Thoughts From the Front Porch

Note: You will notice that I’ve gone from Miss or Mrs. to just plain Miz for all women. I believe that’s how we (in the 1950s) pronounced the names of ladies to whom we were to show respect (’specially school teachers and Sunday school teachers) and whose state of matrimony was immaterial. I imagine our grandparents did the same in the 1910s too. It gave all grown women the same status in a way, whether they were married or not. Unrelated women our families were close to, we called Miz or Miss First Name. Miss Clemmie, for instance even if they were married. This was respectful and, at the same time, affectionate. My grown children still call some friends Miss or Miz Suellen, for instance. I think southerners are much smarter than other people in matters of respect and affection.

As Hazel Shine reflected upon her situation in the new year of 1918, she found herself, among other things, satisfied with her three occupations: seamstress at Miz Polk’s, general helper at the farmers’ co-op, and chore-woman in the town’s two dry goods stores. These jobs, she allowed, with their regular hours and sundry pursuits, got her just enough order to keep a body secure, just enough variety to keep a body heedful, and just enough income to keep Hazel Shine. Miz Shine decided that she had, at the age of fifteen with no one else to look after, a sufficiency of ever’thing required for peace of mind. She was right proud of herself and felt like Papa knew and was proud of her too.

She wasn’t surprised to find that she was good at all three jobs. None of them took much more than a willing spirit and a little bit of skill or attention. When her employers spoke their thanks for her efforts, Miz Shine didn’t “pshaw” and blush and pretend to be modest. She wasn’t surprised at their praise. She’d done her best to give more than a dollar’s worth of work for a dollar’s pay, which was just what Papa had taught her was right. The wonder of it was that the situations had been there, waiting for her, when she saw the need to look for them. If Miz Shine had been of a mind to question her fate, which she was not, she might have wondered why some other ordinary girl hadn’t already been at the jobs before Hazel came along.

With her own needs met, Miz Shine began to think on how to do for others. She remembered, ever’day, her early resolution to love her neighbor as herself–when the time came that she had any neighbors. She had not promised herself that she’d “try to be” a fair neighbor or “meant to be” a friendly neighbor; nor had she made any other variety of oath with a loophole in it. She kept that girlish covenant in a safe inside herself. She unlocked the safe right often and brought out the promise into the light of her own day, so that she could recall the fervor of it when first it was made. Then, after some thought on it, she folded it back inside herself again for safekeeping.

Miz Shine hadn’t ever felt entirely easy with her promise to be neighborly though. She knew that it was a good aim and that it was what she ort to do. And she had to do it. But she did perceive there’d be a little hitch in the getalong. Miz Shine did not want to talk to people. At least not any more than she had to. Others could preach for days and nights on end, through pro-tracted revival meetin’s, with the hope of providing lasting solace to a world of poor miserable souls. Some could natter on with the sorrowful or the ailin’ for a minute’s distraction from their sufferin’. She had seen that done. But Hazel was not a talker. It was not her gift. Papa had taught Hazel that ever’one has a God-given gift or talent and that they are obliged to share it with their fellow man. Some folks, she understood, are burdened with more than one. But Hazel felt like she had not come across her gift yet.

Now, she was set to survive and her neighbors were right there where neighbors belong. So the day was nigh. She’d considered about who to do for and what to do for ‘em for a good little while, with no answer coming to mind. Then one night as she lay suspended in the dark timeless still space that hangs around a body after thanks is given and before sleep falls, it come to her like a revelation. And she knew what to do. She was convicted. Knowing what and knowing who-for come of a piece, like new-milled cotton rolls off the bolt. Anybody could see the whole town needed lookin’ after.

Hazel Shine was an early riser. She’d always done it. It come to her in the night there, that maybe, rising early, or the vigor she rose up with, was her gift. And so she was prepared to visit it on her neighbors.

Ever night after supper, she measured out her little portion of ground coffee, pumped the water into the pot, swept her hard clay floor, set her dwelling in order, banked the stove fire and placed a stick or two of wood ready by–just enough to blaze up and boil water when the time came. All was made ready for the morning, for the coming day. She rose up well before the sun, roused by her own inner timepiece, looking forward to the what was next and eager to get on with it. And she did.

So Hazel had found herself with a good little span of idle time of a morning all along, after she’d dressed, spread up her bed, and it was a sight too early to go on to work. She was often there at the co-op well before the doors were open. Idle time was a plague to Mrs. Shine, just as it had been to her Papa.

So began Miz Shine’s lifelong habit of “doin’ fer” Gearing. It was a Monday, February 18, 1918 the first time she walked out in town early, holding an empty croker sack, before first light, and went right in to tidying up. It was a wonder, hindered as she was with short-sightedness, that Miz Shine could see a lick in the moonless dark before mornin’ and could ferret out the bits of trash. But somehow she did see, as if she made her own light. She saw because she meant business. She did not come out to waste time. She saw because she was focused on the task at hand.

