Two Childhood Memories for a Grandson

Here are two childhood memories written for my grandson Griffin Bliss for a project related to Lois Lowry's novel The Giver in his seventh grade English class at St. Andrews School at Savannah, Georgia. 

The first is about my first job at about his age plowing cotton for Mr. George Kline in his field out the Hill Road just west of Voss Lake.  The second is a recollection of the recurrent thrill of all Bluff children at the sound of the whistle of the Mary Woods No. 2

About Your Age 

When I was about your age, a sixth or seventh grader, I was offered my first real paying job.  Something more than the familiar string of unpaid chores assigned to all boys that age who lived on farms in rural Arkansas in the late 1940s.

It was a relatively simple job working on a small cotton farm owned by Mr. George Kline, one of our neighbors in Crockett’s Bluff, a small community at the bend of the White River where I was born and grew up. 

The downside of this job was that I was required to be at his house shortly after sunrise in the morning, not to return until the sun was setting in the evening, a long day.  But the upside was that I was paid what was to me a hefty sum of $2.50 per day.

Since the field where we worked was almost two miles from his house, we rode the horses back and forth each day we would be using in our labors.

 I was required simply to stabilize a plow, pulled by a great buckskin horse appropriately named “Buck,” up and down between the rows of cotton plants uprooting any grass or weeds that might be there.  Mr. Kline came along behind me down these rows with another smaller and more precise plow – pulled by his favorite horse “Lightning” -- that loosened the soil and “cultivated” the plants in their early stages of growth. 

Buck was an enormous so-called “draft” horse, bred for hard and heavy work, and his strength appeared to me to be unlimited.  So, any thought that I, at less than a hundred pounds, was supposed to control his starting, turning, and stopping movements with the reins I leaned into from time to time tied behind my back, was a joke.  Consequently, Buck stopped and turned whenever he pleased, much to my enormous frustration.  

Consequently, since I never gave up trying to control him, from time to time over those sweltering summer days I suffered the modest shame and embarrassment of being gently chastised by Mr. Kline about the quality of the language I addressed to poor old Buck. 

It was a long summer and the work was hard and long and generally hot.  But it was work of the sort one got paid for, and I spent the first twelve dollars I earned on a used red bike with characteristic balloon tires at the Western Auto Store in DeWitt, the county seat of Arkansas County Arkansas. 

 As I rode it for miles over the graveled roads leading in and out of Crockett’s Bluff I felt –what with a paying job – a new sense of what I would now call liberation. 

 *********

The image of an unknown photographer from a Woodiel family album and title image for this site.

The Mary Woods No. 2

The photograph of  the paddle-wheel steamboat pictured above was made from the bank of the White River no more than two hundred yards or so from where I was born in Crockett’s Bluff,  Arkansas, a village in the 1930s much smaller and even more “quiet” and “tired” than the Macomb that Harper Lee describes in To Kill a Mockingbird.  

So, when the steam-whistle of the Mary Woods No. 2 was sounded, everyone, particularly children, dropped everything and headed for the bluff banks overlooking the river. 

 Its sound could be heard long before its barge of logs nosed slowly around the bend beneath the red clay bluffs for which the village was named.  We knew we were in for a treat, something truly awesome to us.  She was majestic: grand and powerful enough to move upstream a barge stacked with logs larger than anyone ever viewed elsewhere.  And she made all the noise necessary to justify her presence, the sound of her engines, the splashing patter of her enormous rear wheel, and the usual additional whistle as a special treat to us from the pilot on the bridge who always returned our waves.

The experience was necessarily brief, since even though she moved slowly when compared with the familiar out-board powered fishing boats, a full view was limited to a panoramic minute or two, so it was necessary to run barefoot down along the bank for the next clear opening with a view.

Then, when she was gone from view and rounding the next bend near the familiar sandbar, her super gigantic waves having reached the shore making the house boats bounce like buoys, we were left with the image above, the Mary Woods with the steam from its twin stacks streaming along its back downstream as it forged upriver its massive barge of freshly cut timber.

A scene that is in memory almost as alive now as it was then – a lingering sensual feast in the midst of an otherwise long,  slow and quiet summer day in a “tired” little hamlet at the bend of the White River.

At the viewing site with my sister Maureen Shireman.

Water Rising - Spring 2011

An email from my childhood friend Sharon Bullock Rush on Tuesday Evening, May 10, 2011:



"Dale,

Thought you would like to know that the water in Stinking Bay is almost as high as it was in 1927.  Two feet lower, and I think that it will crest tomorrow.

So that means all of the snakes are coming up the hill.  We have killed three in the driveway.  This morning my yard man was here picking up sticks and he killed three in the back yard.  I have to really look good when I go out side.  I always do.  

The farmers  have finally gotten back in the fields.  The fields were flooded and the roads were real bad.  Even I-40 was shut down.  The big trucks had to come from Hazen through Stuttgart to  DeWitt, Gillett, and to Lake Village and then head north to Memphis.  Now, that was a long haul!

