The Pecan Man

Copyright
2012 Cassie Dandridge Selleck

All
Rights Reserved

Acknowledgements

Over the years, I have worked
on this story with the invaluable help of the Gainesville Poets and Writers
group. It would be impossible to name them all, but special thanks to the core
members Charlotte, Christy, Gen, Dorothy, Eldon, Art, Mary, Stephanie, Donald,
Jani and many others who poured their time and energy into this work, offering
honest critique and tremendous encouragement over the years. To my dear friends
Perky Granger, Teresa Renfrow Masters, Cheryl Pulliam, Rick Sgabellone and the
wonderful women of the Mayo Woman’s Club, I thank you for your warm friendship,
constant support and occasional kick in the behind. It has been a blessing to
have people who believe in me and push me to sit down and write.

To my daughters Patti, Katie
and Emily:  You have been a constant source of inspiration and encouragement
and I am so proud of the beautiful young women you have become.

To my parents, Patty and Frank
Dandridge: Thank you for raising us in a home where all who entered were
literally welcomed with open arms. You taught us the meaning of love and
acceptance and I will always be grateful for that. I love you dearly.

To my siblings Petey, Bubba and
Pat, step-daughter Kimie and countless cousins, nieces, nephews, and my beloved
grandbabies, I love you all so much.

To my dear friend Julie
Williams Sanon: You are my sister as if we were born of the same blood. Thank
you for teaching me by example to love as Jesus loved.

And last as always, but first
in my heart – my sweet, sweet husband: I will love you always.

For
Nicholas

Lighter
of candles and finder of lost things

One

In the summer of 1976, the year of our Bicentennial,
preparations for the Fourth of July were in full force. Flags hung from the
eaves of every house along this stretch of Main Street. The neighborhood women
were even busier than usual. I watched them come and go from a rocking chair on
my own front porch.

Every now and then a slight
breeze moved the heavy, humid air and, if there was no traffic going by, I
could hear the flags rustling along the row. I sat with a piece of cardboard in
one hand and a glass of sweet tea in the other. The ice always melted before I
emptied the glass. I used the cardboard to augment the gentle blowing of the
ceiling fan, which I was sure put out more heat than cool with its low purring
motor constantly going. I kept it on though. I liked the sound.         

Back then, the streets of our
small Florida town were not unlike the streets of Andy Taylor’s Mayberry, or
Atticus Finch’s Maycomb. We even have a similar name, Mayville. I always like
to say, “That May sure got around, now didn’t she?” 

There’s no one here to laugh at
my jokes anymore. I used to have a maid who came every day. Blanche was black
as pitch and twice as heavy. I asked her once how she got her name, seeing as
how Blanche is French for white and she wasn't even close. She said she was
born as light-skinned as me and that her daddy had left soon afterwards saying
no baby of his could be that pale.

Her mama waited a couple of
days before naming her. Just held her and rocked her and sang her own tears
dry. Seems she was more than positive she had never lain down with another man
since the day she was born and she felt certain he would believe her and come
home. When he didn’t, she carried the baby in her arms all the way to the
public library just off Main Street. Libraries back then wouldn't check out
books to Negroes, so she found a book of baby names and sat right down on the
floor. Nestling her sleeping infant between her crossed legs, she started on
the A’s. When she got to Blanche and saw what it meant, she reckoned it was as
fitting and pretty a name as she had ever seen, so Blanche it was.

Had her daddy stuck around a
bit, he’d have seen his baby girl turn darker and darker as the months rolled
by. Blanche once told me she figured he was the one who lost out, not her, and
I thought that was a right healthy way to look at it.

Blanche worked for me through
birth and death, joy and sorrow, and Lord knows we had a lot of sorrow in all
the time we spent under this roof. Most people figured she was crazy to put up
with me all those years, but Blanche and I had an understanding. It was a vow
we made those long years ago. Neither of us spoke of it afterwards, but it hung
between us like a spider web, fragile and easy to break, but danged hard to get
shed of once the threads took hold.

It’s been a quarter of a
century since fate sealed the two of us together. Blanche got fatter, but never
looked a day older than she did back then. I, on the other hand, have managed
to get thinner and more fragile, if that’s possible. I’m eighty-two years old.
I was fifty-seven then
, and recently widowed. I’d
tell you about my husband, Walter, but he doesn’t really play a part in this
story so I reckon there’s not much point. Funny, I don’t remember what color
Walter’s eyes were. I’ll chalk that up to what age does to an already feeble
mind. But I remember every single detail about what happened with the Pecan
Man.

Though mostly vacant these
days, the buildings on Main Street once housed dress shops and jewelry stores
with diamonds and gemstones glistening on oceans of blue velvet in the front
windows. Ezell’s Department store survived the arrival of J.C. Penney, with its
shiny tile floors and ornate marble staircase, but they went to mostly rugged
men’s wear for years afterward. Penney’s could never compete with the smell of
denim and leather and the creak of wooden floors when it came to the male
populace. 

