Wedowee Memories

[Today's post is a childhood memory that was first posted five years ago. A couple of years ago, I had a patient in the hospital from Wedowee. I was telling him and his wife about spending my childhood there and that I held idyllic memories from that time. His wife said they had moved there in retirement and mentioned, with some disdain, that "the city fathers decided they would not allow Walmart to open a store in their town." I thought to myself, I like that. I must one day go back for a visit to see this town that would not give in to Walmart's encroachment.]

Downtown Wedowee, photo by Rivers Langley, courtesy of Wikipedia

I will always hold Wedowee, Alabama* as one of the best spots in the world. My family moved there when I was one year old when my father became pastor of the First Baptist Church. I would spend the next five years of my young life in that place. In my memory, it was like Andy Griffith's fictional town of Mayberry, and an idyllic time in my childhood. A small county seat town, it contained everything a boy growing up would need. My older brother recalls the days when we lived there saying, "I would go out to play with my friends on a Saturday or on a summer day, and Mom would say, 'Be home by suppertime,' and that was the only requisite given. It was a great place to be a kid." I am still surprised looking back that I was able to convince my mother to let me walk to kindergarten, which meant walking from our neighborhood street to the town square, crossing two streets at the traffic lights, and heading down to Mrs. Perry's house where she taught our kindergarten class. But then again, it was a small town where everyone watched out for everyone else's children.

What follows is one of my early memories of life in Wedowee. I am not changing any names to protect the innocent or the guilty. In fact, part of my motivation is something like sending a message in a bottle. If my first friends, Phillip Haynes and Mary Lois Dothard happen to see this post, I hope they might get in touch since I lost contact when our respective families moved on to different locales. So Mary Lois or Phillip, if you see this, look over to the right-hand column, hit "view my complete profile" under my name, and you will see how to send me an email.

Old Mr. Lee and His Young Farm Hands

I spent some formative years in Wedowee, Alabama. My family moved there when I was one year old and we lived there until I was six.  Wedowee was where I learned to walk and talk. My first best friend, Phillip Haynes, lived just up the street at the top of the hill. My other best friend, Mary Lois Dothard, lived two doors up from our house and across the road from Phillip. The three of us often played together and sometimes got into mischief together.

Old Mr. Lee lived with his wife in the house in between my house and Mary Lois’s. His house sat on top of the hill just past our driveway. He was quite a character, and there were lots of stories that people would tell about him. He used to sit on his front porch chewing tobacco, but you didn’t see him spit like most folks do when they chew tobacco. Someone asked him once why he didn’t spit his tobacco. All he said was ,”Keeps the ‘skeeters away.”

I knew Mr. Lee as a farmer. He must have been retired from something. He certainly seemed too old to be working anywhere. He always walked with a cane whenever he went out, and his ready, playful smile revealed that he didn’t particularly enjoy wearing his dentures (if he had any), but he kept a hand in farming right there in the Wedowee city limits. He had some pigs in his backyard and we would often go over to watch him “slop the hogs.” I can still see those animals eagerly eating from the trough as Old Mr. Lee poured the hog slop down shoot that led to the trough.

He had grape vines, Mr. Lee did, that grew along the fence between his house and ours. He would tell my Dad, “Any grapes that you see growin’ on yo’ side-a the fence, I want you to hep ye’self to ‘em. I got more‘n I can han’le. Everthing on that side of the fence is yores.”

He wasn’t always that generous, though. Another story that went around was about the time a neighbor asked him if he could borrow his rope. "Nope," he said, "I gotta tie up my milk."

"You don't tie up milk with rope," the fellow protested. 

"One excuse is as good as another when you don't wanna lend yer rope," Mr. Lee replied.

Mr. Lee also had a mule and a plow. He kept a fair-sized garden plot behind his house, and he and that old mule would turn the sod for his garden every spring. Word had it that Mr. Lee once bought himself a tractor so he could do some modern farming. He was quite disconcerted, however, when he went out to plow his field and that fool tractor took off. It must have bolted on out, and Mr. Lee was shouting, “Whoa! Whoa!” pulling on the wheel. The tractor didn’t whoa and Mr. Lee ended up taking out his back fence.

