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

Born up near Cornelia, Alabama on Big Canoe Creek, in 1902, Phoebe Hazel Harp Campbell outlived both her parents before she turned nine. Her Mama had loved an extravagant name so, and she’d been in the valley of the shadow of childbirth so many times and buried so many babies that Papa’s heart finally just went out to her. Lord knows it was little enough to ask, and they couldn’t afford to give the baby much else. The little walled plot out back of the house had seven small flat stones, lined up like stoic soldiers, with Ada, Frank, Gert, Clara, Dan, Ben and Ed chiseled on their faces. Mr. and Mrs. Campbell were getting on up in years, both well past thirty, when they came to the realization that Mama was in the family way again. It came as a sorrowful joy somehow, for Providence had taught them to hold out very little hope. So Papa finally let Mama have her way about the naming of this last baby, the one and only child of theirs who would, as it turned out, live.

After much intense and private deliberation, Mrs. Campbell decided on the name “Phoebe Harp,” (”Harp” as a middle name after her mama’s people) and Phoebe Harp it was to be, for a year or two. Then, when the child was old enough to talk, she began to call herself Hazel. Mr. Campbell had uncharacteristically taken total leave of his senses in regard to his daughter and was ready to allow her to have her way in anything, including her name. He presumed that the child had the good sense to see that “Phoebe” was too fancy a name for anybody. But Mama wouldn’t have it. Phoebe did suit her, she insisted, because anyone could see that the child was tiny and bird-like in her flitting around and lighting on any odd thing inside the house and and out. She was so seemingly weightless to lift, it was as if her bones were hollow. Papa couldn’t disagree. She did remind him of a little brown wren. Brown and gold eyes, she had, and golden brown hair. and after toddling around behind Mama in the garden for a week or two, she was beginning to be golden-brown all over, except for the pink in her cheeks that reminded him of his mother’s damask roses. And yet, even with that coloring, their little girl was so delicate-looking that Mr. Campbell was almost afraid she would wither or dissolve at the slightest touch. So he dared not disallow her a single thing. Mama was more insistent with Phoebe. Instead of changing her name altogether to the more no-nonsense and down-to-earth “Hazel,” Phoebe succeeded only in adding another name to the impressive list of names she already had.

Papa knew one thing. Hazel was an intelligent child, and that was a fact. She had initiative. Not only that, Hazel always had a general understanding well beyond her years. Growing up an only child, she was soon like an adult in her quiet conversations and practicality. She was curious about every little living thing that fell into her path. She would often be found studying small bits of nature, a seed or a tiny blossom, until she felt she had it figured out. Her heart went out to any wounded or stranded small animal. She was always bringing some tiny injured thing out of the cold and wet and into barn to tend back to health or ease its dying. People, she was wary of, because she saw so few of them. She became so shy in the company of strangers that she hardly spoke a word. She would look down and hope to be invisible. But she listened.

Hazel was a slender, energetic child. Sometimes in her hurry, she seemed a wee bit awkward. Papa joked that Hazel burned up every grain she ate, as if it was a waste to feed her. Skinny, she always thought herself, and she never liked her own looks. Papa did though. Hazel knew Papa would never have changed one thing about her. And so she didn’t care and she didn’t give it much thought. Came to terms with her own skinniness and lack of beauty at the age of six.

It was about that time her parents realized that Hazel was sadly short-sighted. Not that she had a lack of foresight, indeed, Hazel seemed to have more of that than most. But just in the sense that she couldn’t see much further than her own hand. By that time Mr. Campbell’s sorghum mill was doing a good little bit of business, and even turning a profit. And so when the peddler came around, Papa bought Hazel some eyeglasses. She tried on several pairs from the peddler’s case and chose the ones that seemed, astonishingly, to work best.  And thereafter, Hazel could see the stars at night and she fell down much less often. Sometimes, though, Hazel took her glasses off and stared into the night time sky or got down on the ground at noon and studied tiny beings in the grass. This puzzled both her parents, but they let her do about it as she pleased.

Papa taught Hazel to read with the Bible, the only book they had, and to count and figure with an ever-increasing number of smooth stones. It was not because he was a scholar, but because he knew the practical applications of both skills. He also taught her the value of thrift and order, which she took up right fast, given that those virtues were a part of her own nature as much as they were his. Mama taught her plain vegetable gardening, and flower gardening too, as far as her limits could go, plain and fancy sewing, and how to cook plain and keep house. Mama and Papa commiserated aloud after Hazel was in bed nights about the isolation of their circumstances and the plain fact that’s there’d be no living siblings for Hazel. It would, they feared, put her at a distinct disadvantage in overcoming the shyness bestowed upon her by nature. Hazel knew when the time came for her to deal with strangers, she’d be able. And she told them so. Though it may see odd to you and me, Mama and Papa believed her. And it didn’t seem odd to Hazel. They carefully taught her right from wrong, though she seemed to already know. She learned honor and honesty and human charity from Bible stories and Aesop-like tales with morals worth remembering. So that by the time Hazel was seven or eight, she knew how to make do and how to appreciate the world around her and the people in it.

