The Prince of Frogtown (5 page)

After midnight, he would lift his uniform out of the closet, kiss her goodbye, and disappear at the corner of D Street and Alexandria Road, leaving a little skid mark there, showing off.

But every late night, in the stillness of the barracks, he wrote her a letter.

Dear Mark,
he wrote. He called her that, for short.

How are you?

I am fine.

He beat his letters home, sometimes, but she ran to the mailbox anyway, six days a week.

He never wrote anything special, at least nothing she remembers.

It was how he signed them that mattered.

Goodnight

Sweet dreams

I miss you

Honey

She read every one a dozen times, then put them, in perfect order, in a cardboard box. One letter, in the fourth month, was a little different from the rest. At the bottom, he wrote:

“Look under the stamp.”

She painstakingly peeled it off. Underneath, in tiny letters, he had written:

I

Love

You

She ran to the box where she had saved them, and, stamp by stamp, peeled the stamps away.

He had written it every time.

A
T THE SPRING,
people were staring at them.

The boy on his knees seemed about to implode into his little self.

The tall blonde woman, prettier than Rita Hayworth, giggled and shook.

“Are you serious?” she said.

“Yes, dammit to hell,” he said.

“Well,” she said, “okay.”

They drove to a little town south of Chattanooga, to a justice of the peace. His sister Ruby and brother-in-law Herman, who lived in Ringgold, waited in the car.

“Your momma was so pretty,” Ruby said.

She borrowed a pink sweater suit from Ruby, and wore white loafers.

He had on blue Levi’s, a blue long-sleeved shirt, and black penny loafers with Mercury dimes.

She was so nervous, she stumbled over the vows.

He was so nervous he kissed her too quickly, with things still unsaid.

They ran out happy, but then she realized what she had done.

“Charles,” she told him in the yard, “I forgot to say ‘I do.’”

He grabbed her hand to drag her back inside, but she was too embarrassed.

She never did get it said.

S
HE LIVED IT AGAIN,
as a favor to me. She did not mind the story too much, because it was the happiest one she had. But as she talked, the man she re-created had no heart in him, no coursing blood, as if she was quoting from some book she had read. As she talked, I had in my mind a pretty rag doll sprawled on a shelf, a half-stitched hole where his heart and guts would be. I think she was still afraid, scared that if she gave him heat, or feeling, she could not stop him coming true again. But he was too much man, even as a bad one, to lie that way for too long in anyone’s mind, and almost against her will he came to life, for at least a little while.

The Boy

I
GOT THE BOY
a sweet tea at Cecil’s café, waved at Shirley behind the grill, and took him on a tour of our town. We saw mansions and monuments, its painted face. Then, at the dead end of A Street, I showed him its still, silent heart.

“Is it really haunted?” the boy asked.

I glanced at the high, red-brick walls.

“As much as a place can be.”

The machines shut down five years ago. The roar that shook this village across a century shushed to a hateful quiet, and a blizzard of cotton fell through dead air to lie like dirty snow on scarred hardwood planks. The last to leave said they heard a rustling, as if generations still moved in the vast rooms that killed them one cut, one cough at a time.

That morning, I told him I would show him the place my father’s people worked and lived. As I slid into the truck I tossed his travel blanket into the back, out of reach.

“You won’t need it today,” I said.

The truth is I didn’t want to be seen with a blanky, or with a boy who needed one. We rolled through the village of sold-off houses to the mill itself. Logging chains sealed its doors, locking out two hundred people who lost paychecks and health insurance when it closed. “It ain’t when it’s running it’s scary,” a man had told me. “It’s when it ain’t.” I wanted the boy to see it, but it was like showing him the dark side of the moon.

It was our first year together. Still hopeful for my improvement, the woman made me go to church. She made me put on a jacket and sit in a pew in one of those big, sedate churches where no one shouts much. Children lit candles and sang hymns, and after the excitement we retired to a foyer for Bundt cake. The boy grew up in it. His grandfather was a deacon and his grandmother was, too. His mother taught Sunday school. He went to church camp, and swam in a baptismal lake. He liked church, he said. What boy says that?

The boy’s school was a gentle place, too, where teachers knew his mother by her first name, called him a sweet boy, well-behaved, and served ice cream with strawberries at show-and-tell. He did not ride the bus. The woman dropped him off in the morning and picked him up in the afternoon, with a suitable bribe. When you are ten, sugar is your opiate, and if he had sorrows, which is unlikely, he drowned them in root beer.

