Kerens.Com - How Daddy Missed Going to Jail

We lived in three different places in Elm Flat—the Parks place, the Thompson place, and the Goforth place. (Out in the Flat, you always referred to the place you lived by giving it the name of the owner of the land. The first house was the Parks place, meaning the farm and farmhouse were owned by Mr. Parks. Ditto with the Thompson and the Goforth places, and later Dad leased the Houston place, which did not have a house on it.) None of these three houses were very fancy, but each had a sound roof overhead, which was nice and about as much as anyone expected. None of these three places are still standing, and passers by would be hard pressed to imagine that houses ever stood on any one of the three sites, although each of the three abodes linger clearly in my memory.

About the time the war was ending, around 1945, we moved from the big unpainted two-story house on the Thompson place to a new place Dad had just rented, the Goforth place on an unpaved dirt road, the old Elm Flat-Ebenezer Road. In other words, our new house was halfway between the farm residences of Doug and Sweet Williams to our east and Grover and Totsie Crawford to our west. (Some of our other neighbors out in the Flat at the time included the Bennets, Rosses, Collins, Walkers, Hobbs, Franklins, Tekels, Rendons, Lancasters, Scruggs, and Johnsons.) To be more specific about the house location, it was on the north side of the road with a large wooden bridge spanning the deep gulley that separated our new home from the road and from its barn which was across the road from the house. The barn still survives, by the way, and remains even today just as I remember it from more than 60 years ago!

I can remember clearly our move-in day and the experience of getting situated in the new house. The house had no bathroom, nor for that matter did the Thompson place that we had just vacated, though both were equipped with durable outhouses conveniently located near the main house. Neither house had electricity either, so water had to be drawn by hand from the well using a water bucket attached to a rope and pulley. Our new home was a one-story house instead of having two stories like the Thompson house, which meant there were no stairs to run up and down when playing hide-and-seek and other childhood games—perhaps a relief to our mother! The new house was heavily infested with fleas, so Dad had to spray it out thoroughly with DDT before we could bring in our furniture. I still remember that he filled the hand pump and went around spraying with a swush, swush, swush sound while we kids followed him watching in eager curiosity while sniffing the acrid chemical aroma of the poison.

The last residents had left behind an ancient guitar with one broken string, and I quickly availed myself of the opportunity to strum away in a totally unproductive attempt to make music. I could produce sound, but the sounds were dissonant, not pleasing to the ear. This musical failure must have been an omen, a kind of predictor of my future musical career! Perhaps it was a way of preparing me for the torture which I, totally lacking in musical skills and aptitude, was destined later to endure while futilely seeking to master the slide trombone in the KHS band!

We had moved from our old home earlier than originally intended because the incoming tenant of the Thompson place (whom I will refer to as Mr. Jackson for lack of a clear memory of his real name and of course to protect the innocent) had pleaded successfully with Dad to allow him to move in a month earlier than first planned. Dad agreed subject to two conditions: (1) we would have the right to return to the place to pick the produce from our summer garden and (2) Dad could come back over and remove the new screen door that he had recently installed at the front door of the house in order to take it with us to the new place. Unfortunately, both these commitments were honored in the breach!

When we went over to pick our garden, we found that someone had already done the first picking for us, stripped it clean—no peas, no beans, no tomatoes, no okra . . . nothing at all. This loomed as a big problem for us as the garden was our main food supply, and it was far too late in the year to plant another full garden. Gardening was central to our farm economy. We ate fresh vegetables and fruit in season, and during the growing season we canned hundreds of quarts of beans, tomatoes, beets, black-eyed peas, jams and jellies, and much more. We needed the canned food to make it through the winter, and it was important to get this matter resolved or we might be going hungry!

The other problem was the screen door, a brand new door that Dad had paid for in cash, around $5.00, I would estimate. (Five dollars may not seem like much, but please remember that a field hand worked a 10-hour day back then for $4.00 in wages, with a skilled tractor driver earning $5.00 a day!) When Dad went to the house to get the door, it was missing. Someone had already removed it. Looking inside the house, Dad could see the screen door lying on the floor of the living room at the front of the house. Taking direct action, Dad raised a window on the front porch of the house, entered, and took possession of his door! He then brought the door back home with him and installed it on the side porch of the new house.

The next day we awoke to loud banging on that same door—Mr. Jackson was there, and he was angry! “Steve, I’m gonna call the law on you, and you’re going to get locked up down the river in Huntsville for breaking in my house and stealing!” All of us children were horror stricken at this threat; our imaginations ran wild, and we sobbed at the horrible thought of losing our daddy to the state penitentiary.

Dad was much calmer. “Well, Mr. Jackson, I didn’t dream you would mind if I picked up the door as we had agreed, and I would just like to thank you for going to the trouble of removing it to save me the work and storing it inside to keep it safe. I think this is all just a misunderstanding, and I am sure we can easily clear it up. Let’s just take my car and drive down to the sheriff’s department together so we can get this whole thing settled. We can talk to them about the garden too.”

Mr. Jackson quickly settled down. He had absolutely no intention of visiting the sheriff’s department, and rapidly decided it was best to let matters rest as they were. Apparently we were not going to lose our daddy to prison after all. We were able to pick the garden’s future offerings as they ripened, and I still remember long sessions of snapping beans and shelling peas, guaranteeing us a food supply for the winter. All’s well that ends well!

In some ways our little town of Kerens was a microcosm of the world at large. I have reflected in later life that growing up there offered me as a child a complete range of experiences with virtually every type of individual likely to cross my path in later life—the considerate and the inconsiderate, the honest and the dishonest, the kind and the cruel, the thrifty and the spendthrift, calm and the loud, the modest and the showoff, the generous and the selfish, the sincere and the hypocritical, the handsome and the ugly, the profound as well as the profane . . . along with every shade in between all these extremes. I learned some important lessons from observing Dad’s encounter with Mr. Jackson. First, I learned that some people will make concessions to get their way, and then engage in deceptive conduct afterwards, failing to abide by their agreements. I also learned that people sometimes bluff and utter threats which they have no intention of carrying out. Those were important lessons, and I appreciate them because the knowledge they provided has been useful throughout my life. As I reflect upon this experience, however, I am most of all thankful that Daddy missed going to jail.

Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
ivernon-ohio@att.net


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