Growing Up Southern: November 12, 2017

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.

I guess one lesson is that the function of a responsible government, including disaster relief, is not a matter for humor, hyperbole, or political aggrandizement. The best we can hope for is to ooze along like a bayou, hope for the best, love our fellow humans, and be thankful when we aren’t targeted for destruction in the meantime. Peace.

There's not a huge demand for "Bayou-side Mansions,"
but it is possessed of a certain charm.

Sailing To Oblivium: July 21, 2017

There is another memory of growing up in a small country grocery store that I wouldn’t believe had I not seen it. Those were different times, you know, very different times.

Most of the business that supported the store came in the morning, at noon, (“dinner time”) and late afternoon as people got off work. Since families had only one car, if any at all, there was not much traffic at mid-afternoon. After crops were “laid by,” there was even less.

During weather such as we are having lately, the only relief from heat in the store was a large pole fan aimed directly at the counter. It provided a minimum of comfort for both customers and the proprietor, my daddy.

Now here is where it gets a little unbelievable. As I have said before, my parents arose each morning at 5:00 a.m. in order to catch the early traffic. One can imagine how someone may have felt by mid-afternoon. Needless to say, small stores like that didn’t turn enough in sales to allow hiring help. You owned it—you ran it—and you just grabbed a little rest when you could.

I have seen my daddy, back in the old, old days, curl up on the counter of the store, under the fan, and nap briefly at that slow time of day. If a customer did come in, it would wake him and he would be right back on the job. Even had he not awakened, the customer would have probably just put an empty bottle in a rack, grabbed a “cocola,” and left a nickel on the counter.

Those times are long gone, in many respects. For one thing, the traffic never ceases these days on that once quiet highway, a graveled one in my early youth. Now, four lanes of asphalt accommodate a steady stream of drivers going somewhere, to do something, for some reason. They drive at speeds my mother would have described as “sacking air,” so one would imagine their purpose is an important one, but of that I am not certain.

Back toward town a short distance is a Walmart store, located on a site, incidentally, that once housed a stock car track. Any number of supporting businesses are located there now as well. Suffice it to say that a motorist headed South would have no use for a country grocery store these days.

And even if one did exist, the noise of modern life would probably keep the storekeeper from grabbing a nap.

Just remembering …

Sailing To Oblivium July 20, 2017

It was just a little country grocery store but, in some ways, a microcosm of a part of America—more Cannery Row than Peyton Place or Revolutionary Road.

It sat beside a state highway that connected the City of Pine Bluff to lower Arkansas (L.A.) and had maybe a tenth of the traffic that uses that road today. It had enough traffic to support the store, though, and the store made enough money to support a family: ours.

The building could be seen from a mile away, as a motorist crossed Bayou Bartholomew, the longest bayou in the world, to be immortalized later by guitar wizard Steve Davison.

A strange cast of characters met there each morning, along with the sporadic customers. My father would open before daylight to catch those going to work. He closed late in the afternoon, often putting in 14-hour days during the long days of cotton chopping and picking. We all helped, at various times.

The regular crew would gather around a pot-bellied stove at the rear of the store somewhere around mid-morning, after the traffic slowed. Sol, a master “body man” would quit sanding a car next door and wander over for a bottle of “Sweet Lucy,” i.e. Garrett snuff. Then came Sam the Bread Man. He would fill the rack and settle in for a break. Sam had been a teacher once. He couldn’t feed his family on the wages of a teacher, but he could still quote long sections of William Cullen Bryant’s Thanatopsis. He would if you asked him to.

Various salesmen and retirees made up the rest of the crowd, along with a few souls that were chronically allergic to work. Those included a man named Elmer, who had tried every known type of employment a rural life could offer, even preaching. When asked why he quit that job, he said, “Well, to tell the truth, I liked it. Didn’t have to work too hard. Got to visit all the women whenever I wanted. Felt good about spreading the Gospel. But, to tell the truth, the son of a bitches just wouldn’t pay me.”

That was a sample of the type humor that could break up the place.

My daddy ruled the store. My mother ruled my daddy. So, the crowd behaved, mostly. Since our house connected onto the store, only a screen door stood between our kitchen and the back of the store. Often, my mother would stop her ironing and cock an ear when the voices up front lowered to a low murmur. “They’re telling jokes,” she would say. Usually, she would allow them one or two, but would then start stirring around, making noises to signal that things were getting out of hand, and the boys might better behave.

They would, for they all feared her above anything.

During deer season, they had a special tradition. Daddy would put a big pot of seasoned water on the wood stove and everyone would bring something to put in it. There was little planning involved, so the results varied, but they always declared their deer-meat stew the best ever made, as long as my mother would furnish the corn bread. I can still smell those days if I try.

The store is gone now, “supermarketed” out long ago. None of the crowd is still alive, just a memory of Sol taking his first dip of the day, Sam quoting poetry, or maybe the way a certain man talked when describing a legendary coon dog. There is nothing left at that spot but those memories. Even the old building fell when they widened the highway.

I like to think though, when winter comes and men head for the “deer woods,” that there is some little white building somewhere, maybe high in the Arkansas Ozark mountains, where a bunch of men are seated around a wood stove on empty nail kegs, cooking a stew and telling jokes in a low voice so no one can hear. America would be better off for it.

The old place with Sol's body shop next door.