It was the same at home. At supper, his mother asked him “What would you like?” knowing damn well it was tall Dr Peppers and chicken nuggets and sundaes swimming with crushed-up M&Ms. The house was his shrine, full of kindergarten paintings and art-class abominations. His friends came over for playdates, in a bedroom buried under an avalanche of toys. At night, after prayers, his mother rubbed his back as he floated into pleasant dreams. She made sure of it. He was not allowed to watch TV news, to see the world on fire. He dreamed of ice cream, as his braces twinkled in the night-light. He had never had a cavity, and not a single curse had ever slipped from his expensive teeth.

Mine, mine were filled with lead and mercury, courtesy of the welfare. I could have had them redone in gold, but I had come to like the taste in my mouth.

I wanted the boy to see the mill, and know how lucky he was.

We idled over a ditch that might have been a creek in wet weather. Beer bottles littered the bottom and not much thrived in it but snakes. In my father’s time little boys caught them with snares made of wire and pipe and boiled them alive in pickle jars. Ragweed smothered it now, but it was a great chasm in 1942.

“My daddy jumped it when he was a boy,” I said.

The boy saw a ditch.

“He was the best at it, everybody said,” I said.

The boy popped sugar-free gum and fondled his Game Boy, his first love. He was not insolent, just disconnected, immune.

“Do you know what they call that creek?” I asked.

“What?” he said, to be polite.

“Shit Creek,” I said.

He laughed out loud. You don’t hear much cussing when everybody at supper is a deacon.

I had his attention, for a while.

I showed him the village church.

“They spoke in unknown tongues, and got slain in the spirit,” I said.

His eyes opened wide.

“They didn’t actually die,” I said.

We passed a patch of weeds.

“There’s where Robert Dentmon killed the police chief.”

“Why?” the boy said.

“They said it was over a water line.”

We made a right turn onto D Street, and there it was, 117.

People here call it Frogtown. My father was the prince of Frogtown.

“They fought in the street,” I said, as much to myself as the boy.

“Who?” he asked.

“My daddy and his brothers,” I said.

“Why?” he said.

I shook my head.

“They liked to,” I said.

“Why?”

“They drank a good bit,” I said.

But he had never smelled it on a man’s breath, or seen it burn wicked blue. Like always, when I thought of it, I could see them again, the men of my father’s house. I was a boy, too, the last time, but will never forget the just-checked violence in them, laughing, cursing at a kitchen table, cigarettes burning in their lips. They held jelly glasses sloshing with moonshine, and I wonder still why they did not blow themselves to kingdom come. As a boy, I believed they were what men were supposed to look like, handsome, unafraid, black knights with tire irons instead of swords. They toasted sunset and sunrise, and broke a thousand cups. “I’d never seen nothing like ’em in my life,” my mother liked to say, “and I never will.” It was their place that created them, too, but grinding, like a whetrock.

The boy asked if we could rent a movie.

“Sure,” I said.

CHAPTER TWO

The Village

I
WAS STILL
a little boy when I saw that first sacrifice, that first empty sleeve. I was rich then. A pocketful of birthday nickels weighed me down as I chased after imaginary Indians from the saddle of my dime-store pony. It was stuck hard in the cement in front of the A&P, but I was gaining on them, one nickel at a time, when the one-armed man walked by. I was barefoot in town on a weekday, so it had to be a payday, and it had to be summer. The linoleum was cold beneath my feet as I followed the man inside, curious and staring. He was thin, his pants billowing from his waist, his face gaunt and grooved and sad, so sad that one of us, surely, had to cry. He had on a long-sleeved, checkered shirt with one sleeve hanging loose and empty, not pinned up and final but swinging ever so slightly with every step, as if that missing arm was something he expected to get back anytime now. But his face told me different, told me that lost is just lost. It was even beyond the power of the miracles in which my people believed. No one ever prayed an arm back on—we would have heard about it if they had. I had been taught better than to stare and conditioned not to cry, by my older brother, by a dozen mean girl cousins. But there was something awful about that swaying, flat piece of cloth, and I just stood there, my eyes hot, my feet turning to ice in that unnatural cold. “Was it the war?” I asked my mother, but she told me to hush, it wasn’t our business. So I asked her again. She shook her head. “The mill,” was all she said.

