My mother’s father, James Jesse Bayne, I called him Big Daddy, had run away from his 2 room, Louisiana pine barren home when he was 14. For the next 3 years he lived in woods and swamps in the wild Delta bottoms. Living on the outskirts of early 20th century southern towns, he experienced poverty that was sublime in its intensity.
Southern cuisine and lifestyle are the epitome of conservation and economy. Practically nothing is discarded from any animal: intestines, gizzards, stomachs–it all was eaten. There was precious little left for hoboes like Big Daddy, who ate crawdads and red-bellied brim.
There was not much that was big about Big Daddy. At 16 His blond?almost white–hair blue-eyedd head oversaw a body that was not symmetrical. His left arm was at least 2 inches longer than his right.
It was not easy being a vagabond in the South. There was not much left for Big Daddy. Therefore, in those early years?far too early?Big Daddy lost al all sentimentality and forgot the meaning of metaphor. Life was harsh and unforgiving.
In the beginning of the 20th century southern poverty was hard to sentimentalize. It was brutal, and it had a veritable existence. There was nothing de facto about this poverty. My grandfather gained a haggard look by 1914 that never left him for the rest of his life. Wrinkles appeared around his mouth and his eyes clouded. My friend Bubba Daniels told me that intestine worms made your eyes cloud. Big Daddy’s eyes always appeared cloudy, as if they were two foggy windows on our Chevrolet. But the fog never left. It make him look sad.
The first complete meal he had was when he enlisted into the army during World War I. The army fed him well and made him a railroad engineer. He drove steam driven trains all over western Europe. He even enjoyed a little intrigue: he delivered allied troops to the frozen Siberia to fight the Bolsheviks in 1919.
He returned to marry my grandmother who was a student at a Bastrop Finishing School for Young Ladies. Much impressed by his good looks, Big Momma, also ironically called Jessie Louise, married Big Daddy in the middle of the 1919 Great Flu Epidemic. They wore sanitary masks as they stood at the altar in their local Baptist church and exchanged vows. Some snickered later and wondered if they consummated their vows later wearing the same masks!
Big Momma taught Big Daddy to read.
The marriage was shaky from the start. Big Momma, a southern belle in consciousness if not by vocation, found it hard to adjust to the poverty that post-World War I railroad wages engendered. Besides, she had a potent temper and he was a closet alcoholic. This was a volatile combination and there was an undercurrent of tension in my mother’s family.
They moved to McGehee where my mother and her eight siblings were born.
Mom had lived all of her sixty-eight years in the same unpretentious, Southeast Arkansas oxymoron/small town named McGehee. McGehee neither backed up to anything and nor was it on anyone’s corner. It lay half way between Memphis, TN, and Vicksburg, MS. McGehee had 4081 residents when my mother was born in 1931. Of course that was not counting illegal alien Adolf Smuckers, who was a former German prisoner of war who stayed behind after the last war.
By that point Mom had four siblings ahead of her and three, all brothers, were still to come. Big Momma had five girls and then three boys. Like her husband, Big Momma’s family was slightly off-center but at least they came in gender order. This made housing assignments much easier. One daughter, Patricia, the youngest died, and while she was sorely missed, her presence would have violated an equilibrium that was critical to my mother’s fragile household.
McGehee began at the railroad stock yard north of Edgar Dempsey’s Pepsi Plant and ended at the railroad round house south of Tip Pugh’s Rice Dryer. When the railroads stopped depositing customers and picking up cotton bails, McGehee weakened and never really recovered. By the end of World War II huge Harvester Trucks replaced the Steam Clippers.
The illness was not fatal, however, and as I sat this last early December enjoying my mother’s last few weeks, McGehee had declined to only 3002. By now, though, the tired town had deteriorated to a critical mass of old people too tired to move and young children too young to think about it yet.
In the 1930s, McGehee boasted of two hotels, the McGehee Hotel and the Graystone Hotel. If strangers stopped in McGehee, they were stranded between more comfortable boarding houses in Greenville, Mississippi, and Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Most gladly traded the ebullience of the Sam Peck Hotel in Little Rock for the pecan pies of the Greystone Cafe.
The Greystone Hotel was strategically placed between the train station and the pool hall. Both mitigated the paltry night life that was endemic to Back Cove. It’s marble floor and chandeliers promised its patrons a luxurious evening with some equally roseate late evening activity at the pool hall.
My Uncle Cutter, married to my mother’s oldest sister, Aunt Mary, ran the pool hall. Besides being one the wealthiest men in town, and a respected church deacon, and being an inveterate and successful bass fisherman, Uncle Cutter sold one of the best collections of girlie magazines in southeastern Arkansas. In a town where there was no real thing for white patrons unless they wished to cross the color line?prostitution in McGehee was essentially aan African-American trade?Uncle Cutter’s pool hall was a veritable deen of inequity. As a young visitor (Uncle Cutter was careful not to let me look at the magazines) I never understood why it was called a pool hall?virtually no one played pool in it. So much of life was like that in McGehee?smoke and mirrors. The genuine article was harrd to procure.
The Graystone Hotel looked like what I imagined a Little Rock or Vicksburg hotel to look like?it was a four story white bbrick structure?the largest building in town. We were all proudd that it greeted train visitors as they debarked from the train.
The McGehee Hotel, on the other hand, was a one level ranch that looked like most of the houses in which we lived. That disappointed most of the local people?who wanted to stay in a hotel that looked like your house?? But many visitors found it modern facilities?the McGehee had toilets in each room?the Graystone asked its patrons to share one onn each hall?the McGehee even had a coffee peculator in each room⢀?more appealing.
Nonetheless, both the Graystone and McGehee were approximately of the same species, but the McGehee Hotel had bragging rights–every Friday night the McGehee Owls, our high school football team ordered steaks, fries, and milk shakes before the big game. This blessed dispensation assured the proprietors of the McGehee Hotel that they would have a steady stream of customers. If the apex of McGehee power and prestige chose the McGehee, who in the general population would argue? To show solidarity with the football team, hundreds of residents would wait in line to eat black-eyed peas, gumbo, collard greens, and fried chicken before the game. They wanted to stand beside their heroes in body as well as spirit.