I was raised in the South, Arkansas to be precise. I grew up with people who believed in Southern hospitality and good manners. There were ways of saying things that got the message across without doing harm to someone else’s psyche. Those good manners were mandated in homes, churches, and schools and seemed to have little to do with economic status. Every boy I knew shot to his feet when a lady (we never used the word, “woman”) entered the room. All adults were answered with a “sir” or “ma’am” tacked on to the end. We also had that strange custom of addressing the adults of our acquaintance by their first name with a Miss or Mister precursor. My father was never Mr. Roberts but Mr. Luther. My grandmother was Miss Wessie. It was perfectly acceptable to have nicknames and hers was short for the middle name, Westfall. And on more formal occasions, children were addressed in the same manner.
I look back on those days with longing because I feel we have let things drift so far from good manners that it is now perfectly ordinary for adults and children to treat each other rudely without even causing that slight lift of the eyebrow that use to say, “Dear child, who is raising you, and why are they neglecting their duty?”
The boys I knew might tease a girl, but it was never suggestive or improper in any way. They could disagree vehemently with a girl’s take on things; but in discussing it, gentlemen used a moderated tone and listened politely. At home, my brother might tell me that one of my friends was as crazy as a Betsy-bug; but when he was around her, he treated her as if she were perfectly sane and had every right to her opinion. I have to say, I miss this.
The summer I was 17, I witnessed this form of chivalry applied to me. It is a thing I have remembered fondly since. I knew then that I would forever adore those young men I grew up with and hold them up as examples of what young men can aspire to.
One of my childhood friends lived in one of those old southern mansions that are sometimes referred to as working plantation homes. While they are huge and graciously appointed, they are comfortable and have an easy lived in look. This big house was on the banks of Old River Lake. The front door faced the lake, which meant that the driveway from the road branched off to go around to the front while the main drive went to the back. Like most working farms and plantations, the back of the house also had access to barns, tool shops, and multi-vehicle garages. Hers had a wide circular drive in the back with spoke going to the house and various buildings. The house was two stories with deep two story screened back porches. The top one was outfitted as a sleeping porch for those hot Southern nights in the days before air-conditioning.
My friend liked to throw a party each summer and the summer of 1957, was no different. This was a significant time for all of us as we were all students of the Little Rock School system by choice and the fact that our parents paid tuition. We were all college bound kids whose parents wanted us to have the advantages that a large school could give. That included foreign languages, arts, and music as well as advanced placement classes in all of the regular subjects. Most of my hometown friends qualified for those. If you remember your history, you know that that was the year Little Rock Central High School would become the most famous or infamous high school in the world. We all knew what lay ahead and most of us were being instructed to keep our heads down and mind our own business which was getting an education not a reputation.
Everybody I knew was at this party. We danced to Bill Haley and the Comets, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper. We were having a great time, and there was a new boy in town to make things more interesting. He was a distant cousin of one of the girls and was visiting from out of state. When he heard one of my girl friends mention that she was nervous about school, he joined the conversation. As always, I took the most liberal view of things and said I had no problem with the upcoming changes. After all, we had been playing with “colored” kids all of our lives, and we knew that some of them were plenty smart. In those days, “colored” was an acceptable word. This boy turned on me with, “So that makes you a N----- lover.”
You could have heard a pin drop. Then in one swift move, every one of my childhood male friends circled this kid and hustled him out of the room. He was back within five minutes, untouched but humbled and apologized in front of everyone there for his behavior. I could not have been prouder of those boys who came to my defense even those that I knew were probably as prejudiced as he was.
When the party was over, the girls stayed for a sleep over. We donned our baby-doll pajamas and retired to the sleeping porch. It wasn’t long before all of the boys came back for their annual drive through. They would come up the road and make a couple of turns around the circular drive and honk and wave as they yelled good-night. We girls would go to the screen and wave back. While our jammies were short, none of us was allowed to have anything immodest. This night as I waved to the boys, I bumped the wooden framework of the porch. I dislodged a wasp nest, and the wasps flew up under my little top stinging me as they fought to get free. I did the only thing I could think of while in pain and under attack. I pulled off my top. There I was with my lithe, 17 year old body displayed brazenly to all of these boys I had known for years. There was a moment of silence followed by hooting and honking such as had never been heard before. I, on the other hand, fled to the bedroom with friends who could see that I was in serious trouble. I began having an allergic reaction to the nearly 20 stings I had suffered, and after a quick phone call to my family, was transported to the hospital.
