WHERE ARE YOU FROM?
How Eph dreaded that question. His normal response was always pleasantly misdirecting, especially when Devon people were doing the asking. “Florida,” he’d say. It wasn’t that his roots embarrassed him, but he didn’t want to be a curiosity, or, worse, an object of suspicion. And maybe when you got right down to it, he was a little self-conscious about it.
Florida wasn’t too far off, not really, since his childhood home was only forty miles north of the Panhandle, and a couple of times his family had vacationed down on the Gulf beaches. Life in the Panhandle wasn’t all that different from life in southern Alabama, so it was the whitest of lies. Floribama, some people called it. Also, he’d earned his Ph.D. in Tallahassee, at Florida State, so that established his Floridian bona fides.
Didn’t it?
Up here, when he said, “Florida,” people assumed he was from Boca or Naples or some other warm-weather outpost where Northeasterners always seemed to have in-laws. He did little to dispel these notions. Eph knew if he said he was from the postage-stamp town of Ashley, Alabama, he’d be treated as a lab specimen, some sort of wayward traveler from that other America, the one of tattoos and rednecks driving F-150s with gun racks. He’d be asked questions, ones oozing with fake sincerity, in an effort to “understand.”
Tell us what it’s really like.
He didn’t feel like being appointed Devon’s cultural “explainer,” like that guy who wrote Hillbilly Elegy. Besides, he’d worked hard to get here. Or was it that he’d worked hard to get away from Ashley? Maybe it was both.
Not much ever happened in Ashley, anyway, so there wasn’t much to tell. What passed for discourse were debates on the relative merits of John Deere and Allis-Chalmers, or maybe arguments over who would win the Auburn starting-quarterback job the next season. To this day, the town’s claim to fame is the world’s only monument to an agricultural pest. Eph had to admit it was the one story about Ashley he liked to tell. He’d shared it with D’Arcy, anyway.
The story went back to the time Eph’s family first settled there, around the turn of the last century, those boundless years of America’s adolescence. In 1898, the Alabama Midland Railway ran a spur behind Main Street, connecting the town to the world and setting off a flurry of commerce. The soil in Melcher County was rich and mineral laden, perfect for growing cotton to meet the growing nation’s insatiable demand, so Ashley farmers stayed busy. The Alabama Midland Railway carted away the town’s bounty, while the venerable Brink’s corporation arrived with cash and bearer certificates, which were immediately deposited in the Merchant & Planters Bank. The town prospered.
In the summer of 1915, farmers first noticed an unfamiliar insect in the fields, an ugly-looking black thing with a mottled shell and extended proboscis. Some said it came from Mexico, which turned out later to have been the case. Few gave it much thought as it wasn’t a known pest, but the boll weevil proved itself an ambitious consumer of cotton and soon, like some biblical plague, was destroying cotton crops all over Melcher County. In a panic, farmers put entire fields to the torch, sort of an agricultural chemotherapy. It did little good. The damn things would just burrow into the soil until it was safe to come out.
Facing ruin, the town fathers gathered and made a dramatic decision: they would diversify Ashley’s crop base, growing peanuts, tobacco, even indigo. The boll weevil was voracious but picky, and that was its weakness. Word from other counties was that the pest didn’t much care for anything besides cotton, so growing other crops was the solution.
While this may seem an obvious course of action to the modern observer, not so in those days. Cotton had brought wealth to Melcher County, and Ashley’s farmers knew how to grow it and grow it well. Peanuts and the like required different growing and harvesting practices, and besides, who would grow which crop? Folks were just used to a certain way of doing things, and change bred uncertainty. Uncertainty bred fear. Some thought they could ride the infestation out, and they argued the point with vigor. In the end, though, the sight of charred fields was more frightening than the prospect of learning new crop techniques, and the town pushed forward.
The plan worked with surprising speed, and before long Ashley was prospering even more than before the pestilence. In 1919, to commemorate what they’d been through, the town commissioned a statue of a goddess holding aloft an oversize boll weevil. They erected the damn thing right in the middle of the town square. Passers-through took it as a tongue-in-cheek gesture, but it was hard to imagine the God-fearing folks of Ashley putting up an expensive statue as an ironic gag. Little did they know that a century later it would be all the town was known for, even if this renown would never extend much beyond the confines of Melcher County. Still, the Boll Weevil Monument stands as an eternal reminder to all how Ashley withstood adversity.
So that’s what it’s like. We build statues to insects.
Eph seldom dwelled on his own history in Ashley. He was the youngest of three, born to Millie and Big Mike Russell. By that time, Ashley was just another rural backwater, its glory years of wealth, industry, and cleverness decades behind it. Eph’s family owned a farm—growing soybeans and peanuts, mostly. They got by, but only just. There was little money for anything but the basics.
Eph’s early years were monotonous. When not in school, he was helping Big Mike and his siblings, Jack and Ellie, on the farm. He knew from an early age it was not his calling. Any spare time he had was spent reading. This did little to endear him to the neighborhood kids, and Big Mike thought it was a waste.
Still, at times in his younger years Eph valued the sameness of it all. Emerson—one of Eph’s favorites—called consistency the “hobgoblin of little minds,” but Eph suspected Emerson wasn’t talking about kids. For kids, change is always unsettling. Sure, the small things, the things that nudge at the order of things, those you got over. Things such as that time when Eph was eight and his mom announced the family would be eating only healthy food from then on. What did this mean for Tater Tots? Spaghetti night? Or a year later, when his pet rabbit, Jedi, died. He was almost as old as Eph when he went to rabbit heaven, and the family buried him out back with a little ceremony. Eph even said a few words. He couldn’t imagine the world without Jedi, but only for a few days.
Then there’s big change, the kind that sends a life on a different track—the kind that leads to Devon University instead of a soybean farm. That’s a different story, one that comes from a knock at the door.