Reed’s Produce

Oh no, not Betty Reed’s! I looked at the pictures in the Review Appeal first, before reading the big headlines, or scanning the story — Richard Reed carrying baskets of petunias, with bananas, pears, oranges, and yellow onions on tables behind him, and then an outdoor shot of customers browsing through annuals and perennials in front of the business  facade. The article begins, “Tomatoes spill out of boxes like red Christmas ornaments near stacks of eggplants and cabbages as plump and colorful as balloons.” [Kevin Walters] Reed’s Produce Stand has been serving customers from its Fourth Avenue site for 40 years. Now the city plans to use eminent domain to take over that land for a Third Avenue road extension to Hillsboro Road. Number One, no, city leaders, this cannot happen! Number Two, this is my own private shortcut, and I wish you’d stop telling people about it.

Pink Butterbeans

Reed’s Produce is a local institution. I can’t think of summer without Reed’s. Through the long cold months of winter, I long for the ripe, hot smell of peaches filling the air and wafting on a summer breeze, swirling under the mimosas and along the river. Box after box, basket after basket of peaches and green apples and summer vegetables. Fresh tomatoes, okra, squash, cucumbers, shelled creme peas and butterbeans. . .

When I went looking for butterbeans to be photographed for the cover of my book, the first place I scouted was Betty Reed’s, but alas, she only had shelled beans in her cooler.

Reed’s Produce is in the Library of Congress! My book contains a story that gave it this distinction. It begins:  “Last Saturday morning, I put some frozen Pillsbury buttermilk biscuits in the oven. They cook up like the real deal. That first bite of hot biscuit spread with blackberry preserves I got last summer at the produce stand on Fourth Avenue by the Harpeth River put me back in time smack dab in the middle of my grandmother’s kitchen at jelly-making time.”

Reed’s Produce is a destination. I go to downtown Franklin just to visit the stand and buy fresh vegetables. For the ambiance, for the old-time feeling of being at grandma’s farm, for the low prices, for the fresh, homegrown food. On the way to or from my destination, I might buy gas at the Mapco, or a bottle of wine, or stop for lotion or film at Walgreens.

I’ve lived in Franklin 20 years, and I’ve been a regular customer of Reed’s for many summers, selecting tomatoes, peaches, squash, okra, and butterbeans. I buy preserves and jellies and honey and chow chow. I even buy herbs and flowers and ferns there. A few years ago, I bought big flat stones to make an outdoor sitting area in my backyard.

I can’t do without Reed’s! Mayor, what are you thinking? Aldermen, what are you thinking? Franklin is an old town, founded in 1799. We bathe ourselves in the pride of traditions, of yesteryear. We are a mix of the “old” and the “new,” and we should strive to keep it that way. We live among dwindling old establishments and progress, pastoral scenes and development. A downtown diner that serves fried chicken livers. An upscale restaurant serving fancy shrimp and grits in a newly remodeled old factory. Old decaying barns and cows grazing beside four-lane bypasses. It’s what makes our town special.

Embrace it.

Please, leave that patch of land that houses Reed’s Produce intact! Please save this Franklin institution. Please save my peaches and tomatoes!

You Got It — Use it!

Now, people, c’mon. Really. Put your “thinking caps” on, as my fourth grade teacher used to say. Take a look around. Note the new jobless figures. Note the declining value of your home. Note the bank failures. Note Wall Street and what our lawmakers in Washington just had to do — a shameful $700 billion bailout in the biggest government intervention in the financial system since the Great Depression. We’re in dire shape, the president said, pushing this passage from his position in a party that promotes less government. He’s in the last of his 96 months in office.

All these failures and depressing signs and fears come to us now after a $600 stimulus check went to every citizen in the country who paid or didn’t pay taxes last year. (Yes, my mother got one, and she is 87 and hasn’t paid taxes in twenty years…so if that thang had anything to do with taxes, I’ll eat my hat.)

And people, c’mon now, what about those supposed tax refunds doled out over the past several years to put money back into the economy to keep it strong? Did that work? Huh, did it? Or did you even get one? I got one the first year, but after that, nada. “Where’s my tax refund that the president keeps talking about?” I asked my accountant, who instantly replied, “Those tax refunds were not intended for people who have to work for a living, like you and me.” So the refunds went out, I assume, to people who did not have to work, and my original question…did they work? Duh. Obviously not. I say again, LOOK AROUND. Look at the shape we’re in.

Our country is sick and broken and needs to be fixed.

Barack Obama

That’s why I proudly support Barack Obama. He’s the man for the job, the man who shares my values, and the one I trust my country to.

Besides, now that I am going to be a grandmother, for the sake of little Jillian Autumn or Lucy Channing or Axle Hardy or Winston Jagger, I want hope, I want there to be a solid USA in 2012. We have one chance for that.

