Through an Old Man's Eyes

The following memoir by Jim Spencer was forwarded to me by Jeanie Marrs Vasseur who lived much of her childhood a stone's throw from the White River in Crockett's Bluff across the river road from Mr. George Gosnell, the subject of this recollection.  It was originally published in the Lightnin' Ridge Journal in June 2004. 

Through an Old Man’s Eyes

By Jim Spencer

            When you leave the pavement and take the winding gravel road that eventually leads you down to the river, it’s not long before you pass a brush-choked old home place on the right. Nothing is left to show of it now, but a friend of mine once lived there.

            In the early 1950s, when my family came almost weekly to our cabin on the river, my first order of business upon arrival was to run down the hill to visit Mr. Gosnell. We’d sit on his front step and talk, and after a while Mrs. Gosnell would bring us fresh oatmeal cookies and cold well water. We were great pals despite our slight age difference. I was six at the time. Mr. Gosnell was 101.

            He was the only person I ever knew who actually remembered the Civil War. “I was born too late to get to fight in it,” he said regretfully. “I was only 13 when it ended. I did throw a rock at that S.O.B. Sherman one time, though.”

            Until Mr. Gosnell was 98, he fished trotlines and limblines in the river. He say ramrod straight in a cane-bottomed chair, paddling up and down the swift river in a one-man cypress boat. They say he was one of the best fishermen on the river, even at 98.

            Mr. Gosnell remembered the river and its surrounding forest the way I’d like to be able to remember them, all virgin timber and lousy with deer and bears and panthers and turkeys. He found in me an appreciative audience, and I listened spellbound to many a tale of adventure in the wilderness. I suspect now that a lot of those tales were invented on the spot to thrill a six-year-old boy, but I guess they could have been true. Some of them, anyway.

            But their truth was unimportant then, and it still is today. If Mr. Gosnell told a whopper now and then, I figure he earned the right. Anyone tough enough to last for more than a century in an environment as harsh and unforgiving as those untamed bottoms can stretch the truth with every breath if that’s what he wants to do.

            But oh, what stories he told: Of Indians traveling up and down the river. Most of whom were friendly but some of whom were not. Of the time they hunt the Union soldiers from the limbs of the gnarled red oak that still stands on a red clay hill above the river. Of the wolves and panthers and bears that came into the very yard in which we sat, killing and carrying off chickens and shoats until they, too, were killed for their trespasses. (The popular version of the soldier-hanging incident says there were nine men hung that day, but Mr. Gosnell maintained it was only five. “Damned if I’ll tell a lie,” he said, “for four miserable Bluecoats.”)

            He told me of other things, too, things I could close my eyes and see as he talked, things I will never see first-hand because like Mr. Gosnell, I, too, was born too late. He told me of ducks falling into tiny potholes and sloughs until they blotted out the sky and blanketed the water, returning stubbornly time after time while Mr. Gosnell shot them by the hundreds for the markets in Memphis and Little Rock and St. Louis. He told me of Canada geese sailing into his smoking guns along the gravel bars and sand bars, and he told me of killing them by the dozen. He told me of the infrequent but terrible raids of millions upon millions of passenger pigeons, and of the temporary but near-total devastation they wrought on the mast-laden oaks and pecans along the river. “I hated to see those things come,” he told me. “When they got through, there wasn’t enough food left to fill up a cat squirrel. But they sure were good eatin’.” Those pigeon stories were the most outlandish of all the stories he told me, and I now suspect they were probably the most truthful as well.

            He was much too old to take me anywhere, but he described a lot of his favorite places to me. I found some of them when I got old enough to roam those bottoms myself, and I’m still finding some of them today. Every time I do, it gives me a little thrill.

            “There’s a little slough back in the woods ‘bout a quarter and a half a quarter southwest of Holly Lake,” he told me one fall morning as we munched cookies on the step. “Used to be a lot of bears back in there on account of there were lots of striped oaks and hackberry trees, and bears like striped oak acorns and hackberries. I never paid much attention, but I expect a fellow could kill a mess of squirrels in there, too, in a dry year when the pecans and white oaks didn’t make.” During a dry year 25 autumns later I recalled what the old man had said, and one morning I walked southwest from Holly Lake. Sure enough, the slough was there. Sure enough, the squirrels were, too.

