PROLOGUE

 

                Memory, that most fragile and delicate of threads connecting us to the past, becomes even more tenuous when one must rely on their own memories of stories shared from the memories of others, like my grandparents who were born in the late 19th century.

All of my father’s large family were, and in some cases still are, wonderful storytellers, their stories rich in telling detail and sharp observation. Here in the 21^st century, I find myself the repository of a significant number of those stories, many of which are unknown to many in my generation, much less succeeding generations. This is my attempt to preserve those stories.

I am a son of the Delta, born in Greenwood, Mississippi, in the middle of the 20^th century. I spent many summers with my grandparents on a small place 2 ½ miles north of Brazil, Mississippi. Except for one who died when I was too young to remember him, I knew all of my father’s seven siblings, their spouses and children too. I roamed all over Tallahatchie County with my grandfather, getting to know the people he knew and hearing their stories too.

Although we regularly attended family reunions in the hills of Choctaw County, I thought of my family as typical Delta cotton planters. But that was not always so. In fact, the Catledge family had been in the Delta only a little over 30 years when I was born.

    Ever since Edmund Catledge arrived in the Pennsylvania Colony in the 17^th century and bought his first 240 acres from William Penn, his descendants had been moving onward, first southward and then westward, in search of better land, first the Carolinas, then Georgia and Alabama, and finally eastern Mississippi, which is where Henry Catledge and Minnie Bailey were born.

So, how did a reasonably successful, but probably small time, farmer and nursery salesman from the hills of east central Mississippi along with his wife and growing family end up in the Delta? How did he even find out there was a place for sale over 100 miles away? How did he finance the purchase?

  We do not know for sure, although there are enough clues to allow for reasonably informed speculation. What we do know for sure is that Henry Catledge, like his parents before him, loaded up his family and headed a little further west in search of better land and more opportunities. They settled in a place called Friendship.

The year was 1919. The Great War ended in November of the year before. The war had claimed the lives of over 116,000 American soldiers, over half of them from the outbreak of Spanish influenza that same year. It is estimated that world-wide over 500 million people, 1/3 of the world population, were infected with the flu. Mortality estimates range anywhere from 20 million to 100 million world-wide. In the United States alone over 670,000 lives were lost to the flu, more than the country’s losses in all of the 20^th century wars combined.

In 1919, more than one in every three Americans lived on a farm. As one might expect, this more isolated life lessened their chances of infection from the flu, and their robust lifestyle and diet no doubt contributed to their chances of survival should they become infected. 

The first commercial radio station would not go on the air until 1920, so most of these farmers got their news by word of mouth, from newspapers, or newsreels at the silent movies if they could get to a theatre and afford the price of admission.

By 1919, there were over 6.7 million cars on American roads, most of them Fords, but most of them were in cities, not on farms. Most travel was by horseback, buggy, or wagon. The use of tractors for framing was a decade away. Fields were plowed by mules or oxen, mostly mules in the South.

These hardy souls out on the farm, burned wood or coal to heat their homes and read their Bibles by kerosene lamps or candles. They went into town to buy supplies and to vote. They gathered in their community churches to worship, consecrate their marriages, baptize their children, and bury their dead. They invariably married someone within their community.

They laughed and cried together, they sent their sons off to war and welcomed their return or mourned their loss, they bickered and made amends, and they recorded their lives in their family Bibles and the family stories that they told and retold to preserve them and pass them down.

The extended Catledge family was fortunate, blessed even. All those that had gone to war, returned home safely. Nor do the records reveal any deaths from influenza.

So, our story begins in 1919 when Henry and Minnie Catledge along with the first five of their eight children, Grady, Morris Bailey, Sadie, Willie, and Maurice, came into the Delta. They arrived with hearts not only grateful for the new opportunities ahead but thankful for all of their family’s past blessings. This is how I imagined that day and the days that followed.

 

 

JANUARY 1919

THE LAST HILL

 

GRADY

                They had been driving nearly all day. Grady glanced over at his mother in the passenger’s seat. Stray strands of her auburn hair had slipped from under her hat and were whipping in the wind. Her cheeks were ruddy with the cold. He assumed his were too, as well as those of his three sisters huddled in the back seat. Not that it was particularly cold today, not for January anyway, but unlike some of the newer models, their Model T had no glass in the windows on each side, only a windshield.  

