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CHAPTER 3 Sylvester Malone Living Memories Back on the Farm Sylvester and Eartha Malone are in their seventies, but neither has the slightest intention of retiring any time soon to become "porch sitters." Sylvester went to work at the mill in 1950. He was a fireman stoking the sawmill boilers until he retired from the "heavy job" just a few years ago when he became a night watchman, which he describes as light work. "Butyou can'tjustloaf around on this job with nine stations to punch on this time clock I carry. You see, I've always got my boss strapped to my shoulder." His wife, Eartha, is also retired as a cook for the company's logging operation; now she also has a "light job" just cooking for one family. This energetic older couple, who between them have made a good living for many years, nonetheless live in one of the plainest, even rundown, houses on Mill Street, demonstrating that in a black community like Jelly Roll, residence is, more often than not, a low priority concern. Sylvester always drives a late-model car, takes an annual trip with his wife to see relatives in California, gives generously to the church at his birthplace on Champagnolle Hill, and lavishes money, again in the black tradition, upon his seven children and many grandchildren , two of whom live with him. Their annual visit to Los Angeles is a bitter-sweet event primarily undertaken to keep up with children and other relatives living there. Sylvester describes it as Br'er Rabbit's trip to the big city: 24 This skittish old rabbit don't like to get shook to pieces on a bus for three days, and he don't like to stay scared to death on a plane that might go down at any minute! Now those pretty people runnin' the plane try to tame you with drinks and food so you won't be thinkin' about what a dangerous and foolish thing you're doin'. But I stay in a sweat the whole trip. And I don't like nothin' about L.A. either; too fast and noisy for this old man, too many fire trucks and police cars. I'm like that hard-to-tame rabbit; everytime an acorn falls, he jumps. I can't sleep out there at all. Don't sleep too well in Calion, but I can go out to the church yard on Champagnolle Hill where I was born and sleep under that big oak tree any old afternoon. Sylvester is a man of superior intellect, a master of language. He speaks rapidly with a song-like cadence to his voice. He is an insightful man, a shrewd judge ofhuman nature who, given another time and another place, might have achieved a lofty position in society. But as fate would have it, he was born black on a remote farm on the upper reaches of the Ouachita River in 1910, father unknown, to an indifferent mother. He recalls being taken over and raised by the white Henderson family who owned and worked the large Champagnolle plantation. On the farm the work was hard, the hours long, discipline was strict and unyielding; but Sylvester dotes upon those idyllic days of his childhood and youth as though he were himself the pampered heir to a great estate. The fact ofthe matter is that he developed deep emotional ties to the Henderson family with whom he was raised like their own, spending his childhood in their house. This cabin, typical for its time and place in the rural South, had an open-air covered hallway down its center roof line that divided the building into two living units. One half, containing the kitchen, also housed a family of black servants, while the other half contained the bedrooms and living quarters for the white owners. Sylvester lived in the former half of the Henderson home and was thus in constant close association with the Henderson family and their own children. The farm was exceptionally large for the hill country of Arkansas and was marvelously situated by over-reaching bluffs and valleys on the banks of the meandering Ouachita River. The Hendersons employed eight black families and had fifteen mules and three horses to cultivate the fields and clear new land each winter, for unfertilized sandy soil rapidly lost its fertility. The farm was located immediately adjacent to the oldest settlement in the region, the historic Champagnolle Landing, where on...

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