Hogs, Mules, and Yellow Dogs: Growing Up on a Mississippi Subsistence Farm

Soft Womb of Greene County

259 Soft Womb of Greene County It appeared not unlike a thousand other rural villages. But the place where I was born and raised wasn’t anything like them. In fact, it was very dissimilar, because that spot of Earth was the place of my early and peculiar memories. My recapturing consciousness made it different. It was mine, and for all its temporal and later-tobe -discovered imperfections, it remains mine, and my recollections bind me to it. Southern Mississippi villages are like that: places that variously give birth to reminiscence, retrospection, and often celebration, for those who look back. What, then, are memories except storehouses for our souls’ journeys? Their existence via matter and spirit in the world of form permit us to reflect on an earlier life in time. Memories are our virtual selves— we and us. Literally, we-and-us is transmuted to society . By some strange leap of my imagination, I become my childhood. Across the South after the Civil War there was a struggle for survival , family success, and social well-being. Circumstances varied, but it was the white, Anglo-Protestant lifestyle that prevailed. Closed and insular societies, however, carry with them a double-edged sword: On the one hand, the past is never forgotten; its beautiful moments and its ugly face. Paraphrasing William Faulkner, “The past ain’t dead; hell, it ain’t even past.” On the other hand, the outside world becomes foreign. My recollections here derive from selected personal experiences and observations that identify my childhood with life in rural Greene County. My story does not produce a generalized account; it originates from a single linear experience. If one wants fuller insight into the real “Southern mind,” one should first read W. J. Cash, then consult Faulkner, O’Connor, Dickey, Welty, Walker Percy, David L. Endings 260 Cohn, or Hodding Carter Jr., and wind up with James C. Cobb’s Away Down South. I make the painful observation that my account is one of the last to connect those who lived during the Civil War and those remaining in the twenty-first century. So few of us are left. We arrived at Unity Baptist Church for the seventieth reunion of my Neely High School class of 1938. I studied the crowd to see how many faces I could recognize. Watching their movements, I spotted a few same-age survivors: grayer hair, hearing aids, and wrinkles, cautious body movement, and blank stares. More sat than stood. If you knew them as I did in the 1930s, you would immediately recognize their countenance, which, like a fingerprint, never changes. I read the minds of two ladies in loud flower-print dresses across the room: What’s Old Jim doin back here? Someone tol me he wuz dead. Rita Daughdrill Clark and Alpha Turner Stanford were our hostesses and managed the “Memory Table.” I picked up a copy I had Agnes Hillman with baby Jimmye on porch of Big House, ca. 1923. Soft Womb of Greene County 261 never seen of a picture of my father when he taught briefly at Neely. Among the piles of old letters and photographs stood a framed newspaper article about Ed “Too Tall” Freeman, who had attended the reunion in 2006. It told of his winning the Congressional Medal of Honor for his valor at Pork Chop Hill in Vietnam. I remember his father, Ed senior, and his uncle, “Am” Freeman, who lived up on the railroad stop at Garner, next to the Hamm brothers, Frank and Elam, who were all friends of my father. They lived so close together, I never knew who were Hamms and who were Freemans. Cousin Cal Hillman, a war hero in the South Pacific with his own collection of medals, had already come and gone. Son of Benjamin F. Hillman (“Bear Ben”), Cal is an expansive personality, and later by phone wove again his favorite story about the time in the 1920s when we all were on the train platform at Denco and a passenger had to jump onto a moving carriage because Denco wasn’t a scheduled stop. We called it the “Mud Line,” and from an ancient train schedule in my files, I see that Denco was twelve minutes from Neely. Cal’s brother Randolph, or “Randy,” paid the ultimate price in the North African Campaign in 1942 and never had an opportunity to reunite with all the graduates...