spiritual resolve.

For Christians, Gethsemane serves as a powerful symbol of prayer, obedience, and perseverance in times of trial.

It dawned on me as I travelled that lonely stretch of highway, that my America has lost, sadly, the physical reality of Gessymane and now seems bent on abandoning the spiritual value of Gethsemane.

DREAMS

 America has forgotten how to dream. I saw something like that in a quote and it started me thinking. My thoughts: Yes we have. No we have not.

It seems to me that we have forgotten to dream of the things that make our country stronger.

We once dreamed of eliminating poverty. Lyndon Johnson tried. It may have represented a classic example of applying the right solution to the wrong problem. Perhaps the problem wasn’t poor people in poor areas. Perhaps the problem was the exploitation of poor people in almost every segment of our country since 1619.

Ronald Reagan dreamed of accommodating poverty by enabling the rich to become richer and the poor to become ashamed of being poor. More wealth was to trickle downward from the rich to the poor and obviate the need for the ones he pictured as being like his “Welfare Queen.” Wealth, falling from the sky like manna from Heaven would enable those below to free themselves from the quagmire of poverty.

It may have contained a twinge of applying the wrong solution to the right problem. It is a characteristic of the rich that that last thing on earth they want is to share in their hoard.

Our poor still wait like hungry pets for the largesse to fall their way.

Oh, we dream alright. The rich dream of a pure capitalistic society in which they face no regulations or pay any taxes.

The poor dream of not having to make a choice between food or shelter.

Many of the rest of us dream of our state’s college sports team winning a national championship.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 In 2024, an estimated 41.7 million Americans were receiving food stamps, also known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. This represents approximately 12.3% of theU.S. population.

Let’s suppose, just for fun, that someone on high directs us to find ways to reduce this number.

A Christian (one of the old love and grace ones, not one from a cult spreading a scorched-earth spirituality) might say, “Care and assistance,” then quote the Gospel of Matthew Chapter 25, verses 31-46.

A Capitalist might say, “Make them work,” although many do already and some are too young, except in my state where child labor is allowed.

A Teacher might say, “Education.”

A Sociologist might say, “Address the root causes of poverty.”

A Labor Organizer might say, “Address income inequality.”

A Billionaire might say, “Cut my taxes and I will help a bit.”

In the end, though, a psychopathic narcissist who became a millionaire when the doctor slapped him on his ass will say, “Cut the SNAP program out. That will get the number down.”

Sometimes visiting places from where your roots grew is like taking a calming dip in a pool of warm memories. It was for my sister, brother, and me yesterday.

 We started out from our home place, a site much altered from our youth. It once contained a small country grocery store with a home attached to it. Our parents bought it and opened for business on January 1, 1940. They reared the three of us there. It disappeared long ago with all the other country stores. To date, no politician is promising to bring them back along with the employment they provided.

 Driving south into what is lovingly referred to as “L.A.,” or Lower Arkansas, we passed a site where, in a small shack in 1918, a frail woman was struggling for her life after giving birth, somewhat prematurely, to her eighth child, a girl. The woman was so near death that the doctor laid the infant aside to die, and concentrated on saving the woman with, among another tools, Vick’s Salve, the WD-40 of the medical world at that time. It worked, lucky for us.

 The woman was our grandmother and the infant was our mother. This, and much of our family history, was provided by her oldest sister, Hallie Harris Harden, the matriarch of our clan, and a character of great enjoyment until her death at near 100 years of age. I thought of her as we passed a small country church, for I remembered the time I was driving her around and she pointed at it and announced, “There’s where Jesus saved me from going to hell, and your Uncle Carl saved me from being an old maid.” I’m not sure about the timing of the first event but the second occurred when she was 15 years old.

 Three years after my mother survived childbirth, her father died. My grandmother was left alone in a harsh rural environment with no means of support, and three young children in hand. Mother never talked much about those awful days except to relate the story of when the local church members acquired new curtains for its windows. My grandmother begged the castoffs from them and made underpants for the girls. My mother never forgot the day she fell on the playground and that embarrassing secret was revealed to a group of cruel schoolchildren. The horrible mask of poverty forms many faces.

 Life goes on. Not long after, the kids' older brother married the daughter of a widower whose wife had given birth to 13 children, and then died. The couple carried messages back and forth, and my grandmother ended up marrying the widower and caring for his children that were still at home. The son of one of those children is now Mayor of Mansfield, Arkansas and I see him from time to time. He never fails to say, almost with tears in his eyes, that my grandmother was the only grandmother he ever knew.

 We visited the gravesites where our grandparents are buried, near their fathers, one a veteran of the Confederacy and the other a veteran of the Union. The unit of the latter saved my hometown, Pine Bluff, from a Rebel assault and the city erected a small monument to it. The obituary of the former stated that he was a “good man who never took part in any of the neighborhood brawls.”

Don’t ask.

 It was a good day. One final surprise caused me to chuckle. Now first understand, my sister started out in her professional life punching data cards for the state’s electrical utility in the basement of a building in Pine Bluff. She ended it in an office near the top of a high-rise office building in Little Rock running a major department for that same company. She is a serious person, and highly respected as a professional by her former colleagues. She is considered a good person by all, and I doubt she would ever take part in a neighborhood brawl, if they have those where she lives. Did I mention that she is a serious person? We lovingly call her “The General.”

 Imagine my amusement when, as we passed over a railroad track near our old neighborhood, she began telling me how she and her girlfriends used to put bags on sticks, walk down those tracks, and pretend they were hoboes. What an image. Times reserved for memories are full of surprises like that.

 Overall, the day ended on a happy note to be filed in the “Ps” under “pleasant.”

 But … my sister a hobo? That still cracks me up. It really does.

 July 12, 2017

The Old Homeplace, gone forever.

 

Fruits of Silence

By Jimmie vonTungeln

©2006

             The boy leaned forward on the wagon seat and shrugged. He twisted his face the way young boys do, not so much for the sake of doing anything but more to relieve the monotony of childhood. The rubber wheels rolled with a smooth hum in tune with the crunch of the horse’s shoes striking gravel. The boy nodded with the pattern. “What’s an Arkansas, Daddy?

            When they were in town selling the pig, one of the ladies said that 1948 had been a hard year for Arkansas and maybe that was why there wasn’t much pork. It was a conversation the boy didn’t understand.

            “Ain’t no thing, just where we live, that’s all,” the man said.

            “Why we live at Arkansas, Daddy?”

            “We just do, now hush talkin’ or I ain’t bringing you with me again, you understand?”

            “Yessir,” he said, and shrugged again.

            They contrasted, the man was thick and dark—the darkness made more so by a white stubble of whiskers—and the boy was lighter brown and dusty. He was quick in movement.  The man was slow and deliberate.

            The wagon was also a contrast, a piece of the recent past of wood and horse grafted onto automobile tires. It was as if the new was stealing in upon the old and whatever gods ruled the backwoods could not hold back the future. Man and machine moved together, sliding slowly into the land of dark woods and scattered homes like a stream flowing into the lowlands.

            “Why did we sell the pig, Daddy?”

            “We need the money, son, I told you once.”

            “We got money now?”

            “Hush boy.” He saw the trap opening and slammed it shut.

            With the slamming he returned to thinking about the day and the day was like something coiled around his neck, threatening to strangle him.

            He made himself focus and then he could see the thing from beginning to end. He remembered the killing and the sticking. He saw the smoke-like steam in the late autumn air, first from the blood then, later, from the innards that spilled out as he started the butchering.

            Lost in himself, he was trying to calculate—trying in spite of the hugeness of such a task. There had been but one hog this year. The rest of the hogs had burrowed into the shack where he kept the arsenic and, in their search for food, spilled the arsenic and licked it in their greed.

            “What are we going to do?” his wife had asked.

            “I don’t know,” he said and he despised himself for not knowing.

            They might have thought it was salt, he supposed, though it had been for the killing of boll weevils and not for hogs. So they had been punished, punished like you might punish a child with one reprimanding stroke, but dreadfully punished and punished in a final way.

            He felt weak and played out when he found them, curled like fallen leaves, cold dead, and—worst of all—unfit. That was the terrifying part: both his winter’s wages and his winter food unfit, except for the one he had butchered at the beginning of the week. He had divided it and kept half and had ridden to town with the boy and had sold the other half.

            “Not a lot to choose from this year,” one of his regular customers said. He said it as much in accusation as in observation. His face narrowed as he waited for an answer.

