A Sixties Memory

CHS Chorus

Cleveland High School Concert Chorus 1967

We wore navy blue skirts or pants and white shirts with a red, white, and blue crepe paper banner stretched across our chests. Under the capable direction of Paul Jones, we traveled to other schools and presented a patriotic program. On this 4th of July, I am reminded of some of the words we sang in harmony:

“This is my country, land of my birth; this is my country, grandest on earth; I pledge thee my allegiance, America, the bold; for this is my country, to have and to hold!”

Happy Fourth, all!

Five Words

Five words. They stayed with me all day.

I bought the inaugural issue of Memoir (and) magazine one year ago, but I haven’t had a chance to look at it until this morning.

I opened to the middle, page 93, an essay by Karen Weil titled “The Year Bess Truman Died.” Good honest memoir writing. But I stopped on a paragraph on page 98, just to savor it for a while.

“I have fallen…someplace soft. Snoopy sheets, army blankets…I don’t know how it happened, but it did: We are at Abby and Annie’s, our old friends’ house, all of us together in blankets and sleeping bags on the great room floor. The feel of fleece on my fingertips tells me this is no dream.  This sleepover almost didn’t happen. ‘Karen’s outgrown her Mickey Mouse sleeping bag,’ Mother said as soon as Mrs. Weissenborn proposed the idea. ‘We have plenty of blankets,’ Mrs. Weissenborn had said. Sure enough, she did. I am under three layers of them right now, and I am as warm as winter oatmeal.”

...as warm as winter oatmeal.

Nice.

Not warm like oatmeal or as warm as oatmeal, but as warm as WINTER oatmeal, because winter oatmeal is different from summer oatmeal. Think about it. I can see it, feel it, taste it, experience it. Winter oatmeal. Steamy, warm all the way down.

I like it.

I wonder if I can get away with using those five words in my memoir. Surely there was a time when I was as warm as winter oatmeal.

April is Amy, Sixteen Years Later

I lived next door to a serial killer.

My little boy played in his backyard, jumped on the trampoline. Many summer evenings, I relaxed in a white rocker on his front porch, sipping lemonade or iced tea with his wife and our neighbor across the street.

He killed them both.

Every April 5, I am supernaturally reminded of Amy and feel compelled to share with the world a memory of two beautiful women who should be here right now. The following story is from my book Pink Butterbeans. Here’s to you, Amy Vick and Kathy Beadle.

April Is Amy

April doesn’t come and go any more without my thinking of Amy. Amy was my next-door neighbor in Maplewood. One night as I slept, she died. April, in 1993, was when it happened, a week before Easter, when the rest of us were thinking about new white shoes, chocolate bunnies, and marshmallow eggs.

It was an accident, her husband said.

“This 31-year-old white female was found in the family hot tub . . . Foul play has not been ruled out,” the police report said.

He was the prime suspect.

*

The years rolled by, and I quit thinking about it. I even moved away from the blue house where Amy drowned.

But as the calendar flipped to April, in 2003, it all came back. Like the Maplewood Lake that yearly went through a cleaning process by turning itself inside out, the bottom coming up to the top and big nasty brown chunks floating on the surface for everyone to see and smell and live with, it all came back up from the bottom of my mind. Thoughts of Amy kept coming at me, and I couldn’t make them stop.

*

Do you believe people come back from the dead? I do. She did. Amy prodded me from the other side. She wanted me to know.

*

Was she murdered? Most people thought so. Thought he did it. Not me. After all, he was a church-going man, an editor of religious books, he told me. And his house stood fifteen feet from the lilac bush on the corner of my house. Many times I sat in a rocking chair on his front porch and visited. My son played on the trampoline in his backyard. How could I be so close to a murderer? How could I let my child play in a murderer’s yard?

*

In her coffin Amy wore her wedding dress of white satin and lace. Her hands were crossed on her chest, her shiny red fingernails stark against so much white. Her dark chestnut hair looked out of place against a pillow of white satin.

