Being as impermanent as the wind, constantly moving, I lost track for thirty-five years of my daddy’s side of the family. I remember nothing specific of my paternal grandparents, and my paternal aunts and uncles remained strangers until I was grown. It was not their fault, nor was it mine or anyone else’s. It just happened that way.
I saw a good deal of the kin on my mama’s side. My Uncle Alton, her brother, was as much as any other man a father to me. He’s dead now, but I will always carry a memory of him in my heart as vivid as any memory I have.
I was sitting on the steps of his front porch just after I got out of the Marine Corps in 1956, when I was twenty-one years old, watching him smoking one hand-rolled Prince Albert cigarette after another and spitting between his feet into the yard. He was so reticent that if he said a sentence ten words long, it seemed as though he had been talking all afternoon.
He was probably the closest friend of the longest standing that my daddy ever had. And I remember sitting there on the steps, looking up at him in his rocking chair and talking about my daddy, saying that I thought the worst thing that had happened in my life was his early death, that never having known him, I knew that I would, one way or another, be looking for him the rest of my life.
“What is it you want to know?” he said.
“I don’t know what I want to know,” I said. “Anything. Everything.”
“Cain’t know everything,” he said. “And anything won’t help.”
“I think it might,” I said. “Anything’ll help me see him better than I see him now. At least I’d have some notion of him.”
He watched me for a moment with his steady gray eyes looking out from under the brim of the black felt hat he always wore and said: “Let’s you and me take us a ride.”
He started for the pickup truck parked in the lane beyond the yard and I followed. As was his way, he didn’t say where we were going and I didn’t ask. It was enough for me to be riding with him over the flat dirt roads between walls of black pine trees on the way to Alma. He lived then about three miles from the Little Satilla River which separates Bacon from Appling County and very near two farms that I had lived on as a boy. We drove the twelve miles to the paved road that led into town, but shortly after we turned into it, he stopped at a little grocery store with Pepsi-Cola and root beer and Redman Chewing Tobacco and snuff signs nailed all over it and two gas pumps out front in the red clay lot where several pickup trucks were parked.
We got down and went in. Some men were sitting around in the back of the store on nail kegs and ladder-back chairs or squatting on their heels, apparently doing nothing very much but smoking and chewing and talking.
One of them came to the front where we had stopped by the counter. “How you, Alton?” he said.
Uncle Alton said: “We all right. Everything all right with you, Joe?”
“Jus fine, I reckon. What can I git you?”
“I guess you can let us have two of them cold Co-Colers.”
The man got two Cokes out of the scarred red box behind him and Uncle Alton paid him. We went on back to where the men were talking. They all spoke to Uncle Alton in the brief and easy way of men who had known each other all their lives.
They spoke for a while about the weather, mostly rain, and about other things that men who live off the land speak of when they meet, seriously, but with that resigned tone in their voice that makes you know they know they’re speaking only to pass the time because they have utterly no control over what they’re talking about: weevils in cotton, screwworms in stock, the government allotment of tobacco acreage, the fierce price of commercial fertilizer.
We hadn’t been there long before Uncle Alton said casually, as though it were something that had just occurred to him: “This is Ray Crews’ boy. Name Harry.”
The men turned and looked at me for a long considered time and it again seemed the most natural thing in the world for them to now begin talking about my daddy, who had been dead for more than twenty years. I didn’t know it then and didn’t even know it or realize it for a long time afterward, but what Uncle Alton had done, because of what I’d said to him on the porch, was take me out in the truck to talk with men who had known my father.
Maybe the men themselves knew it, or maybe they simply liked my father in such a way that the mention of his name was enough to bring back stories and considerations of people who were kin to him. Without making any special thing out of it they began to talk about those days when daddy was a boy, about how many children were in his family, and then about how families were not as big now as they once had been and from that went on to talk about my grandma’s sister, Aunt Belle, who had fourteen children, all of whom lived to be grown, and finally to the time one of Aunt Belle’s boys, Orin Bennett, was killed at a liquor still by a government man.
“Well,” one of them said, “it’s a notion most people have nowadays moonshinin was easy work, but it weren’t.”
“Moonshinin was hard work. Real hard work.”
“Most men I known back in them days,” said Uncle Alton, “made moonshine because it weren’t nothing else to do. They’as working at the only thing it was to work at. I feel like most folks who make shine even today do it for the same reason.”
“I’ll tell you sumpin else,” Joe said. “I never known men back then makin shine that thought it was anythin wrong with it. It was a livin, the only livin they had.”