Let’s don’t blow it.

Damned Wrinkles

“In the name of freedom, America is mutilating [that country]. In the name of peace, America turns that country into a wasteland. And in the name of democracy, America is burying its own dreams. “

Leaflet, Students for a Democratic Society

Americans had never fought a war like it. It was the most unpopular conflict in American history. It was the nation’s first defeat. It was Vietnam.

_____

In April of 1967, my biggest worry was the wrinkle in my stockings in my Senior Favorite picture for the Delta Daze, the school yearbook. I was sitting beside Bobby Cox in a glider in someone’s flower garden for the photo session. He had his arm behind me on the back of the swing and appeared cool, casual, and sexy. I was poised — back straight, chin up, hands folded in my lap, wearing a flower print dress with a white Peter Pan collar and white patent shoes with a double strap. I must’ve twisted my stocking when I put it on that morning, because in the final shot, there was that wrinkle running diagonally down the side of my left calf to my ankle. And it would remain there, stuck to the page of time, for all succeeding generations to see.

That day, I drove my green 1960 Ford Fairlane 500 with the long fins to the photo shoot, and Anna M. rode with me. In the Superlatives, I’d won Class Favorite, and she was Miss CHS, Sophisticated Senior, and a Beauty. I rolled my window down an inch and let hot wind blow in, as we drove out Highway 8 East, chatting and listening to WHBQ and “I’m A Believer” and “Light My Fire.” It was one of those steamy mornings that could melt the make-up right off your face. Instead of worrying about my Cover Girl, I should’ve paid more attention to my Hanes.

“We should’ve caught that,” the editor of the annual said, “and stopped it.”

“Maybe no one will see it,” I said, hoping people would pay heed to my cute shoes, the arch of my eyebrows, or the big pearl and diamond ring my parents had just given me for graduation.

But people always notice wrinkles.

Other than that wrinkle, and maybe trying to dog paddle out of senior math — a friendly term for trigonometry — with my head above water, it was a jubilant time. It was the season for senior parties, Cotillion, senior prom, Class Day, and graduation gifts. It was a time for bonding with friends before closing the chapter of carefree childhood and moving on to college and all the world had to offer.

Yet there was one more wrinkle in the elation of the season. Halfway around the world, half a million boys just a year or two out of high school were fighting a bloody war, getting shot, getting maimed, getting blown up. They waded through flooded rice paddies full of leeches that stuck to them and had to be burned off with cigarettes, or they trudged through jungles, encountering mines, mortar shells rigged to tripwires, booby traps, pits with poison-tipped bamboo stakes, spears lashed to bent saplings, and the enemy darting from hidden tunnels in ambush, raging to kill.

The debacle of war in Vietnam had been going on since I was a baby, when President Truman sent military aid and soldier-advisers. The Soviet leader Kruschev told us, “We will bury you.” Communism was an evil menace that had swept over Vietnam, and if that tiny country fell, it was likely the whole world would go. President “I Like Ike” said, “You have a row of dominoes set up. You knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is a certainty that it will go over very quickly.”

In April of 1967 the biggest military offensive of the war was taking place — a surge of troops sent to Operation Junction City, an 82-day search and destroy operation, that turned out to be successful, but when the troops left, the enemy covered it up again.

The war took place in my living room. The evening news played it — clips of soldiers running with big guns, orange smoke and the fire of bomb blasts, flag-draped coffins coming home instead of live boys, and those infernal helicopters playing the sound of war. Medevacs dropping in to unload fresh soldiers and load up the wounded made deep haunting blade sounds, a whir mixed with rapid beats moving faster than a knife cutting celery on a chopping block. The sound of the blades echoed through my living room, into the kitchen where Mama was cooking supper, into the bedroom where my sister and I were doing homework and listening to records — “The Beat Goes On,” “There’s a Kind of a Hush-sh-sh.”

Thousands of boys were dying in a fury and firestorm, while I slept in my own cozy bed at night beside a picture of my boyfriend in his basketball uniform, ate Mama’s roast beef and mashed potatoes and two-layer chocolate cake, and worried about wrinkles in my stocking.

It all came home to rest one Saturday afternoon when I saw a black car without whitewalls on its tires drive up in front of the house across the street. The boy who lived there was my age, had dropped out of high school, joined up, went to Vietnam. I watched as two soldiers in dress uniforms, pressed to perfection, got out of the car, stopped at the end of the sidewalk, straightened their jackets, straightened their shoulders, then took the first step together and walked in cadence to the front door. I didn’t know what to make of it at the time, but I later realized, after word got out and Mama took food over.