The streets of Gearing had no paving. Hazel had never seen or heard of any such of a thing as “paved streets” on earth. The only paved streets she knew of were heaven’s gold pavin’ told about in Revelations. So the lack of such she took in stride. She was used to wet weather mud, summer and winter. It clung to ever’body that come into the dry goods places and then came loose and clung to the floor Miz Shine cleaned twice a week instead. Men from the farms wore most of the mud that made its way around town. And most them brought bushels of it into the co-op. Hazel felt like she knew Gearing’s earth, muddy or dry, as well as she knew any of the people. She kept sweeping up the same dust over and over and putting it where it belonged. So the mud in the streets was no stranger to Miz Shine.

There’d been a smidgen of rain on Saturday afternoon, a shower. But it was mostly dried up by Monday morning. Rain would not have hindered her in any case. Miz Shine went about the streets at a good clip, collecting bits of cardboard, bottles, wrappers, blank tins and their separated labels, and all that was unwanted and didn’t belong. What she missed on the first pass would wait. Miz Shine would get it when she come back through.

On that first Monday she walked westward on Wilder Avenue past the homes of a young lawyer, the town’s doctor and his brother the dentist, houses of a size she had never seen the likes of, outside Miz Culpepper’s and the McIntosh’s, of course. And she’d never seen the insides of them. She wondered if the insides of any of ‘em were as much in need of alteration as the outsides were. They weren’t untidy on the outside. They just needed a touch of something. Love she thought it was. Miz Shine would’ve loved to have taken a pair of clippers and a shovel to Miz Culpepper’s front shrubbery and flower gardens.

Miz Shine covered both sides of Wilder Avenue in one sweep, passing the grade-schoolhouse and pressin’ on till she got to Alabama Street, which went over the hill to a section of colored folks’ houses. She would, in a week or two, take the turn to right and include Whitesburg in her territory. She did not know that part of town. There weren’t many calls to go there with bundles of hand-made underwear. But Miz Shine knew from livin’ on the outside edge of job-talks and gabfests that there were good people over there, who were a part of her jurisdiction. But on that first Monday, she wanted to cover the common area of town, the part that ever’body went to.

She made the turn to the south on Alabama and then headed east at the next corner onto Tremont and past the plain, neat yards fronting the plain, neat homes of the town’s grocer, telegrapher, newspaperman, postmaster. These folks thought they spread the news in town. And they did too. They just took care of a smaller portion of it than they thought they did. Why, most news had been around town two or three times and was old and worn out before the paper came out on Thursday. People still read it though. Just to make sure what they’d already heard at the barber shop and in the Miz Polk’s parlor was in agreement with the official version. Oftener than the editor would like to admit, the newspaper had more lies in it than the scuttlebutt. The grocer, a-course, now he dispensed a good bit of foolish “wisdom” with his salt pork and sugar. Miz Shine had figgered him out the first day she went in that store. What the mail brought in 1918 was about evenly divided between good news and bad. A letter from Texas or South Caroline could mean a birth or a death. But a letter from the government or a telegram meant death these days from the war or the flu or both, more often than not.

As Miz Shine came to the back side of the jail and courthouse, the pace of her forward progress slowed. There was more trash out in this stretch going on past the high school, the blacksmith, the corn mill, then across Clark Avenue where the going got a mite easier again. The sun was pushin’ to be seen, makin’ its way too, in its daily rounds. Hazel could see its pink light in the sky behind and above the Episcopal Church. The light was coming a good twenty minutes earlier than it had a month before and would take its own sweet time going down of an afternoon now. Miz Shine did admire the dogged ways of nature to stay its course, no matter what man might do. She turned south on Sumner and followed, with her eye, the course of a sunbeam down the alley lightin’ on one piece of windblown trash and then another scattered down against the backs of businesses. Miz Shine could see, right there, she’d have to make that route again on Tuesday and take in the alleys, for they were worse than the front streets. After a week or two of catch-up work, Hazel had policed every street and alley in the town proper before anybody else was out and about. Somewhere along in there, she got Mr. Truitt at the co-op to fix her up a walkin’ stick with sharp nail point at the end.

