3 March 2021
Morton, Mississippi, probably more than anywhere else, was my home town. It was small. I’m not sure it has ever passed 2,000 in population. My family moved – a lot. No matter how often we moved, we always seemed to end back in Morton and most of my early life experiences revolve around the town and its people and my relatives in the town. And we were related to almost everyone in the town. You couldn’t get away with anything as a kid because everyone knew you and would call your parents on those old bakelite phones that weighed a ton.
Dad worked for the Mississippi Highway Department. He did that off and on for 33 years. That meant that every time a job was completed, you moved to the location of the next job. I became very good in geography from his moves within the state and from his time in the military.
Dad was born in Pulaski, Mississippi, named after Count Pulaski of revolutionary war fame and was the oldest surviving offspring of three. One child was stillborn. There was Dad, Uncle Ray, and Aunt Sue, in that order. He was born in 1913 and was 16 at the beginning of the Great Depression. By the time he turned 18, he applied to the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) for employment. He told me he was ploughing the 90 acre plot at the homestead we always called “The Old Place” when his younger brother Ray brought him his acceptance letter for the CCC. He said he left the mule in the field to Ray and walked away.
He was initially assigned duty as a cook. I have to admit, the man could cook. Often I would see him go into the kitchen and drag out what looked like disparate ingredients and whip up something more edible than you would imagine. I suspect it was Grandma Searcy that taught him how to cook and not the CCC. Anyway, his cooking duties didn’t last too long. He was tall and the CCC found he could play basketball. CCC camps all over the country had sports teams and his basketball team played all over the southern U.S. His team became the West Tennessee League Champions one year.
After the CCC, he enlisted in the army and was sent to Camp Blanding near Starke, Florida.
He describes how his buddies came into possession of an old jalopy and drove from St. Augustine to Miami along the beach. The only time they left the beach was having to go inland to get around rivers. Needless to say, you cannot do that today.
He was in a hotel room in Miami on December 7th and listening to the radio when the announcer broke into the music with the news of Pearl Harbor.
He ended up at Officers Candidate School and was shipped out to the Pacific Theater. He was with McArthur in Australia (he remembers the troops being addressed by Eleanor Roosevelt) Papau New Guinea and the Philippines. The jungles very kindly gave him jungle rot that he had for the rest of his life.
He related that when the war ended, his company (he had risen to the rank of Captain by that time) was told if they wanted to go home, those who joined the reserve would be processed immediately and those who did not join the reserve would be processed in a few months. He joined the reserve. He wanted to get home.
Sometime in either 1947 or 1948, he was walking in downtown Morton (a short walk even now) when Christine Agnew McKay (a divorcée) walked out of a drug store with my brother Archie in tow. My brother dropped the ice cream from his cone onto the sidewalk and started bawling. Archie was always a sensitive kid. He had a nervous breakdown at the age of three (probably from the divorce). Anyway, Dad bought him a new cone and he and Mother started dating. I came along 9 months after the marriage.
I was two years old (and Archie was 8) when Dad was called up for the Korean War in 1950 (and back from Havre de Grace). We were living in Ruby and Hollie’s first house – a duplex. It had to be one of the hottest summers on record for Mississippi. We had two oscillating fans (I eventually took one to college – they were built to last) and no air conditioning. Mother was trying to make the house presentable and decided to wallpaper. That was my first experience at seeing that done and for some reason I remember she used flour and water at the glue. It worked but it also attracted roaches.
The other thing I remember was Mother crying a lot. I didn’t know why but knew she was sad. Much later, I found some of her love letters to my Dad. He brought them all home with him and she kept them. I was surprised at the steaminess of the language and the not so subtle innuendo in them. Apparently censors didn’t censor incoming letters.
Archie and I spent a great deal of our early years at military bases, both before and after Korea: Fort Rucker, Alabama, Fort Benning, Georgia, Fort Bragg, North Carolina and Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Maryland. I have to admit those were some of our happiest times. The military housing wasn’t great but was probably better than the housing we experienced in Mississippi. There was generally a lake for fishing and swimming and then there were the officer clubs with pools. I almost drowned on one of those.