            “Nawsuh, jes one hog this year, das all. Be mo fo sure next year.”

            “Well I hope so,” and then, in front of the boy, “You better git your mind on your business out there.”

            “Yassuh,” he said as he and the boy rode away.

            Maybe there was some luck, he was thinking. The hog that had been spared was spared because he was the biggest one and couldn’t follow the others through the rooted-out hole and into the shed and onto the poison.

            So he had butchered the hog. His older boys helped him, the four of them straining to hoist the dead beast into a barrel of water half buried in a slant in the ground and fired to bring the water to a boil. Then they scraped the hide and then wrestled the thing onto a board nailed at the corner of the shed, hanging it by a stick sharpened at both ends and thrust through the tendons of the legs.

            While the carcass hanged there, twisting slowly, almost delicately, like a bottle tied in a tree, they finished the butchering while the youngest boy, the one with him now, watched in fascination. He asked no questions but watched quietly as if he were witnessing a sacrifice and, not understanding the purpose, was forming his own.

            Ya’ll put up our half and we’ll peddle the other half in Armistead,” he told his wife and sons.

            “How much you reckon it will bring?” she asked and he knew the unasked question—the one he had even asked himself: how long will our half last?

            “Church, Daddy!” the boy yelled suddenly, pointing across the other’s chest. “There’s the church.”

“That’s right,” the man said. Then he looked over his shoulder toward town as if he left something there, something that he needed back.

            “Why ain’t nobody there?” the boy asked, pointing toward the lopsided white building positioned between the road and a dark forest beyond.

            “It ain’t Sunday. No reason to be there.”

            “Can’t you go ‘cept Sunday?”

            “Won’t do no good. Ain’t nobody there,” then turning to the boy, “If you don’t hush, I’m going to take a trace belt off and wear you out.”

            The boy turned to look at the church as they rode by. The building looked small and harmless with no wagons pulled around it, no children bouncing in front, and no families proceeding in a slow march to the entrance. He tried to imagine it filled with the saints and bulging with the sound of singing. He tried hard for a moment and then shrugged. He moved his legs toward the front and looked ahead.

            The man settled on his seat, hunched with his thoughts curled before him like a dog at slumber, bringing him neither rest nor peace.

            He was thinking that white people seemed to know when you were up against it and he knew that he had come out short in the trading. Most years, he rode home with the tight role of bills resting in pile of loose change with it all bulging so he could feel it through the worn money purse he carried in his pocket. This time he felt nothing and it was exactly that nothing, that non-feeling where there should have been something that brought the fear.

            Then he was thinking about the cold months ahead and how the faces of his family would look when the hunger really set in, not at first when they would simply do without for that was easy and they were used to it. Later, when the hunger was hurting and wouldn’t go away, they would ration the flour and the meal and they would forget how it felt to be full. Then they would look at him and accuse with their eyes and not speak, particularly the youngest for he had not been through it before.

            He thought about the church then and about a Sunday the preacher told about the life of Job.

            “The land is like that,” he told his wife after the service. Then he had thought about it some more. “No, not like that at all. It don’t do it like a test. No bet. No joke. It does it all the time, like it was trying to keep you off balance and unsteady so you can’t ever see quite straight and like you ain’t never going to draw a breath that ain’t been bought and paid for with your life’s blood.

            “It’s the Lord’s will,” his wife had said.

            The road stretched on along lengthening shadows. A half-mile or so before they reached the white settlement, just before they crossed Bayou Dupree, they met Happy Bill. The boy saw him first as Bill emerged from hiding at the far end of the bridge, as if he had been waiting for them. The boy sat straight in his seat.

            “Happy Bill Daddy, there’s Happy Bill,” he said.

            The man stopped the wagon to allow the figure to cross the bridge. As the stranger approached the wagon, the man nodded. “Brother Bill,” he said in greeting.

            “God bless you gentlemen,” the figure studied the man’s face briefly and, bowing low, added: “Dead pigs, dead pigs. Everybody knows, too bad, too bad.” He rose to his full height. “And how are we by fine Christian brothers. He smiled and the smile revealed a mouth alternating with strong white teeth and black gaps where teeth had once been.

            “We’re fine,” answered the man as he began to calculate in his head how much this would cost, what the least amount that it could cost without loss of face. Happy Bill could not be ignored. He was a fixture on this rural, southern landscape who commanded much respect in an ancient tribal sense flowing back to those dark ceremonies that first held young boys in check and later opened the door of manhood to them. He knew his power, understood it, and seldom misused it.

            He was crazy, no doubt, but it was widely held that when the seizure hit, he spoke the truth. Doubters said it wasn’t the truth, just what happened to be in his head at the moment. Some said he could see the future and some said he could make things happen. The whites tormented him so he avoided them when possible. They knew they could induce the seizure with a poke to his ribs. So they did it when a crowd was present to witness the torment. His own people honored him, never taking chances in this harsh land.

            “Came from Canaan’s Land today my brothers where I journeyed to sup in the presence of mine enemies. I am sanctified and holy. How about you? Are you ready, quite ready, to pass to glory today good friends?” And then, quickly, as if all in one motion, came the twitch and the bowing. “Did you see Sis Ella’s bloomers in church last Sunday. Fell, yes fell she did. Right between the sister-holders. White they were, I promise you, white as the heart of a lily, praise god almighty.”

            The boy nearly laughed, but the man looked hard at him and then addressed the other.

            “Evening Brother Bill. Can we help you today?”

            “Would be nice for me and good for your soul. Yes, would be nice,” he said. “Maybe just a nickel so old Bill could say to Jesus, “I have met a man of faith.” He consulted the sky. Then he looked into the man. “Just a nickel please.”

            “Most assuredly,” the man said. “Most assuredly,” and he reached for the money purse. Producing a coin for the other man, he handed it from the wagon. “Will you pray for me brother?"

            “You be blessed,” said the other. He jerked and the jerk bent him over. “That boy, he’s the one, he must bring the wrath down for sure. He the devil Christ, he is.”

            He stepped away from the wagon, his arms swooping like the boy had seen hawks do on a cold day. Still spinning and swooping in a fluid, mocking motion, he moved behind the wagon.

            “Git hoss,” said the man and he snapped the reins hard upon the horse’s back.

 

The Road to Glory

 

Memories

By Jimmie von Tungeln

Mama used to say us girls picked on Eula Faye or else egged her on, but I can tell you that she gave about as good as she got. Like the time we stole her Bible verse. We all had a good laugh out of it at the time but we didn’t get ahead of her. No sir. Not at all.

Now there are those who wouldn’t think this little episode was important. They have never lived out at the end of the world in south Arkansas where everybody you knew was either direct-kin or step-kin, or sometimes both. It didn’t take much to create a story that would last forever. Particularly if you were as poor as we were.

After Daddy died, Mama raised us as best she could. While she didn’t hold out much for preaching, or churches in general—I think it had something to do with the hardness of her life—she did send us off to church when we got to aggravating her.

Ever third Sunday Brother Elmer Tisdale would ride out from Caldron with his old mare pulling his wagon and hold services in Pleasant Grove Church. I guess this must have been about 1930. I couldn’t have been over twelve or thirteen, I reckon since I was married and gone by the time I was sixteen.

The church was nothing but a little frame building set off from a cemetery that went way back almost to the civil war. My granddaddy had been a charter member but he had died young so Mama could barely remember him. The church building rested under the shade of three enormous oak trees. We kids called them “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” but not around any grown-ups for they had no sense of humor whatsoever about religion.

We would gather up around nine-thirty in the morning and have an hour of Sunday School before the services began. So Mama made us leave early enough to serve the complete sentence. Naturally she didn’t trust us as far as she could spit and I can still see her on the porch as we took off, threatening to cut a switch and wear us out if we didn’t get there in time.

The older ones were gone by then and it was just Sister and Jim and me had to go. Mama made us because she said it wouldn’t do us any harm and might do us some good. She was welcome to her opinion. We had our own, but we went just like she told us to.

We dawdled around as much as we could. Jim would usually cut us off some grapevines to smoke on the way and we would make up all sorts of imaginary trips that we were really going on. None of them included a church house. Hog Eye Bend Creek would be the River Nile and a clump of oak trees would be a pyramid. We used clouds for the Alps and the road we were on was the main street through Paris. For a bunch of country kids, we weren’t bad at making things up.