Even as she worked to keep her horse before her cart, Miz Shine was able to bring in outlying quarters of the community. She figgered out a plan for herself, this range of blocks for the first Tuesday and that for the second Thursday, until all of Gearing was covered. By seeing only the present day’s task and keeping steady at it, Miz Shine was able to move, in small bundles, mountains of the leavings of life away from her small town. Each day she toted her bundle, rolled up in the croker sack, back home and set it down behind her house before she went to her paying jobs. Come evenin’, she separated the buttons, nails and screws (rusty or not), bits of string, and other assorted articles. Then she washed out the bottles and tins, dried out the labels and bits of paper, and dropped the occasional penny into a a clean can meant for the purpose. She didn’t mix the croker sack bits with her sugar bowl money, for she had a special purpose in mind for the found coins. Odd snippets: a single cigareet card, a button hook, a mechanical gadget of some sort, she sat on her window sill. The other refuse: stale cigar ends, apple cores, and the like meant to go gack to the earth, Miz Shine buried in the corner of the big yard she shared with her landlady, Miz Culpepper.

Eventually, the mill village east of town became a part of Miz Shine’s domain. There the homes were smaller, closer, set more companionably close to the streets and each with its own deep front-porch, handy for “settin’” and calling the neighbors in. The streets names recollected the farm roots of of the folks living and working at the cotton mill. Peachtree, Mulberry, Walnut, Beech. The upright and steadfast mill whistle blew at quarter to five ever’mornin’ (as Hazel had already come to know). Now walking up Chestnut and down Cherry, Miz Shine braced herself for the deafening blast and watched as lamps were lit one by one inside the houses where the six a.m. shift workers readied themselves for the day. In an hour they’d come from inside, most carrying lunch pails, and walk from all directions toward the mill as if drawn by a honeycomb. Not long after they went inside, the dog-tired workers of the night shift would shuffle out slow and then spread and hasten like bees leaving the hive. These were going out in the morning, not to be workers, but to rest and sleep in the daytime. Miz Shine often smiled at the odd ways of human beings.

A handful of folks a-workin’ at the mill did not live in the village. Now Miz Shine thought this odd, when she’d figgered it out. The only ones not livin’ in the village were those held to be the most important and those regarded as the least. Mr. McIntosh lived in a fine big house that never would’ve fitted in the village anyhow. And there was one or two others living in big houses in town. The others live in poor places around the edges of town. Some lived over the hill in down Alabama Street in Whitesburg.

Long about the second Tuesday of the month, Miz Shine took up from home up Sumner Street for just one block, then at the Methodist Church, she turned west on Eccles Avenue. The church was a nice respectable white frame building, with a steeple. It was a nice country church. The parsonage itself was respectable and large, but drafty. The only heat came from two fireplaces that didn’t draw well. A sad thing for a parsonage. The parsonage would be charming and comfortable one day. And the church would be replaced with a lovely brick structure with stained glass windows. Miz Shine could see that.

Past the parsonage, this was a pretty street, Miz Shine, thought to herself. It didn’t need a lot of improvement. But she still found bits of this and that about to pick up from the street. It was a higher class of trash. There was a tiny seashell in the street and a silver button. The houses weren’t so all-fired big as Mr. McIntosh’s, but they were ever bit as purty. And they was a lot of ‘em. Six short blocks brought Miz Shine to Alabama Street for the second time, and she turned north and started up Alabama. There were two or three fine mansions on the town side of the hill, but soon as she topped it, the ease of livin’ declined considerable.

From the top of the hill she saw a close -aid neighborhood spread out across the lower rises like a rail-fence quilt. The streets were dirt, a-course, the same as all the rest but cut from narrower strips and sewn around larger squares. Where Howard Avenue would allow four or five mule wagons to run abreast in a race in front of the courthouse, and Eccles had space for a parade of chariots, the streets of Whitesburg were meant for foot traffic. The houses were frame or log and most had set or settled into the ground, not unlike Miz Shine’s. Some had a little porches like she did, with a tin roof held up by slim timbers and a wooden floor supported by rough brick pillars, if the ground was uneven underneath. Some had clay floors inside and out. They were close together and had small front yards, which were all swept clean as Hazel’s own clay floor, so without the leanto roof, porch and yard ran together. Miz Shine, by livin’ out back of Miz Culpepper, had a grass yard. Hazel had heard tell that a man from this clay-yard district came once a week and pushed a contraption with fancy iron wheels up and down all over the ground on the grass to slice it down. She was lookin’ right forward to seeing that done.

Windows in Whitesburg were squarish, sawed-out openings that never had seen any glass.They were flanked by shutters ready to shut against winter winds. A few were shut this morning, though it wasn’t very cold. Just chilly. A week ago Friday it had been warm enough to go to the swimmin’ hole. Oil lamps or wax candles burned on the inside of many little homes in Whitesburg of a mornin’. Hazel kenned the smell of ancient iron skillets tellin’ their ol stories in scent of salt pork, greens, and from time to time country ham, and this mornin’ cornpone or biscuits and sorghum syrup and folks up early to sop and eat.