One Christmas, I think it was at Fort Bragg, I remember Archie getting an erector set and I got a set of Lincoln logs. We kept those for years. He was too big for Lincoln logs but at least he shared the erector set with me and I ended up with it anyway when he got bored with it.
There was a lake near the military housing at Fort Bragg and I remember Dad and I going down there and catching minnows with bread and a net. We used the minnows for fishing and I caught my very first fish there.
I also remember Dad taking me to a house with a beautiful, from what I assume, German lady. I’ve always wondered if he was having an affair. I loved the way she spoke. She trilled her “R’s” and I would giggle. One time I asked her one time too many to repeat a word that had an “r” in it and Dad slapped me across the room. It taught me to be quiet and not say anything to rile my Dad. It wouldn’t be the last time he hit me.
Once Dad was discharged from Korea (with the rank of Major) we returned to Morton. From there, it was back with the highway department and periodic moving. Just within Mississippi, I have lived in Ruleville, Boyle, Cleveland, back to Morton, Pearl, Jackson, Morton, Florence, Morton, Brandon, out from Puckett, Oxford, and Fulton. I remember moving twice within one school year and once, when I was a counselor at summer camp, my parents moved and forgot to tell me. They remembered just as camp was about to end and sent me a postcard with the new address.
As a consequence, I never made long term friends – why bother when you moved within a year? I grew up shy and introverted. To compound the issue, these were the times Mother and Dad were severe alcoholics. On one of our Morton stays, Archie finally left to live with his biological Dad, Otto McKay because he couldn’t stand Mom and Dad’s drinking.
Otto and Dad were actually friends at one time and both worked for the state highway department. Strange that Dad ended up marrying my Mother, Otto’s first wife. Archie and I are half brothers. Archie attributes Mother’s problems in life with being an only child. He forgets he was an only child for the first six years of his life. I suspect Mother was spoiled by her Dad, Hollie. She and her Mother Ruby never got along. Part of it was her drinking but part of it was Mother/daughter tension.
Mother was a wonder. She was the first female to get a pilot’s license in Mississippi. She was also the third person to live with a ruptured liver in the U.S. She and Otto were driving around with Mother in the passenger seat with her right leg up under her body. Otto, probably drunk, hit something and wrecked the car. He asked if she was OK and she said “I think so” and moved her leg from under her and passed out. I think she was bed ridden for a couple of years. Doctor Gordon insisted she eat a lot of liver. Archie loves liver, I hate it. I blame Mother.
Also if the man faces high cholesterol level, stress, depression, poor diet etc. overnight levitra This makes the generic generic viagra buy drugs available at cheaper prices. Its efficiency in treating erectile dysfunction is notably excellent, but it requires definite physician supervision to order generic cialis use. It causes symptoms, which are very far free viagra no prescription from the stomach including stress, anxiety, insomnia, depression, allergy, low immunity, muscle pains, neuropathy, skin rashes, etc.
Otto was the golden boy, at least as far as Hollie and Ruby were concerned. I think Ruby was more upset when he (he was cheating) and Mother divorced than Mother was. As a consequence, Dad never lived up to Ruby’s expectations. He was just a poor country bumpkin as far as she was concerned (she ignored the fact that she was also) and kept that low opinion of him almost until the day she died. Begrudgingly, shortly before she died, she apologized and said he had been good to stick by my Mother through thick and thin. It was shortly after Mother’s divorce from Otto that Archie had his nervous breakdown.
Otto and Dad always were very courteous to each other. I think they had some respect for each other and whenever I visited Otto, he always treated me kindly and fairly, and always made sure I was involved with what was going on. Otto married and divorced numerous times over the years. It seems he could not keep his pants zipped. He lost his leg as a youth in a hunting accident and Archie said he was always a little spoiled because of it. Women always seemed to find him attractive. Either that or they were attracted to an amputee. Regardless, I can think of four wives and five children. I never knew the later children but I kind of grew up with Otto, Jr. and Patsy – the results of the second wife, Vonnicil. They were good kids.