His name was Charles Hardy, and he had been about the best guitar picker in our town. A touring country music promoter saw him play one night in a convention hall, and told him, “Boy, you’re too good to be workin’ for a livin’.” He told him to hop on the bus and try his luck in Nashville, ’cause there was magic in those hands. But he would have gotten fired if he laid out even one day at the cotton mill, and knew his wife would holler at him if he ran off to Music Row. So he put the dream in a box to keep it clean, and told himself he could always drive to Tennessee and show out with all those Nashville cats. But one day, a little hungover, he lost his concentration on the floor of the Marvel Mill and stumbled into the teeth of a machine that shredded sheets of polyester. He fought it like it was something alive as it mangled his arm to the elbow and tried to pull his body into its teeth. He finally jammed it, killed it, with a broken broom handle.

Everything you need to know about a mill village, a smart man told me once, is in that empty sleeve.

But as a boy I wondered why anyone would work inside a place that could keep a part of you at quittin’ time. My mother told me only that it was work, “and people was glad to get it.” I heard that all the time, in conversations of blood, bandages and bad pay. The arm was an offering to the timekeepers, to the machines, in places like Leesburg, Blue Mountain, Piedmont and a dozen other towns in the foothills of the Appalachians. My mother took us from my father’s people and broke our connection to the mill village in Jacksonville before I got to know that world, before I understood how there are things you hate and things you thank God for, and things that are both.

Half my history was fashioned here, between rows of spinning steel. Like the hill people who saw their lives replanted in the mill village, I am descended from two races on my father’s side, but one class. They spilled blood over a paradise neither one could own, and saw it mingle to create a people whose single greatest value would be their own expendability. Here, from the Creek wars to the Civil War to a cold-blooded industrialization of these hills, is a history of my father’s people, the people of the mills.

I
T WAS MAGIC
masquerading as nature. The round summits of the highlands seldom stood stark and clear, but were softened by hot, yellow haze in summer and gray, cool mist in winter. Even in their shrouds, they were beautiful. Poison ivy veined the trees, blistering even the lightest touch. Persimmons hung fat, yellow and inviting, but hexed your mouth into a whistling knot if you bit into them even a day too soon. Tornadoes tore through both springtime and the turning leaves, winter trees filled with a million keening blackbirds, and the summer ground lay red in wild strawberries. Water moccasins, fat as a rolled-up newspaper, rode rivers the color of English tea, bullfrogs beat the air like bass drums, and panthers, black as the inside of a box, watched from the branches of ancient trees.

De Soto rode through it searching for treasure, massacring its people, demanding at every village to know where he could find gold. “To the west,” the people always said, to keep him on the march, to get rid of him, till he died disappointed on the Mississippi.

But the whites kept coming, for timber, for bottomland, for coal and ore buried in the hills. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, the land west of the state of Georgia and east of the Choctaw lands of Mississippi was known as the Alabama frontier. Some of these men, too, had dreams of empire, but most of them had nothing at all.

They were bony and callused and their clothing fit them like feed sacks tied to crossed broom handles. They had carrot-colored and sandy hair and fair skin that burned red in summer, and looked out from blue eyes that swam with suffering and suspicion. Their only birthright was stoop labor, and their class was stitched like patches across the generations, in Scotland, Ireland, the poorhouses of England, and the ever-crowding land in the American East. Most of them had never been inside a school, but they told stories of famine, leaky ships, selfish lords and debtors’ prison, quoted a Bible they had never read, and were raised from birth to believe that black is the true color of a rich man’s heart.

At night, they beat Irish drums, tooted tin whistles and plucked dulcimers as they danced across dirt floors, and sang in lilting, tragic voice of lost homes, lost love and lost wars. They served crowns and toffs and top hats who ordered them into cannon fire for a few pieces of silver, and barely set foot in the red dirt before they marched off to fight for Andy Jackson and the land speculators in the Indian wars. No one told them that, once all the red men were gone, they still could not afford what the land would cost at federal auction.

The gentry called them clay eaters behind their backs, free men without property in a time of human bondage, of less value than a slave. But they cleaved to their cracked, flawed democracy, voted for the populists who told the sweetest lies, and danced on the air, legs kicking, when the deprivations of class forced them to take a respectable man’s hog, cow or purse. There is little photographic record of them and they left few letters or diaries, but look into the faces of the people of the mill villages, and you will find them there.

Look even deeper, and you will see the ghosts of a people who were here before.

I have done the white people all the harm I could.

