The Prince of Frogtown (30 page)

He lectured row by row. You pinch off the first little pepper pods that show. That makes the whole plant react by producing more pods, instead of a single pod or two on a plant that never fully develops. With okra, you cut off the first pod and leaf. You keep the dirt pulled back from the onions once they begin to grow, because the packed dirt will slow or stop them from developing. I told him it was amazing what they had done, and I meant it.

“I had my doubts,” he said, smiling, “when I saw them blackberries.”

I asked him why he would work so hard on something like that, but he never answered.

“Everybody that sees it says it’s the prettiest garden they ever seen,” my mother said.

They live together, the two of them. I have a room there and my name is on the cable bill, but I always feel like a tourist when I come, with the woman and boy. Sam and his wife Teresa and their daughter Meredith, with her family, visit a lot, and we eat that food—fried squash, boiled okra, new potatoes, stewed sweet corn—all seasoned with Velma’s magic, and at dusk we fish the pond and fend off the jackasses. My aunts and uncles and cousins come when they can, but time is catching up with us, and we are fewer now.

I think a lot about my daddy’s people now. The last time I saw Bob, he was Christmas drunk in ’65 and sitting next to me in the backseat of my father’s car. He and Velma had words, and he threatened to cut her with his new pocketknife. “I told your daddy not to give Bobby a knife for Christmas,” my mother said. But he snapped it closed, grinned at me, pinched my arm blue, and we rode, a family. Velma, I saw for the last time in the funeral home in Jacksonville. The young preacher told us Velma had come to him near the end of her life, and told him she was never saved. He said he prayed with her, and he was with her when she was. But I think the young minister had it wrong. I think she was saved all along.

Their youngest son lies near them, in a grave we rarely visit. One day Sam came by, covered in sweat, and told me he had gone to the cemetery to cut the weeds off the family plots on my mother’s side—our grandfather, grandmother, others—the people he considers real family. “I walked over and I cut Daddy’s,” he said. “I mean, I was already there.”

The garden at my mother’s house thrived all summer and into the fall, bore its fruit, and died, but as it withered my baby brother was still fine, still gaunt and old before his time, but living inside that peace he had found, and allowing her to live inside it, too.

They broke that circle, together. “Everything we wrote about in them letters has come true. Everything we dreamed about has come true, this time,” my mother said. “How often does something like that happen in this world?”

T
HE NEXT SPRING
they started over. Fearful of snakes in the tall grass of the pasture, my brothers used mowers to cut a clean path for her from the yard to her pond, and from the yard to her garden. In one week the path was covered in wildflowers. “Everywhere Momma walks is flowers,” Sam said, and he didn’t mean it to sound pretty but it was. It has acres of flowers, her new Eden, and not one rose.

She prayed it would last forever, but even for an old woman, forever can take too long. My little brother stumbled and fell. But what fine minute she lived in, before he did. Some days, she did not check the mail at all.

The Boy

F
UNNY THING,
about that silver sports car.

No one ever bought it.

It may be because, when people called to ask about it, I would sometimes neglect to call them back.

I guess I never called anybody back.

The boy says that’s all right.

He plans to drive it to prom.

“You don’t even know how to shift gears,” I said.

“Teach me,” he said.

He is three years away from a driver’s license, but there is no harm in knowing early.

We crawled in, and I turned the key.

The sound of it, Lord, it just hums in your blood.

The wind blows the rust off a man.

I worked the clutch but I let the boy shift through the gears from the passenger seat, telling him to listen for a change in that growl, that roar, and he figured it out quick, like he was born to do it.

We were in Fairhope, in a dwindling summer. We idled along Mobile Bay, then went due east on those needle-straight country roads, a respectable fifteen miles over the speed limit.

“You know,” I said, “if you ever drive reckless, I’ll whip you like you were mine.”

He just laughed.

“I mean it,” I said. “You can’t.”

“Okay,” he said.

“You don’t understand consequences,” I said. “Your life’s been too safe, too easy…” and before I knew it I was deep into my rant, again. I think I will always do that, because someone has to be afraid for this boy.

I geared down and nudged the accelerator a little more. The timbre of the engine changed, sweetened, and the telephone poles went by like fence posts.

The boy raised his hands into the wind, like a little kid.

For a second, just a brave second, the car split the air under its own volition, and I raised mine, too.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Before I can begin to thank the people who made this book possible, I must first offer apologies to my mother and brothers for having to endure my questions about a past that was hard to relive. I can let things lie now.

