The Suburbs of Scutchalo

The Suburbs of Scutchalo

© 2024, Tom Chapman

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 979-8-35095-750-1

eBook ISBN: 979-8-35095-751-8

Contents

Preface

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Acknowledgments

For Linda.

Preface

Southwest Mississippi

2008

The celebration was for the hundred-year life of my third Mammaw on my father’s side.

They told us she finished her oatmeal, dabbed neatly with a corner of the napkin, and stood up to head for her spot at the near end of the couch. She sat a spell there, contented, smiling that astounding smile that had you feel arms around you clear across a wide room, and gently slept. We celebrated in dark colors to show a proper depth of hurt and regret but heard from the pulpit how our faces gave away only the joy arrived with news of her passing. All any of us could do was sit up straighter, to beam the brighter. Just as the ache is in us to be done someday with our own course, we knew she was already home. We had her gone on beyond what best pictures as a narrow door, on through the less traveled side entrance held open for those close and comfortable with the owner and his family.

A child of one of the few descents still anchored in the Scutchalo hills, she was Washed in the Blood here, taught school here, told us she drove the school bus since she was going up there anyway. Then she moved ten miles away to the suburb at Utica as a middle-aged woman to share enormous love and devotion, a reservoir of patience and The Lawrence Welk Show on Saturday nights with my older, twice-widowed grandfather. At his death, she came back to the family farm to take sides and throw in with her baby sister at hauling a tight rein for thirty-years on four bachelor brothers and the retired Methodist-preacher brother-in-law.

For her last few years, she could not be here with us the whole time. We would sit and hold hands, but it was clear she wasn’t sure you were in the right place, where you fit in. Now and then we could arrive for a visit to warm hugs and the correct name, followed an hour or two later by hugs just as warm, and a Now, you hurry back to see us, to someone you knew and thought highly of, but weren’t. No matter which way it went, you still left there feeling loved. We always knew who she was, and that made all the difference. To think otherwise would have left us so much the smaller for it, and what good can come of that?

Off to one side at Carpenter Methodist Church with the last brother, himself less than three years shy of century candles, I leaned in to screen his slight frame with mine and swipe with necessary vigor at an impressive crust of closet powder gone unnoticed on the shoulders of an ancient dark suit. I hinted he could be diagnosed with a major case of the dawdles, losing a step or two off his usual speed, to let such a load of dust catch up and settle. He said my Mammaw Dorris and their sister Grace needed full credit for inspired efforts to brush and polish and send him away from the house approximating presentable, to the degree it was possible. He thought that energetic pair likely last had at this neglected old suit five years before when we hurried out here to stand over ninety-nine-year-old brother Blanford.

Then, two years barely gone, 2010 brought another call and I worked again with what might have been the same handkerchief from my own same dark, aging pocket. A single swipe at the one, two at the other, and we looked after the merest clue of smudges on Uncle Sonny’s shoulders, standing this time over tiny ninety-seven-year-old Grace. He decided the powder shortage was our impatience brought to light. He made us out as in too big a rush, not leaving grit time enough to collect between visits to this place. My offer to tend to any overlooked blemish at our next celebration drew a wide-awake promise to do the very same for me. I supposed, because of his age, he had not considered how that sounded—or looking back, maybe he considered it just fine.

He made the monument company wait almost six more years to deliver his stone, the last of the seven siblings to be tilted on edge in the sunny family corner out beyond the old Carpenter settlement. Until then, he could barely hear us talking, but would read the questions if we made them big enough with his notepad and Sharpie King Size. Pulled up two feet from the full-volume television screen, he stayed sharp on what the weather map had in store for tomorrow and was up to date on the highest price to bid on game show merchandise without going over the actual retail value. Count on him tuned in, same time, same station, every day. He said he had long been in the habit of getting by in that condition and thought it bothered us much more than it did him. It definitely was better than the alternative; he felt sure.

