Everything Fred – Part 4

4 March 2021

I digress again. I was speaking of Morton, Mississippi. In a lot of ways, it was the quintessential small town in the South.

However, one place you went at your own peril was Mrs. McCoy’s pasture. She and her husband lived at the junction of Agnew Street and West Second Avenue.  She would keep  few head of cattle and perhaps, on occasion, a bull in the pasture beside her house.  However the bull was never the danger.  As kids, we all had heard how mean Mrs. McCoy was and how she would shoot at you with her shotgun if you trespassed in her pasture. 

Obviously, the temptation to kids was too great and we often cut across her pasture to Doc Burnam’s pond where we fished and swam.  My religious upbringing, the moral guidance of Mary Moore  and my conscience finally got the better of me and I convinced myself to go up to Mrs. McCoy’s house and knock on her door and ask for permission to cross her pasture to get to the pond.  

She opened the door, called me by name, invited me in for cake and coke and proceeded to relate to me stories of my Mother and grandmother.  I had permanent permission from then own to cross her pasture anytime I wanted.  What a wonderful person whose reputation got smeared by kids.  I do, however, suspect it was some adult who started the rumor just to keep kids closer to home and out of the cow pasture. I made it my business to always stop by and say hello and talk with them before crossing the pasture.

Ask I mentioned, Mrs. McCoy’s house was at the top of Agnew Street (named for my great Uncle James) and West Second Avenue.  Branching south off West Second Avenue was Spring Street which led to Tank Hill.  I assume it was called Tank Hill because there was a water tank for the town atop the hill.  It became a natural extension of our childhood play areas. 

I remember most the wild plums that grew all around tank hill and I loved plum season. I was later to learn they were Prunus americana. My cousin Jimmie and I would hang out around the water tank and eat the plums.  You had to know when they were ripe and when not to eat them because of worms.  Ripe plums on Tank Hill came in two colors: red and yellow.  If there was an abundant crop, you could collect enough for you parents to make wild plum jelly – still my absolute favorite.  

I’m sure you are curious if I ever climbed the water tank.  It took Jimmie to convince me to climb it.  She was a year older than I and was always more daring.  She finally convinced to me climb it and from then on, anytime I went to Tank Hill, I climbed the tank.  The view was spectacular.  

Jimmie was the first to do everything between us.  She was the first to ride down Agnew Street on her bike with her hands off the handlebars and turn into her driveway – still without hands.  It doesn’t sound too dangerous until you realize Agnew Street is probably at at 35 degree angle.  From the top of the street to the bottom of the hill were her drive is, you could get up a great deal of speed.  If you missed, you ran perpendicularly into US80 and the accompanying traffic.

That angled street led to some shenanigans by my Mother when she was a teen.  Her best friends, Audrey Harp and Beth Lack and her decided they wanted to go to Jackson – some 30 miles west on highway 80.  My grandfather and Ruby were living in the old duplex at the time opposite Jimmie on Agnew Street.  Their property bordered Agnew Street and U.S. Highway 80.  At the time, Highway 80 was the only coast to coast highway in the United States and it was two lane.  Traffic was heavy, particularly with transfer trucks.  

Hollie had a 49 Chevrolet pickup (I think that was the model year) that had the old starter pedal as well as clutch and three speed on the column.  Audrey, Beth and Momma decided to steal the pickup for their trip to Jackson.  Audrey and Momma put the gear in neutral and pushed it backwards out of the drive onto Agnew Street (Hollie was taking his daily nap before returning to his hardware store).  Beth stood at the bottom of Agnew Street and highway 80 to watch for traffic.  When the highway was clear, she signaled to Mom and Audrey to go.  Mother, with Audrey in the passenger seat, let off the break, shifted into first gear, and as she got to highway 80, Beth jumped on the running board and Mother popped the clutch to crank the truck.  Off they went to Jackson, stranding Hollie at home.

Jimmie was also the first to get me to climb the sycamore tree that sat on the side of their yard next to Ruby and Hollie’s new house.  It seemed huge to me at the time and I was totally afraid of heights.  Not Jimmie.  She climbed high up in the tree.  Finally she coaxed me up to the first limb.  I held on for dear life.  After a while, I began to shift around and get comfortable.  She coaxed me up to the next limb.  I found that if I spent a little time getting comfortable, heights really didn’t bother me.  We lated built a tree house in that sycamore.  

I loved playing in Jimmie’s yard. Her Dad had built a “sky rocket” which was simply a cable leading from one post to another in her yard with a wooden platform attached to wheels that fitted on the cable. It had a rope attached so once you rode the “rocket” downhill you could pull the rocket back to the top and go again.

Her Dad also built a “jungle gym” made of wood and metal pipes. It would definitely not pass safety standards of today but it was great fun. Jimmie, ever the daredevil, would sit atop one of the metal bars and instead of locking her legs around the bar and falling over backwards would fall over forwards. It took me quite a while before I was willing to try that feat.