The first part of their trip, winding through the wooded hills of Choctaw County on gravel or dirt roads, had been dusty. But some of the roads in Montgomery County and now in Carroll County had been paved, thankfully. Still, they had stopped often at places like French Camp, Kilmichael, Winona, and Carrollton, for gasoline sometimes, but mostly to stretch their legs and step into a local store to have a cup of coffee or cocoa and get warm for a bit.

Here, the road was as straight as an arrow, due west through alternating stretches of fallow, brown fields and thick stands of forest, black tree trunks and limbs bare of leaves. A pale-yellow sun hung low in the sky ahead of them. He estimated it would be dark in two hours. They chugged up the next hill, slowing as they neared the top. Grady reluctantly downshifted. They topped the hill and started down the far side just like they had been doing for the last three hours.

Father and his brother Morris Bailey were somewhere ahead of them in the two wagons loaded with all the family owned. They had left three days earlier. He would have liked to have been with Father, but at the same time felt a sense of pride that Father has trusted him to drive Mother and the girls. After all, he wasn’t quite fourteen years old yet.

He and his mother and sisters had stayed with Grandpaw Lige and Grandmaw Becky on their place outside of Concord, giving the wagons a head start. Grady expected to overtake Father and Morris Bailey by the time they reached Greenwood.

The Model T crested yet another hill, and he quickly braked to a halt right there in the middle of the road. They were atop the last hill. From here the road went down, down, down to a flat expanse of farmland, clad in winter’s ochres and grays, broken only by thin verges of brown forest and the serpentine courses of rivers and bayous, some fringed with evergreen cypress. Sadie Belle, Willie, and Maurice craned their necks to see. Sadie hung her head out of the window.

He stared straight ahead, his eyes drinking in the view, as he spoke, as much to himself as to his mother.

“I’d heard about the Delta, how flat it was. Father described it often, but I was not prepared for that first time I saw it last month with Father. Seeing it is another thing altogether, isn’t it?”

He turned to look at his mother who was staring straight ahead at the flat expanse before them.

“What do you think, Mother?” he asked.

“I think this place will be good for us, for all of us. Your father is a good farmer,” she said.

He turned back to stare across the Delta. He stretched out his left arm and turned his closed fingers perpendicular to his palm, then measured the distance from the sun to the horizon, just like father had taught him, an hour per hand-width, fifteen minutes per finger. Yes, they would reach Greenwood before dark.

“I imagine that it will not be long before more of the family heads this way. Your father’s parents are already considering the move,” Mother added. “His brother George too.”

Sadie punched him in the back of his shoulder.

“When will we get to Greenwood?” she asked. “I want to see a real city.”

“Me, too,” his two other sisters chorused.

“And I’m cold,” Maurice, the youngest, added.

“Not long at all,” he answered. “Should be a good road, and flat.”

He imagined that he could see Greenwood from the hilltop, although he knew he could not.

“Carrollton was our last stop. We’ll be there soon.”

 He had memorized the map, knew every town and distance between Ackerman and Greenwood and on up to Friendship just west of Sumner. He pressed the pedal to engage low gear, pulled down on the throttle, and they rolled down the last, long hill into the Delta.

To his mother he added, “Still, it is hard leaving all of our people back at Concord. Harder than I expected. Won’t you miss Granpaw Bailey and Aunt Lennie? I know I will. Father’s folks too.”

For the first time in his life, he felt somewhat lost. He had grown up surrounded by kin, mostly Catledges, Granpaw Lige’s two brothers and their families, five of Father’s six surviving brother’s and their families, but also Mother’s father and grandmother, the Baileys and Porters, and Mother’s sister and her family, not to mention all of Granmaw Becky’s Blackwood kin. They were leaving all of that behind, along with the fields and woods, hills and creeks he knew so well, for a flat, near featureless land but for the stands of timber and convoluted bayous, that was filled with strangers.

Mother gave him a very small smile, not her usual smile but one that he could not quite figure out. Then she nodded and turned to stare through the windshield at the world ahead of them.

