Poor White Trash No More: From Sharecropper to Country Squire

By Don Neese

No one would have guessed that Donald Neesewho grew up poor in Alabama in the 1940s and 1950swould become an Air Force pilot, a CIA agent, and a senior executive with Lockheed Martin.

But Neese always had a way of surprising folks. No one ever saw him coming, which may be why he made a great spy.

He looks back at his adventure-filled life, from growing up with an abusive father and an overly religious mother to trying to live up to his valedictorian brother and then flying missions over the battlegrounds of Vietnam and beyond.

Not everything turned out as planned, for instance, there was a painful divorce, but his love of country and family got him through the toughest of times. Hed also discover love again.

In Poor White Trash No More, Neese looks back at an incredible life filled with surprising turns. His story will inspire you to keep chasing your dreams even during the darkest of times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781532005152

Don Neese

Don Neese is a retired U.S. Air Force pilot decorated with the Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal, Purple Heart, and Vietnamese Gallantry Cross. He is a Chinese linguist and served in the Nixon administration and the CIA. He lives with his wife, Melinda, on a farm in Virginia. They have four children.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

D OESN’T EVERYONE WANT TO BE IMMORTAL? At least we want to be remembered, don’t we? We want to leave the old legacy thing, right? As I began contemplating writing my memoirs, I kept asking myself, so what? Who cares? Well, I had to assume that my wife, kids and grandkids would be at least a bit interested. After all, it was their life too. And then there was the fact that I have, indeed, had a very eventful and interesting life after all. Now you might say that everybody has had an equally eventful and interesting life, but let’s face, they probably haven’t!

Ever since I can remember, I craved attention. Being the third and last child in my family, I was the lost child. My brother Waylon was the star, since he was not only the oldest in my immediate family, but he was the oldest grandchild of my maternal grandparents, the Whitmans. My sister Wylene, being a girl, was different, and no one expected much of her except to be a good girl, learn about homemaking, get married, and have kids. She was my buddy, since in many ways, we were both lost.

So I found many ways to get attention and compete with my brother, the valedictorian. I made faces when photos were being taken. I intruded into adult conversations. If someone said, No, I wanted to know why, often ignored them, and did what I wanted anyway. I was a clown! I also lived in a fantasy land reading books, listening to far away radio stations, and hearing programs which took me away from my poverty in rural Alabama. I was thrilled when Captain Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, and dreamed that someday I would fly airplanes too!

Seeing my daddy struggle as a sharecropper and then as a cotton mill worker, I knew that the only way for me to achieve my dreams would be to study hard, work my tail off, achieve—get strokes, and go out into the world to seek my fortune.

So my story deserves to be told. Because, I really did it! With God’s help, and a lot of good role models who believed in me, I did it. As the following pages unfold, I will occasionally come back to why I’m writing this. I hope it makes sense.

This is my story. It is my recollection of what happened. It may contain some inaccuracies, and to that extent, I bear full responsibility for its content.

CHAPTER 1

A SHARECROPPER LIFE

I T WAS BITTER COLD IN BABBIE, Alabama on that January 1940 day when I was born. They named me Donald Jack. I never learned if I was named for someone but I think it just sounded like a good southern name. My mother, Bonnie Vea Whitman, had just turned twenty years old and I was her third child. Later she said, You pert near kilt me. At the time, however, she said that I was a beautiful baby. My daddy, Argle Neese, was a sharecropper. We lived on the Tisdale place. The Tisdales were what might be called landed gentry. They had several hundred acres of land. Our house was small and simple, but not unlike most sharecropper houses at that time. Having children at home was the norm, but Dr. Hinton Waters, a noted general practitioner in nearby Opp, came by later that day.

Daddy must have had an adventurous streak in him, because in the fall of 1940, we moved to Haines City, Florida. Uncle Foster had already moved down there and was picking oranges during the season and pulling moss the rest of the year. The moss grew wild on all of the trees, and was used as stuffing in car seats. Daddy quickly followed the pattern of picking oranges and pulling moss. Later he worked in plants where the citrus fruit was packed and shipped around the world. From pictures, we appeared to be a typical lower middle class family, and dressed very nicely. Life must have been good; Mother and Daddy always said South Florida is heaven on earth. Then Pearl Harbor was attacked.

image2.jpeg

Mother, Wylene, Waylon and Don in Haines City, Florida

Soon after December 7, 1941, my family packed up and moved back to Alabama. Farmers with three children were not drafted. So in a way, my Daddy was a draft dodger. I really think he regretted not going, because he would have been a totally different person had he gone, served and survived. But he made the choice to stay home and be a sharecropper and prepared again, to make a crop at the Tisdale place.

