My mother’s father, James Jesse Bayne, I called him Big Daddy, ran away from his two-room, Louisiana pine barren home when he was 13. For the next seven years he lived in woods and swamps in the wild Delta bottoms. Living on the outskirts of early 20th-century southern towns, he experienced poverty that was sublime in its intensity.
Southern cuisine and lifestyle were the epitome of conservation and economy. Practically nothing was discarded from any animal: intestines, gizzards, stomachs — it all was eaten. There was precious little left for hoboes like Big Daddy, who ate crawdads and red-bellied brim.
There was not much that was big about Big Daddy. At 16, his blond-haired (almost white), blue-eyed head oversaw a body that was not symmetrical. His left arm was at least two inches longer than his right.
In those early years — far too early — Big Daddy lost all sentimentality and forgot the meaning of metaphor. Life was harsh and unforgiving. He learned to expect little from life and for that reason he seemed always to be content. At the same time, he never recognized the bird of good fortune when she happened to roost on his shoulder.
The first complete meal he had was when he was drafted into the army during World War I. While in the army, he drove steam-driven trains all over western Europe. He even enjoyed a little intrugue: he drove troops over to fight the Bolsheviks in 1919.
He returned to marry my grandmother who was a student at a Bastrop, Louisiana, finishing school for young ladies. Much impressed by his good looks, Big Momma, also ironically called Jessie Louise, married Big Daddy in the middle of the Great Flu Epidemic. They wore sanitary masks as they stood at the altar in their local Baptist church and exchanged vows.
Big Momma taught Big Daddy to read.
The marriage was shaky from the start. Big Momma, a Southern belle in consciousness if not by vocation, found it hard to adjust to the poverty that post-World War I railroad wages engendered. Besides, she had a potent temper and her husband was a closet alcoholic. This was a volatile combination and there was an undercurrent of tension in my mother’s family.
They moved to McGehee where my mother and her eight siblings were born. Mom lived all of her 68 years in the same unpretentious, southeast Arkansas small town named McGehee. McGehee neither backed up to anything nor was it on anyone’s corner. It lay halfway between Memphis, Tennessee, and Vicksburg, Mississippi.
McGehee had 4,081 residents when my mother was born in 1931. By that point she had four siblings ahead of her and three, all brothers, were still to come. Big Momma had five girls and then three boys. Like her husband, Big Momma’s family was slightly off-center, but at least they came in a male and then female gender. This made housing assignments much easier. Alternative siblings could share the same room. One daughter, Patricia, the youngest, died, and while she was sorely missed, her presence set off an equilibrium that was critical to my mother’s fragile household.
McGehee began at the railroad stockyard north of Edgar Dempsey’s Pepsi Plant and ended at the railroad roundhouse south of Tip Pugh’s rice dryer. When the railroads stopped depositing customers and picking up cotton bales, McGehee weakened and never really recovered. By the end of World War II huge combines replaced cotton pickers
McGehee was ill, but the illness was not fatal, however, and as I sat this last early December enjoying my mother’s last few weeks, McGehee was still about 5,002. Big Daddy was gone, Big Momma was gone, and Mom apparently would be joining them soon.
By now the tired town had deteriorated to a critical mass of old people too tired to move and young children too young to think about it yet.
When my mother was growing up, in the 1930s, McGehee boasted of two hotels, the McGehee Hotel and the Graystone Hotel. If strangers stopped in McGehee, they were stranded between more comfortable boarding houses in Greenville, Mississippi, and Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Most gladly traded the ebullience of the Sam Peck Hotel in Little Rock for the pecan pies of the Graystone Cafe.
The Graystone Hotel was strategically placed between the train station and the pool hall. Its marble floor and chandeliers promised its patrons a luxurious evening with some equally roseate late evening activity at the pool hall.
My Uncle Cutter, married to my mother’s oldest sister, Aunt Mary, ran the pool hall. Besides being one of the wealthiest men in town, and being an inveterate and successful bass fisherman, Uncle Cutter sold one of the best collections of girlie magazines in southeastern Arkansas and his pool hall was a veritable den of iniquity. As a young visitor (Uncle Cutter was careful not to let me look at the magazines) I never understood why it was called a pool hall — virtually no one played pool in it. So much of life was like that in McGehee — smoke and mirrors. The genuine article was hard to procure.
The Graystone Hotel looked like what I imagined a Little Rock or Vicksburg hotel to look like — it was a four-story white brick structure — the largest building in town. We were all proud that it greeted train visitors as they debarked from the train.
The McGehee Hotel, on the other hand, was a one-level ranch that looked like most of the houses in which we lived. That disappointed most of the local people — who wanted to stay in a hotel that looked like your house? But many visitors found its modern facilities — the McGehee had toilets in each room; the Graystone asked its patrons to share one on each hall; and the McGehee even had a coffee peculator in each room — more appealing.
Nonetheless, both the Graystone and McGehee were approximately of the same species, but the McGehee Hotel had bragging rights — every Friday night the McGehee Owls, our high school football team ordered steaks, fries, and milk shakes before the big game. This blessed dispensation assured the proprietors of the McGehee Hotel that they would have a steady stream of customers. If the apex of McGehee power and prestige chose the McGehee, who in the general population would argue? To show solidarity with the football team, hundreds of residents would wait in line to eat black-eyed peas, gumbo, collard greens, and fried chicken before the game. They wanted to stand beside their heroes in body as well as spirit.
In addition to our two motels, there was one drugstore that gave credit and dispensed viscous chocolate sundaes to waiting patrons. The great attraction of the drugstore was the proprietor’s daughter whose bosom was the lodestone for dozens of excessive testerone-endowed McGehee male youth. There were two department stores: Wolchanskies and the Wests.
Wolchanskies was run by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Dark, dreary, and always smelling different, like a scene from Casablanca, Wolchanskies had the latest fashions. Only stores in Greenville, Mississippi, could compete with Wolchanskies. The Wests would be the equivalent of our present day Dollar Stores — long on variety and short on quality.
My mother grew up 10–12 blocks from Wolchanskies. Big Daddy’s house was only a little bit better than a shack. Born in a rambling clapboard house next to the city sewage, mom always understood limitation and constraint. Her home sat on buckshot clay, a type of soil that blistered and cracked in the summer, and stuck eternally to every surface in the winter. The smell of feces and mildew intensified every hot summer afternoon. Behind her house was a wood lot too often the victim of unscrupulous foresters. Enchanted trails and moss-covered paths that would pique the imagination of most children were compromised in my mother’s forest by young locust trees unimpeded by shade and larger competition. Sunlight was everywhere abundant. Since there was no reason to grow up and clasp sunlight, the young trees grew out, and selfishly deprived all the pretty things in the forest of light and life.
My mother’s life, like all of our lives, was full of ambiguity, of pain, and of joy. In the midst of such turmoil, the best course of action is to evoke the love of God in the midst of tentativeness. It was not easy growing up in the Great Depression, it was not easy for Big Daddy to grow up before then, but love can cover a multitude of pain and failures. Young people, learn to love. Learn to forgive. And be quick to exhibit both with alacrity!