One of them looked at me and said: “It wasn’t much whiskey made in your daddy’s family, though. I don’t know the ins and outs of how Orin come to be killed up at that there still. But your granddaddy didn’t hold with none of his own younguns making whiskey or bein anywhere around where it was made. Not ole Dan Crews didn’t. He’d take a drink, drunk his full share, I’d say, but he never thought makin it was proper work for a man.”
“I’ve made some and I’ve drunk some, and I’d shore a heap ruther drink it than make it.”
Just as natural as spitting, a bottle of bonded whiskey out of which about a quarter had been drunk appeared from somewhere behind one of the chairs. The cap was taken off. The man who took it off wiped the neck of the bottle on his jumper sleeve, took a sip, and handed it to the man squatting beside him. The bottle passed. Uncle Alton, God love him, didn’t have any of the whiskey. Even then his stomach, which finally killed him, was beginning to go bad on him.
The man who had done most of the talking since we came in finally looked up at me and said: “It’ll take a lot of doing, son, to fill your daddy’s shoes. He was much of a man.”
I said: “I didn’t think to fill’m. It’s trouble enough trying to fill the ones I’m standing in.”
For whatever reason they seemed to like that. One of them took a hit out of the bottle and leaned back on his nail keg and said: “Lemme tell you a story, son. It was a feller Fletchum, Tweek we called’m, Tweek Fletchum, and he musta been about twenty-seven years old then, but even that young he already had the name of makin the best whiskey in the county. Makin whiskey and mean enough to bite a snake to boot.” He stopped long enough to shake his head over how mean ole Tweek was and also used the pause to bubble the whiskey bottle a couple of times. “Me and you daddy was hired out plowin for Luke Tate and one evenin after we took the mules out we decided to go on back there to Tweek’s place to where his still was at. We weren’t nothing but yearlin boys then, back before he went off to work down in Flardy, we couldn’t a been much more’n sixteen years old, but we would touch a drop or two of whiskey from time to time.
“We didn’t do a thing but cut back through the field and cross the branch and then up Ten Mile Creek past that place your daddy later tended for one of the Boatwright boys. When we got to Tweek’s, his wife, Sarah, pretty thing, a Turner before she married Tweek, she seen us comin and met us at the door and said Tweek was back at the still and me’n your daddy started back there to where he was at. Tweek didn’t keep nothin at his house but bonded whiskey an that was just for show in case some govment man come nosin around, so we went on back to the still and while we’as kickin along there in the dust, we decided to play us a little trick on Tweek. I cain’t remember who thought it up, but it seem like to me it’as your daddy because he was ever ready for some kind of foolishness, playin tricks and such. That ain’t sayin a thing agin him, it was just his nature. Coulda been me, though, that thought it up. Been known for such myself.
“Anyhow, that still of Tweek’s was set right slap up agin Big Harrikin Swamp. Out in front of the still was the damnedest wall of brambles and briers you ever seen in your life. Musta been twenty acres of them thins, some of’m big as a scrub oak. And it was that suckhole swamp in back of the still. Brambles in front and waist-deep swamp full of moccasins in back, with a little dim woods road runnin in from one side and then runnin out the othern.
“Your daddy went around and come up the woods road from one side, and I went around and come up the other. Everybody was having trouble them days with that govment man come in here from Virginia or sommers like that and given everybody so much trouble before Lummy finally killed him, but in them days, Tweek and everybody else was having trouble with ’m, so when I was sure your daddy had time to git on the other side, I got up close to the still in a clump of them gallberry bushes and cupped my mouth like this, see here, and shouted into my shirt: ‘STAY RIGHT THERE!’
“Tweek he was stirrin him some mash, but when I hollered, he taken and thrown down the paddle and jerked his head up like a dog cuttin a rank spoor in the woods. He tuck off runnin down the road the other way, his shirttail standin out flat behind him. I didn’t do a thing but cup my mouth agin like this here and holler: ‘HEAD’M OVER THERE!’ And a course he was runnin straight at your daddy. He waited till ole Tweek got real close and then hollered: ‘I GOT’M OVER HERE!’
“Tweek come up slidin soon’s he known the road was closed on him at both ends and he tuck him a long look at the Harrikin Swamp behind him and then he tuck’m a long look at them brambles in front of him. And I got to credit ole Tweek, it didn’t take’m but about three seconds to make his mind up. He put his head down and charged them briers and brambles.
“We heard’m screamin and thrashin around out there for what musta been fifteen minutes. It was as funny a thing as I ever hope to see, and damn if me and your daddy didn’t bout break a rib settin there sippin some mash Tweek’d more’n likely run off that mornin, all the time listenin to Tweek out there screamin and tearin through the brambles.