            My oldest friend is long dead now. His old heart finally gave out on him at 104, and they said he kept his wits about him to the very end. I feel privileged to have known him, because he was one of the last of a vanished breed – men who made their way in the wilderness with hook and trap and gun without changing either themselves or the land on which they lived. A century earlier, Mr. Gosnell would have been a mountain man, trapping beaver, fighting Indians, meeting his compatriots at rendezvous each summer. The only thing men like Mr. Gosnell were ill-equipped to handle was the very thing that killed them off, one by one – the inexorable advance of the monster we know as civilization.

            “I think I’m about ready to go,” the old man told me the last time I ever saw him. “The summers are hotter than they used to be, and the winters are colder. There ain’t no big trees left, and it’s been 20 years since I seen an eagle. A bear steak would ruin my stomach even if I could find one to eat, and the cold water from the dams has ruint the river. I seen the best of it, and now it’s gone. I might as well be going, too.”

            And go he did, not long after. But thanks to him, I “seen the best of it”, too, through the faded blue eyes of a worn-out old man. I can close my eyes and see it still, the way he described it to me 50 years ago, and I can’t walk those bottoms or float that river without remembering something or other he once told me.

            And every time I drive past that brushy vacant lot, I can smell fresh oatmeal cookies.

Clip from its publication in the Pine Bluff Commercial, Feb. 24 1981

The Night of Passage

Samuel Allie Woodiel
March 6, 1902 - June 14, 1988

Except for four years during World War II when he worked in a defense plant near Little Rock, S.A. Woodiel lived and worked in Crockett's Bluff from the early 1930s until his death in 1988.  This is an account of his death at the Bluff, June 14, 1988 by his son-in-law Ken Shireman who, along with his wife Maureen (Woodiel) Shireman and her brothers Shelby and Billy and their mother Lucille, were present.

We arrived at Crockett's Bluff at 12:45 and S.A. was asleep, breathing very shallow with brief periods of gasping.  The night was clear and warm.  I walked back outside after we sat with him for a while.  The big dipper was at about the 10:00 position.  I walked Billy back to the trailer and we lit the pilot light on the water heater.  Whiskers, the new family dog, was my constant campaion.  Later, as Shelby and I sat at the kitchen table we talked about the good times we had all shared, particularly those of John and Gary with Papaw.  I asked Shelby if he expected S.A. to wake up and he said, "No" . . . which confirmed my observations.  I felt death to be no more than a few hours away.  I went to Maureen where she sat on the bed and said, "You do realize that he isn't going to wake up don't you?"  She then began to talk to S.A. and said, "It's me, it's Maureen, I'm with you."  He turned his head toward her and opened his eyes in narrow slits and uttered a word which sounded like "I". I felt he wanted to speak but the strength was no longer there.  She then began to say  "Mother is alright, Shelby and Ken are here . . . Billy is here . . . you have been strong for so long but you do not have to be now.  It's OK to relax, to let go."  I seemed to sense a release at that point . . .I went back outside.  
 
A fox was barking and a lone owl was hooting.  The big dipper had progressed to about the 8:00 position in its counter-clockwise rotation.  Shelby came out and we stood and watched as the cup on the dipper began to descend into the tree line.  We talked some about the stars and the universe, then went back inside.  

I sat in a side chair against the west wall of the bedroom with my feet very near the bed.  Maureen's mother Lucille sat very close to S.A. on the bed watching his face intently.  Maureen put her arm around her and moved closer, searching for the weak signs that life was still there . . . I was awe struck by what I saw . . . The small night light near the floor cast a half light on their faces and projected their larger than life-size shadows in the corner of the room.  It was as if the shadows were watching, overseeing the event unfolding before us.  I moved closer and watched as the breaths became weaker . . . death was near.

