The Petrified Forest
Both trees and the past surround life in deep East Texas, where lumber is king and the Civil War was yesterday.
(Page 5 of 7)
Early spring brings poke salad. It is parboiled for fifteen minutes, fried with bacon drippings and scrambled eggs. (Pokeweed, however, can be poisonous if not properly prepared.) Much of the food comes from the wilder swamp or creek bottoms. First to ripen in early May are dewberries, then mayhaws, which look like miniature apples. Kids shake trees and seine the mayhaws out of the bayou with minnow nets. Wild plums ripen in June, then elderberries, persimmons in August, and the later varieties in October—blackberries, huckleberries, and last, after the first frost, blackhaws, the favorite of possums. There are many varieties of nuts, but chinquapins are best. Smaller than a chestnut, the kernel has a sweetish flavor appreciated by river bottom kids and squirrels. There are always deer to kill, no matter the season; rabbits, either cottontail or swamp rabbits, the latter used for chili; and blackbirds to fry with dumplings. Catfish and bass are staples.
Everybody raises a little corn, not for the dinner table as much as for meal and for feeding hogs. White corn is for bread and meal; yellow, which has more nutrients for the mules. A hog or two is slaughtered in the late fall, maybe a cow if times are good, and the meat is covered with sweet gum leaves to keep the flies away. It is virtually a pioneer’s life. Trips to the store are rare.
Elmer Adkins was born near Grapevine and only left it once, for a job in the Orange shipyards after he got married the first time at sixteen. His first wife left Elmer after fourteen years of marriage, but he and Audrey Lee, his second wife, celebrated their fourteenth anniversary in February. Hauling pulpwood and construction work are the two skills Elmer knows. He hasn’t worked in eleven months because of an ulcer operation that claimed most of his stomach. Four years ago a seventeen-year-old neighborhood boy yelled at Elmer while they were both hunting squirrels in the Ayish Bayou bottoms. Elmer thought he wanted help turning a squirrel. Instead the boy shot him with a twenty-gauge shotgun once in the shoulder, then in the eye, then in the chest. Elmer won’t say why.
Elmer and his family live in a three-room house down a narrow backwoods red-dirt road. Next to the house is a small garden, and behind that are hog and chicken pens and four cows grazing over the 42 acres his family has had for years. Jay Mark lives with his grandmother in the old family cabin just down the road, where the name of Elmer’s father, C.T. Adkins, is still on the mailbox. Jay Mark attends school in San Augustine, has a pet rooster named Bruce, a mean yellow dog, a dove he has kept alive for two years, and a raccoon named Tubby, who sits caged in his parents’ impossibly littered front yard, surrounded by tires , an oxygen cylinder, dog cages, ducks, a battery for the bass boat, bottles, washtubs, a yellow plastic swing, tin cans, a supermarket shopping cart, tools, stacked wood, a clothesline, broken windows, auto parts, bicycle wheels, an old washbasin, dogs, nanny goats, cats, chickens flapping in dung-laden dirt, bent wire, torn ropes, and hundreds of no longer useful things that will never be thrown away.
Across the dirt road is the family car, a green Dodge, along with a bass boat, thirty or forty Quaker State Motor Oil cans, a broken-down pickup, and, under a lean-to made from a portion of skylight, a large RCA color television set, so unexpected as to be surreal.
When I visited them, Elmer was wearing green pants, two unlaced left tennis shoes, a used work shirt with the name “Andres” stitched above the right pocket, bought for a dollar at Burks’ grocery in San Augustine. Elizabeth Ann had just one pink plastic curler rolled in the front of her blonde hair and a runny nose. She held her favorite pet, a mangy dog named Creature. Inside the house, Audrey Lee worked to finish her chores before leaving for the hospital.
The living room was buried in dirty clothes. A small goat and a cat huddled next to the wood stove in the cold room. On the walls were a tiger painted on black velvet and mirrors holding a score of family pictures. In the corner was a television set. On that cold December day, what smelled like fried chicken wasn’t. “That’s squirrel,” said Audrey Lee, smiling for the first time since I arrived. This week she had to slaughter two hogs and deliver the meat to the locker plant in town so the family would have pork that winter. Hog meat, snap beans, and biscuits smothered in ribbon cane syrup were last night’s meal. Elmer loves syrup and often consumed a gallon a week before he lost his stomach.