The old man wasted no time. He sold his new-fangled tractor and went back to his mule and plow. He said, “I want sump’m ‘at’ll whoa when I holler ‘whoa,’ and this here mule knows how to whoa!”

One spring, Mr. Lee decided to plow a little plot in the front of his house up near the road. It was not a large endeavor, just a small section to grow a few more things. On this one particular bright spring day, Phillip, Mary Lois, and I were all playing at Mary Lois’s house. Her mother called us together and told us as we gathered on her big front porch that Mr. Lee had said that if we wanted to, we kids could go over to his garden and pull some weeds and use them for pretend vegetables to play house.

“Yay! Let’s do it!” Mary Lois was most enthusiastic. I had learned at an early age that girls are always eager to play house. We boys were more into exploring the yard looking for bugs, playing cowboys and Indians, climbing trees, or maybe swinging on the swing set. But on this day, Phillip and I were off to play house with our friend, Mary Lois, in Mr. Lee’s yard.

“First we have to find where these weeds are,” Mary Lois said. She was a natural leader so we naturally followed her lead, and off we went.

‘Here they are!” she exclaimed as we came upon Mr. Lee’s small garden plot. “I’ll start here, and you and Phillip go over and start over there,” she pointed us over to the other side of the garden.

Mary Lois set our immediately, plucking the small grass-like plants.

“Why are these weeds growing in rows?” I asked.

“That’s just the way these weeds grow,” she explained. Who could argue with such a confident view?

Phillip and I each took our row of weeds and began pulling and gathering. It wasn’t long until we had pulled every weed we could find. Mary Lois then gathered them all into a bundle. She handed them to me while she set out to mark off the kitchen area under the tree in our imaginary play house.

I took the bundle of weeds – which was just large enough for me to hold in both hands with my thumbs and forefingers containing them in a nice circle. As I held it, I did what I suppose any four-year-old boy would do: I held it up to my nose and smelled the roots.

“This smells just like corn,” I said.

Phillip reached over to take the bundle. “Let me see,” he said as he gave it a big sniff. “You’re right! It does smell like corn.”

“Never mind,” Mary Lois said. “This is where we’re going to have our kitchen. And right here will be the stove.”

We then went through the motions of cooking and stirring and dishing out food onto imaginary plates. We sat in a circle and said things like, “Yum, yum! This is so good!” “Are these beans or carrots?” “I think they are beans.” “We can pretend its corn.” “Next time, if it rains we’ll make mud pies.”

I suppose we kept playing house for about as long as our attention spans could take it. I don’t remember the rest of the day, but we probably headed back over to Mary Lois’s house to play with toy cars on her front porch or to watch Popeye cartoons on T.V.

I do remember, however, the next time the three of us got together to play. Mary Lois’s mother gathered us together just like before, only this time she told us, “Mr. Lee does not want you playing in his yard anymore. He told me that some kids ran through his garden and kicked up all of his corn that he had just planted.”

I can still remember the look of Phillip’s face as we both, right on cue, turned and looked at each other, remembering the aroma we had smelled on the roots of those weeds.

After those words of admonition, we three were off looking for something to do.

“I wondered why they were growing in rows,” I said as we headed around to Mary Lois’s back yard where her swing set was.

*    *    *

Looking back, I can see how this story has played out many times in my life. Amazing how our childhood years become prologue to patterns that will follow in our adult life.

[My poem, “An Early Time,” shares another memory from this period. You can read it here]

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* "Wedowee is a town in Randolph County, Alabama, United States. At the 2010 census the population was 823, up from 818 in 2000. The city is the county seat of Randolph County. It was initially incorporated in 1836, but its charter lapsed by the late 19th century. It was reincorporated in 1901...Wedowee, which means "old water" in the Creek language, was named after a Muscogee Creek Indian chief. This area was historically occupied by the Muscogee Creek people." (From Wikipedia)

WWI monument in the town square
"Honoring the Heroes of Randolph County"

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Growing Up under Southern Apartheid (Part 4)

White Christmas

In east-central Alabama, we typically don’t get a white Christmas, at least not like the one Bing Crosby sang about. When I was a kid, I looked at many a picture book with snow-laden Christmas scenes and saw Christmas cards come in through the mail that featured snow-covered villages. In the South, we could wish for snow, but we were more likely to get rain. Snow might come later (if only for a day) but never as early as Christmas.

