Bird's Eye View of the Bluffs

Not exactly Google Earth but a clear view from the air of an approach to the Woodiel place and the bluffs themselves -- thanks to a Stuttgart friend of Ken Shireman who flew us out in his small plane -- made, I believe, sometime in the late 1970s or early eighties. [A double click should produce a fairly clear view.]

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.

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.

Two Glimpses from the Late 1930s

I have Elizabeth Dupslaff Minton to thank for forwarding these two pictures from what appear to be from the late 1930's, one made at the entrance of the Crocketts Bluff Lutheran Church that stood adjacent to the "Pete" Prange homestead along the river road between the Prange Store and the entrance to what would be the lane leading up to the Woodiel homesite, the other of the members of the Pin Oak School that stood five miles or so south of the Bluff. [A double-click on the pic should reveal for you a much fuller version of the figures. Perhaps those of you closer to the age of those pictured will be able to help identify them.] L to R: one of the Prange daughters, the church pastor, Ruth Dupslaff, unknown girl, and Herbert Dupslaff, Jr. L to R: Liz believes the boy (second boy from right side, second row) to be her brother Bill and two of those in the middle of the front row to be Norma June and "Charlie Boy" Krablin. Activities surrounding the Luthern Church are among my earliest memories, though I don't believe anyone in my family attended it. I associate it in my memory with the W.R. Smith, the Herbert Dupslaff, and the Prange families. I believe I recall the daffodils that lined the picket fence along its entrance and (if this is not a fantasy) the sound of its organ. Sometime, perhaps during the War years when we were away living in Little Rock and the Prange family had moved to California, it vanished. I have been told it was dismantled and moved to by the Black Poplar Creek congregation to a site three or five miles west of the Bluff toward Stuttgart where portions of the original structure remain standing. The Pine Oak School House, similar to those that dotted the praires across Arkansas County, I clearly recall, since the road from the Bluff ran directly into the face of it exactly five miles to the south where it took its turn eastward toward St. Charles. It was a one-room structure similar to the one at the Bluff where I first remember being in school -- most of my introduction to reading and aritimetic coming from a fifth grade girl who functioned as a most efficient "teacher's aide -- before we moved in 1941 briefly to DeWitt and then to Little Rock and the Robert E. Lee Elementary School which to this day I remember with great fondness, for it was there that my first formal education really began.

Crockett's Bluff: May Day '96

I've come 0n one of those rare Arkansas spring mornings that graces the landscape and the hearts of the farms and river here before the onset of an inevitable span of long mosquito-infested days -- devoted in my memory to serious toil -- before the arrival of a seemingly brief but welcomed autumn with its gradually brisker mornings and the inevitable first frost that will bring to their knees all those sources of sustenance that have flourished since the previous April or May.

I have returned once again to this spot to confront or perhaps embrace the spirits that inhabit this otherwise naturally pleasant spot above the White River and and into the woods surrounding the place where, for the record I suppose, my family begins.

Not far fron this spot rests the remains of the house, long abandoned, in which I was born one September afternoon sixty years ago and where my father died with all, except for me, of his family around him.

His wife, my mother, survives today in a nearby town in the care of those who are not her family.

The breeze is fresh and cool across the new grass and fledgling foliage near this spot where I first saw a pig butchered, its belly opened and its guts removed after having its hair scraped clean, fresh from the scalding water. Even now, the images of that scene, as well as the taste of the fresh sausage that it produced, remain etched, fresh in my memory.

The barns are gone, the grassy hills now trees, the out buildings vanished -- the sheds, the two-hole outhouse, the chicken coops. It is memory that is required now that change has worked its will, removing the clues to the past and altering the landscape with growth.

We are left to memory and the local spirits to transmit their meaning. Anxious and reluctant to let go of our pasts, we are left to their mercies.

Yet time and age and death's accounting dare not extinguish the life that persists in the cool currents of nature's cycle this morning on this rise above the White River where on one shining morning past I watched in awe the house boats along its banks bounce like buoys beneath the waves of the heroic paddle-wheeler Mary Woods No.2, the steam from its twin stacks streaming along its back downstream as it forged upriver its massive barge of freshly cut timber.

Another View of the Buff in the Early 50's

by Roberta Robinson Hudson

I am Roberta Robinson Hudson. Your mom was my Aunt Lucille. She was energetic and wonderful as she trudged from one end of the farm to another doing everything, collecting eggs, riding her bicycle and a million of other chores. She was so fast about everything that Dad and I could not keep track. In Kansas City in the early 1950's city people just ran for buses and street cars and lugged groceries from the local store, hoping all the time that it wouldn't rain before we got home. Anyway, Dad and I decided to pay a visit to your farm since Aunt Lucille was his only sister. She embraced us warmly even when we might have posed an interference in her daily routine. I can still feel her bear hug and her rapid-fire questions and answers as she and Dad remembered things that happened long before I was born. I enjoyed especially the stories that I had never heard before. The weather was hot in August, but we really didn't notice. The farm looked spacious and the White River beautiful. I remember there was, however, just a little excitement when Aunt Lucille discovered a snake that she thought to be harmful, so she raised her hoe and dispatched it immediately. I really did not understand what had happened until Dad informed me that it was a water moccasin and not an especially friendly one. When your calm and friendly father made an appearance he was unflappable when we told him what had transpired. His eyes seemed to make everything all right. As we were talking, two young boys, barefoot and wearing Huckleberry Finn pants and carrying fishing rods, came home, and the older one, Dale, enumerated his fishing success. My dad had read everything that Mark Twain had ever written and immediately dubbed Dale "Huckleberry," and I agreed. Thereafter, when we saw someone who resembled Dale, we both said "Huck Finn." What a wonderful summer that was. I got to see Aunt Lucille in action. (She wrote to us often and I knew her through her letters.) S.A. was your Dad and A.L. your older brother. She described what each of you was doing. She referred to Billy Gene, Shelby Arnold, Dale and Neil by name. She also described the canning of fruit and vegetables that she had grown herself. My own mother was amazed by her energy and wrote to her often, exchanging recipes and news about the families. My dad, of course, was interested in things from the past that he was too young to remember since he was ten years younger than Aunt Lucille. She was proud of him (perhaps because he was so handsome and looked like the movie actor Errol Flynn.) Later, before he died (he was fifty-six years old and diagnosed with a stage four brain tumor in nineteen sixty-eight) he spoke of Aunt Lucille and our visit to Crockett's Bluff in the early nineteen fifties. He wondered about Huck Finn and his brothers. Roberta Robinson Hudson BirdiegeneH@aol.com [The photo above of Dale and Neil Woodiel was made about the time of Roberta's visit.]

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.