Back porch genealogy - August 2, 2017

I don't really have anything much to report today - nothing informative and quite possibly even nothing entertaining - so you're free to just zoom right past this entry in search of something more worth your time.

Me, I'm off work for the afternoon.  I suppose there are loads of productive things I could be doing in the two hours between now and time to start supper, but I don't want to do any of them.  For example, I could be trying to figure out how to change Gloria's cranking thing - I've already bought the part - so that I could use her to till up the cucumber row (when it gets dry enough to work) so that I can plant another round of cucumbers before it's too late for them to make before frost.  But I don't want to.  Not today.

Or, I could be -

No, I'm not making that list, for fear I'll shame myself into wasting this lovely afternoon doing something useful.  I'd rather sit here and watch this hummingbird as he tries to get nectar from the still-closed four-o'-clocks beside the porch.  He's got another 13 minutes to wait, judging by the clock.  As he flies away, a big black, orange, blue, and white butterfly lands on the screen and slowly waves his wings.  I'd be missing all this, if I were doing something useful.

I thought about finishing the book I'm reading, The Prince of Frogtown, by Rick Bragg.  This is the fourth book of his that I've read.  I've thoroughly enjoyed them all and hate to finish this one, hate for it to be over.  So I'll wait until bedtime, when I'll fall asleep after about 3 minutes of reading (no reflection on the reading material intended), thereby stretching it out, making it last another day or two.

I found out about Rick Bragg as a result of my genealogy research.  No, we're not kin (or, heck, maybe we are, five generations back).  My daddy's family is from Alabama, and as part of my  research, I've been reading Kindle books on Alabama history.  Rick Bragg's books probably came up on a "Folks who bought this book also bought" list.  I downloaded one of his books and got hooked. He speaks my language.  I don't know if it is the language of the South, or the language of Alabama, but I "get it."  I see my own family in his.

Rick's paternal grand-family worked in cotton mills and lived in cottages supplied by the mills.  My paternal grand-family lived in coal mining camps in Walker and St. Clair counties.  My grandfather finally got out of the mining business and took up share-cropping, some time after 1922, when my father was born in Walker Co.  The family spent a year or two share-cropping on an island in the Mississippi River, then later on various farms in the river bottom on the Tennessee side.  My grandfather ended up on the wrong side of the law and had to high-tail it back to Alabama in the early 1940s, but my daddy stayed, and met my mother, and married her when he was 22 and she was 14.  That's when his trouble started, I reckon.  ;)

Unlike Rick's father, my daddy did not drink much.  Not that he wouldn't have, if he could've gotten away with it, if it had been regularly worth the lip he would get from my mother if he were to come home with glazed eyes or even a hint of alcohol on his breath.  Only occasionally did he defy her, probably partly because he could rarely afford a pint.

Daddy was wicked smart, and although he was illiterate, he could figure out how to do most anything.  He could weld.  He could operate heavy equipment.  He could carpenter.  He could fix motors.  But he didn't want to do any of that; he'd rather go fishing.  Consequently, he'd quit a job when the fishing got right, and find him another one whenever the fish quit biting or times got too tight or he got sick of hearing it from my mother, whichever first occurred.  So it was that in his late 40s or early 50s, after a long stint of unemployment, he was able to get on with a millwright union, and finally began to make enough money to afford hamburger meat in his spaghetti and a pint of whiskey (which my mother would always pour onto the ground if she found it) under his truck seat.

I well remember Daddy's last "toot."

One Friday night, payday, he didn't come home at the usual hour.  By the time he was 30 minutes late, my mother was fuming; he was out loafing, was probably getting drunk, would lose his whole paycheck (which he would've cashed at the liquor store on the way home), would hit a tree, etc.  Sure enough, he didn't come home until almost daybreak, and he was drunk as Cooter Brown.  She went outside - I was right behind her - and found him in his puke-splattered work truck, half passed-out behind the wheel.

Man, oh, man, was she mad.

She yanked open the truck the truck door and, as soon as she found out he wasn't dead, tried to shove him over so she could snatch his wallet out of the back pocket of his overalls.  He resisted, as best he could, and told her to go to hell.  She rang his jaws for cussing her, and probably because she was so mad, and took the wallet, anyway.  Thank God, most of the money was still there.  Next, she snatched the keys out of the ignition and slammed the truck door so hard I thought all the windows would shatter.  She marched me back in the house, and woke up my sister, and said for us to get ready, we were going to town.  She drove straight to Stepherson's furniture store and bought a new living room suite AND a new maple kitchen table and six matching chairs, probably she first brand-new furniture she'd ever owned.

He was still sitting in the truck, his head tipped against the back glass, when we left for town in our ragged old car.

So, yeah, I get where Bragg is coming from.

I tried to e-mail him one time, through his publisher, to talk to him about a phrase I'd read in one of his books.  Regrettably, the email I received in return was from his publisher, telling me to mail him a letter c/o somewhere or another.  That was too much effort for such unimportant communication, and I let it slide.

In case he googles himself and runs across this, I'll quench his curiosity and tell him that the phrase was "if the creeks don't rise," used in the concept of a hindrance.  It is a wonderful phrase, I think, doused with history.  These days, rising waters don't routinely hinder us, but in olden days, they did.  The concept matches perfectly with the phrase, when used in that sense. 

But I learned something about the phrase when I was touring the Constitution Village in Huntsville, Alabama, a couple of years ago.  The bonnet-clad young lady who was leading the tour told us, as an aside, that the phrase "if the creeks don't rise" originally referred to the Creek Tribe, not bodies of water.  You could've knocked me over with a feather.  That put a whole new twist on the concept of hindrance!