November 15, 2009 - Reflections on my Mississippi Genesis

“What Fifty Said” by Robert Frost

When I was young my teachers were the old.
I gave up fire for form till I was cold.
I suffered like a metal being cast.
I went to school to age to learn the past

I began life in the care of my grandparents—more precisely, my grandmother and my step grandfather. With them, I was an only child living in Mississippi in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Those first few years were lived in two worlds. One was in a farmhouse six miles outside of Brooklyn, Mississippi, even today a small one-street rural town, near the train tracks of the Gulf and Ship Island Railroad and Black Creek. The house had electricity but no indoor plumbing. Water came from a hand-pump well and food was cooked over a wood-burning cast iron stove. An icebox kept perishables from doing so for a day or two. The second world was Biloxi, Mississippi a thriving, fast-growing city with a population of 37,000—20,000 more than it had ten years earlier. Biloxi was on its way into the 20th century but holding on to its 19th century wink-at-the-law ways.

On the farm, there were chickens, pigs, milk cows and a horse or mule—I can’t remember which (perhaps both). I do recall following along behind the horse- or mule-drawn plow guided by a relative of my grandmother or step grandfather as it slowly turned the field making a tearing sound as the roots of grass and weeds laying claim to the land were ripped from their mooring. I remember the horse or mule—eyes blinder-bound—straining to pull the plow through the resistant ground and I remember the smell of the newly exposed earth dark and moist, its edges drying from the heat of the sun. The fields on either side of the house were under cultivation at various times with potatoes, okra, string beans, watermelon, cucumbers, corn and sugar cane. I remember my step grandfather cutting and presenting me a sugarcane stick to suck on, which in addition to potatoes and watermelon were about the only things we grew that I wanted to eat. I was compelled to eat the rest.

The foundation of the farmhouse sat atop large tree stumps all around the perimeter of the rectangular shaped wooden structure. The stumps were arrayed underneath the house at stress-bearing points. On the occasions I venture among the stumps, I found the cool dark area filled with spider webs, lizards, field mice, and a wide variety of insects, the damp smell of mildew and no doubt mold. It was just another mysterious place to explore. It never occurred to me back then that raised foundation was a precaution against flooding. My grandmother’s homestead (it was hers) was near Black Creek, which ran behind my grandmother’s property though a good walk down a hill from our back door. It rained a lot in Mississippi and the creek would overrun its banks. The property, which lay on the edge of the De Soto National Forest, was constantly being overgrown by native pine trees and brush and it was muggy. Land was often purchased simply to harvest the trees that covered it.

Daily chores I recall included collecting eggs from the chicken coop in the morning, an enclose affair with a wooden roost with nests for the chickens to lay their eggs. An enclosed surrounded the roost where under the watchful eye of the rooster the hens ambled about during the day pecking the ground for unexpected tiny prey or spilled grain that came under foot, all accompanied by the sound of their continuous clucking. Outburst of bird songs and the grunting of pigs mixed with the chatter of the chickens created the cacophony of the barnyard. The sound of crickets, filled the evenings and nights, which were completely pitch black during the new moon, but countless stars filled the sky. On such nights, I had the feeling that I was completely alone with my grandparents and that there was no world beyond the farm. I knew that there were other families living in the surrounding countryside as we would visit them or they would come to our place for Sunday dinner; the women folk catching up on all the gossip that had transpired since they were last together, the men sitting smoking and erupting in sporadic conversation interrupting stretches of silence.

There was a length of time, perhaps a year, when my parents returned with my sisters to live with us—my father intent on earning a living farming after a tour of duty in the Army. He had re-enlisted after the war so he could return to the Philippines and bring my mother and me to the states. Rather than take me to Ft Benning, Georgia, where my father was ordered upon returning from the Philippines, my parents left me with my grandmother, who had asked to have me stay with her. From Ft. Benning, my parents moved to Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, where the oldest of my three sisters was born. From there, they moved to Camp Stoneman, California, near the city of Pittsburg, where my second sister was born and where my father was discharged from the service.

That was when my father returned to the farm with my mother and my two sisters. It took a year for him to realize that farming was a hard way to earn a living for someone who had spent his working life, outside the Army, in construction. He re-enlisted and reported for duty to Camp Stewart, Georgia, where my third sister was born. My life with my grandparents continued after my parents and sisters left, though we moved from the farm to a rented place in Biloxi, 55 miles south on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. After a short stay at Camp Stewart, my father was ordered to a tour of duty in Germany and my mother and three sisters returned to live on the farm during my father’s absence. One of my father’s army buddies, drove my mother and three sisters back to the farm on his way to his next assignment. As I would discover the enlisted man’s Army produced countless acts of kindness that were repaid in kind. My father’s sergeant’s salary went a longer way when there was no rent to pay and only electricity and groceries to buy each month.

While my mother and sisters lived on the farm, my grand parents and I lived in Biloxi and visited them on the weekend. My grandmother worked in a restaurant on Beach Blvd, Highway 90, which hugs the coast from Pass Christian through Biloxi to Pascagoula in Mississippi. My step grand father worked in construction at Keesler Air Force Base. We rented a wood frame house in the colored part of town that has since been torn down. I went to school with neighborhood playmates and in the evenings we ran free along the sidewalks and backyards of the neighborhood, a striking contrast to my solitary escapades on the farm with only the animals and my adult relatives to interact with.