At her funeral I stood on a grassy hillside under a maple tree and cried. The melancholy words of Skeeter Davis kept coming at me: Why does my heart go on beating? Why do these eyes of mine cry? Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?

Amy was put under in the moist dark earth, a world where bugs and worms crawled and tunneled and carried on their daily lives. A different world under our world of sunlight and laughter and thunder and madness. She was too young to go down there, and it scared me because I knew with one slip, I could go, too.

Her death was ruled accidental.

*

I never went back to the cemetery. But come April 5, 2003, I was compelled to go. Something was pulling me.

I remembered the grassy hillside, the maple tree, the approximate location of her grave. I walked up and down every row, checked every marker for her name. I couldn’t find it.

“It’s #148,” the funeral home man said. “In the Garden of Prayer.”

He took me there. He scratched his head, then shrugged. “There ain’t no marker. She’s right here, though.” He pointed to the spot.

A chill went over me. No marker. Nothing to show that someone lay beneath the cold spring grass. Nothing to show that a life was lived, a person was gone. You couldn’t even tell a grave was there. It was seamless.

Amy was lost to the world.

No one deserves to be buried, then forgotten.

“Exactly when did she die?” I asked the funeral home man. I’d forgotten and was hoping to see it on her marker.

His eyes pierced me, he shifted nervously, cleared his throat. “Ma’am, she died April 5, 1993. Ten years ago today.”

“Oh God.” My lips formed the words, but the sound didn’t come out.

Ten years. Ten years to the day.

Amy came back on the tenth anniversary of her death because she wanted me to know her plight. Her husband got away with murder and left her in an unmarked grave.

*

I thought of Amy’s car wrecks two months before she died. Two of them, eight days apart. The first one, she skidded in gravel and hit a piece of machinery on the side of the road. She had glass embedded in her face and arms and was all scratched up.

The second accident, her car rolled down an embankment and caught fire. She managed to free herself while patting out flames. “Smell my hair,” she told me. “I’ve already cut my bangs, but you can still smell fire in my hair.” It got singed, along with her eyebrows and eyelashes. Her knee was injured, too. She had to do physical therapy for it, which was why I thought she was in the hot tub the night of her death.

When she went to the hospital after the second accident, the glass was still embedded in her face from the first wreck.

“Amy, what are you trying to do—kill yourself?” I asked her.

Fifty-one days later, she fell out of a boat on Lake Barkley and had to swim to shore. That same night, she got in a hot tub and met her fate.

*

I wake up in the morning and I wonder why everything’s the same as it was. I can’t understand. No, I can’t understand, how life goes on the way it does. More Skeeter lyrics.

Amy’s widower went on with his life. He took up with the young widow across the street. Two years later, she went missing. I saw the story on the five o’clock news, her picture plastered across the screen. Her body was found eleven months later buried in their backyard, entombed in concrete under landscaping stones and timbers. She had been strangled.

He disappeared, then was nabbed up north, attempting to shoplift a suit from a bargain store.

He was tried for murder, given a life sentence.

Amy’s case was re-opened.

He made a surprise appearance in Circuit Court and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He pleaded “guilty in best interest,” not an admission of guilt. The plea kept him from getting the death penalty.

He never said he did it. Amy never got her day in court. Justice was not served in her behalf.

*

April, in 2004, I went to the courthouse, pulled the records, spent a week reading through them all.

Seven months later, he called a reporter from Channel 4 News and confessed to Amy’s murder.

April, in 2005, I visited Amy’s grave and saw that someone had placed a marker there.

Amy got her due.

And Skeeter Davis is now buried a few rows up.

Material Girl

“You only need two dresses.” He held up two fingers. The shape of a V. Victory. That gave an implied impetus to his words. He knew what he was talking about.

“One to wear, while you wash out the other,” he continued.

“Aw, Dad. That might’ve been the way y’all did it out in the sticks back during the Depression, but it’s not that way any more.”

