Growing Up Under Southern Apartheid (Part 6)

Neighbors

Jackson's Gap was not named after Gen. Andrew Jackson, whose defeat of the Creek Nation at nearby Horseshoe Bend opened much of eastern Alabama to white settlement. Rather, the town was named for another man who erected a cabin and traded with the Creeks and local settlers and travelers, possibly in the 1810s or 1820s. Soon after, a man named Patterson established a blacksmith shop there and more settlers began to arrive from Georgia and South Carolina in the 1830s. There was some gold mining activity in the vicinity of Jackson's Gap, most likely in the 1840s. The Tallapoosa Baptist Church was established in 1854 and currently exists as Jackson's Gap Baptist Church. 

                                                                       ~ Christopher Maloney, Auburn University

                                                                          From the Encyclopedia of Alabama

Young Charlie with the family dog, Trixie. In the background is a corner of
Rex Nickerson's pasture, Not seen, but to Charlie's right would be Bill Ornsby's house.

Tallapoosa County is filled with low rolling hills and quiet hollows. In Jackson’s Gap, the narrow country roads wind about through those hills and hollows. My family moved to Jackson’s Gap, Alabama around the time I turned six. It was a small rural community, known as “The Gap” to folks living around there. Small farms were scattered throughout the county where textile mills had become the major source of employment.

My Mamma once said that she preferred living in the city, but she was fine with life in the country as long as your nearest neighbor was close enough that you could see their laundry on the clothesline.  Our move to Jackson’s Gap was a move to the country, but we had neighbors in sight. Our small house sat on a hill, and just down the hill from us was where the Nickerson’s lived. Mr. Rex Nickerson was the brother of Paul Nickerson, the principal of Jackson’s Gap Elementary School. Mr. Rex had a large pasture that lay within the small valley between our house and his. His horse, Tony, grazed happily in that pasture. In the far corner of the pasture, just across the creek that ran at the bottom of the hill was a small garden plot that he let my Dad use for a couple of summers to grow vegetables for the family table.

Just across the road from our house lived our nearest neighbors, a Black couple, Mr. Bill Ornsby and his wife Ludie. Our two houses faced one another on what must have once been the same hill before it was cut in two to make the road that led from the Gap to the train depot. Mr. Bill had a one-eyed hound dog named Red and always kept some chickens in the yard. The house that Mr. Bill and Ludie lived in would have to be described as a shack, but it was well kept. It had a small unpainted porch, but there was siding on the house that resembled sand-covered tar roofing shingles but it was in large sheets that were nailed to the side of the house.

Mr. Bill was better off than many of the Black people around. He had a steady job at a warehouse 45 miles away in Sylacauga, which I always thought was a long way to drive to go to work. Dad said that Mr. Bill got that job during the War (that would have been WWII) and that after the war was over, he was able to stay on. It was said that Mr. Bill made the best moonshine in the county. He must have been very smart about it if that was true, because no one seemed to know where the still was, and I never knew him to have any trouble with the law in our dry county.  

There is something quite poetic about a Baptist preacher and a moonshiner, one white and one black, living right across from each other in a dry county in the Jim Crow South, and on the same hill that was cleaved two generations before to make a road to the train station. We looked out each day across the gulf between our two houses on two sides of the same hill. It was a small gulf to look at, but we were also looking out over a larger gulf that had been 300 years in the making.

Mr. Bill owned the house and the land he lived on across the road from us. Within a couple of years, in fact, he had built himself a nice new house under the big oak tree next to the shack. It was a fully modern brick house that he and his wife moved into. I can remember walking across the road with Dad to see Mr. Bill’s house-in-progress after the foundation was laid. There was already framing going up and Mr. Bill was out there looking things over.  It was a comfortable autumn day. The reason I remember the season is that we were going to the county fair that day. The reason I remember the county fair is that I had awoken that morning with a gimp in my leg, as sometimes happens with growing children.  I was walking with a limp because of that pain in my leg whenever I put my foot down. As I was walking around looking at Mr. Bill’s house that he was building, and limping with each step, my older brother teasingly said, “Charlie, if you still limpin’ this afternoon, ya cain't go to the fair.”

With that comment, I started walking about a little faster, still limping with each step. Mr. Bill let out a big laugh and said, “He sho’ want to go to that fair don’t he!”

Separate but not Equal

In Jackson’s Gap, we lived with the Jim Crow laws that kept white people in power and kept Black people in poverty, or as some said, “kept them in their place.”  Out in the country, though, there was no city council, no zoning board, no housing regulations. Even though there was a “Black neighborhood,” there were also houses scattered throughout the countryside where a few Black families lived. Thus we lived in close proximity to Black people while maintaining separate lives.  For example, that county fair that I mentioned, the one that Mr. Bill laughed about me wanting to go to, would be an all-white event. The carnival rides and exhibits at the cattle barns would be attended by white people only. There may have been a day set aside for Black people to attend, but it was definitely not an interracial gathering in the early 1960s.

Even so, perhaps country life gave me a closer look at our separate lives than I had been able to see in Wedowee. It was a chance for a young white boy to see how our Black neighbors lived. In addition to those rides into the Black community when Dad took our maid home, I often witnessed the comings and goings and the family gatherings at our Black neighbors’ house across the road. Mr. Bill’s friends would drop by as would his nieces and nephews.

I remember one day a Black man walking down the road in front of our house while I was playing in the yard.  As his friend walked by, Mr. Bill called out from his front porch to ask him how he was doing and inquired about a mutual friend. “He’s sick in the hospital,” the man said.

“What’s he in the hospital for?” Mr. Bill asked

“He got the flu,” his friend replied.

That was the first time I became aware that the flu could be bad enough to send someone to the hospital. That little exchange was also an example of how those country greetings would often occur, with brief conversations shouted from the porch to the road as one passed on his way home or to a job.

The pace was slow and people did what they had to in order to make a living and to get by. Most lived by routines set by earlier generations. In 1954, the year I was born and six years before we moved to Jackson’s Gap, the Supreme Court handed down the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared segregated schools to be unconstitutional and that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.*” In my world, as I entered the first grade at Jackson’s Gap Elementary, there was no inkling of recognition of that court decision, and no rumbling to be heard of any changes coming down the pike.

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< Part 5, From Town to Country                                                Part 7,  Breaking Ground >


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* See Brown v. Board of Education at Wikipedia

Photo Credit: The picture of me and our dog at the top was taken by my younger brother, Bill, using a Kodac box camera my uncle had given to me for Christmas. I would have been around nine or ten years old, and I really wanted my picture taken with Trixie, so I asked Bill to take it using my camera. He was three years younger than I, and I think he did a great job for a kid who was six or seven years old at the time!


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