Stories of growing up in the south

[FrommerStop]

This is written by the head of the 'Southern Fruit Fellowship of growing up in Mississippi.

Have Gun; Will Travel
My first job that actually paid money was bounty hunting. I was about seven or eight years old, I guess. Ten cents per carcass; cash on the barrelhead. Grandma was my employer.
She paid me to sit under her back porch and shoot birds out of her extensive fig orchard with a .22 rifle. Birds of all sorts kept a close eye on those maturing Brown Turkeys, and when the fruit was ripe, they descended upon the bushes in hordes. Birds can really devastate a fig crop – they’ll take a peck out of one after the other, not consuming a single fruit but ruining them all. This distressed Grandma. Fresh and canned figs were a big part of our family’s diet. She and Mama spent all summer canning fruit and vegetables. Fig and pear preserves, plum and blackberry jelly - those were our sweets to eat all year long. Grandma had the old-time farmer’s attitude toward any varmit that threatened a food crop – eliminate it.
I was a very proud boy on those occasions when I presented her with a pail of slain songbirds. She counted them out and paid on the spot, pleased to be rid of these nuisances. Most were blue jays and blackbirds, with a rare crow - very rare, since crows are usually smarter than your average eight-year-old boy. Grandma asked me not to shoot mockingbirds. She believed they kept snakes out of the yard, and they sang for her. Woodpeckers carried a bounty of 25 cents – they pecked holes in her unpainted wood house, up high in the eaves, where it was difficult to repair. I killed only a few; my stalking skills were still developing. Woodpeckers are smarter than they look.
Grandma bragged on me so much a neighbor offered to pay me to rid her orchard of pests, too. I found contract killing to be quite lucrative – it didn’t pay as well as lawn-mowing, but it was much easier and a whole lot more fun!
The older generations of farming folks were generally pretty hard on any form of wildlife they considered non-edible, dangerous, or predatory. Hawks, owls, raccoons, and foxes were all shot on sight, lest they bother the poultry. And they did indeed all kill chickens with relish; I have seen it myself. Hawks learn to watch for flocks of chickens in the open and will return to kill one every day. Owls will actually alight and crawl through cracks in a henhouse to get at the chickens. Foxes often seem to go into frenzy once inside a coop – they just can’t stop with one hen; they will kill an entire flock in an orgy of bloodletting. That’s not a scene a farmer likes to see when he opens the coop door in the morning.
It goes without saying that all snakes were killed as soon as spotted, except maybe king snakes or corn snakes. King snakes eat other snakes, which was thought to be a very good thing. Many farmers caught corn snakes to release into their corncribs – they ate lots of rats. Of course, hawks, owls, foxes, and many other species of snakes also prey on rats, but that didn’t matter – if a varmit looked too hard at a chicken, he was dead.
I’m not sure if chicken snakes really eat chickens, but they do eat eggs, sometimes several at a time. Many of us have quite vivid memories of groping around for eggs in a nest and grabbing instead a five-foot chicken snake. That’ll wake you up!
Big, aged snapping turtles were thought to eat all the fish out of a pond and were edible themselves, so were easy to catch as they crossed roads.
The list of “good” critters was very short. Bats, purple martins, and toads were spared because they ate mosquitoes – a helpful function in Mississippi. Buzzards were tempting targets but were never shot since their undertaking activities were considered necessary. Mockingbirds were sacrosanct. Legal hunting seasons on game were often respected.
I’m sure many of you are having a fit right now, aghast at the barbaric slaughter of so many innocent beasts and bemoaning the damage it did to the ecology. You’re right, too, in a way, and I agree it’s ignorant to exterminate creatures just because they might someday give trouble. We’re a little more enlightened nowadays. But look, don’t dare judge those olden farmers; you and I have the luxury of hindsight and a lifestyle that is not hand-to-mouth subsistence farming. If an animal dines on our garden, we’re not really going to go hungry, are we? We can afford to be merciful; they couldn’t. You must view it in the proper context – it really was a different time and place.
In this part of the world, sixty or seventy years ago, there wasn’t any industry of which to speak. Nearly everyone farmed; they grew cotton for cash, corn to feed stock, and vegetables, chickens, and hogs to feed themselves. When a varmit ate some of this, farmers saw it as food taken directly from the mouths of their children, and did the best they could to eliminate this competition – they shot, trapped, or poisoned it, ruthlessly. A strict zero-tolerance policy was upheld against all “varmits.”
There’s been quite a turnabout since the old days, hasn’t there? Both in the landscape and in peoples’ attitudes. And for the better, I think. Things are a lot easier on the wild creatures now. Much of the land that was farmland when I was a youth is now wooded, or in that lovely transition state in between the two, which provides SO much cover and food. My father was an avid hunter, but never killed a deer, or a turkey; there just weren’t any around in the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, all had been shot out, and poor habitat was left for them. I stopped deer hunting after I killed 100 of them. My dad and uncles hunted POSSUMS at night, all the coons and foxes had been killed out – now, I can see them every day, in my YARD, in TOWN. Panthers and bears have moved back into this area. The OTTERS are back in Mississippi! Apparently, all those pine trees we’ve planted over old cropland have slowed soil erosion, so our creeks and rivers are clearer. When I was a child, the bag limit on ducks was about one a day, and I never saw a Canada goose until I was fifteen years old – now, the sky abounds with waterfowl, and I can literally look up and see geese in the sky at any time. We have coyotes, armadillos, and fire ants now, too, THOSE are recent arrivals; the jury is still out on them, but I’m pretty sure they’d be placed in the “varmit” category by any old-time farmers. People are now planting crops specifically to nurture birds and animals, and for the bees, other pollinators, butterflies, and hummingbirds, too. “Wildlife food plots” are a major industry; it’s keeping some of those old feed stores alive. I consider the fruit trees that I plant now as being as much for the wild animals as myself.
I grow fig trees, but I never get a single fruit from them. Birds take them all. I’ve no complaint – I reckon I owe them.
(This article was printed in POMONA and the Southern Fruit Fellowship Newsletter a few years ago. Odd, but I got more responses from this article than anything else I’ve ever written, way more. It seemed to strike a chord with middle-aged and older men – apparently, this was sort of a Rite of Passage for males of my generation, to be handed a weapon and sent forth to protect the family’s food crops, and we took those responsibilities very seriously. It seemed to stir fond memories of days spent afield stalking the elusive fig-eating jaybird. We live in a strange world.)

