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May 04, 2023

{THE VIEW FROM THE BACK ROW} Leaving Lumberton

free content I saw a tumble weed rolling down the main street of my hometown the

free content

I saw a tumble weed rolling down the main street of my hometown the other day. Maybe it was my imagination. It could have been a dust devil. Or maybe it was a metaphorical tumbleweed. In any event, hard times have come to the Eden of my early youth.

On one hand, Lumberton is an enigma: a wide spot in the road, a crown in the highway, surrounded by burgeoning towns that box the compass on all four sides: Purvis, Poplarville, Columbia, and Wiggins. On the other, it's a case study in the demise of countless small towns of similar demographics throughout Mississippi and the South: lack of a tax base, a declining population, and geographic isolation when the Interstate passed the town by years ago. There is a positive note: a huge sawmill operation, headquartered in Idaho, has begun operations in the town's industrial park. Hopefully, it will put the "lumber" back into Lumberton. Maybe, as my favorite disc jockey on radio station WBZ Boston used to say back in the 1960s, "Broadcasting to all the ships at sea:" that will "put some power in its tower and some wattage in its cottage."

But it is what it is, and although I left town at 17, consumed by that "I’ve got to get out of Dodge" feeling, Lumberton is still my town, a palimpsest of my history, and the storehouse of my first memories. My early life in Lumberton imbued me with the sense of melancholy and rootlessness that's characterized my life. I guess it's no surprise that Albert Camus’ "The Stranger" (1942) is one of my favorite books, and that I cut my literary teeth on Franz Kafka. "I’m older now, but I’m still running against the wind" (The first time I heard Bob Seger sing "Against the Wind," I was sitting in the Seaman's Club on the Naval Base at Subic Bay, Republic of the Philippines.). If wanderlust wasn't in my DNA, it crept in when I was a child. Looking back, there's two things I can blame leaving Lumberton on: the Blues, and the Greyhounds.

I blame it on the Blues. I’d lie in my bed in the dark and listen to the songs wafting through my window on the night air from juke boxes playing late and loud in adjacent Love Quarters. Rolling Fork's Muddy Waters, aka McKinley Morganfield, would be singing "Well, there's two trains running, and neither one's going my way; one's leaving at midnight, and the other just before day." And then, as if in competition, another juke box across the quarters would crank up with John Lee Hooker, from Tutwiler, singing "Boogie Chillen" (1948):

One night I was laying down,

I heard mama n’ papa talking’,

I heard papa tell mama, let that boy boogie-woogie,

And I felt so good,

Went on boogie’n just the same.

When I got up the next morning, I was ready, then and there, to "boogie" right out of Lumberton the first chance I got.

I also blame it on the Greyhounds. I became familiar with the Greyhound Bus Station in Lumberton when I was very young. Every Sunday morning my daddy would have me walk the two miles into town to pick up a copy of the "Times Picayune" newspaper which the bus brought up from New Orleans. I taught myself how to read when I was five by reading the Picayune's "funny papers" ("Prince Valiant," "Little Abner," the "Katzenjammer Kids,"), etc. It caused me problems in the first grade because when everyone else was going over "Dick and Jane," and "See Spot run," and pasting down their gold stars, I was looking out the window, bored out of my mind, thinking to myself, "You’ve got to be kidding me." Unfortunately, this negative attitude persisted all throughout my public-school career and made me a terrible student.

When I was a little older, maybe seven or eight, the real nice gentleman who ran the bus station, a Mr. Howard, would let me stand and read the magazines when I walked home from school, even though he knew I didn't have any money. Those magazines were really my first "window on the world." A few years later, when I joined the Navy days after graduation from high school, the new owner of the bus station brought me a bag of candy as I stood outside the station waiting on the bus to boot camp in San Diego. It's funny what you remember – on that trip, when the bus pulled into Dallas, Texas, "Green Onions" by Booker T and the M.G.s was playing on the public address system. That instrumental song became part of my interior furniture for a long time to come. Upon graduation from boot camp, I rode another Greyhound straight through to Charlestown, Massachusetts, where I caught my first ship just before it got underway for Barcelona, Spain.

You hardly ever see a Greyhound bus anymore, but they are still big back east and out west. When they were common on Mississippi roads, if you had a car that could keep up with one, it was considered "fast." A young man in Lumberton a little older than me got a job as a Greyhound driver. We were all so impressed when he came back from his training in Birmingham: quasi-military uniform, peaked cap, maybe even a Sam Browne belt. He was a genuine rock star to those of us who were looking for a way to leave town.