Every girl had to have at least 5 dresses — one for each school day of the week — and then appropriate Sunday clothes on top of that. No girl would be caught dead wearing the same dress twice in one week. Actually, no girl would be caught dead wearing the same dress twice in two weeks, unless she really, really liked it, and then she might. So here was the need for at least 10 school dresses and at least 4 Sunday dresses to cover a month’s worth of holy days.

Clothes were expensive, and we all know what happened to the world in 1964. The Beatles came to America and butch hair cuts and crew cuts and short hair became like that 2-dress rule of the 1930’s. Out! My dad owned a barber shop and with all the boys wearing their hair longer and even the men not getting their customary haircut a week, the City Barber Shop fell into a slump. Dad had two daughters and could not afford the obligatory 28 dresses. And Kamien’s — Your Favorite Store since 1904 — out-priced my mama’s pocketbook on a teacher’s pay.

It was a real dilemma because we had to have the dresses and on top of that we needed piccolinos, penny loafers and Weejuns, padded bras, panty girdles, and stockings six days a week. Plus, hats and gloves for Sunday School. Needs were great and times were hard.

Mama’s Singer came to the rescue. She bought a brand new sewing machine in a sleek blond cabinet. She’d sewed for us all our lives — pretty polished cotton dresses with sashes and puffed sleeves, shorts and matching tops, and sequined costumes for our dancing recitals. You could buy a pattern for under a dollar and material, thread, zipper, and buttons for about five. Mama and I figured out real quick that we could stretch the clothing budget with the Singer.

Coat Dress of the 60s

Mama gave me a monthly allowance of $50. I could buy ten new dresses a month with that! Yet reality was that after buying stockings, cherry Cokes at Bob’s, fake earrings, Chantilly cologne, and Cover Girl and Maybelline makeup, I could only buy one or two.

So at least once a month, the Hardy Girls — Lucille, Kathy, Judi — would head south down Highway 61 to Leland in Mama’s turquoise Ford, then turn west toward the river on 82 to Greenville. Our first stop was Bev-Mar, a huge material warehouse, filled with all kinds, naps, and colors of cloth, with all the peripherals and patterns. We’d spend the first hour sitting on tall stools looking through pattern books and the next two hours picking out material. My sister was still a preteen, not quite ready for the fashion scene, and this was misery to her. After quickly agreeing to what pattern and material she wanted, she was ready to go. She’d fold over backward on columns of bolts, throw her arms out in despair, cry, and beg Mama to go home. “Kathy’s never going to get finished. She’ll take all day!” We were there at store opening and by lunch we had sacks full of new-smelling fabric to stick in the trunk. We’d eat at Pasquale’s and then head downtown to Washington Avenue where Sam Stein’s shoe store and Stein Mart stood at the foot of the levee.

Sam Stein helped keep us dressed and well-heeled. He was a Russian immigrant who came to America in 1900, to Memphis in 1901, where he sold jewelry up and down the Mississippi River before deciding Greenville was the place he wanted to settle. He peddled his jewelry in a horse and buggy between Greenville and Vicksburg and then started his business in 1902 in the front of Finlay’s Drug Store on the corner of Washington and Walnut. Later he opened his first location on Washington Avenue, selling shoes and fabrics, towels and wash rags, dishes, and other sundries. Sam Stein was the granddaddy of all the Marts; he was a mass merchandiser before K-Mart and Wal-Mart were ever a seed in anyone’s imagination. Sam helped mamas and daughters stay in style in a time of long bangs and collar-length hair, when daddies needed burr cuts to make a living.

The Hardy Girls had to stealthily slip their packages into the house in front of their daddy sitting in the living room in front of the TV. It was like one at a time. We didn’t want to stress him out about money and such, so we tried to protect him by letting him believe in his V and the two-dress rule.

“What’ve you got?”

“Nothin.” I clutched the sack between the cups of my padded bra.

He’d look at us sideways in our new clothes and shoes, but he never asked.

He was afraid of knowing. And besides, he liked seeing us all dressed up in fancy new clothes on a front pew at the First Baptist Church and it was fine as long as he didn’t have to know how much or how little money we spent.

