history

“PEPSI COLA”-A LESSON IN PREJUDICE

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In the early 1960’s our Southern heritage was being assaulted with Yankee government mandates to end “separate but equal” in favor of desegregation “with all deliberate speed.” The Deep South was deliberately dragging its feet. Alabama’s flamboyant governor George Wallace probably expressed our segregationist attitudes best when he attempted to stand up to that Yankee government exclaiming, “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Our own native son and segregationist Strom Thurmond said, “All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement.” Strom would even help lay the foundation for today’s modern GOP when he exchanged his Democratic blue for Republican red because Democratic President Lyndon Johnson stabbed the Solid South in the back by signing into law the Civil Right’s Act of 1964. Thurmond claimed it was in protest of big government and State’s Rights. Sound familiar? Wasn’t Strom a candidate for president on the Dixiecrat ticket? Since Strom’s defection the only Democratic presidential hopeful to take a majority of deep Southern states was Jimmy Carter from Georgia. Considering how well that turned out, I doubt that will happen again. Two years prior to the Civil Right’s Act of 1964, in 1962, the debate over the Confederate flag flying on the Capitol grounds would begin when the Battle Flag of Northern Virginia was raised over the Capitol Dome to commemorate the Civil War centennial…and to “shoot a bird” at the federal government’s attempts to push us toward desegregation.

Despite it being racist times I don’t remember my community being a racist hotbed. It certainly wasn’t a hotbed of racist rhetoric. There were plenty of pro-segregationist meetings in our little part of the world, though. Community meetings with the School Board, superintendent and principal were held in, what I thought back then, was the spacious auditorium of our school. I remember the principal and superintendent, along with the local school board fielding questions from a packed “white” house. One question that was never quite answered was “What are we going to do about those Negro ‘Bucks’ walking the hallways with our daughters?” I realize now how fearful some parents were that their daughters were going to be carried off and raped…or worse, that they might willingly walk off on their own before giving up their most prized gift—gasp!—gladly.

Despite this not being an original thought, I believe that race relations in South Carolina (you may insert racism) is the product of fear that has plagued South Carolina since slavery days when the slave population outnumbered the white population. That fear manifested itself in the “well-founded” terror of a potential slave revolt on one side or the prospect of reprisals caused by revolts on the other. In a few accounts, it would appear that reprisals were carried out because there might have been a brief thought of a revolt. This dread would be continued and intensified after the Civil War. Panic mounted over the contemplation of retaliations by the former slaves and that their “unbridled African passions” would be unleashed on our innocent white female population. (What were the African ladies doing?)

The centerpiece of our hate was the resentment by white supremacists, a majority of the white population throughout the South specifically and the US in general, that we were going to be groveling at the feet of black lawmakers. The old “loss of status bug-a-boo” was primary on the minds of old white “planter class” who had had the power and wanted it back. While some blacks were elected, all of that would change with the end of Reconstruction and the antebellum status quo would return and be maintained with De Jure legislation that became known as Jim Crow laws. Later this would be upheld with the Supreme Court railroad case Plessy v Ferguson which made “separate but equal” the law of the land and which intensified the trepidation and hate on both sides of our heritage.

Separate but equal did not seem to be a problem in Indian Land. It did not seem Brown’s “with all deliberate speed” could be an issue at this time but, for reasons that eluded my six-year-old mind, people were worried. We did not have a huge population of African-Americans and none of them were carrying spears or wearing leopard skins like in the Tarzan movies. They tended to live around Van Wyck, the brick making capitol of the state, or out past Uncle James’s farm which might as well have been in…deepest Africa. Maggie Cureton’s family lived way, way, way across the road and by the 1960’s they were long gone.

