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

The Old Turner Place

104 The Old Turner Place “Grandpa, of all your properties, what’s your favorite?” I asked, risking another of his condescending grunts, as he and I were walking toward the barn. Only seven, I was sufficiently adroit to know that he himself had never asked the question. I should have known that all his properties were equal—as long as they had hogs on them. At the same time I did know that the place we stood at that moment had a special niche in Charles Hillman’s soul. That spot, in a field clearing, was just a few hundred yards south and east of the confluence of Courthouse Creek and Leaf River. He stopped, removed his crumpled felt hat to swat the everpresent gnats, and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He knew I was fudging to get in my own bias, so I blurted it out: “The Turner Place is my favorite spot in the world!” He struck at the gnats again, and slowly turned 360 degrees to look at the dense woods surrounding us. Then, glancing up at a clear blue autumn sky, he replaced his hat, and began walking and mumbling, “Yer dan’d right, boy; good hog country, cept for them bootleggers down there.” He pointed toward the river under the swampy bluff. We were in a fallow field at one of the most sentimental places of my childhood. It was a paradise of wild birds and butterflies, bees and honey, and earthy solitude. From the earliest days, an old homestead occupied ground a short piece from the bluff. In my childhood, the frame house sat beside the little dirt road on equally high ground that led from Bald Hill. Denco was to the east, and Bob McKay’s Camp to the west. The property was on the edge of the river swamp and near the McLain-Piave spur track. A few yards farther up the river from the bluff flowed Atkinson Creek, draining the west side of Greene County. The Old Turner Place 105 A typical front porch of an old house in Mississippi. Tradition has it that William and Mary Turner came to Greene County from South Carolina. Their son, James Turner, worked at the courthouse at the time of Mississippi statehood in 1817 and possibly owned the property. The history of this homestead is vague, but the Turners probably first laid claim to it when other European settlers were coming inland up Leaf River from the Gulf of Mexico. The Turner Place and its small fenced plots lay adjacent to the wild hills bounding the river. Well known as a hog paradise, the swamp was one of three places my grandfather cut timber. During Prohibition (1920–33), the Turner Place guaranteed a hideout for bootleggers. Sour mash whiskey and the sacks of corn for its production came and went across the river. McLain was the local hub for bootleg liquor distribution, with connections south to the Gulf Coast and north to cities as far away as Chicago. On a busy day, you could see the smoke from shinny stills, though they were meticulously hidden in the bramble under the steep bluff. On a windy day, you couldn’t see the smoke, but you could still smell what was going on. The distillation apparatus could be purchased in Hattiesburg and easily assembled by the average handyman with Beginnings 106 wrenches, screwdrivers, and pliers. Buckets, tubs, and barrels lay about the still. The odor of yeast wafted for miles. Every time we visited the Turner Place, Father or Grandpa repeated the warning, “Don’t go behind the fence at that steep bluff!” Their initial message seemed to imply that we might fall off and get lost in the dense thicket below. But the word soon got out that a nefarious process was going on down there: “demon corn.” Years later, I discovered that a deacon in the McLain Baptist church, along with taking up collections, was mashing and fermenting. A few strategic preachers, along with the distiller and the county sheriff, made a strange coalition in the bootlegger culture. The A typical front porch with chairs. The Old Turner Place 107 bootlegger paid off the sheriff as the moonshine dripped slowly but quietly in the swamp’s stillness. At the same time, to assuage community suspicion and to rectify his evil deed and sin, he would drop coins into the church coffers...