Pictures Awaiting their "Thousand Words"

Many pictures, particularly those with some age and history behind them, are indeed worth a thousand words, as the old saying asserts.  Such words are at the same time worth even more when they are rich with detail and enlightenment -- or even simple nostalgia.

The following pictures are examples special to me.  Although I know something about them, others still among the living know even more than I, particularly about the circumstances of the moment captured in the image, as well as the subjects pictured.

Pictured above is my sister Maurine and my brother Neil on either side of Carlotta Smith at our old home place at the Bluff during the days, perhaps in the late 1940's, before the old water tank was removed from its platform near the back porch.  It's obviously summer and Carlotta's white sandals stand out above the bare feet of my siblings resting in the grass out of sight.  Special occasion?  Who made the picture and why?

This is the basic structure of the Lutheran Church that stood for years before World War II on the river road at the end of drive up from our house.  Sometime after the Prange family closed its store and moved to California the congregation diminished apparently to its end, and the structure was somehow moved four or five miles west of the Bluff to replace a previous structure of the Afro-American congregation at Poplar Creek where it stands today with several of the concrete piers that supported the west end of the original structure serving as an entry.  There must be former Bluff dwellers  still alive with knowledge of the details of this transformation.  If so, these details need to be recorded before they are lost.

These pictures made by Ken Shireman -- originally 35 mm slides recovered digitally -- capture a visit made by him and his sons John and Jason, along with my father S.A., to the river side houseboat of Tony Elmer? a half mile or so around the bend and down from the bluffs themselves, perhaps the last of its kind (that actually floated on logs) to survive in the Bluff area where there had been numerous such structures into the 1930's and early '40's.

The second picture of my father S.A. Woodiel and John Shireman obviously captures the excitement of  what might be John's first deer.  Details please?

The final image of this series is of Russell Marrs on an occasion when he was explaining to Ken the reason for dragging for shells from the White River -- the "pearl button" industry.  Though this procedure has been depicted over the years by others, it was an arduous enterprise -- genuine hard and hot work -- for many river residents during the depression years, especially.  There's much to be said about both the process and the "work ethic" that dragging for shells reflects.  [After "the war," several heroic individuals such as Russell and O.V. Gosnell created rudimentary diving helmets that enabled them to "dive" or decend on anchored ropes to simply gather the mollusks from the river bottom into long knitted sacks.    O.V. hired me at fifty-cents per hour (great wages at the time) as a lookout while he "dove."  My duties were to watch for steamboats and the maintenance of the simple engine that pumped air through a garden hose to his helmet below.  This, of course, is another story on my list.]

A Canal "Baptising": A Summer Ritual

 

In his memoir Crocketts Bluff As I Remember It David Prange recalls his experiences as a youthful witness of Negro baptisms that usually took place at Voss Lake, about a mile or so west of the Bluff. Unlike the baptisms he recalls at his family's Bethlehem Lutheran Church located slightly north of his family's store at the entrance to the lane leading up to the Woodiel home site, the ceremonies at the lake were carried out not ritualistically within a church itself but outdoors in natural water deep enough for total submersion -- just like that of Jesus by John the Baptist, according to their reading of the scriptures. And so it was with the local -- all white -- Baptists in the Bluff whose church was attended by my family.

Like most pictures, the one above captures a moment in time. A moment shortly before a group of people, here crudely encircled in the Prange irrigation canal in Crocketts Bluff, are to be baptised -- that is, dunked backward beneath the surface of the water by the country preacher to emerge as new members of the local Baptist Church. The ceremony marks the end of a summer "revival," a series of nightly meetings whose purpose was, along with renewing the spiritual intensity of the faithful, to bring the "lost" to salvation.

How strange are all of these terms to me today -- revival, baptism, salvation. So commonplace in my youth, but today strangely absurd. I am one of the people captured in this picture. I appear to be about fourteen. The dark-haired figure in the right foreground is "Brother" (we didn't call the minister Reverend, as I recall) Monroe Davis, and I, not quite like Athena from Zeus, appear to be rising out of his head. My memory of this occasion remains vague and faint, but I clearly recognize in addition to Brother Davis several personalities significant to me at the time: Russell Marrs, Earl Gammon, and (I believe) Glenn Widener -- all people whom I admired and respected and for whom I worked either with or for over those years. I think I learned more from Russell Marrs than from any adult in my youth other than perhaps Charles Downs, the Principal of St. Charles High School during my years there.

In his "remembrance" David includes his recollection of joining others in attempting to disrupt the ceremony of the Negro baptism as a belated confession, confident that God has forgiven him for his youthful indiscretions.

All the witnesses along the bank of the canal pictured here, apparently almost directly across the road from Schwab's Store, appear to be most orderly and respectful, even curious. When I look at them I try to recall not just what I might have been feeling and thinking at the time but what it all might have meant to me. What I glean, however, is more imagination and fantasy than recollection.

It occurs to me, however, that it was not far down the canal near a noteworthy sycamore tree from whose limbs local swimmers loved to dive, that some years earlier I had learned to swim after having been tossed into the canal by my older brothers. When I arose frantically to the surface that afternoon I did what I had to do -- frantically "dog-paddle" to the shallow water.

Rites of passage. Essential and unavoidable and valued to one's last day, regardless. Perhaps in ritual captured on this Sunday afternoon I was once again doing what I felt I had to do.