As children, even without the snow we began to feel the anticipation of the holiday as the time drew near. Adults would start it. They’d say, “What’s Santy Claus gonna bring ya?” or “Have you been a good little boy this year? Well mind your Mama ‘cause Santa’s comin’.”

Sights and Sounds of Christmas

One of the things that really set the stage for the holiday was putting up the Christmas tree. In rural Alabama back in the 1950s, most folks cut their own trees. Cedars grew wild in the pastures and farmland in the area. I remember going with Dad one year to look for a tree. We went to a farm owned by an older man who let us walk through the pasture to find the one we wanted. I remember Dad stopping back by the old man’s house to pay him, but the farmer just waved him off and wouldn’t hear of it. It was probably because my Dad was the preacher in town. In those days, churches paid their preachers a meager salary but people tried to make up for it in other ways. Someone might have a good day fishing on the river with too many fish to clean, and he’d take the preacher enough to feed his family. Someone else would have some corn or beans coming in and would take a mess of vegetables to the preacher’s house. Many merchants in town offered discounts for clergy.

At our house, by the time the Christmas tree went up, we had Christmas records playing. We had a little record player that played 45 and 78 RPMs and we’d delight in hearing “Up on the Housetop,” “Jingle Bells,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and the like. Of course, in Sunday School we would sing “Silent Night,” “Away in a Manger,” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” 

And then there were the Christmas stories.  Dad would thrill us in reading Clement Moore's poem, ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. On Christmas Eve, Mom would read Why the Chimes Rang, by Raymond MacDonald Alden to set a solemn yet magical tone for the holiday. Our excitement could hardly be tamped down because the next morning would be filled with drifts of wadded wrapping paper, stockings filled with candy, and the unmistakable Christmas aroma of new plastic from all of the toys gathered under the tree.

 Santa Comes to Town

We lived in Wedowee, Alabama from 1955 to 1960, so that makes it easy for me to place a relative time period on my early childhood memories since I was only a year old when we first arrived. I suppose in those days every community had its own way of marking the beginning of the Christmas season.  In Dadeville, Alabama, where I began the sixth grade, the local Girl Scouts sang carols on the courthouse steps on a Saturday afternoon as the town turned on the Christmas lights for the first time on Main Street.

In the small town of Wedowee, the county seat of Randolph County, the Christmas season was heralded by Santa riding into town on the back of a red fire engine. Children would gather at the town square in glad anticipation. Sure, New York City had the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with Santa and his sleigh as the grand finale, but we ushered jolly old St. Nicholas into town in grand style!

1955 GMC Pumper 

I remember when Dad took my brother and me to join the crowd of kids waiting to see Santa come to town. At the appointed time, we heard the siren wailing in the distance. Soon the fire truck appeared, driving through the town, Santa standing on the back and waving to the crowd. When the fire truck stopped, Santa began handing out bags of candy to all the eager children.

Christmas in the South was as segregated as all the other community activities, but there must have been some allowances in Wedowee for Santa’s visit. That day when we went to see Santa ride into town, it was an event for all children, both Black and white. It made such an impression upon me as a child that one particular image stands out in my memory to this day.  As I made my way up to see Santa who was handing out the candy to all the children, I saw a little Black girl walk up to get some candy. She was younger than I – I would have been around five, so she must have been around three years old. She had on a blue dress and pink bows tied up in her hair. The little girl walked slowly up to Santa at her mother’s encouragement, and what did Santa do?  He bent down and picked her up in his arms!  He then walked around, continuing to wave at the kids, carrying the little girl in his arms.


Of course, we knew this was not the real Santa. It was clear that he was a man in a costume. I have no idea who Santa was that day, but I never forgot the way that he carried the little Black girl in his arms. I was not accustomed to seeing Black children because Black people and white people lived separate lives and the children went to separate schools. While the little Black girl did not fit into all of the Christmas images and songs that I had in my head at that young age, that day a new image of Christmas was added to my memory. Throughout my childhood, though we never had snow, all of my Christmases were white, except for that one day.

