Loose Strife

We’ve been back for over a week now and I’m finally getting around to posting a more detailed trip report. You can find photos from our trip at photos.dizz.org/200806AR. 
We arrived late on Thursday into Little Rock and crashed at Jerry and Karen’s house, where they had a pig’s mess of roasted pig. It was the first of many barbeque meals and I wasn’t complaining. Jerry Ray is Laura’s oldest cousin, a liquor distributor with a taste for fine wine, good food, and travel. We’ve met up with him a couple times in California while he was on expeditions to the Napa area in search of good wine. But for this trip, we missed Jerry because we were a day late and he was away. The next morning the girls splashed in the pool for a little while, Jerry and Karen’s son James stopped by, and then we headed west on Rt 40 for the Ozarks.  
About three hours later we arrived at Ronda and Troy’s house. Ronda is one of Laura’s seven Arkansas aunts. Troy is a pastor for a Missionary Baptist church in Ozark — the third church he’s literally built in the area. Their children, Ada and Kirby, both live nearby and their kids are close in age to Lily and Naomi. So our girls had no trouble making quick friends — swinging, wading, riding an ATV.  And we all enjoyed more delicious barbeque. Yummy. I chatted with Kirby for a while. He’s a real cowboy — running a beef cattle ranch down the road a bit. And he also runs a “cowboy church”.
I took a drive around the area and saw a modest winery and vineyard operation. What amounts to a large scale wine operation in Arkansas is not much to see, especially compared to the huge farms in the Delta that we’d be seeing later. Back at Ronda’s we kept eating more food until I was just about waddling. Natalie cajoled Naomi to sing Do Re Me a half dozen more times. Laura, I, and the kids spent the night at Ada’s house nearby where she’s in the middle of an impressive renovation.
The next day, Saturday, we were in the car heading back across the state to the southeastern region of the Mississippi Delta — Holly Grove — where Laura’s father grew up and most of her aunts and uncles live (eleven brothers and sisters; nine in Arkansas; eight near Holly Grove). Holly Grove seems to me like the quintessential old country south. The region, northwest of Helena, is flat as a pancake — an enormous, rich alluvial plain. After leaving the highway we drove along straight roads with fields of corn, rice, or winter wheat stretching from the road into the distance. “Town” is a 3 block zig-zag and then it’s gone again. There’s an auto parts store, a liquor store, dozens of mostly rundown homes, and two churches — the methodist and presbyterian sitting on opposite corners of one of the crossroads in town. On the opposite diagonal corners are two homes: one is Laura’s uncle Dickie and wife Ginny, on the other are her aunts Norma Ann and Arlene.  
We stopped at her aunts’ house first and had some iced tea — always sweetened with Fasweet.  I got talking to her aunts about what it felt like to witness the gradual decline of their town. They told me that in the 40s and 50s there was hardly room on the sidewalk on a Friday or Saturday night. There were multiple grocery stores, restaurants, a cinema, etc. But as automobiles became affordable even to the poor, small towns like Holly Grove lost out to bigger towns that were now not so far away, like Brinkley or Helena.
But in addition to the availability of fast transportation, I’m pretty sure that the town has shrunk so much because the population has shrunk. In the mid-1900s Laura’s grandfather managed a sharecropper farm outside of Holly Grove with, I think, a thousand or more acres divided into small parcels among hundreds of farmers. Every year they’d show up to pick up their mules to farm their 40 acres. The physical labor required to farm was immense until tractors and large-scale automation were introduced. Now one person can farm several thousand acres with some extra hands for harvesting, contractors for spraying, etc.
So farmland in Arkansas looks nothing like New England. There are no quaint old sidehill barns among rolling hayfields. Instead, large metal sheds are found infrequently along the roads. They protect huge tractors and equipment. And these machines work on sprawling, flat acreages — much of it rented from distant landowners. This is the real farming of most of America. Massive, efficient, and industrialized. And, ironically, almost none of it ends up directly on our dinner plate. It’s not monoculture exactly because fields are rotated among soybean, rice, wheat, corn, and cotton. But for the most part, these crops are harvested in massive amounts and trucked to grain elevators in nearby towns where they are ultimately incorporated into processed food or exported.
The afternoon we arrived we headed over to Laura’s aunt Ozella and uncle Stanley’s place in Ragtown — about 10 miles east of Holly Grove. Ozella is a bright smiling, tiny woman who seems to care more than she could contain. She’s always thinking about us, checking up on the computer, calling us up to make sure we got home OK. She beams when we arrive and fixes me a screwdriver.