 

[FLT]

That brought back many fond memories, thanks for posting it.

 

[FrommerStop]

The author was Larry Stephenson

.Below of some of the pictures for the public enemies of his youth along with a damaged fig.

 

[FrommerStop]

A moccasin is killed on sight.

 

[FrommerStop]

Here is another of Larry's Stories

June, 1865​

SOMEWHERE IN ALABAMA…a threadbare figure trudges down a dusty country road. He’s gaunt, unshaven, unwashed, shoulders slumping a bit, rather a despondent sort of character. He is Captain Davis, discharged from the Army of the Confederacy six weeks ago at Greensboro, NC, after serving his country faithfully for the past four years. He’s a civilian now and walking back to his home in Kosciusko, Mississippi. It’ll take him most of the summer. He’s eager to get back home, but at the same time, anxious as to what he is returning to – mail has been unreliable in the Confederacy of late; the last letter he had from his wife was eight months ago. These are uncertain times, and he doesn’t know if he will find his family and neighbors alive, or where they may be. He is fairly sure how he will find his farm – after four years without its master’s hand, the fields will be overgrown, stock run off, house and fences in poor condition, IF still standing.

He’s just spent the last four years of his life engaged in a War, and got whipped, and THOROUGHLY whipped, and he knows it; all that he has fought for has been lost. It shows in his attitude and his stance; it’s difficult not to be dejected. The last couple of years have been Hard Times in the South, and there’s the strong possibility times will become even harder.

He doesn’t have much. The patched gray uniform he’s wearing, cracked boots with one sole starting to flop, a Leech and Rigdon revolver with one nipple broken, a pocketknife, a blanket folded to make a pack containing a skillet made of a canteen half nailed to a stick, a small sewing kit, half a Bible (he’s been through desperate times recently, desperate indeed to force him to tear pages from his beloved Pocket Testament), and in one jacket pocket, a piece of cloth carefully wrapped around a dozen apple seeds. He takes out these seeds occasionally and gazes at them, then returns them to his pocket.

A couple of weeks ago, somewhere in the Carolinas, some kind soul took pity on him and gave him three apples. He ate them right away, stems, cores, and all, first food he had had in three days, and thought they were the very finest apples he had ever eaten. The seeds, though, he thoughtfully saved the seeds…

A few years ago he would have had no regard whatsoever for a palmful of apple seeds – just trash, something to be spat upon the ground after enjoying the fruit. Things are different now. To Captain Davis, those few apple seeds represent something…they are Something of Value; they represent HOPE, a promise of better things to come, a possibility of someday feeding his family…in his mind, they are his most valuable possession. Hope, and Promise, and Possibility – those things are short on the ground nowadays, and he seizes these things to his breast, desperately. He envisions his children wandering amongst the vast forest of apple trees he will plant from these seeds, plucking unblemished apples from fruit-laden boughs as pink and white petals flutter down around them, while the most delicious aroma in the world fills the air…hogs and horses fatten on the drops. This is a dream worth holding onto. Those apple seeds are his Treasure, and he guards them carefully.