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Photo credit:

• Vintage 1950s Christmas card was found on Pinterest
• "Unmanaged eastern red cedars" photo from Wildlife, a publication of The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation.
• The record player and fire truck images were both found on Pinterest with no credit attributed.

< Part 3, A Matter of Complexion                                  Part 5, From Town to Country > 

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Growing Up under Southern Apartheid (Part 2)

Downtown Wedowee as it looks today (photo by Courthouselover at Flickr)

What's in a Name?

When I was a year old, my family moved to Wedowee, Alabama when my father became pastor of the First Baptist Church. We lived there until I was six, so many of my first-experiences happened in Wedowee. It was where I had my first best friend, my first explorations of the Five & Ten Cent store, my first time to attend Sunday School and kindergarten. My understanding of family and community was honed during that time. I was happy and protected as any toddler or preschooler’s life should be.

Naturally, my first awareness of race emerged in those young years in Wedowee. One early encounter that I recall was when I was playing alone out in the front yard of the pastorium where we lived. It was a quiet neighborhood, and I was rolling about in the leaves near the street. As I sat there on the ground, I saw a Black man walking by. I was a shy, quiet kid, so I said nothing, but I watched the man as he walked by. He looked down at me as he walked and said, “I ain’t gonna hurt ya.” As he kept walking by he repeated, “I ain’t gonna hurt ya.”

I had no fear of being hurt, and I remember wondering why he was saying that. Later I went to my mother and I mentioned the Black man walking by and I asked her he kept saying he wouldn't hurt me.  As I recall, my mother said something like, he probably wanted to make sure I wasn’t afraid of him, that I need not worry.

In our small town, there was never any sense of danger that I can recall. My older brother has said that on any given Saturday when he went off to play with friends, the only direction he got from our mother was, “Just be back by suppertime.” Everyone knew that everyone else would be looking out for the kids.

Careful with the N-Word

It would have been in the late 1950s when my brother was riding his bike to meet friends and I was at play in my yard. Having contact with Black people was common, whether it was a worker walking to a job, or a maid in a household. In those days, the word we used to refer to Blacks was negro. It was the accepted term that even Martin Luther King used in his speeches in the early 1960s. When we used the term, however, with our southern dialect it was pronounced “negra.”

One day when I was playing with one of my friends, I'll call her “Jane,” who lived just up the street, a Black man was walking by. In those days there was a lot more walking, especially since there were so many who could not afford a car and also given the fact that Wedowee was too small a town to support any kind of public transportation system. I said to my friend, “There goes a negra,” simply commenting on the man I saw walking by.

“Uh-oh!” she exclaimed, “You’re not s’posed to say that word! I’m tellin’ ” With that she went skipping off into her house to report to her mother. Her mother came straight out to inform me that I was never to use that n-word, that I should say “colored” instead. My bashful self tried to explain that I didn’t say “that word,” but all I could do was to swallow my words and say, “Yes ma’am.”

Jane’s parents were always kind and generous. On that day, they wanted to make absolutely certain that I did not use any derogatory term when talking about Blacks. Even though I was not using “the n-word” that they thought I was using, the conversation was not lost on me. By the time I started school as a first-grader, I had decided that it was easier to avoid any confusion by saying “colored people*” instead of “negro” (or negra) so that my dialect did not communicate something unintended, to show I meant no disrespect.

Jane’s father was an Alabama State Trooper. He went on to become part of Gov. George Wallace’s private security detail. Serving as his primary bodyguard, he was injured by gunfire during the assassination attempt on Wallace's life. He was then appointed by the Governor to be the director of the Alabama Department of Public Safety. Years later when he died by suicide while being treated for terminal cancer, the AP news story ran in The New York Times and The Washington Post. George Wallace personally lamented the loss saying, “He was almost like a member of my family.”