“Got through and went on back up there to the house and Sarah said, ‘No, Tweek ain’t come in,’ so we set down on the front porch swing to finish off that little mason fruit jar of shine we’d taken from the still. Well, it was damn nigh dark and we’d moved into the kitchen where we’as settin at the table, a kerosene lamp between us, eatin sausage and syrup that Sarah given us, when what do we hear but this te-nine-see scratchin at the back door.
“Sarah opened it and I could see Tweek standin down in the yard, but he didn’t see us. He was cut from lap to lip, nothin but blood and scratches on his face and neck.
“‘Sarah,’ says Tweek, ‘put a little sumpin in a sack to eat. Goddamned govment man’s after me.’
“She says, ‘Tweek, that weren’t no govment man. Them’s just Ray and Tom that. . . .”
“But we didn’t hear the rest of it cause we heard him beller like a bull and seen he was going for the shotgun. Onliest thing that saved us was he had bird shot in it and maybe on account of it was gitten on toward black dark. But he thrown down on us as we’as goin out the fence gate. Your daddy didn’t catch none of it, but I’m carryin sign to this day.”
He unbuckled his galluses and pulled up his work shirt. His back was full of little purple holes, like somebody had set it afire and then put the fire out with an ice pick.
Uncle Alton and I stayed around for three or four hours talking and drinking—or at least I was drinking a little—and listening to stories and talking about my daddy and his people.
I’d heard the moonshine story sitting around the fireplaces of a dozen different farms. This was the first time I’d ever heard that daddy was there when Tweek had two years of his growth scared out of him, but this was also the first time I ever had the storyteller lift his shirt and show me the sign of the bird shot. Wounds or scars give an awesome credibility to a story.
Listening to them talk, I wondered what would give credibility to my own story if, when my young son grows to manhood, he has to go looking for me in the mouths and memories of other people. Who would tell the stories? A few motorcycle riders, bartenders, editors, half-mad karateka, drunks, and writers. They are scattered all over the country, but even if he could find them, they could speak to him with no shared voice from no common ground. Even as I was gladdened listening to the stories of my daddy, an almost nauseous sadness settled in me, knowing I would leave no such life intact. Among the men with whom I have spent my working life, university professors, there is not one friend of the sort I was listening to speak of my daddy there that day in the back of the store in Bacon County. Acquaintances, but no friends. For half of my life I have been in the university, but never of it. Never of anywhere, really. Except the place I left, and that of necessity only in memory. It was in that moment and in that knowledge that I first had the notion that I would someday have to write about it all, but not in the convenient and comfortable metaphors of fiction, which I had been doing for years. It would have to be done naked, without the disguising distance of the third person pronoun. Only the use of I, lovely and terrifying word, would get me to the place where I needed to go.
In the middle of the afternoon, Uncle Alton and I left the store and drove out to New Lacy, a little crossroads village where Uncle Elsie and Aunt Gertie lived with their house full of children until Uncle Elsie died. Aunt Gertie was my mama’s sister and Uncle Elsie spoke in tongues.
We sat on a little porch with a man who must have been old when daddy died. His eyes were solid and cloud-colored, and his skin so wrinkled and folded it looked like it might have been made for a man twice his size. His mouth was toothless and dark and worked continuously around a plug of tobacco as he told us about chickens with one wing and chickens with one leg gimping about over the first farm my daddy worked on shares.
“Mule was bad to bite chickens,” he said, sending a powerful stream of tobacco juice into the yard, apparently without even stopping to purse his old wrinkled lips. “Been your daddy’s mule he mought woulda killed it. Horse mule, he was, name of Sheddie.”
The old man had withered right down to bone, but his mind was as sharp as a boy’s.
“Workin shares like he was, Sheddie come with the crop. But he was bad to bite chickens like I said. Chicken’d hop up on the feed trough to peck a little corn and Sheddie’d just take him a bite. Sometimes he’d git a wing, sometimes a leg. Sometimes the whole damn chicken.”
He began to cough and he stopped to spray the porch with black spit.
“Ray he got tired of seein all them chickens hobblin about the place with a wing or a leg missin. So he cured that Sheddie, he did.”
Daddy, the old man said, killed a chicken and hung it up to ripen. When it was good and rotten, he blindfolded Sheddie, put on a halter with a jawbreaker bit, and fastened that stinking chicken to the bit with hay wire. It was a full day before the chicken came completely off the bit it had been wired to. Sheddie was never known to bite again. He had lost his taste for chicken.
Before we got through that afternoon, Uncle Alton and I had been all over Bacon County and never once had he said to anybody: “Here is Ray Crews’ son and he never knew his daddy and he wants to hear about him.” And yet, somehow, he contrived to have the stories told. We finally went back to his house a little after dark and he never mentioned that afternoon again to me nor I to him, but I’ll always be grateful for it.