You might be asking how chivalry comes into this after those boys reaction to my strip tease. Well, the word spread quickly that I had been dangerously close to dying . To this day, not one of those young men ever mentioned to me or anyone else that I know of what happened that night. What they saw may be burned into their brains just as the experiences of that evening are burned into mine, but a true gentleman tells no tales.
Showing posts with label Arkansas Delta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arkansas Delta. Show all posts
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Frog Giggin'
One of life's truths is that you can't choose your relatives. I think that's a good thing as long as they are not abusive or dangerously criminal. If they are just normally crazy the way most of our relatives are, then they are a great source of reference for building stories and for learning life lessons. I have wondered why someone can be so dumb as to do some of the things I saw adults do when I was a child. Don't get me wrong. I was glad they goofed up. It was entertaining, and it took some of the heat off of me when I goofed up. After all, if Uncle Charles did stupid stuff, couldn't I be cut some slack for what I did. Believe me, I needed all the excuses I could find.
My Uncle Charles was a volatile, unimaginative man. For that reason, he was much funnier than he intended to be. He had one supreme talent, horsemanship. The rest of his life would have been dull to us was it not for his childlike urge to tease us unrelentingly. There are certain advantages to being half-orphaned, and having overly indulgent relatives was one of them. We children loved Uncle Charles because he caused delightful chaos in my grandmother’s otherwise quiet and organized house. He brought in candy bars or treats and tease us to try to get them. The house rocked with the noise. He would stand around chatting with Daddy and Grandmother quite a while before even acknowledging us. We knew better than to breach good manners and ask. When he did bring out the treats, we would jump up and down to get them as he laughingly held them higher and higher. My grandmother, in her measured tone, would say something like, “Please, don’t excite the children that way.”
When one of us did managed to get a hold on a sleeve or arm, he’d take off running, dragging that child through the house with the rest of us in hot pursuit followed by my grandmother calling as firmly as she could bring herself to, “Stop the running or someone is going to get hurt.”
We never actually wrested any of the gifts from him as he always gave in just about the same time as my grandmother’s refined English manners had taken her as far as they could, and she was telling him he would have to leave if he could not stop. The other thing that we loved about Uncle Charles was that he did dumb things --- the very types of things we children were capable of doing. The difference lay in the fact that he did things accidentally while we had to plan and scheme for the same effect.
My favorite tale of such an exploit was the time he and my father went frog gigging. Uncle Charles loved the out of doors; and he loved frog legs, preferably lightly dredged in seasoned flour and sautéed in butter. In the Central Arkansas delta where I grew up, there are numerous rivers, small lakes and bayous; and in spring and summer the night air is a symphony sung in four part frog harmony. Uncle Charles and Daddy took advantage of the docile nature of the large bullfrogs that provided the bass section.
In order to catch these frogs, they used spring style gigs attached to long poles. The gigs would be stretched open like the claws of a lobster until the gig was brought down onto a frog’s back tripping the spring and snatching the frog from his perch on a log or grassy bank. This didn’t usually kill the frog so they had to be released into a burlap bag with a drawstring closure to keep them from escaping. The other bit of necessary equipment for these adventures was a strong light. Daddy and Uncle Charles had acquired old miner’s helmets with attached lamps. These were battery operated so that each man carried a 9-volt battery in his hip pocket with a wire running up to the miner’s helmet perched on top of his heads. When this beam of light hit the frog in the eyes, he would be temporarily blinded giving the gigg-er time to attack the gigg-ee.
While no other weapon was needed, Uncle Charles always took a six-shooter with him on these outings, just in case. Daddy never armed himself saying that if Uncle Charles ever did shoot him he wanted it to be perfectly clear to everyone that his death was accidental homicide not the result of Daddy loosing control and challenging his brother to a duel over some stupid remark only Uncle Charles could make. Thus equipped, they would go out to Grassy Lake so named because of the grassy rushes that covered the banks and grew well out into the shallow edges. There were a few widely spaced willows along the bank as well.