Sonny reached a hundred and five the day after Christmas. On the following 10th of March, the long-suffering dark suit was called down.

Spotless? You betcha.

Then hard experience, as it quite often does, turned into the playful teacher.

It had me head off from that final get-together fiddling with windshield visors to annoy a late afternoon sun known to crouch at the side and hop, rude, out from behind not fully leafed-out springtime trees. And I could drive slowly, in no particular hurry jouncing over twisty, log-truck inspired lumps and potholes through battered and regrown, overgrown, ridges and hollows. For distance, there was very little to cover. Well aware of time, I made sure to leave enough for calling up eons. Important things went on here. History, along with a touch of prehistory, came down differently because of this tiny region and its wind-blown placing between Vicksburg and Natchez and closeness to Jackson. Old people like my Mammaw and her sister Grace and those brothers and so many others made sure I heard how the past picked out moments, and events, and even people—and crafted situations that could only be addressed and dealt with in an odd and special corner such as this.

Something along those lines had bounced lively inside my head for years, asking me to look for a way to talk about moments, and events, and especially the people. I made myself the promise to not allow anything I plucked out to come across as earth-shaking, nor momentous, nor a serious history lesson. What I hand over to the page should be of simple lives, and simple living—and unimportant, everyday news worth repeating.

But before any attempt is made, I know better than to let myself be thought an instigator of anyone innocent, anyone unversed, to come prowl alone through Scutchalo. It happens without my contribution anyway—regularly. Three old citizens report on being born ad-lib in a couple of nearby towns. They arrived on the scene to echoes of cusses and screams, grown cynical in the wait for old-time house calling doctors to find a way back from the overnight hills. They, those docs, found themselves wonderfully lost is what they did—and forced the demand on me to explain how passing familiar sights three times carries no shame. Half the forks in the road, in the middle of one, stumped, looked just like the one before, and remarkably like the next when they came to it. Useless in that day to give a thus far loyal Ford or Chevy its head and lie back to doze across the seat while it finds the way to its own stable door.

My sweet mother dared to stand and defend those turns and twists, saying they were not without certain virtue. She would wink and suggest the prospect of a quick safety inspection on taillights as you come up behind yourself in a switchback. And our father taught my brother and me early on to not let bouts of shuddering anxiety and nervous breakdown get in the way of youthful explorations. He set us loose to teenaged toing and froing at all hours, knowing at least half the people we could meet were somehow related and the rest would be friends and neighbors fine-tuned to one another’s business, for better or for worse. We judged he had dropped that last in there for effect, to give us an unfamiliar word, with any luck to give us pause.

Our late and esteemed U. S. congressman Charlie Griffin stood up and crowed proudly, loudly and often on Capitol Hill of his birth and proper Southern rearing in a special, singular place he called Scutchalo. Pressed for details, he insisted the hills and hollows and rich bottomlands, just like the rest of the true South, exist. But he would add, we cannot fail to notice a degree of confusion rising out of smart people not willing to agree on a set of boundaries. Is the region five miles wide or eight? Is it ten miles long or thirteen? Suggestions offer this public road and that to serve as borders. Though outlining a much larger area than realistic, at least they were something we could find and point out in a current atlas. Others saw more trust in sets of landmarks, possibly some of those forks in the road, maybe a rattling wooden bridge crossing a tiny creek, or what about that leaning old barn as a starting point? In the last stages of dilapidation, would another storm leave it upright and on hand at the next trip? Guests came searching for something or somebody and were directed to look for a certain jump-off spot a mile down the road. Arrived there, the farmer or timberman met convinced them they might as well turn right around, as they had gone by it a mile or so back.

Tongue wedged in a cheek at a Lion’s Club luncheon in nearby Port Gibson, the ever-honorable Charlie Griffin responded to a lady’s question and nailed the area down to a population center of less than 50,000—and it starts just beyond the next ridge.