~   ~   ~

< Part 1, The Long Shadow of Jim Crow                           Part 3, A Matter of Complexion >
 

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* As the Civil Rights Movement unfolded in the 1960s, finding the proper terminology to use when referring to Black people began to evolve with some terms falling in and out of favor. While "negro" was used in official writing and discourse, "colored" was seen by many as the polite term for everyday use in the 1950s and early 60s. Soon "Black" became the accepted term ("colored" and "negro" were out), and then the term "Afro-American" was in vogue for a while. In recent years, "African-American" and "Black" have both been in use. It was just last week that the Associated Press announced new writing style guidelines to capitalize Black "when referring to people in a racial, ethnic, or cultural context." The New York Times has followed suit, and I have chosen to follow those guidelines in my writing about segregation here.

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Wedowee Memories

Downtown Wedowee, photo by Rivers Langley, courtesy of Wikipedia

I will always hold Wedowee, Alabama* as one of the best spots in the world. My family moved there when I was one year old when my father became pastor of the First Baptist Church. I would spend the next five years of my young life in that place. In my memory, it was like Andy Griffith's fictional town of Mayberry, and an idyllic time in my childhood. A small county seat town, it contained everything a boy growing up would need. My older brother recalls the days when we lived there saying, "I would go out to play with my friends on a Saturday or on a summer day, and Mom would say, 'Be home by suppertime,' and that was the only requisite given. It was a great place to be a kid." I am still surprised looking back that I was able to convince my mother to let me walk to kindergarten, which meant walking from our neighborhood street to the town square, crossing two streets at the traffic lights, and heading down to Mrs. Perry's house where she taught our kindergarten class. But then again, it was a small town where everyone watched out for everyone else's children.

What follows is one of my early memories of life in Wedowee. I am not changing any names to protect the innocent or the guilty. In fact, part of my motivation is something like sending a message in a bottle. If my first friends, Phillip Haynes and Mary Lois Dothard happen to see this post, I hope they might get in touch since I lost contact when our respective families moved on to different locales. So Mary Lois or Phillip, if you see this, look over to the right-hand column, hit "view my complete profile" under my name, and you will see how to send me an email.

Old Mr. Lee and His Young Farm Hands

I spent some formative years in Wedowee, Alabama. My family moved there when I was one year old and we lived there until I was six.  Wedowee was where I learned to walk and talk. My first best friend, Phillip Haynes, lived just up the street at the top of the hill. My other best friend, Mary Lois Dothard, lived two doors up from our house and across the road from Phillip. The three of us often played together and sometimes got into mischief together.

Old Mr. Lee lived with his wife in the house in between my house and Mary Lois’s. His house sat on top of the hill just past our driveway. He was quite a character, and there were lots of stories that people would tell about him. He used to sit on his front porch chewing tobacco, but you didn’t see him spit like most folks do when they chew tobacco. Someone asked him once why he didn’t spit his tobacco. All he said was ,”Keeps the ‘skeeters away.”

I knew Mr. Lee as a farmer. He must have been retired from something. He certainly seemed too old to be working anywhere. He always walked with a cane whenever he went out, and his ready, playful smile revealed that he didn’t particularly enjoy wearing his dentures (if he had any), but he kept a hand in farming right there in the Wedowee city limits. He had some pigs in his backyard and we would often go over to watch him “slop the hogs.” I can still see those animals eagerly eating from the trough as Old Mr. Lee poured the hog slop down shoot that led to the trough.

He had grape vines, Mr. Lee did, that grew along the fence between his house and ours. He would tell my Dad, “Any grapes that you see growin’ on yo’ side-a the fence, I want you to hep ye’self to ‘em. I got more‘n I can han’le. Everthing on that side of the fence is yores.”

He wasn’t always that generous, though. Another story that went around was about the time a neighbor asked him if he could borrow his rope. "Nope," he said, "I gotta tie up my milk."

"You don't tie up milk with rope," the fellow protested. 

"One excuse is as good as another when you don't wanna lend yer rope," Mr. Lee replied.

Mr. Lee also had a mule and a plow. He kept a fair-sized garden plot behind his house, and he and that old mule would turn the sod for his garden every spring. Word had it that Mr. Lee once bought himself a tractor so he could do some modern farming. He was quite disconcerted, however, when he went out to plow his field and that fool tractor took off. It must have bolted on out, and Mr. Lee was shouting, “Whoa! Whoa!” pulling on the wheel. The tractor didn’t whoa and Mr. Lee ended up taking out his back fence.