It was through his friendship with my Uncle Alton that daddy first took notice of my mama, whose name is Myrtice. I suppose it was inevitable that he eventually should, because in the same shoebox with his pictures—the pictures of him playing the dandy with half the girls of the county—is a picture of mama just before she turned sixteen. She is sitting in a pea patch, wearing a print dress. And even in the faded black-and-white photograph, you can tell she is round and pink and pretty as she smiles in a fetching way under a white bonnet.
As pretty as she was, though, God knows there were enough children in the family for her to get lost in the crowd. Besides Uncle Alton and mama there was Dorsey, who died when he was four years old from diphtheria. Then there was Aunt Ethel and Aunt Olive and Leon, who died of pneumonia when he was two, and Aunt Gertie and Uncle Frank and Uncle Harley and Aunt Lottie and Aunt Bessie. Grandma Hazelton, whose name was the same as Grandma Crews, Lilly, gave birth to children over a period of twenty years. Nine of them lived to be grown and married. As I write this today, three are still living.
I think he really noticed her for the first time the day her daddy, Grandpa Hazelton, almost killed a man with his walking stick. My daddy had come over to their place for the very reason that he knew there was going to be trouble. He could have saved himself the trip because as it turned out, Grandpa handled the whole thing very nicely and with considerable dispatch.
Uncle Alton, who had just turned seventeen at the time, had managed to get in a row with a man named Jessup over a shoat hog.
“Pa,” Uncle Alton said, “Jessup says he’s coming over here today and he’s gone bring his friends with him.”
Grandpa Hazelton was never a man to talk much, probably because he didn’t hear very well. He said: “He ain’t comin on the place and causin no trouble.”
But they did, later that day, three grown men. They stood in the dooryard and called Uncle Alton out, saying they had brought a cowwhip and meant to mark him with it.
Grandpa Hazelton said: “You men git off my place. You on my land and Alton here ain’t nothing but a boy. You all git off the place.”
Daddy and Uncle Alton were standing on the porch with Grandpa when he said it. The three men, all of whom had been drinking, said they’d go when they got ready, but first they had business to take care of and they meant to do it.
There were no other words spoken. Grandpa Hazelton came off the porch carrying the heavy hickory walking stick he always had with him, a stick he carried years before he actually needed it. He hit the man who had spoken between the eyes with the stick, hit him so hard that his palate dropped in his mouth.
The two men carried their friend, his dropped palate bleeding and his tongue half choking him, to the wagon they had come in and headed off toward town for the doctor. Grandpa followed them all the way to the wagon, beating them about the head and shoulders with his stick.
He stood in the lane shaking with rage and told them: “You come back on the place, I got some buckshot for you.”
In that time, a man’s land was inviolate, and you were always very careful about what you said to another man if you were on his land. A man could shoot you with impunity if you were on his property and he managed to get you dead enough so you couldn’t tell what actually happened. The sheriff would come, look around, listen to the man whose land the killing took place on, and then go back to town. That was that.
In the commotion of the fight, the whole Hazelton family was finally on the porch, and there—daddy’s blood still high and hot from watching the old man’s expert use of his stick—was my mother standing pink and in full flower under her thin cotton housedress. In that moment, any number of lives took new and irreversible direction.
Once he saw her, he didn’t waste any time. Four months later, in November, they were married. She was sixteen, he twenty-three. Immediately there took place in him a change that has been taking place in men ever since they got out of their caves. As soon as he got himself a wife, he took off that white linen suit and put on a pair of overalls. He got out of that Model T Ford and put it up on blocks under Uncle Major’s cotton shed because he didn’t have enough money to drive it. He drove a mule and wagon instead. And he went to work with a vengeance. More than one person has told me that it wasn’t his heart that killed him, that he simply worked himself to death.
Still, he must have cut a fine figure that blustery, freezing day in November of 1928, when he took my mother down to Ten Mile Missionary Baptist Church and married her in a small service attended only by blood kin. They were joined together by Preacher Will Davis, who two years earlier had baptized my mother in Ten Mile Creek, which is just down behind Ten Mile Missionary Baptist Church. They went to the church that day in a mule and wagon, as did most of the other people who came, and after they were married, they spent their wedding night at Uncle Major Eason’s house. Uncle Major would one day own the livestock barn in Alma and become known as one of the best mule traders in Georgia. Uncle Major’s first wife had died early and he was then married to my mama’s sister Olive.
After spending the night under Uncle Major’s tin roof in a deep feather bed, with the ground frozen outside, they got up the next morning and, still in a mule and wagon, went to the first farm they were to live on. Daddy had gone from being a young dandy in a white suit driving a Model T Ford to a married man in overalls sharecropping for a man named Luther Carter. They farmed the place on shares, which meant Luther Carter furnished the seed and the mules and the fertilizer for them to make the crop and at the end of the year they kept half of what they made.