Paul Gallows Road sets off as an unconvincing, unsuccessful strip of asphalt just beyond an unremarkable next ridge in the southwestern corner of Hinds County. It lets itself be renamed Hickory Ridge where it meets eastern Claiborne County deep in the hills. Threading my way toward that jump-off point, I was not surprised by a lack of signposts and signage upright on the shoulders to advertise the occasion from both directions. Log trucks, long, long log trucks negotiating tight turns, haul full tree-length timber away to sawmills and papermills. Half their enormity rides in or on the other side of the road ditch through curves, mashing evidence into briar- and Johnsongrass-cloaked oblivion. Bear in mind there are very few mailboxes left to report missing. Switchbacks and glimpses into bottomless, timbered creases kept me focused on my hood ornament and awake. Snaking away from the outskirts of the tiny town of Utica along this tall geologic backbone, I take my time east to west through the middle toward the ghost town of old Rocky Springs and it’s still active 1837 Methodist Church.

Everything falls away down from this narrow lane-and-a-half toward Big Sand Creek on the north and Bayou Pierre Creek to the south. At any point along its barely twelve-mile length, I knew I would be no more than a couple of miles from either of these north or south unmarked borders. Any descriptions or directions I might offer come across best anchored on this less than noteworthy track and those two creeks, one of them noteworthy and Big Sand not so much.

Turning aside often, my design passes me within sight of more than a dozen family cemeteries. Close by these once stood dozens and dozens, hundreds, of substantial residences—and even pretentious mansions—built and maintained over generations from the production of a wildly thriving agriculture. Planters and their varied labor forces marched off to scatter cotton seed over undulating yellow-gray dirt and dragged back reinforced nine-foot-long canvas sacks, sacks overstuffed with a snowfall that tumbled out turned to gold. And they definitely were never reluctant to spend and enjoy and show off their gold. My first notice of someone applying ostentatious was in a description of one of those uppity old homes.

Only occasional eighty-acre clear-cut timber sales and their just-completed late-wintertime replantings to pine seedlings let me see far enough driving along to imagine a picture of the region, well-off and well-to-do, shorn very nearly treeless pre-Civil War, pre-boll weevil and pre-Great Depression. Families and their guests relaxed back then on a cool, breezy porch, receiving company on the gallery. Their view took in long miles down and across Bayou Pierre’s wide basin and Big Sand’s smaller drainage.

Eroded, corrugated by years of unbecoming, unflattering judgement, dozens of those abandoned galleries and complete addresses washed away from high ridges and rode upwellings down the Bayou Pierre and Big Sand. Growing up, I heard people tell how this one and that, with too much to drink, fell off the front porch. In places here, blamelessly sober, after the wearing and washing away, you could fall off a front yard.

But for my taking enough time to search out distinctive rows and ranks—Miss Welty’s avenues of outsized moss-hung Eastern red cedars—I might turn away without pinpointing the majority of these grown over homesites. Each little evergreen sprout was part of a joyous event, eagerly planted to announce and honor new birth. Locations catch your eye with fifteen lined-up reminders of the frailty and defenselessness of childhood back then. At places, two tall people, stretch as they may, will find enduring specimens they can fail to stand and touch fingers around.

Too, planted cedars pull the statement back to balance in shade-wrapped graveyards. Consider them immortality symbolized. Overwhelmed and disfigured under miles of lumber company hardwood and measured-off rows of plantation-pine timber, they stand now at proud, if raggedy, attention. They linger as real, living monuments doing their best to hang on within the healing wildness taking back tenancy of a region so long ago tamed and rudely damaged.