Daddy liked to do his gigging from the lake bank, as he believed there were more frogs there. Uncle Charles preferred to quietly pole a flat bottomed boat along the shore line. He had built this boat himself out of
corrugated tin stretched over a wooden frame. The boat was purely functional and had no redeeming aesthetic qualities. It was, in fact, a joke among the locals who, non-the-less, borrowed it for their own excursions into night fishing or frog gigging.
The brothers were keeping to their usual pattern one moonlit May night when Uncle Charles paddled his boat under an overhanging willow tree. Standing in the front of his craft, poling it quietly forward, he was startled to hear a soft thud behind him in the floor of the boat. Turning to see what it was, he came face to face with a water moccasin that had apparently been resting in the tree and had chosen that moment to drop back into the water for a swim.
As I said in the beginning, Uncle Charles was fairly unimaginative. He cussed frequently, a thing that made my grandmother unhappy. He only had one phrase that he used, and I don’t think it harmed us particularly as I was fully grown before I heard any cussing other than Uncle Charles’, “God-damn, Son of A Bitch.” Grandmother usually addressed this behavior with something like, “Please, not in front of the children.” We found that wholly amusing since it was already said in front of the children loudly and clearly.
You would think that staring down a water moccasin would be one of those times when Uncle Charles’ cussing would have come in handy. Instead, he started to scream incoherently flailing his arms wildly. His gyrations knocked his hat and light into the water. He was now in the dark, in a boat with a water moccasin.
When he heard Uncle Charles let out his frantic yell, Daddy turned towards his brother, flooding the scene with the light from his miner’s hat. He stood transfixed as Uncle Charles pulled the six-shooter from his belt and fired Blam! Blam, blam! Blam, blam, blam! All six bullets fired at the snake. Daddy said later that he was even more amazed as he watched six fountains form in the bottom of the boat and then become bubbling waves as the boat slowly sank into the lake leaving Uncle Charles standing in a tin-roofing and wooden boat submerged under two feet of water.
The frogs inside the burlap bag were trying desperately to get away from all of the commotion, so they were thrashing around in a soggy lump of burlap as Uncle Charles frantically searched the surrounding area for the snake. Ripples from the gyrating frog bag spread out over the water in ever widening circles. Uncle Charles and Daddy saw the snake at the same time. It was calmly slithering and bobbing away along the surface of the water right in a path of pearly light from Daddy's miner's lamp. For years, Daddy swore that the snake stopped at one point and looked back over whatever shoulder it had with a grin on its face. Uncle Charles raised the gun and clicked off several empty rounds. Finally, in frustration, he threw the pistol at the departing snake. As the gun sank into the water without touching the snake, Uncle Charles stomped out of his sunken craft, took two steps forward as if he was going to chase down his fleeing nemesis, then raised his fist to heaven and finally said, “God-damn Son of a bitch.”
My Uncle Charles was a volatile, unimaginative man. For that reason, he was much funnier than he intended to be. He had one supreme talent, horsemanship. The rest of his life would have been dull to us was it not for his childlike urge to tease us unrelentingly. There are certain advantages to being half-orphaned, and having overly indulgent relatives was one of them. We children loved Uncle Charles because he caused delightful chaos in my grandmother’s otherwise quiet and organized house. He brought in candy bars or treats and tease us to try to get them. The house rocked with the noise. He would stand around chatting with Daddy and Grandmother quite a while before even acknowledging us. We knew better than to breach good manners and ask. When he did bring out the treats, we would jump up and down to get them as he laughingly held them higher and higher. My grandmother, in her measured tone, would say something like, “Please, don’t excite the children that way.”
When one of us did managed to get a hold on a sleeve or arm, he’d take off running, dragging that child through the house with the rest of us in hot pursuit followed by my grandmother calling as firmly as she could bring herself to, “Stop the running or someone is going to get hurt.”
We never actually wrested any of the gifts from him as he always gave in just about the same time as my grandmother’s refined English manners had taken her as far as they could, and she was telling him he would have to leave if he could not stop. The other thing that we loved about Uncle Charles was that he did dumb things --- the very types of things we children were capable of doing. The difference lay in the fact that he did things accidentally while we had to plan and scheme for the same effect.
