Chapter Two
Voyage To A World That Is No More
© 2005 Jack Ragsdale
In the early 1920s, when I was eight or nine years old, my father would take a rare day off and drive us to his brother Will’s farm in Coweta County thirty miles south of Atlanta. To mention that the roads were bad is so far off the mark as to misstate their condition entirely. They were horrible. Occasionally we would come to a mud hole that was so bad my father would stop and study the best route to get through. Usually he would get up speed and go crashing into the quagmire, creating a tempest of splashing red muddy water. His goal was to arrive early—6 A. M. if possible.
My Uncle Will was cold, distant and unemotional but my Aunt Fannie was strong, loving and enthusiastic. She welcomed us with kisses and backbreaking hugs. In no time she had two chickens in one frying pan and thin slices of salty ham in another with biscuits in the oven. As she flew about the kitchen, four or five beautiful orange-colored cats followed her feet, excited at the cooking odors but untouchable by me. They were wild. In minutes we were sitting down to a feast.
Uncle Will was the eldest in my father’s family, followed by petite Ethel, Tom, an engineer on the Dixie Flyer on the run from Atlanta to Macon, my father Paul and Virginia, the youngest.
One day while visiting there, all of us males, boys and men, piled into my father’s car and traveled a few miles to see the giant rock under which lay my great grandfather. As my cousin John, my brother Paul, and I stood around a huge irregular slab, Uncle Will and my father told the story of their origins. Their grandfather and a large contingent of his grown sons with their families living in Virginia, decided to emigrate to Texas. Apparently tales of cheap land and eternal prosperity drew them to the southwest. On the road in Georgia, near Turin in freezing weather my great grandfather was taken sick with pneumonia. The sons pleaded with a householder to allow the ailing old man the protection and comfort of his hearth but he refused and Great Grandfather died in their wagons that bitter cold night. The next day those sons (my grandfather among them) buried the old man across the road from the settler’s house, a huge irregularly-shaped natural stone his only memorial.
For whatever unknown reason, my grandfather, farmer and professional chimney builder, abandoned that difficult hegira, leaving the others to continue on to Texas. No doubt at their destination they found the riches they pursued. Texas is full of Ragsdales, black and white, some of them quite well-to-do, I understand. I never recall them sending money back to us unfortunates who dropped out of that race to the Lone Star State.
For me, Uncle Will’s farm was full of magic with its collection of animals. I was wild to see and touch: big, flop-eared hound dogs that barked woeful tones, unfriendly cats, pigs, cows, calves, horse and mule. There was a pond with fish, tadpoles and croaking frogs. Uncle Will’s children were all grown and married but he and Aunt Fannie held on to a favorite boy grandchild, whom they spoiled with attention. Fannie was a second wife, who had borne Will no children. His first wife’s name was Abezena, a name presumably from the Bible.
Will was in local politics and had lots of friends. Every year he gave a barbecue attended by more than a hundred. They prepared a pit and fire the day before so a foot or more of glowing embers sufficient to roast a pig were left from the burnt wood. It seemed that everyone there was introduced as cuddin this or cuddin that and an unwanted kiss and a pat on the head was the reward of every child. “This is Paul’s son,” they said of me. My interest was in the terrific array of foods. I liked Brunswick stew and all of the dishes except the meat which I passed up for peaches, apples and scuppernongs.
At night, all the beds were taken by adults, so pallets for children were laid on the floor. One night, after all were abed, I had a coughing spell so my mother and Aunt Fannie stirred, Aunt Fannie found the paregoric and I was swiftly wafted off into dreamland without further adieu. I doubt that any child in the South in those days was raised without the aid of that trusty opiate. Now I suppose you need an act of Congress just to buy it.
Papa’s brother, Uncle Tom, who was an engineer on the Dixie Flyer, had a room somewhere on Whitehall Street. Invariably when we drove past there, someone would point and say: “Uncle Tom’s room is in that building.” He stayed in the room only when he “layed over in Atlanta.” The Dixie Flyer was a red carpet train from Chicago to Florida. Once when he came to College Park he asked mama to play “Nearer, My God to Thee” and he cried—I suppose, visualizing his own death. At times, papa also had to struggle to control his emotions. His worst time was when they made up after mama left him. He really fell apart that time. I think I am a little harder, although I am not above shedding a tear at the movies.
I really loved J. M. High’s Department Store. Stores were very plain then, but exciting. Overhead there were all sorts of strange devices. For instance, when a sale was made, the clerk put the payment and sales ticket into a container which went via a suction tube to the cashier in the back of the store. Quick as a flash, the container was returned with the receipt and the change. There was another spring-motivated system which accomplished the same deed in an overhead trolley. The clerk pulled a cord and off went the container at the speed of light.
It must have been in 1924 that my brother Paul came home from work telling us that High’s, in conjunction with Quaker Oats, was giving out toy crystal radio sets to boys. The next day I was down there to get one.
The device was a cylindrical Quaker Oats box, exactly like the ones you see on the shelves today, with a few turns of copper wire coiled around the container. The connection to the galena was a contrivance to allow the operator with the connecting pin to find the spot on that little galena mineral which would bring in the wireless station. That night my father and I played with it on the dining room table and were able to get an amateur radio station some eight or ten blocks from our house. All radio was new then and my little toy contraption too simple to have any practical use. Now as an antique toy its value would be considerable.
As we fooled with that radio set, the far-off twenty-first century was mentioned and my father commented that I could live to see it “if you take care of yourself,” he said. I was eighty-six in the year 2000, or if you nitpick, eighty-seven in 2001, the actual end of the century.
Around that time Paul Junior bought our first real radio. It consisted of a black horn about thirty inches high, a collection of batteries and a boxed tuning device. The equipment took up the entire library tabletop. It was a curiosity but not great fun. Tuning was too much of a chore.
In 1926 College Park started construction of a new school. The land for it rose moderately from the street, so, to provide a level schoolyard and athletic field, it was necessary to remove a large amount of earth. Since this was before the invention of great earth-moving machines we see today, the work had to be accomplished by simpler and more primitive means. In Fulton County that meant mule-drawn bucket scoops and convict labor.
Twelve years of age at that time, work of any sort in construction had my interest. I was not obnoxious nor did I interfere. This job, by its size alone, for me was excitement of the purest grade. There were fifty to sixty convicts, ten or twelve half-ton bucket scoops, each pulled by a team of two of the sleekest, finest mules you ever saw. The drivers were tough, whip-wielding, Georgia cracker muleteers. I don’t know how it came about but one guy let me ride with him on the two-wheeled chariot-like scoop.
Earthmoving was an assembly-line job. Each empty two-wheeled vehicle drove up to take its turn in line, the mule-team perfectly controlled by the driver who stood on the ground alongside the scoop, reins in hand. A single convict released the lever which held the empty scoop off the ground as others hooked two additional teams of mules to those pulling the scoop. Amid whip-cracking, loud shouts and sharp slaps on the rump, the six mules lurched forward scraping up and filling the scoop with red Georgia clay. Several convicts then applied brute strength to the lever, raising the scoop off the ground. The driver and his twelve-year old assistant then climbed aboard the load of raw earth on the chariot, and, holding on for dear life, sped away to the dumping ground nearby. Each circuit took about fifteen minutes. Each man knew his job and the work went on smoothly as one after another the scoops dug into the hillside. Guards with heavy guns lounged in boredom around this frenzied activity. It was live theater supplied solely for the benefit and entertainment of a twelve-year old boy.
Because I have now recounted two incidents in which I was closely related to convict labor, I may be thought to have some special knowledge of the system. I do not. That it was cruel was well known even then. Prisons have always been designed for poor people and in America, to a very substantial degree that means black people. I have seen white convicts working on the roads in Georgia and their work may have been lighter, I don’t know. I do know that the work black convicts did on Harvard Avenue in front of my house in 1920 was brutally exhausting in the summer heat.
All southern states have gotten bad press over their prisons but Georgia was hit especially hard in 1932 with the release of Paul Muni’s film “I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang”. It was the much-altered story of Robert Burns, a northern WWI veteran down on his luck in Atlanta. He and another man stole a small amount of money. Burns’ sentence was ten years under conditions most brutal. After a short time, he escaped to Chicago, married and entered into a successful career. It is believed that, due to a falling out, his wife denounced him and he was arrested. Under an agreement which he thought would bring him release after a year, he returned to Georgia to find himself facing a much longer sentence under the harshest conditions. Thinking his new penalty a death sentence, he made up his mind to escape again. He did so, ending up this time in New Jersey.
Having had some success writing, defiantly, he wrote his story, which immediately brought him national—even international notoriety. Through extradition procedures, Georgia tried to get him back but because of the state’s horrendous reputation, New Jersey refused. Because of the scathing anti-Georgia publicity and the intercession of Governor Ellis Arnall, he was awarded a pardon on the basis of time served.
In a remarkable twist reminiscent of O. Henry, Burns’ brother laid claim to some of the money the book and movie had earned him, suggesting that he, not Robert, was the true author of “I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.”
In the notorious Scottsboro Boys case in Alabama where no crime had actually been committed, the authorities were unrelenting but unsuccessful in their prosecution, keeping the accused in jail most of the time from 1931 to 1937, managing most cruelly to destroy the lives of half a dozen young black men.
A year or two later I attended the school I had watched being constructed. I did fairly well although I remember one problem—the Civil War (oops, in the South in those days, one never said those two words. It was the “War Between the States).”
We were given an assignment to write a short essay on the war. It seems odd to me now that I was not able to assemble a few words to satisfy that fourth or fifth grade teacher. For many years I have had a keen interest in that fratricidal bloodletting in which 620,000 died, but for some reason I was not able to complete that simple task. The teacher’s desire to have us know something about the war was quite reasonable for there was much fighting around Atlanta and in the end, the city was completely destroyed by fire. Boys I knew had collections of mini-balls, which could be found from Peachtree Creek to the southern edge of College Park. They were the bullets of that war. Both my mother and my sister Louise tried to help me to little avail. My mother was upbeat, she said “Go to bed now and get up early. Your mind will be clear and you will fly through it as though it were nothing.” Little did she know her son?
I was confused by the vast number of generals on each side and the equally vast number of casualties, 34,000 from the fighting around Chattanooga alone. For my childish mind Lee and Grant were enough “commanders.” What about General Pershing? He was the one I was hearing most about in those days. I had trouble separating one war from another.
I followed three legendary trials during the 1920s. We took the Journal, Atlanta’s afternoon paper. Margaret Mitchell wrote for that paper’s Sunday magazine section and started writing her novel in the 1920’s. She was a city girl captivated by her grandmother’s plantation home and imagined romantic life in Clayton Country just south of Atlanta.
I generally read the newspaper stretched out on the floor on my stomach. These were the gripping stories I read and everyone talked about:
Leopold and Loeb
In 1924, eighteen and nineteen year old sons of wealthy Sears, Roebuck executives kidnapped and killed young Bobby Franks in Chicago. These privileged, spoiled near genius types had in mind committing the perfect crime. Not long into the baffling investigation, Loeb, the younger and brasher of the two, undertook to aid the police in solving the case. This brazen ploy as the most amateur among us can guess, quickly led to official suspicion that he was involved in the crime. If that were not enough to sensationalize the case, Clarence Darrow, an opponent of the death penalty undertook the defense. He passed up a jury trial and his historic plea to the judge saved the boys’ lives. They received life sentences.
Loeb was murdered in prison and many years later Leopold won release to a socially beneficial work program in Puerto Rico.