The winter wheat harvest has just begun and their son Calvin farms over a thousand acres. Calvin’s brother Stanley Karel, was helping with the harvest, as was Laura’s uncle Billy. While everyone visited (and Naomi continued to sing show tunes to anyone who would listen), I drove out to meet Calvin a couple miles away where he and Billy were harvesting wheat. The combine was a huge machine, with a small air-conditioned cab at the top. (I soon realized that the dust was so severe that it would be almost impossible to drive without a closed cab.) A 25 foot wide spinning cutter bar gobbled up the grass, sucked it into its belly, separated the seed, spit out the chaff, and tossed the seed into a hopper pulled by Billy in a tractor that drove beside the combine.
It was fun, but the whole scope of it all seems like risky business. I would guess that the weather or some input price could fluctuate just a little and throw the whole financial picture into the red when you’re dealing with such a big operation. What happens when you take a futures contract for wheat and then the price of fuel goes up 50%? Or your work shed blows down in tornado winds, like it did for Calvin?
Back at Ozella and Stanley’s we had another classic family feast that included more barbeque (no regrets!) and rich desserts. Visiting continued late into the night. The girls were so tired that they were starting to hysterically spin like tops. I took them back to our “base camp” at Janice and Randy’s place, a few miles south of Holly Grove. They were asleep in the car before I was a mile down the road.
Janice is one of Laura’s cousins, Bobbie’s daughter, and she and Randy have a really nice place on the banks of Maddox Bay, but they weren’t there. Randy is a crop duster and this time of year is so busy that they often live at the airport.  We stopped by the airport to visit and check in with Janice. She’s been in terrible back pain for many months and we worry about her a lot. Everyone keeps praying that she gets some relief…
And so we were grateful but felt guilty for taking over their house — considering that Janice wasn’t well. Still, everyone insisted that we do so, which is predictable southern hospitality, but also genuine, it seems, and we could hardly refuse.
Maddox Bay isn’t a conventional bay. It’s actually a long, sinewy branch off the White River in the White River National Wildlife Refuge — a swampy mix of bottomland and bayous. I borrowed a fishing boat with an outboard motor and took the girls for a ride. Lily insisted that we turn back as soon as she lost sight of civilization, but Naomi and I then struck out on our own and had fun watching the turtles sun themselves and spotting snakes wriggle across the water. We turned off the motor and lazily floated among the flooded low lands. The boat ride would have been perfect if the fish were biting, but a recent high water flooding seems to have kept the fish away according to Laura’s uncle Neil. So instead, we had other fishing plans for another day.
On Sunday afternoon there was a lunch at the Presbyterian church hall in Holly Grove just for Laura. Pretty much all the rest of the Colemans that we hadn’t yet seen were at the church for another big buffet. Not everyone actually lives around Holly Grove. Most of Laura’s aunts and uncles do, but the cousins have all moved elsewhere: Little Rock, Jonesboro, etc. But everyone came back to Holly Grove — even some distant cousins and old Coleman family friends.
Laura cried a lot during the goodbyes. She told me that she kept thinking that each goodbye was the last. We took lots of pictures, including a big group photo of 44 kin.
Laura often didn’t wear a hat that day and during the rest of our visit. Her hair is growing back now in a very odd way that’s sort of male-pattern-baldness meets hari krishna. We call it her inverse mohawk. And in the back is a strange square of hair with straight edges and sharp corners. (Her oncologist has never seen such a growth pattern.) But she’s comfortable with the crazy look. It’s easier to just accept the weirdness of it all than to try to make herself look different. At home she has a drawer full of caps, hats, head scarves, and a wig — but she never found the lid that was right for her and now that it’s warm, she wears a baseball cap mostly just to shade the sun.
Before we left the Sunday food extravaganza, Naomi and Lily found the dress-up clothes — this time across the street at Dickie and Ginny’s where there’s a big collection for their granddaughters. Their house is a craftsman bungalow and it’s packed with all sorts of interesting collectables. And in their backyard was a big, strutting rooster. The story of the week on 2nd street seemed to be the fate of this bird, which apparently was purchased by one neighbor from another for dinner, but it escaped. While its fate was discussed in the neighborhood, the bird took refuge in Dickie’s backyard.