In time, he does make it home. Some things are better than he expected, some worse. His wife is still alive; one child has died of a fever. His parents have passed away, but his wife’s parents are still alive. The house has burned down, but the barn is in good condition. The fields are overgrown with blackberries and sweetgum sprouts, but he knows they can be burned off in the coming winter, and the ashes will enrich the soil. He plants those apple seeds his second day home, in a prime spot, and tends them carefully. Most do sprout, and in time, produce fruit. All but one tree makes hard, sour crabapples, which he makes into cider. The one tree, though, makes very nice eating apples, pretty color, and good flavor. He digs sprouts to plant several more around his property, and does feed his family with them, and after a number of years even has enough to sell for cash. His neighbors all want trees of this apple, and he generously shares them.

When Captain Davis is an old, old man, his grandsons build him a bench under the original tree. He sits there often, when the weather is nice, and reflects upon his life. Occasionally he looks up at the limbs, and muses to himself, “Ah, well, at least I got ONE good thing out of that damn war!”

OK, this story is 99% pure speculation and imagination on my part, but the basic facts are there. Don’t you think this is likely the way it happened? I’m a Southerner myself, bred and born; we’re not a folk to let a few facts interfere with the telling of a good story.

History and description: This is a well-known local apple around the Kosciusko, Mississippi area. Records show that Captain Davis was discharged from the C.S.A. on April 26, 1865, in Greensboro, N.C. On his way home, he ate some apples from “somewhere in the Carolinas” and put the seed in his pocket. Upon his arrival at the family farm approximately 8 miles north of Kosciusko, he planted the seed and this resulted in a fine apple tree kept through root sprouts by family from the late 1860’s to 2003. I found this apple in the fall of 2003 at his former home in Kosciusko. The apple is 3” in dia. and is oblate. It is green with a red cheek and ripens in late July through August. The skin has numerous dots. The stem is 1/4” to 3/8” and the cavity has rust. The basin is very shallow, slightly ribbed with an open calyx. The flesh is white, crisp, and fairly tart, and is an excellent cooking apple. This is a pretty apple with no sign of rot. The tree is a spur type and has a vigorous growth habit. Four additional trees exist at another descendant’s home place (the Ralph Walker home place). - Jack Herring

My friend Jack Herring of Brandon, Mississippi, has been an avid apple explorer for many years. He grew up in north-central Mississippi, and has done a lot of searching in this area for heirloom fruit, or worthy seedling trees. One of his more valuable finds has been the Captain Davis apple, described above. Jack doesn’t have many apples at his present home (unsuitable soil), but our mutual friend, Stacy Russell, in Fulton, Mississippi, grows most of Jack’s collection, and has graced me with scionwood from his Captain Davis tree. He reports it to be one of his best apples. Since I live thirty miles from Kosciusko, I think it will be a very suitable apple for me to grow, too. I’m not entirely satisfied with the story behind it, though – here’s MY version, fleshed out a little:

 

[Welldoya]

I used to shoot the birds out of my grandma’s fig trees, mostly blue jays, but I did it with a Daisy Model 25.

 

[MauserLarry]

Thanks FS for posting these stories. I really identify with the first one. Sounds a lot like my upbringing. The second story wouldn't have meant much to me but I found out last year my great grandpa fought in the civil and was fighting in Alabama when it ended. Nobody ever mentioned it when I was coming up but I found it out on the internet of all places. The author lives in the town my mother was born in. Small world.

 

[FrommerStop]

Don't let a good raccoon go bad; shoot it because the only good raccoon is a _____

 

[LowRiderRed]

Thanks FS for posting these stories. I really identify with the first one. Sounds a lot like my upbringing. The second story wouldn't have meant much to me but I found out last year my great grandpa fought in the civil and was fighting in Alabama when it ended. Nobody ever mentioned it when I was coming up but I found it out on the internet of all places. The author lives in the town my mother was born in. Small world.

I love a good Civil War story. My great great grandfather fought in Cobb's Legion, and was from Carrollton, GA. He died at age 99, in Tallassee, AL. My mother is the last living person that knew Grandpa Beck and she has told us his story many times. He fought at Gettysburg, was shot in the thigh and in the chin. He was discharged when he was well enough to walk, and walked back to Georgia. Members of our family still have some of his possessions, including a bullet mold, powder horn, and a few other things. She said he's probably the kindest man she ever knew.