Here on a high bluff on the west bank of the White River . . . daylight seems to arrive a bit earlier, and as it was just barely beginning to get light I left the house for a walk.    Three foxes were in a social disagreement about something and their playful barks and snarls were waking the day.  Whiskers bolted at the sound to break it up.  I walked past the end of the drive and turned toward Schwab's store . . . long since closed.  The nightwatcher cast its mercury glow on the emptiness of the road.  I remembered what S.A. had said on a tape that we made Thanksgiving and sent to my son John in Colorado . . . "You don't have to worry about us out here . . . it's just about as dead as it can be."  I turned and looked west down the road, past the post office.  No car lights, and you could see for miles.  I started back to the house expecting to find that it would be all over for S.A.  Birds were beginning to awaken . . . and I heard one very persistent whipporwhill.  The foxes were still yippig and Whiskers walked beside me.  I looked again at the big dipper.  It had slowly continued it's north star orbit as it has done since this planet has existed.  The only part visible as it slowly set behind the trees was the last three stars of the handle.  As I walked to the bed, Shelby, Lucille and Maureen were huddled closely to S.A.  Lucille said "He hasn't moved his hands . . . he's been moving his hands."  Maureen said "Look Mother, he's still breathing."  I sat beside Shelby on the bed and placed my hand on S.A.'s abdomen.  I counted for 15 seonds before I felt a breath.  Shelby had his fingers of his left hand tucked under the rib cage near the heart and Maureen had her hand on his neck.  Lucille was holding his hand.  I counted for 32 seconds before I felt another feeble breath.  We were silently awaiting the end.  After another lapse of 35 seconds I felt a breath accompanied by a weak gasp and I knew it was the last.  His energy, his life force was gone.  I leaned to Shelby and said "I'm going to get Billy" who was asleep in Jack's trailer.  Shelby said "His heart just stopped."  I pushed the call button near the phone which rang the bell in the trailer four times and started my walk.  Billy was just starting to open the door when I arrived.  "He's gone," I said.  We walked back to the house . . . I don't remember what we said except that as Billy opened the screen door he said, "I'll never be the man that he was."  It reminded me of a comment by Shelby's.  "Even if somebody put the screws to him, he always found something good to say about them."  We walked into the bedroom, everybody embraced everybody.  It was over.  We began to perform our different tasks of consolation.  The already prepared list of phone numbers sat by the phone and coffee pot.  Billy and Shelby began calling and Maureen sat with her mother.  Billy and Shelby walked back into the bedroom. . . they both in turn lifted S.A.'s jaw which held his mouth open wide.  Maureen had already closed his eyes, but his jaw would not remain.  After they left the room, I lifted his head and rearranged the pillows, tilting his head forward.  I then rolled the blanket and tucked it under his chin.  It then held his mouth almost closed. 

I thought of the days when the family would prepare and dress the body for burial.  I thought, "I could do that.  It wouldn't be so bad, maybe even pleasant, a sort of last act of service to the loved one."  I watched as the color was quickly fading from S.A.'s face.  It reminded me of how when you catch a trout, when they die, how quickly the color fades.  Shelby had called John Hestir, the family doctor and the Essex funeral home, to send an ambulance.  I walked outside to wait.  The sun was not yet up but it was good light.  He had died at about 5:05 A.M. 

Shelby and Billy walked outside with the portable phone and did some more calling.  It wasn't long before Hestir arrived and they went inside.  We had seen one fox near the end of the drive.  I called Jason and told him, and Maureen called John.  When the ambulance arrived we took the stretcher inside.  Hestir and I got on S.A.'s right side with Cooper and Billy on the other and Shelby at his feet.  We gently lifted him to the dolly.  Cooper covered him with a blue terry cloth robe and we all helped put him in the ambulance, as if we were all needed.  He probably didn't weigh 115 pounds but everybody wanted to feel like we had a hand in it.  It was our last act we would ever perform for him.  The grandsons would be the pallbearers . . . it was over . . . Cooper drove away.  Spencer and Sevella Parker came over and all of the men stood outside and talked as the women sat in the kitchen. . . It reminded me of our childhood school days and that S.A. was a school teacher.  How the boys and girls gather in their respective circles.  The sun was just peeking through the trees.  We talked of good times . . . most of the mourning had been done . . I thought . . .how can anybody leave this world any better . . . A beautiful summer day . . .owls and birds calling . . . foxes alive with their playfulness and the hands of loved ones on you as you begin to sleep the big sleep.  It just doesn't get any better.