Widely consulted and habitually quoted by the South, the United States Census of 1860 gave the rollicking town of Rocky Springs a population of 2616. Never allowed a reckoning in the same column, we must add to that nearly 2000 slaves. By the time I wound my way to stand in the churchyard and cemetery there, I could easily have been persuaded that the stubborn blanket of shade laid down was created by a minimum of 4616 evergreen tally symbols. Large numbers were planted, honoring, though most volunteered from nature’s seed drop over these many years. All are stand-ins for vigorous mortals long moved on, not gone to graveyards everyone, just fled, fled to zero by the time of the count recorded in 1940.

Sixty or more sizable plantations operated within easy reach by 1860. Spread about on namesake spring-watered high ground, with the busy Natchez Trace and its all-season National Postal Road designation passing through the middle of town, there was plenty of activity, bustle, and hum. Count three, then four large stores, a post office, four doctors, schools and teachers. A dozen or more artisans and craftsmen ply their trades, alongside inns and saloons. Heroic preachers, steadfast in their charge, call down fire and sulfur on old recidivists who tiptoe out Saturday night to sow wild oats and arrive in full, upright stride Sunday morning praying for a crop failure.

Enough, we might even agree to say more than enough, is written and talked about as regards the ills of rampaging civil wars, rampaging yellow fevers, rampaging boll weevils and a smug shortsightedness on the part of people in answerable stewardship of their land. All of it comes across as negative and off putting. I was hard pressed to get beyond all the sadness and suffering that went with the collapse of the area. If any of this was to be turned into a positive written description of Scutchalo, about all I had so far was a show of gratitude to the National Park Service for a modern-day Natchez Trace Parkway and an exit installed at Milepost 54.8 to let us off at Rocky Springs. An adequate visitors center, campground and clean restrooms, backed up by several miles of hiking trails, allows the uninitiated to come preview the hills and return unhindered home to an accustomed civilization without a need for search teams and tracking dogs.

There had to be subjects more uplifting and fun to talk about than a white on brown exit sign with its lonely arrow pointing, or the Natchez Trace maintenance guys upkeeping the bricks and mortar and painted parts of a historic Methodist Church, even if it was almost two hundred years old. And so, I stood and gazed off toward nowhere, like you’ll do when you look for something—need to find something—and got nada. You know it’s out there, but can’t quite reel it in. About then is when the blue-black dirt dauber hurtled by at just above eye level and powered into a steep climb delivering, uplifting, a consignment of shiny mud toward the top left corner of the rear door of the rugged old church.

There it was, and that’s all there was. At least for now, we had something of promise to build on. I need not go study door frames and dried-up mudballs with their encased sleepy spider snacks feeding baby dirt daubers; I knew I held a reasonably firm grasp on all that already. What this fast-flying little dump truck brought in addition to muck and mire was a memory from an eight- or nine-year-old little boy of the mid-1950s. I stood right there and listened to Miz Mary Edna Hill Regan again, and to my young father and several observant old notables of the area repeating a positive, optimistic untruth, a delightful fiction, of what took place back in the mid-1930s after the hills washed away, the springs dried up, the town dried up and everybody scattered away to the suburbs.

Their talk traded back and forth, the story better with each swap, about countless courageous, nothing-diverts-them dirt daubers, not so many as locusts from Exodus, but enough to get noticed. Flying their little wings off, they found moisture suitable for gummy mud molded of the few tiny flecks of topsoil found sprinkled about and did their best to preserve it. They installed it, stored it for a distant future, under the eaves and inside on the walls and ceilings of the struggling old church and the tumble-down abandoned collection of buildings.

Back then, my father hurried to let me know how he and the others only teased, only continued a fine exaggerated foolishness, within it injecting that spot-on serving of tongue-in-cheek, of genuine irony. He said they never held any doubts about an un-therapied generation of country kids such as mine being able to understand and appreciate what they were saying. I’ll tell you this, hoping you agree. How could I, any of us, feel any way but positive toward people who can find and dig out the humor in losing everything?

So there, the rest of my task had its direction, and the perfect reason for going that way. Now we were getting somewhere. This thing I’m about might end up done and finished after all.