—CHIEF RED EAGLE OF THE CREEK NATION
(from
Inside Alabama
by Harvey H. Jackson III)

The men were called Red Sticks, from the paint on their war clubs. They carried iron-forged tomahawks and muskets, wore flowing capes and parson-like coats over soft buckskin and wrapped their hair in turbans. The women, regal cheekbones framing eyes like slivers of coal, wore their lustrous black hair loose to the waist. Part of a confederacy of tribes that coexisted with whites for a generation, they were not nomads. They built cabins and hoped to live in them a lifetime, and for twenty years they signed treaties, trading land for lies. As British warships set sail for America in what would be the War of 1812, the Red Sticks declared their own war on the United States.

A bloody saga played out in places like Burnt Corn and Holy Ground. The Creeks left settlers dead in squalid, smoking cabins and on muddy trails, as white militia killed whole villages. Enraged by the massacres, Chief Red Eagle and 700 warriors surrounded Fort Mims, a settlement on the Alabama River, and killed 340 militia, women and children. In the North, newspapers ran lurid accounts, and the destruction of a people was begun.

In Tennessee, Jackson raised an army and rode south into the frontier, collecting fighting men along the way, resting awhile at a trading post called Drayton, on the edge of hostile land. It was a beautiful place, a green place with good water in the foothills of the Appalachians, and some of the men said they would come back here to farm, once the Indians were killed.

From there Jackson pushed south into the heart of Creek land, fighting as he went, and backed the last Red Sticks into a crook of the Tallapoosa called Horseshoe Bend. On March 27, 1814, he attacked 1,000 warriors with 2,600 white soldiers, 500 Cherokee and 100 friendly Creeks. His Indian allies swam the river and stole the Red Sticks’ canoes, loaded them with troops and set a torch to the village, burning men, women and children alive. As it burned, Jackson ordered a drumroll and sent his force on a direct assault of the breastwork that guarded land access to the stronghold. This, according to a National Parks Service account of the battle, is what happened next:

A slaughter. European American soldiers and their Creek allies killed as many Red Sticks as possible. They set fire to a heap of timber the peninsula’s defenders had hidden behind; when the Red Sticks emerged, they were immediately shot down. The bloodshed continued until dark; the next morning another 16 Creek, found hidden under the banks, were killed. In the end, 557 warriors died on the battlefield, and an estimated 250 to 300 more drowned or were shot trying to cross the river.

The river ran red for a mile.

The genocide of a nation all but complete, Red Eagle rode into Jackson’s camp.

“How dare you?” Jackson said.

“General Jackson, I am not afraid of you,” Red Eagle answered. “You can kill me if you wish. I have come to beg you to send for the women and children, who are starving in the woods. I am now through fighting.” (From
Know Alabama: An Elementary History
by Frank Lawrence Owsley, Jr., John Craig Stewart, and Gordon T. Chappell.)

Jackson rode his military victories into the presidency. He ignored treaties that set aside land for Southern tribes, and ordered the removal of the tribes—even many of his Creek and Cherokee allies. Starving, freezing, dying on the way, they walked to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, on the Trail of Tears.

In 1832, an old chief named Ladiga signed away the last of the Creek land at the Treaty of Cusseta in Washington, but was given title to his homestead, which included Jackson’s old camp on the campaign south, the picturesque Drayton. In 1833, Ladiga sold it to a land speculator for $2,000, and left. The little trading post of Drayton would become a cultural and business center on the frontier. In 1834, to honor the man who opened the land to expansion, a grateful citizenry changed the hamlet’s name to Jacksonville.

But even after Horseshoe Bend and the Trail of Tears, enough of a beaten people remained, drop by red drop, to color the heritage of this place, and the imaginations of little boys who ran whooping through pines with chicken feathers in their hair. If you ask old people in the mill village if they have Indian blood in them, they will tell you they are an eighth Indian, or a sixteenth, and show you faded photographs of their great-great-grandmothers or-grandfathers, of high cheekbones, hooked noses, hair like ink, and say with great pride that “she was almost full” or “he was pure, I believe.” I always thought the Indian blood in us was Cherokee, but that was unlikely, said my father’s kin. More likely, on his side at least, it was Creek, from a far-back place in the mountains called Pinhook. But even if there was no other evidence, it is there, in my father’s face, a blue-eyed white man in the county ledger, but as much war whoop as Rebel yell.

I pledge you my word. I’ve never heard such a cry for bread in my life. If anything can be done, for God’s sake, do it quickly…This is no panic, but real hunger that punishes the people.

—W.B. COOPER,
a prominent citizen in Jacksonville during the Civil War, writing to Governor Lewis E. Parsons for help for women who roamed the streets of the town to beg for food (from
Poor but Proud
by historian Wayne Flynt)