In 1910 a rash of influenza came through Cornelia. They had not known of the epidemic at home, but when Papa started out for town Hazel felt a strange tightness inside herself and tried to persuade him to stay home. He laughed and said he’d be home again before dark. And he was. But he came with grim news. The influenze had sickened a dozen a people there and already five were buried or about to be. There were bound to be more deaths.

Papa got sick first and suffered longer.  Mama died first. Hazel nursed them and made do the best she could until she was weary to the point of weeping, and weeping already anyway. She near ’bout despaired. Then Mrs. Shine, the Campbells’ nearest neighbor (from about two miles away over toward Helms), came bustling in and put Hazel to bed and cooked and cleaned and washed the clothes and bedsheets, bathed and dressed the bodies and organized the funerals and had Mr. Shine come and build coffins and do the outdoor work. Hazel was filled with so much gratitude that she never forgot how important a good neighbor can be. From that day forward she promised herself she would be one.

On the morning after Mama died, both Hazel’s parents were laid beside the babies. It was a comfort to Hazel to know that her family was resting side by side together, tucked underneath the greening blanket and into the earth, as if it was a soft feather bed and they were all taking a long nap. She wasn’t worried in the least about the future. Hazel was confident she could make do right there in the only house where she’d ever lived. She knew exactly how to perform every task that her parents did. But Mrs. Shine convinced her to change her plans with some sensible talk about the dangers of a little girl living alone. So, though Hazel was as confident as she could be that she’d fare just fine, it was to relieve Mrs. Shine’s fears that she finally agreed to go on home with her. And she allowed Mrs. Shine raise up her the rest of the way, which wasn’t to be very far.

At the age of fourteen, Hazel married Mrs. Shine’s son, Ernest, and the young couple headed off to the town of Gearing, where they were hiring at the mill. Ernest got on, and they set up housekeeping in a tiny dwelling that had been intended for the servants of the big house it sat behind, which was right up in the middle of town. They thought it was grand. The rent was reasonable, even for them, and they made a home of it.

Not long after the signing on at the mill, on an evening in August, there came a knock at the door of the Shine’s little residence. It caused Hazel’s heart to jolt against her rib and her hand to thrust itself against her chest to keep the beating fear inside of it. Ernest got up from his supper and, in spite of Hazel’s warning head shake, he took two steps towards the door. Hazel pulled at his sleeve. Ernest grinned and said she was silly and opened the door to as ordinary-looking a fellow as you’ve ever seen. He was calling at the Shine residence in his official capacity as a member of the draft board. He was polite and plain-spoken. Nothing about him suggested any hint of wrong-doing.  He sat down at the Shine’s table and helped Ernest to fill out his registration papers, explaining all the time that it was now the law in the United States for young men to register for the selective service.

Hazel felt an unusual abiding apprehension behind her breastbone that never seemed to subside. About two paychecks after the man came calling, Ernest got a letter from the government calling him up for the war. Within two weeks of the letter coming, he was gone on the train with several other boys. And within two months of going, Ernest was dead somewhere in France. The letter came early in 1918 and said that Ernest had died in the line of duty and had been a good soldier. Hazel allowed herself a sensible time to grieve and then woke up early on the morning after the letter came and took it up to read it again by the weak light of dawn. Ernest had died on 18th day of December in 1917, Hazel’s fifteenth birthday. That was the day when the anxious feeling crowding her ribcage had dissolved away to calm. Hazel did not take a second to wonder at this. She felt calm still. She just pulled herself up, dressed quickly in the cold room and took a hard look at her circumstances. She was a fifteen-year-old widow alone in the world with no formal education. She had six dollars and some change in the sugar bowl and less than a cup of meal in the cupboard. It was early in the month and the rent was paid. Directly after waving Ernest and his train into the distance, Hazel had sought and secured work two afternoons a week dusting and straightening in the town’s two dry goods establishments. It paid very little but gave her something to do. There’d be a pension from the army, but Hazel wouldn’t depend on it till she had it in hand.

Hazel left her little house at six a.m. and went directly to the co-op, where she knew they’d be open already. It was, as it turned out, a fortunate time go asking for work there. They’d never hired a woman before, nor much less a girl, but the boy who loaded the big burlap bags of peanuts onto the train car headed for Atlanta was late. The man couldn’t leave his register and “Them peanuts has got to go.” So Hazel had herself another job.

As she went home at the end of the day, Hazel felt tired but still tranquil. She missed Ernest in a way and in another way she felt him nearer now than when he’d been overseas. It seemed he was nearer now than he’d ever been. She walked along, looking down at the sidewalk, as she did so often, at the places where her feet would set down in the next step or two. In this manner, she took herself home to her simple supper.