Floyd Collins
This is the story of an experienced Kentucky spelunker who became pinned in Mammoth Cave in January, 1925. In a low ceiling area some distance from the entrance, Collins’ became tightly penned by the leg in a cave-in. He was found a day or two after being missed, in pain, cold and wet in freezing weather. Because of the low ceiling in the cave, he could be reached only by people of very slender physique. The effort to rescue him was highly disorganized and the instability of the earth at the site as well as the inclement weather made his liberation unlikely. The imprisoned man lingered in that pitiable condition for nearly a month before dying. That same night, an Atlanta paper put out a special edition, for in the early dark, I remember some person of indomitable optimism coming down our street yelling out the headline that Floyd Collins had died. I doubt that he sold one newspaper.
Scopes Monkey Trial
After Tennessee passed a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution, several locals in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, encouraged by the ACLU, induced John Scopes, a young biology teacher to defy the law. The authorities accommodated them by prosecuting the intrepid teacher.
Clarence Darrow was chosen to represent Scopes, and William Jennings Bryan, the state of Tennessee. Those two national heroes of very different ilk immediately commanded the attention of every American.
The trial was held in the terrible heat of July in a small courthouse that hardly accommodated the reporters, let alone the interested public. The building’s windows were thrown open and crowds outside listened to the proceedings. In the town the sprit of carnival prevailed. With a half dozen of the country’s finest lawyers assisting the greats and many national reporters like sardonic H. L. Mencken covering the story, one can imagine the sensation the trial caused.
Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. William Jennings Bryan died a few days later. Poor gentle Darwin still spins in his grave as the controversy over his 1859 book remains as heated as ever.
One of my aunts had a crude cabin in the country where they lived part of each summer. Her husband, who was an engineer on Southern Railroad’s famous Crescent Limited, owned a “farm” about three to five miles distant from Stone Mountain. Every summer my mother and I would spend a week or more with them. One year about 1925 when sculptor Gutzon Borglum was carving the Confederate Memorial on the steep side of the huge granite outcrop, we could see the sculptor’s crew hanging down the side of the mountain in bosun’s chairs. Another year when the Daughters of the Confederacy ran out of money, only the scarred face of the mountain marked the area of work.
The cabin we lived in was very primitive. It consisted of one large room with curtained areas offering some privacy to the ladies, and a screened-in porch which served as kitchen and dining room. We had no electricity, just kerosene lamps. My uncle owned a Model T Ford sedan which looked something like the Toonerville Trolley in the popular comic strip of that day. My cousin drove it from a very young age, twelve or thirteen years. Fords had no modern gearshift in those days; instead they had a pedal on the floor which did that job. There was also a “spark” control, the use of which required some expertise I never learned.
My cousin and I hauled water from a well three hundred feet away or from a clear bubbling spring one hundred and fifty feet down in a ravine behind the cabin. Tiny crawfish inhabited that spring. We bathed in a nearby creek that had a neat little beach on one side. The old folks, all in their middle forties then, sat outside under shade trees and there was usually a watermelon cooling in a washtub with ice. One summer my cousin had a horse and we rode bareback—he artfully and I inexpertly. We went to bed early and got up at dawn. With no duty except to tote water, we roamed the countryside without any aim except to gratify our curiosity.
I can give nothing but a childish estimate of the size of the “farm” but it must have been fifty or sixty acres. Besides the cabin, which sat on level ground the edge of a narrow valley fifteen to twenty feet from the dirt road, there were several other houses. One was a decent country house, painted white with green trimming, but the other dwellings were crude, unpainted shelters, the type in which the poorest sharecroppers lived.
Our view, across flat fields of stubble, was the broad side of Stone Mountain—the view shown in most encyclopedias. One year there was a hog cholera epidemic and one field was littered with unburied dead animals accompanied by great flocks of feasting buzzards. I remember the remainders of former crops and spare pine barrens but of growing fields, I can dredge up no memory. It was a farm without agriculture.
My aunt had a young black cook named Adelaide and we sat down to a table loaded with vegetables and platters of heavenly sliced tomatoes. My aunt was the least delicate of my mother’s sisters and I believe a bad influence on my mother.
Another year, my sister Louise drove my mother and me to Bellton, the little North Georgia town where my mother was born and grew up. We were there to visit Bob and Beulah Scales, mama’s childhood friends whom she loved. I’m sure the Scales meant happy times to her. Beulah was postmistress and Bob farmed and drove the school bus. They lived in a huge country house facing the highway and had a large family. Their children were the same age as my brother and sisters.
My mother must have had a happy childhood in spite of some unpleasant experiences with her stepmother. Her mother died in an epidemic about 1886 when my mother was six or eight years old.
Off to the north of the Scales’ house, they had about ten acres of apple trees. Naturally, I ate my share of those beauties, possibly a local variety since apples do not “breed true” from seed. That’s why we are unlikely to see “Yates”, “Horse”, or “Habersham” apples on our grocer’s counter. I loved all of those apple varieties that once grew in Georgia.
Sleepy Bellton sat on the Southern Railroad mainline route to New York. I had been there once before to the funeral of my grandfather. He died in the winter of 1919-1920 and was buried in the graveyard of the town’s old white-painted church which sat on a foundation of rough Georgia stones that had not known the mason’s chisel. As an adult, I had occasion to travel that road several times. When I approached the town I would leave the main highway for that lesser road, to try and spot the Scales’ house. It was easy enough to pick out the old white church, which sat close to the road, but I was never able to recognize the house where as a child I had spent a pleasant week. I decided it must have been torn down or lost in fire.
In 1961, I spent Christmas at my brother’s in Florida. I drove down with a car full of people and as in the past, approaching Bellton, I pulled off the main highway to pass through the town. I slowed down and took pains but I had no luck spotting the Scales’ house. That was a year of major activity at Cape Canaveral. On the return trip, nostalgia brought me back that same route through Bellton. It was a fine clear day with sunshine but crisply cold. Arriving at Bellton in the early afternoon, I drove up a slight rise in the road, around a subtle curve and there, directly in front of me, was the house. I was astounded to see the landscape just as it had appeared to me as a child, except: the apple trees of thirty-six years previous were gone. O, the curséd casualties of time!
My heart was stricken and I resented the loss but I realized at once this was the opportunity of a lifetime. I had to stop and knock on that door.
I crossed the railroad tracks, pulled up into the yard, all the while saying to myself, “This is a fool’s errand.” I mounted the steps of the side porch. I rapped lightly on the curtained glass-paneled door. A lady of moderate years answered.
“Pardon me,” I stammered, “I visited this house thirty-six years ago when I was a boy. Mr. and Mrs. Scales lived here then. Do you have any word of that family? They were friends of my mother, Ida Coggins.” About that time I realized that I had an audience. Inside the slightly darkened room someone said “My goodness!” and I was invited in.
Five women were sitting around a low stove, their conversation stopped at this gross interruption. I had barged in on the rarest of occasions. The elderly lady was Mrs. Scales, my mother’s friend—then in her eighties. The other four were her daughters, three of whom had flown in from the ends of the earth to celebrate Christmas with their mother—one from the northeast, another from the Midwest, another, I believe, from Hawaii. They offered me tea and I sat for fifteen minutes with these friends of one week thirty-six years before. Ah, the vagaries of chance. Nostalgia. When I heard from them again, it was to announce their mother’s death.
I drove away in a somber mood. The bare field where the orchard had been, added to my gloom. In disbelief I stared at the field in its winter dress. In company, I was alone and afflicted with the black bile of melancholy.
Just being a parent with daughters in the 1920s was a hard job—particularly for the father. I remember one night when Lunette was out and my parents didn’t know where. Papa was very agitated and went out in the car looking for her—probably to quiet his frustration in a useless exercise. Many times since then I have wondered what he expected to accomplish. The world then was just as big as it is now and looking for an individual at night in a situation of complete ignorance as to her whereabouts puts one at a slight disadvantage I would think. But, out he went. His trouble came to naught.
In due time Lunette arrived, pert and independent as you please. Papa must have been aware that he lacked the diplomacy to deal further with the situation so he buried his face in the newspaper. Mama took over and nothing came of the matter. My sister didn’t get pregnant and I doubt that she had flung herself at some passing fancy.
It was a time when an unmarried girl with a baby put her family into a scandalous situation. Later on, I knew of a man who forced his daughter to sit on the front porch immediately after giving birth at home. I suppose he was driven mad trying to decide what he could do to keep the shameful secret hushed—meanwhile keeping his daughter visible to forestall gossip. How pitiful was our society in its bind with nature. Books and information on the subject of sex were prohibited in the mail. Margaret Sanger, who could have supplied sorely needed sex education, was hounded out of the country.
A further dilemma for me is the fact that my parents were highly independent and somewhat contemptuous of “public opinion.” Parenting was not easy then. I know people who would tell you it is not a snap now!
When my brother was eighteen or nineteen, he and Eugene Surles bought a second-hand model T Ford roadster. Having an itch for adventure, they headed for New Orleans, a city known even then for sin and good times. Their car broke down and soon their bankroll was in tatters. Young as they were, they were essentially conservative for they had a wild card up their sleeves: each had a connection in Memphis. They high-tailed it in that rickety old Ford to that Tennessee town on the Mississippi.
Paul’s old boss headed a department at the new Sears Roebuck mail order complex and Gene had a cousin in the auto supply business there. On their arrival they both had jobs. After that, they were permanently separated from their families. Paul was the first of ours to fly the coop.
It was about this time that my Aunt Dora, my mother and I, went to Birmingham to visit my mother’s youngest sister Cora Hix. Naturally, papa got us a pass, probably on the Southern Railroad (I bet the train was the Crescent Limited). Since the journey was short, we rode in the chair car—with huge luxurious swivel chairs. It was great fun.
Three of the Hix’s five youngest children were still living at home, two girls and the youngest, a son a year younger than I. He might have been twelve. Very vaguely through some gossipy comment, I knew he had a health problem. Still, he was a robust and lively kid—in fact he had a job doing chores around a drug store. I liked everyone, including my uncle and aunt who were cordial and welcoming. They lived in a big comfortable brick two-story row house. My uncle was a successful salesman, probably the most prosperous of all my relatives and he was home then in the middle of summer. Like all salesmen, he went “on the road” from time to time, driving the circuit to see his customers. He sold candy, cigars and such, through his representation of northern factories. A somewhat grumpy father of five, it is unlikely he was overjoyed at the visit of a young boy, and a sister-in-law but he seemed to like us just fine. His children did not share my good feelings toward their father, a fact I absorbed rather quickly. It was not something we discussed. I began learning it at the table.
Once Dorothy and John Daniel sat down to eat, they fought. When they had food on their plates, they started a silly game of exchanging it—not in a mutually agreeable way but in a manner of one punishing the other with some unwanted bit of food: “Here, I don’t want this—you can have it.” To my uncle that was not funny and he threatened both children with dire punishment.
Their manner of service was different from ours. My uncle served each of our plates that were then passed to us. The children were not overwhelmed by their father’s threats and never completely calmed down nor left off their foolish game, keeping it just below the threshold of their father’s anger. What a cruel practice to inflict on a parent in the presence of company!
I showed an extreme partiality for the magnificent tomatoes that were then in season, and were dealt out to us in splendid abundance. My uncle was amused at a child so fixated on a single item of healthful food. When a farmer peddling vegetables came by, Uncle Tarp bought a huge basket of flaming red beauties so I could indulge my passion without stint. I doubt that they cost him a whole dollar.
