BBMF Harry Track 1

The speaker describes their grandmother's house and the surrounding property. The house is located in Ouachita Parish, outside of Monroe. Across from the house is a canal and a zoo called Louisiana Purchase Gardens and Zoo. The speaker recalls hearing peacocks and elephants from the zoo. Behind the house is a pasture and the Louisiana Technical Institute, which was a reformatory for boys. The speaker reminisces about riding on a tractor with their grandfather and picking blackberries and figs with their grandmother. The grandparents lived a subsistence lifestyle, focused on survival and earning a living. The speaker wishes they could have had deeper conversations with their grandfather. The house was in poor condition. Hello, Harry. Let's start off this way. I want to tell you a little something about my grandma's house and the property where these events took place. It is actually in Ouachita Parish, which is where Monroe is. Monroe is the parish seat. But her home didn't exist within the boundaries of the city. It sat on a rather large patch of land that was in the unincorporated portion of the parish. It sat on a street, if you will, that was called Standifer, Standifer Avenue. I think the address was 1304 or 1309. It's an odd place in that, according to my grandmother, this parcel that she and my grandfather had, had 100 years prior to been part of a plantation in that area. Now, it's not something that they had inherited from any family members. This is something that my papa had purchased prior to World War II. But it sat in a very unique area. If you think about the home, it was rather close to the road, and Standifer was a rather busy road, and I'll tell you why. Immediately across from her front door was a large canal that, the only thing that separated her home from the canal was actually Standifer. And on the other side of the canal was a place called Louisiana Purchase Gardens and Zoo. And I actually remember when this place opened, and it was, at the time, the only zoo in Northeast Louisiana, and I would wake up as a small child when I was sleeping there to the sound of peacocks, you know, crowing off in the distance, which is a very unique sound. And interestingly enough, it's kind of unique to the South in the sense that, folks might not know this, but peacocks were owned by plantation gentry in the South, and they were actually used as guard dogs. I know that sounds rather odd. First off, they're beautiful and exotic. I know that you've seen them at Audubon probably when you were a kid, I certainly did. But here's the thing about it, if any person comes up in the yard, a peacock will begin to crow, and it's very distinctive. Well, you could hear these peacocks off in the distance. I'd say it's probably, I don't know, the outer portion of the property of the zoo was probably about 600 to 700 yards away from her front door. And every now and then, you could actually hear an elephant trumpet, which was, again, a bizarre thing to have here in, you know, in this Mississippi Delta town. But it was there. And every now and then, you'd catch a whiff from the zoo as well, the smells that would emanate from that place. But as a child, I thought that it was a grand, a grand place. And we would go there regularly. She didn't have a lot of money to spend, and, you know, it probably cost a couple of bucks to get in. And so we would go over there and see all of the animals. Now, back of my grandmother's home was a pasture. Now, in total, their property was probably about four to five acres. It was a big slice of land. But if you go to the most distant portion, the back portion of the pasture, which was ringed by old, rusty barbed wire, on the other side of the back pasture was actually the property for what was called Louisiana Technical Institute, the LTI. And it was colloquially, it was actually called the Pea Farm. And this was the reformatory for boys from all over the state of Louisiana that had, you know, done bad things. And it was located there, there in Louisiana. As a matter of fact, I may have written about this and bled beneath my feet. I can't recall. I know I'd made notes at one point in time. But my grandfather, on a couple of occasions, found a few of the boys that had escaped hiding in his barn where he kept his horses and mules. So it was a fascinating location, to say the very least, to grow up in. About back of the house, my papa used to have a, he had a blue and gray Ford tractor. And he would put, my father, my grandfather was a horseman. So he had lots of tack, he had saddles and saddle blankets and all this sort of thing. And can you imagine, can you imagine people doing this nowadays? But he would take that, he'd take a saddle blanket and throw it over the cowling of the engine of the tractor. While he was bush hogging, he'd put me up on that cowling and he'd hold on to the back loops of my pants. And we'd run up and down that pasture with him towing a bush hog behind it. And it was great fun for me. As a matter of fact, at