Energetic, organized, sadly near-sighted, the young widow Mrs. Shine woke up early every morning, grateful for the new day and her old peddler-sold eyeglasses, and went about making her little corner of the world as tidy and clean as can be. It took her no time at all to set her own house right. In not much more time than that really, she’d secured yet another job.

Mrs. Polk had a nice little business doing machine sewing in her home for near ’bout everybody in town. The seamstress hired Mrs. Shine to come in three afternoons week and help with the hand work and pressing. Mrs. Polk told Mrs. Whittle that Mrs. Shine did the finest hemming she’d ever seen, and the odd thing was she always did it with her glasses off. As the years went by, Mrs. Polk taught Mrs. Shine about tailoring and making upholstery and lined draperies. Mrs. Polk discovered that Mrs. Shine had a good eye for what style of dress looked better on one body than another, what went well together, what made a room comfortable to the eye and spirit. She often shook her head with her hands on her hips and declared to no one in particular, “That Miz Shine can just see how things will go.”

Mornings, Mrs. Shine worked at the feed and seed co-op, tending the bedding plants, ringing up fertilizer, acting as billing clerk. At the co-op Mrs. Shine learned of people and plants the likes of which she’d never heard of or even imagined back in Cornelia, their needs and behaviors, which ones you could count on and which to avoid. The co-op manager, Mr. Truitt, found out for himself  that Mrs. Shine had a knack for gardening and was always good for advice on the best tomato or melon or way to fertilize. She could take one look at a house and yard and just know, without thinking, what shrub or blossom ought to be where, whether sweet peas or jasmine would flourish best on a trellis in whatever situation, how the roof of the eave on the northeast side would cast an unexpected shadow in the spring beneath one dormer window, where a lemon verbena would never make it, but a rhododendron would make itself at home. Mrs. Shine would often take her glasses off and get down near the ground to look. If anybody asked her what she was looking for, Mrs. Shine would shrug her shoulders. “Caint zactly say.”

On those alternate weekday afternoons, when she tidied and dusted in the town’s two dry goods stores, she tried to be invisible. Never drawing attention to herself, because she didn’t want attention, Mrs. Shine became like a part of the stock on the shelf. People knew she was there, but they paid her no mind. She went about her business and they theirs. Most folks focussed all their attention on their own wants and needs, their own worries and problems, but  Mrs. Shine had no wants or worries.  She was satisfied with so very little in the way of belongings. She harbored no envy, nourished no reckless ambition. But she was interested in the people of her town. She listened attentively as she worked.

Mrs. Shine had heard all the stories that flew around town. Sometimes she caught one as it came around for the second or third time, always a little changed with every telling. She was a good listener, not talking much herself. Just saved up a little reservoir of knowledge or gossip, dependin’ on your point of view.

Somehow, she began to attract talkers. People just wanted to tell her things. She paid attention to what they said, but never gave any of it too much weight in the big scheme of things. She knew that tales told around a small town may be partly true, but are mostly gussied up with imaginings. But she analyzed automatically all she heard in the boiling copper of her brain. The spiritous vapor drifted off the top and distilled it down to a drops of what Mrs. Shine believed to be truth. Hear enough of ‘em and a person begins to understand what really went on.

Sometimes it seemed to other people, and to herself too, that Mrs. Shine didn’t put these things together with logic as you would a jigsaw puzzle. It was as if she had an aptitude for vision. An intuition into what was true and right and beautiful and what was not. When something she heard troubled her, such as tales of cruelty, Mrs. Shine wouldn’t try to think it through. She let it alone and the tale seemed to decide itself whether the it was true or not. She saw it in the same way she saw the hawthorne bush in the corner of the yard long before it was there. It belonged.

One summer afternoon in the Mason-Hicks, while Mrs. Shine was on her knees polishing the brass cuspidor (which was very near the door, but out of the path of foot traffic), a man came in tugging a little boy along who was about seven years old.

Mrs. Shine liked children, as a rule, better than she liked most other people. Most  children seven years old or less still have some fragrance of innocence about them. This boy did not. He yanked himself away from the man and charged directly at Mrs. Shine, as if he intended to bowl her over. Which he did. And then flew out of the door and into the street. The man was right behind him and neither inquired into Mrs. Shine state of health or injury, much to her relief. She did not want to be helped up. She didn’t even want to be noticed. So she righted herself quickly and went back to polishing brass, watching all the while through the glass door light to see if a tin lizzie would run him down. The streets of Gearing were full of such mechanical beasts in 1918. They flew by at 20 miles an hour, sometimes three or four in a day. But none were passing as the boy raced into the path. Only a mule-drawn wagon rolled along, which the boy easily evaded, after spooking the mule and near ’bout overturning the load of hay. Then he kept running across the courthouse square, with the man chasing after.

