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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White Christmas

(The following essay is a re-post from Growing Up Under Southern Apartheid)

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.

________________________

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.

For an index to other essays in Growing Up Under Southern Apartheid, go here.

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White Christmas

(From Growing Up Under Southern Apartheid)

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.

________________________

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.

For an index to other essays in Growing Up Under Southern Apartheid, go here.

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Growing Up under Southern Apartheid, Part 10

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The Last Work Song

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. For my family, it was a move from town to country and my world changed from small-town sidewalks to creek banks and woods. 

Our small house at the Gap was flanked by a pasture on one side and woodlands on another. In front of our house, just across the road lived a black couple who were our nearest neighbors. If you walked down that road just a little piece, you would pass Mr. Wilson’s fish pond just before you got to the site of the old train depot. The train no longer stopped there but the old folks remembered when you could catch the train and go down to Opelika or you could go in the other direction to Alexander City. There remained only a cement platform where the small train station had once been. 

Watching Trains

The one activity that still occurred at the old depot site was mail pickup and delivery. The postmaster would go down every morning before the nine o’clock passenger train came through. He would hoist a canvas bag of outgoing mail on a chain that ran up a pole beside the tracks. When the train came by, someone on the train would swing out a hook to grab the bag of mail. Simultaneously, a canvas bag containing incoming mail would be tossed from the train onto the ground. The postmaster would then pick up the bag of mail and take it to the post office to be sorted and delivered. 

The quiet of my childhood home on the hill by the woods was disrupted only by the routine passing of the trains. When we had first moved there, the midnight train would jar me from my sleep as it barreled through blowing its horn, “whining low” as Hank Williams described it in song. In a short time, I grew accustomed to the sound of the trains as they passed through. 

There were freight trains: the Georgia Pacific and the L & N were two of the lines that came through; and there were passenger trains, sleek and black with a red line along the side. The passenger train came through twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. I enjoyed watching them pass by, rumbling down the tracks.

On one memorable day, it was a different sound down by the old depot that got my attention. It must have been around 1963 or 1964. I would have been 9 or 10 years old when I heard the nineteenth-century echoes of rhythm and harmony that lasted into the night. 

What I heard was a loud and robust men’s chorus chanting songs along the railway. It was not the sweet strains of a church choir, which was where I normally heard songs being sung, but it was bracing and compelling. My father took me down to see what was happening. Down by the old train depot, we saw a crew of Black men laying new rail along the tracks. They were singing songs I had never heard before, but the sounds seemed to go directly to my chest and made something stand up on the inside. It was the first and only time I had seen men singing together while they worked. 

My father told me that the singing was a tradition that went back to the old plantation days when slaves would sing in the fields. When doing hard physical labor, that singing helped to keep them going, my dad said. The pounding of a hammer or the chopping of a hoe might become the beat of a song, and the song kept them together with their work. Much later in life, I would learn that musicologists classified the songs we heard as “negro prison work songs.” I would also learn that the railroad employed Black work crews that they could dispatch for such labor-intensive projects. 

Black workers on the B & O Railroad line

A New Day Ahead

That vivid work song memory has remained with me as a briefly opened door to the past. Perhaps I was witnessing one of the last remnants of the Old South. Even though Brown v. the Board of Education had been settled by the Supreme Court in 1954, it had yet to have an impact in our community – or even in our state, for that matter. As I stood on that summer evening listening to the Black men singing songs that could be heard in the distance from our front porch, I had no inkling of the drastic social changes that would soon be headed down the line. 

The bus boycott in Montgomery had been the first wave of unrest. My parents would have known about it, but I, of course, had no knowledge or understanding of the unrest that would soon erupt. Cities like Selma and Birmingham were tinderboxes ready to explode, but it would take a little longer for change to arrive in small rural communities like Jackson’s Gap. 

As I continued to watch the trains go by throughout my childhood years, I noticed with each passing year that the numbers of passengers grew smaller and smaller. I was witnessing the nation’s shift in traveling habits as train use declined. In the end, the passenger lines stopped. They would be replaced by Amtrak, but not on these lines; not in Jackson’s Gap. By the time I finished high school those sleek black trains with the red stripe along the side were no more. 