In that little sharecropper’s house of Luther Carter’s they lived with Uncle John Carter and Aunt Ora, who was daddy’s sister. Uncle John Carter was no kin to Luther Carter, but they were in Cartertown, where most people had that last name. The house had a wooden roof that leaked badly, no screens and wooden windows. There were two ten-by-ten bedrooms and a shotgun hall that ran the length of the house to the kitchen. They put up a partition in the middle of the kitchen, and Uncle John and Aunt Ora had one room to live in and the use of half the partitioned kitchen. Daddy and mama had the same arrangement on their side. Mama had a Home Comfort, Number 8, wood stove to cook on. There was a hot-water reservoir and four eyes on the cast-iron top of the stove, but it was a tiny thing, hardly more than three feet wide and two feet deep.
They brought to the house as wedding presents: a frying pan, an iron wash pot, four plates and as many knives and forks and spoons, an iron bedstead complete with slats and mattress, four quilts, four sheets, and a pillow. Daddy built everything else: a little cook table, a slightly larger table to eat off of, with a bench on each side instead of chairs, a chest of drawers, and an ironing board made from a plank wrapped in striped bed ticking. It was almost a year before they got two flatirons, one of which would be heated on the hearthstone while the other was being used.
The farm had sixty acres in cultivation, and so Luther Carter furnished Uncle John and daddy each a mule. Thirty acres was as much as one man and one mule could tend, and even then they had to step smart from first sun to last to do it. They had no cows or hogs and no smokehouse, and that first year they lived—as we did for much of my childhood—on fatback, grits, tea without ice, and biscuits made from flour and water and lard.
It was on the Luther Carter place that mama—with a midwife in attendance—lost her first child in the middle of August 1929, the year following their marriage. The baby was not born dead, but nearly so, its liver on the outside of its body. Its life lasted only a matter of minutes and mama didn’t look at it but once before it was washed and dressed in a cotton gown and put in a coffin not much bigger than a breadbox and hauled in a wagon to Ten Mile Missionary Baptist Church, where it was buried in an unmarked grave. I don’t know how wide the practice was or how it originated, but if a child was lost in miscarriage or born dead, or died nearly immediately from some gross deformity, there was never a marker put at its head.
I’ve tried to imagine what my daddy’s thoughts must have been when the child was lost. He had told mama what happened down in the Everglades and in the town of Arcadia, and I know the death of his firstborn son must have hurt him profoundly. It was commonly believed then in Bacon County, and to some extent still is, that a miscarriage or a baby born dead or deformed was the consequence of some taint in the blood or taint in the moral life of the parents. I know daddy must have keenly felt all over again the crippled pleasure of that night so many months before under the palm-thatched chickee with the Seminole girl.
Maybe such thoughts are what drove him to work so hard. The sun always rose on him in the field, and he was still in the field when it set. He worked harder than the mule he plowed, did everything a man could do to bring something out of the sorry soil he worked, but that first year the crop failed. What this meant was that in August at the end of the crop year, he got half of nothing. They stayed alive on what they could borrow against the coming crop and what little help they could find from their people, who had not done well that year either.
Nearly everybody in the county had done worse that year than any of them could remember in a long time. Part of the reason, and probably the most important, was tobacco. Tobacco had come into the county as a money crop not many years before, and though eventually it turned into a blessing of sorts, for a long time it brought a series of economic disasters. It was a delicate crop, much dependent upon the weather. Most of the farmers were not yet skilled enough in all that was necessary to bring in a good crop: sowing the seeds in beds, transplanting from the beds to the field at the right time, proper amounts of fertilizer (too much would burn it up), suckering it, worming it, cropping it, stringing it, and cooking it in barns so that it turned out golden and valuable instead of dark and worthless.
Before tobacco came into Bacon County, the farmers were self-sufficient in a way they were never to be again. In the days before tobacco they grew everything they needed and lived pretty well. Since they were too far south to grow wheat, they had to buy flour. But almost everything else they really wanted, they could grow. Grandpa Hazelton even grew rice on a piece of his low-lying land that had enough water to sustain that crop.
But tobacco took so much of their time and energy and worry that they stopped growing many of the crops they had grown before. Consequently, they had to depend upon the money from the tobacco to buy what they did not grow. A failed tobacco crop then was a genuine disaster that affected not just the individual farmer but the economy of the entire county.