I backtracked then. Drove maybe a little too fast, anxious to turn off Hickory Ridge and down through the pine thicket back to the Bill Greer family cemetery. I had left there earlier with dates attached to names jotted down, but in no way certain what should become of them. This time I knew to lean my elbows on the top rail of the chain link fence and close my eyes for long enough to call Uncle Shorty back from a day late in the 1980s. I’m pretty sure I heard him before I fancied him. He came at the front of a hardy squad of young Greer descendants bringing a pair of squalling chainsaws and a box of matches to do business with four ancient dead cedar tally symbols. And he laughed, always. He would back up to feign a seated position against each tree, marking, measuring, and remeasuring just so. He wanted these tough old stumps left flat and smooth at the tops, and tall enough to offer roomy benches weak, old visitors would stand up from and not have to look pitiful reaching for help.

Paused a moment or two longer, I must have blinked, and the memory parade continued on forward to a comfortable November morning in 2003. All four still solid and strong, showing a touch of weathering like those using them, Uncle Shorty’s custom-crafted seats served perfection again. We celebrated the joy of Aunt Pearl preached and prayed to the place he held for her there beside him since March of ’97.

And, wouldn’t you know it, everything wants to fall into place at the same time. I took a second to reach over my shoulder for a congratulatory self-slap on the back and saw flashes of color stand out like neon lights against newly greened springtime. As sap begins rising, so too the early flowers. Whites and yellows register how we depend on the longer days of February and over now into March, back every year without fail in rows and circles of generations-old daffodils, jonquils, and what old women call them pretty white cemetery irises. We spot willing springtime reminders throughout the hills of the line a picket fence took, the curve of a driveway, where the mailbox stood, or the wonky circle where a hurrying log skidder discovered another old cistern. And never overlook rectangles outlining once cherished and cared-for gravesites. A last caretaker almost certainly lies close by. Can we assume someone knew to stay behind after that service, or to come back in the cool moisture of fall and place one more double handful of bulbs?

Among gravesites like that, recognizing so many names and dates, I was certain we long ago had gathered the creators, then followed with the repeaters of an oral history of our hills and lowered them into Scutchalo dust. They arrived from far reaches to look for a living in the dust, brought generations up from dust. Perhaps one or two did not spend enough time on their knees in the dust, but all came back to sleep side by side in it. Their inscribed stones stand watch. Heavy. Cold. Biding. Notice given to expect only peace and quiet, no further news, no more teasing, no more exaggerated foolishness swapped and sent from this ridgetop.

An icy rock, scratched with my own story, lies poorly hidden and scarcely minutes from an impenitent good-hearted busybody stubbing a toe. I could go smiling off this worthy planet to know a mild set of double-hernias, and absolutely a banged and battered toenail rewarded the high-spirited rush to tip my granite bulletin board on edge in its sunny corner. Let that be justice finagled for too soon trying to hide my store of memories out of reach under fresh-dug yellowish-gray clay and uncoerced daffodils.

The ancient African proverb counsels, Every time an old man or woman lays down to die, a library burns to the ground. I’ve had a lifetime to come to terms with that, and always let it fly over my head. Believe that I’m on top of it this time. Believe that I’ve taken it in hand.

There are stories here. We’re practiced listeners.

We’re of the true South. We appreciate our stories.

There are bygone days here. We hold dear our past and enjoy wiping it off as we would the good forks and spoons and laying it out. There is nothing here so weighty or important as to shake the earth or change lives to be found, but never let me pass up a chance to jot down scraps of unimportant oral accounts I’ve absorbed and repeated my entire life. If I fail, where will be reminders of comings and goings and doings of denizens of prosperous hollars and wore-out ridges? It’s not a bit more complicated than that.