Evelyn, an older daughter, was already teaching school. The next girl, Dorothy, clever and excelling in school, was herself destined for a career in teaching. I thought them both very beautiful.
On summer nights in College Park, my parents rocked on the porch, listening to the crickets raspy mating calls. Birmingham people also sat on the porch at night, but it was far different. The blast furnaces of the steel mills lit up the sky with fiery brilliance that can only be described as hellish. When the mills performed some particular operation, a minor explosion took place. It was scary. The night world I knew at home was silent and tranquil. This world was frenetically at work; explosively so. I connected it at once with my sister’s tale of our world destined to be destroyed in fire. Nights in Birmingham were exciting and somewhat frightening to me but most ordinary to the others.
On leaving Birmingham, I did what might be called a “summing up.” The minds of thirteen year old boys are thought to be full of toad frogs and baseballs, but mine was into comparing myself to others, however likable but different—whose parents were stricter or richer. Call it a game if you like. I was really just paying attention to the people around me.
I wondered what John Daniel Hix thought of me—his somewhat backward cousin. John had a job. He was a sophisticated kid for his place and time, working at a drug store, doing chores, making deliveries—and money. He had plans and an independence I hadn’t dreamed of then. We got along just fine, but, thinking it over, I was not his equal.
Back in College Park, our next-door neighbors, the Warbucks, moved up the street into a new and unattractive brick house—the only one on the street. All those years by us they had had a cow. My guess is that it was for a sanitary milk supply for their children. Now the cow was gone. In the past, each morning and evening an old black couple that lived on their property behind their house tended the cow—milking her twice a day and taking her to the pasture three blocks down at the end of our street. Although the Warbucks children now lived only two blocks away, I seldom saw them.
Mr. Warbucks owned quite a bit of property in the town. In an undeveloped part where only blacks lived, he owned many houses in what was called “Warbucks Town.” His kindly, refined mother-in-law, a widow whose husband had been a minister and church official, was also invested in that business. The economics of it is simple and easy to understand. The land was cheap and Mr. Warbucks had access to inexpensive lumber through his business. The houses were not houses at all; designate them as you wish: shack, hut, cabin, or if you are unkind, hovel. There was no indoor plumbing. There was a spigot in the yard for water for each two or three dwellings. Privies were outside and shared. All the houses I saw had newspapers pasted to the walls to cover cracks and stop drafts. The insubstantial newspaper soon faded and pealed, making the interiors dismal.
Those primitive and unsanitary conditions existed only six or seven blocks from our house on the other side of Main Street. In later years I often thought of the danger to public health. Having a large population living in such conditions nearby cannot have been in the best interest of the community.
Almost immediately a family with many children moved into the fine old Warbucks’ house. I describe it as “fine” because to me it had character. Our house, two generations more modern, was just fine and I loved every room in it but the Warbucks house seemed better suited to the neigborhood. Imagine that block before our house was built in 1919: only two houses in one whole block, one sitting on each corner, with an acre of old oak trees between. It had been that way for fifty years, probably since 1865 or 1870.
One of the many children of the new family was a boy my age whose name was W. L. That kind of naming was common in the South then and probably has ancient roots. In Wales, Dylan Thomas’ father chose to call his son D. J.
As best friends, W. L. and I roamed the nearby meadows and unsettled wild areas. We checked small streams for minnows and braved a wicked summer rainstorm to watch the little branch rise to a raging torrent. I find strange that in spite of my keen liking for W. L., few memories of him have survived but having him as a friend for a short time was great fun.
W. L.’s family had a fine car and they talked constantly of Manatee and Bradenton—two towns on the west coast of Florida. While my father worked seven days a week, W. L.’s father never seemed to work at all. He was always at home. In spite of it, they seemed quite prosperous.
On summer nights all the kids in the neighborhood played hide and seek under the streetlight. The wooden telephone pole was “home.” The point of the game was to avoid being "it." This is the rhyme we used in summer in the low 1920s when we played hide and seek:
Eenie meenie, Dixie deenie,
hit ’em a lick and John McQueeny,
Time, time, ’Merican time
Eighteen hundred and forty nine.
We used another rhyme which was racist. It will do no good to repeat it here.
The fun intensified when one or two young adults became kids again and joined us. The game engendered loud arguments over who got to the telephone pole first, but anger could not be sustained to spoil the fun when the person who was "it," had his back turned for an instant in dispute, and somebody got home free—upsetting and ending the argument. The dark specter of neurosis had not yet entered our lives.
Practical parents who had to go to work in the morning eventually destroyed our game. One by one they called us to go to bed, the call always being followed by begging and pleading to be allowed to stay a little longer. But those wonderful, childhood games had to come to an end because children needed shoes and even more importantly they needed lots of tomatoes, spinach… and love to keep them from growing up ill-tempered and spiteful.
Alas, the game of hide and seek was like my good friendship with W. L.—destined to be short-lived. The family soon departed for Manatee. The great Florida boom was on. Swampland was on sale at premium prices.
I have a fragmented memory that has stayed with me for a lifetime. Many times I have asked why. Its basis was a single meeting, the memory of which should have been erased after a day. This short-lived friendship was the one I had with a boy named Stough Beers. I must have known him through school for I can recall no other connection. One day he invited me to come to his house to see his father’s Ford car which I estimate to have been a model of about 1912. It was an open car in immaculate condition: perfect paint job, shiny brass radiator, no longer used in the Fords of that day. Leather straps from the top to the front end held the top in place against the wind. The view I have of him and the car is as clear as if I had seen him yesterday. He was proud of the car, but comfortable in its ownership—and not a braggart. It was clearly a showpiece, sitting in the backyard of a Rugby Street house under ancient oak trees. Was it that he lived too far from my house? Why did I so desire his friendship? I never remember seeing him again.
It was the brass band and the noise of shouting that drew Randolph and me up to Main Street. We ran to see the unexpected excitement—the only parade ever in College Park. Following the band there was what seemed to me to be about a thousand black-shirted men. They were followers of Benito Mussolini.
You can damn me if you wish, but I claim that Fascism has always been just below the surface in the United States. In any situation where one party or class holds the power, no great force is required to push democracy over the edge. Democracy is not strong in America and never has been.
Now College Park was not a place of great excitement in the 1920s. Cox College for young ladies had failed, its handsome building standing in lonely disuse facing Main Street. The Atlanta and West Point Railroad paralleled Main Street and for two blocks there were stores without a gap—two pharmacies, three groceries, and a dry cleaner. There were two trains a day and a streetcar every twenty minutes. That was it. A political parade was unheard of. Rarely, perhaps once or twice a year, Hemperly Funeral Home’s private ambulance would pass, siren screaming, tearing through town at breakneck speed, recklessly endangering the patient’s life more than his disease. Theirs was our only ambulance service. I never recall anything more of Fascism in College Park in my tender years, although I often, heard Il Duce’s name and saw his picture in newsreels.
I must now recount an episode of such inanity as you will probably find no equal outside of an insane asylum. It was in the fall of the year for ripe persimmons were involved in this story. It was at the earliest period of darkness and I was in the back yard, alone. Inside the house, the lights were on and supper was being prepared.
The persimmon trees were of the wild kind and the fruit small—one-sixth of the size of the monstrous fruits we see in the markets today. I placed my lightweight home-made six-foot wooden ladder up against the persimmon tree but could not reach the fruit, which was far out on the limbs. I was frustrated. My day was over. The other children were already inside but there I was with nothing to do and not ready to call it a day. I hung my hatchet on the top rung of the ladder and hefted it straight up even with my own statue so that the hatchet hung over my head in its insecure position. Then I went marching around the yard fully aware of the danger. You may ask: “Did you have suicide in mind?” and I would have to answer that I surely did not have safety in mind. Well, the worst happened and the hatchet came crashing down on my head. It’s that gravity thing you read about in school. Do you remember?
The pain was minor. I didn’t fall down gasping for air. There was some blood. I put my hand up there and it was wet. I lingered outside knowing I would be asked for an explanation when I went inside. I was in no hurry. Of course they asked. I fudged by giving a partial answer so they would assume I had been doing some important work under the hatchet lying precariously near an edge. It didn’t work and I had to confess to the hare-brained truth.
In ten minutes papa and I were in Doctor Foster’s office on Main Street. Naturally, the doctor also wanted an explanation. No stitches were required although, as I sat there flinching from the burning of the disinfecting agent, both the doctor and my father teased me, telling me I would have to have many stitches and other dire treatments—none of which I believed because of their jocular ragging manner.
I have told how much I loved living in College Park and how simple my life was. I had not the least notion that others in the family did not love living there as I did. The trouble stemmed from my elder sister’s conflict with my father and the influence she wielded over my mother. They longed to be back in Atlanta. My mother’s situation was much easier to understand than my sister’s. It was her health, the tedium of inactivity, the heavy burden of pain. Her two sisters living in Atlanta visited us frequently and we them. It hardly seemed logical that it was her separation from them for they were in constant contact by telephone. Looking at this matter of relationship with a child’s eyes, or in mature judgment, I cannot grasp the problem. It must have been the boredom my mother suffered, and thoughts of what might have been without disease. Whatever hurt brought the disaffection my sister had for my father happened before my time and was never revealed to me. Her relations with him were a disaster. She hated him.
My father referred to it several times—almost tearfully. It was a dilemma that bothered him but was insoluble in his view. It hurt him and denied him the pleasure of family he should have enjoyed in middle age. It was his fate that each of us rejected him. He didn’t deserve it. I believe it stemmed from the mistaken feeling that we were better than he, a notion that was patently untrue. Perhaps none of us were his equal.
My father was a very intelligent man but the opportunities available to him, due to his limited education, were few—all a country boy could hope for. Furthermore, he burdened himself too early with marriage and family. In his small domain he was the absolute boss with loyal assistants. In working on his car, he wanted to instruct me and have me as his assistant but I hated that work. Was he a bad teacher, or was I just a sluggish, recalcitrant son? Instead of remaining neutral, I absorbed the opinions of my sisters, as I believe did my mother.
There was one occasion when my father and I went off together on a pleasant excursion to a company safety meeting. There was the excitement of a long train ride and a good-humored meeting in which a man with a small cut on his face was teased unmercifully because he injured himself using a safety razor at this safety meeting. It was the only fun time I can recall with my father.
The pièce de résistance of the picnic lunch of sliced tomatoes, pickles and sauces, was the endless supply of oysters on the half shell. It was only much later in New Orleans in the ‘30s that I enjoyed them equally. They were fifty cents the half dozen in bars down there and I indulged daily.
It must have been 1927. They—meaning I had no part in finding the new place—found a new section of Atlanta in West End—Stokes Avenue—ten houses already built. Ours, number 1659, was a purple-ish brick three bedroom, coal furnace in the basement, very modern. I’m not sure of the price but I think it was $7800.
Building continued—one or two houses at a time and that interested me. It was a pleasant neighborhood. The only boy I knew was Woodrow, younger than I, the son of older, stuffy parents. Oddly, his father, a former warrant officer who worked at Fort McPherson, had the same disease as my mother, his body and limbs twisted as were hers. He walked with two canes. We hardly knew them.