I think I was always a little scared of Hollie, my Grandfather on my Mom’s side. He had a temper – much like my Mother – and most members of the Agnew family. I remember Ruby and Hollie coming home from Sunday church service and them screaming and cursing at each other and Mary Moore, their maid, laughing so hard at their profanity after attending church.
Hollie wanted me to like him. He bribed me with silver dollars with a 1923 date, the year of my Mother’s birth. They stacked up quickly because every time we would visit, I got another silver dollar. I must have had 50 or more of them from over the years but eventually, Mother dipped into the stash frequently to afford her cigarettes. I think I finally gave up during my teenage years and spent what remained of them on something.
Hollie smoked Lucky Strikes. I dreaded when he did his morning bathroom ablutions (actually taking a morning shit). He always struck up a smoke and the combination of unfiltered Lucky Strikes and the smell of his shit always choked me to the point of nausea. Archie loved him and his rough ways. Hollie always walked around me like he was on egg shells. I think he knew I was afraid of him and he really didn’t want to scare me. When he would come into a room, I immediately ran to Ruby and hid behind her.
To be honest, there was only one time he got mad at me specifically. I was being baby sat by Mary Moore, Ruby and Hollie’s maid. It was a rainy day and so I couldn’t play in the yard. To occupy me, she sat me down with a pair of scissors and paper and told me to cut out shapes. She got occupied and I got bored. I decided paper was dull so I took her rain galoshes and began to cut them up. She was upset with me – not in a mean or cruel way – but upset. I started crying and ran out the door. I decided the only person who could understand me was Hollie who was at his hardware just east of main street in Morton. I ran as fast as my legs could take me, through downtown traffic and across highway 80, then the busiest highway in the state with Mary Moore chasing me. Poor Mary. She was a little heavy and diabetic and she couldn’t catch me. When I reached the hardware, I cried to Hollie that Mary had been mean to me. When Mary appeared, she explained and Hollie roared. He cussed and yelled the whole way back to his house in the old black pickup – not at me per se but at how I could have been killed in traffic.
Somewhere during this time, Mother took me to see Lash LaRue in Meridian, Mississippi who was appearing in person. This was before we had a tv in our family and movies were the major source of entertainment. That started a long fascination with cowboys that only grew over the years. For my fifth birthday party, I had a birthday cake with Hopalong Cassidy on top. I was even the proud owner of a Hopalong fork. Yes, they were merchandising like crazy even back then. I even have a photo of me, my Dad, and my six shooters and chaps in front of our house (Ruby and Hollie’s old house) in Morton. From there, I graduated to Gene Autry and eventually Roy Rogers.
Archie tells me the story of me getting lost in a cotton field when we moved to Ruleville in the Mississippi Delta. I don’t remember much about Ruleville except the duck episode. Apparently Dad and some of his friends went duck hunting in the Delta and decided to cook the ducks at a party at our house in Ruleville. What I remember was the mistake they made of pouring boiling water over the ducks so they could pull out the feathers like you used to do when you plucked a chicken. Apparently boiling water sets the feathers in the ducks and it’s almost impossible to remove the feathers. The more they drank and the more they tried to pull out the feathers, the more they cussed. Eventually, I think I remember them throwing the ducks away.
Mom and Dad used to frequent juke joints in the Delta. Mississippi back then was a dry state and beer, wine and liquor were illegal which meant juke joints were making money hand over fist with selling all three, but mostly beer, all with a state sales tax stamp on each and every bottle. Mississippi was not averse to taxing illegal liquor. Juke joints were so named because they always had a juke box to play music. Back then, it was common to have tables around the periphery of the place and when someone put music in the juke box, people would dance in the middle of the floor. Mom and Dad liked to dance and needy me wanted to dance with them. They would often lift me up and I would be caught between the two as they danced to Hank Williams, Sr. I’ve always had a thing for him since then. My favorite for them to dance to was “Your Cheatin’ Heart.“
We used to go to a country club in the Mississippi Delta that sat near a levee on the Mississippi. It was a dinner/dance club and off we’d go in the old tan and brown Plymouth. We’d eat dinner and Mom and Dad would stay upstairs in the club and drink illegal booze and Archie and I would go downstairs with nickels provided by Dad to play the illegal slot machines.
