Southern Legitimacy Statement: My Big Ditch
Daddy finally made enough money selling used cars to build Mama a new house he had promised. It meant that our favorite play place, the Big Ditch would get covered over and no more tadpoles, and crawfish to capture in our Ball jars. Some of the boys actually ate ‘em. Dumb asses. Nobody asked us nothing. We were happy in the house we were born to. We gave it time and tried, but the new one never became a home.
Dirt Wars
He never held a dirt clog he didn’t like. The little ones he used as rifle shots, straight and far like bullets, and he more often than not hit his target which was usually the body of a friend-enemy in that day’s dirt war. The big ones he liked best. He could lob them into a group of unsuspecting 15-year-olds, and they would explode into a cloud of black and grey dust that would cover the once-clean after-school play clothes their hard working mothers or their help had just recently removed from the clothes line.
During the late summer and fall planting seasons as the work before the work began in the still-farmed fields dotted around and in his small southern town were tilled, some still with mule and plow while other more successful towns folk had small tractors that did most of the plowing smiling in their pride. The rich fresh-turned black earth would produce an armory of ammunition for the more adventurous boys, and a brave girl or two, as they chose up sides, good guys against the bad guys, using dirt clogs as weapons of minor destruction, the forefathers for paint ball and computer games of virtual combat and strategic childhood energy venting. It was healthier and a lot dirtier and a heck of a lot more fun.
Freddie never got too dirty. Since he was the main player in the dirt wars, as he invented them when he was nine and was the only general in charge they had ever had, he hardly ever got splattered with a glob. Once Jane Smith got lucky when he wasn’t looking and filled his left ear with some fresh soot-black dirt that hadn’t been turned over but about half an hour. It was plenty juicy just coming out from down under and it took Etta some deep digging with a wet cloth and a pencil with cotton on the end before she gave him a “that’s clean a’nuff I reckon. Your Mama will probably still find some grains in there, but best I could do since you such a wiggly worm.”
“Shoot fire, she got lucky” he told Etta who was putting away his dirty ear rag while doing several other duties: she was fixing supper and ironing daddy’s white shirts and mama’s blouses which she had starched just like mama liked them. Etta knew exactly what they wanted and had been satisfying Freddie Williams’ family all of his 15-year life. She practically raised that boy and was proud of it. Freddie was one of those in-charge young’uns, Etta would tell her friends, never acted biggety or bossy. Everybody liked him a lot and looked to him when decisions had to be made. He was one of those natural born leaders, and Etta said she had a hand in helping him be natural. Even though he was just in junior high, most folks in town and in school admired him. He was nice and considerate of others and their feelings and the only time he ever got any unfriendly looks from his friends was when their parents fussed at them for their manners and wanted them to be more like Freddie. He didn’t like it much, but his Mama did. So did Etta. Hard to tell who was proudest. Mama always told Freddie and his two brothers that the main thing they could accomplish in life was to always be nice. Etta said amen to that, too. Etta went on to say “it won’t always be the easy thing to do, but it will always be the right thing to do.”
Mama, Etta and Freddie’s Daddy were big on doing the right thing. That everybody had to believe in doing the right thing was a family thing. So Freddie learned that from the start, and it came to him quite naturally.
Etta managed to work into her do-list a banana sandwich with a smear of peanut butter on one side of the bread for Freddies’s lunch before she went outside to get the clean sheets just washed drying on the line. She had convinced Mama that while a dryer machine was good enough for most things, the natural wind was still the best way to get them sheets dry and fresh and ready for some good sleeping.
While Freddie was having a cookie, Etta plopped down a heavy load of sheets and got ready to fold them into neat squares as only she could.
Freddie stopped chewing for a moment as his thoughts jumped to the mound of white sheets, taking him into a memory set deeply in his mind and heart when he was ten.
Etta’s grandson Charles came into town just every now and then on the Saturday that Etta came in to help Mrs. Katherine with some special work. Charles wasn’t very good at dirt wars since he had trouble seeing the dirt as bullets because he helped his daddy in the fields when they were plowing up the stuff. To him it was just dirt, so he wasn’t a soldier very often.
That particular Saturday would be one they would long remember.
It was unusual growing up in the 40s and 50s when equal rights was as odd a concept as a round world was a while back. That a white boy and a colored boy would be friends, but they were, from the first time Etta let Charles come to town with her.