To Write …

It is six thirty in the morning and I’m sitting in my burgundy leather chair at my desk, fingers on the keyboard. I roll the tips in tiny circles over the ASDF and JKL; and think how good it feels. I finally got around to clipping my fingernails last night; I cannot stand to type with with a nail, and I had let them go too long.

Above me warm air rushes out of the vent, purring, lulling. I do not want to be lulled. I want to write an essay for my memoir, but I cannot think of anything to write about. The air stops abruptly.

I go downstairs for more coffee. The Cuisinart is set to go off automatically, and it is OFF. I stick my refill in the microwave for twenty seconds.

Is that it? Is my life over in 45,000 words? There’s not much to read about within that count. I did not have a colorful life. I didn’t lie much. I didn’t do too much that was illegal. Who wants to read about the adventures of a nice girl? I remember the words of the New York literary agent who looked me in the eye and said, “You must either have a platform … or it’s about the writing. You better have some damn good writing.”

I think back to my early years in the Mississippi Delta. My only “platform” is the Time and Place where I grew up. What’s left for me to write about? Dress fashions and stretching the clothes budget by buying patterns and material? Entertainment in a small Delta town? Looking for UFOs? Playing in a cotton trailer on a moonlit night with my boyfriend?

Or maybe the Sunday afternoon my best friend Gerri and I took her daddy’s 1949 truck for a spin up Highway 61. Her mama and daddy had gone to Winona to visit her grandparents. We were sixteen and out of things to do. I had Maybelline, my 1960 green Ford Fairlane 500, but then I had her all the time. No, we needed a little excitement, something different, a new look, and besides, the keys were in the old beige jalopy-like, barely-sputtering machine. There was just one challenge.

“It doesn’t have a second gear,” she said.

“Your dad gets to work in it.”

This was an old timey straight-shift vehicle that looked like a cockroach, only lighter in color.

Before we headed out of her driveway and down Memorial Drive and Boyle’s main street to the highway, we tested one of her daddy’s cigars from the glove compartment. We held it between our fingers, sniffed it, lighted it, took a puff. One was enough.

We bounced and lurched to the highway, and then as we built speed, Gerri had to pull over to the gravel shoulder to force the gear from first to third. In those days before seat belts, I rolled around on the padded and torn vinyl, laughing at her efforts. She had one hand on the steering wheel, one on the feeble gear shift, left foot on the clutch, right foot working the brake and accelerator, and she somehow punched the radio buttons, and she never stopped talking herself through the shifting and clutching. She never faltered as we hopped up 61 on a stretch between Boyle and Cleveland, cut back to Memorial Drive on a gravel road over the railroad track, kicking up dust behind us, windows down, static radio competing with our laughter.

Or maybe I should write about the day she got a speeding ticket on Memorial Drive in her Plymouth on the way to Youth Choir at the Baptist Church.

Alas. I should stop writing now. I’m meeting two friends for coffee at the Henpeck Market this morning — one friend at ten, the other at eleven. I should put some polish on my fingernails before I go. And stick my jeans in the dryer. And make my bed and scour out the kitchen sink. And I should go for a walk and eat some Cheerios and an orange. And empty the wastebasket that I didn’t have time to take out on trash day yesterday. My, how life gets in the way of writing.

Hot Grid

Growing up, I sat beside a floor furnace to get warm. It was a big square grid — about 36″ x 36″ — that filled the tiny hallway in the middle of the square house, joining the living room, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. Before Mama and Dad built an addition on the back, the furnace had to heat the entire house.

In summertime it was no big deal. It was just there — a big hole in the floor with a heavy metal grate over it. Mama would cover it up with a rug. But in wintertime, it gave us heat on cold wet days, and we all lingered near it, especially as we were getting ready for bed. It was at the center of our house, and it centered our family. It brought us together.