There was little trash to pick up in Whitesburg. The streets were swept as clean as the yards they ran along beside. But Miz Shine made the circuit just the same and found her bag about empty at the end of it. The folks livin’ in Whitesburg didn’t waste much. And Miz Shine had heard one or two use that word where the Eccles Avenue folks would-a said “spill.” “Here, you done wasted that buttermilk all over the floor.” A spill meant nothing to them. But in Whitesburg spilt was wasted.

Had a world of patience, did Miz Shine. She never thought to guilt the folks who were born to ease or wealth and thought nothing of a spill. Bless they hearts, they couldn’t h’ep how they was raised. She never blamed the ones that tossed their candy wrappers beside the trash basket, instead of taking the trouble to drop them inside. Nor even the ones who let empty whiskey bottles slip from their grasp in the alley. They had their griefs and troubles too. She did not have the natural mechanism to produce blame and anger. And she knew such illogical feelings were a waste of time and energy. And besides that, the idlers who missed the basket were a blessin’. They gave Miz Shine a deed to do. Like a little mother hen, she began to think of the townsfolk indulgently, as if they were all her own children. Truth is, she enjoyed this little service she performed for her fellow man and the less they knew about it, the more joy it brought to Miz Shine.

For a good little time there, no one noticed, in particular, that the town was becoming a bit more pleasant and more friendly. Smiles and waves came easier. And the townsfolk were a grain more content ever’day. Contentment, Papa had told her, is a rare and delicate thing, as common and sublime as a snowflake on your tongue, appreciated most by the young and wonderstruck or the old and wise. Until it is disturbed. Then it’s the vacant place where it once was comes to mind. And Papa said that may be a bat-wing-ruffle of disquiet or a Biblical Gehenna. If anyone had noticed as the peaceful, orderly presence of Hazel Shine tiptoed over the town, they would not have been able to say where the contentment had come from, which was just fine with the shy Hazel Shine.

Naturally, in time, one or two and then more people did notice Miz Shine walking about with the croker sack and stick. If she’d given it any thought, probably, Hazel would’ve little doubted that some folks thought her peculiar or foolish. But if other folks had opinions, they did not worry Miz Shine.

A few months into her project on mild morning in June, Miz Shine, with her head down watchin’ where her feet would step, as she always watched, watchin’ the ground for bits of trash ripe for pickin’ up, she crossed Maxwell Avenue aimed for the railroad tracks beyond. It was her day to visit the neighborhood of Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont Streets (”the states” as she liked to think of them). Except for the big hotel on Virginia near the depot, most folks livin’ on the states side of the tracks had smaller homes, even than the ones in mill village. They were honest, hardworking people. Miz Shine had seen many a hobo hop off the train and go right by the hotel on foot and keep on goin’, bound for a partick’lar house, one they’d been told of by another of their kind who’d come this way and found a generous woman who’d share what little she had. No one in the state streets ever gave Miz Shine that odd look that she’d seen coming from her neighbor (or rather Miz Culpepper’s neighbor), Miz McIntosh, like as if there as something smelled real bad or else as if she thought Hazel’d been of a mind to steal or intendin’ some other evil. Miz Shine felt right sorry for Miz McIntosh.

Yes. Miz Shine looked forward quite a bit to pickin’ up over in the state streets. She felt right at home there. On this June mornin’ she’d not been lookin’ out for any but the states street folks. The sun was just up. Miz Shine crossed the tracks, using the fresh pale light of mornin’ to look for bits to pick up. She hadn’t noticed the depot had a few passengers on the platform a-waitin’ to board the 5:25 Silver Bullet to Miami, which waited with impatient chugs and spurts of smoke, as caramel-colored porters hustled caramel-colored leather trunks into the baggage car. A shrill sound broke the morning stillness into bits. It was a boy’s voice calling out, a child it was, but not hardly an innocent child. There was meanness in that “Hazel Shine!”

She stood stock still on the tracks. Nobody’d called her that since Ernest left for the war. Nobody’d called her anything but Miz Shine. She knowed who’s voice that was, knowed who it b’longed to before she looked up from the tracks to see. His mama was a-tryin’ to hush him up, but he was not to be hushed. “Hazel Shine. You’re a crazy damn witch.”

Miz Shine just looked directly at him and nodded her head. She never blinked. She told Miz Polk that afternoon, “His daddy swatted him five or six times on his little behind. And that boy howled like he was kilt. Was still a-howlin’ and kickin’ with his arms and legs flyin’ here and yon when they wedged him, first tryin’ one way and then another, into that door slot there, where the people go in through to get on the train.”

It didn’t bother Hazel airy a bit what the boy had said. That didn’t matter. She was worried, though, about what was goin’ to become of him. It didn’t look good if he didn’t turn around soon. And she told Miz Polk, “I was mighty glad I didn’t have to ride nowhere and him howling on that train.”

The Right Southern Corner is a series by Sara Rast
Copyright: 2010 Sara Love Rast. All rights reserve

The Right Southern Corner