Standing behind his house, watching Audrey Lee’s guineas and Elmer’s banty hens (kept in separate pens), I smelled the odors of a Southern winter—soft blue wood smoke, frying squirrel, sweat, animals, manure, and wet decaying pine needles—smells of deepest rural East Texas. The family members had a look of remoteness and solitude as they stood near the trees under a gently clouded sky, Audrey Lee was smoking, saying little, listening to Elmer tell of misfortunes, of being too weak to cut posts.
Elmer hopes to get some help from social security or from an old employer he worked for off and on for 23 years, a timberman in San Augustine named Hal Land. But Elmer is tired and the other eye is going blind and he can’t keep much down in his stomach. So he keeps the kids and works on the bass boat battery as Audrey leaves for work.
It is like seeing a slide made for a stereopticon, a forty-year old fading sepia photograph, and if one had the hawk’s high synoptic view of mid-San Augustine County, one would see similar pictures, other homes like Elmer and Audrey Lee’s walled in by the forest.
As a group the blacks, one-third of the county population, are the poorest. Sixty-four per cent live in poverty. The daily life of the San Augustine black man and woman is determined both by the lingering presence of their terrible past and their current condition of poverty, powerlessness, restriction, and isolation. Although a black man or woman no longer has to clear the sidewalk and step into the street when white folks pass, the legacy of slavery and segregation still prescribes a certain deference. Don’t protest when a white man steps ahead in the grocery line. Don’t call a white woman by her first name without a “Miz.” Don’t expect to visit the nicer homes in town unless you’re the maid or yardman.
In San Augustine’s pre-Civil War agrarian economy, only slaves held their value on the commercial market—not the land, which could be gotten for the asking, and not the livestock, which were worth almost nothing. An examination of tax rolls, deed records, and county archives testifies to how basic the slave was to the white man’s economy: slaves were mortgaged for small and large loans, used to settle estate debts, to purchase whiskey, to recover property. Of one man’s total property holdings of $21,000, his 24 slaves accounted for $16,000. Another record shows that a slave boy of twelve was equal in value to 237 acres, five head of cattle, four horses, three bales of cotton, some furniture, farming tools, and a rifle. On September 15, 1842, Aran Roberts mortgaged to Abner Partners one Negro girl aged fifteen, named Sarah, for ten barrels of whiskey.
One hundred and thirty-six years later blacks are, of course, no longer bartered for whiskey, cattle, furniture, or rifles. But little else has changed for them. Reality for the county’s blacks is unrelenting subservience in their public and private relations to the white world. A few blacks do have businesses. One family, Percy Garner and his sons, who own Garner Funeral Home, is moderately well off, but the rest work at low-paying jobs, trying to ignore the undercurrents of Negrophobia as best they can; they are getting by. One thing is a certainty: in this county you cannot separate the two races. They are tangled together through history and daily commerce like the region’s snarled underbrush.
“They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence,” said a character in Flannery O’Conner’s short story ironically entitled, “Everything that Rises Must Converge.” But besides the stores, and only since 1970, the schools, where is the point of convergence?
If changes in the county are to occur for the black man and woman—a lessening of money and job troubles, better instead of bitter times—they will have to come from the blacks. In the city of San Augustine, blacks make up 50 per cent of the population. The whites will alter their customs as people always do for compelling reasons—legal ones, economic ones—resulting from pressure exerted by the blacks themselves. There is no reason at this point to believe the change will occur, that the blacks of San Augustine will ever be anything more than outcasts. But in similar counties in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, the black majority has organized, so it could happen here.
“I can describe the black so-called leadership of San Augustine like this,” said F.D. McClure, a former school principal in the county and now administrator of the Community Action Program in Center, eighteen miles north of San Augustine. “If we were to go down to the coast and go crabbing and put one crab in the basket, it would crawl out. But if we put two crabs in the basket, they both would stay because cause just as one would reach the top to climb outside, the other would drag him back.” McClure’s wife, Mayme, has been the system’s nurse for 23 years. Their son, Fred, once salutatorian and class president of San Augustine High, was state president and then national secretary of the Future Farmers of America, student body president and summa cum laude graduate of Texas A&M, the recipient of that school’s Earl Rudder Outstanding Student Award last May, and a participant in the White House Intern Program. Fred McClure presently serves on the staff of Senator John Tower while he finishes work on his master’s in agricultural economics.
My Library