Even if the tobacco crop was successful, all it meant, with rare exceptions, was for one brief moment at the end of summer they had money in their hands before they had to give it over to whoever supplied the fertilizer to grow the tobacco and the poison to kill the worms, and to those who helped harvest and cook it, and a hundred other expenses that ate up the money and put them right back in debt again. Tobacco money was then and is now an illusion, and growing tobacco became very quickly an almost magical rite they kept participating in over and over again, hoping that they would have a particularly good crop one year and they would be able to keep some of the money and not have to give it all away.
But the tobacco crop was not successful that first year on Luther Carter’s place or anywhere else in the county, and daddy, along with everybody else, was desperate for money. On top of money worries, there was great pressure from Grandpa and Grandma Hazelton for daddy and mama to move back to the home place and live with them. Daddy didn’t want to do it out of simple pride. Even though he was already a sharecropper, he didn’t want to move in with and work for his wife’s parents. He had never gotten along very well with Grandpa Hazelton, a man who liked to give much advice and do little work.
Grandpa spent most of his time reading the three newspapers he subscribed to, newspapers brought by the mailman. It didn’t bother him that the newspapers were always two or three days out of date; he read them all from the first page to the last, staying up until the small hours of the morning with a kerosene lamp beside him, all the while taking little sips out of a mason fruit jar full of moonshine which he kept on the mantelpiece over the fireplace. He didn’t get drunk; he just liked to have little sips while he was awake.
He stopped only long enough to look about now and then to see if anybody was about to do something. If they were, he would explain in great and careful detail just how they should do it. He would do this whether he knew anything about the task at hand or not. Then he would go back to his newspaper.
Daddy was too proud and stubborn and independent for such an arrangement to work. But his wife was the youngest child of the family, still only seventeen years old. She had just lost a baby and the crops had failed, and so, against his better judgment, he went to live with his in-laws.
It was a total and unrelieved disaster that came to the point of crisis, strangely enough, over biscuits one night when they were all sitting at the supper table. Daddy looked up and saw Grandpa Hazelton smiling down the table at him.
Daddy said: “Something the matter?”
Since the old man was bad to bristle and bark himself, he said: “Is it look to be something the matter?”
“What you laughing at?”
“I ain’t laughing.”
“I seen it.”
The old man said: “A man cain’t tell me in my own house I was laughing.”
Daddy said: “You was. And it was because of them biscuits.”
“I don’t laugh at biscuits, boy. I ain’t crazy yet, even if it’s some that think I am.”
“You was laughing at how many I et. Was you counting, too?”
Daddy didn’t have a very thick skin, and one of the things he was touchy about was how much he ate. Just a little over a month before his run-in with the old man, he was at a church picnic and Frank Porter, a boy from Coffee County, said something about him being Long Hungry, which to the people in that time was an insult. To be Long Hungry meant you were a glutton. A hog at the trough. So Daddy invited Frank Porter—since they were at a church and couldn’t settle it there—to meet him the next day on a scrub oak ridge separating Coffee from Bacon.
The next morning at sunup the two men met, daddy and the man who had insulted him, up in the middle of a little stand of blackjack oak on a sandy ridge full of gopher holes and rattlesnake nests. They had each of them brought several of their friends as overseers of the fight, or rather their friends had insisted on coming to make sure that no knives or axes or guns got in the way and resulted in one or both of their deaths.
They set to and fought until noon, quit, went home, ate, patched up as best they could, and came back and fought until sundown. They didn’t fight the whole time. By mutual consent and necessity, they took time out to rest. While they were resting, their friends fought. Those that were there said it had been a real fine day. A little bloody, but a fine day. For years after the fight, time was often measured by farmers in both counties by the day the fight took place.
“It weren’t no more’n two months after Ray and Frank met up on the line.”
“That girl of mine was born three months to the day before Frank and Ray had the fight.”
And sitting there now at the supper table still smarting from being called Long Hungry and still carrying sign on his back and chest and head from the fight with Frank Porter, he could not bear what he knew he saw in grandpa’s face.
He stood up from the table and said to mama: “Myrtice, git your things. We leavin.”
Grandpa said: “Where you going to?”
Daddy stopped just long enough to say, “I don’t know where I’m going. It’s lots of places I could go. What you don’t understand, old man, is if I didn’t have anyplace to go, I’d go anyway.”
But he had a place to go and he knew it. Uncle Alton had recently been married to a lady named Eva Jenkins and they were sharecropping themselves for Jess Boatwright. Summer was coming on and all the crops had been laid by, which meant they’d been plowed the last time and all that remained was the harvest. Daddy put mama on the wagon seat beside him and started the long slow ride over the dirt roads in the dark to offer Uncle Alton a proposition which in his heart he didn’t believe Uncle Alton would take. Since he was sharecropping for grandpa, he meant to trade crops.