And, though it is far too late, I must say how sorry I am for letting my feelings for my father keep me for so long from his people, from my grandmother, especially. I am told she loved without condition, loved my mother, and loved us boys. I never gave her reason. It was just the kind of person she was.

It is a cliché, to say it will be impossible to thank all the people who made this endeavor possible, but it is nonetheless true.

First, I must thank the storytellers who were generous enough to put a more human, complicated face on my father. Jack, Carlos, Shirley, Billy, Bill Joe, so many others…I would never have known him, if not for you.

Others built the stage that my family’s story is played on. Jimmy Hamilton told me the best story I ever heard of my grandfather. Homer Barnwell made the Jacksonville of his boyhood come alive. Ruby England, my father’s sister, told me how pretty my mother looked on her wedding day. Wayne Glass told me one of the finest whiskey-running tales I ever heard.

And as with every book I write about home, I must thank my aunts Juanita, Jo, and Edna, and my uncles Ed and John, for once again lending color, drama, and substance to the past. Your stories have filled the very air around me with pictures, all my life.

Before I could begin piecing together their remembrances, I needed more distant history. This book, like so much of what I have tried to write in my lifetime, attempts to peer into the pasts of blue-collar Americans, specifically the mill and mountain people of the foothills of the Appalachians. Chapter two, the story of where we come from, would not have been possible without the genuine historians who have already chronicled that history.

I must begin with Wayne Flynt. In
Poor but Proud
and other works on the poor, rural people of my state, he educated me on my own soil, and revealed the sweat and blood spilled into it by generations. By reading his works, I began to better understand the gut-tearing contradictions in my people in the years before, during and after the Civil War. His exhaustive research into the deprivations of the postwar period—from dejection-filled letters to damning statistics—put flesh and blood on dim history. I had heard that Alabama soldiers marched into battle without shoes, had known that women back home cried for bread, but never really saw it, in my mind’s eye, until I read it in his books.

I found more historical gems in the most unusual places. A history of Jacksonville compiled in my youth by the First National Bank provided a glimpse into what was done and said as young men of the town marched off to war.

Hardy Jackson’s works took me even deeper into my state’s history, back to the time of the Creeks. I know more than ever about my people thanks to him and to so many other historians whose works gave voice to the men and women who were here before.

This history of the Jacksonville cotton mill alone is upheld by more sources than I can count. The memoirs of Knox Ide gave me entrée to the people who shaped the future here. Peter Howell, who tried to save the mill from the wrecking ball, provided, literally, a trunkful of information. The most official history of the mill and its founders, written in an application for historic status by David B. Schneider (compiling information from local historians such as Jack Boozer and others), showed me its origins, its founders, more. Dozens of first-person accounts of life in the village, from Donald Garmon, Odell Knight and others, provided beautiful insights into life there in the first half of the twentieth century.

I also have to thank the reporters, most of them long gone, of the
Anniston Star
and the
Jacksonville News,
who chronicled our history one faded page at a time, and took me—with the help of flesh-and-blood sources—inside the tragic killing of Chief Whiteside.

And I have to thank the people who loaned me their legs, and minds, in gathering first-person remembrances and press and historical accounts of the cotton mill village and the surrounding town—most of which will find a home in a book yet to come, but a small part of which helped me in these pages: Jerry “Boo” Mitchell, Greg Garrison, Lori Solomon, Megan Nichols, Jen Allen, James King, Taylor Hill, Ryan Clark, Beth Linder and Cori Bolger.

As with every book I write, I must thank my editor, Jordan Pavlin, for taking this imperfect work and turning it into something I am proud of. I have never minded a good editor. In this book, I would have drowned without one. And again, I want to thank my agent, Amanda Urban, for giving me a book life to begin with, at a level I never even dreamed.

I have never been the kind of writer who needed a perfect place to write, a willow tree, a seaside cottage. I could write just as well—or just as poorly—on an upside-down oil drum. But the University of Alabama gave me a place to write that looks out over massive oaks and green lawns, within earshot of the chimes. I am now spoiled.

Perhaps most of all I thank the readers who have found value in the stories of my people, and—more important—found value in their time on this earth.

Finally, I must thank the boy, for forgiving me for all that I have fumbled, broken and lost, and the simple fact that, sometimes, I just don’t have good sense.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rick Bragg is the author of two best-selling books,
Ava’s Man
and
All Over but the Shoutin’.
He lives in Alabama with his wife, Dianne, and stepson Jake.

ALSO BY RICK BRAGG

All Over but the Shoutin’

Ava’s Man

Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg

I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story