Anyway, Hattie Ruth Turner taught school up at Armistead so they had her teach Sunday School to the girls on preaching day. There were about seven or eight of us. Eula Faye was distant kin and her daddy had a pension from World War One. They also owned a grocery store out on the state highway, so they was about the richest family in the community. She was a round-faced thing with freckles ever place they had a spot to be in. Her mamma kept her hair done up in curls to tight I bet you could have played music on them. She kind of had this little bounce when she walked and we would giggle that someday she might just bounce off like a rubber ball. She would hear us and say that rich women in the city walked like that. We liked her okay, I reckon. We didn’t mistreat her. It was just that she would sometimes create the opportunity for a laugh or just make one up on her own.

All the girls had to have a Bible verse memorized to recite first thing in Sunday School. This was supposed to help us into Heaven in some way, but it wasn’t real clear to us how and we didn’t care much for it. It might have been due to the lack of scriptural resources available to a bunch of little country kids. Some of those girls were from families that couldn’t even afford a Bible. We had one but our step-daddy wouldn’t hardly let us touch it. So we were in a constant of agitation about it. It sure wasn’t our favorite part of this whole salvation thing.

Miss Hattie, since she was a regular school teacher too, had to remember what side her bread was buttered on so she would always let Eula Faye go first. We would start to snicker even before she stood up. We met in the back of the church house and the boys in front. Eula Faye would make sure the boys were watching her and then when the room got real quiet, she would brush a hand across her hair and say it just like some movie actress.

“Jesus wept, John 11:35”

She got away with it ever Sunday.

Then we would have to stand up and quote some regular verse. And you weren’t allowed to repeat someone else’s choice. It got to where it played on our nerves.

Well this one Sunday, we fixed it up so Sister held Eula Faye up outside the door on some pretense and she hadn’t come in when we started. So Eloise Covington jumped up and asked if she could go first. What could Miss Hattie say?

Eloise was in on it, see? She stumbled around until she saw Eula Faye come in then Eloise shouted out loud enough for the whole church to hear: “Jesus wept, John 11:35”

You could just about see the color drain out of Eula Faye’s face when she took her seat. We swallowed our giggles until our stomachs started to swell, expecting to see Eula Faye have a nervous breakdown. But she didn’t miss a beat when Miss Hattie called on her. She stood up and took a deep breath. The boys knew something was up and had all stopped talking and were watching like a bunch of hounds at hog dressing time. She nodded to them as if they were her audience and then gave us her best “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet” look. Then she announced to the world, as if she might be telling the Red Sea to part.

“Moses crept, John 3:15.”

She said it real loud and then just set back and smiled the same as if she had just recited some long-winded psalm. We all broke up laughing until Miss Hattie stared it out of us. The boys didn’t know a Bible verse from a horse-collar so they mostly just stared with their mouths all open. Then it was all over and we re-commenced our recitation period. Miss Hattie never let on like anything unusual happened at all.

That was the day we knew it wasn’t going to be easy to get something by Eula Faye. But Sister and I laughed all the way home over it anyway. Jim just smoked a grapevine and looked puzzled over the whole thing. We talked some about the next meeting cause it was set to be Baptizing Day. We liked to watch that. Sometimes Mama would even come with us and it made for some good memories.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fiction?

 

The Charleston

By Jimmie von Tungeln

The younger girl held the matchbox steady as the older bored through one side and out the other an inch or so from the front. Using a rusted ice pick, she carefully pierced the cardboard without caving in the side. Her eyes narrowed from the concentration and her tongue curled against her upper lip. Together, they repeated the process at the rear and the girl held it up for inspection. “Now for the axles,” she said.

The younger picked up two slender twigs whittled to a near cylindrical shape and handed them to her sister. She stuck the twigs from side to side through the box. “Wheels,” she said. The other reached into her dress pocket and handed her four large buttons retrieved from a discarded coat. Taking them, she held them to the sky for inspection. There were four holes in each button, pre-cut for accepting thread. In the center, the girls had bored a single, larger hole. Through this hole, she pushed one of the buttons, then the rest, onto the sticks protruding from the sides of the box.

“Won’t be long, now,” the girl said. As she positioned each wheel, she stuck straight pins adjacent to the sides of the buttons to hold them in place. Finished, she held the completed apparatus up for inspection and then rolled it along the ground. The younger girl watched in admiration.

“Works good Essie,” she said. “Works real good.”

“We got us a wagon, Mabel,” the other said. She rolled the toy along the ground twice more and then held it up. “Now we’ll work on the tongue.”

“Let’s check on the team,” Mabel said.

“Let’s,” said Essie as she rose from her squatting position. She placed the toy wagon against a great oak tree rising from the front yard. She took the younger girl’s hand and they ran to a place under the porch of the house. There they had built a small lean-to a foot-square in the shade.

A woman in her mid-forties sat on the porch in an aged rocking chair watching the girls and moving in slow rhythm as she fanned herself with a fan that proudly announced its source as The Buie Funeral Home, Rison, Arkansas. The house was a modest structure of maybe 20 feet in width. Like many others of its type, it had three rooms, one behind the other with a back door leading to a well in the back yard for drawing water. Other than the rocking chair, the only embellishments visible on the front porch were a piece of broken mirror hanging from a string and a calendar by the door outlining the year 1924.

The woman stopped her rocking and fanning long enough to bend toward where the girls were crouched. “I’m a’tellin’ you girls them baby rats ain’t gonna live the day out so you moughts well bury them now.”

Neither girl replied. The had removed a piece of filthy blanket covering a small nest of hay and twigs that furnished the bed for four recently born rats. The tiny pink things were curled into tight balls and quivered as the air hit them.

“How long afore they’s big enough to pull the wagon?” asked Mabel.

“Couple of weeks, I reckon.”

“Hot damn.”

“I heard that,” the woman yelled from the porch. “Now y’all quit tormentin’ them babies or I’m gonna whup somebody’s ass.”

Essie giggled and covered the babies. “When we get the axles and tongue finished, we’ll start on the harnesses.”

“You still got them shoe laces?”

“All we’ll need.”

The girls withdrew from under the porch and stretched in the morning sun. Both were thin. Essie was six inches taller than the younger girl with jet-black hair that contrasted with the auburn hair of her sister. Both had bobbed coiffures, apparently fashioned at home. They each wore thin, simple dresses that draped over their bodies like clothes hanging from a line. They were barefooted.

“Mama, you said Uncle Frank used to make wagons out of match boxes and hook them up to rats. Why you fussin’ at us?” Essie said.

“Them rats was growed. He didn’t use no baby rats.”

“Ours gonna be growed in a couple of weeks if you give us some milk to feed them.”

The woman rocked back. “Now you girls shut up and come on around here. We got some washin’ to do.”

“Aw Mama. Can’t we play awhile?” Mabel said.

“You can play when I tell you to,” she said, but the girls didn’t hear. Their attention had centered on a distant sound, one unusual but familiar. They both walked to the edge of the cleared area that served as a front yard.

“Hear that?” Essie said nudging Mabel. “It’s car, and it’s headed this way.”

Mabel didn’t answer. She turned to look at her mother for confirmation. The woman had heard the sound as well. She raised a hand to her mouth and Mabel could see concern on her face. “Mama, somebody’s …,” she began but the woman motioned for her to be quiet.

“You girls come up here,” she said.

The girls obeyed and stood by their mother as the automobile came closer. They heard a rattling sound that seemed to echo from the large oaks that ringed the house. Had it not been for the fact that only one road led by their home, Mabel thought that it would have been hard to tell from which direction the sound came. It just came, that was all, growing louder until they could hear, among the sounds of the engine, the squeaking of the car’s body as it labored along the ruts and crevasse making up the dirt road.

“Reckon who it is, Mama?” Essie said.

“Hush now. You girls be quiet.”

Then there was a flash as sunlight bounced off glass and the girls could see snatches of a dark form moving through the woods like an animal on the prowl. The two moved closer to their mother.

The form then burst from the darkness of the woods and a complete automobile emerged. A faded black shape marked with large rings of rust and dents bounced into view and headed straight for the house.

Instinctively, the mother shooed her daughters behind her, ready to absorb the first shock if the shape didn’t stop before it reached them.

It swerved, though, just as it reached the edge of the front yard and came to a sudden stop parallel to the front porch. The front end dipped twice as if bowing in deference and then the entire apparatus was still.

Essie peered from behind her mother. “Look, Mama, it’s Carl and Fred.” She laughed at the thought of their being frightened. “It’s just Carl and Fred. They done got themselves a car.”

