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  That year, 1919, was a boom year for Pocahontas. When Arkansas seceded and joined the Confederacy in 1861, the town was destined to suffer but after Reconstruction things picked up. Newcomers to Pocahontas outnumbered those who were leaving. Many came by road or rail, but most still came on the fleet of steamboats that had been working the river and hauling timber, crops, and people up and down it for almost a hundred years. On most days, you could see a cluster of them: Passenger boats, snag boats, barges, and freight boats tied helter-skelter to each other and to deep-set mooring posts that lined the riverbank high above the river’s whirl-pooling current. To get off or on the boats people made their way, sometimes from boat to boat, over a series of narrow, wiggly gangplank boards. From there they hauled themselves and their belongings uphill to the town square, set well above the high-water mark of the river.

  The arrivals were an odd lot. All year long men staggered home from the battlefields of World War I, a conflict that ended when Germany agreed to a ceasefire on November 11, 1918. Some returned in pine coffins, others with god-awful wounds. A few wore the World War I doughboy uniform, or at least a piece of it. The veterans looked older than they must have been. Others who came in 1919 wore the plain clothes of working people. Friends or family met some of the arrivals, but there were many newcomers, mostly from the East, who did not know anyone. They intended to sink roots and live in or near the town. Germans, Scots-Irish, Welsh—you could pick them out because they came with luggage, gunnysacks and boxes stuffed full of belongings. They were families for the most part. The rest—a parade of whores, roughnecks, toughs, drummers with big sample bags, itinerate sailors, deckhands, snag-boat crews, gamblers, and ne’er-do-wells—came just to make a quick buck or let off steam in the taverns and saloons.

  Those with the gumption to stay would quickly learn what those who had come before already knew: There was nothing easy about life in Northeast Arkansas in 1919. The rocky clay soil in the hills west of Pocahontas was scratch-poor and the low-lying farmland east of town flooded in rainy months and was unbearably hot and buggy in the summer. The Current River comes out of Missouri and flows into the Black River, which runs generally from northeast to southwest, and together they make up the fault line between the hill country and the lowlands of Randolph County. In both places, the hills to the west and the lowlands to the east, people had to deal with wounds and prejudices stemming from the Civil War, World War I, and other human conflicts. These issues ran deep and like the scab of a putrid wound they would, from time to time, reopen and ooze pus. There were other perils too, diseases, natural disasters, and accidents. These came with little or no warning. They had nothing to do with war, hatred, or prejudice and they struck indiscriminately.

  My grandmother, Mama Lewallen, belonged to one of the families that had come before. She was born in 1885 on a hardscrabble farm in Warm Springs, a tiny outpost in the hill country twenty miles north of Pocahontas. The town had a reputation in the early days as a rough-and-ready place. Fistfights, knife fights, and wrestling matches were commonplace because the local toughs, for some reason, felt compelled to boast of being the “best man” in the community. It was no place for the fainthearted.

  Mama was the oldest in a farm family of nine girls and one boy, the boy being the next-to-youngest child born to Mark and Etta Vermilye. Mark, my great-grandfather, was the son of rugged Dutch émigrés and he had made his way to Arkansas via Pennsylvania shortly after the Civil War. It was not his nature to whine about anything, especially the minor setbacks of farm life. The Vermilyes were good people; strong-willed people who had learned, through years of hard knocks and forced relocations, to deal with whatever came along. The girls absorbed the hard, independent edge of their father; they were good-looking but they brooked no foolishness or softness. On rare occasions, the Vermilyes might discuss their fears or foibles with each other, but they never opened up to outsiders whom they always bunched together and considered with the utmost caution as “them” or “they.” I remember Grandpa Vermilye coming to the Lewallen Café every morning just as the breakfast crowd was thinning out. He was in his eighties but he walked the two miles from where he lived to the café. He always brought a basket of eggs and garden vegetables he had gathered that morning. Mama would buy them from him, and then she would feed him a good plate of ham and eggs with biscuits and gravy. He was a tough old bird, wiry and short of stature. I was a little scared of him because he did not say much and he smelled like wood smoke and he did not smile or laugh, ever.