The old man wasted no time. He sold his new-fangled tractor and went back to his mule and plow. He said, “I want sump’m ‘at’ll whoa when I holler ‘whoa,’ and this here mule knows how to whoa!”

One spring, Mr. Lee decided to plow a little plot in the front of his house up near the road. It was not a large endeavor, just a small section to grow a few more things. On this one particular bright spring day, Phillip, Mary Lois, and I were all playing at Mary Lois’s house. Her mother called us together and told us as we gathered on her big front porch that Mr. Lee had said that if we wanted to, we kids could go over to his garden and pull some weeds and use them for pretend vegetables to play house.

“Yay! Let’s do it!” Mary Lois was most enthusiastic. I had learned at an early age that girls are always eager to play house. We boys were more into exploring the yard looking for bugs, playing cowboys and Indians, climbing trees, or maybe swinging on the swing set. But on this day, Phillip and I were off to play house with our friend, Mary Lois, in Mr. Lee’s yard.

“First we have to find where these weeds are,” Mary Lois said. She was a natural leader so we naturally followed her lead, and off we went.

‘Here they are!” she exclaimed as we came upon Mr. Lee’s small garden plot. “I’ll start here, and you and Phillip go over and start over there,” she pointed us over to the other side of the garden.

Mary Lois set our immediately, plucking the small grass-like plants.

“Why are these weeds growing in rows?” I asked.

“That’s just the way these weeds grow,” she explained. Who could argue with such a confident view?

Phillip and I each took our row of weeds and began pulling and gathering. It wasn’t long until we had pulled every weed we could find. Mary Lois then gathered them all into a bundle. She handed them to me while she set out to mark off the kitchen area under the tree in our imaginary play house.

I took the bundle of weeds – which was just large enough for me to hold in both hands with my thumbs and forefingers containing them in a nice circle. As I held it, I did what I suppose any four-year-old boy would do: I held it up to my nose and smelled the roots.

“This smells just like corn,” I said.

Phillip reached over to take the bundle. “Let me see,” he said as he gave it a big sniff. “You’re right! It does smell like corn.”

“Never mind,” Mary Lois said. “This is where we’re going to have our kitchen. And right here will be the stove.”

We then went through the motions of cooking and stirring and dishing out food onto imaginary plates. We sat in a circle and said things like, “Yum, yum! This is so good!” “Are these beans or carrots?” “I think they are beans.” “We can pretend its corn.” “Next time, if it rains we’ll make mud pies.”

I suppose we kept playing house for about as long as our attention spans could take it. I don’t remember the rest of the day, but we probably headed back over to Mary Lois’s house to play with toy cars on her front porch or to watch Popeye cartoons on T.V.

I do remember, however, the next time the three of us got together to play. Mary Lois’s mother gathered us together just like before, only this time she told us, “Mr. Lee does not want you playing in his yard anymore. He told me that some kids ran through his garden and kicked up all of his corn that he had just planted.”

I can still remember the look of Phillip’s face as we both, right on cue, turned and looked at each other, remembering the aroma we had smelled on the roots of those weeds.

After those words of admonition, we three were off looking for something to do.

“I wondered why they were growing in rows,” I said as we headed around to Mary Lois’s back yard where her swing set was.

*    *    *

Looking back, I can see how this story has played out many times in my life. Amazing how our childhood years become prologue to patterns that will follow in our adult life.

[My poem, “An Early Time,” shares another memory from this period. You can read it here]

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* "Wedowee is a town in Randolph County, Alabama, United States. At the 2010 census the population was 823, up from 818 in 2000. The city is the county seat of Randolph County. It was initially incorporated in 1836, but its charter lapsed by the late 19th century. It was reincorporated in 1901...Wedowee, which means "old water" in the Creek language, was named after a Muscogee Creek Indian chief. This area was historically occupied by the Muscogee Creek people." (From Wikipedia)

WWI monument in the town square
"Honoring the Heroes of Randolph County"

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