If you leave the main highways and travel on one of the county roads in northwestern Tennessee—which is what I did in August of 1995—you will see endless cotton fields. I had last seen the cotton fields of Tennessee in 1933, the year my family left the South. Then the fields were small, family-owned, bounded by fences or hedgerows; nowadays they stretch out with no lines of demarcation and have the look of big business. It is, however, still a quiet place, a rural land. I was born there, in the small town I am calling Concordia.
I left the highway out of Nashville and got onto County Road 431 because of a sentimental wish to travel the same road that my parents, my brother, Joey, then seven, and my sister, Miriam, five, had traveled by horse-drawn wagon in 1920—two years before I was born. Although County Road 431 was then a clay road meandering along, it made its way, as now, west through Weakley County and into the county I have named Banion, of which Concordia is the county seat.
Until this trip I had not been back. A Buddhist text tells us that the elephant is “the wisest of all the animals, the only one who remembers his former lives, and he remains motionless for long periods of time, meditating thereon.” This may be fine for the elephant, but Concordia is one of those towns that has been steadily losing population, and I am a woman of more than a certain age. By 1995 I was feeling an urgency to forgo meditating and take a look at the site of my childhood before it or I disappeared. A grandchild told me I was having a “roots emergency,” and I guess I was.
I decided on a one-day visit—enough, I thought, to cover a town only six blocks one way and five the other. And I planned not to visit people, only places.
County Road 431 was never very lively. You see the cotton fields, but you need patience to get to the signs—the BANION COUNTY one and then the one that says CONCORDIA TOWN LIMITS. After a church and a graveyard turn up, you are almost immediately on First Street.
First Street seemed little changed from what I remembered. Though no longer cobblestoned, it is still only three blocks in length, stores on both sides. I went quickly to our old store, which had been in the center block—the Number One location in that day’s merchantspeak.
You used to be able to spot our store by the gold letters on the plate-glass windows: BRONSON’S LOW-PRICED STORE. My father had splurged on those letters. For customer morale, he said, so customers would not feel that “low-priced” meant cheap.
Our store is now Swain’s Electronics, one of the few stores on the street that still sells things. Most of the properties that are occupied offer services. Some persevere from my day. The First National Bank, for example, seems as in charge as ever, its brass plaque gleaming perhaps for the ages. At the end of the street the train depot is still operating, if minimally. And across the railroad tracks the church steeple rises into the air, though the church may no longer be New Bethel Baptist.
Bronson’s Low-Priced Store was Concordia’s “Jew store.” There had been none until my family got there, and in those days it was the custom for every small Southern town to have one. A Jew store—and that is what people called it—was a modest establishment selling soft goods—clothing and domestics (bedding, towels, yard goods)—to the poorer people of the town—the farmers, the sharecroppers, the blacks, the factory workers. We were the only Jews among Concordia’s inhabitants, of which, when my family arrived in 1920, there were 5,318, counting whites and Negroes.
For us Concordia actually began at the house of Miss Brookie Simmons. As I pulled my rental car up to it and sat looking, it seemed much as it had when I had last seen it and, I have no doubt, much as it had been when Aaron and Reba Bronson and family had pulled up to it themselves on their arrival in Concordia.
Though I was not there on that first day, it doesn’t really matter. The story of it, and the events leading up to and following it, have been so often recalled and relived in my family, they have long seemed as much my experiences as the things I remember as having happened to me. My mother and father are with us no longer for the nostalgia sessions that so engrossed us, but Miriam and Joey are still around. Miriam and Joey live up North; I, in the South, though among a mixed population of Southerners and Northerners. Although Miriam has been living up North for many years, her Southern accent is as strong as ever, if not stronger. Joey (“Joe” now to most people but “Joey” as ever to Miriam and me) lost his a long time ago. Mine is still there, more there at certain times than at others: When Southerners are present, my speech is dense with y’alls and mercys and much less so when they’re not.
Joey and Miriam and I get together as often as possible, and when we do, out come the stories, along with the snapshots and the newspaper clippings and the old store newspaper ads.
Like Banion County and Concordia, most names are not real ones; but what happened and why are pretty much the truth, or, as my father would say, “close enough so nobody argues about it.”