I started school when I was five years old.  Mrs. Berry was my first grade teacher in Boyle, Mississippi.  I knew how to read pretty well for a five year old since Dad used to read the comic pages with me when we were living in Mr. Crain’s house in Morton.  Mrs. Berry really made an impression on me.  I was shy around the “older” kids who started at six.  She took extra time with me to make sure I was included in everything.

I have a theory that my parents started me in the first grade too early. I never grasped the concept of math and was never any good at it. I think another year (or even two) and I would have been more mentally capable of understanding mathematics.

In 1956, I was eight years old and living in Cleveland, Mississippi by way of Ruleville first, then Boyle.  I was in the third grade. Cleveland, at that time, had a very large Chinese population.  I really had a thing for one Chinese girl in my class.  She wore pigtails and I sat behind her.  Even though I would pull her pigtails, she must have liked me because she let me cheat off her paper during math quizzes.  

Cleveland was another near death experience.  Mother had just dropped me off at school and I was crossing over to my building when someone’s mother got a little upset and hit the gas.  She clipped me as she sped away.  It knocked me down but other than being scared out of my wits, I was OK.  

It was in Cleveland I learned to stand up to bullies.  There was one kid at recess who took it upon himself to torment me.  I got no peace.  One day I was standing at the top of some stairs (probably no more than three or four steps) and he was at the bottom taunting me.  Something snapped and I launched myself from the top stair directly at him with my fist.  I hit him squarely in the face, knocked him down and then I fell on top of him and continued to pummel him.  Some teacher broke us up but he never bothered me again.  

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Over the years, I’ve had bullies get up into my face. Some of those times included graduate school with the department head of biology and another time with a colleague in a college where I taught.  I’m the type that it takes a lot to get me mad but when you do get me mad, it’s not a pretty sight (I didn’t get the gene for Agnew temper).  In both cases, I blew up at the department head and the colleague.  The department head later became a pretty nice guy to me.  I remember him saying he didn’t think botanists were violent or angry people but I convinced him I was not to be trifled with.  The colleague and I were hammering out course objectives for a botany course.  He kept pushing my buttons and I finally blew up at him.  To this day, he treats me with respect, if not with kid gloves.

One day in Cleveland, I was waiting for Mother to pick me up from school.  She never showed up.  I suspect she was passed out drunk at home.   I was the only kid left at school and it was cold and getting close to dark and it was raining.  As I was waiting, I looked up and saw the brown and tan Plymouth with Dad driving.  His window was down and I tried to shout to get him to see me.  He kept on driving.  I was getting scared and had no idea how to get home.  Three high school boys who, up until that time I would have classified as “hoodlums” pulled up.  I think two were smoking.  They asked me what I was doing all alone.  I think I probably started to bawl.  Those three guys immediately got out, put their arms around me and consoled me.  They put me in the front seat between the driver and the shotgun with the third guy in the back.  They asked where I lived and for some reason, I knew the address.  They stopped and got me a coke along the way home.  When we arrived at home, they got out, rang the doorbell, and presented me to my parents.  What could have been a disaster ended up being one of the better experiences in my life.  My parents thanked them profusely but I’m not sure they even knew I was missing.  

Just before he died, Dad and I were talking and I asked if he remembered this.  He broke down crying saying it was one of his greatest regrets not seeing or hearing me trying to get his attention as he passed by me in the school yard.  

In May 7th of 1956, Mom, Dad, Archie and I loaded up the brown and tan Plymouth and headed to Morton.  Mother cried the whole way.  I didn’t understand what upset her.  When we pulled into my grandparents’ driveway, she started to wail to Mary Moore.  I still had no idea.  I hadn’t seen my cousin Jimmie in a very long time, so I went next door to see her.  I remember I was sitting in her swing when she told me Hollie had died.  No one had seen fit to tell me.  Archie knew, but I didn’t.  

The Ott and Lee funeral home brought the body to their house and his casket was placed in the living room against the west wall.  People kept coming up to the front door (which was never used) to pay respects.  When Ruby was taken in the living room for a viewing, she broke down and began to wail.  I had never been exposed to death that intimately.  It was the first time I had ever seen a body.  I knew of death, of course.  I had two grandparents and a great uncle pass away.

In the south, there is this concept that deaths occur in threes.  Grandma Laura (Ruby’s Mother and my Great Grandmother) was dying.  I remember Archie answering a phone late at night from someone asking her prognosis.  I remember Archie saying she had taken a turn for the worse.  The next day she died.  