I sat in the doorway to the living room and placed my feet on its edges, and when the metal got too hot, I’d move them off. I liked the feel of the hot tic tac toe squares that remained on the soles of my feet. The furnace would make a loud clicking sound, then the heat would come on and gush upwards making my nightgown balloon, blowing my hair, warming and drying my eyes and the skin on my face.

Mama had a wooden clothes drying rack that she’d place on the furnace and hang towels on after she washed them. The heat would blow against them, waving them like flags, and dry them in no time.

My sister and I could sit quietly there and let the hot air wrap around us. Then our mother would walk over the hot grid between her bedroom and the bathroom, and her gown would blow out, and my sister would groan and fuss because our mother did not always have underwear on.

The Delta.

“There’s only one … and it’s in Mis’sippi!”

Graphic on a T-shirt

The Delta. The Most Southern Place on Earth, James Cobb says. It stretches out one hundred fifty miles north to south, like a fat, naked lady — ripe and pulsing. The Delta starts at the Peabody, a man named Cohn said, and comes to an end in Vicksburg on a street called Catfish Row.

The Delta. Home.

My sister gave me the T-shirt for Christmas. I’d wanted a reminder of “home.” I really wanted some earrings I saw in Delta Magazine — page 39 (November/December issue) the Mississippi River earrings by Christine Schultz, a hammered sterling silver wire triangle with a squiggly line hanging down the middle of it — a representation of the Delta and the river that runs through it, the Mississippi. (My sister also gave me a subscription to Delta Magazine.) But they were sold out.

The hot pink shirt reminds me of gliding down Highway 61 through cotton fields … goin’ home. The hot pink shirt reminds me that I need to get busy and finish my memoir of my early years growing up in this Place.

2009 will be the year to do that.

Outhouse Theology

My sister gave me Outhouse Theology for Christmas, and I read it last night before going to sleep. It’s a book by Macklyn Hubbell who was our preacher when we were growing up. He has written a collection of funny stories that have happened over the years to him, as he has interacted with people in his congregations. “The minister, handler of the holy, will experience the humorously unholy in pursuit of the holy.”

Dr. Hubbell, who was also a professor at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, served six churches in all as pastor. Some of the book’s stories happened in my hometown Baptist church. Some of them I remember from the 1960s, like the earthquake that shook the sanctuary during the Sunday morning service when he was preaching about the Second Coming, and like the man who came forward during a Sunday evening invitation hymn and asked to deliver a word to the congregation. He told us when the world would end … around 1970, I think.

My favorite story in the book involves Brother Hubbell, as we called him back then in the Sixties, and Brother Burd, the Minister of Music and Education, who is still involved in the work of the church after forty-five years. The two were agitated because someone was messing with the Coke machine every Monday during afternoon and evening children and youth activities: choirs, Sunbeams, GA’s, RA’s, and Boy Scouts. The pranksters were puncturing a hole in the caps of the bottles that lay sideways in the machine and drinking all the liquid out of those bottles available for purchase. To catch the Coke thief, Brother Hubbell and Brother Burd decided to play detective and hide in the tiny ladies’ restroom that had a good view of the machine. Hubbell sat in a chair and Burd peeked through a crack in the door.

You’ve got to get this image right for the story to be funny — two respected and dignified holy men of the cloth, leaders of the biggest church in town, pillars of the community … hiding in a small women’s bathroom — together — with the lights off, in a pitch black church.

Someone appeared with a flashlight. They thought they’d caught him.

“To our surprise,” Hubbell says, “the thief was not the thief — it was [science] Professor Henry Lutrick of Delta State University looking for his daughters’ school day pictures. His daughters had participated in the church choir program on Monday and had left their pictures somewhere in the building — Henry thought.”

The two Coke detectives thought their cover was safe, as surely Henry would not check the bathroom … but he did, shining the flashlight first in Burd’s face, then in Hubbell’s. “Startled, he backed out of the restroom and disappeared.”