one point in time, he had actually tied a rein to the front grill of that old tractor. And I still, to this day, can remember the heat coming up off of the motor, me wearing a little Tony Lama cowboy boots that he had bought for me at the Western store over in West Monroe. We'd go to the sale barn. And I had an old cowboy hat and I'd ride up on top of that thing. And it was one of the, it was a treasured moment for me back then. It was very innocent. And we'd go back and forth across that pasture. And he had to stop finally because my mama found out about it at one point in time. In her own way, she chastised him. He would listen to anything she had to say. And I think it hurt his feelings because it was something he could do with me that, you know, he couldn't play ball or anything like that. He didn't grow up doing that. He grew up real hard. He had never held a ball in his life probably. He had a lot of guns and could hunt, he could fish, he could skin, he could kill just about anything. He could raise horses, he could raise mules, and he could raise one hell of a garden, which they did on the south side of the pasture, probably one of the biggest gardens that I'd ever seen and to this day have ever seen in my life. It was row upon row of peas and corn and squash, which was his favorite, and okra. But you know, everything that they did, those little pleasures in life that they had, they were all about subsistence, Harry. There was nothing that they did, no effort that they made in this life other than to survive. And if you need further evidence of that, Pearl, adjacent to the garden patch that she had, had a long line of blackberry bushes. And she would, she always wore a house dress, I don't know if you remember ladies wearing these back in the 60s, but in the 70s too, the older ladies, and it kind of zipped up the front. It was always floral print, but she put on a pair of my Papaw's rubber boots, and she had a pair of gloves, and she had a big wide brim straw hat that she'd wear and she'd carry buckets with her out there to the pasture. And I'd go with her, and she'd always say, now baby, you gotta watch out for these snakes up in those bushes. And that's the truth, because snakes do get up in the blackberry bushes. And she'd pick and pick and pick those blackberries from, you know, through the heat of the day, which as you well know, Louisiana might be one of the hottest places on the face of the planet. But in addition to that, she had wild fig trees that grew on that pasture as well. And she would go out and collect figs, again, warning of snakes, that sort of thing. She had several pecan trees, which came into play during the Christmas season for her. We'd go out and we'd pick pecans up and, you know, take them back to the kitchen. She taught me how to shell them and how to pick them, and she would save them all. There was nothing that went to waste for her, again, back to subsistence living. Probably the most unique thing that they had, which as a little boy I was always fascinated by, she had, I think, I think they either had four or five gigantic Catawba trees. If you've never seen a Catawba tree, they have worms that grow on them, and they're big. And so people love to use these things to, well, to hunt, excuse me, to fish for just about anything. Bass will hit them. They'll bull bream, which, you know, the bream up in North Louisiana are gigantic. You get up in those black sloughs and bayous up there. Matter of fact, there is a bayou up there called Black Bayou, and then you've got Bayou de Seard. My grandmother's brother-in-law, who I mentioned in a phone call to you, Uncle James, who had lost his fingers, he ran a bait stand on Bayou de Seard, and she would put them in peat moss and put them in Cool Whip containers and take them up there, too, and she'd freeze them. And she would trade them to Uncle James, and he would sell them for her and give her, you know, give her the profit off of them. So everything she did and everything Papaw did was about earning a living. There was not much, let's see, how can we say, recreating. The only recreation my grandma ever had was going to church, being a Sunday school superintendent or running a vacation Bible school or hanging out with her sisters and talking to her sisters, but she was always doing something. It was a busy household, and, you know, as tired as Papaw was, when he would get home during the day, he'd still go out there in that backyard, and he'd sit in that old metal chair, and he'd either roll cigarettes, chew tobacco, but all the while talking to himself. I remember being little and I'd be out in that backyard, and I remember listening many times. You know, when you're little, you don't think about things that adults are going through, and you might even question it. I'm sure at some point in time, and I don't recall this, but I'm sure at some point in time, I may have said, Papaw, what did you say? But he never could give me an answer. He'd just keep on talking, and every now and then I'd listen, but