Take Care,

Sharon

Water Rising May Floods 11

White River Flooding

Two Tales of a Noble Family

Fanny and Charles Dodson at their home near Crocketts Bluff
Summer 1968

Crocketts Bluff during my early years was in every traditional respect a segregated southern society from the mid-nineteen thirties until the decade immediately following the aftermath of the Brown vs Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court in 1954, and there certainly were over those years incidents of overt and violent, as well as covert and indirect, acts of racial oppression of its Black members. Acts of this sort to which I was witness remain etched in my memory today, sixty or more years later. One would like to believe, however, the Bluff was throughout those years a more open and just and generous community than many of those that populated the states of the deepest South.

In fact, among its most noble and respected families -- names like Allen, Phillips, and Dodson come immediately to mind -- were families we would label today as African-American, but who were distinguished in those days from their white neighbors not simply by their skin color but their reputation and example as responsible workers, individuals of integrity, faithful neighbors, and devoted parents.

"Charlie" and Fanny Dodson, pictured above, are noteworthy to me, not only for the qualities I've noted, but also for the fact that somehow they sent their four children to college even before the Woodiel family began to make it a tradition.

One has to meditate on that fact for a while to fully appreciate its significance.

Two Dodson Stories

One From "Miss" Fanny

During one of the summers between my college years at Arkansas Tech I managed to get a job once held by my father S.A. with the AAA. My task was to go from farm to farm and determine by means of large aerial photographs whether individual farmers had exceeded their allotted acreage.

It was during one of these visits that I found myself chatting with "Miss" Fanny [same old tradition: I called her "Miss" Fanny and she called me "Mr." Dale] while waiting for Charlie to come up to the house from the cotton field below the hill on which it sat. I can't recall what brought it on, but I believe it was one of those very large cast iron cauldrons used for a variety of tasks including washing clothes before the advent of washing machines.

I can hear her voice in my memory, but I'll not attempt the dialect, though the story is better with it. So I suppose that will remain special just to me. Nevertheless, she told me a story about the day just before "my last baby was born."

She had "been choppin cotton all mawnin" and had decided just before noon to come up to the house to make some lunch, or "denna," and had decided, while the lunch was cooking, to go down and "start a bit of wash" by building a fire under the large cauldron. At this point in the story, pausing while turning to look back down the hill, she slowly reflected:

"And, you know, Mista Dale,"when I cum back up that hill, I wus a carrin that baby in my arms!"


One About Mr. Charlie

Some time later that same summer I was in DeWitt on one of those sweltering Saturdays of July when lots of folks have come to town. Like many other predominantly white folks -- I had made my way to Coker-Hampton's Drug Store since it was the only -- or certainly one of the very few -- establishments with what amounted to an air conditioned atmosphere.

Am I'm sitting at the soda fountain counter, I'm suddenly aware of a disruption behind me just inside the entrance, and I turn to find the black man lying apparently unconscious on the floor is Charlie. I rush to where he's lying just as one of the Hampton crew has arrived from somewhere in the back. (There is general muttering from customers and other observers as the spectacle proceeds. The phrase "drunk nigger" sticks in my mind.)

"Do you know this man"? blurts the Hampton pharmacist.

"Yes, I do, his name is Charlie Dodson."

"Well, could you help get him out of here? Dr. Rascoe's office is just around the corner."

By this time Charlie is awake and totally startled. Perhaps he realizes he's just fainted, but he's glad to see my face, I can tell. I help him to his feet and out the door. I put his arm around my neck and my arm around his waist, but after a few strides he's able to manage on his own.

We make our way around the corner and up the long flight of stairs to the doctor's office. The receptionist is startled, and she immediately interrupts Dr. Roscoe who is with another patient. He comes forth and with an immediate smile:

"Charlie, what on earth's the matter?"

For me, it was one of those rare moments of complete satisfaction.

Charlie Dodson is all right, and so am I. He's not a young man and he has just suffered the shock of coming from a sweltering temperature into an unreal rush of cold air. And what a relief for us both to learn even the county doctor knows and respects Charlie Dodson.

Of course.

"The Bluff": Still on the Map

An official historical marker verifies today what was for more than a hundred years the center of the active community of Crockett's Bluff, Arkansas where I was born on an early September afternoon in 1935. Near this site stood during the years of my childhood a tall water tank of the conventional sort that can still be seen on the skylines of small towns throughout America. Here it was designed with fire protection in mind for the Prange Farm warehouses that rested along the bluffs at the bend of the White River for which the site gets its name. For more than half a century, at least, it served as a focal point that could be seen actoss the prairie from as far as eight or more miles away. Today it almost totally abandoned. There remain, of course, "hunting cabins" here and there along the river, as well as a few permanently inhabited scattered houses, and there's occasional traffic from the outlying areas --from the "hill road" leading west toward Stuttgart and the almost straight asphalt stretch leading south toward St. Charles and DeWitt. But what was once an active river and farm community is today about as dead as it can be and still be said to have life at all. The marker provides the occasional visitor evidence there was once a lively village huddled around the long bend with the bluffs overlooking the river. Not more than a quarter of a mile west along Rt. 153 in the well-kempt cemetery near the Baptist Church lies more detailed evidence of that past life.