One night, when Archie was not with us, it was raining to beat the band and Mom and Dad had too much to drink. The way into and out of the country club was atop the levee. Somehow Dad turned too quick for the off road from the levee and the car rolled over several times on the way to the bottom of the levee. If you have ever seen those levees on the Mississippi, they are the tallest thing around (around 24 feet). We landed upright and Dad simply drove away and back onto the road.
Mom and Dad would often drive around the Delta in the old Plymouth with me either on the back seat or in between them on the front. Dad would throw lighted matches out the window to burn off the highway right-of-way. To this day I don’t know if he had a bit of the fire bug in him or if this was standard operating procedure for his job with the highway department. It was back before the state used to mow the right-of-way along highways with tractor/mowers so it could indeed have been department policy.
I’m not sure what I was doing but it apparently it was annoying to Dad. I was standing in the front seat between him and Mom and he turned and slapped me so hard he knocked me down into the well of the car. Mom looked at him and said “are you trying to kill him?” I’ve often said that Mom should never have been allowed children and Dad should have been encouraged to have more. I’ve seen little children so shy as to never utter a word around an adult gravitate towards him and begin a conversation with him. I’ve never been able to reconcile those two aspects of him – slapping me around and kids naturally gravitating to him.
Another slapping incident occurred when I was in the third grade in Cleveland. Hollie had sprung for a new house for us in Cleveland when Dad was working for the state highway department. I had a bike, that like any kid, left it in the yard. Mom told me to go pick it up and put it away. I told her if she wanted it put away for her to do it herself. I found myself flying across the room from a slap by my Dad. I can safely say I deserved that one.
I’ve been spanked several times by my Dad and I can safely say I never deserved but one spanking/slapping (see previous). One time, Mother and Dad decided to go on a little drinking jag and the last person who needed to know was Ruby. We were back in Morton again. They arranged for me to stay with Mary Moore. When time came for me to leave with Mary from Ruby’s house, I didn’t want to go and Archie told me I could stay with Ruby if I wanted. The problem was Mom and Dad were to pick me up at Mary’s. Instead, they had to pick me up at Ruby’s and she found out they had been on a drinking spree. I got punished. To be honest, I think I was too little to understand their machinations and just wanted to stay with Ruby.
I did often stay with Mary Moore in the Black section of town called Keen Inn. There were two Black sections in Morton: Keen Inn and Lick Skillet. Both were shanty towns but Mary’s house was a little nicer since Hollie owned the house and she worked for him. I’ve never in my life ever seen a cleaner house in my life even though it was a simple shack. Mary would take me to the black Methodist Church and I remember loving their service much more than the service at the white Methodist Church.
In reality, the book The Help was pretty much the story of my life. Mary Moore and Hazel Smith basically raised me during my Morton years. What was instilled in me as far as goodness came from them. My work ethic was based on theirs and their ability to love me showed me how to love others. Major portions of my life have dealt with drunken parents and loving maids who took on the responsibility for me from my parents. Mother was abusive not only to me but to Mary and Hazel, and how they stood it is beyond me.
Once, when we were living in Mr. Willard Marler’s house on the Pulaski road in Morton, Ruby drove up with her cousin Cleo for an unannounced afternoon visit. Mother had been drinking. I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth when she rushed in, knocked me into the tub to get to the bathroom sink so she could gargle mouthwash to keep Ruby from detecting the alcohol on her breath. Mother was never loving. Her Agnew temper could peel paint off the walls. Archie had left to be with Otto then and most of her anger was directed at me – or at least it seems so in retrospect.
Ruby wasn’t too averse herself to manipulation of me. I remember she put me up to asking Dad why he drank. I had crawled up in his lap and looked up and popped the question. He pushed me out of his lap and told me I was no son of his by asking that question.
To be continued….