The railway lines were fading, as were the sounds of those work songs that had pierced the night so many years before. It would soon become a distant memory – as if the turning of a page could instantly place a child’s memory into a past era. While cities across the country would erupt in violence, we would quietly hunker down to greet the new day with varying degrees of resistance and acceptance. 

We were neighbors, after all, Black and white. We knew everybody’s dog and saw each other's backyard clothesline. We would all find ways to navigate the new rules of the day, and somewhere in my being I would retain the strains of those work songs that made something stand up on the inside>  

< Part 9, Learning to Read and Other Important Things              Index >

________________                                                                                                                   

Photos Credits:

Upper: Illinois Central's train 25, the "Southern Express", an all stops local from Chicago to New Orleans is seen passing through Fraser on the north side of Memphis on Oct. 02, 1965.

Bill White Photo. Collection of Phil Gosney. (See Illinois Central Passenger Trains, Memphis, TN)

Middle: "African-American track workers labored long, hard hours. They were known as 'gandy dancers' and used rhythmic songs and chants to maintain motion and unity necessary to move sections of rail, hammer spikes, and perform other back-breaking labor to build our nation’s rails." (Photo and quote from B & O Railroad Museum, found on Pinterest.)

Lower: "Autumn Leave on Railroad Tracks" (Getty Images)

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Growing Up under Southern Apartheid (Part 8)

School Days at the Rural Schoolhouse

Jackson’s Gap Elementary School was a simple white framed wooden building with three classrooms and a lunchroom. Concrete steps led up to the front porch and straight ahead from there was the classroom for the first and second grades. A turn to the left would lead to another door that opened onto a long hallway that led to the lunchroom in the back where Miss Lindy served up some of the best southern cooking around. Miss Lindy was a Black lady who was employed to cook all the meals in the school lunchroom. I never saw Miss Lindy in a bad mood. She always had a bright smile and a twinkle in her eye. She was short and round, usually had her hair tied in a kerchief, and she wore sneakers with cuts in the side where her pinky-toes would stick out. I gathered that her feet were too wide for her to find comfortably fitting shoes, so she had to make alterations. She would walk to work, getting to the schoolhouse early, and by 10:30 in the morning, fantastic aromas would be wafting down the hallway.

Oh, yes, we are still in the hallway I was describing. On the right was the boys’ restroom. The entry to the girls’ restroom was back out on the porch beside the first and second-grade classroom. Just past the Boys Room was the classroom where grades 6, 7, and 8 were taught by the teacher who also served as principal. Further down the hallway to the left, before you reached the lunchroom was the classroom for grades 3, 4, and 5. That hallway also held a Coke machine and a freezer box that held ice cream bars that kids could buy during morning recess.

First Day at School

I can remember my first day at school. It was a momentous day marking a shift in my life from days centered at home to days spent learning new things in the classroom. My Dad took me to school that day, and we arrived early before the bell rang. We may have been the first ones there, or more likely, a few other students were slowly coming in. It was a large room with tall windows across the back wall. In front of the classroom ran two long blackboards, with a third blackboard on the far side of the room where the second-grade class sat. Above the blackboards were the letters of the alphabet, wrapping from one wall around to the other. On the side of the room near the doorway, there were two large pictures. They were reproductions of paintings. One was a farm scene featuring a red barn and a young boy leading a horse around the barnyard. The other was a reproduction of Winslow Homer's famous painting, “Snap the Whip.” The painting portrayed school children playing outside a little red schoolhouse. Dad walked to the back of the room and raised one of the windows to let some fresh air in. There was no air-conditioning in the school (most houses did not have air-conditioning either).

Out in front of the schoolhouse were a few large oaks. Just beyond them was Jackson’s Gap Baptist Church where my father pastored.  Just beneath one of the oaks was a well, covered by a concrete casing. The well supplied all of the water for the school. Everyone in Jackson’s Gap had their own well; there was no “city water” supplying our homes or businesses. We had running water, of course, and indoor toilets, but each well required a pump to get the water from the well to the plumbing. Sometimes at recess, we would organize a game of chase or hide-and-seek. We would sometimes use the concrete casing over the well as “base” for those games.