I started attending the Joseph E. Brown Junior High School. Joe Brown was Georgia’s Civil War governor. I remember only two teachers: a man who taught shop and once lectured a boy about his speech in a very offensive way. The other was a woman, who was a Christian Scientist. She thought Mormons were just terrible. I rode my bike to school up Gordon Street past “The Wren’s Nest,” the home of Joel Chandler Harris, the renowned author of Uncle Remus’ tales of Bre’r Rabbit, Bre’r Fox and the Tar Baby. The bike was soon stolen and never recovered.
I made some friends and once two boys came for a sleepover with a lot of noisy fun. I never adjusted to the school and always disliked going there.
A short walk down our street you came to a large wild and very beautiful wooded area that extended a considerable distance to the edge of West View Cemetery where my baby brother was buried. I roamed those woods during the summer and sold bottled soft drinks to the carpenters working in the neighborhood. I had a fox terrier named Pat and a cat that came and went through a small opening in a basement window. No cat I owned was ever spayed. Kittens came to us a number of times over the years.
My mother seemed to be thriving; my father came and went to work as usual. He was fifty-one years old on January 4, 1927. The girls and my mother took an interest in decorating the house with some new furniture, then BANG, the girls left and my mother and I went to live with them. Evidently some negotiations were going on for one day my mother and I were in my bad aunt’s house and my father came and he and my mother made up. They stayed alone for a long time.
My father broke down and was crying as they embraced. We went back to 1659 Stokes Avenue to live and things seemed to get back to normal except that the girls were gone permanently. One night I came home at seven or eight o’clock and my father and I met in the little hallway off our bedrooms, he nearly naked after sex, bouncing into the bathroom, both of us shocked but silent.
Once in the basement in winter, some wood chips in contact with the stack conducting the smoke from the furnace to the chimney caught fire. Mama called the fire department and they raced down the street, but never came to us. She must have given the wrong address. The fire was very small and I managed to put it out with water.
We had another problem in the basement probably caused by the cat: it became infested with fleas. I solved that problem by burning sulfur.
The double windows of my and my parent’s bedrooms were on the back of the house and were at waist level for someone standing outside. Lying in bed one night before sleep came, I saw a black man approach the window of my bedroom and try to force the screen. I faced him in the dark—only three feet between us. Apparently he had no tool, for after trying a short time he turned and left. I then went to my father who got up, turned on lights and checked. The episode gave me the fright of my life. The brazen recklessness of the intruder, I believe, can be explained by drunkenness.
I had one fairly good friend at this time—a boy my age but much heftier, John Butts. Once he took me on a tour of a local abattoir, the White Provision Company plant where his father was the refrigeration engineer. We were all over the huge building. The slaughtering activities there were dreadful to observe but the ingeniously cooled building was most interesting.
Early in 1929, because my mother’s health was failing, she went to Hot Springs for a month. I suppose due to financial pressure, Papa put our house in the hands of a real estate company, authorizing their collection of the rent, and moved us into the smaller unit of a duplex. I was then in Boys High across town. I hated the school and had an intense dislike for some of the teachers. At first I did fairly well in French, biology and English but my relationship with the school was a disaster. I liked Messrs. Martin and Hitechue, science teachers and the French teacher—he was an American whose accent was, I thought, exquisitely Parisienne. I pictured myself one day speaking French in the same sophisticated manner, saying such things as: “Mon Dieu, je ne sais quoi” as I tapped the ash off the tip of my cigarette. Sadly, it never happened.
My home-room teacher was the football and baseball coach, Shorty Doyle, well over six feet, a he-man of the lowest order with a creepy, sadistic laugh. For his personal amusement he introduced the paddle—one with holes in it to increase the pain. It was the greatest fun for him and some of the boys who probably were on teams he coached. The penalties were “made-up” as you might say by Mr. Doyle. We went through this ritual every day immediately after roll call. I wasn’t in that clique nor was I ever called to stand in front of the class, bend over and receive blows on the butt to regale the teacher but the idea and possibility terrified me. I was fifteen at the time and it was no joke to me: students had to lean on the front desk and be paddled while our teacher sat at his desk guffawing obscenely. In today's paper there is a story of a lady awarded $1 and 1/2 million damages for having been paddled in like manner.
Doyle was the spoiled darling of principal H. O. Smith and Mr. Floyd, the assistant principal. In their eyes, it seemed, he could no wrong.
After school, the streetcar company had five or six ancient cars ready to transport students to the center of town. As we traveled on Boulevard rowdy boys would unscrew light bulbs and as they called out insults, throw them at the feet of blacks walking in the street. No doubt the company received many complaints of this conduct. My crime was that I pulled the cord that rang the bell as I stood with half a dozen students and the streetcar conductor on the back of a double-ender. Waiting for us at Boulevard and Peachtree Streets were the company’s chief of police with five or six assistants. They arrested me and took me to the juvenile jail. I was locked in a huge room by myself from, say 2:30 to 4:30 P. M. I was then released with an order to appear in court. Alone upstairs, locked in the huge room of that dilapidated old house, I remember thinking I would have had little chance in case of fire.
In due time, I appeared before Judge Garland Watkins, either alone or with my mother. My father was angry over the matter, and did not attend. My prosecutor was the same Georgia Power Company police chief whose men had arrested me. He was dedicated in the presentation of his case—excessively so, in fact. When he interrupted the proceedings several times, the judge scolded and threatened him and told him to be quiet. I suffered no penalty. I suppose he told me to go and sin no more. Actually I don’t remember. Surely, I did not gloat; on the contrary, the experience had a huge effect on me. Some days or weeks later, on my own initiative, I went back to the judge’s office and had a long talk with him though I cannot remember what was said. It must have been clear to him that I was a lost soul. I used the occasion to visit the various courts in session to listen to what was going on. I found the trials fascinating.
An army sergeant named Short was the person in charge of ROTC at Boys High School. As a symbol of his office he carried a swagger stick which he twirled authoritatively as though he were a general. A fellow student named Oscar Welch had a point of view I think worth telling about. His father had been an officer of a certain rank in WWI; he remained in the army after the war but at reduced rank. Oscar longed for another war that would give back to his father his former exalted position or one perhaps in even higher status with greater prestige. Another aspect of ROTC I disliked was the swaggering of student officers. They quickly began to think themselves better than the rest of us.
After about a month in Hot Springs, my mother returned home and almost immediately had an operation followed by radium treatments. About this time my brother Paul got married to a girl who worked with him at Sears Roebuck in Memphis. I continued at Boys High. Some very attractive houses were going up in our new neighborhood and I liked their style. They were stucco finished outside and very modern. I had only two friends there: the girl whose father owned the apartment we lived in and a boy whose father I was to call on in an emergency soon afterwards. We hung out at a neighbor’s, a very young mother only a year or two older than we. Being one of us, she was fun, but her husband, older, perhaps twenty-five, was fiercely jealous and protective of his very young lady. He definitely did not like teen-age boys hanging around his prize.
For me those were grim times. They hang in my mind with an evil aura and I would like to erase them from my memory. Although my relations with my father were cold, he began to let me drive the car and it became my duty to put it in the garage at night. Of course I made a big deal of it, moving it around in the yard a number of times before driving it into the garage. I drove on the road with him too. I think we had a Dodge touring car then. Earlier he had had Maxwells which he seemed to like. He never owned a sedan.
Once when papa and I were driving on the road he started to tell me what he thought was the root cause of my mother’s illness. He said the poisons left over from my birth had not left her body as they should have. If he should give me such a naïve explanation today, I would scold him mildly and tell him neither of us had the scientific knowledge to discuss that matter seriously. Fourteen or fifteen years old and with a parcel of troubles of my own, I became angry and created a scene. Fortunately, he was driving, otherwise we might have driven off the road.
Today, before we should qualify him as stupid and ignorant, it is well to note how much of our medical knowledge is recent. Curatives then were aspirin and narcotics and very little more. Fifty years before in the Civil War limbs were sawed off without the benefit of an anaesthesia. Darwin gave up medicine because of the misery patients suffered. During Prohibition one popular medicine was Lydia Pinkham’s Compound. People bought it for its alcohol content. Yes dear, respectable old ladies tippled Lydia Pinkham's because she made them dizzy. Another popular medicine was calomel, which people gave to their children. Look it up. It is a compound of mercury and chlorine, two potent poisons. Modern instructions dealing with calomel are: SEEK IMMEDIATE MEDICAL ATTENTION.
My mother had radium treatments, but with techniques so crude in the 1920s, I wonder: Did they do her more harm than good?
To hone my business skills I took on a paper route for the Atlanta Georgian, a Hearst newspaper. I rather liked it but had little success collecting the money which was twenty or thirty cents a week for each customer. People never had the money. I was always told to come back next week.
I began to have more duties at home too, because mama was more often in bed. It may seem strange but I had little understanding of the serious nature of what was happening. My sisters came often to help, but never stayed. I can’t remember how we cooked and cleaned. Somehow it happened. No doubt my mother was in the depths of depression at her condition and I reflected her grim outlook. She once told me she wondered what she might have done to deserve such suffering.
At a time I cannot pinpoint, my eldest sister who had worked for years at the Buick factory office, quit her job and went to live in Chicago. I can only speculate on the reason, but it had to do with her relations with her boss, a Mr. MacDonald, on whom she had a crush. Her move did not work out and in about six months she returned to Atlanta.
I have mentioned that our rented apartment was new and that we were the first occupying tenant. By this time my mother had become bed-ridden. Across the room from her bed there was a dresser. Suddenly, one day when she and I were alone, she began to call out hysterically for me. “There is a snake in the dresser,” she said. I ran as fast as I could to my friend’s house a block away and just as hysterically told that story to the boy’s father and a male friend who was with him. My excitement infected them and in three or four minutes the two men had the dresser out of the house into the yard. They removed the drawers and sure enough, in the labyrinth of spaces behind the drawers there was a three-foot long snake. Apparently the house had been built around him, cutting off all possibility of his escape.
A short time later my mother, totally helpless, was taken to my bad aunt’s house.
My brother and fraternal foe was notified of the seriousness of her condition and he immediately came to Atlanta. It was late December, 1929. He and I met in the lobby of his hotel. We had not seen each other for several years and nothing between us had changed. In spite of the blood in our veins, we were complete strangers. He was shocked at my fuzzy teenage face and his first words to me were accusatory: “Why haven’t you shaved?” He took me at once to Herndon’s Barber Shop near Five Points.
Herndon’s was an Atlanta institution. Black owned and very prosperous according to my lights, it occupied a large store on Peachtree Street, staffed by tall, haughty, well-dressed, distinguished-looking black men. Their behavior was cool, superior and impeccably proper. Each barber, patrician in bearing and manner, no doubt had a college education, likely the equal to that of their upscale customers but trapped because of the color of their skin. I would not qualify their manner as friendly; after all it was 1929. Rosa Parks was still a mere slip of a girl. They undoubtedly recognized us for what we were: my brother a small-time business person and I, a sullen dependent dragged in to be forcibly converted into a temporarily socially acceptable delinquent. I left the place shaven.
When Paul was with my mother in private, she asked him to take care of me. My poor, dear, kind, loving, unworldly mother. What could he do? He promised and fixed my fate. The devil himself could not have arranged for me a more dreadful destiny.
The next day, my desperately ill mother was removed to the hospital, where she talked incoherently about her children and soon fell into a coma. My sixteenth birthday came on January 2, 1930. Mama died on the sixth and was buried on the eighth in West View next to my baby brother. As she lay in bed at Patterson’s under surreal circumstances, I touched her arm. In fright at the icy cold of her body, I withdrew my hand in uncontrolled horror.
To continue click Chapter Three under Previous Posts.