Daddy never knew that his grandfather, Henry Irving Neese from South Carolina, served in Company H., 60th Alabama Infantry Regiment, Confederate States of America, during the War Between the States. Henry Irving survived the siege of Petersburg during the winter of 1864, but was captured during the Battle of Hatcher’s Run, and held as a prisoner until the end of the war. He is buried at Good Hope Cemetery, Neshoba County, Mississippi, where he made his home after the war.

Daddy also never knew that he came from a long line of Neese ancestors, and that his Great, Great, Great, Great Grandfather Conrad Neese (spelled both Niess and Neys), immigrated from Baden Wurttemberg, Germany in 1753 and bought 250 acres of property on the Saluda River in South Carolina. Evidence of the Neese legacy in South Carolina is a small town named Neeses, near Spartanburg today.

image4.jpeg

Ashley and Don in Neeses, SC

Daddy was the youngest of twelve children. I was told stories about how his older sisters raised him. I can believe it because by the time he was born, my Grandmother Neese must have been worn out. Life was hard for the Neeses as Daddy grew up so my grandfather ‘sold’ him to a neighbor named Mack when he was in his teens. It wasn’t that unusual back then to earn money for the family.

Finally, I also never heard him mention that his father, William Joseph (Joe), received a 59-acre land grant in St. Stephens, Alabama, from his grandmother, Clarissa Melton. I can only assume that all was lost somewhere along the way, because from the time I first remember, the Neeses were very poor.

My Grandmother Neese was one half Cherokee. Her name was Mary Ellen Idona Black. Folklore has it that her family was ashamed of her mother, the Cherokee, and kept her in a back room when folks would visit. I can’t document any of this because my research found little information on the Blacks. What it does say is that they were white! I don’t know if they considered Cherokees white, as opposed to black, whether or not there was even any category for Native Americans, or whether they may have been ashamed to admit it. So I will accept the family tales that Grandmother Neese, was, indeed half Cherokee. With today’s vogue about ethnic backgrounds, I am proud to be one-eighth Cherokee!

image201.jpg

William Joseph Neese & Mary Ellen Idona Black

In the fall of 1942, after the crop was made, we moved to a section house on the railroad since Daddy worked for the Louisville & Nashville (L & N) Railroad. The section houses were very small shotgun houses literally feet from the tracks, purpose built for the section hands, like Daddy, who did manual labor on the tracks. Not different from the Chinese ‘coolies’ used to build the Union Pacific in the West. With Daddy an employee, the family could ride the train free. It even stopped right in front of the house if it were flagged down with a white handkerchief, which Mother always had so she could spit and polish our dirty faces when we went to town.

Some months into his job with the L & N, Daddy got itchy feet again, quit the railroad and moved into a tenant shack on the Browder place on Lightwood Knot Creek, near Babbie. Everyone called it ‘lidurn not’. For years, I never knew the correct spelling or the fact that it was the same thing as the ‘fat lidurn’ which we used to start fires. For those who have never heard of either, lightwood is the dried out, aged stump of pine trees, which contain lots of pine sap or pine oil. In any case, Daddy made a crop as a sharecropper for the Browders, but he also did odd jobs, including driving a truck for Rob Moulton, a local landowner.

The Browder place was tiny, and had two rooms, a kitchen and living/bed room. It was close to Lightwood Knot Creek, and kind of dreary, damp, and depressing. I was barely three years old so remember very little except playing doctor with one of the Browder kids named Mary Nell. I also remember that it snowed, and we scraped it up from the porch, and Mother made ice cream by adding vanilla flavoring.

US Highway 84 was very close, and we had a dog named Trixie. We lost her to the traffic. Sad to think of it now, but that was how it was back then; dogs fit for themselves. Mother and Daddy were still quite young, hosted parties, drank home brew/white lightning, and smoked! Daddy smoked Chesterfields, and Mother smoked Kools. I guess they were happy.