While I had seen African-American males I would not meet my first African- American adult male until the very late fifties when we remodeled our house. A black brick mason with the interesting name of “Pepsi Cola” Mobley was hired to add the brick veneer to our original home along with the two new rooms added onto each end.
“Pepsi Cola” was a stud, as were his two sons who served as helpers and apprentice brick layers. It was their responsibility to carry the bricks and “mud” to their father as he did the placing of the brick runs. I found the whole endeavor to be interesting but not nearly as interesting as the “colored” folk who were carrying out the tasks. The acorns did not fall far from the tree! Close-cropped “steel wool” hair over clear ebony skin; they possessed the whitest of stereotypical teeth below broad flat noses and wide cheekbones. All three were powerfully built with muscles bulging and glistening with sweat from handling and placing the bricks. “Pepsi Cola’s” decades of brick work had given him shoulders so wide I doubted his ability to walk through a door without turning sideways along with hands that were beaten, scarred and as rough as the slabs on the side of my grandparent’s barn. All three started the day in tattered yet clean tees and denim pants that had patches patched over patches. As the heat of the day intensified, shirts would be discarded exposing broad, powerful chests that were covered in tight black curly hair. Curiously, whenever my grandmother or mother stepped outside, there was a bit of a scramble to put their shirts back on. “Pepsi” was gregarious, singing Negro hymns and laughing his way through the day or “holding court” for anyone near by, which was usually the eight or nine-year old “little man” that was me. I found him to have the most interesting accent to go along with a lot of words that began with “dees” ended in “esses.” His sons were the exact opposite – quiet and, I would say, somewhat sullen. In hindsight, my guess is that there was little way to wedge a word in edgewise with “Pepsi Cola” around.

I learned a lesson of the times during the course of the remodeling. Sent to carry a jug of water out to the workers, I asked Mr. Mobley, “Mr. Mobley, would you like some water?” “Eyes do, Eyes do, indeeds, Little Man,” he answered with his best grin. In turn, I gave the sons water and returned to my grandmother who informed me of my grievous faux pas, “You don’t refer to ‘coloreds’ by mister unless you use their first name.” Okay, “Mister Pepsi Cola!”

For me and the rest of South Carolina, Separate but Equal would hold on tenaciously until my senior year when “token integration” was introduced. Over the next few years, mainly 1969 and 1970, full integration and busing would rule the day when made possible by the threat of losing federal funds instead of earlier threats of federal troops which could not help but bring back references to Reconstruction. Scenes of angry whites meeting buses carrying black children had been broadcast nationwide on our little black and white television since 1957 in Arkansas. Luckily these scenes were not played out in our little corner of the world; however, throughout the state white families fled their public schools, preferring instead to turn down federal subsidies and send their children to private schools bearing names of Confederate generals and politicians. Forty-five years later many of those “academies” still exist, especially in areas that can be described as socially and economically lacking and whose public schools are still predominantly black.

Most of our fears have not been realized. Our most prized possessions it would seem, our women, were not carried off and gang-raped by angry blacks. I guess some white supremacist would say that things are worse because there are A LOT of BIRACIAL folks walking the streets and country roads of the South today. I wonder by what means they got here? Oddly enough, there is even one in the White House! Could it be that most of us are finally overcoming our fears?

I wrote this in the language of the times and it was not meant to offend anyone…except racist and white supremacist. I hope I was successful.

BARNS AND BUTTERMILK

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Sitting across the road from my house is an old red barn. Some one hundred and twenty years ago that same barn sat on land that was part of an original two-hundred-and-fifty-acre tract of farmland formally known as The Bramlett Place. By 1987, when we signed over our lives over to it, that original tract of land had shrunk to eighty-five acres which was eighty more acres than we were looking for.

The original tract had been dispersed to who knows where. I know part of it was sold as a tract of land across the road because, at some moment in history, the original barn was separated from the farmhouse by what is known today as Scenic Highway 11 or the Cherokee Foothills Highway. My garden is located directly across the road from the barn and there is not a day that goes by that I don’t commit the deadly sin of envy because I covet the barn. I guess it could be worse; I could be coveting my neighbor’s wife.

I love old barns. I stop and take pictures of old barns and try to visualize how they would have looked in their “hay” day. I have even drawn plans for my own barn that I am going to build one of these days, if that day ever comes before the sands of the hourglass run out. I love what I would call old southern barns that aren’t tobacco barns, although even tobacco barns beat the gambrel or saltbox roof…for looks. For some reason I associate gambrel-roofed barns with the barbarian part of the world located above the Mason-Dixon Line. I’m sure that, for usable space, gambrel roofs allow you to put more hay in the loft but how much hay do you need for one horse and one cow?