Inside the store near the men’s handkerchiefs two ladies whispered, unaware that Mrs. Shine, down near the floor, could hear them very well.

One said, “Mr. Richardson had better get a- holt of that boy. He’s the worst child we’ve ever had to deal with  in all my years of teachin’ at the Baptist Sunday School.”

The other replied, “Did you hear how he behaved at Mary Nell Humphries birthday? Threw the ices brought in from Birmin’ham all over the porch. Mrs. Humphries paid two dollars for them fruit ices and a dollar to have ‘em brought out on the train.”

Mr. Cosper, the shoe clerk, gasped and announced to all “That Byrd Richardson is a menace. I’m gettin’ where I hate to see him comin’. He’ll be the death of somebody one of these days.”

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

The Right Southern Corner

Since it has a nice little part in the story, being the site of the only murder trial ever faced by Byrd Richardson, I’ve become fascinated (my family might say “obsessed”) by our original courthouse building. Like most early parts and people of our hometown, the 1902 courthouse has escaped my memory, probably because it was never there. The reason my contemporaries clearly remember the faces and facades of our town before 1957, while I don’t, may very well be that I was too nearsighted to see them. I remember how everything looked after I put on my first pair of glasses at the age of nine. It was a big shock to realize that everybody else could always see the leaves on the trees. But by that time, the old courthouse was gone. I just missed it. It was replaced by the modern one in 1956.

When I “went to looking” for a photograph* of the 1902 courthouse, a friend pointed out this photo on this very website. Sometimes I still feel a bit nearsighted.

Old Courthouse

One wonders, when first considering this picture, what was wrong with the old courthouse? What was so bad about it that it had to come down after only fifty years or so and be replaced? The old one was much more classic in its basic design., though it wasn’t Greek-Revival. And quintessential southern courthouses so often are, as if county seats were longing in concert with the residents for some non-existent, Romantic, idealistic and long-gone past. Our old one was certainly more in the neighborhood of a proper southern courthouse than the one we got later. It was trying to be French Second Empire, another kind of revival of another kind of past. And it was more nostalgic at least than the mid-fifties, mid-century modern, German cousin of prisons we had next. It was lately “gussied up” to become the renovated faux-antique building we have now. But after considering the oldest for a moment, some of its flaws become become fairly clear. It looks as if it were put together by a committee.

The original courthouse committee I imagine as Mr. Gearing, the first mayor, and Mother and Father McIntosh, as the arbiters of all things social and proper. They were new to town at the time and thought a lot of themselves, an attitude which oddly always seems to impress people. Surely there were some county natives involved too, though they may not have been bold enough to speak up. Could be, the mayor’s wife also sat in.

Someone, perhaps the mayor and his wife, came in with a fantasy of French Second Empire style. Ever since the Marquis de La Fayette helped us defeat the British at Yorktown in 1781, all things French were deemed superior in America, at least until the second World War. (Come to think of it, the attitude the French took towards us after the war may have been what turned the town against the courthouse.) Our ancestors in the 19th century gave their children French names, although almost no one in Alabama pronounced them as the French did. So they spelled a daughter’s name Etoile, with accented ‘e’, which is French for “Star,” and which the French would pronounce something like Eh-TWA. But the family would call her E-tool all her life just the same. Or they’d take a French name for their boy, such as Henri, and instead of calling him Ahn-ree, he’d be forever Hen-rye. Who, in nineteenth-century Alabama, had ever heard French spoken?

Probably only Mother and Father McIntosh. I wouldn’t be surprised if they took the Gearings aside and made suggestions that such French-inspired architecture was the latest fashion. They were, I’m afraid, rather late, by fifty or a hundred years. The 1902 courthouse building was symmetrically block-shaped with tall semi-arched windows balanced on all sides. It was built of darkish brick. A Mansard roof rose up from the squareness of the building itself, with a cupola centered on top. The idea of Second Empire style is to suggest a regal altitude. And attitude too. Elevation of stature was the point.

But though the entrance shown in the photograph is centered as it should be, it is anything but the elegantly proportioned, slim-columned portico it should be. It is a squat white block monstrosity, arched in a heavy way, with a incongruous flat, stepped roof. It looks like a bit like a thick-thighed Budda, weighing the building down. It’s sort of blots out the rest of the building and it’s difficult to see anything else. It’s a horror, but you can’t take your eyes off it, like witnessing a train wreck. Directly above it is another flattened arch of white block inlaid in the building’s facade to repeat the Budda motif. It’s meant, I suppose, to direct the eye above, to what might be a flat clock face. Perched above all, in the center of the roof, is a rather large cupola, exactly the same disproportionate size as the stoop. But it looks more like a widow’s walk by-the-sea or a guard tower at a frontier fort or a well house a mile out of town than any Second Empire accoutrement.

