War and Politics by Other Means: A Journalist's Memoir

Obion County

OBION COUNTY MY BE S T F R lEN D S in those hard times in the 1930S in West Tennessee were John Lee, Jerry, Wolf (pronounced Wuff), Hunter Byrd, and Charles. We played football, baseball, and imaginary war games and fought each other. On Saturdays we went together to the cowboy picture show at the Capitol Theatre, cheering Buck Jones, the Lone Ranger, Ken Maynard, Hopalong Cassidy, and even Gene Autry, although the singer looked kind of sissy. I shared my allowance with John Lee, Jerry, and Wuff. Times were harder for them, or so it seemed from their ragged clothes and perpetual search for green apples. At the theater entrance on Main Street, Union City, the Obion County seat, we parted. They went to a side door and then up to the colored section in the balcony. They paid the same price for the ticket, 10 cents, and cheered as loudly as Hunter Byrd, Charles, and I when Buck and Ken routed the black hats and Indians. It was especially good when, occasionally, Randolph Scott was the star. He had a noticeable Southern accent, like us. My allowance, 15 cents a week, came from chores. In winter these were strenuous for a lad. It turns cold in the damp of West Tennessee near the Mississippi, Obion, and Forked Deer Rivers, an alluvial plain patched with hardwood thickets where creeks come down and run to the rivers. My task was to make fires in the fireplaces that heated the room of my mother, Stella, recently widowed, and the dining room. I was a firemaker, but that was the easy part. The hard part was busting large chunks of coal into small pieces, 3 4 / OBION COUNTY then hauling the fuel in metal scuttles to the yawning fireplaces. We were a large Southern family-ten siblings-but by that time in I940 all had left Obion County except myself and a younger brother and sister. They were of little help with heavy chores. We lived in the old Waddell place, a fiercely ugly piece of post-Civil War architecture with Is-foot ceilings, and windows that ran the same length. The windows were shuttered with cedar venetian blinds that moved up and down in grooves along the frames, a bit of Victorian luxury. The house was made of brick but smelled of decaying wood. The lovely part was its great, sloping lawn and fixed rows of old oak, elm, and walnut. This is where we played games and climbed trees. I attained a close bond with one of the young maples, odd as this may sound. The tree became a refuge, then a friend; a refuge because when Addie Ross, the family serf, a field hand never fully broken to the work of wash and kitchen, would give me chase for some improper act. I'd run from the old house, down the lawn to a small branch of the young maple. One leap and I'd be free, scrambling up the branches to its limber summit , leaving Addie barefoot and frustrated on the earth below. "You ain't fitten to be a white boy," she would announce with terminal disgust and turn away. Safe from her fury and a serious beating, I'd hold to the maple and gently sway, grateful to the tree for deliverance. Much later when the mountaineer-philosopher Willie Unsoeld wrote, "I am son of the rock, brother to the ice," 1 understood. But once 1 failed to break free of the dreadful house. 1 was alone with my Grandmother Victoria when Addie launched a search and destroy mission against me for some outrage. We ran in circles in the big, cold dining room. I was fast and nimble. Addie was huge and clumsy. Grandmother was an island of calm. She knelt by one 'of the dining room windows-this I saw as I raced ahead of the black woman-fixed in a pool of sunlight coming through a venetian blind. She prayed while Addie pursued: "Dear Jesus protect this precious lad from the wrath of Addie Ross. He is a good child, despite his mischief. And, sweet Jesus, bless this good woman Addie, a child of God and duty." All this was said in Grand- OBION COUNTY / 5 mother's clear, declarative English sentences. It mixed with Addie's litany of reproach: "I'm fixing to skin you alive, boy. You ain...