Growing Up Southern: September 9, 2017

 A good man died this week, not a close friend, but a good one, and he liked my first book. Fussed about my taking so long on the second. That was when I saw him for the last time. I’ll not finish it in time for him. Too bad.

He was of the class “Southern Farmer.” He worked all his life and was still working until just before he took sick for the last time. Robert Cole was his name, and he was Brenda’s cousin. He leaves behind his childhood sweetheart, Betty, whom he married in 1957.

He and Betty lived down the road, Cole Road they named it later, a few houses from where Brenda and her parents lived. When we first married, there were maybe a dozen families living on that road. Now there may be three. Many were related and they all shared memories, sadness, joy, and at times, farming equipment.

Before crops were laid by, you couldn’t travel the road without seeing men out on their tractors working the fields. At days end, some would simply stop the tractors and walk home. There were even enough families to support a small Methodist church where the gravel roads intersected back in the day.

The roads are paved now, but the church disappeared decades ago. As I say, few people live in the community anymore. The fields are empty most of the time, worked sporadically by corporate crews who come en masse, work for day or two, then move to another field. You don’t see men driving around on Sunday afternoons, as my daddy used to, just to see how the crops are doing.

And these days,  nobody parks equipment in the fields of an evening. They don’t always steal the whole tractor, sometimes they just steal the most hard-to-find parts, which is worse in some ways. Times have changed, many for the worse.

They won’t make men like Robert Cole anymore, men who lived in a square plot carved from their fields so they often looked out on them while they ate breakfast. That sort of connection between the land that gives us food and the men and women who bring it forth doesn’t exist around here anymore. Farming is just another corporate enterprise.

Robert and Betty loved life and I’m glad for the good times they had together. The hard times they lived through justified them. They even took up snow-skiing later in life. They left a good lesson for us all: work hard, but, as Robert would have said, “Dadgummit, stop and play every once in a while.”

So, I think I'll just do that.

Just thinking.

Morning Thoughts: Gravity

Sitting in the living room at our farm, I’m watching the sunrise illuminate a spot I’ve only heard referred to as “The Grove.” It’s a quiet place. Ancient farm implements lie scattered around, of no use in the modern world save being used, on occasion, as lawn ornaments. It's fun to imagine what their users would have thought of that. Intrusive gum trees now compete here with the young oaks, adding a sort of tension to the peaceful setting.

History hangs over the spot like the morning fog that covers it this morning. Tax records of the late 1850s show the owners at that time owned eight slaves. Their hands may have made the ancient bricks just below the surface of the ground. Who knows?

They say the county Extension Service taught “canning classes” under the huge oaks that once shaded the ground here. They taught local women the skills of preserving food for their families, as well as preserving traditions. B’s grandpa made molasses in The Grove. Parts of his apparatus still linger as gateways to the past. They say he made stronger stuff here, a legend supported by the existence of a home-made still hidden away in the attic.

A branch of the “Trail of Tears” passed a quarter mile from The Grove. Did some of those unfortunates take a moment’s rest here? One can only speculate.

I’d had heard tales that Union Troops once camped in The Grove. I had dismissed them as rumors until I read about Doc Rayburn. He was a diminutive Rebel guerrilla who roamed this countryside. Legend has it, would dress as a woman and sneak into the parties held by Federal Officers. Supposedly, troops tracked him to this farm, having heard the owners were hiding him. In reprisal, cattle and mules were taken and slaves freed. Doc Rayburn’s grave has never been located.

The mighty oaks have died. One massive skeleton remains, leaning to the east as if waiting for The Second Coming. One can only guess the date on which gravity, or storms, will bring it down.

Someday, I’d like to clean the grove and make it into a park, if gravity doesn’t get me first. 

When this tree's companion fell,
I quit counting growth rings at 150.

Old Souls

I'm ashamed to say I'd never gotten around to reading "Dead Souls" by Nikolai Gogol. So ... I'm listening to it on audio as I drive. Today, I'm travelling overland from Lonoke, AR to Pine Bluff, my home town, so I'll be listening. I'll travel mostly through flat, desolate land farmed by absentee owners. I’ll also pass near a maximum-security prison where we have always housed "death-row" inmates, or those for whom we deemed "social-death" was not sufficient. Farm-land, waste-land, or dead-land, take your pick. Its identity disappeared long ago.

I'll pass through land where long-dead souls toiled under the lash in brutal weather and inhumane conditions as what conservatives now want to call "guest workers." Later, they were called "sharecroppers," a term that bespoke a partnership that hardly existed in the harsh economy of the Arkansas Delta. The main things they shared were poverty and indignity. Today, those workers are gone, replaced by behemoth machines with multiple tires and implements as wide as a hobby-farm barn. The inhabitants are gone and the land won't even support the skeletal remains of what years ago were towns of value.

When I get to Gethsemane, once a community with two small groceries but now just an empty gash in the land—pronounced locally as "Gessymane,” I'll turn off the Bluetooth, slow, listen, and see if any souls will speak to me.

She left years ago. We can only
hope it was for a better place.