Some time in 1943, we moved to the Moulton Place, which was a couple of miles away, on Horn Hill Road. I guess Daddy had earned the respect of Rob Moulton driving his truck, so Rob offered Daddy a chance to make a crop for him. Again, the house was a shack, with a living/bed room, a small kitchen, and a very small back room. It had a small porch on the front, and the outhouse was about 50 feet away, near the fields. It had a rather large barn (bigger and better built than the house), where we kept a cow, mule and a couple of pigs.

There was a Mulberry tree near the front porch, and I spent hours climbing that tree. There was the typical 40 acres of land, planted in cotton and peanuts. I also remember we had a sizable cane patch. As sharecroppers, we gave the landlord one half of everything earned from the sale of cotton and peanuts. We could keep or sell things from the vegetable garden, cane patch, chickens, and eggs. It was the only source of cash during the year until the crop came in.

After paying for seed and fertilizer, there wasn’t much left for the sharecropper. It was a dead end life. It was almost like being a slave. You could say that a sharecropper was always free to leave, but then, to where? What would he do? So the term Poor White Trash fit. Uneducated, no money, no property, no class, name it. In my early years, I had little self respect, and thought everybody was better than I. No wonder I always wanted to be somebody.

After D Day at Normandy in June 1944, the Allies pushed into France and Belgium and took thousands of German and Italian prisoners. It is not well known today, but over 400,000 were brought to the United States where they were used in 46 states to work in various jobs but mainly on farms. In the fall of 1944, we had German prisoners come and help gather our crops. Just imagine, here I am standing there watching this Army truck, with its open wooden slat body, from nearby Camp Rucker over in Enterprise, racing down Horn Hill Road with a cloud of red gully dirt streaming out behind it. A couple of dozen German prisoners were standing in the back of the truck, peering through the slats. They looked in good condition and were well dressed, although with a cobbled up mix of uniforms and civilian clothes.

By that time, I could talk, so I was fascinated. Even under guard, they were friendly, and some spoke pretty good English. They didn’t like our food, especially the sweet potatoes. They gave them to the pigs! The American guards were also pretty friendly, and one even showed us how to break down an M-1 rifle. I still remember how impressed I was at how quickly he did that, and then put it back together just as quickly. I guess the Germans saw how skilled our GI’s were!

Life during the war had its horrors also. A number of Opp boys went off to war and some came back in caskets. It was customary to ‘set up’ with the departed during the nights when they lay in state at their parents’ homes.

As it turned out, it was probably a good thing for my daddy living with the Macks because they loved him, and he became one of the family. So, when one of the Mack boys was killed in the war, Daddy was one of those setting up and, I don’t know why, but he took me with him.

Back then, you were obligated to visit the casket, so I was shocked when I saw, through a sealed glass, the soldier’s face. It had obviously been very injured, so the undertaker had tried to reconstruct it with some kind of plaster of Paris stuff, and he looked like Frankenstein’s monster! I will never forget that, and to this day, I refuse to gawk at dead people.

I will also never forget attending the graveside ceremonies. I suppose that even at such a tender age, the rifle firing, the flag presentation, and taps left their mark, so my sense of country and patriotism was born. I think this must have been my first call to get away and see the world.

One day our landlord and his family visited. The wife was a beautiful redhead named Arlene, and the son’s name was Bobby. Ironically Bobby and I became best friends years later in high school. Anyway, Rob, Arlene and Bobby are out at the scuppernong vine, and I’m standing there staring at Arlene’s red hair and said, "What’s your name, Redhead?" Really, can you believe it? Well, I had heard my parents use that name ‘Redhead’. I think they must have been very embarrassed, but everyone took it well.

There was a ‘Rolling Store’ which came by on Horn Hill road. Mother would take me down with her to meet it and maybe buy something if she had a bit of cash. The Rolling Store was a flatbed truck with a kind of shell on the back. It opened up on each side, exposing shelves filled with all kinds of things from canned goods to sewing thread—and candy! During the years of WWII, sugar was rationed, so there was never much candy, and even then, there were also ration coupons, which could be used for sugar, and other rationed things, so you can imagine that a candy bar was pretty special. There also weren’t many choices; Baby Ruth may have been the only one!

One day when I was about four years old, I decided to play cowboy. I took a rope and went out to the barn and chased a little heifer into the corncrib. She didn’t like that very much and kicked me in the head. Maybe that’s what’s been wrong with me all this time! In any event, I ran into the house crying and yelling to Mother that I had fallen out of the mulberry tree. Well, she took one look at me and knew the truth. You’ve been chasing that heifer, haven’t you? I sheepishly confessed, Yes, Mother, Billy ticked me. A bit of Rosebud salve made my head feel a lot better, and life went on.