I would give a chunk of money, a gold Krugerrand, and an old diamond engagement ring to know the thoughts that went through Henry Lutrick’s head at that moment. Two ministers. After hours in a dark church. Together, in the ladies’ restroom, lights off. No excuses offered when the light hit them.

Come to find out — as Hubbell found out ten years later at a dinner party — that it was Franklin Nored who punctured the Coke caps and sucked out the Coke with a straw. Franklin was two years younger than I, and we went on many of the same church outings … and if memory serves correctly, I was in on pranks with and to him.

After the visual of the faces of these two holy men shining in the beam of a flashlight, it took an episode of “Andy Griffith” and two episodes of “I Love Lucy” before I could go to sleep.

Christmas 1955

I keep an old black-and-white photograph from December 1955 displayed on a tall black bookcase in my family room. It’s a reprint that came from my own Epson, 4 x 5, in a white mat, under glass, inside a silver frame Made in China. It’s a picture of a dark-haired man of thirty-two with two little girls under the Christmas tree on Christmas morning. The girls are looking at all the toys. The man is playing with them. He is squatting, barefooted, leaning on one hand, his other hand pushing a train. His lips are parted and he is probably saying something like “Choo choo! Look what Santa Claus brought!”

Dad and his little girls

This was a man who only got firecrackers and oranges for Christmas — maybe an occasional wooden truck — as a boy growing up in backwoods Mississippi in the 1920s and 30s during Depression years. Times were “depressed” all the time for his daddy, a poor dirt farmer with a small plot of 80 acres. He graduated from high school in ‘41 and then the war came. He’d gone to Mobile with a cousin to work in a lumber mill, and they decided they’d work a little longer, earn some money, and then join up. But a telegram came from his daddy in Kemper County, saying to come home immediately, he had to report to the draft board the following morning. He rode the bus all night and his daddy met him at the bus station and took him to report to the Army. He spent one Christmas at Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge and the following Christmas at Garmish-Partenkirchen serving as a lifeguard in the beautiful mountains during occupation before coming back home, going to trade school, and putting a life together. At the opening of the next decade, the first little girl was born. Four years later, the second came along. Christmases during the 1950s were fun for him. He was living the American dream.

In the snapshot, a white circle of flash from the Kodak sits on the dark screen of the tabletop Philco TV, two big round knobs for On/Off and Volume under its face. A vase shaped like a giraffe sits on top of the television and next to it on the same wall is a blond cedar chest that holds the sparse three-foot Christmas tree, full of strung lights that are red and blue and yellow and green. The tree is doubled because it is sitting in front of a big mirror with palm fronds and flamingos on it. There’s a white sheet wrapped around the base of the tree — pretend snow — covered with packages wrapped in two or three holiday designs of paper.

The baby girl stands barefooted on the polished hardwood floor, looking down at all the toys. In her right arm she is holding a cloth doll in a bonnet, half as big as she is. Her white nightgown hangs to her ankles and her brown curls are tight to her head, the white lines of her scalp showing, where sleep has parted her hair. Her white blanket lies in a heap on the floor, the stiff edge she holds in a tight fist, sticking up. To her left, the big sister sits Indian style, her flannel print gown wrapped tightly around her bare legs, cold against the floor. A doll with a bonnet and white shoes lies upside down on her lap, and she is looking at a big blackboard, about three feet long, propped up against the Philco. Her mama has written MERRY CHRISTMAS on it, and she knows she will erase that and fill it with letters and words and pictures. Baby dolls — maybe a half dozen of them — sit up against the blackboard and the cedar chest, looking back at the family. The girl’s blond hair is curled only on the ends where her mama had rolled it to make it that way. Her hair is not naturally curly like the baby sister’s.

The baby sister has gotten a little wooden workbench with pegs in holes and a little hammer to pound them in farther. She has also gotten a train, the one toy the daddy takes over. The girls are slow to pick up the toys because the daddy makes such a racket laughing and saying HO! HO! HO! and LOOK AT ALL THESE TOYS!, then pretend-fussing about Santa sneaking in the front door unannounced.