Later that evening we all went over to Laura’s cousin Matthew’s house. Matthew and Melanie have two boys — the second just recently born and the second grandson of one of Laura’s aunts to be given a first name of Coleman. Matthew was one of the cousins that came up to visit us this past winter. When I first joined the family, Matthew seemed to be the one with the most wild redneck personality. I remember a running joke about Matthew saying something like “Looka here what I done kilt” after picking off some animal from his truck. It was a line that echoed among Laura’s brothers and sisters as though it was yet another Saturday Night Live quote. Shorthand for a place and a lifestyle. Matthew works for a local ag company as a contractor spraying fields and I think he works spring, summer, and fall just so he can spend the winter duck hunting. But there’s a lot of family sentimentality in this good old boy, too. He’s one of the three or four in the family that’s always calling to keep in touch and check in. And Matthew now owns, after much effort, Mamaw Cassie and Papaw Lawrence’s old house — the small farmhouse that Laura and all the grandchildren remember well. So Matthew and I stood in his backyard, drank some Bud Light and he showed me antler racks and duck tags and told me stories about the people and the farms all around us.
We spent the next day, Monday, at Laura’s Aunt Bobbie’s. Bobbie is the oldest of the eleven Colemans and she and her husband Neil live on the main road south out of Holly Grove near a cross roads called Deep Elm. People call it Deep Elem, though, and claim there was an infamous juke joint there that was the inspiration for the Deep Elem Blues. “If you go down to Deep Elem, keep your money in your shoes; The women in Deep Elem got those Deep Elem blues.” (The roots of the delta blues include this part of Arkansas, but it’s hard to tell unless you search for it. I wanted to go to Helena this trip to try to get a sense of the history of the local black music culture, but unfortunately I didn’t make it.)
Bobby has a wonderful, pull no punches, down home personality and she always has something going on in the kitchen — greens on the stove, biscuits in the oven, fish in the fryer. Neil is a quiet man who these days spends a lot of time tending his garden, checking on his laying hens, or fishing in the bay. I know that I’ve settled into a visit when I can successfully chat with Neil — a slow, deliberate cadence from lips that seem to barely move and words that drip with local accent.
Neil had learned that Tina Wilson had a pond behind her place that was stocked with plenty of brim. I wanted to take the girls fishing, so Neil, Joe, Naomi, Lily and I drove to Tina’s house in Ragtown with a bucket of crickets and some makeshift fishing rods — one made from an old reed. I should probably be worried that the girls’ first fishing trip set unreasonable future expectations. The brim in the pond were so hungry that it almost didn’t matter whether there was bait on the hook or not. The line was never in the water for more than five seconds before the bob begun to dive and the girls would give a tug and out came one fish after the other. Twenty in all. They squealed with pride and posed for pictures of their catch.
When we got back to Bobby and Neil’s, Laura was resting. She had thrown up a couple times and was wiped out. It was the first time she’d been ill in a week or more. Even though Laura’s generally in good health, her chemo or cancer or both will shout out regularly to make sure we don’t forget she’s sick.
While Laura rested, we picked a few of the bigger fish (none more than 6 inches) to prepare for dinner. Lily helped scale them and both girls rolled them in cornmeal to be fried. I hoped the whole experience — a meal from start to finish — would be instructive, fun, maybe it would even test better. I imagined that this would be a watershed moment where southern cooking would awaken their appetites for good food, but alas come dinner they stayed with the reliable french fries and steered clear of the fish except to play with the fish skeletons now cleaned by me of every morsel.
Somehow that day the girls and I also squeezed in a trip to see cousins Kinsey, Katie, and Emma down the road in St Charles where Brandon and Misty have a swimming pool and dress-up clothes. Heaven!
The next day, Tuesday, was a lazy day. Laura slept. I took the kids boating. More visiting with relatives in the evening. Laura’s second cousin Angie came by, who has been dealing with her own struggle with breast cancer.
On Wednesday, we packed up to go, met at Bobbie and Neil’s again, and the other aunts — Ozella, Norma Ann, Arlene, and Brenda — came by to visit one last time. More photos and more tears. We left for the airport in the early afternoon.
Because of more weather delays we missed our scheduled flight and we spent an extra night in Arkansas — imposing again at the last minute on Jerry and Karen. Luckily Jerry was home this time, so we got to visit with him after all. (I only regret that he wouldn’t let me pay for the pizza!) The next morning as we waited to leave for the airport, Karen pulled out dance performance videos for Lily and Naomi to watch. Karen runs a dance school in North Little Rock and we watched the recitals from years back. The girls jumped around as they watched young children their ages perform for a crowd. Maybe a seed planted?
And then we were finally off and arrived back home in Ashfield to a quiet little house and bullfrogs and peepers.
So long Arkansas. Thanks to all who put up with us, fed us, gave us shelter, and otherwise made our visit so good. (The rest of the pictures can be found in the Arkansas photo album.)