Those on the porch couldn’t see them well, but to the right of each of the men sat others who appeared to be female.

“How you, Mama?” Fred yelled.

The woman didn’t answer. She looked at the car and its occupants as if they had dropped into her yard from another world.

“We come by to see you,” the man said. “How you like my car?”

The woman looked the car over from end to end. “What you boys up to?” she said.

“I done told you, Mama,” Fred said. “We come by to see you.”

“Why ain’t you boys workin’?”

The man in the rear spoke to the other who replied and then turned to face his mother again. “We off today.”

“Who’s that in the car with you?” she said as if noticing them for the first time.

“They’s some friends Mama.” He turned to the passengers and said, “You girls git out and meet our mama.”

He turned to this mother again and opened the door of the car. “They comin’ around to meet you, Mama.”

With that, those in the car emerged one by one, straightening their clothes and slapping away the dust that had covered them. As the women came around the car, the girls stepped from behind their mother and stared.

“Would you look at that?” Mabel said.

“You girls hush,” their mother said.

The women did present a spectacle for two young girls in the backwoods. Both wore similar dresses that hung straight from their shoulders and ended midways between their hips and knees and were joined by a row of fringe that ended six inches above the knee. The girls watched entranced as the fringe jiggled as the women walked toward the front porch, each on the arms of one of the men.

Fred and his companion stopped halfway across the yard. Carl took an extra step as he and his bumped the other two from behind. Recovering, they all stood at attention as if on review before those on the porch.

“Mama,” Fred began.

“Where’d you git that car?” His mother interrupted him and glared.

“Hit’s mine,” Fred said. “I bought it last week. Now Mama,” he began.
            “Where’d you git the money?” she said.

“I hauled some hogs for old man Atkins,” he said. “Now Mama …”

“Hit must have been one big load of hogs.”

“Mama, this here is Adele,” Fred said, proud of his persistence. “And back ‘air is Bobbie June. They’s friends of ours.”

“Why ain’t y’all haulin’ some more hogs if’n it’s yore day off? Can’t you use some extra money? I know we could.”

“Now Mama,” Carl said from behind Fred. “That’s what we need to talk to you about.”

“Shut up, Carl,” Fred said. “Mama, can we come in and talk to you a minute?”

The woman deliberated, still ignoring the two other women. Finally, she turned to the door, “Come on in, then. You girls stay out here.” She didn’t specify which girls so the two younger ones remained on the porch staring at the two women. They heard a door slam in the back of the house and the Mabel knew they had gone all the way to the kitchen to talk. It must be serious.

“What’s your name, sweetie?” the one named Adele said to Essie.

“Esther Mae,” she replied.

“That’s a right pretty name,” Adele said. “And what’s yours?” she said, turning to Mabel.

Mabel didn’t speak. She just turned toward Essie who nodded. “Mabel,” she said, finally.

“Well I’ll swan. Ain’t you the cutest two girls in Cleveland County?”

Before they could respond, loud voices roared from behind the closed door. The girls could only make out a word or two but they could tell it had something to do with liquor. Before they could hear more, the woman named Bobbie June spoke in a loud voice.

“Hey girls, come down here and let us show you something.”

They looked at one another. Again, Essie nodded and the two descended from the porch, one behind the other.

When they reached the two women, the one named Adele placed her hand on Mabel’s shoulder. She started to speak but sounds of loud voices from the back of the house attracted their attention. Mabel only caught the phrase “comin’ in here drunk” in the mixed confusion.

Suddenly Adele spoke. “I bet you girls don’t know how to do the Charleston, do you?”

Essie and Mabel both looked at her. “The what?” Essie said.

“The Charleston,” Adele said. “It’s the latest dance. You do know how to dance don’t you?”

“No ma’am,” said Essie. “We ain’t allowed to.”

“Not allowed to?” said Bobbie June, moving to draw their attention away from the house. “Why, you should, and I bet we can teach you in a sec.”

“You bet,” said Adele. “We been all the way to Dallas, Texas to learn it. You know where Dallas is?”

“No ma’am,” said Essie.

“Well, it’s a long way from Cleveland County, I’ll tell you that. Come here and look.”

She led the girls a few steps farther from the house and then turned to Bobbie June. “Let’s teach these girls a thing or two,” she said.

Bobbie June began to clap her hands in rhythm and, much to the delight of the girls, sang in a husky voice.

“Five foot two…

Eyes of blue..

But oh, what those five feet could do…”

They giggled when Adele began to move forward and backward in pace with singing, placing one foot in front of the other and then in back of it with arms swinging in perfect rhythm.

“Turned up nose…

Turned down hose…

Never had no other beaus…”

“Now come on, you do it do,” said Adele, grabbing Essie’s arm.

When Essie drew away, Adele said, “Don’t be afraid. It’s easy. Give it a try.”

She continued to dance and motioned for the other two to join her.

“See, just put one foot here, one foot there.”

Bobby June was joining her now, continuing to sing.

“Now if you run into…”

Suddenly Adele cried. “Look at that child.”

Three of them turned to watch Mabel who was now beginning to move in perfect imitation of Adele. She stumbled once, missed a beat, but soon was bouncing on her feet in complete harmony with the music.

“Look at that bearcat go. Kick them gams, you darb you,” said Adele. She stopped herself and joined Adele in singing and clapping as Mabel began to move in frenzied ecstasy. He eyes grew wide and her face contorted from concentration. Essie looked at her in amazement.

“But could she love…

Could she woo…

Could she, could she, could she coo?”

Bobbie June stopped singing then. Mabel continued do pour every bit of energy into dancing though there was no more music. The two women had turned toward the house when Carl came quick-stepping through front door toward the steps. As Mabel raged forwards and backwards, sounds of broken glass flew from the house and Fred came running out, dodging blows from a broom wielded by his mother. He crashed into Carl, who was halfway down the steps and the two went flying together into the four standing in the yard.

It was then that Mabel stopped dancing.

“And take them whores with you,” her mother shouted.

She needn’t have worried. The two women were already in car by then and before anyone else could move, Fred had joined them. Carl was already in front of the car violently spinning a starting crank. The engine stared immediately and he ran to the back door, crank in hand, and dove in as the car began to move. In a moment, they were gone.

Mabel and Essie didn’t move. They had seen storms before and knew that the best defense was no defense at all. Essie simply looked a Mabel in amazement. Without changing expression, Mabel winked at her.

“You girls start gettin’ ready,” their mother said. “We got to go pick up Mizz Reed’s washin’.”

The girls walked back to the house holding hands. Without speaking to one another, they walked to the spot under the porch where they had left the baby rats. Essie squatted and removed the cover. She watched the babies for a minute or so, it seemed to Mabel. The she poked them with a finger.

“Mama, I think our babies died,” she said.

“I done told you they would. Now you girls git rid of them and git ready to go.” She turned and, broom in hand, went back into the house.

“Bring me our wagon,” Essie said.

Mabel turned without a word and went to the base of the tree where the matchbox wagon lay. She picked it up and returned with it to where Essie still squatted quietly. She handed the box to her sister.

“We ain’t got time to bury them now,” Essie said. She folded the rag that covered the tiny creatures and placed it in the box as a liner. Then she picked up the tiny objects one by one and placed them in a row upon the cloth. She rose slowly and showed the box to Mabel who simply nodded.

Holding the box in front of her, Essie started walking to a copse of trees just beyond the edge of the front yard, in the direction from which the car had appeared.  As they moved from the clearing, the trees made shadows cross their forms and then they were in the cool darkness out of sight from the house.

Essie began to sing as they walked, and after a few more steps, Mabel began to sway with the music. Now Essie did the same, still holding the matchbox coffin before her as they walked farther into the cool, dark woods.

“Five foot two…

Eyes of blue…”

Hope

I often visit cities with major problems. Some are apparent, some aren’t. Some appeared with the mechanization of farming. Some appeared a hundred years earlier when we used the so-called “Black Laws” to systematize the disenfranchisement of former slaves. Some appeared with the opening of the Interstate Highway system. Some appeared with the Swan Decision on April 20, 1971, in which the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously upheld busing programs that aimed to speed up the racial integration of public schools in the United States. Some appeared when guns and drugs became the two products in America most easily acquired by the poor and hopeless. Some won’t become fully known until the Interstate Highway system becomes a vast parking lot covering the entire nation. (Casual observation suggests no more than ten years hence.) Some won’t appear until we see the psychological effects of children growing up in what I call “gated cities,” in which society shields them from any human that isn’t a mirror image.

