HOME AGAIN.
Home to the town where I learned to read, write, and do my multiplication tables. Home to the town where my mama fell ill, stayed ill for many years, and died, and where my father was long known as “the only honest judge in Pike County.”
My town, a little over three thousand souls, where I once set the Mississippi state record for the hundred-yard dash, shortly before I broke my leg in a fall from a barn roof. Where Thomas McGoey, the mail carrier, rang our doorbell and personally presented me with the letter announcing I’d been accepted at Harvard.
The last time I’d been home to Eudora was for my mother’s funeral, six years ago. I remember being startled at the time by how much the town had changed. Most astonishing to me then were the two gas-powered motorcars parked beside the hitching posts.
Many other things had changed since that last mournful journey to my birthplace. But on this day, while I waited for Eudora Station’s one ancient porter to summon the energy to unload my trunk, I found myself amazed to see how much this lazy little town resembled the one I knew when I was a boy.
The early-summer heat remained as overwhelming as I remembered, the whitish sun seeming to press down on everything under its gaze. The First Bank, Sanders’ General Store, the Purina feed and seed, the Slide Inn Café—everything was just the same.
Eudora Town Hall still featured an oversized Confederate stars-and-bars hanging in the second-floor window above the portico. The same faded red-and-white-striped barber’s pole stood outside the shop with the sign that said “Hair Cuts, Shaves, & Tooth Extractions”—although no one had gone to Ezra Newcomb for a bad tooth since the first real dentist moved to town when I was eleven.
One difference I noticed immediately was that many of the doorways—at the depot, at the little vaudeville theater, at the Slide Inn—now bore signs marking certain entrances as “White” or “Colored.” When I was a boy, everyone knew which places were for whites and which for Negroes.
At last the porter approached with my trunk and valises, accompanied by a gangly colored teenager. The porter asked, “Will we be taking these to your father’s house, Mr. Corbett?”
I frowned. “How’d you know my name?”
“Well, suh, the stationmaster tol’ me to hurry up and go help Judge Corbett’s boy with his trunk, so I purt’ much figured it out from there.”
I gave the old man a dime and offered another dime to the boy if he would carry my luggage on to my destination. He threw that heavy trunk up on his shoulders as if it contained nothing but air and picked up my pair of valises with one large hand.
“I’ll be staying at Maybelle Wilson’s,” I said. “I’m here on business.”
We crossed to the First Bank and turned left onto Commerce Street. It was right then that I had the feeling that I had entered into one of Mr. H. G. Wells’s fabled time-transport machines. “My God,” I said under my breath. “How can this be?”