 Out on the Playground

As for the playground, we had three large open areas, one in the front and two in the back. One of the areas in the back of the school was a baseball diamond where the little league would practice in the summer, and which kids made use of during recess.  When baseball season came around, the older kids would play baseball. The school did have a few bats and a softball. Some kids would also bring their own ball and bat and everyone needed their own glove if they were going to play.

There was no playground equipment, however – no swings or slides, no see-saws or climbing gyms.  During recess, children would find ways to play together. Some days we brought our bags of marbles.  We younger kids would have fun shooting marbles, some of the big kids, though, played for keeps.  

We often organized games of chase, Simon Says, freeze tag and Red Rover. Freeze tag was always a fun innovation on the basic game of tag, and Red Rover required two teams, often involving kids from several grades. Each team would form a line, linking hands to form what was hoped to be an unbreachable link. One team would call out to the other, “Red Rover, Red Rover send _____ right over.” They would call out the name of a person on the opposing team. That person would then charge ahead and attempt to break through the line. If he broke through, he carried a person back to his/her team, if he failed to break through, he was assimilated into the opposing team.  

I wish I had a picture of the school where I spent those formative grade school years. While it was not a “little red schoolhouse,” having no playground equipment or city water, Jackson’s Gap Elementary in some respects did resemble the painting that hung on the wall of the first-grade classroom. We never played snap-the-whip, but we often played a similar game we called “sling train.” in that game we formed a long line with each one holding onto the hip pockets of the kid in front of us.  The kid in front would lead us running down the playground, taking twists and turns as kids gradually were slung to the side and onto the ground. Eventually, the teachers ruled that we could not play that game any longer because parents were complaining that kids were coming home with the hip pockets ripped off their jeans.

When the School Bell Rings

I mentioned at the outset that on my first day of school, Dad got me there before the bell rang. The school bell marked the beginning and the end of the school day it also marked the beginning of recess and the called us to return to class at the end of recess. Most people probably think of the school bell as that electric bell located somewhere on the walls of the school. At Jackson’s Gap, it was a handbell that was kept in the principal’s desk drawer. He would ring it in the hallway, and he would hold it outside the window to make sure everyone on the playground heard the bell. Often he would let a student ring the bell. One day, Walter Dreshler and I asked if we could ring the bell to end recess. As first-graders, that was an awesome thing, indeed!

Some of the older kids would sometimes think they could extend recess by hiding the bell. That tactic did not work, however. The Lion’s Club met at the school and they had a brass bell on a stand with a hammer that they would tap to call their meetings to order. When the mischievous ones hid the bell, the principal, Mr.Paul, went to the closet and took out the Lion’s Club bell. Two of the older girls set the bel in the window and pounded it with the hammer. We went up to the window and said, “Is that the bell?”

“Yes,” they told us, “this is the bell until we find the real one.” 

I’m just glad I wasn’t there when Mr. Paul found out who took the school bell. We heard stories about the paddle that man had in his desk drawer!

Our Learning Enrichments

In addition to no playground equipment, Jackson’s Gap Elementary had no library. Each classroom did have a corner reserved for books. Every two weeks, the bookmobile ran from the Tallapoosa County Library System to the school. Teachers would select books that they wanted for their classrooms until the bookmobile returned. During the summer, the bookmobile came to The Gap every two weeks for anyone in the community who wanted to check out a book. It would park in the Jackson’s Gap Baptist Church parking lot under the shade of the trees while people in the community came to make their selections. Dr. Seuss was among my favorite selections in first and second grade, especially Horton Hears a Who, and Horton Hatches the Egg.

Jackson’s Gap Elementary School was perhaps an anachronism in our time. It was a vestige of a time when a small schoolhouse and a small church were the center of community life in rural America.  After my first-grade year, the school had gone from eight grades to six grades. Word had it that the County School Superintendent wanted to shut the school down.  At the end of my fifth-grade year, our family moved into Dadeville, and the following year the school was closed. While we had limited resources, it was a supportive environment where we were able to learn the basic grammar school curriculum.