I visit them all. I observe that the rain falls on the lucky and the unlucky.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m no genius. I can’t solve the problems generated by the foregoing causes, and others I didn’t mention. I can’t wave an academic voodoo-dust over a city and remove these problems. I can’t offer them a “bright-line” solution. I can’t promise them a magical prosperity just around the corner. I can’t say, “This too shall pass,” when I’m not sure it will.

What I can do is tp not insult, degrade, and humiliate them. What I can do is to not tell them that the problems are their fault and compare them to a third-world country. What I can do is offer them some ray of hope. What I can do is offer them, based on my experience and education, a path toward solutions that may help. At the same time, I might help lead them away from solutions that don’t work like those of the so-called urban designers who are telling them that planting trees on Main Street will bring back the retailers. They resemble the “cargo cult” natives of the South Sea islands who believed that making replicas of bombers would bring the Americans and their largess back to their islands after World War Two.

What I might do best is offer them the words of the Galilean in the 25^th Chapter of Matthew in the Christian New Testament:

“Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

If the Galilean heard what the President of the United States of America said to the people of Chicago, Illinois yesterday, I feel sure he— the Galileanؙ—wept again. Maybe we’ve lost account of what is just and holy. Maybe all of our urban problems began occurring the moment we began to care more about a person’s sexual orientation than about the young child in dirty diapers sitting on a front porch in the Arkansas Delta, hungry, hopeless, and weeping for all of us, both the just and the unjust.

What we value

 If things work out, I hope to have a few good years left as an urban planner. Continuing to work at it remains more fulfilling than, say, trying to learn to play golf. I’m afraid, though, that I’m beginning to be known as a bit of an old curmudgeon. I’ve even developed a rep as hating the latest fad in my profession: vehicular roundabouts. May I set the record straight?

I don’t hate them. I think they work well. I think they meet their purpose in an excellent fashion. They are fine devices for moving traffic, if that’s the reason that urban planners were placed on Earth.

So, what’s the rub?

 I’m just tired of our spending so much public money to feed the insatiable demands of the automobile. If history tells us one thing, it’s that the demands of the automobile can never be met, nor can that monster ever be satiated. Someday we will know that. Drive slowly and sneak a look next time you cross over Interstate 40. What you’ll see now is the scene of a variety of cars sandwiched in between miles of 18-wheelers, resembling long trains with rubber wheels on concrete tracks.

What you’ll see in maybe five more years is a parking lot stretching from Wilmington, North Carolina to Barstow, California. Our state highway department will then tell us that it needs several trillions of dollars to fix the problem. Oh, and they won’t have a cent left for those kids I see sometimes walking several miles in the summer heat to their first job at a fast-food franchise.

I’m hoping our cities will decide to spend more on their people and less on cars. I don’t really care if someone gets their car from point A to point B faster. What I care about is how fast we can get that kid in dirty diapers off the front porch of that shack in the Arkansas Delta and into an education, a decent home, and a life with a future. He’s waiting for us to help, while his mother is inside earning enough for the next meal or the next hit of methamphetamine, whichever she needs first. Our fundamentalist “Christian” friends say, “Hey, no problem. He’s born now so all is well. Don’t worry, be happy, and just hope he doesn’t decide to be gay.”

Yesterday I visited the site of a memorial to a beloved niece whom I hired for her first job as a grant writer and grant administrator. After a long career, and a losing bout with cancer, she received, posthumously, a monument for procuring a grant to help a city build a splash pad for its youth. It stands as a fitting and well-deserved honor.

What she should receive a monument for, although she won’t, is for the many hot summer evenings she spent in small, frame, often unpainted, churches in the Arkansas Delta, one of the most neglected sections of our country. She’d be meeting, in the stifling heat and the hordes of mosquitoes with a group of poverty-stricken brothers and sisters trying to secure safe drinking water for their families, just drinking water is all.

It’s all a matter of priorities. Our priorities. It reminds me of a call I received in the late 1990s. I was enjoying a limited, but not particularly lucrative, success as a planning consultant. A friend, an attorney with whom I had done some work, was the caller. He had left his job in Little Rock and moved to Northwest Arkansas, a region richly blessed by the whims of modern history.

“You need to move up here,” he said. “There’s money to be made.”

I supposed that there was, but said, “No, I’ll stay down here.”

“Why? Don’t you want to be where the action is happening?”

I thought for a moment. “No,” I said again.

“Why?” he said again.

“Oh,” I said, “I think the Galilean would have me stay where the action isn’t happening.”

The Libertarian Roundabout

Of Castles and Homes

Last week, we learned of a mysterious farm hand in the Depression-era Arkansas Delta. Here is an account of the same man from a different voice.

The Last Cotton Boll

II

Sure, I can tell you about the one that they called Ferd Starling. You ready? Where should I start? Maybe by stating up front that I knew him before it happened just enough to recognize him. I knew which of the “shotgun shacks” was his and that’s why I knew him. When Daddy and Momma first got married they lived in that house for awhile until they could afford to move over on the Taylor place and that’s where we were living when I saw him the first time.

He drove up in one of Mr. Easter’s wagons one day while I was in the front yard chopping wood. I don’t think he looked any different than any other––a little bigger maybe. There was something about him that made you think he was a little smarter. I don’t know what it was, just a feeling or something in the way he talked. He stopped the wagon and I stopped chopping and he asked me if I was the Hinson boy. It come to me to ask why he wanted to know, but instead I just said that yes I was Timmie and could I help.

Was it my folks that used to live on the Easter place he asked and I said that was what I understood but I didn't live there long. I grew up on this place.

Come over here he said and again it come to me to ask why but instead I walked over. He reached under his seat and pulled out a greasy paper sack and handed it to me and I looked inside. There wasn’t anything in it but an old brown curved woman’s comb and I looked back at him, probably with a question on my face.

He said he found it behind the cook-stove in the house and since we had been the only family lived there in anyone’s memory that had a lady in the house he thought it might belong to my Momma. It’s tortoise shell he said and asked me if I knew what that meant and I said no and he said it was made from a turtle shell, only turtles around here weren’t big enough to make them from and this had been made from some turtle that lived a long way from here. He asked me if I had ever been out of Arkansas.

I said no and then thanked him and said I would ask Momma if it was hers. I wasn’t much interested in women’s stuff and I guess he knew that for then he asked me if I wanted to see something. When I didn’t answer, he reached under the seat and pulled out the prettiest 22-rifle I had ever seen in my life. Every inch of it was polished like it just came out of the box. I whistled and he asked if I wanted to hold it and of course I said yes I would.

He pulled the bolt back and checked the chamber and handed it down to me. I knew that I never had, and thought that I probably never would, hold anything that pretty in my hands, ever again. If I had owned that whole farm that Momma and Daddy were helping to sharecrop, I would have traded it to him for that rifle. Where did he get it I asked and he just said that a man who taught him a trade and other things left it to him when he died.

It is a beauty I said and handed it back to him real slow. He put it back under the seat and then reached behind him and pulled up three dead squirrels tied with a string. He handed them down to me and said give them to Momma along with the comb and she could cook up a meal that had come from that gun. I thanked him and then he said maybe I’ll see you again sometime and I said maybe so and he drove off.

It turned out it was Momma’s comb and it had belonged to her grandmother and probably was bought at Memphis when they were moving west. She said it was a nice thing for him to do. She had never expected to see it again and had been real bothered by that. She wouldn’t cook the squirrels, though, for she said she didn’t know where they had been nor how long they had been shot but I wasn’t to tell him that if I saw him again —just thank him for the comb and that was all.

I did see him again not long after that... He walked by one day in early fall carrying that rifle and a bag and saw me in the front yard and of course I stared straight at the gun.

He called me over and said he was going to Beauford’s Bayou to hunt squirrels. It was a kind of misty day with not much of a breeze and he said it was just the right weather for “still hunting.” Then he thought for a second and said that I might ask my folks if I could go. I said they and my little brother had all gone with my Momma’s uncle to Pine Bluff to visit and wouldn’t be back home ‘til after dark.

He just nodded and started to walk away. Then I yelled after him that I was sure it wouldn’t bother them. So he said come on then, let’s go.

We walked along together and he asked if I had hunted much. I said some but my Daddy worked so hard we had but little time. He asked if I had my own rifle and I said we didn’t have but one and it was an old one that had some rusty spots. But it shot pretty straight and hard, I thought, for such an ancient gun.