  Mama Lewallen (far left) with eight younger sisters and a brother, the only boy born to Mark and Etta Vermilye. Circa 1902

  Mama told me a lot about the old days but I learned more, things that I will never forget, by just watching her. She was a great cook although most every dish she made dripped fat. Lard, bacon grease or simply fried fat meat were the staples of her diet. Her favorite dishes were wilted lettuce and onions, biscuits and gravy, fried squirrel and gravy, fried rabbit and gravy, brains and eggs, and blackbird pie.

  Waste not; want not—that was Mama’s motto. At the end of a fulsome squirrel dinner Mama would fish the squirrel heads out of the pot and crack them open with the handle of her knife. With great fanfare and a narrow smile, she would spoon out the brains and spread the goo onto a gravy-covered biscuit—the ultimate poor man’s canapé. I was not shocked because the appetite for such things was part of the Vermilye family culture and I realized that country people throughout Northeast Arkansas ate such things. Even so, I always looked away when Mama put it in her mouth.

  Thinking about diet and cooking is a good way to appreciate the hard life lived by rural Arkansans in the early part of the twentieth century. People used wood cook stoves that they stoked up before every meal. They had no running water, indoor plumbing, or electricity. They made big gardens every year and canned all the surplus vegetables and fruit so that they would have something to eat during the cold months. They raised and slaughtered chickens, hogs, goats, and cattle in order to have meat on the table. They cured hams, slabs of bacon, jowls, and made chunks of salt pork they could eat and cook with in the winter. Nothing was wasted. Pig’s feet were pickled and put up in jars or used as the main ingredient in a souse. People managed, but they were strictly on their own. In the case of the Vermilyes, the urge to be ruggedly independent became stronger day by day, as they adapted to the hardships of life in rural Randolph County, Arkansas.

  Mama had a sense of humor, but you had to search for it. Once, when we walked in the woods just down the hill from the café, Mama gave a false alarm. She cried out that she had spotted a “blue-racer snake.” It scared me and I ran like a bat out of Hell until I realized she was tricking me. She laughed like crazy, her gold front tooth shining like a light. Mama did not laugh often because that would have been out of character, but when she did, it was something to behold.

  Mama met and married George “Papa” Lewallen from Missouri, a Welshman by heritage. He was as tough as she was and together they saved enough to open a wholesale grocery that was a mainstay in Pocahontas for years.

  In the first years of their grocery business Papa delivered groceries in a wagon pulled by two old mules that his daddy gave him. Papa’s daddy had named the mules Grover and Adlai because he despised President Grover Cleveland and Vice President Adlai Stevenson. They were for the Gold Standard and hard against the idea of Free Silver, a position supported by Papa’s daddy and most farmers. Papa did not share his daddy’s radical ideas, but that did not matter because it was not long before he and Mama got rid of the mules. They had found a better way to make their deliveries.

  The Star Herald, a local newspaper, revealed their progressive thinking as merchants with this news story in 1916: “George Lewallen is the first merchant in Randolph County to purchase an auto truck for delivery of merchandise.” Shortly thereafter, Papa decided it would be good advertising to put a gaudy red-and-white-checkerboard paint job on the delivery truck. The paint job had the desired effect.
Everyone who saw it said, “There goes Lewallen’s truck.”

  They prospered in the grocery business, but unfortunately Papa had a taste for liquor and it began to consume him as their business and family grew. He managed to control his alcoholism with sheer willpower for quite awhile, but it got the best of him during the hard times of the Great Depression.

  By the time I came along Papa was a lost cause. I think that is why Mama talked mostly about her childhood and building up the grocery and café business, but she seldom talked about her marriage and she never said anything good about Papa.

  In particular, Mama did not talk about my mother’s time as a little girl. She did not, that is, until I was thirty-three years old and Mama was near death. Then one day she gave in to my persistence and opened up. She told me things that my mother never, to the day she died, revealed. What she told me helped me to understand how my mother came to be the strongest, sternest, toughest woman I ever knew.