I lived in "early Lumberton," in a settlement called "Piatonia," just a whistlestop on the railroad a mile or so north of the current city limits. In 1883, the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad was completed from Meridian to New Orleans. Trains would stop occasionally at Piatonia, a turpentine camp, to take on naval stores. The railroad had selected it as the site of their proposed railroad station and had set apart several acres of land for the station and section houses. A small school building was erected, and a considerable mercantile business was established. As a child, I played in the foundations of several of these buildings. Two brothers from Georgia, however, aided by the father of Hugh White, later the governor of Mississippi, established a large sawmill about a mile south of Piatonia, on the banks of Red Creek, and the railroad eventually built their station there, the current site of Lumberton. The big hill where the Lumberton City Hall is located was also once the site of an old Indian village. A promotional brochure from around 1915 showcases the optimism of the Lumberton city fathers:

Come to Lumberton! It is growing fast! Population in 1883, one family. In 1885, 50 people. In 1900, 1800. Present population: 2,500. Unsurpassed water. Excellent lights. Telephone system. On the line of two railroads. Magnificent schools. Attractive churches. Fine buildings. Three immense sawmills (combined output, 270,000 feet daily). Ice factory. Bottling plant. Brick plant. National bank. Lodges. Military company. Library.

Probably the most famous person who left Lumberton that nobody's ever heard of today was the author, James Street (1903-1954). His father served as mayor when he was a child. In fact, at 23, he was the youngest mayor in the town's history. I walked past the house James was born in every day on the way to school. I might have been the only one in my high school who had read any of his books. He was one of America's most popular writers in the 1930's and 40's, writing such novels as "The Biscuit Eater" (1939), "Oh Promised Land" (1940), "Tap Roots" (1942), and "Good-by My Lady" (1954), several of which were turned into Hollywood movies. He also wrote extensively for such magazines as the "Saturday Evening Post," "Cosmopolitan," and "Colliers," which were all coffee table staples before the days of television. I’ve often thought that Lumberton was missing a bet by not having an annual "James Street Literary Festival." Other towns in Mississippi celebrate "days" of dubious provenance (mullet, frogs, pecans, tung nuts), while Lumberton is missing a legitimate claim to fame. Clarksdale has its annual "Tennessee Williams Festival," and Williams’ only association with that delta town is having spent a summer or two as a child with his grandfather who was an Episcopal pastor there.

But what you leave also stays behind you. My people are buried there, and Lumberton's past is my past. One thing I’ve always appreciated about growing up in Lumberton, however, is that, for its time and place, there was a positive attitude toward race relations. It was still the apogee of the Jim Crow South, but times were changing. One of the few people who paid me any attention was Mr. Gilly, a black gentleman who ran a small grocery store near my home, what would be called a "sari-sari" store in Asia, with very limited wares. Whenever I had a quarter, I would ride my bicycle down to his store, and he would sell me an ice-cold RC cola from the old-fashioned ice box, a "stage plank" cookie, and cut me a big hunk of bologna and a piece of cheese from the cooler. I would have a picnic, then and there. I know he lost money on the deal, but he was my friend. There was a big picture of Dinah Washington, the "Queen of the Blues," all dressed in white, hanging on the wall. He also taught me to shoot pool. I was just a kid, but I knew, and my peers knew, that a lot of the things we saw going on were bogus. For example, I would walk by the "separate but equal" black public school in Big Quarters at night and see light shining through countless cracks in the building; I would sit in the main café in town, wondering about the irony of eating a hamburger prepared by a black cook who could not sit and eat beside me; on our high school class trip to Chattanooga, a day after the death of Lumberton's Mack Charles Parker, possibly the last lynching in Mississippi, I was proud that a teacher ripped some moron's racist sign off the tour bus before we left the parking lot. Such actions and attitudes prepared me for the military which had long been integrated, with President Harry Truman leading the way with the Navy in 1948.

Things were not totally wonderful, however. If you went to the segregated Apex theater, where I first fell in love, with the actress Betty Hutton, about 1952 in "The Greatest Show on Earth," you learned not to sit just forward of the segregated balcony above. Otherwise, you might get some interesting stuff dropped on your head. It was still the greatest deal in town: 15 cents bought you a ticket to the movie, a bag of popcorn, and a coke in a bottle.

Say what you will, Lumberton is a resilient place. It lost its main highway; it lost its red light; they even wanted to take away its school, but it always bounces back. Even as one of the smallest 1A school systems in Mississippi (138 students), Lumberton bats and plays far above its weight in both athletics and academics. Next month, my high school class, the class of 1959, will have its 65th reunion. There's not many of us left. Somewhere along the way, I picked up the large picture board with all our graduation pictures on it. At each reunion, we have a little ceremony and paste gold stars on the photographs of classmates who died the previous year. When my name is eventually called, it will be the first gold star I ever received, and the last time I leave Lumberton.

Light a candle for me.

—

Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: [email protected].

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