In my researches I’ve found a 1930 Sanford Fire Insurance Company map of our town, which pictures a bird’s eye view of every house and shack, to scale.  It’s a drawing, of course, of simple building footprints, and not blueprints unfortunately. But it’s not so disordered a reality as GoogleEarth. The1902 courthouse sat centered east and west on the same entire block of town as our current building, rather more toward the north side of the block and away from the main street, so the front lawn to the south was more capacious. In the north east corner of the block, behind the building, was a hundred-thousand-gallon water tower. In the northwest corner was the jailhouse, just 12 feet square and not fenced. It was placed so that those inside could see nothing much from the windows, except the children going to and from the schoolhouse across the street and on the corner to the east.

The old courthouse sat, as the new one does, on the top of what seems to be a square hill, too conveniently risen and flat on top to have been a construction of nature. The plan for the building itself seems to have been father to that manmade, perfectly balanced rise from street level. They were going for vertical importance. Drive around our state to other small town county seats. You won’t often see courthouses looming from a higher elevation than the town at large.

Changing of the lay of the land could have been planned as a “cost-effective” means to give the building, and the laws it represented, added importance. Maybe it was meant to suggest a boundless, ever-upward future. That was a theme of the times. It does make the building upon it seem taller, even now. Anyone who’s ever been interviewed by a person in a tall chair behind a big desk, while sitting way down in front, will understand the purpose of such a lofty vantage point. It is to intimidate the people below and maintain in them that false sense of inferiority to their “betters.” Mother and Father McIntosh would’ve been in favor of that. But moving all that earth for the purpose doesn’t seem cost effective. Unless they used prison labor.

Prisoners were sometimes bought out of incarceration, I’m told, or rented for their labor in those days. Workers could be procured for a one-time fee paid to the state and kept for the remainder of their lives. A general rule back then, when looking for house servants, was to stay away from those imprisoned for thievery. Because a thief doesn’t change his stripes, as it were, and you’d never be able to trust him. Look for a man who’d murdered his wife in a fit of jealousy, they said. He won’t be likely to kill again.

Prisoners could be “leased” in Alabama as late as 1924, when the state legislature outlawed the practice. At the time it was banned, it was earning the state a million dollars a year. I imagine it took quite a legislative brouhaha to put the state out of the prisoner leasing business. Alabama was the last state in the union to abandon this source of revenue. But in 1902, it would have been cheap and easy to rent a few dozen laborers from the prison system and have them move the earth, a shovel-full at a time.

The first town fathers couldn’t have known in 1890 that there’d be a second courthouse on that square. On the other hand, there it is, a handy square in the center of town, available for a courthouse. Could be, they did know. They certainly knew where the junction of the railroads was going to be. Otherwise, the established town of Eden, just a mile or two to the west, would have been just as good a place for them.

Our principal founder looked down from New York to Alabama and chose a spot to found his town, then he bought the site. His family happened to be in the railroad business. A junction nearer the river could have made more commercial sense. Selma had the river transportation commerce and then the railroad came. Same with Tuscaloosa, Demopolis, Montgomery, Eufaula. But not our town. Get you a 19th-century map* and look at that little iron horse dogleg to where we are. Would’ve made more sense to put the railroad through Cropwell where they had river traffic already. Where the cotton was being grown. But our founder didn’t own Cropwell, he owned a little piece up the road a ways. And somehow or other, the railroad junction came to us.

*(Here’s some: historical maps)

The point was to lay out a town and make a killing in real estate on their insider trading knowledge. Unfortunately for our principal founder, it didn’t work out that way. He was caught in the depression of the 1890s in a bank fraud scandal in New York. And he went to prison. He was later pardoned, though, and lived out the remainder of his life on his lavish old family estate in New Rochelle (that’s way up north) enjoying the country and holding lavish dog shows. And the town he owned was just about abandoned till 1900, when another investor thought of building a cotton mill and bought the town at a reasonable price.

A decade after its layout and beginning, our town was designated the second county seat. Look at an early twentieth county map, and you’ll see the obvious problem we had here. Railroad tracks lay along every possible route between towns, except from our town to Ashville. The reason was simple. It wasn’t possible to build a railroad to traverse Backbone Mountain. You couldn’t get there from here. If the first town planners, those who bought the land and laid out the town, knew where future railroads would be, wouldn’t they know where they wouldn’t be as well? Yes. It is possible they set aside a large central block just for that purpose.

The size of the courthouse square itself is unusually large. Logically, it has to be as   wide as the blocks on two opposing sides.While you’re out driving around to other county seats in our state, notice most towns were laid out in smaller blocks with larger lots, with whole squares dedicated to schools and libraries. Not so in our town. The purpose from the beginning in 1890 was to enrich the owners as quickly as possible. Of course, roads and sidewalks are more expensive in such towns, because there are, by necessity, more linear feet of them.

