COAL FIRED SAILINGS AND COTTON FIELDS

COAL FIRED SAILINGS AND COTTON FIELDS(L DOUGLAS ST OURS) COAL FIRED SAILINGS AND COTTON FIELDS

This journey was a shocker, inspiring mom to later teach us to respect all human beings. In the sixties and early seventies mom stuck her neck out and ruffled feathers volunteering and organizing on behalf of the victims of discrimination and poverty. Then the south was so mired in ignorance and fear, shackled by its defeat, that moving there was like entering the oppressive mindset of the third world.

With the intrepidation of the innocent, the two "bobby soxer" sisters boarded the interstate diesel bus. They peered nervously through the smudged windows, pulling free of the honking horns, the hunched and hat topped pedestrians, the encrusted shadows of gray buildings, the arab wagons, the streetcar lines, the banana boat docks, and the marble stoop rowhouses of smokestack Baltimore.

Huddling around them protectively and smiling, a clutch of passengers complimented the two girls sweetly, one gushingly describing the elder as "prettier than Judy Garland." And another, referring to the younger noted "she's as cute as Shirley Temple." And so comforted by the adoring attention, the small and precocious siblings settled in, bound for the oil patch and sulfur smell town of Houston.

They were to rendezvous with a remote father more at ease on the sea than the land. In Houston his rust bucket ship found berth, a safe harbor to lighten its load after coal fired sailings to Cairo, Shanghai, Rio, Capetown, and the U-boat killing lanes of the Murmansk run. But the memory for the younger girl arose more out of the journey than the destination.

As the bus rumbled and disturbed the sleepy revenuer stalking moonshiner byways, the sisters witnessed a world as strange, wondrous, and alien as Dorothy saw following the yellow brick road.

Cream puff cotton fields stretched till broken by pine forests bordering a soup pot sky. Dotting the dusky tobacco rows, tarpaper shacks fractured and akimbo as if thrown there by tornadoes out of Kansas heading for Oz.

Coca Cola signs were as common as the barefoot strawhatters hanging around the dog run porches, leaning on wood stave barrels, spitting chaw, chicken bones, pork rinds, and watermelon seeds onto red clay roads, lynch mob paths dividing the peanut crops from the chain gang farms on land backward, bitter, and smoldering in defeat.

The bus swung onto the courthouse main street of a half dead town. It inched up close to a tired old cafe, next to a general store offering collards, chickpeas, okra, hush puppies, catfish, "nigger cues," scrapple, chitterlings, and hominy grits behind a window broad enough to frame the solitary reflection of the guano streaked statue of a Johnnie Reb standing in the center of the magnolia studded square.

Across from the depot under strands of Spanish moss, the littlest girl saw a nice ceramic and chrome fountain marked "white only," and she thought in amazement "could it be milk or even better whipped cream?" She was eager to drink until she noticed out back in the mud a rusty spigot that said "colored" and she imagined "like fruit juice?" And, she decided, this was the one she wanted to taste.

As she reached for the faucet, a local shooed her away "Honey y'all oughta know better than to drink after nigras, now git!" That scene, that experience, she would retell and remember out of a childhood that for the most part she preferred to forget.

by L DOUGLAS ST OURS
March 2010