“We got to swap,” he said when Uncle Alton came to the door.
“Swap what?” Uncle Alton said.
“You take my crop and I’ll take yours. You and Eva go and live with your daddy, cause I cain’t stand it. Me and Myrtice’ll come live here.”
Daddy told him what had happened, and Uncle Alton never questioned it, knowing as he did how his daddy was. Also, daddy was his best friend and mama his baby sister. He knew daddy would never consent to going back after leaving in the middle of the night that way. They had to live somewhere. There were no options.
“We’ll swap even,” Uncle Alton said.
“I ought to give you something to boot,” daddy said. “You got ten acres more’n me.”
Uncle Alton said: “We’ll swap even.”
And they did. It made quite a noise in the county. Nobody had ever heard of such a thing. Some of the old folks still talk to this day about that trade, about how daddy and mama moved into the house on the Jess Boatwright place and Uncle Alton and Aunt Eva went over to live with Grandpa Hazelton.
Daddy never set foot in grandpa’s house again as long as he lived. He would allow mama to go and visit and after my brother and I were born to take us with her.
After they finished gathering the crop, which was good enough to let them get far enough out of debt to borrow on the next crop, they rented the Jess Boatwright place for one year. But as the world seems to go sometimes when a man’s got his back right up against the wall, the tobacco crop that year was so sorry daddy couldn’t even sell it, and he ended by putting it in the mule stable instead.
Cotton that year was selling for three cents a pound and you could buy a quarter of beef for four cents a pound. It was 1931. The rest of the country was just beginning to feel the real hurt of the Great Depression, but it had been living in Bacon County for years. Some folks said it had always been there.
But in that year two good things did happen. On the ninth of July, mama gave birth to a healthy baby, who was named after daddy, Ray, but who has always been called Hoyet. The other thing that happened was that daddy somehow managed to buy a mare. A mare, not a mule. Her name was Daisy, and she was so mean that daddy was the only one in the county who could put a bridle on her, much less work her to a plow or wagon. It was the first draft animal he’d owned, and he was almost as proud of the mare as he was of his son.
As mean as she was, Daisy pulled a fine wagon and even a better plow if you could control her. As it turned out, daddy could control her. He had her respect and she had his. They knew what to expect from one another. He knew dead solid certain that she would kick his head off if she got the chance. And she knew just as surely that he would beat her to her knees with a singletree—the iron bar on a plow or wagon to which the trace chains are hooked—if she did not cooperate.
It sounds like a terrible thing to talk about, hitting a mare between the ears with a piece of iron, but it was done not only out of necessity but also out of love. A farmer didn’t mistreat his draft animals. People in Bacon County always said that a man who would mistreat his mules would mistreat his family. But it was necessary for daddy and Daisy to come to some understanding before they could do the work that was proper to both of them. And whatever was necessary to that understanding had to be done. Without that understanding, there could be no respect, to say nothing of love. For a man and an animal to work together from sunup to dark, day in and day out, there ought to be love. How else could either of them bear it?
Still, it was unusual for him to have a mare instead of a mule. Horses and mares were playthings. Mules were the workers. Mules bought the baby’s shoes and put grits on the table.
I never remember seeing anybody plow a horse in Bacon County, and it wasn’t because mules were cheaper than horses. They weren’t. Daddy got Daisy for $60. A good young mule even in the depth of the Depression would have cost him $200. So it was not because of cost that farmers plowed mules instead of horses; it was because horses have no stamina in front of a turnplow breaking dirt a foot deep. Worse, a horse doesn’t care where he puts his feet. A mule puts his foot down exactly where he means to put it. A mule will walk all day, straight as a plumb line, setting his feet down only inches from young corn, corn that might be less than a foot high, and he’ll never step on a plant. A horse walks all over everything. Unless, that is, you can come to some understanding with him, which most men did not seem to be able to do. But daddy made a sweet working animal out of Daisy, and she was ready, if not always willing, to do whatever was required of her. In the shoebox of pictures, there is one of my brother when he was only four years old sitting on Daisy bareback. Nobody is holding her rein and she is standing easy as the lady she became under my daddy’s firm, gentle, and dangerous hand.
Maybe it was because of the crops failing or the trouble they’d had with Grandpa Hazelton, but mama remembers the house at the Jess Boatwright place as the worst they ever lived in. It was made out of notched logs, but instead of being mud-sealed, it was board-sealed, which meant the wind had a free way with it in the winter. My brother had a case of double pneumonia that year and almost died. There was no smokehouse, so the little bit of meat they could come by was cured by hanging in the sun during the day and then putting it in the shed at night. They also put some of it in stone jugs of brine to preserve it, but while meat never spoiled in a jug of brine, it took real courage and a certain desperation to eat through all that salt.