In Talladega, founded much earlier, the courthouse square is smaller, because the town was laid out with twelve smaller blocks in the center, and increasingly larger blocks as you move from the center in any direction. This provides more street-front shop space downtown and more spacious lots in the neighborhoods. But in our town, the first high school was alloted only half a block’s space and was just to the north and east of the courthouse. A block further north was the “classroom building” where the elementary students went to school. There was no thought of a library.

I imagine the architect, if there was one, eventually threw up his hands in disgust and let the committee go off in all the directions that it wished. Why Second Empire anyway, except for the French-ness of it? Because it was the second courthouse in the county? Because the place had changed hands and come back from the brink of being a ghost town?  It was in a way the second coming of our town, with a second family at the helm taking us in a more fortunate direction.

Whatever the reasons, whatever the flaws, the Second Empire Courthouse gave way in 1956 to something entirely new. A courthouse designed by Martin J. Lide, the same architect who’d drawn the plans for Kilby Prison in 1924. It was known as the most elaborate prison in the South in its day. A “monolithic concrete structure” with a concrete roof laid on steel. And walls topped with four strands of barbed wire, carrying 6,600 volts of electricity. There’s a hint to what our new courthouse looked like, but without the barbed wire, of course.

On November 1,1951, Byrd Richardson was arrested and taken to the jail across the street from the old courthouse. He remained there until his bond hearing, in that courthouse, on November 16. Now Richardson was no doubt familiar with the jailhouse. He’d been taken there drunk and disorderly many a time, but was always released right away to his daddy or his friends. Never before had he been kept longer than one night. Those fifteen days and nights were a new experience for him.  I like to think his situation was uncomfortable. I like to think he worried quite a lot during all those days and hours when he had little else to do. The sheriff came under quite a bit of pressure to release him, but, bless his heart, he stood his ground.

From cell across the street, Byrd could see the courthouse building. I’d like to imagine him worrying that he might be convicted, thinking about “Yellow Mama.” But I sincerely doubt he ever gave it thought. It was just an inconvenience, this spell in the jailhouse. He knew he’d get out, and he knew he’d never be convicted. His daddy would see to that.

The Grand Jury met the following spring, and on April 10, 1952, they issued the following official statement:  Byrd Richardson, Jr. aka John Byrd Richardson did, unlawfully and with malice aforethought, kill Erk Bailey, aka Eckhart Bailey, by cutting him with a knife, contrary to the law and against the peace and dignity of the State of Alabama and is to answer in court to the charge of Murder in the First Degree.

And, until the trial in the hottest part of the coming summer, in the French Second Empire courthouse, Byrd would keep on doing whatever he pleased.

*As I look again at the 1911 photo of the courthouse, I doubt that it was taken from the front of the building. On the left we can see the fancy facade of buildings that seem to be aligned along main street. The 1930 map shows no buildings on the street to the west of the courthouse, except city hall on the front corner and the fire station on the far corner. The rest of the block was vacant. Of course it’s possible there were buildings there twenty years before the map was drawn, but unlikely. The 1930 map clearly shows the jail building to the east and back of the courthouse, just about where we see the small building on the right of the photograph. My cousin remembers concrete walks from all four sides of the building to the edges of the block, and from the corners of the block to the corners of building. Lots of roller skating. The photo seems to be primarily of the man on the bench, taken from the eastern sidewalk near the corner drugstore. Maybe someone who remembers the courthouse from the front can confirm or deny this. Although it’s no excuse for the Budda stoop, and the front may have been better, I like the 1902 courthouse better than any we’ve had since. We could’ve fixed it.

The Right Southern Corner is a series by Sara Rast
Copyright: 2009 Sara Love Rast. All rights reserved

The Right Southern Corner

Kathleen Holding Her Nephew

Our town in 1951, like most American small towns in the middle of the twentieth century, was a place where very little out of the ordinary ever seemed to happen. The storefronts were occupied with thriving little businesses, and the sidewalks were busy with foot traffic then. Men in ties and fedoras or flannel and overalls went about their various occupations. And women in stockings and full-skirted dresses towed pre-schoolers along on housewifely errands. Our concerns would have seemed humdrum to some, being mostly about family, home, church, and community. But they were earnest concerns and important to us, however conventional.There was comfort in the mundane routine of our quotidian existence. Because we knew the disquiet of something happening, when that something was murder unresolved.

The double killing of 1948 had not yet slipped into the background of bygone days. People still whispered about the lingering mystery, running over old ground behind closed doors and reminding each other that danger might lurk anywhere. But the newspaper had nothing to say on the subject. It was not a case of no news being good news either. Because, quite frankly, with no one arrested and the murderer still roaming around free, there was nothing new to be said.