In 1976, the bank was building
its new home out on the highway and their old four-story relic downtown was
sold to a company that provided counseling and other services to alcoholics,
drug addicts and the like. They called it Lifeways, but that was just a euphemism
for nuthouse and most of the residents weren’t going to stand for that kind of
element in our neighborhood. Dovey Kincaid got up a petition to keep them out
and we all signed it, but we lost in the end. Frank Perley was head of the city
commission and he made sure his wife’s cousin’s company got in. After that our
neighborhood went downhill fast. People moved out by the truckload and
practically gave their family homes away.

It’s still a beautiful, if
somewhat ragged, neighborhood and I do what I can to keep my own house looking
stately and neat. Our streets are lined with pecan trees so large that two men
could wrap their arms around their trunks and only barely touch fingertips. The
trees used to look majestic, but now they just look tired. Their limbs droop
miserably and the Spanish moss that once served as regal attire now hangs limp
and shaggy like the beards of the homeless old men who pass by daily on their
way downtown.

Several blocks from there, the
opposite direction of my neighborhood, is what we call
colored town
. Oh,
I know it’s not right to call it that these days, but that was what we called
it then and I’m too old to relearn the etiquette I had drilled into my head
from the time I could hold a spoon.

Blanche raised five children of
her own there, plus the two grandchildren she took in when her youngest
daughter ran off with a drug dealer. She might have been mad at that child if
she hadn’t known what she did about the whole situation. As it was, Blanche
couldn’t find it in her heart to blame her daughter for any of the bad choices
she made, considering the role she played in this story.

The events of that year were
the real driving force behind the mass exodus from the neighborhood. It was the
year of the Pecan Man. None of us knew how much impact one skinny old colored
man could have in our lives, but we found out soon enough.

There is a wooded area not far
from downtown that has sat neglected for as long as I can remember, although it
was not nearly so grown over with weeds when I was a child and played there. It
is widely known now to shelter several homeless men, one of whom is blatantly
crazy and should be an inpatient, if you ask me. Back then, only one man was
known to inhabit the place and that was the Pecan Man. Whoever first gave the
man the name pronounced it
Pee-can
and it stuck.

The Pecan Man took up residence
there in the summer of 1975, but it took a while before anyone ever figured out
he actually lived there. Maybe it was his gaunt frame or the ghostly way he
just seemed to appear from those woods riding a bicycle as old as he was and
every bit as thin and rumpled. Whatever it was about him that struck people as
frightful, it didn’t take long before parents took to calling their children in
whenever he appeared.

They called him the Pecan Man
because he always had a sack full of pecans tied to the handlebars of his
rickety old bike. Turns out he got most of his sustenance from the nuts of
those prolific trees. He’d stop all along his route to who-knows-where, picking
up any pecans that had rolled onto the sidewalk or street, but leaving alone
any that so much as touched the yard of the tree’s owner. This was the widely
accepted rule and I never saw anyone break it, not even the children, and I’ve
spent many an hour on this porch watching.

The neighborhood children made
up a song that they sang as they jumped rope in their yards. I heard it enough
times to know it by heart and I still wake up some nights in a cold sweat with
the rhyme pounding over and over in my head.

            Mama call the
po-lice

            Catch him if you
can                      

            Everybody scared of
the Pecan Man

Then they’d launch into a list
as long as they could make it by filling in the names of every man, woman and
child they knew. The winner was the one who called out the most names without
missing a jump.          

            David scared of the
Pecan Man

            Jimbo scared of the
Pecan Man

            Mary Beth scared of
the Pecan Man

            Rita Gail scared of
the Pecan Man

            Miss Abernathy
scared of the Pecan Man

and so
on.

Two

When you're as old as I am, it takes a while to make a
point. The Pecan Man had a name - Eldred Mims. I called him Eddie. The people
of Mayville didn’t know his name at all, until he was arrested and charged with
the murder of a sixteen year old boy named Skipper Kornegay.

Now, twenty-five years later,
his name has made the papers again. I suppose it is noteworthy news that Eldred
Mims died in prison of old age. His sentence was twenty-five years to life. I
guess it worked out on both counts.

I feel pretty certain that most
townspeople would just as soon forget the man, but now that I’m the only one
left who even knows the whole truth, I think it’s time I told it.

In the spring of 1976, the
Pecan Man began mowing my lawn. For two weeks I watched him ride that rickety
old bike out of the woods dragging an equally pathetic lawn mower behind him.
He wouldn't return until late afternoon, his ragged shirt plastered to his
gaunt body by wind and sweat. I figured he'd found a few yards to mow outside
of our neighborhood, since no one near us would hire him. This was before the
murder, mind you, when people just
thought
he was dangerous because he
was homeless and black.
After
the murder they were certain of it. I just
thought he looked hungry and I was willing to take a risk.