My favorite tale of such an exploit was the time he and my father went frog gigging. Uncle Charles loved the out of doors; and he loved frog legs, preferably lightly dredged in seasoned flour and sautéed in butter. In the Central Arkansas delta where I grew up, there are numerous rivers, small lakes and bayous; and in spring and summer the night air is a symphony sung in four part frog harmony. Uncle Charles and Daddy took advantage of the docile nature of the large bullfrogs that provided the bass section.
In order to catch these frogs, they used spring style gigs attached to long poles. The gigs would be stretched open like the claws of a lobster until the gig was brought down onto a frog’s back tripping the spring and snatching the frog from his perch on a log or grassy bank. This didn’t usually kill the frog so they had to be released into a burlap bag with a drawstring closure to keep them from escaping. The other bit of necessary equipment for these adventures was a strong light. Daddy and Uncle Charles had acquired old miner’s helmets with attached lamps. These were battery operated so that each man carried a 9-volt battery in his hip pocket with a wire running up to the miner’s helmet perched on top of his heads. When this beam of light hit the frog in the eyes, he would be temporarily blinded giving the gigg-er time to attack the gigg-ee.
While no other weapon was needed, Uncle Charles always took a six-shooter with him on these outings, just in case. Daddy never armed himself saying that if Uncle Charles ever did shoot him he wanted it to be perfectly clear to everyone that his death was accidental homicide not the result of Daddy loosing control and challenging his brother to a duel over some stupid remark only Uncle Charles could make. Thus equipped, they would go out to Grassy Lake so named because of the grassy rushes that covered the banks and grew well out into the shallow edges. There were a few widely spaced willows along the bank as well.
Daddy liked to do his gigging from the lake bank, as he believed there were more frogs there. Uncle Charles preferred to quietly pole a flat bottomed boat along the shore line. He had built this boat himself out of
corrugated tin stretched over a wooden frame. The boat was purely functional and had no redeeming aesthetic qualities. It was, in fact, a joke among the locals who, non-the-less, borrowed it for their own excursions into night fishing or frog gigging.
The brothers were keeping to their usual pattern one moonlit May night when Uncle Charles paddled his boat under an overhanging willow tree. Standing in the front of his craft, poling it quietly forward, he was startled to hear a soft thud behind him in the floor of the boat. Turning to see what it was, he came face to face with a water moccasin that had apparently been resting in the tree and had chosen that moment to drop back into the water for a swim.
As I said in the beginning, Uncle Charles was fairly unimaginative. He cussed frequently, a thing that made my grandmother unhappy. He only had one phrase that he used, and I don’t think it harmed us particularly as I was fully grown before I heard any cussing other than Uncle Charles’, “God-damn, Son of A Bitch.” Grandmother usually addressed this behavior with something like, “Please, not in front of the children.” We found that wholly amusing since it was already said in front of the children loudly and clearly.
You would think that staring down a water moccasin would be one of those times when Uncle Charles’ cussing would have come in handy. Instead, he started to scream incoherently flailing his arms wildly. His gyrations knocked his hat and light into the water. He was now in the dark, in a boat with a water moccasin.
When he heard Uncle Charles let out his frantic yell, Daddy turned towards his brother, flooding the scene with the light from his miner’s hat. He stood transfixed as Uncle Charles pulled the six-shooter from his belt and fired Blam! Blam, blam! Blam, blam, blam! All six bullets fired at the snake. Daddy said later that he was even more amazed as he watched six fountains form in the bottom of the boat and then become bubbling waves as the boat slowly sank into the lake leaving Uncle Charles standing in a tin-roofing and wooden boat submerged under two feet of water.
The frogs inside the burlap bag were trying desperately to get away from all of the commotion, so they were thrashing around in a soggy lump of burlap as Uncle Charles frantically searched the surrounding area for the snake. Ripples from the gyrating frog bag spread out over the water in ever widening circles. Uncle Charles and Daddy saw the snake at the same time. It was calmly slithering and bobbing away along the surface of the water right in a path of pearly light from Daddy's miner's lamp. For years, Daddy swore that the snake stopped at one point and looked back over whatever shoulder it had with a grin on its face. Uncle Charles raised the gun and clicked off several empty rounds. Finally, in frustration, he threw the pistol at the departing snake. As the gun sank into the water without touching the snake, Uncle Charles stomped out of his sunken craft, took two steps forward as if he was going to chase down his fleeing nemesis, then raised his fist to heaven and finally said, “God-damn Son of a bitch.”
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