“Yes, it is hard,” she whispered. The wind from the open window whipped her words away like fleeting memories.

They sped down the flat, paved, straight road and soon reached the outskirts of the city. In the distance, water towers and tall buildings rose above the housetops. They rolled into town on the Carrollton Highway and crossed the railroad tracks just above the station. An engine sat huffing steam and smoke as passengers came and went while freight was loaded and unloaded. Warehouses lined the rails to their left. The streets were paved with brick.

“Grady, do you remember how to get to the hotel?” his mother asked.

“Yes, Ma’am. We take a right up ahead on Howard Street. The hotel is just up from there on the left, the Hotel Irving.”  

By now all three of his sisters were staring out the windows, pointing out this or that to each other, too excited to sound cold or tired now. They passed by storefronts filled with merchandise, occasionally pulling around a horse- or mule-drawn wagon. But most of the traffic was cars and trucks.

At Howard Street, they turned right, and there a block away on the left was the Hotel Irving, four stories high, all brick, practically brand new, the finest hotel in Greenwood, maybe the whole Delta. He pulled up and parked on the curb in front of the hotel. He got out and was about to open the door for his mother when he heard a clatter and a swish of spraying water. He leapt to the running board just as a black truck with a large black tank rattled by spraying water. On the tank it read “Commercial Division-Greenwood, Miss.-Street Cleaning Dept.”  He stepped down to the glistening wet, freshly cleaned bricks, opened the door for his mother, and helped her out. His sister tumbled out right behind her.

Holding the heavy door for all four of them, he entered the lobby of the hotel. He strode across the slick marble floor and up to the immense wooden front desk like he had been doing this sort of thing all his life, or at least he thought he did.

An elderly, bespectacled man behind the desk smiled. “May I help you, young man?” he asked.

“Yes, Sir,” he replied. “We are the Catledge family. My father, Henry Catledge, and my brother should have already arrived and made arrangements for all of us.” He nodded in the direction of his mother and sisters.

The clerk placed his forefinger at the bridge of his eyeglasses and pulled them down his nose to peer over the lenses at him.   

“They have indeed,” he said. “And if I may say so, I see the family resemblance.”

He blushed slightly, embarrassment and pride comingled. He worshipped his father and secretly relished the comparison. 

The clerk continued, “I believe your father and brother are in the dining room off the lobby. Do you have luggage?”

“Yes, Sir, we do.”

“If that is your car out front, I will have a bellboy take your luggage up to the rooms your father reserved. The ladies will be able to freshen up very shortly.”

“Thank you, Sir,” Grady replied. “I think we will step into the dining room.”

“Very good.”

He turned. His tall, slender mother and his three sisters, stair-steps at nine, seven, and four years of age, all clad in dark colors dusty from the drive, waited with various degrees of patience near an array of potted plants near a sort of round couch. He smiled to himself as he crossed to them.

“Father and Morris Bailey are in the dining room. Shall we join them?” Grady asked, humor lacing his tone.

“What about our luggage?” Mother asked.

“It will be taken to our rooms. You will be able to freshen up soon. Let’s go see Father and Morris Bailey first.”

Grady extended his left elbow, and his mother slid her right arm through his. Sadie took Willie and Maurice by the hand, and Grady led them all into the adjacent dining room.

The dining room was elegant, chandeliered and wood-paneled, like nothing he had ever seen before. He heard a collective intake of breath from his sisters behind him, and Sadie whispered, “Golly.”

Soft light filtered through the tall windows and fell on the few, scattered patrons. China cups and saucers clinked above the low hum of conversation.  He spied his father and brother immediately. They were seated at a table, each with his hands wrapped around a steaming cup of coffee, deep in discussion.

A young man approached and offered to seat them. He was about to answer when Father looked up and spied them. As Father rose a smile split the familiar angular features. Morris Bailey turned, and his face, too, broke out in a grin.

The two groups converged and met in the middle of the dining room. Abandoning all decorum, they all embraced and kissed as if it had been two years, not two days, since they had seen each other. He did not mind at all. This was the first big adventure in his young life.