  Mother was Delta, named so because Mama liked the sound of it. She was the only girl in a family of five children. She was born in 1909, the same year Mama and Papa opened Lewallen Grocery, their new store on the town square. A younger brother, Gerle, was born two years later. There was an older brother, Herschel, but it was natural that Mother latched on to “Little Gerle”—that is what she always called him—as her special charge. Mama said she mothered him like little girls are wont to do, and her gentle ways made it plain to everyone in the family that she was going to be a different kind of Vermilye. With every day that passed Mother showed less interest in her favorite baby dolls. Her attention shifted to her little brother. She was an open, loving, and carefree little girl and it showed the most when she was watching over Little Gerle. Mama said, “They played together, fought over silly things, shared secrets, slept in the same room, and got in the same messes.” They were, she said, “inseparable.” Mother also felt responsible for Little Gerle. She would blame herself for failing him even when there was no reason to feel that way. She believed Little Gerle was hers to protect.

  Mama centered on the end days of September 1919, a glorious moment in America and Pocahontas. World War I, the “war to end all wars,” was over and the boys were coming home. The town was growing and the Lewallen Grocery was a success. A sense of prosperity was seeping through the town and optimism was building day by day.

  There were chores to do and school to attend, but there was still plenty of time for children to play outside before it got dark. Mother and Little Gerle were the “ringleaders” of playtime, according to Mama. They would meet up with other children at Marr Creek, a tributary of the Black River that carried various kinds of runoff and an assortment of trash through Pocahontas. At a place where the creek deepened and made a small sandbar, their favorite spot, the children would swap stories, fish interesting things out of the water and push, shove, and playfully hit each other when they could not think of anything to say. I imagine they, like kids everywhere, also exchanged peeks at their private parts.

  Little Gerle with his pet raccoon, Mother with her pet chicken, and older brother Herschel with his raccoon. Circa 1919.

  Mama said the town was abuzz. The war had taken its toll, but it was fall and everyone was feeling good, feeling upbeat.

  Northeast Arkansas was enjoying an Indian Summer, that wondrous weather phenomenon that brings perfect temperatures and the clearest skies one can imagine, and—Hallelujah—word had it that a carnival was coming to town.

  The carnival people would set up their rides and tents in the holler south of the town square that was reserved for tent meetings, rodeos, big revivals and such things as that. Mama, trying to lower expectations, told the kids it was not a big carnival such as you would see in St. Louis or Memphis, but Little Gerle and Mother could have cared less. The carnival was coming!

  Finally, the Chicago White Sox were getting ready to play the Cincinnati Reds in the 1919 World Series. Mama loved baseball and had a weakness for gambling on the games. She made tencent bets on the White Sox with a bookie she called, “Baseball Man.” He came by the grocery several times a week during baseball season.

  Mama’s fondness for the White Sox came from a favorite uncle of hers who had worked in Chicago before the war. He talked endlessly about Shoeless Joe Jackson and Eddie Collins and the team heralded to be the best team in baseball. For Mama, a rabid fan and no shrinking violet, the White Sox could do no wrong, and she stuck with them even though the nearby St. Louis Cardinals were the local favorite. Cardinal fans regarded Mama’s allegiance to the Sox as apostasy. They were cheering for the National League team, the Reds, to win the Series.

  With all that was taking place the little town was about to implode. The rumors about the carnival spread like wildfire. A makeshift World Series scoreboard rigged up just off the square was the place where people could get inning-by-inning results of the games. Baseball Man planned to post the scores as quickly as he received the details from the telegraph office.

  Automobiles were still a novelty, but various brands—Ford Model T, Maxwell, and Oldsmobile to name a few—were beginning to show up in Pocahontas, and it was common to see one or two around the town square. Even so, the occasional signs of a new era and a promising future were in sharp relief to the dominant signs of the past. Horses, mules, oxcarts, wagons and carriages easily outnumbered the new-fangled automobiles. People ignored the ever-present smell of livestock droppings, but they paid a lot of attention to where they were about to step. The stores were still featuring old-time hand tools, dry goods, seed and feed, and various farm implements. Only occasionally could you see an ad for a radio, a washing machine, or some other newfangled gadget. The background noises—the blacksmith’s hammer, the clopping of hooves—were those of yesteryear.