After skating by over so long a time, I hate that I came across this much left to do, to sort through, but am so proud that I will. Simply put, I’ll give myself permission to bravely scuffle with words, to see if I’m up to raking and piling them together. Maybe I can prove trustworthy enough to leave some of our stories, hopefully with a measure of reverence and coherence, up in sunlight. I find it awkward to fess up to just how good that lets me feel.

I could go fritter away time in dusty courthouse vaults of these three adjoined counties and pick out traces of young couples setting up housekeeping among the hills. Were they able to pay their taxes? Were there youngsters, and would any leave a story? Did they own anything—a wagon, a pair of brindle heifers, a black horse, maybe a Guernsey cow, or a Ford or Chevy pickup—heaven forbid anyone should have to depend on a Dodge back then—to place a dollar’s value on? There was this family of mechanics I knew who got pretty fair service out of the only old heavy-duty Studebaker pickup I ever saw, but they came along much, much later.

A courthouse surrenders such as that, yes, but whoever searches will best make the visit buoyed by buckets of coffee stout as tar. And never let them fail at double-checking, copying to paper every detail of deeds and old wills and probate records before they turn to leave. Gathered history loves to seep out of mind and settle back to quiet dust before we regain the front door. I honestly do not possess the nature, or could it be enough character, to invest in such exertions? I will not, cannot, even begin to include myself among an eager few with the strength of mind to go and focus long enough to find and recognize the value there.

My three descriptive words for their greatly appreciated dedication are extremely important—and boring.

All the same, I need not thrash and look sideways at myself for any supposed laziness. Accounts handed down about Scutchalo and its suburbs are never found anywhere near vaults and yellowed mountains of paper. Our search pays off big-time in living rooms, or around kitchen tables and the coffee pot, or taking turns poking at the fireplace, or in a shaded spot on the tailgate of a pickup, and thank goodness, here lately, for the love affair sprouted between arthritic fingers, bifocals, and email subscriptions. Oh yes, and yes, what about being old enough to pull up the times I watched and heard old men flip nickels in long ago country stores? They clowned and laughed and matched heads and tails to see who paid for the six-ounce bottles of Coke—back when we mistakenly thought six ounces was big enough to satisfy?

Our anecdotes, sketches, yarns, tales, pranks, and tributes, by whatever name we invite them back, touch a common thread and involve people going about the very same twenty-four-hour day we all appreciate. They each develop from, I remember. . ., and hearing the one invariably reminds of another, and just this one more before we got to get on home, while more sweet tea brews, or the pickup is started—cranked-up as we say here—and moved the few feet to take the tailgate back under shade. I found more than enough who could sit for hours and find something agreeable, lighthearted, second- and third-hand, to recall and expose about this ancestor and that, or a cousin twice removed, or somebody’s bucket-kicking old milk cow. My brother pointed at a tire on one of his eighteen-wheeled pulpwood trucks once and told a gathering of friends I could sit next to it and talk it flat. Put me on record as confessing I might flatten it undrivable if I ever thought it cast a sidelong bead of eye contact and slipped in a "Pfffttz" of slow leak now and then. That tire could easily earn a place in the lengthy lineup of my kind of people.

One of that kind of people was Billy Byrnes, a special second cousin from my mother’s side, gone now to glory with so many others. His memory needs to accept specific blame, along with those of my father Theron, and Billy’s stepfather, Wiley Shorty Greer, for provoking my determination to leave behind an attempt at repeating, if sophomoric, a collection pulled from the nine-plus million stories we must have swapped.

Years ago, at least an hour into one of our tailgate shared rememberings, a remark Billy passed was taken as an affront, but I tried my hardest not to let on.

You, Theron Chapman and Shorty Greer should never waste money on a watch, he said. When a good conversation breaks out, time loses all meaning to you three.

Another hour later, at least that, still swapping, still feeling a tiny bit injured, I reached across to thumb back his left sleeve. You see, I never wear a watch—and that day, God love him, neither did Billy.