Daddy let me ride on his cotton sack when he picked cotton. It must have made his load a bit heavier, but he seemed to enjoy my being out in the field with him. I loved that attention!

Daddy also took me and my brother, Waylon, hunting a couple of times. I was so excited that I ran ahead in the woods yelling, Let’s go, boys, I smell him. Never brought home much, a couple of squirrels, but they tasted good when meat was rare.

We also went to Lightwood Knot Creek to ‘set out hooks’. It was a nighttime fishing method, which involved catching ‘puppy dogs’ (salamanders), putting them on a fishhook, then a simple cotton line, and tying it to a stump or log next to the river so the puppy dog swam around and attracted catfish! We’d set out the hooks, maybe sit a while, then go home, sleep and come back the next morning to collect the catfish! We did pretty well; the catfish were the river kind (mud cat), and not very edible today, but back then, they tasted good.

We had a battery powered radio. Mother loved boxing and managed to have enough money for a fresh battery for the heavyweight fights. She loved the ‘Brown Bomber,’ Joe Louis. I don’t think she even knew he was black! We listened to Louis, Walcott, and others. It was simple entertainment, but exciting.

I smoked my first cigarette when I was about five. Our neighbors, the Harrisons, had a couple of older boys, and they had a car! The older boys would sneak out, get in the car and smoke cigarettes! I tagged along, and one of them gave me a drag on his cigarette. Luckily, I didn’t get hooked! It would be ten years before I had my next one. Goes to show, though, I had a rebellious streak!

Sometimes, when we had a bit of money, Daddy would hitch up the mule and wagon, and we’d go to Opp. It was five miles, but we were in no hurry. Just being out and seeing things and people was a treat. We might even take in a Saturday matinee at the Royal Theatre, owned by George Owens. Westerns were the Saturday feature, with Roy Rogers, Gene Autry or maybe even Johnny Mack Brown, home grown hero from Dothan, Alabama!

Brown played football for Alabama, which won the national championship in 1926 by defeating Washington in the Rose Bowl where the Hollywood moguls discovered him. I always enjoyed pretending to be Johnny Mack Brown when my cousins and I played cowboys and indians. He was my hero.

I surely loved that Royal Theatre; it was air conditioned, and we watched the movie at least 2-3 times, so it was usually dark when we came out. How strange it felt, to come out into the heat and dark! It was like walking into a different world.

One time when we were out on the wagon, we stopped at Free’s grocery store. Daddy was inside, we kids were playing with the other kids, and Mother was waiting in the wagon. Something spooked the mule and he took off, with Mother hanging on for dear life. Somehow she made it to the back of the wagon, and either jumped or fell off, and smashed her head.

She was lucky to be alive, and went to see a doctor in Opp who sent her home. Later, when she didn’t get any better, she was taken to the hospital in Andalusia, the only one around at the time. She saw Dr. Evers at the Memorial Hospital, and he and the other staff saved her life with surgery, because she had a fractured skull!

She was in the hospital for weeks, then home for recovery, but I don’t think she ever really recovered. I always thought she would die of something. She became a hypochondriac. I don’t know if it was because of the accident or something else, but it became her way to get attention. Only much later in life did I confront her and let her know how frightening it was for a little kid to think his mother was dying. I don’t think she really ever got it!

But Mother loved her babies. In many ways, I was spoiled. I got away with things that my brother and sister could not. Mother was very protective; she would always hold my hand tightly when we were out and about. That made me feel good, and I loved her for that.

image6.jpeg

Lila Rosebud Maloy and Ira Newton Whitman

The Whitmans were English. My ancestors were part of some English settlement, such as Oglethorpe’s Georgia, or possibly the ‘Lost Colony’ in the Carolinas, or even Jamestown! Although my Great, Great, Great, Great Grandfather Grandfather Samill Whitman-was born in 1767 in Ohio, later ancestors came from South Carolina.