Rolling the train across the wood grain of the floor, the daddy surely remembers the firecrackers and oranges of his boyhood Christmases on the farm. Or maybe he remembers coming home from the war when he was put in charge of all the Mississippi soldiers on the train ride home from New York after arriving in the States by ship.

The daddy always overdoes it in the mornings — laughing and singing (“I’ll get a line and you get a pole, and we’ll go down to the crawdad hole…”) and teasing — whether he is frying bacon and eggs on a workday morning or rolling a train on Christmas morning.

On Christmas morning, the daddy springs to life like a Jack-in-the-Box: wind it up, around and around, and when the time is right, a clown pops out the top, all smiles and lively and animated. The daddy is the first one up, he turns on the tree lights, and when the two little girls walk into the living room, he bounces and hops and yells, ME-E-E-ERRY CHRISTMAS!”

Luke Boyd’s New Book

Yesterday at noon I went to a booksigning at Landmark Booksellers in downtown Franklin. It wasn’t the only event going on. Yesterday was also Dickens of a Christmas, a street festival featuring more than 200 costumed characters re-enacting scenes from A Christmas Carol and other stories by Charles Dickens.

Luke Boyd with Coon Dogs...

Luke’s childhood came along three decades after the Victorian Period.

Most people in Williamson County know Dr. Lucas G. Boyd [the Ph. D. kind of doctor] as the former principal of Battle Ground Academy, with a tenure of nineteen years at the elite private school in Franklin. I have an interest in him because he comes from the same neck of the woods — or should I say flatland — as I do: the Mississippi Delta. His book is titled Coon Dogs and Outhouses Volume 2: Tall Tales from the Mississippi Delta, and many of the stories therein are based on real people and true happenings from his early years, tales he heard his daddy relate as they sat on the front porch or around the dinner table.

Luke was born in a three-room shotgun house on Jabe Dunaway’s place near Anguilla, Mississippi, during the depths of the Depression. His father had attended two years at Mississippi A&M [Mississippi State University], quit to manage one of the school’s experimental farms, then took a job with the Wrought Iron Range Company, and lost everything when the Depression hit. He was forced to return to the land to provide for his family and started out as a sharecropper before he managed a plantation. The plantation culture left an indelible mark on Luke, who grew up immersed in it in the 1930s, south of Hollandale [Anguilla, Percy, Panther Burn], which is southeast of Greenville.

In fact, there’s a story in the book titled “Plantation.” I started reading it about five thirty this morning. I grew up an hour’s drive north [Cleveland] from where Luke did, but my daddy owned a barber shop, and I was a town girl. However, I had an innate understanding of the mystery and pull of the land — all of us did who grew up in the Delta — even though I didn’t live directly in the cotton and work it. I knew enough about the life of planters and plantations, but found it really interesting to read a firsthand account. As Luke points out, these were not farms and farmers. They were plantations and planters. My granddaddy was a farmer on an 80-farm in the Mississippi Hill Country, but these were all just poor, hick, redneck dirt farmers. The Delta had the cream of the crop with rich planters owning a couple thousand acres. I somehow just knew this as a child. I didn’t have to read it anywhere or hear it from anybody. I also knew there was sort of a caste system, and Luke describes it in his story. I don’t think things had changed much by the 1950s and 60s when I was growing up close by.

“The land was cultivated by black labor using hoes and mule-drawn plows. There were two tractors which were used primarily to work the large block of the plantation reserved for the owners — the medieval demesne. Because of the plantation’s dependence upon the labor of the black tenants, a good manager had to be able to attract and keep good workers. That’s probably why my brother and I were instructed never to call one of the tenants “nigger” to his face. … In December and January after the crops had been sold and farm work was minimal, my father began to “trade” with the tenants for the next crop year. On the designated days, they would gather in the back yard, come in the back door (never the front) one by one, and stand with hats in hand before my father who sat at the kitchen table with the account book. It was the day of economic reckoning. They were told what they had been “furnished” (advanced in money and goods against their crop) and what their crop (always cotton) had sold for. They were paid any profit in cash. A negative balance meant that they started the next year in the hole — if my father decided to “trade” with them for another year. If not or if they wanted to go to another plantation, the debt had to be paid by the other plantation before they could leave. The sheriff was sent after those who left with debts on the books. Also, there were few managers who would take a tenant without checking out his status with his previous manager. This union of the law and the dominant economic class kept the black laborers in a state of peonage. It was not legal or right but it was the way the system worked. … A plantation manager, with the backing of local authorities, had a great deal of power over his tenants.”