  The burst of new activity was almost too much for the children. The grownups were thrilled too, but they pretended not to be. Finally, the excitement reached its peak. The World Series was underway and the carnival trucks and wagons paraded into town and around the square. A huge man dressed in a fine white costume with gold braid and epaulets led them. He was riding a spirited white Arabian horse with red and yellow plumes. Close behind the rider came a small band in full parade dress, playing Souza-like march music. The parade, with scores of screaming kids in tow, wound its way onto the street that led to the holler where the carnies would unload the wagons and set up. Little Gerle and Mother climbed halfway up a high bank on one side of the holler so they could see it all and watch the carnies work. They were not about to miss anything. The colorful, showy banners told of freaks, wonders of the world, and wrestling champions who offered to take on all comers. There were games of chance, and for the grown men there were whispered reports of a hootchie-cootchie show featuring a star performer who, for an extra dollar, would “smoke a cigarette with it.” Little Gerle and Mother were not privy to the whispers about the hootchie-cootchie show, but the rest of it astounded them.

  On the afternoon before the first night of the carnival Little Gerle and Mother were acting silly, giggling and running aimlessly in every direction. From time to time, they would fall in a heap and lie there trying to stop laughing so they could get their breath. Little Gerle was especially wide-eyed and full of wonder. It was his nature to get that way when he was about to learn something new. He was a bright boy and Mama said it was impossible to ignore him when he smiled and looked at you with his “big brown eyes.” He had one question after another and the closer they got to the carnival grounds, the faster his questions came. He wanted to know about the wrestlers, the barkers, the carnies, and the freaks, especially the freaks. When Mama told him about the freaks Little Gerle winced and said he did not want to see them because he felt sorry for them. Finally, when they got into the carnival the smells of frying onions, popcorn, cotton candy, candied apples, hot dogs and hamburgers overtook their conversations, catapulting the children into a fit of ecstasy. Little Gerle and Mother took off, holding hands and running wild. All Mama could do was stand ba
ck and watch them skip playfully from one concession to another. They were not about to miss a single sight, or the slightest smell or sound, and they stayed until the barkers stopped barking and the carnies started closing down the concessions.

  In a few days, it was all over. The carnival folded its tents and was gone as quickly as it had come. The Indian summer fizzled out and Pocahontas was getting a deluge of rain and colder weather. The Cincinnati Reds won the World Series. They beat the Chicago White Sox in eight games (in the period after World War I, the World Series was a best-of-nine series). For the record, Mama did not budge from her support of the White Sox then, or a year later, when she learned that eight players, including Shoeless Joe Jackson, had thrown the 1919 series. Mama lost her bets, and the 1919 White Sox were forever after known as the Black Sox, but until she died, she held fast to her belief that they were the best team in baseball. That was Mama, through and through. When she died in 1971 the preacher, commenting on her renowned stubbornness and bluntness, said, “One thing about it: You never had to ask Mrs. Lewallen what she said.” Those attending her funeral chuckled and gave each other knowing glances.

  Meanwhile, in the midst of the carnival and the World Series, the chores had piled up. It was time for things to get back to normal. Mother was back to helping Mama around the house and in the kitchen, but Little Gerle fell behind with his chores. The trash baskets filled up and he did not bring the kindling for the kitchen cook stove, two easy jobs that fell to him as the youngest in the family. Mama kept after him to get his work done, but he was listless and said he did not feel good. The day after the carnival left town, he went to bed without eating anything for dinner. Mama figured it was a hangover from “too much carnival.”

  Mama and Mother tried everything they could to perk him up, but they did not have much luck. When they read to him and talked to him about school, they expected him to show some interest because he was a promising student, but that did not work. Nothing worked.