My Great-Great Grandfather was Samuel W. Whitman, born in 1824 in South Carolina. He was a Private in Company D, 13th Infantry, CSA, during the War Between the States, and is buried at Andersonville National Historical Site in Georgia. Samuel had four sons and one daughter with his first wife, Lessie McLellen (McLeldnes). One son of Lessie McLellen was Joseph Jefferson (Jeff) born in 1845. Jeff was wounded at Chickamauga in December 1864, and died a few days later in Atlanta in a Confederate hospital. Other sons were William Glenn, born in 1849, Michael Washington, born in 1852, and my Great Grandfather—James Michael, born in Lee County, Alabama, in 1846, died in 1922, and is buried at Pine Level Cemetery, Coffee County, Alabama. Mary (Mollie) Hindi, born in 1854 was their only daughter.

Samuel married Mary Jane Carmack after the death of my Great-Great Grandmother Lessie McLellen, and had five boys and five girls. Their 9th child, Malinda, was the last of the line to die in 1950, in Salem, Alabama.

James Michael, my Great Grandfather, also married a Carmack (Nancy), in Russell County, Alabama, on October 30, 1866. Nancy was the daughter of Fredrick Carmack and Martha Edwards; she was born in 1848 and died in 1926. They had 15 children.

Lila Rosebud Maloy, my maternal grandmother, was actually French. Her ancestors came from Aquitaine, France, where their name was Milois. My Great, Great, Great, Great, Great, Great, Great Grandfather (Jacob Milois) (1583-1604) immigrated to Scotland, where he changed his name to Melloy, then, over the years, to Maloy. Several generations remained in Jura Island, Scotland, where my Great, Great, Great, Great Grandfather, Angus Maloy was born in 1745, then immigrated to America, settled in Alabama, and died in Covington County in 1840. Three more generations continued to live in Alabama, and ultimately, my Grandmother, Lila Rosebud, was born in Crenshaw County, Alabama, on November 22, 1887.

Her father, Charles Irving Maloy, was an educated Primitive Baptist preacher, who, according to my mother, was a lot of fun. He married his first wife, Annie Butler, when he was 20, in 1871. Annie gave them six children, but died young in 1885, only 35 years old. Their children were: Roxie Ann in 1872, Gatzie M. in 1874, Elzie Elizabeth in 1875, Howell W. in 1877, Malza R. in 1879 and Lloyd Irving in 1881. Charles Irving then married his second wife, Nancy Jane Kilkrease the same year his first wife died—1885.

In addition to Lila Rosebud, Charles Irving and Nancy Jane Kilkrease had two children. Aunt Evey Adella, married James W. Parrish, who lived on 15th street next to my grandparents in Opp when I was growing up. They had two daughters—Lillie Mae and Willie Ray. Lillie May had a son named Ronnie, whose father was Hollis Frank Bane. There were Maloy cousins in Samson who were descendants of James Henry Maloy, son of Harty Thomas Maloy, my Great Grandfather Charles Irving’s brother.

Folklore had it that one of the Samson Maloys, Travis, who worked at Cape Canavera, actually pushed the button to send the astronauts into space..maybe! Cousin Addie, (nee Francis Adaline Morgan) was Jim’s wife; they lived in a big, rambling white house in the middle of down town Samson. I loved visiting them. They had stuff!

My grandparents, Ira Newton and Lila Rosebud, married on December 14, 1904. They had four children, all born in Crenshaw County, Alabama.

The Ira Whitmans lived well during the early part of the twentieth century. They worked the land hard and, as I heard from Mother, lived pretty well. They and their neighbors loved to party, with home brew or moonshine, and held dances their homes. And they dressed up! Old pictures show them with natty suits and dresses. Uncle Foster played the guitar. They even had a Model T Ford! Mother played basketball for her school, Mount Chapel. Strange to look at pictures of the girls in pants!

They would go to the fields together and pick cotton. Folklore has it that they could pick a bale a day (2000 pounds raw). Having picked cotton myself, I can hardly believe it, because on a good day, I could pick only about 200 pounds—and I was pretty good, according to my grandfather, who always worked the fields with me after he retired.

Like millions of Americans, The Great Depression apparently wiped out the Ira Whitmans. There were times when they had only cornbread and cane syrup to eat. Those lean times must have contributed to the way they raised our generation. I heard many stories about how hard it was during what they called ‘Hoover Times’, and how much they loved President Roosevelt. The WPA, CCC, and TVA came to be revered as the saviors of the country, and it was the beginning of the ‘solid south’ for Democrats for decades to come.

