Tippah County Boy

I'm currently reading One Matchless Time, the new William Faulkner biography, thanks to the kind people of Harper Collins who were nice enough to send me a copy to review. I'm enjoying it so far, but I'm wondering for how long since many of the reviews I've read of it say it's not that great of a book. My only criticism at present is early in the book Faulkner's family moves from Ripley to Oxford and much is made of Oxford being a county seat. Well, Ripley's a county seat too. It's the county seat of Tippah which borders the state of Tennessee. I lived for a short time in Ripley before I started school and I visited there at least once a year until I got out of high school. North Mississippi's pine trees and red clay are a big part of me, occupying a dreamlike space of my memory that seems to loom larger as time ever recedes from when I was physically present there as a child. I've envisioned writing a book of short stories relating to that time, but the best I've done so far is a poorly written pastiche called The Last Cotton Field that you can read at Dead Mule.com http://www.deadmule.com/content/word.of.mule.php?content_id=832

Of course that story predates me time spent in Tippah County during the Seventies and Eighties. My experiences probably aren't all that different from anybody else, but I'm compelled to share them. My remark about future semi-serious posts to this blog does include the distinct possibility of subjecting you to trial runs on stories from there. I harbor thoughts about translating and transmuting those days into a North Mississippi version of Joyce's Dubliners. It will all depend on how much will I possess, because it will be really tough, and I'm not even talking about coming close to the masterly job of a James Joyce. I'm referring just to writing a story well and the Dead Mule entry is proof that I'm a long way from that. So if I make you suffer through some fumbling attempts of literature here, I ask your forgiveness at the start.

Jumbled up events run through my mind. My mother and father running a restaurant called Raney's along the main highway for a few short months. I used to play the jukebox continuously; my favorite tune was "Dueling Banjos". I first heard an electric guitar just down the road from the railroad overpass (the railroad that William Faulkner's great grandfather helped found) in a small trailer. My baby sitter's teenage son could really wail. When tornado weather was threatening we would leave the trailer and drive down the road the few hundred feet to the overpass and park beneath it. I played on that overpass with other small children; by this time I was being watched by my Aunt Beverly's sister whose land bordered the railroad tracks. We weren't supposed to go onto the tracks, but of course we did often. One day we pressed our luck by throwing gravel at the cars driving beneath. I'm eternally grateful we didn't hurt anybody and I'm also glad we were caught and given a sound whipping. I didn't really like playing on the overpass since I was in constant terror from the possibility of being hit by a train, but there was a girl involved that I wanted to impress so I went along with the older boy that wanted to do it. A standard refrain runs through those days and it was of being hustled around to different baby sitters. The people that watched me who lived down the street from the restaurant were the worst. Our street was next door to a shoe factory. The field beside the factory was polluted with muck. The few houses down the street were tiny clapboard hovels with leaking roofs and peeling paint. I will say that at least the dump we lived in was the biggest house on the street. The baby sitters there had loathsome older children that would pick on me as soon as the adults turned their heads. I remember their delight at scaring me with tales of the devil's eye you could see from a hole in the ground next to one of the houses. I suppose it was just the reflection of your own eyeball. Trying to scare me was one of their lighter attempts at picking on me. Don't misunderstand; I'm not trying to wallow in some post-childhood trauma to make myself feel better. It's only natural for kids to get picked on by meaner kids. I had a high threshold for that kind of crap, but if I ever reached the point where I felt completely threatened I would boil over like some miniature Hulk and the bullying would stop. The most compelling memory I have of that group of baby sitters was when I joined them to move a house. Moving an entire house is something one can't forget. Maybe next time I'll tell the complete story of that day, which was one of the stand out days in my Tippah County boyhood.