© 2005 Jack Ragsdale
In the early 1920s, when I was eight or nine years old, my father would take a rare day off and drive us to his brother Will’s farm in Coweta County thirty miles south of Atlanta. To mention that the roads were bad is so far off the mark as to misstate their condition entirely. They were horrible. Occasionally we would come to a mud hole that was so bad my father would stop and study the best route to get through. Usually he would get up speed and go crashing into the quagmire, creating a tempest of splashing red muddy water. His goal was to arrive early—6 A. M. if possible.
My Uncle Will was cold, distant and unemotional but my Aunt Fannie was strong, loving and enthusiastic. She welcomed us with kisses and backbreaking hugs. In no time she had two chickens in one frying pan and thin slices of salty ham in another with biscuits in the oven. As she flew about the kitchen, four or five beautiful orange-colored cats followed her feet, excited at the cooking odors but untouchable by me. They were wild. In minutes we were sitting down to a feast.
Uncle Will was the eldest in my father’s family, followed by petite Ethel, Tom, an engineer on the Dixie Flyer on the run from Atlanta to Macon, my father Paul and Virginia, the youngest.
One day while visiting there, all of us males, boys and men, piled into my father’s car and traveled a few miles to see the giant rock under which lay my great grandfather. As my cousin John, my brother Paul, and I stood around a huge irregular slab, Uncle Will and my father told the story of their origins. Their grandfather and a large contingent of his grown sons with their families living in Virginia, decided to emigrate to Texas. Apparently tales of cheap land and eternal prosperity drew them to the southwest. On the road in Georgia, near Turin in freezing weather my great grandfather was taken sick with pneumonia. The sons pleaded with a householder to allow the ailing old man the protection and comfort of his hearth but he refused and Great Grandfather died in their wagons that bitter cold night. The next day those sons (my grandfather among them) buried the old man across the road from the settler’s house, a huge irregularly-shaped natural stone his only memorial.
For whatever unknown reason, my grandfather, farmer and professional chimney builder, abandoned that difficult hegira, leaving the others to continue on to Texas. No doubt at their destination they found the riches they pursued. Texas is full of Ragsdales, black and white, some of them quite well-to-do, I understand. I never recall them sending money back to us unfortunates who dropped out of that race to the Lone Star State.
For me, Uncle Will’s farm was full of magic with its collection of animals. I was wild to see and touch: big, flop-eared hound dogs that barked woeful tones, unfriendly cats, pigs, cows, calves, horse and mule. There was a pond with fish, tadpoles and croaking frogs. Uncle Will’s children were all grown and married but he and Aunt Fannie held on to a favorite boy grandchild, whom they spoiled with attention. Fannie was a second wife, who had borne Will no children. His first wife’s name was Abezena, a name presumably from the Bible.
Will was in local politics and had lots of friends. Every year he gave a barbecue attended by more than a hundred. They prepared a pit and fire the day before so a foot or more of glowing embers sufficient to roast a pig were left from the burnt wood. It seemed that everyone there was introduced as cuddin this or cuddin that and an unwanted kiss and a pat on the head was the reward of every child. “This is Paul’s son,” they said of me. My interest was in the terrific array of foods. I liked Brunswick stew and all of the dishes except the meat which I passed up for peaches, apples and scuppernongs.
At night, all the beds were taken by adults, so pallets for children were laid on the floor. One night, after all were abed, I had a coughing spell so my mother and Aunt Fannie stirred, Aunt Fannie found the paregoric and I was swiftly wafted off into dreamland without further adieu. I doubt that any child in the South in those days was raised without the aid of that trusty opiate. Now I suppose you need an act of Congress just to buy it.
Papa’s brother, Uncle Tom, who was an engineer on the Dixie Flyer, had a room somewhere on Whitehall Street. Invariably when we drove past there, someone would point and say: “Uncle Tom’s room is in that building.” He stayed in the room only when he “layed over in Atlanta.” The Dixie Flyer was a red carpet train from Chicago to Florida. Once when he came to College Park he asked mama to play “Nearer, My God to Thee” and he cried—I suppose, visualizing his own death. At times, papa also had to struggle to control his emotions. His worst time was when they made up after mama left him. He really fell apart that time. I think I am a little harder, although I am not above shedding a tear at the movies.
I really loved J. M. High’s Department Store. Stores were very plain then, but exciting. Overhead there were all sorts of strange devices. For instance, when a sale was made, the clerk put the payment and sales ticket into a container which went via a suction tube to the cashier in the back of the store. Quick as a flash, the container was returned with the receipt and the change. There was another spring-motivated system which accomplished the same deed in an overhead trolley. The clerk pulled a cord and off went the container at the speed of light.
It must have been in 1924 that my brother Paul came home from work telling us that High’s, in conjunction with Quaker Oats, was giving out toy crystal radio sets to boys. The next day I was down there to get one.
The device was a cylindrical Quaker Oats box, exactly like the ones you see on the shelves today, with a few turns of copper wire coiled around the container. The connection to the galena was a contrivance to allow the operator with the connecting pin to find the spot on that little galena mineral which would bring in the wireless station. That night my father and I played with it on the dining room table and were able to get an amateur radio station some eight or ten blocks from our house. All radio was new then and my little toy contraption too simple to have any practical use. Now as an antique toy its value would be considerable.
As we fooled with that radio set, the far-off twenty-first century was mentioned and my father commented that I could live to see it “if you take care of yourself,” he said. I was eighty-six in the year 2000, or if you nitpick, eighty-seven in 2001, the actual end of the century.
Around that time Paul Junior bought our first real radio. It consisted of a black horn about thirty inches high, a collection of batteries and a boxed tuning device. The equipment took up the entire library tabletop. It was a curiosity but not great fun. Tuning was too much of a chore.
In 1926 College Park started construction of a new school. The land for it rose moderately from the street, so, to provide a level schoolyard and athletic field, it was necessary to remove a large amount of earth. Since this was before the invention of great earth-moving machines we see today, the work had to be accomplished by simpler and more primitive means. In Fulton County that meant mule-drawn bucket scoops and convict labor.
Twelve years of age at that time, work of any sort in construction had my interest. I was not obnoxious nor did I interfere. This job, by its size alone, for me was excitement of the purest grade. There were fifty to sixty convicts, ten or twelve half-ton bucket scoops, each pulled by a team of two of the sleekest, finest mules you ever saw. The drivers were tough, whip-wielding, Georgia cracker muleteers. I don’t know how it came about but one guy let me ride with him on the two-wheeled chariot-like scoop.
Earthmoving was an assembly-line job. Each empty two-wheeled vehicle drove up to take its turn in line, the mule-team perfectly controlled by the driver who stood on the ground alongside the scoop, reins in hand. A single convict released the lever which held the empty scoop off the ground as others hooked two additional teams of mules to those pulling the scoop. Amid whip-cracking, loud shouts and sharp slaps on the rump, the six mules lurched forward scraping up and filling the scoop with red Georgia clay. Several convicts then applied brute strength to the lever, raising the scoop off the ground. The driver and his twelve-year old assistant then climbed aboard the load of raw earth on the chariot, and, holding on for dear life, sped away to the dumping ground nearby. Each circuit took about fifteen minutes. Each man knew his job and the work went on smoothly as one after another the scoops dug into the hillside. Guards with heavy guns lounged in boredom around this frenzied activity. It was live theater supplied solely for the benefit and entertainment of a twelve-year old boy.
Because I have now recounted two incidents in which I was closely related to convict labor, I may be thought to have some special knowledge of the system. I do not. That it was cruel was well known even then. Prisons have always been designed for poor people and in America, to a very substantial degree that means black people. I have seen white convicts working on the roads in Georgia and their work may have been lighter, I don’t know. I do know that the work black convicts did on Harvard Avenue in front of my house in 1920 was brutally exhausting in the summer heat.
All southern states have gotten bad press over their prisons but Georgia was hit especially hard in 1932 with the release of Paul Muni’s film “I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang”. It was the much-altered story of Robert Burns, a northern WWI veteran down on his luck in Atlanta. He and another man stole a small amount of money. Burns’ sentence was ten years under conditions most brutal. After a short time, he escaped to Chicago, married and entered into a successful career. It is believed that, due to a falling out, his wife denounced him and he was arrested. Under an agreement which he thought would bring him release after a year, he returned to Georgia to find himself facing a much longer sentence under the harshest conditions. Thinking his new penalty a death sentence, he made up his mind to escape again. He did so, ending up this time in New Jersey.
Having had some success writing, defiantly, he wrote his story, which immediately brought him national—even international notoriety. Through extradition procedures, Georgia tried to get him back but because of the state’s horrendous reputation, New Jersey refused. Because of the scathing anti-Georgia publicity and the intercession of Governor Ellis Arnall, he was awarded a pardon on the basis of time served.
In a remarkable twist reminiscent of O. Henry, Burns’ brother laid claim to some of the money the book and movie had earned him, suggesting that he, not Robert, was the true author of “I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.”
In the notorious Scottsboro Boys case in Alabama where no crime had actually been committed, the authorities were unrelenting but unsuccessful in their prosecution, keeping the accused in jail most of the time from 1931 to 1937, managing most cruelly to destroy the lives of half a dozen young black men.
A year or two later I attended the school I had watched being constructed. I did fairly well although I remember one problem—the Civil War (oops, in the South in those days, one never said those two words. It was the “War Between the States).”
We were given an assignment to write a short essay on the war. It seems odd to me now that I was not able to assemble a few words to satisfy that fourth or fifth grade teacher. For many years I have had a keen interest in that fratricidal bloodletting in which 620,000 died, but for some reason I was not able to complete that simple task. The teacher’s desire to have us know something about the war was quite reasonable for there was much fighting around Atlanta and in the end, the city was completely destroyed by fire. Boys I knew had collections of mini-balls, which could be found from Peachtree Creek to the southern edge of College Park. They were the bullets of that war. Both my mother and my sister Louise tried to help me to little avail. My mother was upbeat, she said “Go to bed now and get up early. Your mind will be clear and you will fly through it as though it were nothing.” Little did she know her son?
I was confused by the vast number of generals on each side and the equally vast number of casualties, 34,000 from the fighting around Chattanooga alone. For my childish mind Lee and Grant were enough “commanders.” What about General Pershing? He was the one I was hearing most about in those days. I had trouble separating one war from another.
I followed three legendary trials during the 1920s. We took the Journal, Atlanta’s afternoon paper. Margaret Mitchell wrote for that paper’s Sunday magazine section and started writing her novel in the 1920’s. She was a city girl captivated by her grandmother’s plantation home and imagined romantic life in Clayton Country just south of Atlanta.
I generally read the newspaper stretched out on the floor on my stomach. These were the gripping stories I read and everyone talked about:
Leopold and Loeb
In 1924, eighteen and nineteen year old sons of wealthy Sears, Roebuck executives kidnapped and killed young Bobby Franks in Chicago. These privileged, spoiled near genius types had in mind committing the perfect crime. Not long into the baffling investigation, Loeb, the younger and brasher of the two, undertook to aid the police in solving the case. This brazen ploy as the most amateur among us can guess, quickly led to official suspicion that he was involved in the crime. If that were not enough to sensationalize the case, Clarence Darrow, an opponent of the death penalty undertook the defense. He passed up a jury trial and his historic plea to the judge saved the boys’ lives. They received life sentences.
Loeb was murdered in prison and many years later Leopold won release to a socially beneficial work program in Puerto Rico.