Apparently there was a pecking order among Bill, Bessie, Foster and Bonnie. Bill was the oldest and was considered a bit wild. He wanted to do stuff, and go places. And, Lord, did he talk! We all loved him because of it, and when he told us about all the wonderful places he had lived or traveled, like Virginia and the Blue Ridge Mountains, Georgia, the Peach State, and others, I imagined myself going there. Uncle Bill’s family must have felt like Gypsies, but the rest of us envied them because they lived in towns! They even had indoor plumbing in some of the places they lived. We also envied them because Uncle Bill was a respected mechanic, and fixed machines in textile mills such as the ALATEX, in Andalusia. We called mechanics like Uncle Bill ‘fixers’. We had people like that in the cotton mills in Opp.

My Aunt Bessie Rea, being the oldest girl, got to spend time with my grandmother in the house, and especially the kitchen, as Mother told it. I guess she resented it, but since she was the youngest, my grandfather called her ‘Baby,’ and he would always take her to the fields with him. I don’t think she minded that too much!

My impression was that Uncle Foster was considered the one with the most potential, and since he lived with my grandparents until his 30’s, they depended on him. Uncle Foster wanted very much to be proper, and he didn’t hesitate to correct any of the grandchildren when they erred in any way—language, courtesy, hygiene, etc. He worked in the cotton mills, and would then come home and work on the farm. He was a ‘doffer,’ another respected mill job because one had to be fast and accurate to pull off the full spindles, and replace them with empty ones.

Speaking of cotton mill jobs, both Daddy and Uncle Walter worked in the ‘Picker’ room. They were also highly regarded, because they were the only person in the room, and they tended four picker machines at once, including minor maintenance and ‘doffing’ the huge, heavy rolls of cotton and placing them on carts which were rolled over to the ‘roving’ room. I remember going in to see Daddy, and admiring how he manhandled those heavy rolls of cotton. The machines were very dangerous, and Uncle Walter actually lost some of his fingers. Sorry, no workman’s compensation back then. There wasn’t even a union!

My Whitman ancestors were farmers—relatively successful. Reconstruction and the Depression wiped out most of the land holdings of Ira’s family. I don’t know how, but by the 1940s, Grandaddy was actually able to buy a farm—albeit small. Most of my childhood memories revolve around that farm, which Grandaddy named ‘Whitman Ridge.’

I was lucky because my family’s farm was only a ‘hoot and a holler’ from Whitman Ridge. Sharecroppers didn’t have an identity; we were just known to live on ‘The Moulton Place’—our landlord. Similarly, my Aunt Bessie Rea and Uncle Walter and family lived on ‘The Walton Place’—also a hoot and holler from Whitman Ridge, just over Indian Creek! So I saw a lot of my Grandparents and my cousins—Wayne and Myron.

I also saw a lot of my Uncle Foster, since he lived with my grandparents on Whitman Ridge. He planted a lot of pecan trees which are still there today! He also built a fishpond, down the hill behind the house. We would go over to Whitman Ridge often, like on Saturday night, listen to the Grand Ole Opry, and play cards around the kitchen table. High Nine and Five was a favorite game.

A few things about the house and property stand out. There was always a huge scuppernong vine. We could hardly wait until they ripened each year, and oh boy, Grandmother could cook some really good scuppernong pies. She put the whole scuppernong in, skins, seeds and all. Cooked to death, so no problem digesting all that.

People back then also didn’t like grass in their yards. They pulled, and hoed it right down to the bare ground, which was mostly sand. Sticks made of sagebrush, tied together with cotton mill cords, made great brooms. Nothing prettier than a fresh swept sandy yard!

There were not many neighbors but in addition to the Hub Browns, there were the Manns who lived up on Horn Hill Road. We used to cut across their place to go to Gridertown, where old man John Grider ran a country store, and where he had the only telephone in the area. The Manns must have kept to themselves pretty much; I don’t remember much about them. We would wave to them when Daddy would hitch up the mule and wagon and we’d go to Opp. On Saturdays, we might visit the Morrises and all the boys would take a bath in number 3 washtubs—Yeah, whether we needed it or not.

Since we were close, I think we probably walked over Indian Creek, or maybe rode the wagon pulled by our mule named Ada—the only one we had on the farm. Hence a one horse farm. The land was divided into 40-acre plots because that was the amount of acreage one farmer and one mule could plow for a crop. So if one had a two horse farm, that meant he had 80 acres…a rather big farm compared to our one horse farm.