Well sometimes old things is good he said and we could always learn from them. We were to the bayou by then and didn’t talk much more. We walked out of the sunlight and into the dark woods along the muddy stream. It was only a little ways from the road and the cotton fields but it seemed like a different world. I always liked it there. We found a likely spot and sat down so any breeze would carry behind us. After a while, the woods just seemed to forget we were there. The mist settled on us real slow but it wasn’t enough to get you wet before it dried. I tried not moving a single muscle and thought about how some Indian probably hunted once in this very spot. I don’t know what Ferd thought about. He just stared out into the forest and nodded his head every once in awhile.

Sure enough, before long a whole family of squirrels came out to play and once they had climbed a giant oak, we moved into place. I didn’t even dare ask him but I suppose he knew what I was thinking for he whispered and asked if I wanted to shoot one. Sure I whispered back. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a few greasy looking shells along with a couple of matches and a pocket knife. He picked one of the shells and loaded into the rifle and handed it to me. He pointed to a large squirrel that had heard us by now and had frozen in perfect sight along a huge limb. I took careful aim and I’m sure I rushed it too much for we saw the bark fly a good foot or so behind the squirrel.

To my surprise it didn’t move and I handed the rifle back to Ferd. He said no, it was my squirrel and to try again. Don’t jerk it this time, boy, he said. Take your aim and then just pull your whole body tight all at one time like you was trying to make yourself small. I did just what he said and we both smiled when we saw the squirrel tumble off the limb and fall and then hit the ground with that thud that any squirrel hunter loves to hear. He said I would be a real hunter.

Neither of us had a way of knowing that six years later I would show a boy from New Jersey how to shoot Germans the same way.

We shot three more and then started home. I thanked him for the trip and said that Momma thanked him for the comb and he said take the squirrels with me. I tried to say no but he just said he was going to be too busy to cook any squirrels and I should take them. I didn’t want them to go to waste but I couldn’t help but remember the last time, though I didn’t tell.

Then he said something that struck me as odd. He said he really wasn’t that interested in hunting for squirrels. He was just out observing how trees were formed and he needed an excuse to be in the woods alone. His ways were different, I suppose.

It turned out that after I vouched for the squirrels, Momma did cook them although she was upset about the fact that I took off without telling anybody. She knew I was growing up, though, and she could tell it had been a real good time for me and she went ahead and let me enjoy the thought of it for she said folks like us didn’t have enough good times in life. I’ve thought many times, after it happened, that she was so right.

It started out innocent enough as most things do. It was a few weeks later and we were using up one of those fall Saturdays. It was me and the two Cooper boys and Bobby Skinner and of course Ricky Pickens who had got the whole trip up and who, as everyone knows by now, was responsible for what happened although others suffered for what he done.

We were what we called hunting although really we were just wandering through the cotton fields looking for something to shoot. The crops were all in and we walked through the dead, empty stalks. They would rattle when the wind blew and it was a little spooky like they were cotton-stalk ghosts trying to talk to one another. We were spread out, each with a rifle though the Cooper boys only had one between them so they had to take turns. They would get to arguing about whose time it was and Ricky would have to stop us and straighten it out. Goddamn it he would yell, you are scaring off any game within twenty miles so one of you take the goddamn gun till we get halfway across this field and then the other take it the other half. It wasn’t working too well, however, for they would start to argue again before we went fifty yards.

So Ricky was in a bad mood and it threatened to ruin the whole day and I was really getting ready to go back home. It helped a little when we found an empty Yellowstone Whiskey bottle. Ricky made us take turns throwing it up in the air while we tried to shoot it but none of us could. I tried a couple of times but didn’t have but a few bullets and didn’t want to use them up on such an impossible shot as that. So I quit and pretty soon so did the others except Ricky who seemed to have taken it on as a personal trial and kept shooting and making us, one after the other, throw it up for him.

We soon got tired and said that we weren’t going to throw it up for him anymore and that seemed to make him madder than ever. He called us a bunch of sissies and said we weren’t coming next time and that he would just bring some girls along and we could all go straight to hell. He had a mean street like that and that was the cause of our little run-in a year later on the main street in Armistead. But, back to that day, he was already in a bad mood when we reached the edge of the field and came out right up in front of Ferd’s house.

It sat there like every other shack up and down the road. It did have one old oak tree in front that had never been cut down. On the other sides, though, the cotton had been planted right up to the house except for a well and outhouse in back. It almost looked like it had grown right up out of the ground, along with the cotton. In the back it looked like he had at least two cords of wood cut up and stacked. He was ready for the winter.

Ricky said he was thirsty and let’s go make him get us a drink but I said I had to get home. He said he couldn’t make it home without a drink of water first and asked the others if they wasn’t thirsty too. Naturally they said yes and Ricky started off toward the cabin yelling for Ferd to come outside.

Nobody came and then Ricky went up to the door and knocked. Still nobody came so he opened the door. There wasn’t anyone there so he just walked in. I figured he would take a quick look and leave but then he hollered look at this shit, just come and look and the others walked toward the door.

I yelled Ricky let’s go but the others walked in too and they started yelling come look at this. It suddenly occurred to me that they might have found the gun so I walked in too.

It took a second or two to see in the dark room but I could see what they were talking about. There was a kitchen in back and a front room where Ferd stayed and that’s where we were. I knew we were in violation but I could no more move than the rest of them. There on one whole wall were pictures drawn on writing paper that were prettier than any book I ever saw. Buildings mostly—but buildings like none I had ever seen before. I didn’t know it then but they were cathedrals like they have in France and Italy. I’ve seen them since, but standing there that day I had never seen any thing like it. The sheets were tacked to the wall with roofing nails and in some places there would be six of them put together for one big drawing. Building after building seeming to be held the ground by little stone webs coming from the top and arching to the ground. Some of the sheets had small drawings of how stones and bricks fit together and notes written in the neatest handwriting I had ever seen.

I looked around and then I saw the books—row upon row. Ferd had made shelves from bricks and some old barn lumber and there were rows of books stacked against one wall. There was a table made of bricks and an old door covered with a piece of cardboard. And there in one corner was a bed made up as neat as you please. It was the strangest thing. In the other corner was an old stuffed chair and a wood heater and between them was an ancient table with a coal oil lamp on it.

We were stunned. The room got still and all we could hear was the sound of our breathing. It was deathly quiet.

Then we heard a loud thump and nearly jumped out of our skin. I was closest to the door and hated like anything in the world to look but I knew I had to. I turned and looked at the front door. There was nobody there. I walked to the door and down the steps and heard the knocking again. It was coming from the side of the house so I walked around and then I saw it. A large cotton boll, dried up and never opened, was swaying from a stalk in the wind and knocking against the side of the house. Just a cotton boll, that’s all it was and I yelled inside and told them and said let’s go.

They didn’t come out and I yelled again and then I heard Ricky say you son of a bitch you goddamned son of a bitch, who do you think you are? I yelled back and said what’s wrong and he kept yelling you son of a bitch. Then I heard a loud noise and I ran to the steps and looked in. Ricky was swinging something against the wall with the pictures on it and I yelled stop.

He just kept swinging as the pictures started flying off the wall. He said you sorry son of bitch , I’ll be goddamned if you do this and he kept on swinging and then he told Bobby to turn the goddamned table over and he started to do it and I yelled stop and started in and then he turned on me. Either help or get the hell out he said and I said stop this right now and said I would tell the Sheriff and he said we’ll be through before the Sheriff can come and go right on and tell him.

I’ll stop you myself I said and started in. That’s when they all turned to face me and I saw Ricky had a poker in his hand and the others all had a brick.

Come ahead Ricky said and we will fix you too. Now help or get the hell out he said and the others looked at me too. Looks of hate and anger ran down their faces like drool from a mad dog’s.

I said once more let’s get out and they all took a step towards me at the same time.

I backed down the steps and Bobby stood watch at the door while the others started in laughing and tearing the place up. I heard books hit the floor and sound of paper tearing. Please Bobby I said, you know this aint’ right I told him again but he just said get the hell on and it won’t concern you.

Oh no Ricky don’t do that I heard one of the Cooper boys say and I heard the splashing of water. I felt sick to my stomach and Bobby said get the hell on again.

I think about that decision a lot. There were four of them and one of me and we were a mile from the nearest house. We had stacked our rifles against the Oak tree and I backed up to where they were and picked mine up without turning around. I didn’t trust Bobby in this mood.