But luck fortunately comes in two flavors: good as well as bad. And some good luck came their way at the end of the second year on the Jess Boatwright place. My Grandma Hazelton gave them 120 acres of land. What wealth there was in the Hazelton family at that time came through my grandma. Grandpa Hazelton brought very little to the marriage and what little he brought got away from him somehow while he read his three newspapers every day. But Grandma Hazelton’s daddy left her a big piece of land and they—she and grandpa—built the house they lived in out of the sale of part of it. But there was a good bit left, and because mama was the youngest in the family, and because of the tragic circumstances of her firstborn child, and maybe also to try somehow to make up for daddy and mama having to trade crops with Uncle Alton and move out of the house in the middle of the year, she made the land a gift outright, and they went to live on it.
But even good luck rarely comes made out of whole cloth, and theirs had several pretty ragged places in it. For starters, none of the land was in cultivation. It was nothing but pine trees and palmetto thickets and stands of gallberry bushes and dog fennel. Worse than that, if there can be anything worse than a farmer with no land he can farm, there was no house on it, no building of any kind. There was nothing for daddy to do but build one.
And he did. Uncle Randal Jordan and one of my daddy’s good friends, Cadger Barnes, helped him. Daddy paid them a wage of a quarter a day. None of the trees on the land they’d been given were big enough to use, so Cadger, who had a heavy stand of big pine on his land, gave daddy enough trees to build the house. And the three of them, using crosscut saws, felled the trees and snaked the logs over to the place with Daisy, and then they cut the trees into lengths they could split for boards. There was no money for a sawmill, so with wedges and mallets and axes they split the pine by hand into boards.
Once it was finished you could smell the turpentine out of that green pine house from a mile away. The whole house cost $50 to build. Mama planted a cedar tree out in the front yard the day they moved in. It was the house in which I would be born. The house is gone now, but I stood in the shade of that cedar tree four months ago.
The first year they were there daddy cleared ten acres for cultivation. The second year he cleared another ten. He and mama did it together with an ax and a saw and a grubbing hoe and Daisy. Daisy pulled what she could from the ground. What she couldn’t pull out, mama and daddy dug out. What they couldn’t dig out, they burned out. There were a few people, very few, who could afford dynamite to blow stumps out; everybody else dug and burned, burned and dug. An oak stump might cost a man a week of his life.
All through the winter of that second year, the hazy smoke of burning stumps floated over them as they picked up roots and grubbed palmetto and gallberry. Mama had been growing pinker and rounder and seemingly stronger every day with her third and what would prove to be her last pregnancy. She didn’t quit going to the field until May, and on the seventh of June, 1935, Daddy got on Daisy and went over to get Emily Ahl, who came racing back behind his galloping mare in her midwifery buggy in which she had gone to farmhouses all over that end of Bacon County.
In the late afternoon, Miss Emily, wearing her black bonnet and black, long dress, a dress and color she considered proper to her calling, cut me loose from mama and tied me off. She was a midwife of consummate skill, and my entrance into the world was without incident.
I am compelled to celebrate the craft and art of the lady who did everything that was required of her so competently. Not only did she make a lovely arrangement of my navel when she cut me free, but she also left me intact, for which I have always been grateful.
Since they had no land to tend while they were taking in the new ground, daddy rented thirty acres from the land bank, a federal agency that controlled a lot of land and let it to farmers at a cost they could afford, which meant practically nothing. In his spare time, when he wasn’t farming the acreage he’d rented from the land bank or pulling stumps or working on the stable for Daisy, he hired out to plow for other people. Mama would pack him some biscuit and fatback and maybe a vegetable she might have put up the previous summer, along with a little cold grits; she’d put it all in a tin syrup bucket, and he’d leave the house before sunup and come back after dark, bringing the empty syrup bucket and twenty-five cents for his day’s work.
By the time I was born he’d put up a mule barn and a notched log smokehouse sealed with mud. Just when he got the place looking pretty good, he had the chance to sell it at more than he’d thought he’d ever be able to make out of it again, and at the same time the chance to buy a place cheap that he’d been looking at a long time. So he sold out and bought the Cash Carter place, which had a little better than 200 acres of land—about 40 of it in cultivation. He got it at a good price because the land had been allowed to lie fallow until it was rank with weeds. Most of the fences were down, there was no mule lot or smokehouse or tobacco barn, and the dwelling house was nearly as sorry as the one they’d lived in at Jess Boatwright’s. But it was 200 acres of land, and daddy knew, or thought he knew, that he could make it into a decent farm on which he could support his family. It wouldn’t be easy and it wouldn’t be quick, but given five or ten years, he would do it and he would do it right.