Most weeks, our newspaper editor had to work like Grant taking Richmond to fill his front page up with local news. It was a broader and deeper format then, in the strictly physical sense. Newspaper pages were bigger in the fifties than they are today, and the print was finer too, with lines of text more closely set. It took a lot of local stories to fill up a small town newspaper’s front page in 1951.

Most of the time, the editor would have to resort to articles from the press services to pad out his front page. So he’d scatter, amongst the sparse local stories about our town and county, news of strange, new-fangled ideas, such as color television or some outrageous thing, a national credit card system, for instance. Or he might choose oddities from exotic locales, quadruplets born in Funk, Nebraska, perhaps, where the mood was not very much improved by the jump in population.

Familiar troubles in faraway places meant that stories of the war in Korea, for example, folks would read with great interest. Because many of “our” boys, the boys the town knew and remembered from childhood, wiggling on a church pew or winning a public speaking medal, were over there. And the letters were few from their miserable, muddy trenches. Credit cards we knew little about and cared less. What in the world would anybody want one of them for? People saved up for what they wanted or, often to their ultimate discredit, opened up a charge account at the store and made payments. The town gossips would have something to talk about, if the payments weren’t made.

So life had settled down to a low busy hum, and the people of our town got involved in living and tried to forget the unrecompensed dead. And aside from the peaceful sameness of one week fading into the next and the worries that went with war, there was a good deal of well-founded hope for the future. And not much else to write about in the paper.

Until the first week of November in 1951. The front page on Thursday of that week needed no padding with outside stories. It gave us reason to smile and weep, to hope and dispair. The Masons had broken ground on their new lodge building and the foundation was laid. Kathleen’s father, our Big Daddy, was a member of the building committee. Brick and mortar had been purchased to complete the building. They’d paid cash. My maternal grandmother’s women’s group had a big event planned. They were in the social news every week with meetings, Red Cross blood drives, weight loss competitions alternating with sweet buttery recipe swaps. But the Mutual Improvement Club rarely made the front page. Sometimes they even took themselves and their husbands on trips to Chicago, or the Smokies or Mexico. This particular week, the MI Club, made up entirely of the Avondale Mills wives and working women, were organizing and sponsoring a variety show. Their master of ceremonies would be the “famous Joe Rumore,”  with his equally “famous team of Rebe and Rabe.”

The high school was holding its homecoming football game, and they were on a winning streak. The captain played tough at center, in spite of having a leg weakened by “infantile paralysis,” as they called it in those days. He must have been quite a hero in town, because he represented victory over a disease that still threatened to afflict any child at anytime. And it had struck a local third-grader the week before. His photo is right there on the front page next to the football team’s. That little boy, who so many hoped and prayed would one day be as well and strong as the football captain, has such a sweet smile in his picture. I know my grandmothers prayed for him. They had a little grandson who’d survived polio too. And small town that we were, the polio victim in that week’s story had some first cousins who were also our first cousins. Hearts ached for that little boy. Polio struck fear in the hearts of all parents in 1951.

But there was another story on the front page that week that had set the town to buzzing. Everyone knew about it of course, well before they read it in the newspaper, because the paper came out only once a week. It was old news by Thursday. But it was reported on the front page nonetheless. And townspeople studied the article, looking for clues that weren’t there. It planted another kind of fear and grief in the hearts of our town, along with an oddly half-baked sense of satisfaction. Headline: St. Clair County Man Dead Following Knife Injuries.

A local man is in jail charged with first degree murder, and another lies dead, after a fight and stabbing that occurred over the weekend. Erk Bailey, age 46, of Pisgah was pronounced dead, early Monday morning at the local hospital, of injuries received in the fight. Byrd Richardson, Jr. is in the county jail charged with murder.

The county sheriff’s department and state law enforcement personnel are conducting a joint investigation. Authorities say Bailey was found by two local men near Richardson’s Store in Cropwell after the fight occurred. The men were able to stop a game warden, who called an ambulance to the scene. Bailey was rushed to the hospital, but there was little hope by the staff on duty that he could survive his injuries.

Sheriff Cash Strickland arrested Richardson and jailed him. He was initially charged with attempted murder, pending the result of the Bailey’s injuries. No bond for the accused was allowed. The sheriff indicated that Richardson had said he would plead self-defense.

According to the sheriff, Richardson made the statement “He [Bailey] would not let me take my car home.” Richardson further stated that Bailey physically pulled him out of his car and that he [Richardson] cut Bailey accidentally in the ensuing struggle.

Ernest Forney has been retained as attorney to represent and defend Mr. Richardson in this case. Forney has requested a preliminary hearing at the earliest possible date. Judge John Williams has said he would set the date for a hearing in a short time.

Funeral services for Bailey were held at Mount Pisgah Baptist Church on Tuesday afternoon, with burial in the adjoining cemetery. He is survived by the widow, four sons and four daughters. The children range in age from 19 down to 2 years old.