A wrinkle, in the name of freedom, in the name of peace, in the name of democracy…

Mississippi Simmering

Sometimes my jaw drops at the audacity of some in this great nation. They believe we are charged with “spreading democracy around the world.” Our leaders tell other nations they should have a democracy, like us, and they should let their people live free. Did they have their heads in the clouds growing up, like I did? Or did they miss class the day American history was taught? Because our country hasn’t always been free. Some of us have, but some of us haven’t. Some of us came to this country for freedom, and some were brought to be slaves.

Freedom is when everybody is free. Because of the place and time I grew up, I can’t write a memoir without talking about that.

_____

It was the White South. If I were to make a fist, closed up tight like a cotton boll, and then open it to the point to where my fingertips just barely didn’t touch each other, like burs separating to hold fluffed cotton, it would be a representation of my life, growing up. That fluff was me, contained, held in place, protected. I was detached from issues that defined my world.

I only knew life at my fingertips. I was busy being a kid. It was a rich time, and even for folks who didn’t have a lot of money, like Mama and Dad, we still had a lot of new gadgets and toys and dreams, and I knew that anything was possible in my world. Mama and Dad had grown up during the Great Depression, fought and won a world war, and now, they were going to make darn sure my sister and I had every opportunity they didn’t have.

A few months before I started kindergarten at Hill Demonstration School on the college campus six blocks from my house, the Supreme Court said that “separate but equal” had no place in public education. I was too little to know what that meant, if I even knew about it. It certainly didn’t affect me. Life at my fingertips had always been separate—all white schools with kids just like me. In the days that followed, though, my vocabulary grew to take in new words: integrate, integrated, integration. I also learned the cheer that other kids were chanting: “Two, four, six, eight. We don’t want to integrate.” I was attuned to anything with rhythm and rhyme.

At the beginning of third grade, over in Arkansas, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to escort black children to an all-white school in Little Rock. I watched it happening live, in black-and-white, on TV. I heard the term “integration” again. But other things occupied my thoughts in those days. Mama was my third-grade teacher, and I had to call her Mrs. Hardy like all the other kids, and all in the world I wanted was to be normal like everybody else. I didn’t want everyone thinking I was getting special treatment because of my status as the teacher’s child. I wanted to be equal.

In third grade, a girl knew she was popular if she could get on the merry-go-round at recess, and the other kids did the pushing. I was privileged. I stood on that round platform with my friends Jacqueline and Mary Sue and held on tight to the bars, and the other children pushed us, and I laughed and let my hair blow. I don’t think they ever got a ride. I told them once they could have a turn, but they said no, it was okay.

When I started sixth grade, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy were running against each other for president. Mama sat me down and told me we were “unpledged” and “don’t tell anybody who we are voting for because Dad’s customers might get upset and quit coming to him.” I didn’t know who they were voting for anyway, so it didn’t really matter. But Mama had never gotten so serious with me before, so I got the idea that something was up.

Yet life at my fingertips consisted of a boyfriend named Scotty and a whole new wardrobe of dresses and skirts and sweaters from the Sears catalog and Frehling’s dress shop. There was boy-girl softball at recess, and I played in a dress with full petticoats under it. Sometimes, I took off my shoes and played barefooted. Sometimes, I stuck sticks down in doodlebug holes.

The summer after sixth grade there were Freedom Riders. To be honest, I really couldn’t understand if people were saying Freedom Riders or Freedom Writers, so when I repeated that term, I said it so it would sound like either one. I didn’t understand what it was all about. But there was a lot of talk going on, mostly about “troublemakers” and “stirring things up.” “They should stay in their place,” some said. That meant separate. Separate waiting rooms at doctors’ offices, separate schools, separate seating at the movies, separate public restrooms, separate water fountains. Separate churches. They had their own separate cafes, but then they began to have “sit-ins” at lunch counters at Woolworth’s in faraway places, but not in my town.

This was about the time The Twist came about, when Chubby Checker introduced the song and dance on American Bandstand. I went to 4-H camp that summer and saw the older girls and boys doing it, and I did, too. I knew things would be different after that.

In junior high, my school closed the day James Meredith integrated Ole Miss. Leaders were afraid there would be trouble. Everybody was afraid of what it was going to bring. But me, I had penny loafers and Piccolinos and a black leather jacket and a charm bracelet, and I learned to “rat” my hair. I had a crush on an Australian boy who moved to town and started high school. The biggest concern of my day was getting the timing right after third period so I’d be passing through the corridor between the junior high and high school at the same time he’d be coming the other way to go to the lunchroom, just so I could say hey. That’s as far as it ever got.

The summer after eighth grade, Medger Evers was gunned down in Jackson. I saw it on the news and heard talk. People feared there might be trouble. Then Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “I have a dream that one day … sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”

As for this great-great-granddaughter of a slave owner, I could only see as far as the end of my arm. I had a new friend named Linda Gail, I’d be going to a new school, I learned to wear my hair in a flip, and I had Pep Squad tryouts. I discovered The Varsity, with its juke box and hamburgers. And I had to find just the right shade of pink lipstick.

