by Everett Reid
These days when that part of my road which lies ahead gets continously shorter than that part I once traveled and since so many changes have occurred, I thought perhaps there might be those who would like to read what it was like in those long ago days.
Grandma Zilphia, mama's mama, had a picture on her parlor wall which fascinated me. It was of an old plantation house, with long white pillars and huge oak trees sheltering it with Spanish moss hanging from their limbs. A flowing river in the foreground completed the picture which had been nicely painted in oils.
"Grandma," I would tease, "Tell me about this house again."
Grandma, who didn't have much patience with kids, didn't mind repeating her story because it involved Uncle Charlie, her favorite son.
"Your Uncle Charlie stayed there for a week," she told me. "He went there to interview a famous judge for a story he was writing."
"And what's that stuff hanging from the trees, Grandma?"
"That's called Spanish Moss," she replied.
"Pretty, isn't it?"
"Some people think so. For my part I think it looks awfully gloomy." And then as if talking to herself she added, "Maybe it affects me that way after seeing so many black men hanging from those limbs too."
"Oh, Grandma, why would they do a thing like that?"
But Grandma would say no more and it was years before I learned that there really was no reason for it. It was just another of the brutalities of man that I witnessed as I traveled along my road.
When I was 15 I had laboriously finished the eighth grade and Papa, who had a great hatred of schools because he felt it caused him to pay high taxes, decided that I had had enough education and made arrangements for me to become a cabinet maker's apprentice. Along with my shop education I received 15 cents an hour totaling to $1.50 a day. All the other men were grumbling and complaining over their wages of 35 cents an hour and a few really skilled workers enjoyed the princely salaries of 50 cents per hour.
From time to time after completing our 10 hour day and we readied ourselves to go home, we'd be confronted by a fiery man who waited outside the gate and tried to talk to the men about their low pay and bad working conditions.
At first no one paid any attention to him for times were tough and jobs hard to find but he kept persisting.
He kept harping about how Harry, the owner, drove a Studebaker while his slaves walked or rode bikes to work in all kinds of weather and earned barely enough money to put food on the table for their families.
"Ya gotta strike. Ya gotta make him hurt," he'd yell, and it wasn't long before he began gathering an audience.
One day I took one of the papers he handed out home to show Papa. The heading in large bold print read, "Fifty cents or nothin'"
Papa eyed it with contempt. "Who ever heard of a working men gettting such a wage. Why, they will all become so rich that nobody will have to work. Take my advice, boy, and keep out of this. When they go out on strike, just phone the office and say you're sick and can't come to work."
So on the day when the big strike was to take place I phoned from McDonald's grocery saying I was sick and couldn't come to work.
The strike lasted three days and all the men returned to work at the minimum wage of 40 cents an hour. My next pay check showed a five cents an hour increase and some of the men taunted me as I hadn't walked the picket line.
Not long afterwards I got a job working in the shipyards where work was always available during the winter months. The place had four huge sheds, each which housed a yacht in the process of being built. It was a race to have them completed by the first of June when the new owners wanted delivery. Then for the next four months the sheds remained empty until about the end of September when new keels would be laid and work again would commence.
During the idel summer days the workers had to find other ways of earning money.
My first summer job was working for a garden farmer who grew vegetables to sell at the farmers market. But by the time the second summer came along I had managed to set aside a considerable sayings and decided to take time off and explore the old south which I had been reading about for so many winter nights by the light of our old Alladin's lamp.
I bought a train ticket to Cincinnati and as I stood on the banks of the mighty Ohio river, I thought of how it had marked the separation of the north and the south during the Civil War. I walked slowly towards the center of the bridge that connects Ohio to Kentucky and when I came to the sign reading, "You are now entering Kentucky" I made a great ceremony of placing one foot in Ohio and the other foot in Kentucky. As I walked for the first time into a Confederate State I could just feel the Civil War in my veins but was a little disappointed that it didn't seem any different than the north.
I put my thumb into action and almost at once got a ride with a salesman driving to Chattanooga. Land of Jefferson Davis, here I come, I thought with excitement. But where were the plantations with the huge oaks dripping with moss that I had seen in the picture on my grandmother's wall? I was disappointed.
Finally, after thumbing rides on semi trucks hauling freight and with farmers on their way to markets, I managed to reach Georgia with its plantations and huge oaks dripping with Spanish moss. This was the deep south where my mama's papa had fought.
What a lot of history those old oaks had witnessed and what a lot of stories they could tell if able. Those majestic beings will be standing long after my travels along my road are over.
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