Soon after Grandma Laura died, Uncle George Searcy died (no relation).  I never knew much about Uncle George other than he was devoted to my great aunt Deliah (we pronounced it Deelee).  Archie later told me Uncle George flew with Eddie Rickenbacker during WWI.  As kids, we always wanted to shoot off fireworks during Christmas.  In the south where I grew up, you didn’t celebrate the fourth of July with fireworks (something about Yankees) and neither did we celebrate New Year’s eve with fireworks – only Christmas.  We were not able to as long as Uncle George was alive because he suffered from shell shock – what we would today call post traumatic stress disorder.  

The third death in the triumvirate was Hollie. I don’t think my Mother ever recovered from his death. It also led to a more tense and nasty relationship between Mother and Ruby.  The main problem was Hollie left the hardware store to my Mother.  Ruby resented that. It didn’t take Mother too long to run/drink the store into the ground.  It didn’t help that Ruby, according to my Dad, would walk into the hardware and open up the cash register and take out whatever amount of money she wanted and then walk out again.  

I loved that hardware.  It had a certain smell to it that was a mixture of leather, oil, metal, rope and dirt.  The old wooden floor was so worn that in places you could see the dirt floor underneath the boards.  It had nooks and crannies a kid could hide and never be found by inquiring adults.  To this day, I wax nostalgic when I walk into one.  Unfortunately, the new ones don’t have the intoxicating aroma of old country hardwares.

After Hollie’s death, we moved from Cleveland back to Morton and I entered the fourth grade.  We lived in Mr. Crain’s huge house near downtown.  One of my distant cousins, Mrs. Huff, was one of my teachers.  Morton elementary was trying out a new system to get students ready to move into junior high school by rotating teachers among classes.  I remember Mrs. Huff very well and Mrs. Hearn.  

In that year, 1958, a real horror occurred.  Our Lady of Angels school in Chicago caught fire.  In 1958, we had a television set and the fire was covered extensively on the news of the two television stations in Jackson, MS. Ninety-two children and two nuns died in the fire.  I had nightmares of that for quite a while.  It was not helped by the school board instituting our first ever fire drills. For years, fire drills terrified me.  

Not long after, we moved to Mr. Marler’s house just outside of town and I remember Mother telling Mary Moore to always hang clothes in the closet with the hanger facing in one direction.  Her explanation was it would be much easier to grab clothes out of the closet in case of a fire.  For years – and I do mean years – I repeated a mantra to myself every night before I went to bed to protect me from fire.  For some reason, I felt if, after I said my prayers, I repeated “fire!” three times, I would be protected.

I always think of that when I see or hear of some young child being exposed to some dramatic situation and how that can scar you for life.

Another scarring situation came about when we later moved to Jackson, the capitol city.  I was enrolled at Bailey Junior High School on North State Street.  This was a massive school.  The football field had stands that to me (7th grader) seemed to be on the same level as many national sports venues.  The building was opened in 1937 and was in Arte Moderne style.  The auditorium could hold 1200 students.  The building was two stories with a basement (see the similarity to Our Lady of Angels?) and from a kid who went to schools where 1200 was the entire K-12 experience, I was lost.  Bailey had 1200 students in three grades. The level of instruction was more impersonal and at a higher level than the small town schools I was used to.  I didn’t fit in well. 

We were living in a basement apartment a mile or so from Bailey on Poplar Blvd.  Dad was with the state highway department again and Mother stayed at home.  For some reason, she felt it was appropriate to take me to see the movie Pyscho!  To this day, I hate taking a shower unless the shower curtain is clear so I can see Bates coming to stab me.  

I generally walked to school and back every day.  If I had money (seldom) I would take the bus on winter days.  One spring day, I was walking home from Bailey on Riverside Drive when a high school kid drove up next to me with his girlfriend in the passenger side.  She was facing me on the curb.  She screamed at me with a look of horror on her face as her boyfriend reached across her and pointed a gun at me through her window.  I froze.  He fired the pistol at point blank range.  It was all a joke to them.  He used blanks but that really shook me up.

I was walking to the bus stop one day on my way to Bailey when I looked up and saw mother stopped at a traffic light.  I shouted to her thinking she had come to pick me up from school.  When I approached the car and got in, I realized she was really, really drunk.  The car was a stick shift and when the light turned green, she kept stalling it out.  Traffic was backing up behind her and she wasn’t functional.  I ran out of the car and down the hill to the bus stop.  I didn’t see her that night.  Later, when I got up the next morning, she wasn’t there.  Dad wasn’t either.  He was off on some job down further in the state.  I kept waiting for her to show up and she never did.  I was beginning to panic.  Then I noticed her car was in the apartment multi-space garage.  I started looking through the garage, under the cars, everywhere.  I couldn’t find her.  There was a flood control “creek” behind the garage so I stood on the edge and looked down.  There she was, passed out, face down, head only a few inches from the water.  I really don’t know how I got her back on her feet and up out of the creek and into the house.  

I think you can see with the new school, my fears of fire, and the shooting incident, the car incident and the creek incident, I was in a precarious state.  Then the bottom fell out.

Stay tuned….