Biloxi on the Gulf of Mexico, in 1720 was the capital of French Louisiana until it was moved to New Orleans three years later. Though not as well known, the former has much in common with its Louisiana neighbor. Tourist came to Biloxi because, much like New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities of the 1940s and 1950s, it was wide open with illegal gambling widespread. The city resembled Las Vegas as hotels such as the Pine Hills, the Edgewater Gulf, the Tivoli, the Buena Vista, and the White House openly offered roulette wheels, dice tables and slot machines. Slot machines appeared in grocery stores and other businesses and, though the act of using them was illegal, owners paid federal and state tax on all slot machine that operated anywhere in the state.

Roadhouses for the white population offering gambling were called “honky-tonks,” and for blacks the roadhouses were called “juke joints.” I don’t recall being in a juke joint but I do remember sitting at what seemed to be a bar, kneeling on a stool eating fried chicken and French fries with my fingers from an oval red plastic basket lined with wax paper. The bartender laughingly remarked to my step grandfather how much the boy seemed to be enjoying his fried chicken—funny the things you remember from childhood. I also recall driving with my grandfather at night along the coast road, the bright lights of the restaurants, motels, and other businesses along either side of the road a joy to behold as I knelt on the front seat looking out the window—better than television and so unlike the solitary, moonless nights on the farm.

To visit my mother and sisters over the weekend, my grandparents would drive the 55 miles from Biloxi to the farm seven miles east of Brooklyn—a one-block town with drug store—one where the pharmacist actually mixed the prescriptions himself, post office, and a few other stores—along the Brooklyn-Janice Road. It’s funny that I don’t have vivid memories of my time spent with my sisters other than to recall my mother feeding my youngest sister hominy grits mixed with egg yolk and fresh churned butter. Sometime during his tour of duty in Germany my father was involved in a car accident that shattered his hip. After recuperating in Germany, he was flown back to William Beaumont Army Hospital in El Paso, Texas. My mother’s uncle, who lived in San Francisco drove out, picked up my mother and sisters and drove them to El Paso, where my father was assigned during his rehabilitation. I stayed behind in Biloxi with my grandparents, their relationship of over 20 years beginning to strain. My step grandfather was a good timing man and my grandmother had gotten tired of being a good-hearted woman.

The break finally came a year or so after my mom and sisters reunited with my father in El Paso. My father had completed his rehabilitation and was given the option to receive a medical discharge or continue his tour of duty. My father back on his feet and with little or no residual affects from the crash decided to remain in the service and the army assigned him to Ft. Bliss. When he received the call from my grandmother that she had divorced my step grandfather, she told him she needed a medical procedure and didn’t have the money to afford it. My father said he would bring the two of us to El Paso, where he would claim her as a dependent. She could have the procedure done at William Beaumont.

And that’s what happened. He took the bus out from El Paso loaded my grandmother and me and our belongings in the Pontiac that my grandmother got out of the divorce settlement, and drove us west. Back then my father didn’t believe in breaking up a road trip and drove the entire 1100 miles stopping only for gas. We arrived in El Paso in the early morning and I remember waking up later in the day inside my parent’s rented house. The first thing that struck me about El Paso was the absence of the lush green that engulfed us in Mississippi. There were no shade trees and the sun seemed incredibly bright. The ground was dry, hard, and rock strewn. Small houses on 9000 square foot lots looked out on the gravel road my parents’ house was on. The street rose for about two miles heading west at a good grade to the foot of the Franklin Mountains. The further up the street you went, the fewer houses lined the street, which eventually dead-ended. One thing you could say about the neighborhood, there were no two houses that looked alike and all of them looked in need of some repair or another. The desert is hard on man made structures.

Shortly after my grandmother and me arrived, my father found a larger house for us in Ysleta, Texas on the outskirts of El Paso. Less than a mile from the Rio Grande, the house had trees in the yard and lots of bedrooms. I remember going into first grade at an elementary school near the house. I recall being put into a class that had already started the school year and having to catch up with my studies as well as make friends with a room of strangers, most of them white. The students in the school I had attended in Biloxi and Brooklyn had been black, though the color difference wasn’t something I remember. I felt equally alienated in both, though over time I blended in with the others, just another kid struggling to recognize, articulate, and write letters, numbers, and words.

While I was acclimating to school (my sisters still too young had not yet started), my grandmother was being examined and prepared for the medical procedure she had come El Paso for. The plan was that when she left the hospital, she and I would return to Mississippi, no doubt back to her life with my step grandfather. She couldn’t live with him but she absolutely couldn’t live without him. I can’t remember how I felt about being one place or the other. I only knew that I would be going with my grandmother where she chose and that was okay by me.

But life is never a matter of clear alternatives as the two roads in Robert Frost’s poem suggests. It chooses its own direction and the protagonist in his life story suddenly finds himself in an alternative universe. My grandmother died on the day she was to be released from William Beaumont Hospital and we went into mourning as my father made arrangements for the funeral. My grandmother and I made the journey back to Mississippi, she within her coffin, on a train; me in the Pontiac with my parents and my sisters. She was buried in the cemetery next to St. John Baptist Church near our farm in Brooklyn. I returned to El Paso with my family and began a life completely different than the one I knew before. And as Frost so eloquently pointed out “…that has made all the difference."