In ninth grade in the middle of Mississippi History, the intercom came on. Another rocket had launched, we thought, because Mr. Crain always turned it on when we shot one into space. There was so much static we could barely hear. Gunshots. In Dallas. Parkland Hospital. The president. Dianne Bobo started to cry. Some were saying good, serves him right, he deserves it because he was the civil rights president. Many of us didn’t go immediately to the gravity of the moment. But then, a pause. And the announcement was made. “The president of the United States is dead.” And then it was recess, and it was raining that Friday afternoon, and we stood outside under the canopy at the entrance to Margaret Green Junior High, stunned, and all we could say was I can’t believe this, as cold chills and a sense of loss and a loss of innocence covered us.

It was all uncovered and laid bare — all the wrongs — the cancer that was eating to our core.

I knew things would be different after that.

I saw that freedom didn’t come easy, that it would come hard and painful and with a high price.

You get the message…

No, not once did it occur to me that if I took a picture of me in the mirror, my I Voted sticker would be backwards. But there you have it.

My son called about 10:00 this morning to see if I’d been to the polls.

“Yep, been there, done that.”

“Oh, gaaa…well, I just hope you did the right thing.”

“I did. I did the right thing.”

I want change. I want a healer, someone who can unite this deeply divided country. Someone who will guide and shift us to a better course. Someone who will lead us to protect our borders, who will keep us safe, AND who will make us proud to be American.

A Whipped Puppy, Out in the Cold

Sad, lonely, beaten down, hungry. And no one cares.

That’s how I felt after watching the State of the Union message Monday and then the Republican debates Wednesday night on CNN. Politicians — hot air, all of them, blowing words, puffing their own glories.

The visual of a DIVIDED house lingers, slapping against my face like loose shutters on a rickety house in a bitterly cold windstorm. One side blowing one way, one going the other, both sides banging against the house, bruising it, knocking holes in it, damaging it. With all the banging going on, I clearly got the message that neither side cares about me and how I feel.

“You and I interact with people all day,” I said to my husband. “Business associates, customers, friends, neighbors, volunteers, the clerks at the grocery store, the bookseller at Barnes & Noble, the man at the doughnut shop. We don’t know whether they are Republican or Democrat. We just know that we are all Americans. We’re in the same boat. We’re all facing the same problems and running up against the same brick walls.”

Too bad our country’s leaders don’t understand that.

I’m sick of the spin and slurs and insults and empty promises. And when it comes to the issues, I’d like real solutions that help real American common working citizens.

I can only speak of problems I know firsthand.

First off, I know a man who comes to a monthly writers’ group that I am involved with. He’s an educated man, from up north, moved to Tennessee and got a job on a dairy farm to use his degree in animal husbandry. After Hurricane Katrina his son talked him into going to Louisiana to rebuild houses, which he did for a year. When he returned, he had an idea of starting his own construction business. Because it was hard to get off the ground, a friend recommended him to the owner of a local construction company, so he could have an income while he worked toward his own dream. The owner asked, “Is he white?” The answer was yes. “Well, I don’t like to hire white men,” the owner said. “They’re greedy. They just want to earn money.” Translated, I think that means he has to pay them more than $3 an hour, and he can get cheaper labor.

You know where this is going without me saying another word. Illegal immigrants.

A while back, I had to get a tetanus shot at the county health department, because my doctor didn’t have the vaccine in stock. I was the only one there who didn’t speak Spanish. Even the signs were foreign. I took off from work to go sit and wait my turn among people who were obviously not working. After I got my shot, the lady at the check-out desk said sarcastically, “Do you plan to pay for this?” “Do I have a choice?” I asked in the same vein. She swooshed her arm toward the waiting room and said, “They don’t pay.”

I pay $309.25 a month for health insurance, and then when I have a procedure — for example, a colonoscopy, as I did last month — I pay co-insurance — for that procedure, an additional five hundred. On top of that, I must pay taxes to cover the health care of illegal immigrants — people who broke the law to get here to live free. Only there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Somebody has to pay.

I got stuck alright.

Turning the other cheek, I have a young cousin who lives in a rural area of a southern state. She took college courses to train for a job in medical transcription so she could earn four times minimum wage. She has worked for the same company for ten years, and now she is being phased out. Why? Because they are sending her job to India. My cousin is a thirty-five-year-old single mom supporting two children, now starting over, looking for something she can do in America to earn a living.

I suggest a funeral home. The one thing they can’t do over there is bury our dead.

But they can bury us.

Yeah, I feel like a whimpering, whipped puppy, longing for a new day, but knowing in all likelihood I will never see beyond the bars of this cage.