I held my rifle and looked at the house again. The knocking about had stopped and then I heard one of the Cooper boys laughing and yelling oh my god Ricky and then they both squealed and I backed up to the road and turned and left them there. I remember thinking I hope they don’t find his rifle but of course it turned out they didn’t and I went back home.

I told the Sheriff my side of the story and even the rest of them agreed I wasn’t in on it but to me that never meant I wasn’t as guilty as the rest. He—the Sheriff—was asking lots of questions about it but I heard that Mr. Pickens came to see him and the questions stopped. I never had anything to do with the rest of them after that except for beating up Ricky Pickens in the Main Street of Armistead a year later which made a reputation for me in town and it wasn’t a bad one. It was over mistreating a shoeshine boy though, and didn’t have anything to do with what they did to Ferd. At least I don’t suppose it did.

Ferd taught me some things and for that I am grateful. Those were different times back then, when colored people didn’t have what you might call rights or anything. They had to be so careful. So I wasn’t his friend or anything. Even if I had known him better, there would have been this wall between us. He just taught me some things, that’s all. I’ve always tried to learn from people whenever I could.

That’s about what I know about the affair, or what I care to remember. There was this one other thing. Years and many experiences later, after the storm of 1947, I was farming near Ferd’s old place and I found a crumpled sheet of paper that had blown into the hollow of a tree, laying there like it was a treasure map or something. I guess it blew there in all the commotion. It was faded and stained and almost fell apart in my hands. But I was able to unfold it and recognized the drawing and handwriting as Ferd’s. It was a part of one of the pictures of a church he had drawn. He had written on it:

Oh mighty structure.

The glorious buttress!

 So far to soar for man.

Someone had taken a pencil and changed it to:

Oh mighty strut
The glorious butt!

So fart for man.

I guess they thought that was funny.

To be continued …

Dreams of the Delta

Fiction Friday: Here's the first part of a longer piece I wrote when I was trying to fictionalize some stories my late father-in-law, Julius Cole used to tell about WWII, the Depression, and the Arkansas Delta.

The Last Cotton Boll - Part One

By Jimmie von Tungeln

© 2005

            You asked about Ferd Starling and, though it breaks my heart to even say the name, I will tell you what I know of that sad and gentle man. I will tell you first to keep his name alive, but then for personal solace too. Who knows what good might come from praising saintly men?

I did him some small favors once. So I can say that I knew him, probably as well as anyone around here did—not in a personal sense, but from trying to help him, as Christians should, one to another. That includes trying to do something about what happened and I tried hard, considering my position, which is not one involving a great deal of power. Most likely, though, you will want to know how I came to know him and what I know about the events that led to that awful day. Perhaps you can make some sense of it. I can’t.

            It was a quiet time, shortly before so many of our young men were to perish in Europe and in the South Pacific. Good times, you might say—the farms around Armistead, Arkansas were productive and hiring again. There seemed to be jobs for everyone who wanted to work. So it was that I met the man you asked about.

Ferd—his Christian name was Ferdinand—worked for Thomas Easter. Mr. Easter always had a goodly number of hired hands but Ferd was, I think, more or less in charge of the others. I understand that he was a good and dependable worker, one of the reasons why Mr. Easter took it so hard—as anyone with a soul would have.

But, as to what I know:

Mr. Easter and I attended the same church and in passing some small talk one Sunday, I commented that I had been busy all summer getting the library ready. Some people think I just sit there all day, day after day and watch the children come through. They don’t consider the work involved, but I am used to it.

            Anyway, I mentioned having a pile of junk that needed to be hauled to the dumping pit and how it was too much for me to carry.

            “What does it consist of?” he asked.

            “Just trash, and some worn-out books,” I said, “Too worn out even for the colored school.” Then I added “You can’t believe what children do to books that are paid for with tax money.” I wanted to make sure that he knew I understood my responsibilities.

            “I have a hired hand,” he said. Then he told me that this man seemed a little better than most and that he had come down from north of here and he ― Mr. Easter ― had heard that the new man could lay brick and had put him on for the summer several years back.

            Then he said, “Turned out he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, lay brick. I never quite knew which. He just told me, ‘I can’t do that any more.’ And that was that. I taken a chance on him anyway and it worked out fine. Good worker, and respectful. He can talk like a white man when he wants to, which ain't very often.” He finished by saying he would send him by with a wagon later that week.

So that was how Ferd happened to come to the library some days later to pick up trash. Otherwise I would have never known him, even as casually as I did. He drew up in one of Mr. Easter’s wagons while I was on the porch of the library and at first I couldn’t imagine who he might be. He was tall and sat straight as a light-pole on that wagon seat—didn’t have that slumped-over look that so many of them have. Then I realized that he was here for the trash.

When he stopped at the back door, I waited for a decent interval and then asked what he wanted.

“Mr. Easter told me to come,” he said.

It provoked me, the way he said it. I mean he said it like I should have expected him—like he was in on some conversation that had passed between me and Mr. Easter. I let it pass, but not completely. People should show respect.

“Did he say why?”

“Something about some junk to be hauled away.”

It still wasn’t completely satisfactory but I moved on. I said “There are some boxes of trash and discarded books that need to go.”

He turned sharply, almost frightening me. I have never seen eyes that could take a person in the way his did. I was close to taking offense when he said, very politely, “Missus, could I ask what kind of books they is?’

“What an odd question,” I thought. “Why just some old books with broken binders that the children have mistreated,” I said, adding “And there are some that nobody has ever touched all these years that were just taking up space.”

"I see,” was all he said as he descended from the wagon.

While he was tying the horses, I propped the back door open and then I walked to the edge of the porch. I stood and waited.

“It’s all in boxes just inside the door,” I said, and he just said “Yessum” and walked inside. I noticed that he stopped and took a long, deep breath, touched his hand to his eye and moved toward the boxes, but slowly. That didn’t seem strange in itself—they never want to work too fast in front of you. But there was something dreamy about the way he moved. If you ask me, I think he was trying to prolong the experience.

It was a late June day in the Delta, if you know what that means. I had forgotten my hat but I couldn’t go back in for it while he was in there. So I shielded my head from the sun with a magazine that I had been about to file. When he walked by with the first box, I noticed how strong he was. He wore a faded short-sleeved work shirt and a pair of worn but clean, pressed trousers of some long-forgotten color. He picked up a box of books like it had been a bouquet of flowers and walked out with it. I had just barely been able to slide it across the room, but he picked it up as if it were nothing.

Though he had just started to work, his arms were already covered with perspiration and I couldn’t help notice the muscles. He was a powerful man.

That’s when I realized just how hot it was. I had just the faintest twinge of dizziness, and began fanning myself with the magazine.

He must have noticed, for he stopped on his way back in and asked me if I was alright. “I’m fine,” I said, “You just load the trash,” and he said “Yessum.”

I would say he worked slowly but efficiently. We spoke no more while he was loading the trash. I fanned myself and looked toward Main Street. It was mid-morning of a Saturday just before cotton-chopping and the street was beginning to fill with folks from out in the county. Although it was a slow time of year and few people had money, downtown Armistead was still the place to be on Saturday. Whole families would unload from a wagon or pile out of an old Ford, the men in pressed khakis and the women in their second-best clothes licking a handkerchief and trying to clean some imaginary spot on the face of a small boy whose face had already been polished to a high sheen under oiled and roached-up hair. A sister would giggle and smirk. Then they would all trot off, hoping that some new mystery had been added to Main Street since last Saturday. I tried to appear absorbed by it all, but I kept an eye on Ferd’s progress.

In those days the library was in a separate building behind the rest of the school. It doubled as a town library for those few from town who wanted to use it. The porch where we were working faced Main Street and I was sure the folks there could see that I was taking care of public business. Of course, some of them would say that it was a pity that I had nothing better to do of a Saturday than to tend the library, but let them talk. I didn’t care as long as they could see I was on duty.

I was imagining some of their conversations when Ferd brought me back to the job at hand.

“Finished Missus,” he said. I walked to the door and looked in just to be sure. I turned and, reaching in to the pocket of my frock, produced a dime and tried to hand it to him with my arm fully extended. I thanked him.

He ignored my hand and said, “Does it have to happen, Missus?”

“Why what do you mean?” I said, surprised. I thrust the dime toward him again. He looked past it and straight at me.

“Must they be thrown away if a person could use them?”

It puzzled me briefly. I returned the twice-rejected dime to my pocket. Then I said, “Why, do you mean the books?”