Floyd Collins
This is the story of an experienced Kentucky spelunker who became pinned in Mammoth Cave in January, 1925. In a low ceiling area some distance from the entrance, Collins’ became tightly penned by the leg in a cave-in. He was found a day or two after being missed, in pain, cold and wet in freezing weather. Because of the low ceiling in the cave, he could be reached only by people of very slender physique. The effort to rescue him was highly disorganized and the instability of the earth at the site as well as the inclement weather made his liberation unlikely. The imprisoned man lingered in that pitiable condition for nearly a month before dying. That same night, an Atlanta paper put out a special edition, for in the early dark, I remember some person of indomitable optimism coming down our street yelling out the headline that Floyd Collins had died. I doubt that he sold one newspaper.
Scopes Monkey Trial
After Tennessee passed a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution, several locals in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, encouraged by the ACLU, induced John Scopes, a young biology teacher to defy the law. The authorities accommodated them by prosecuting the intrepid teacher.
Clarence Darrow was chosen to represent Scopes, and William Jennings Bryan, the state of Tennessee. Those two national heroes of very different ilk immediately commanded the attention of every American.
The trial was held in the terrible heat of July in a small courthouse that hardly accommodated the reporters, let alone the interested public. The building’s windows were thrown open and crowds outside listened to the proceedings. In the town the sprit of carnival prevailed. With a half dozen of the country’s finest lawyers assisting the greats and many national reporters like sardonic H. L. Mencken covering the story, one can imagine the sensation the trial caused.
Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. William Jennings Bryan died a few days later. Poor gentle Darwin still spins in his grave as the controversy over his 1859 book remains as heated as ever.
One of my aunts had a crude cabin in the country where they lived part of each summer. Her husband, who was an engineer on Southern Railroad’s famous Crescent Limited, owned a “farm” about three to five miles distant from Stone Mountain. Every summer my mother and I would spend a week or more with them. One year about 1925 when sculptor Gutzon Borglum was carving the Confederate Memorial on the steep side of the huge granite outcrop, we could see the sculptor’s crew hanging down the side of the mountain in bosun’s chairs. Another year when the Daughters of the Confederacy ran out of money, only the scarred face of the mountain marked the area of work.
The cabin we lived in was very primitive. It consisted of one large room with curtained areas offering some privacy to the ladies, and a screened-in porch which served as kitchen and dining room. We had no electricity, just kerosene lamps. My uncle owned a Model T Ford sedan which looked something like the Toonerville Trolley in the popular comic strip of that day. My cousin drove it from a very young age, twelve or thirteen years. Fords had no modern gearshift in those days; instead they had a pedal on the floor which did that job. There was also a “spark” control, the use of which required some expertise I never learned.
My cousin and I hauled water from a well three hundred feet away or from a clear bubbling spring one hundred and fifty feet down in a ravine behind the cabin. Tiny crawfish inhabited that spring. We bathed in a nearby creek that had a neat little beach on one side. The old folks, all in their middle forties then, sat outside under shade trees and there was usually a watermelon cooling in a washtub with ice. One summer my cousin had a horse and we rode bareback—he artfully and I inexpertly. We went to bed early and got up at dawn. With no duty except to tote water, we roamed the countryside without any aim except to gratify our curiosity.
I can give nothing but a childish estimate of the size of the “farm” but it must have been fifty or sixty acres. Besides the cabin, which sat on level ground the edge of a narrow valley fifteen to twenty feet from the dirt road, there were several other houses. One was a decent country house, painted white with green trimming, but the other dwellings were crude, unpainted shelters, the type in which the poorest sharecroppers lived.
Our view, across flat fields of stubble, was the broad side of Stone Mountain—the view shown in most encyclopedias. One year there was a hog cholera epidemic and one field was littered with unburied dead animals accompanied by great flocks of feasting buzzards. I remember the remainders of former crops and spare pine barrens but of growing fields, I can dredge up no memory. It was a farm without agriculture.
My aunt had a young black cook named Adelaide and we sat down to a table loaded with vegetables and platters of heavenly sliced tomatoes. My aunt was the least delicate of my mother’s sisters and I believe a bad influence on my mother.
Another year, my sister Louise drove my mother and me to Bellton, the little North Georgia town where my mother was born and grew up. We were there to visit Bob and Beulah Scales, mama’s childhood friends whom she loved. I’m sure the Scales meant happy times to her. Beulah was postmistress and Bob farmed and drove the school bus. They lived in a huge country house facing the highway and had a large family. Their children were the same age as my brother and sisters.
My mother must have had a happy childhood in spite of some unpleasant experiences with her stepmother. Her mother died in an epidemic about 1886 when my mother was six or eight years old.
Off to the north of the Scales’ house, they had about ten acres of apple trees. Naturally, I ate my share of those beauties, possibly a local variety since apples do not “breed true” from seed. That’s why we are unlikely to see “Yates”, “Horse”, or “Habersham” apples on our grocer’s counter. I loved all of those apple varieties that once grew in Georgia.
Sleepy Bellton sat on the Southern Railroad mainline route to New York. I had been there once before to the funeral of my grandfather. He died in the winter of 1919-1920 and was buried in the graveyard of the town’s old white-painted church which sat on a foundation of rough Georgia stones that had not known the mason’s chisel. As an adult, I had occasion to travel that road several times. When I approached the town I would leave the main highway for that lesser road, to try and spot the Scales’ house. It was easy enough to pick out the old white church, which sat close to the road, but I was never able to recognize the house where as a child I had spent a pleasant week. I decided it must have been torn down or lost in fire.
In 1961, I spent Christmas at my brother’s in Florida. I drove down with a car full of people and as in the past, approaching Bellton, I pulled off the main highway to pass through the town. I slowed down and took pains but I had no luck spotting the Scales’ house. That was a year of major activity at Cape Canaveral. On the return trip, nostalgia brought me back that same route through Bellton. It was a fine clear day with sunshine but crisply cold. Arriving at Bellton in the early afternoon, I drove up a slight rise in the road, around a subtle curve and there, directly in front of me, was the house. I was astounded to see the landscape just as it had appeared to me as a child, except: the apple trees of thirty-six years previous were gone. O, the curséd casualties of time!
My heart was stricken and I resented the loss but I realized at once this was the opportunity of a lifetime. I had to stop and knock on that door.
I crossed the railroad tracks, pulled up into the yard, all the while saying to myself, “This is a fool’s errand.” I mounted the steps of the side porch. I rapped lightly on the curtained glass-paneled door. A lady of moderate years answered.
“Pardon me,” I stammered, “I visited this house thirty-six years ago when I was a boy. Mr. and Mrs. Scales lived here then. Do you have any word of that family? They were friends of my mother, Ida Coggins.” About that time I realized that I had an audience. Inside the slightly darkened room someone said “My goodness!” and I was invited in.
Five women were sitting around a low stove, their conversation stopped at this gross interruption. I had barged in on the rarest of occasions. The elderly lady was Mrs. Scales, my mother’s friend—then in her eighties. The other four were her daughters, three of whom had flown in from the ends of the earth to celebrate Christmas with their mother—one from the northeast, another from the Midwest, another, I believe, from Hawaii. They offered me tea and I sat for fifteen minutes with these friends of one week thirty-six years before. Ah, the vagaries of chance. Nostalgia. When I heard from them again, it was to announce their mother’s death.
I drove away in a somber mood. The bare field where the orchard had been, added to my gloom. In disbelief I stared at the field in its winter dress. In company, I was alone and afflicted with the black bile of melancholy.
Just being a parent with daughters in the 1920s was a hard job—particularly for the father. I remember one night when Lunette was out and my parents didn’t know where. Papa was very agitated and went out in the car looking for her—probably to quiet his frustration in a useless exercise. Many times since then I have wondered what he expected to accomplish. The world then was just as big as it is now and looking for an individual at night in a situation of complete ignorance as to her whereabouts puts one at a slight disadvantage I would think. But, out he went. His trouble came to naught.
In due time Lunette arrived, pert and independent as you please. Papa must have been aware that he lacked the diplomacy to deal further with the situation so he buried his face in the newspaper. Mama took over and nothing came of the matter. My sister didn’t get pregnant and I doubt that she had flung herself at some passing fancy.
It was a time when an unmarried girl with a baby put her family into a scandalous situation. Later on, I knew of a man who forced his daughter to sit on the front porch immediately after giving birth at home. I suppose he was driven mad trying to decide what he could do to keep the shameful secret hushed—meanwhile keeping his daughter visible to forestall gossip. How pitiful was our society in its bind with nature. Books and information on the subject of sex were prohibited in the mail. Margaret Sanger, who could have supplied sorely needed sex education, was hounded out of the country.
A further dilemma for me is the fact that my parents were highly independent and somewhat contemptuous of “public opinion.” Parenting was not easy then. I know people who would tell you it is not a snap now!
When my brother was eighteen or nineteen, he and Eugene Surles bought a second-hand model T Ford roadster. Having an itch for adventure, they headed for New Orleans, a city known even then for sin and good times. Their car broke down and soon their bankroll was in tatters. Young as they were, they were essentially conservative for they had a wild card up their sleeves: each had a connection in Memphis. They high-tailed it in that rickety old Ford to that Tennessee town on the Mississippi.
Paul’s old boss headed a department at the new Sears Roebuck mail order complex and Gene had a cousin in the auto supply business there. On their arrival they both had jobs. After that, they were permanently separated from their families. Paul was the first of ours to fly the coop.
It was about this time that my Aunt Dora, my mother and I, went to Birmingham to visit my mother’s youngest sister Cora Hix. Naturally, papa got us a pass, probably on the Southern Railroad (I bet the train was the Crescent Limited). Since the journey was short, we rode in the chair car—with huge luxurious swivel chairs. It was great fun.
Three of the Hix’s five youngest children were still living at home, two girls and the youngest, a son a year younger than I. He might have been twelve. Very vaguely through some gossipy comment, I knew he had a health problem. Still, he was a robust and lively kid—in fact he had a job doing chores around a drug store. I liked everyone, including my uncle and aunt who were cordial and welcoming. They lived in a big comfortable brick two-story row house. My uncle was a successful salesman, probably the most prosperous of all my relatives and he was home then in the middle of summer. Like all salesmen, he went “on the road” from time to time, driving the circuit to see his customers. He sold candy, cigars and such, through his representation of northern factories. A somewhat grumpy father of five, it is unlikely he was overjoyed at the visit of a young boy, and a sister-in-law but he seemed to like us just fine. His children did not share my good feelings toward their father, a fact I absorbed rather quickly. It was not something we discussed. I began learning it at the table.
Once Dorothy and John Daniel sat down to eat, they fought. When they had food on their plates, they started a silly game of exchanging it—not in a mutually agreeable way but in a manner of one punishing the other with some unwanted bit of food: “Here, I don’t want this—you can have it.” To my uncle that was not funny and he threatened both children with dire punishment.
Their manner of service was different from ours. My uncle served each of our plates that were then passed to us. The children were not overwhelmed by their father’s threats and never completely calmed down nor left off their foolish game, keeping it just below the threshold of their father’s anger. What a cruel practice to inflict on a parent in the presence of company!
I showed an extreme partiality for the magnificent tomatoes that were then in season, and were dealt out to us in splendid abundance. My uncle was amused at a child so fixated on a single item of healthful food. When a farmer peddling vegetables came by, Uncle Tarp bought a huge basket of flaming red beauties so I could indulge my passion without stint. I doubt that they cost him a whole dollar.