Well, back to Whitman Ridge. Originally, the access to the farm crossed Hub Brown’s property, and across Hub’s dam on the pond. Hub’s house was up the road on Horn Hill Road, across from the house where Ira and Lila lived before Whitman Ridge. I can’t remember who lived across from Hub, but they had a cane mill. It consisted of a center with two big gears, which when meshed, crushed the cane. The gears were connected to a long pole, and at the other end was a mule, who was strapped to the pole and encouraged or prodded to pull it around and around. Maybe the first invention of the rabbit at dog racing tracks!

Anyway, since it was the only cane mill around, everyone brought their stalks of sugar cane to grind. Boy, that was a nasty job cutting that cane. The leaves would cut you if you didn’t wear long sleeves, and can you imagine doing that in Alabama in the summertime. As the stalks of cane were fed through the gears, the juice ran down into a funnel and into a barrel. When it was full, it would be poured into a vat over a hot fire, and cooked until it made syrup. Oh, we also drank a lot of the juice. It was even peddled around the cotton mill and town for a nickel a bottle.

We took the syrup home, and ate it with literally everything. If it set too long in the tin can, it hardened and became hard rock candy. Grandmother always managed to give us some that had hardened. She also gave us a syrupy holey biscuit for a snack. That was simply a cold biscuit, leftover from breakfast, punched with a finger in the side, and filled with delicious cane syrup-yum! Not exactly Twinkie’s, but it worked! By the way, speaking of syrup cans, here’s a joke.

This traveling salesman was going around selling pecans. Peecans for sale, peecans for sale. This young hillbilly girl says, No thank you, we use syrup buckets.

Whitman Ridge seemed large, and I think it was at least a two horse farm. Initially, both Uncle Foster and Granddaddy worked the farm. Uncle Foster part time, because he worked in the cotton mill. I remember when he and Aunt Frankie got married. We were living at 84 West Highway in the Mill Village. That was just down the road from the Sunny Slope grocery store. My folks and I were sitting out on the front porch. When Foster and Frankie drove by, they yelled We did it!. Strange, how we remember those things.

I always loved to visit Aunt Bessie Rea. She was the sweetest aunt I could have ever wanted. Their home was filled with love. In his own way, Uncle Walter was also sweet. I mean it. He was not ashamed to show his love to his family, and sometimes to me! Aunt Bessie Rea always wanted to talk, and to know how I was, and what I was doing. And boy, did we boys play! We argued over who would be Roy Rogers! And Wayne and Myron had cap pistols! My mother, who was a Pentecostal, thought anything fun was a sin, would not let me have a cap pistol..well another story. We refought all the movies of the time, and I even got to play Roy Rogers a couple of times. Wayne was the oldest, so you can imagine who got the lead role.

We also boxed, and wrestled. And, we played baseball between the houses, or on the street. I wasn’t very good at baseball, but Wayne had a great fastball. Some of the neighbors would come out and watch. Anne, one of my friends and classmates, came out one day with nothing on but a flimsy, see-through negligee. Needless to say, not much baseball that day.

We fancied ourselves as singers, and sang like the hillbilly singers on the radio, such as the Wilburn Brothers singing Ramshackle Shack. There’s a ramshackle shack, in old Caroline..it’s calling me back, to the one that I love, etc. Wayne always liked the way I could hit the high notes! We had fun. I recently looked up the song on the Internet, and guess what? Someone put the Wilburn Brothers on Youtube. Just like the old days, except now I actually saw them sing it!

In the late 40’s, Ira and Lila quit the farm and moved to 15th Street in Opp. They lived a couple of houses down from Aunt Adella. They lived there for a year or so, and then using the money Granddaddy earned from working on the highway for the state, they bought a lot at 114 14th Street. My daddy, who was a part time carpenter, designed their house, bought the materials with the $900. Granddaddy had earned, then built the house. Waylon and I helped..me less so probably, since I was only eight. It was a ‘shotgun’ house, which was a simple rectangle shape with the rooms in a row and one could see straight through from the front door to the back—ergo—shotgun. Nevertheless, Granddaddy and Grandmother loved it.

The front room was both a living and bedroom; the middle room a bedroom, then the kitchen. There was a small fireplace in the living room and a wood stove in the kitchen which together heated the little house. The outhouse was about 50 yards behind the house. All in all, the home was simple but comfortable. I have fond memories of sitting there with Grandmother as she rocked and spat her snuff while we listened to major league baseball on the radio.

image8.jpeg