 

[MauserLarry]

damn-that's a long walk! I drove back from up there to Crestview and it nearly killed me.

 

[MauserLarry]

FS-you think Larry still has that .22?

 

[LowRiderRed]

damn-that's a long walk! I drove back from up there to Crestview and it nearly killed me.

He didn't travel straight through. LOL

 

[MarkS]

On my mom’s side all of my great-great- grandpa’s bothers enlisted along with him. One brother was shunned after the war because when he was captured and given the choice of a POW interment or enlisting in the yankee army he choose to fight with the yankees and was never forgiven for it
Still on mom’s side my other great great grandfather got his parole from the Yankees and went home to Chaffin now Milligan, Florida and opened a hotel and general store
Everything he built washed away in the flood of 1928 but he died in 1923 at the age of 99. My great grandmother Emma Carter Merritt drove a wagon from Falco,Al. to Milligan and loaded up her daughter (my grandma’s) belongings before the building washed away.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Fathertime]

If you really want to find out more of the real story of your decendents go to the VA website and request your decendents parole records. Both of my Great Grandfathers fought in the war so I was able to get the records for each of them, what is stated is their own words not hear say, this cleared up some untruths that I had read about one of my GGF. Anyway The Sons Of Confederate Veterans can be very helpful also. I had a dear old friend that lived here in Atmore that I would visit, one day I was visiting her and there was a picture above her bed of a stately gentleman so I asked her who it was, the picture was of her Grandfather who she told me was a Confederate soldier. She told me that he was wounded and was sent to the prison hospital in Chicago that was famous for being the hell hole up north. Her Grandfather was laying in his bed when a doctor and a nurse came by , the doctor would stop at each bed and point his finger at the patient and ask, are you going to live or die? if the patient didn't respond they would move on. When they got to her Grandfathers bed and asked the question he responded in his own words " I am going to live so I can get out of this hell and I will return to the south because there is no way that I will die up north" . The doctor told the nurse to treat him and he survived to be able to come back home were he lived for the rest of his life.

 

[M60Gunner]

Some states have the unit and pension records from the war of northern aggression on microfiche. It was wonderful to see the records of the battles and where he was wounded, what unit he was with, the pension, etc. I have previously posted pics of the sword I have managed to somewhat restore. In my gilded Southern childhood I remember BB gun fights in 2nd grade, firearm education starting in 3rd grade, to having my own shotgun and free roam in the woods behind our house by 5th grade, family reunions at the church, fishing with my grandfather all summer when he wasn't teaching me the 1911 he used in WWII, paper-cup baseball in the front lawn with trees as bases, fresh watermelon, peaches, plums and apples right off the trees, going to the battle fields, the farms of my uncles, the mountains, the islands, beaches, swamps, rivers, lakes and sounds of our state. Imagine if an 8th grader today did an in class report on the 1911 handgun, with blown up pictures and charts! Best part was the prettiest girl in school was in the front row and was genuinely interested and asked me questions lol. I was blessed to grow up in the South, and didn't really understand how wondrous our history and heritage is until my overseas service ended and I returned to the US. My wife, whom I met miraculously within 30 days of being back, is also a southerner with deep family history. As I read and studied the works of Prof Clyde Wilson, Prof David Fischer and others, I stated to understand some of the things my elders had tried to teach me. I was ashamed of my previous behavior, spending years perfecting the hiding of my accent and not standing up to insults and lies told all around me by fools who swallowed the mainstream narrative of racist social bumpkins with low IQ who are inbred. As a grown man I finally am proud of my heritage, and hope my children will understand the gumption and bravery and wherewithal it takes to be a Tarheel, no matter what others may think or say. Here is a true part of my states history, Southern history, American history, with much more unsaid than said...when the state legislature of North Carolina did not return enough votes to secede, this information was communicated to the POTUS, who responded by ordering North Carolina to immediately attack Tennessee. The return reply is famous, and was said to be unanimous, "Sir, you shall get no troops from North Carolina."

 

[Fathertime]

Imagine if an 8th grader today did an in class report on the 1911 handgun, with blown up pictures and charts!


When I was in Grammer School (1st thru 6th ) grade every year we would have show and tell. This was always a wonderful day, I had a guy in the class that would bring the lower jaw of a Japanese soldier that his Grandfather killed and cut out. The reason he did it was because the jaw was full of gold teeth. No one seem to be alarmed or offended at all it was cool to hold it and show it.
we also had parents day were we would bring our parents and show them of, my Daddy would always bring everbody a pencil. I was so proud.