it was always met with more ranting, nothing that you could ever make sense of. Some days I wish I could go back and sit across from him, that I could have been older, that I could have looked him in the eye, and I could have talked to him, that I could have talked to him maybe, talked to him about those things that were swirling about in his mind, maybe his regrets, his fears, but like everything else in life, it disappears. You know, I think about him sitting in that backyard, looking at that house, looking at the back side, and it was, to say it was ramshackled is to say, is an understatement. It had white asbestos shingles on the sides of it, and they were cracked, many of them were. The roof never leaked, but the floor always felt like it was about to cave in, and you'd have to go a long way in North Louisiana to find a hill anywhere, and like every place else, the ground always held water. And there was always a smell, I thought, there was like a tiny drainage ditch that ran through the middle of the yard, and you could always get a whiff of raw sewage. Many years later, I remember I would, every now and then, I'd catch that smell in the French Quarter, every now and then, and I know that that's what it was, and then it always rained, there'd always be heavy rains that would come through, and so the ground was super saturated all the time. But amongst all of that, my grandmother had, over the years of living in this home, had around the perimeter, just outside the windows on both sides of the house, she had planted camellia bushes and gardenia bushes, and gardenias were her favorite. And I think, you know, the aromatic quality, it smells like heaven when they're in bloom, and generally they're in bloom about this time of year, as I'm speaking right now. They start to bloom in May and go into June. And that smell was so rich and so sweet, and she would always have bouquets of them that time of year that she would pick. She had dogwoods too, and every time she'd go out to pick a dogwood, there'd be dogwood flowers, there'd always be a story that went along with it, and it was always the story of Christ. You know, she'd talk about the shape of the flowers and how the flowers are in the shape of a cross, and she'd talk about the little red line, and she'd say that's a dot of Jesus's blood. And then, you know, she'd say if you ever cut the trunk in two, there'd be a little, there's a red dot inside of that trunk, and she'd say that's more evidence of Jesus's blood. You know, the old tale, I think it's been dispelled, I don't think dogwoods grow in the Holy Land, but, you know, the old tale had always been that Christ's cross had been made out of dogwood tree. Either way, she would use it as an opportunity to talk about Jesus, and that was, that's what she did. And many times, you know, I don't know that she was trying to bear witness to me as much as she was longing to have the presence of God beside her because there was so much chaos around her that in that kind of the eye of the storm, he was that anchor that she could hold on to and maybe find peace with and ultimately find healing with when it came to my daddy in particular, and to my papa as well. And then, you know, by extension, the family, her sisters and their lives as well. I always think about how many of us in our lives, we offer up ourselves to bear the burdens of those around us when maybe they choose not to bear the burdens themselves. Now I'm not saying Pearl was a saint, she wasn't. She's a human being, flesh and blood. But she always looked at life that way, that God's hand was always on her life, even up until the point she died, you know, when my papa, my daddy moved her out to Oregon. I asked her one time, I didn't have a lot at the time in my life, I wanted so badly for her to come and live with me and Kim so that I could just take care of her, take care of her and take care of her. And her response on at least three occasions here was that, Joey, your daddy is my last mission field. No matter what attempt she ever made with him, he was my last mission field. No matter what attempt she ever made with him, he always rejected it, always. And for whatever reason, he resented her, I think. But the life that she and papa built in that house, and my father, by the way, was her only child, she didn't have him until late in her life. She was born in 1913, she didn't get married until, I think she was 29 years old, which is very, very late in life for someone that age, I mean, back during that time. But her whole mission in life was tending to people. And here's an interesting other little aside that still sticks in my mind. If you were to pull out of my granny's driveway and turn to the right, the zoo would be on your left. And as you're heading out that road, you pass by my papa's property, and then there was an older black guy that lived next to him, and his name was Junior. My daddy went by the name Junior, and my daddy went by the name Junior, and my daddy went by the name Junior, and his name was