These tenants, the black laborers, put the crop in and picked it in the fall. They were the backbone of the Delta economy. Without them, the whole system would fall, and there would be nothing. This is the system that fed the fight against civil rights in the Sixties. When people from other places try to write about and make movies about Mississippi during this era, they don’t see the whole picture; they don’t have the foundation for understanding a People and a Place. They paint a picture of dumb people with a backward mentality [which in some cases...], when in reality, these landowners knew exactly what they were doing — they were trying to hold on to their way of life that had existed forever in this Place, and that meant keeping the majority “in their place” while preserving the power of a few and pulling along by fear the middle class. [I could comment here, but won't.] This is not a justification; it is just the way it was. Without the black farm laborers, there would have been no “Cotton is King” and wealth and power for the few rich landowners. In fact, one hundred years earlier, without slaves, there would have been no Delta. It was the slaves sent by rich landowners to occupy Delta jungleland, to cut the virgin forests, to drain the swamps, to endure mosquitoes and malaria, to plant a cotton crop, who developed this land and who are responsible for its existence. It is a rich legacy for them, and they endured much before the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1965 … and much after that.

That ended the Delta I knew growing up. When I was a little girl, making the three-hour drive up Highway 61 to Memphis was like skiing on thin tracks on a flat slope, only it wasn’t snow and cold, it was cotton and hot. Cotton fields came almost right up to the concrete of 61 and went to the horizon on both sides of the road. As far as you could see. But it all changed. The system and the crop.

In “Plantation” Luke alludes to this. “During the time I lived on plantations, ‘cotton was king.’ Of course, my father had to raise enough corn, oats and hay to feed the livestock but the owner always wanted every other acre planted in cotton. My father wanted to diversify, especially with soybeans. He argued that soybean prices were always good and could help with the profit margin in years when cotton prices were down as they generally were in the 30s. It was a hard sell. The owners had grown up with cotton, their fathers and grandfathers had built both their plantations and social position on cotton. No need to change a good horse. However, he did manage to get some soybean acreage — until cotton prices began to rise. He, and those few like him, were voices of the future for now soybean acreage in the Delta probably outstrips that of cotton. And diversification has gone to the absurd with catfish farms and gambling casinos.”

I married in 1970, moved to Texas, and then returned three years later. I had a friend whose husband was a landowner, and she talked about him being busy “cuttin’ beans” and I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. Come to find out it was harvesting soybeans. Soybeans had become a strong crop.

For anyone who wants to write about Mississippi and learn what it was really like in the early and mid-1900s, Luke’s book would be a good reference. Landmark Booksellers can get you a copy of it. For those who have already written about it and didn’t get it right, PLEASE BUY THE BOOK!

Sharon and Dave Stewart in period costumes

During Luke’s booksigning, Dave and Sharon Stewart came by, dressed in their Victorian costumes. They were Dickens characters. Dave is the vice-president of the Council for the Written Word, and Sharon knows Luke from Rotary. Both heard him read one of his stories at a Tennessee-Read-Around, sponsored by the Tennessee Writers Alliance. Both — as rings true for the rest of us locals — are fascinated by Luke’s storytelling ability. Luke’s book is not just a good reference … it’s good entertainment.

And I might add, it was just as entertaining to watch how he interacted with all his friends who stopped by Landmark to get a signed book. I could picture them all telling tales early mornings with cups of coffee over a red-checkered tablecloth at Merridees.