All right. The town sighed in unison. What relief! What delivery from evil. Richardson was in the jail. He’d been allowed to kill again, and leave a large family with no husband or father. But at least they’d put him away this time. And this time he should stay put. That’s what a lot of people expected and prayed for. It is what my grandmother and grandfather profoundly hoped.

I’m not sure Byrd’s own Uncle Pete didn’t share my family’s hope that his nephew would go away to prison permanently. He knew it would cause immense pain to his brother and sister-in-law. But damn it all, they’d raised him. It would cause enormous embarrassment to the family. But the embarrassment could hardly be more than it had been already. Probably, Mr. Pete held out little hope.

Most folks believed Mr. Pete was pure-dee scared to death of Byrd. And who could blame him? Mr. Pete knew a lot more than he wanted to know about his nephew’s transgressions. He’d been forced to step in before and open the bank in the middle of the night to take money out. That money had been used to pay people off.  Mr. Pete was an honest and gentle man by nature, and his conscience bothered him. He prayed for deliverance from evil too. Knowing what he knew, Mr. Pete understood that Byrd, Jr. might kill anybody he felt like killing, whenever he took a notion. And knowing what he knew, Mr. Pete felt that at any time he, himself, could be a victim of Byrd’s irrational anger or fear of exposure.

Most folks in town would have been glad to see the last of Byrd Richardson, if only the authorities could lock him up and throw away the key. They were grateful to Sheriff Strickland for putting him there for the time being.

This was not the same sheriff who’d been serving in 1948, when Kathleen and Doc McIntosh had been stabbed to death and their house burned down with them inside. Sheriff Wiley Dodge had been persuaded, by politically sensitive and well-connected friends, not to seek re-election to the post of county sheriff in 1950, for reasons known best to himself and his friends. Wiley Dodge had instead been persuaded to run for the state house, and aided by those politically connected friends and the voters they controlled, in and out of local cemeteries, he was elected to represent  the people of his district in the state legislature. I’m sure he fit in well there. Those politically connected friends had counted on Byrd to behave himself from that time forward. They’d been disappointed.

The new sheriff actually tried to enforce the law. He been a thorn in Byrd’s side since he taken over. He’d busted up a number of Byrd’s stills in the area. He’d refused all attempts at bribery and would take no payoff money. Sheriff Strickland held Richardson in jail for almost two weeks, from the day of the murder to the day of the hearing. And all during that time, he was taking calls from a party in Washington, D.C. everyday, beseeching him to grant the prisoner a release on bond. He refused.

There was another article in the local paper the next week about this unfortunate incident, to put a southern euphemism to it. Down by the movie theater listings, on Thursday, November 15, 1951, there are three short paragraphs. Headline: Charges of Murder to be Aired Friday at Hearing. The text below the headline reveals nothing new, except that hearing date, Friday, November 16, 1951. It briefly reports again who is accused and who is dead. The dead being unable to object, once again the defendant accuses the dead man of dragging him from beneath his own steering wheel and states that the killing was accidental. And, anyway it was self-defense.

There is no mention in the newspaper of a fact which all those who read it probably already knew. The defendant outweighed the murdered man by at least 100 pounds, and he was quite a bit taller too. The idea that Mr. Bailey could have pulled Mr. Richardson from his car would have been laughable, had it not been surrounded by such tragic circumstances.

On Thursday, November 22, 1951, Thanksgiving Day, the newspaper appeared on doorsteps all over town again. But if anyone looked in it for a report on the court hearing of the week before, they were disappointed. It seems the news staff was too busy discovering the identity of the minister who would deliver the community Thanksgiving service to attend and report on the court hearing. If anyone hoped that the short holiday week had prevented the paper’s staff from publishing a report, and it would come later, in the next week’s edition, they found in a week’s time nothing to be thankful for on that front.

There was never any report in the town’s newspaper on what happened at that hearing. In fact, as far as we know, nothing is mentioned in the local newspaper about the murder of Mr. Bailey for the rest of the natural life of the newspaper. And it hung on, under one banner or another, for an additional fifty-seven years. That is an odd thing indeed, given the editor’s usual scraping around for a story, and the general lack of news there ever was to report.

Fortunately, some court records for this case still exist. On November 16, 1951 the accused waived his right to a preliminary hearing and by a mutual agreement between the defendant and the State, he was granted release from the jail. Bond was set at $15,000. His bond note is signed by, other than himself of course, his father and mother and his attorney, Mr. Forney, all of them certifying that they are able to pay the full amount of the bond set. He was charged by the Grand Jury with Murder in the First Degree. And the trial was set for the 1952 spring session of county court.

The Right Southern Corner is a series by Sara Rast
Copyright: 2009 Sara Love Rast. All rights reserved

The Right Southern Corner