The funeral was two days later.  As the family waited near the front of the church to enter the sanctuary the center of our attention was Mary Catherine, the youngest great grandchild.  She was the symbol or perhaps the actual rebirth or resurrection of the spirit.  I do not know where the life force comes from or to what great reservoir it returns, but maybe through a transformation process that transcends our understanding, part of it flows to the young who carry it into the future generations.  I know that when I look at Mary Catherine and the other young members of the family I will always see a part of the spirit and energy of S.A. Woodiel.  His passage has been completed.

S.A. Woodiel died June 14, 1988 at 5:05 A.M.

 Ken Shireman, June 15, 1988

In and Around the Prange Store

The following is a third excerpt of Crockett's Bluff As I Remember It,  David Prange's memoir of his childhood in the Bluff from his birth in 1926 until his family moved to California in 1944. See "I: Approach From the West" and "II: School Days." Pictured above in Schwab's Grocery as it was about 2000, the last surviving store in the Bluff, to which he refers in this recollection.

"Our dad's store was the most popular place of business in town, but for one.  That one, which was by some considered the Honky-Tonk, was the Schwab's store.  There were actually only two stores in town that were actively serving the public.  The August Prange store was also active but served, mainly, the employees of his vast plantation.  To say the least, it bordered on being a company store.  The Schwab Mercantile was considered the Honky-Tonk because beer could be purchased there and a pool room was a part of the establishment.  An interesting difference was our dad ran a credit business while the Schwab store, to my knowledge, did not.  Generally, as to be expected, when  folks had money they patronized the competition.  The availability of beer and the pool tables were a great attraction.  When they were short on money they often came to dad's store.  Our dad, with his gentle heart, was an easy touch, and most knew it and some took advantage of it.

"The Schwab, the August Prange and dad's stores were active within my earliest memories.  The August Prange store closed to business during the mid to late 1930s.  Our dad's store remained open . . . until the remainder of our family moved to California in 1944.  The Schwab store closed in or about 1985.

"I have wonderful memories that surround our store.  Sunday mornings, after church and if the weather was accommodating, some of the adult men gathered for the game of pitching silver dollars.  This was always played next to the store, on the north side.  This game, as I remember it, has very nearly the same rules, as did pitching horseshoes.  Rather than ringing a stake, the silver dollars were pitched into a small hole in the ground.  This was during the early 1930's and as the Great Depression progressed through the decade the game continued, but the silver dollars were gradually replaced with common steel washers.

"A very dear family friend I associate with the store was John Johnson who had migrated from Nebraska with the Prange clan.  He is a very much a part of my memories of the store.  He was rarely seen without his bolt action, single shot, twenty-two-caliber rifle.  He enjoyed shotting blue jays out of the trees, and much of this was done while sitting on dad's front store porch.  I remember him once having his eyes tested for glasses by a traveling optometrist, if I dare call him that, on the front porch of the store.   At some point during those years there had apparently been a break-in a bit before my time, so I suppose there was a reason for vigilance; therefore, for several years John actually slept in the side room of the store as the night watchman.  I do not recall a problem with burglars developing during my days, however.

"The front store porch was the gathering place for many residents.  My brother Charles and I spent hours listening to tall tales being recounted.  It took bedtime or school homework to pry us away, and always with regret.

"During the summer months, the mosquitoes provided a real challenge.  During those tall tale sessions most were stripped to the waist because of the hot and humid weather.  It was a continual swing and alap.  No one seemed to give that circumstance a second thought.  I suppose we thought that the mosquitoes were just a part of living.  You live, you slap mosquitoes." 

[Many of David's recollections -- the men playing washers, certainly John Johnson who was a friend of my fathers who was at our house often, and definitely the pool table (and eventually the pinball machine) at Schwab's Grocery during my high school years -- are vaguely familiar.  I recall the pool table set in the middle of a back room surrounded on all sides by sacks of feed, fertilizer, and other commodities. DPW]

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.