Evelyn, an older daughter, was already teaching school. The next girl, Dorothy, clever and excelling in school, was herself destined for a career in teaching. I thought them both very beautiful.
On summer nights in College Park, my parents rocked on the porch, listening to the crickets raspy mating calls. Birmingham people also sat on the porch at night, but it was far different. The blast furnaces of the steel mills lit up the sky with fiery brilliance that can only be described as hellish. When the mills performed some particular operation, a minor explosion took place. It was scary. The night world I knew at home was silent and tranquil. This world was frenetically at work; explosively so. I connected it at once with my sister’s tale of our world destined to be destroyed in fire. Nights in Birmingham were exciting and somewhat frightening to me but most ordinary to the others.
On leaving Birmingham, I did what might be called a “summing up.” The minds of thirteen year old boys are thought to be full of toad frogs and baseballs, but mine was into comparing myself to others, however likable but different—whose parents were stricter or richer. Call it a game if you like. I was really just paying attention to the people around me.
I wondered what John Daniel Hix thought of me—his somewhat backward cousin. John had a job. He was a sophisticated kid for his place and time, working at a drug store, doing chores, making deliveries—and money. He had plans and an independence I hadn’t dreamed of then. We got along just fine, but, thinking it over, I was not his equal.
Back in College Park, our next-door neighbors, the Warbucks, moved up the street into a new and unattractive brick house—the only one on the street. All those years by us they had had a cow. My guess is that it was for a sanitary milk supply for their children. Now the cow was gone. In the past, each morning and evening an old black couple that lived on their property behind their house tended the cow—milking her twice a day and taking her to the pasture three blocks down at the end of our street. Although the Warbucks children now lived only two blocks away, I seldom saw them.
Mr. Warbucks owned quite a bit of property in the town. In an undeveloped part where only blacks lived, he owned many houses in what was called “Warbucks Town.” His kindly, refined mother-in-law, a widow whose husband had been a minister and church official, was also invested in that business. The economics of it is simple and easy to understand. The land was cheap and Mr. Warbucks had access to inexpensive lumber through his business. The houses were not houses at all; designate them as you wish: shack, hut, cabin, or if you are unkind, hovel. There was no indoor plumbing. There was a spigot in the yard for water for each two or three dwellings. Privies were outside and shared. All the houses I saw had newspapers pasted to the walls to cover cracks and stop drafts. The insubstantial newspaper soon faded and pealed, making the interiors dismal.
Those primitive and unsanitary conditions existed only six or seven blocks from our house on the other side of Main Street. In later years I often thought of the danger to public health. Having a large population living in such conditions nearby cannot have been in the best interest of the community.
Almost immediately a family with many children moved into the fine old Warbucks’ house. I describe it as “fine” because to me it had character. Our house, two generations more modern, was just fine and I loved every room in it but the Warbucks house seemed better suited to the neigborhood. Imagine that block before our house was built in 1919: only two houses in one whole block, one sitting on each corner, with an acre of old oak trees between. It had been that way for fifty years, probably since 1865 or 1870.
One of the many children of the new family was a boy my age whose name was W. L. That kind of naming was common in the South then and probably has ancient roots. In Wales, Dylan Thomas’ father chose to call his son D. J.
As best friends, W. L. and I roamed the nearby meadows and unsettled wild areas. We checked small streams for minnows and braved a wicked summer rainstorm to watch the little branch rise to a raging torrent. I find strange that in spite of my keen liking for W. L., few memories of him have survived but having him as a friend for a short time was great fun.
W. L.’s family had a fine car and they talked constantly of Manatee and Bradenton—two towns on the west coast of Florida. While my father worked seven days a week, W. L.’s father never seemed to work at all. He was always at home. In spite of it, they seemed quite prosperous.
On summer nights all the kids in the neighborhood played hide and seek under the streetlight. The wooden telephone pole was “home.” The point of the game was to avoid being "it." This is the rhyme we used in summer in the low 1920s when we played hide and seek:
Eenie meenie, Dixie deenie,
hit ’em a lick and John McQueeny,
Time, time, ’Merican time
Eighteen hundred and forty nine.
We used another rhyme which was racist. It will do no good to repeat it here.
The fun intensified when one or two young adults became kids again and joined us. The game engendered loud arguments over who got to the telephone pole first, but anger could not be sustained to spoil the fun when the person who was "it," had his back turned for an instant in dispute, and somebody got home free—upsetting and ending the argument. The dark specter of neurosis had not yet entered our lives.
Practical parents who had to go to work in the morning eventually destroyed our game. One by one they called us to go to bed, the call always being followed by begging and pleading to be allowed to stay a little longer. But those wonderful, childhood games had to come to an end because children needed shoes and even more importantly they needed lots of tomatoes, spinach… and love to keep them from growing up ill-tempered and spiteful.
Alas, the game of hide and seek was like my good friendship with W. L.—destined to be short-lived. The family soon departed for Manatee. The great Florida boom was on. Swampland was on sale at premium prices.
I have a fragmented memory that has stayed with me for a lifetime. Many times I have asked why. Its basis was a single meeting, the memory of which should have been erased after a day. This short-lived friendship was the one I had with a boy named Stough Beers. I must have known him through school for I can recall no other connection. One day he invited me to come to his house to see his father’s Ford car which I estimate to have been a model of about 1912. It was an open car in immaculate condition: perfect paint job, shiny brass radiator, no longer used in the Fords of that day. Leather straps from the top to the front end held the top in place against the wind. The view I have of him and the car is as clear as if I had seen him yesterday. He was proud of the car, but comfortable in its ownership—and not a braggart. It was clearly a showpiece, sitting in the backyard of a Rugby Street house under ancient oak trees. Was it that he lived too far from my house? Why did I so desire his friendship? I never remember seeing him again.
It was the brass band and the noise of shouting that drew Randolph and me up to Main Street. We ran to see the unexpected excitement—the only parade ever in College Park. Following the band there was what seemed to me to be about a thousand black-shirted men. They were followers of Benito Mussolini.
You can damn me if you wish, but I claim that Fascism has always been just below the surface in the United States. In any situation where one party or class holds the power, no great force is required to push democracy over the edge. Democracy is not strong in America and never has been.
Now College Park was not a place of great excitement in the 1920s. Cox College for young ladies had failed, its handsome building standing in lonely disuse facing Main Street. The Atlanta and West Point Railroad paralleled Main Street and for two blocks there were stores without a gap—two pharmacies, three groceries, and a dry cleaner. There were two trains a day and a streetcar every twenty minutes. That was it. A political parade was unheard of. Rarely, perhaps once or twice a year, Hemperly Funeral Home’s private ambulance would pass, siren screaming, tearing through town at breakneck speed, recklessly endangering the patient’s life more than his disease. Theirs was our only ambulance service. I never recall anything more of Fascism in College Park in my tender years, although I often, heard Il Duce’s name and saw his picture in newsreels.
I must now recount an episode of such inanity as you will probably find no equal outside of an insane asylum. It was in the fall of the year for ripe persimmons were involved in this story. It was at the earliest period of darkness and I was in the back yard, alone. Inside the house, the lights were on and supper was being prepared.
The persimmon trees were of the wild kind and the fruit small—one-sixth of the size of the monstrous fruits we see in the markets today. I placed my lightweight home-made six-foot wooden ladder up against the persimmon tree but could not reach the fruit, which was far out on the limbs. I was frustrated. My day was over. The other children were already inside but there I was with nothing to do and not ready to call it a day. I hung my hatchet on the top rung of the ladder and hefted it straight up even with my own statue so that the hatchet hung over my head in its insecure position. Then I went marching around the yard fully aware of the danger. You may ask: “Did you have suicide in mind?” and I would have to answer that I surely did not have safety in mind. Well, the worst happened and the hatchet came crashing down on my head. It’s that gravity thing you read about in school. Do you remember?
The pain was minor. I didn’t fall down gasping for air. There was some blood. I put my hand up there and it was wet. I lingered outside knowing I would be asked for an explanation when I went inside. I was in no hurry. Of course they asked. I fudged by giving a partial answer so they would assume I had been doing some important work under the hatchet lying precariously near an edge. It didn’t work and I had to confess to the hare-brained truth.
In ten minutes papa and I were in Doctor Foster’s office on Main Street. Naturally, the doctor also wanted an explanation. No stitches were required although, as I sat there flinching from the burning of the disinfecting agent, both the doctor and my father teased me, telling me I would have to have many stitches and other dire treatments—none of which I believed because of their jocular ragging manner.
I have told how much I loved living in College Park and how simple my life was. I had not the least notion that others in the family did not love living there as I did. The trouble stemmed from my elder sister’s conflict with my father and the influence she wielded over my mother. They longed to be back in Atlanta. My mother’s situation was much easier to understand than my sister’s. It was her health, the tedium of inactivity, the heavy burden of pain. Her two sisters living in Atlanta visited us frequently and we them. It hardly seemed logical that it was her separation from them for they were in constant contact by telephone. Looking at this matter of relationship with a child’s eyes, or in mature judgment, I cannot grasp the problem. It must have been the boredom my mother suffered, and thoughts of what might have been without disease. Whatever hurt brought the disaffection my sister had for my father happened before my time and was never revealed to me. Her relations with him were a disaster. She hated him.
My father referred to it several times—almost tearfully. It was a dilemma that bothered him but was insoluble in his view. It hurt him and denied him the pleasure of family he should have enjoyed in middle age. It was his fate that each of us rejected him. He didn’t deserve it. I believe it stemmed from the mistaken feeling that we were better than he, a notion that was patently untrue. Perhaps none of us were his equal.
My father was a very intelligent man but the opportunities available to him, due to his limited education, were few—all a country boy could hope for. Furthermore, he burdened himself too early with marriage and family. In his small domain he was the absolute boss with loyal assistants. In working on his car, he wanted to instruct me and have me as his assistant but I hated that work. Was he a bad teacher, or was I just a sluggish, recalcitrant son? Instead of remaining neutral, I absorbed the opinions of my sisters, as I believe did my mother.
There was one occasion when my father and I went off together on a pleasant excursion to a company safety meeting. There was the excitement of a long train ride and a good-humored meeting in which a man with a small cut on his face was teased unmercifully because he injured himself using a safety razor at this safety meeting. It was the only fun time I can recall with my father.
The pièce de résistance of the picnic lunch of sliced tomatoes, pickles and sauces, was the endless supply of oysters on the half shell. It was only much later in New Orleans in the ‘30s that I enjoyed them equally. They were fifty cents the half dozen in bars down there and I indulged daily.
It must have been 1927. They—meaning I had no part in finding the new place—found a new section of Atlanta in West End—Stokes Avenue—ten houses already built. Ours, number 1659, was a purple-ish brick three bedroom, coal furnace in the basement, very modern. I’m not sure of the price but I think it was $7800.
Building continued—one or two houses at a time and that interested me. It was a pleasant neighborhood. The only boy I knew was Woodrow, younger than I, the son of older, stuffy parents. Oddly, his father, a former warrant officer who worked at Fort McPherson, had the same disease as my mother, his body and limbs twisted as were hers. He walked with two canes. We hardly knew them.
I started attending the Joseph E. Brown Junior High School. Joe Brown was Georgia’s Civil War governor. I remember only two teachers: a man who taught shop and once lectured a boy about his speech in a very offensive way. The other was a woman, who was a Christian Scientist. She thought Mormons were just terrible. I rode my bike to school up Gordon Street past “The Wren’s Nest,” the home of Joel Chandler Harris, the renowned author of Uncle Remus’ tales of Bre’r Rabbit, Bre’r Fox and the Tar Baby. The bike was soon stolen and never recovered.