I associate barns with my youth. One plow horse and one milk cow were all we had, and our barn didn’t have those nifty advertisements painted on the side either. “Visit Lookout Mountain”, “See Rock City” or “Drink Coca Cola” would have been nice, but you could not have seen it from the road anyway.

My grandparents’ barn was a slab-sided barn. For the uneducated, slabs were the outer bark covered planks that were first trimmed from the log that is being processed. Because a log has a rounded surface, slabs cut from a log had one round side and one flat side. Since they were cut from different sized logs there was no rhyme or reason for their width. This made them only useful as barn siding or for burning in a wood stove or fireplace. We did both.

My grandfather and his brother, Banks, ran a sawmill during the winter months to help make ends meet until my grandfather began working full time at Springs Mills. The sawmill itself consisted of a large rotating circular saw blade that was turned with a pulley belt attached to an incredibly old tractor. I do not know this for sure, but it makes the story in my head warmer to believe that Paw Paw not only built the barn with his own hands but also built it from the lumber that he and his brother milled themselves. True or not, that is the story that I have decided to believe.

As a child that barn seemed huge but, as I sit here as an adult, I realize it could not have been that big. It had only a pair of stalls on one side and a tack room and workshop on the other. It was separated by an entry way large enough to accommodate an old wagon and various plows, planters, and a drag-harrow. Above it all was a loft that was a child’s dream of a playhouse…until I found the twenty-foot snakeskin. Okay, it might have been a little shorter.

Cowboys and Indians, war games and hide-and-seek were all played in and around that barn and in its loft. One game that almost got out of hand was played after seeing some old western movie where the hero jumps from the second-story balcony onto his horse and, without so much as a grunt, rides off after the desperados.

My best bud decided he wanted to imitate Roy Rogers but because we didn’t have a second-story balcony or a horse at the time we decided to use the loft and his bicycle as stand-ins. That didn’t turn out too well and, thankfully, he jumped first while I was holding his bike. Ouch! Not that I was a chicken or anything, but I decided quickly that I didn’t want to imitate him. I wonder if he ever had any children.

One of the first clear memories that I have as a child is of following Nannie, my grandmother, into the barn at dark thirty to milk the cow. Winter or summer, clear or rainy, it did not matter. The cow had to be milked and it was milked every morning before my grandfather returned from his third shift at Springs in his ’49 Oldsmobile Rocket 88.

During the spring and summer, after a breakfast that always included fresh milk, biscuits, grits or oatmeal and eggs, he would trade the Olds for the plow horse and head to the fields before finally going to bed in the early afternoon to rest for his next shift that began at ten that night. My clear memory is of Nannie milking that cow while squatting on her heels in the manner that only country folks can seem to achieve. The memory must have been of an event that took place in winter because my memory is of the steam first rising from the water Nannie used to wash the cow’s udder and then from the milk itself as it hit the cold milk bucket.

Before being refrigerated, the milk would be placed in a clear pitcher and allowed to separate. Cream would rise to the top and be skimmed off and used for baking or to “whiten” the bitter Luzianne coffee with chicory that my grandparents preferred. Of course, there would be raw, unpasteurized milk for the rest of us.

Once a week it would seem, leftover milk would be poured into a churn and turned into sweet, pale-yellow butter and its byproduct, buttermilk, which unlike the butter, was not sweet at all. While I cook with it, buttermilk is not something that I have ever developed a taste for so. I got lost on that path around home.

I remember meals that involved leftover cornbread crumbled in cold glasses of buttermilk. In my mind’s eye I see both of my grandparents wiping their mouths after finishing off a glass of buttermilk and smiling in such a way to make me believe it was the best liquid libation one could have. Eventually the “buttermilk gone bad” would be fed to the hogs.

Periodically, I drink a little buttermilk just to remind myself that I still don’t like it and that I don’t really know how you tell if buttermilk has gone bad. Aside from what was used to make biscuits, it all could have gone to the hogs. Luckily, my youthful memories are as rich as the raw unpasteurized sweet milk in my grandmother’s milk bucket. There are only a few memories that remind me of the soured buttermilk we fed to the hogs.