The Williams family hired several coloreds as maids and cooks and yard workers, but they never treated them badly and Freddie and his brothers became friends with the children who tagged along with the domestics while they earned meager wages to barely live. Etta was with the family from the time Freddie was born till he brought her home his new wife for her approval. Their long-time cook and pretty much home and family manager died at age 106. Her children called Freddie and his brothers her “spiritual” children in the funeral program. Freddie’s folks were the only white people there. Freddie added that to a long list of questions he had about what and why the grown-ups made the choices they made.
The dirt war on this Friday was especially fun, too. School was out for three whole days, and the plowed fields with grenades and bombs were perfect for letting out all those cooped up fidgets that made it hard to sit still on a sunshiney Friday afternoon. There were enough soldiers to make two good sides, and Freddie led the “good guys,” the US Army, against the Japs who still got that role even though they had surrendered to another general on a ship in the Pacific five years before
As Freddie thought back now on his growing up different, he didn’t feel strange at the time…just different. He knew he cared about things that others didn’t seem to mind. He was mystified why his fellow athletics liked to pick on people; people who were fatter, or uglier, or dumber, or something other than they were. He never participated in the demeaning and was kidded about it no end. And, don’t even bring up the “negro” issue.
Freddie took a last bite of cookie, started to leave then stopped, sat and started to talk with Etta in quiet almost whispered tones. “You know what that pile of sheets just made me think of, Etta?”
“No, I don’t have no idea, Freddie. You know I don’t know your mind at all. You tell me what.”
“It reminds me of that awful day when the white sheets came to town…”
“Lord, boy, don’t you even go thinking about that… That was a bad day for sure.”
“It was for sure.”
It was about 9:30 on Saturday morning when Freddie and Charles went into town to get some ice cream at Dippy’s. They were on the streets when the Southern Society of the Ku Klux Klan made an infamous tour through town with some 30-odd cars with three to four white-sheeted people in each one.
They wound around through the colored sections as well as down the main streets of town. Sirens blew and some blank shots were fired. It appeared that the KKK was putting on some kind of a recruiting drive, but the real purpose was to take over the streets, create a general confusion, cause many persons to believe there was a fire and then after gathering their forces, they left, headed in the general direction of another nearby town. It was said that the police department in that town escorted the parade through the city.
In Freddie’s town, no effort was made to stop them or to encourage them, and so far as is known, no violence occurred. The uninvited horde was believed to be largely South Carolinians with almost every car carrying a South Carolina license. The occupants wore their traditional robes but most of them had their hoods pushed back off their face to keep within the law’s ruling that no hooded gangs could operate in public.
Many local citizens were considerably disturbed by the demonstration, and it was understood that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been notified that the Klan was operating in that area and that they had been asked to intercede should there be any incident of a lawless nature that could not be handled by local law enforcement.
Some of the more aggressive klansmen fired their long rifles, raised the guns and waved them over their heads, more-than-not accomplishing their goal of scaring the locals, especially the black citizens, into being obedient to their ways of thinking and being. It worked for sure on two young children holding hands and running from the scary scene back to the safety of Freddie’s home.
“Charles and me were so scared that day, Etta. We didn’t know what was going on, who those people were and what they wanted. Daddy did all he could to calm us down and help the town return to its regular slow pace.”
Freddie’s daddy sold insurance of all kinds and took out ads in the paper to condemn the actions of the Klan.
The weekly newspaper ran several editorials condemning the entire KKK movement and continued to fight against them ultimately bringing in the force of the federal government which brought the movement to a screeching stop with multiple arrests and jail sentences.
“It was a good thing you was scared. You done exactly the right thing by coming on home and not standing around looking all googly eyed at them bad people. Specially you two being different colors. Them people would not have been pleased to see you boys friends and all.”
“What is it they want, Etta? They trying to do everybody’s business and make us all like them? Why you reckon they act like the bosses of everybody?”
Etta mulled over Freddie’s question for a minute or two and then answered, “They wasn’t born that way. I don’t believe, anyhow. They was born into it…some gets out, some stays there. Far as I know they always been that way… white, ignorant and stubborn. That’s what I think. How can they be anything else…specially what they don’t know no better?”
“You think it’ll always be that way, Etta?” Freddie asked.
“Lordy, child, I don’t know but I do believe in my soul that change will come some day. Change will come someday. It’s kinda like your game.. you call it dirt wars…sometimes that dirt gets so deep in the skin, under the fingernails in your hair and it ain’t too easy to wash it out…like cleaning them ears of yours.”
“I don’t get too dirty though, you know, “ Freddie assured her.
“I know, child. That’s because you been taught how to do the right things. You a lucky one, that’s the honest truth. You a lucky one.”