I made some friends and once two boys came for a sleepover with a lot of noisy fun. I never adjusted to the school and always disliked going there.
A short walk down our street you came to a large wild and very beautiful wooded area that extended a considerable distance to the edge of West View Cemetery where my baby brother was buried. I roamed those woods during the summer and sold bottled soft drinks to the carpenters working in the neighborhood. I had a fox terrier named Pat and a cat that came and went through a small opening in a basement window. No cat I owned was ever spayed. Kittens came to us a number of times over the years.
My mother seemed to be thriving; my father came and went to work as usual. He was fifty-one years old on January 4, 1927. The girls and my mother took an interest in decorating the house with some new furniture, then BANG, the girls left and my mother and I went to live with them. Evidently some negotiations were going on for one day my mother and I were in my bad aunt’s house and my father came and he and my mother made up. They stayed alone for a long time.
My father broke down and was crying as they embraced. We went back to 1659 Stokes Avenue to live and things seemed to get back to normal except that the girls were gone permanently. One night I came home at seven or eight o’clock and my father and I met in the little hallway off our bedrooms, he nearly naked after sex, bouncing into the bathroom, both of us shocked but silent.
Once in the basement in winter, some wood chips in contact with the stack conducting the smoke from the furnace to the chimney caught fire. Mama called the fire department and they raced down the street, but never came to us. She must have given the wrong address. The fire was very small and I managed to put it out with water.
We had another problem in the basement probably caused by the cat: it became infested with fleas. I solved that problem by burning sulfur.
The double windows of my and my parent’s bedrooms were on the back of the house and were at waist level for someone standing outside. Lying in bed one night before sleep came, I saw a black man approach the window of my bedroom and try to force the screen. I faced him in the dark—only three feet between us. Apparently he had no tool, for after trying a short time he turned and left. I then went to my father who got up, turned on lights and checked. The episode gave me the fright of my life. The brazen recklessness of the intruder, I believe, can be explained by drunkenness.
I had one fairly good friend at this time—a boy my age but much heftier, John Butts. Once he took me on a tour of a local abattoir, the White Provision Company plant where his father was the refrigeration engineer. We were all over the huge building. The slaughtering activities there were dreadful to observe but the ingeniously cooled building was most interesting.
Early in 1929, because my mother’s health was failing, she went to Hot Springs for a month. I suppose due to financial pressure, Papa put our house in the hands of a real estate company, authorizing their collection of the rent, and moved us into the smaller unit of a duplex. I was then in Boys High across town. I hated the school and had an intense dislike for some of the teachers. At first I did fairly well in French, biology and English but my relationship with the school was a disaster. I liked Messrs. Martin and Hitechue, science teachers and the French teacher—he was an American whose accent was, I thought, exquisitely Parisienne. I pictured myself one day speaking French in the same sophisticated manner, saying such things as: “Mon Dieu, je ne sais quoi” as I tapped the ash off the tip of my cigarette. Sadly, it never happened.
My home-room teacher was the football and baseball coach, Shorty Doyle, well over six feet, a he-man of the lowest order with a creepy, sadistic laugh. For his personal amusement he introduced the paddle—one with holes in it to increase the pain. It was the greatest fun for him and some of the boys who probably were on teams he coached. The penalties were “made-up” as you might say by Mr. Doyle. We went through this ritual every day immediately after roll call. I wasn’t in that clique nor was I ever called to stand in front of the class, bend over and receive blows on the butt to regale the teacher but the idea and possibility terrified me. I was fifteen at the time and it was no joke to me: students had to lean on the front desk and be paddled while our teacher sat at his desk guffawing obscenely. In today's paper there is a story of a lady awarded $1 and 1/2 million damages for having been paddled in like manner.
Doyle was the spoiled darling of principal H. O. Smith and Mr. Floyd, the assistant principal. In their eyes, it seemed, he could no wrong.
After school, the streetcar company had five or six ancient cars ready to transport students to the center of town. As we traveled on Boulevard rowdy boys would unscrew light bulbs and as they called out insults, throw them at the feet of blacks walking in the street. No doubt the company received many complaints of this conduct. My crime was that I pulled the cord that rang the bell as I stood with half a dozen students and the streetcar conductor on the back of a double-ender. Waiting for us at Boulevard and Peachtree Streets were the company’s chief of police with five or six assistants. They arrested me and took me to the juvenile jail. I was locked in a huge room by myself from, say 2:30 to 4:30 P. M. I was then released with an order to appear in court. Alone upstairs, locked in the huge room of that dilapidated old house, I remember thinking I would have had little chance in case of fire.
In due time, I appeared before Judge Garland Watkins, either alone or with my mother. My father was angry over the matter, and did not attend. My prosecutor was the same Georgia Power Company police chief whose men had arrested me. He was dedicated in the presentation of his case—excessively so, in fact. When he interrupted the proceedings several times, the judge scolded and threatened him and told him to be quiet. I suffered no penalty. I suppose he told me to go and sin no more. Actually I don’t remember. Surely, I did not gloat; on the contrary, the experience had a huge effect on me. Some days or weeks later, on my own initiative, I went back to the judge’s office and had a long talk with him though I cannot remember what was said. It must have been clear to him that I was a lost soul. I used the occasion to visit the various courts in session to listen to what was going on. I found the trials fascinating.
An army sergeant named Short was the person in charge of ROTC at Boys High School. As a symbol of his office he carried a swagger stick which he twirled authoritatively as though he were a general. A fellow student named Oscar Welch had a point of view I think worth telling about. His father had been an officer of a certain rank in WWI; he remained in the army after the war but at reduced rank. Oscar longed for another war that would give back to his father his former exalted position or one perhaps in even higher status with greater prestige. Another aspect of ROTC I disliked was the swaggering of student officers. They quickly began to think themselves better than the rest of us.
After about a month in Hot Springs, my mother returned home and almost immediately had an operation followed by radium treatments. About this time my brother Paul got married to a girl who worked with him at Sears Roebuck in Memphis. I continued at Boys High. Some very attractive houses were going up in our new neighborhood and I liked their style. They were stucco finished outside and very modern. I had only two friends there: the girl whose father owned the apartment we lived in and a boy whose father I was to call on in an emergency soon afterwards. We hung out at a neighbor’s, a very young mother only a year or two older than we. Being one of us, she was fun, but her husband, older, perhaps twenty-five, was fiercely jealous and protective of his very young lady. He definitely did not like teen-age boys hanging around his prize.
For me those were grim times. They hang in my mind with an evil aura and I would like to erase them from my memory. Although my relations with my father were cold, he began to let me drive the car and it became my duty to put it in the garage at night. Of course I made a big deal of it, moving it around in the yard a number of times before driving it into the garage. I drove on the road with him too. I think we had a Dodge touring car then. Earlier he had had Maxwells which he seemed to like. He never owned a sedan.
Once when papa and I were driving on the road he started to tell me what he thought was the root cause of my mother’s illness. He said the poisons left over from my birth had not left her body as they should have. If he should give me such a naïve explanation today, I would scold him mildly and tell him neither of us had the scientific knowledge to discuss that matter seriously. Fourteen or fifteen years old and with a parcel of troubles of my own, I became angry and created a scene. Fortunately, he was driving, otherwise we might have driven off the road.
Today, before we should qualify him as stupid and ignorant, it is well to note how much of our medical knowledge is recent. Curatives then were aspirin and narcotics and very little more. Fifty years before in the Civil War limbs were sawed off without the benefit of an anaesthesia. Darwin gave up medicine because of the misery patients suffered. During Prohibition one popular medicine was Lydia Pinkham’s Compound. People bought it for its alcohol content. Yes dear, respectable old ladies tippled Lydia Pinkham's because she made them dizzy. Another popular medicine was calomel, which people gave to their children. Look it up. It is a compound of mercury and chlorine, two potent poisons. Modern instructions dealing with calomel are: SEEK IMMEDIATE MEDICAL ATTENTION.
My mother had radium treatments, but with techniques so crude in the 1920s, I wonder: Did they do her more harm than good?
To hone my business skills I took on a paper route for the Atlanta Georgian, a Hearst newspaper. I rather liked it but had little success collecting the money which was twenty or thirty cents a week for each customer. People never had the money. I was always told to come back next week.
I began to have more duties at home too, because mama was more often in bed. It may seem strange but I had little understanding of the serious nature of what was happening. My sisters came often to help, but never stayed. I can’t remember how we cooked and cleaned. Somehow it happened. No doubt my mother was in the depths of depression at her condition and I reflected her grim outlook. She once told me she wondered what she might have done to deserve such suffering.
At a time I cannot pinpoint, my eldest sister who had worked for years at the Buick factory office, quit her job and went to live in Chicago. I can only speculate on the reason, but it had to do with her relations with her boss, a Mr. MacDonald, on whom she had a crush. Her move did not work out and in about six months she returned to Atlanta.
I have mentioned that our rented apartment was new and that we were the first occupying tenant. By this time my mother had become bed-ridden. Across the room from her bed there was a dresser. Suddenly, one day when she and I were alone, she began to call out hysterically for me. “There is a snake in the dresser,” she said. I ran as fast as I could to my friend’s house a block away and just as hysterically told that story to the boy’s father and a male friend who was with him. My excitement infected them and in three or four minutes the two men had the dresser out of the house into the yard. They removed the drawers and sure enough, in the labyrinth of spaces behind the drawers there was a three-foot long snake. Apparently the house had been built around him, cutting off all possibility of his escape.
A short time later my mother, totally helpless, was taken to my bad aunt’s house.
My brother and fraternal foe was notified of the seriousness of her condition and he immediately came to Atlanta. It was late December, 1929. He and I met in the lobby of his hotel. We had not seen each other for several years and nothing between us had changed. In spite of the blood in our veins, we were complete strangers. He was shocked at my fuzzy teenage face and his first words to me were accusatory: “Why haven’t you shaved?” He took me at once to Herndon’s Barber Shop near Five Points.
Herndon’s was an Atlanta institution. Black owned and very prosperous according to my lights, it occupied a large store on Peachtree Street, staffed by tall, haughty, well-dressed, distinguished-looking black men. Their behavior was cool, superior and impeccably proper. Each barber, patrician in bearing and manner, no doubt had a college education, likely the equal to that of their upscale customers but trapped because of the color of their skin. I would not qualify their manner as friendly; after all it was 1929. Rosa Parks was still a mere slip of a girl. They undoubtedly recognized us for what we were: my brother a small-time business person and I, a sullen dependent dragged in to be forcibly converted into a temporarily socially acceptable delinquent. I left the place shaven.
When Paul was with my mother in private, she asked him to take care of me. My poor, dear, kind, loving, unworldly mother. What could he do? He promised and fixed my fate. The devil himself could not have arranged for me a more dreadful destiny.
The next day, my desperately ill mother was removed to the hospital, where she talked incoherently about her children and soon fell into a coma. My sixteenth birthday came on January 2, 1930. Mama died on the sixth and was buried on the eighth in West View next to my baby brother. As she lay in bed at Patterson’s under surreal circumstances, I touched her arm. In fright at the icy cold of her body, I withdrew my hand in uncontrolled horror.
To continue click Chapter Three under Previous Posts.
posted by Jack Ragsdale @ 9:33 PM
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