Going Home Again

The 50th Reunion of the St. Charles Class of 1953

[Whether or not it's fully realized, each of us has his or her our personal mythology -- our own collection of stories -- that reflects our understand of our life to this point. All social cultures, even the relatively small ones that dot the landscape along the rivers and across the great prairies of southeastern Arkansas, are nurtured and kept alive by their stories. Each of us has stories to tell, and when given half a chance, each of us is willing to share them. Portions of these reflections are a part of an on-going in-progress effort to write a memoir of my youth in Crockett’s Bluff. My efforts to date have evolved into a collection of biographical reflections – poems, stories, incidents, and photographs.]

I

Standing in the middle of Rt. 1, the two-lane blacktop stretch a couple of miles west of St. Charles, AR this afternoon in late June of 2003, the only sound is that of a slight wind and the occasional familiar call of a red-winged blackbird. Not a living soul in sight, not a sound of the modern world. Though the moment is not unfamiliar and a thousand memories rustle about in the back of my mind, after fifty years of modern urban hustle and bustle, the silence and isolation of it all makes me a bit ill at ease.

I’m thinking of Thomas Wolfe, a North Carolinian novelist of a generation earlier than ours, whose stories were probably unknown to us in those years of the early fifties when we were together. Wolfe is often remembered by the title of one of his famous novels: You Can’t Go Home Again. The marvelously charged assertion of his title is, for me, both provocative and mildly disturbing. I’m naturally inclined to respond, I can too go home again, but then again, obviously I can’t. The essential ambiguity of the statement produces in me a mixture of frustrating and mildly nostalgic if not sad challenge to my memory.

I can return to Crockett’s Bluff, the place of my birth, to St. Charles and DeWitt and varied spots across the vast Grand Prairie, to the locations of the experiences of my youth, to the place on the little rise just yards from the banks of the White River that was once for more than twenty years my home. I can walk over the space, the fields, the river banks, the old orchards; I can touch those signs of permanence that remain, the old oaks around the old home site, the Civil War monument in St. Charles, the old County Court House in DeWitt; and I can, with luck, even speak to one or more of those few living souls who remain there where they thrived a half-century ago; but, like the memory of my mother, alive and literally “still kicking” at 101 in a DeWitt nursing home, that which remains bears only slight resemblance to what I remember – which, of course, no doubt bears only slight resemblance to what was.

So, how does one’s attempts to reunite with the past match up with the ever-present and persistent erosion of time and change and age? Perhaps the more potentially instructive question is why does it matter? Why does one care? What does one’s need to revisit one’s past say about human need, or simple aging, or the values of the human spirit? Do we go in search of the positive aspects of our youths, the bright spots of our early age of possibilities? Or, is there a need to examine the dark side, as well? Is there a need to take stock of past actions in view of what might have been one’s perceived “potential,” albeit in the face of limited opportunities? I suspect in all of these lies a touch of truth.


II

My anticipation during the weeks before our gathering included – usually in my scattered responses to the “Are you looking forward to it?” inquiry from friends who when informed that I was returning to my fiftieth high school reunion were naturally amazed when learning of the size of the class which inevitably led to further questions re how many were anticipated to attend, who we were, where we lived, what we had done with our lives, etc. At base, however, returning was for me, in an even more intense way than usual, more a spiritual than physical return. Since, as my wife Linda gently but continually reminds me, I tend to live inside my head. And recollections of my childhood in Crocketts Bluff and the area around it – a remote backwater of cultural isolation, as I look back on it – bring to mind a world from which I eagerly escaped as soon as there was opportunity and to which I have returned over the decades only occasionally. Yet, on each visit there are always, quite apart from the return to the scenes of my childhood, a series of re-encounters with the spirits that reside there – both living and dead – those often visited in the wee hours of those morning when I’m half awake before rising, when my defenses are down and I’m vulnerable to such visits.

It’s at those times that I’m back again with Russell Marrs doing loops over the rice fields near DeWitt in a Piper Cub rented from the Butternut Jones flying service; doing landings on an old abandoned WWII airstrip near Stuttgart that I had not at the time known existed.

Or racing at full tilt of the throttle down the narrow asphalt two-lane west out of St. Charles with B.J. Starks in his old Model A Ford, its lights out by choice on a moonlit night, and swerving wrecklessly only at the last moment to avoid a large horse that had suddenly loomed into the center of the road on his midnight wanderings across an unfenced prairie night.

Or watching with Joe Currie and a small gathering of Black farm hands on a Sunday afternoon around a clay circle worn smooth in a wooded grove just outside of St. Charles, their fists clutching small wads of dollar bills, shoot away no doubt much or most of their weekly wages in a crap game freely laced with fruit jars of clear "moonshine."


Such incidents bring to mind the random nature of all existence on this earth, particularly the reckless and carefree existence of youth in which awareness of mortality did not rank as a high priority on the screen of our consciousness. So, considerations of where I was going and why and to what, along with the spirits I would be sure to encounter there, had filled my mind for weeks prior to leaving Connecticut.

Since from Hartford there is no direct flight to be had to Little Rock, a connection is required, in our case in Cincinnati. The second leg of our trip, this time on a much smaller plane which flew at a relatively low altitude that allowed for us an excellent view of the Ohio River all the way to where it connected with the Mississippi before the landscape switched to a more familiar patchwork of soybean and rice fields as we made our approach to Little Rock. All of this brought back to me the one flight I had had in a very small plane almost a quarter of a century before over the old home place at The Bluff and along the more familiar White River to St. Charles. There’s no better way of gaining perspective of the physical world of one’s day to day existence than checking it out from a few thousand feet above.