I’ve heard recall comes like a turn on the sidewalk to glance in a storefront window, and catching glimpses of a small-town reflected street, of familiar people and things passing in familiar predicaments. I can vouch for that. I truly can. Every single time I rattle down ice and fill my plastic, trough-sized cup with sweet tea at the Dairy Queen, I stand there and eye their root beer dispenser. I stand right there and hear my father on a big yellow, clackety D-6 Caterpillar widening the road to a rented cotton patch we called the woods field, and Lum Junior McCay hands me a foot-long sliver of bulldozer-scraped sassafras root for my five-year-old nose to never in this world forget.

At times, a story coming at us from two different directions might be challenging to recognize. All are based on actual comings and goings, though something may pry loose a wrong name, or location, or date, from a repeater’s memory. Some come together over time, hearing a part here, then another there. And we easily pick out those voices from a tongue lodged firmly in a cheek. We try for and delight in the rendering that draws a chuckle, and better, an outright belly laugh. But, as fun as jokes and pranks are to watch and execute, we do well to let ourselves occasionally be called out, caught on the receiving end. Left no high ground to stand on, we let peers decide if we can take a joke, if we still deserve inclusion in the clique we share. So many of us, for so long, overlook such clear-sighted wisdom until we arrive at an age I like to refer to as done got too old to run fast.

And very few of our repeaters were somebody of sway. No need to search for their names dressing tall buildings or memorialized in the shadow of steeples. They never made it into the newspaper unless they died or were asked to be pallbearers for somebody who died or found somebody willing to get married and all the parties managed to stay on board long enough to go through with it. Expect memories of classmates learning in one-room schoolhouses, or teaching there, or helping build one. Hardly a one could stand up and preach a sermon—would have no clue how to start—but we watched them live one every day out among us. A small number, marching a different way, backsliding down a tarnished path, find our recall buffed sufficient to leave a soft glow when we speak of them.

Go prod a current generation in the suburbs to link their connection to a given family name, and they may have no idea. Mention a tie to the abandoned Scutchalo hills. Watch somebody actually turn away. Embarrassed, reminders of derision and hard times lingering, they refuse to even acknowledge being born here. A very few old people, old city people, a looking down my nose at you kind of people, made it a point to ask visitors back from the hills if they encountered the monkeys, the brush apes, darting across the roads. In my childhood, thinking I was going along with a fantastic joke, I said they must have turned onto Ranch Road and the hard-baked red clay of our Pea Ridge suburb and spotted me, or some of mine.

Grown up, understanding, I realized that is exactly what they were saying.

But in the end, economics was the toothy monster chasing originators of these families away from hollows and ridges to the near at hand suburbs of Carlisle, Reganton Crossroads, Utica, Port Gibson, Chapel Hill, Carpenter, Myles Station, Insmore, Midway, Hermanville, Reedtown, Bear Creek, Dentville, Cayuga, or on to far-flung Jackson, Vicksburg and even beyond. Scutchalo became a child’s view out a rear windshield, or from a featherbed mattress perched atop a sway-backed cut-down pickup’s load of bare essential household goods as another family slipped away under cover of dark, looking for a living, going to what might be the better chance. A sweet lady, child of foreclosed tenants, told me how she clung to one of those old cars converted to a truck with three sisters to watch the petrified log that marked the end of their borrowed driveway fade into gloom. A wee sister asked if the others supposed that chunk of rock to be as hard as a mean old banker’s heart. No one said.

But there were those who managed to trade up and prosper once out of the hills. Big extended families, moving as one, negotiated discounts on large acreages and shifted the generations all to the same new neighborhood. Imagine the stranger, uninformed, picking a fight on that school bus. Holding on to land deeds in the hills, others bequeathed wisely and allowed relocated heirs, over the decades later, to accumulate millions in timber and gravel sales, and coveted hunting leases. A few, not many, stayed, found, and commuted to outside jobs, managed a decent living, and now are rewarded in children and grands moving back to build and