The school was, in keeping with the times, all white. As I have related my childhood stories of life in the segregated South, most of my stories have only a limited appearance of Black people. The reason for that is that our society was kept segregated so that there was very little interaction between white people and Black people in my childhood experience. For example, Miss Lindy, the cook for the lunchroom, was the only Black person we ever saw at school.

What I cannot tell you in my reminiscences here is what the school for Black children was like. I had no first-hand knowledge. It may be that they were bused on up the road to Dadeville which was four miles away. Council School served the Black community there. Jackson’s Gap Elementary may have seemed backward and limited in comparison to the school in the county seat of Dadeville. Compared to the learning environment that was offered to most Black children, however, we were still among the privileged class – we just didn’t know it.  

A rural Black school in Alabama

      Next week: Learning to Read – and Other Important Things

<Part 7, Breaking Ground  

         

                                                   Part 9, Learning to Read - and Other Important Things>     

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Images:
Top: "Snap-the-whip" (1872)
Artist: Winslow Homer 

Medium: Oil on Canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bottom: Black students in Alabama gather outside their segregated school, 1965. (Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos). Read about School Segregation in Alabama at Equal Justice Initiative.

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Growing Up under Southern Apartheid (Part 7)

Breaking Ground

Today I’m sharing a brief interlude in my childhood reflections. I remembered a poem I wrote several years ago recalling an early childhood event*. This one harks back to the time we lived in Wedowee, Ala. Dad always kept a vegetable garden, and our house in Wedowee had a large back yard that could accommodate a good-sized plot for tilling. Dad always had to hire someone to plow up the garden because he had no heavy farm equipment. He had a hoe, a rake, and a shovel with which he could plant and tend his garden once the ground was harrowed.

The first time he put a garden in and Mamma saw that red clay soil being turned up by the plow, she told Dad he would never grow anything in that poor dirt. Mamma grew up in south Alabama, Clarke Country, in the Black Belt Region – cotton country. She was used to seeing the rich black soil of South Alabama farms and she doubted the red clay of East Alabama.

Dad surprised her, though! His garden always flourished. He planted pole beans, squash, cucumber, butter peas and butter beans, and several prolific tomato vines. He could grow watermelon and cantaloupe, and he always had a few rows of corn and okra. Lord, could he grow okra. I’ll have to tell you about my okra experience sometime. Oh wait – you can read about it in my archives here.

On this particular occasion, he hired a Black man who had the most magnificent white mule I had ever seen. You can read the account in my poem which follows. It is a happy poem that also gives a brief glimpse into our life in the segregated South.

An Early Time

It was early morning.

There was a mist in the air

And dew on the ground.

The clover aroma of spring

Mingled with the scent of moist earth.

It was early morning

As I stepped out the back door

With sleepy eyes.

I was three years old.

At the edge of the yard

I saw a grand white mule

Standing in the springtime mist –

The largest animal I had ever seen.

Beside the mule

Was a dark-skinned man in denim overalls.

My father stood there with them

His laughter rippled the morning air.

I went running across the yard,

Shoes collecting dew,

Lungs sampling the damp air.

I had to see the great white beast.

He stood tall

Shoulders brimming with power,

Head proudly facing the day,

Subdued grunts and clouds of breath

Spewing from his large nostrils.

It was early morning

As I hastily made my way ahead.

Before I could reach the mythic beast

I heard a shout from behind.

“Stop!” cried my mother.

“That mule might kick you.”

I stopped.

Then I slowly edged forward.

How close would they let me get?

If only I could touch

That white behemoth.

It was early morning

And the rhythmic chore began.

A cadence of sound emerged

From leather straps, metal rings,

Wooden handles, steel plow,

Heavy grunts, and slow steady hoof-beats.

All moved together like a ship heading out of dock.

Cutting through the ground,

They left a red clay wake

As man and beast crossed the green clover field.

It was early morning

And an early time

When a three-year-old boy

Took more into his heart

Than he could realize.

He walked into a spring day

Humid with promise –

A powerful beast shrouded in mist,

The heavy earthy aromas,

A father laughing

And a mother warning of danger ahead.

< Part 6, Neighbors                               Part 8, School Days at the Rural Schoolhouse>

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* "An Early Time was first posted on my blog on April 13, 2010

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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.

~  ~  ~

< 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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