Junior. My daddy went by the name Junior as well, by the way. And the black gentleman named Junior worked with my papa at Louisiana Power and Light at LPNL, and he drove a pole truck. My granddaddy was, he worked for LPNL his entire life, setting poles and bringing electricity to places that didn't have it. He was working with them back in the 30s, and he traveled all over the Gulf South, all over South Louisiana. Anytime there's a hurricane, you see all those trucks parked out there. And that's all he had ever known. As a matter of fact, he was almost killed by a transformer. It fell, came loose from a pole one time and crushed his leg. It's what kept him out of World War II. His leg was mangled. But that's all he'd ever done, work for LPNL. But as you're traveling down that road, Junior had been his companion and would drive the pole truck out, and papa and his crew would go out, and they'd string those lines and hang those transformers. But the house just beyond Junior's was an old black guy named Silas. And Pearl used to gather me up, and she had an old Chrysler, and this thing was a boat, man, I mean, it was gigantic. And she always had, you know, back then they didn't have paper plates, and, you know, she had china, you know, and it was daily use china. And she cooked just copious amounts of food all the time, more than anybody ever needed, and particularly fried chicken. There was always fried chicken laying on the stove, covered up with a napkin. But every day, she would drive down to Silas' house, and Silas would sit on the front porch in an old busted lounge chair, and I remember being terrified of him when I was little. And his hands were all twisted and gnarled, and we'd walk up those front steps, and the front porch was just about to collapse. And I tried to look through the screen door every now and then, see what I could see, and it was not much in there. There was a bed in the front room, and I guess he had a toilet in the back. But the thing about Silas is that Silas was blonde, and his eyes had that milky white coating over them. And he would sit out there on that front porch, and he had a cane, and Pearl claimed that he had grandchildren somewhere, but they never came by to see him. And she would take him a plate of food every day, and she'd go back, and she'd collect the plate, and take it back home, and wash it. And then, she would come back the next day. It was the same process over and over again, and she felt compelled to do that. What she had confided in me was that at that time, she had said that Silas, Silas's granddaddy had been a slave, and had been a slave in Washtenaw Parish, and had been a slave in this old house, though it didn't look like traditional, what you would call slave quarters. It looked more something like a sharecropper's house, weathered siding on it, raw wood, the trash all out in the yard. The only thing that was missing was a dog laying on the porch. But after I was around Silas for a while, I'd speak to him every now and then. I'd talk to him, and of course, in my own feeble way, I was probably six, seven years old. I couldn't really carry on conversation with him, but I was always fascinated by him, because he was almost like viewing history, sitting there, and he was right there adjacent to my grandparent's property. I was always fascinated by that, by the fact that he indwelled that space where my granny lived. I think back on those days, and in that house, and with the muddy, smelly yard, and the top of trees, and pecans, and the smell of the tack room, my grandpa's old barn that he had out there, and his horses that he kept around, even the mules. I can still remember the smell of the sweet grass when it'd be cut in the summertime. I still remember going out there to the garden with him, walking through the garden, picking blackberries, and figs, and whatnot. I remember the heat, that sticky Louisiana heat, and you can't go nowhere to escape it. But it was peaceful. It was a peaceful existence that I don't know that I've ever had at any other time in my life, other than possibly now, in this stage of my life with Kim. The thing that always stuck with me, though, is that there was always a sound in Pearl's house, and most people in this generation don't know or recognize the sound, but it was actually, there was always a sound of multiple box fans running, because she had an air conditioner, and it was like a single unit that hung in a window, and it didn't, you know, it's really hard to defeat that heat, you know, it's just really hard, but there would always be box fans going, and they weren't like these new ones that are plastic. These are mean looking things with metal blades, and the framework was metal as well, and you could hear rattling, and they'd last for a long time. But of course, you know, Pearl in her own way would always tell me, baby, don't ever stick your fingers in there, because you won't get them back. And I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's really important, and I think that's