“Yessum.”

“What’s your name, boy?” I asked.

“Hit’s Ferd, Missus. Ferd Starling.”

“Well then, Ferd. What would you do with all those books?”

“Not all, Missus, just some.”

“Can you read?”

“Just a little” Then he asked me again, “Must it happen?”

“Well, they aren’t picture books, you know. There are some math books that the boys defaced. And we finally changed the history books—those old ones stop with the first Mr. Roosevelt and here we are well into the second. I don’t have to tell you what a struggle it has been to get these books in these hard times.”

“No Ma’am.”

I thought through the possibilities. “You take what you might could use and don’t be strewing them all over the county, understand?”

“I understand. Just some I might use.” He had removed his hat and was twisting it as he stared toward his feet. Neither of us spoke for what seemed a long time.

“That’s all, then” I said. He started to turn and, surprisingly, I heard myself say: “And in that big box are some nearly used-up writing tablets and pencil stubs that you can have if you won’t scatter them all over the place.”

He turned back toward me and smiled. “Much obliged,” he said. And then he left. 

I thought no more about it and spent the next few weeks straightening up the library from the last school year and getting it ready for the next. I liked to have all that done by the time the crops were laid by.

Those were busy weeks in the delta. I don’t see how people survived. It would seem that every man, woman and child would be laboring either in the fields or preparing for those who did from sunup until sundown. They were hard times –backbreaking, spirit-killing times. Trucks covered with canvas and fitted with rude benches would collect the cotton-choppers of a morning and, after a quick stop at a grocery store to purchase food for their dinner, spread them amongst the farms. In the evening they would reverse the process with another stop for the purchase of supper and breakfast. Then the process would repeat itself in the never-ending, slow heartbeat of cotton country.

In families that could afford it, a mother would remain home in a tin-roofed house, cooking and washing as the heat poured mercilessly through the ceiling and wrapped around everything it could reach, like a transparent snake that oozed steam from every scale. Babies would suffer and cry from heat rash. Old people would sit just as still as they could so as not to taunt the heat. Dust would settle in every corner—a gagging, suffocating dust that a person couldn’t defeat. The very sun itself would seem to stop of an afternoon to prolong the suffering. It was a time when folks spoke very little to one another, just worked and hoped. And of course the really poor—the coloreds I mean—had it even worse.

Then one day it would change. The crops would be laid by and work would shift to cutting hay and wood for the winter. This was the worrying time. From rain and hail to blight and boll weevils, there was more than plenty to threaten the future as summer lengthened, stifling day by stifling day into fall. Then the pace would quicken and the morning trucks would reappear, this time to gather pickers for the cotton crop.

With luck—no doubt nurtured by all that worrying—the crops would be gathered and it would seem that everyone had a little money to spend. Downtown Armistead would flourish, even on a weekday. The County Fair would come and go and folks would settle in, hoping for a mild winter. Those were the days I liked best. School would start and thus my busy time of the year. Children whose family had turned a good crop or had stayed employed all summer would fairly crackle with new clothes and shoes. Even the students were bright and alert and ready for new experiences. And it lasted such a short time. It was a rare period of transition in a world that usually changed very little from one day to the next.

That’s when I saw Ferd for the second time. You can imagine my surprise when he just appeared one Friday afternoon. Knocking at the back door, standing as far from it as his reach would allow, his hat twisted in one hand and his eyes directed toward the floor.

I asked what and wasn’t he one of Mr. Easter’s boys and he said “Yessum.” Then I said wasn’t he the one called Ferd and he said “That’s right.”

“Did Mr. Easter send you?” I asked. He told me no, that he had come on this own.

“What for?”

“Hoped there might be more, Missus,” he said.

“More what?” I asked and then he told me.

“Thought you might have some more books to haul off and then I could be some help.” He said this while still looking down, almost as if he were ashamed and was trying to see right through the planks of the porch and to the ground below.

It all came perfectly clear to me then. I thought for a moment. “I only clean them out once a year. I won’t throw anymore away until next summer.”

“Yessum,” he said softly. He turned to go and I heard myself speak, but like it really wasn’t myself —just someone with my voice.

“I do have maybe one,” I said. “It takes way too much space and I don’t think anyone has ever touched it. Then I heard myself saying that I didn’t think anyone ever would and that it was full of pictures. “Wait here,” I told him.

He waited on the porch while I walked back into the coolness of the library. I retrieved the volume in question and returned to where he was waiting. This time he wasn’t looking down but staring straight at it. I knew he was trying to read the title.

“It’s called A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, by Sir Bannister Fletcher, I said. “Someone left it here years ago and I’m afraid it’s been wasted in Armistead.”

I handed him the book.

He took it and flipped through a few pages. He closed it gently and held it to his chest and looked toward me. I looked back, but I realized he was looking through me at something far, far away. He closed his eyes, almost as if in prayer, still clutching the book. Then he looked down and opened it toward the middle and flipped a few more pages. I could see page after page of small drawings—buildings and parts of buildings. There were also photographs of buildings. He turned them, one after another, for a moment and then stopped. It was then that I saw his hands were shaking.

“Why Ferd,” I said. “Your hands tremble so, are you ill?”

They stopped. He closed the book reverently and smiled. “No, Missus. I’m fine. I'm just fine, thank you." He stopped, as if catching himself. "I'se fine," he said.

            Whatever he had must have been catching for I could imagine my hands trembling as well.

            From then on, I would see him on occasion—that is until it happened. It was odd, but I even started to sense when he might show up. A student would drop a book into the water while crossing the bayou, or one of the older boys would write something vulgar and impossible to erase or I would find a partly used Big Chief tablet left on a library table and a small stack of things would begin to build up in the closet. That’s when I would start thinking he might come and I would look out the window of a long summer day when the heat had broken for a short spell. That’s when I would see him walking the long road leading to Main Street, or driving Mr. Easter’s wagon into town on some errand. I would turn and go sit at the check-out desk and pretend to be busy until he had knocked several times.

I always acted surprised to see him.

            “Why aren’t you Mr. Easter’s boy?” I would ask and he would say yes and tell me his name again and I would pretend to remember and then would ask what he wanted although I knew and I knew that he knew by now that I did. Rituals are important when you have so little.

            I will go ahead and tell it now that so much time has passed since it happened and dare anyone to say a word about it. I probably slipped him a few books during that time that hadn’t really reached the proper stage for discarding. But I had discovered the kinds he liked and those were the very ones that were wasted in the Armistead High School Library. When I would offer an old volume of paintings or illustrated history, it would always produce that strange trembling in his hand and I would derive a great deal of enjoyment from the act. Let a person begrudge me that and I will invite them to have my job. I am weary now and wouldn’t mind.

            The last time he came by was a year or so before Pearl Harbor, if I remember correctly. It seemed that Mr. Roosevelt had maybe brought the country through the worst of things and we didn’t yet know about the awful times ahead. It was one of the happy times I recall. There have been so precious few of them.

I asked him if Mr. Easter would keep him on full-time during the winter and he said “No, the last boll is picked. Just part-time work for the winter. I have some time now”

I had saved a partial set of John Stoddard’s Lectures, which contained an extraordinary amount of photographs. He seemed particularly pleased and said something rather odd about it filling in the missing pieces of something or other. We were standing on the back porch and folks were filing steadily by. The fair had just finished and people were still feeling festive. I suppose I was, as well, for I suddenly asked him “Ferd, what do you do all winter way out in that little house all by yourself? Do you ever feel lonesome on those long, cold evenings with no family and nothing to do?”

            He turned to me and smiled.

            “No, Missus,” he said and stopped as if remembering something. “I keeps busy.”

            He left and I walked back into the library. It was dark there, and cool. I sat behind a desk and thought about a person living alone in a shack in the middle of a cotton field all winter. After awhile the image rose and expanded like smoke on a clear autumn day and it didn’t seem so bad. I imagined the satisfaction of knowing the last cotton boll had been picked, and the world was at rest outside your door. I could almost smell the stirrings of a fire in an ancient iron stove blending with the older smell of things a person truly loved. Contentment has many faces, I think, including a solitary winter. One may look at it however he chooses, either as a stifling loneliness or as a chance to prepare for springtime in the world. It was nice to know that Ferd was at peace with it. I can hear it now, so many years later, as if he had just this very second looked at me and walked away smiling.

            “I keeps busy.” I think that was Ferd’s only dream.

To be continued …