PANSIES

Pansies 211 Celeste Dr.

After they took down the wrought iron fence that surrounded the yard on 10th Avenue, the yard looked bare. They also removed the cattle guard on the drive because new town laws prohibited cows from grazing on residential lots… except for the milk cow grazing on an empty lot that I avoided when I walked up the street to visit my Aunt Kathryn. The barrenness of the front yard and drive troubled my Grandmother Nell. So she decided to put in pansies in front of the tall steps leading to the front porch. She didn’t turn the ground herself, but Ernest, the yardman, dug a large round bed that covered half the front yard, and she put in pansies using a trowel with a splintered handle and adding a small amount of Vigoro and water.

“Frost won’t kill them,” she said to my aunt. “They can weather as low as 25 degrees. I’ll put in purple ones for sure. They’re symbols of love. My granddaughter will like them.” I was only three years old when she began her landscaping project, but  to her I seemed old enough to appreciate the beauty of flowers. I also knew what love was because she told me often how much she loved me.

Era Leader Clipping

She sent brief messages to the society column of the Era Leader, the town of Franklinton's newspaper of note: “Little Miss Diane Marquart of Baton Rouge is spending the week with her grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. P.E Greenlaw.” She felt that the message distinguished our family living in a provincial southeastern Louisiana town of 1,000 or more inhabitants. After all, little Miss was the granddaughter of a Greenlaw, a descendant of the Scots clan among the Humes, although I’m sure no one in that small redneck town knew or cared about the lineage of the Greenlaws. Or about my frequent visits to that community.

However, Grandmother Nell clipped and pasted these society mentions in a scrapbook that is now stored in a sideboard of my living room in New Iberia, Louisiana. I was three when she showed me the circular bed of purple pansies. “Puppy dog noses,” I promptly said, and she clapped her hands as if I’d vocalized the most precocious statement of any three-year old in the world.

Those colorful symbols of her affection became my favorite flower — and remain my favorite flower, planted every fall, sometimes in the spring, by friends who know this story about the language of love that flowers impart.

 

Photography by Victoria Sullivan

 

 

THE WHISTLE OF TRAINS

Sketch by Billie Perkins

An artist gave the above sketch to me to accompany a little feature I was writing for The Daily Iberian back in the 70’s. It’s a rendering of the platform and partial front of the train station here in New Iberia, Louisiana, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The platform and tracks are owned by BNSF and have also been used by the Louisiana and Delta Railroad since 1987.

According to Leo Marx, author of The Machine in the Garden,  the railroad’s development didn’t have any particular meaning for the southern states during pre-Civil War times because the South was enamored of a pre-industrial pastoral ideal which Marx claimed southerners used as a weapon against industrialism. However, the Civil War provided unexpected liberation for southerners to get on the road to modernity, and Georgia led the way in the performance of southern railroads. Railroads were soon established in the post-antebellum South, and by 1890, historian Edward Ayers observed that nine out of every ten southerners lived in a railroad county, “surrounded by an aura of glamour throughout the New South era.”

In Louisiana, depots became the sites of frenetic activity where one northerner related his privileged treatment at a Louisiana depot: “Here we are at the depot and oh, what a collection of porters, cabmen and Car men, Irish, Americans, and Blacks.”* Actually, New Iberia’s first passenger train from New Orleans didn’t arrive until 1879, and a few years later a spur was laid to Avery Island and Abbeville. The railroad became vital to the lumber business and was used to transport cypress from the swamp to landowners who built many of the handsome homes along the Bayou Teche.

In the early 1900’s, my Great-Uncle Ed Greenlaw laid a private railroad track leading from his property in Ramsey, Louisiana to my Grandfather Paul’s lumber mill in Franklinton, Louisiana, transporting long leaf pine logs approximately 28 miles. When he sold the property after he had denuded the forests around Covington, Louisiana, he had the audacity to pick up the rails and take them with him, according to the present owner of the property that is now a bed and breakfast destination.

I have no idea how many trains passed on those first laid rails to New Iberia, but today I look up numerous times during the day when I hear them whooing on the tracks. I also hear them rumbling through at any time I wake during the night. Their long whistles used to sound like lonesome wails to me, but when I wake in the darkness now and hear them, I think of mobility – of going places and having new adventures, of still being able to travel.

In A Lonely Grandmother, one of the books of poetry I published last year, the lead poem is about a train:

The Aging Express

The sound of so many journeys

passes in the whistle of a train

and little wonder

this master of navigation wails,

pushing through sleeplessness

and darkness without news.

Shut-in passengers urge it on

thinking it a boundary-less machine

traveling on an open frontier

carrying them past houses

with open windows

crying ‘welcome aboard'

and rumbling through the night

making connections

in desolate places…

but not stopping for long.

*Most of the information about the history of railroads in this blog was derived from Railroads in the Old South by Aaron W. Marrs, a book I used while doing research for my book, Redeemed by Blood.

LABORERS IN THE VINEYARD

Shelling butter beans

The other day I walked into a vegetable market in Winchester, Tennessee and got excited when I saw a plethora of fresh vegetables and fruit– tomatoes, squash, corn, South Carolina peaches – fresh, mouth-watering food that made me think about my childhood visits to the home of my Grandfather and Grandmother Greenlaw in Franklinton, Louisiana where we had fresh vegetables, including fat butter beans, for lunch all summer. I didn’t see any speckled butter beans in the market, but I probably wouldn’t have bought a bagful because a particular memory of shelling them back in the 40’s suddenly assailed me. Here’s the memory in the form of a short-short vignette:

Grandfather set down two washtubs of speckled butter beans – a Mt. Hermon farmer’s harvest of plenty – on the back screen porch and grinned at us. He had a wide mouth, and his grin covered his entire face. He was hardly ever serious because he said he was a Greenlaw, a bona fide Scot, and Scots were known to be practical jokers.

“Fifty cents each to shell the whole bunch,” he said to me and my brother Paul, as he headed out to sell Fords at “The Garage,” a plebian name for a motor car business, also known as “Motor Sales and Service,” a moniker just a tad above “The Garage.”

In 1943, fifty cents looked like a good deal to us. Paul was ten; I was eight, and neither of us had earned over a quarter for doing chores in our household. We smirked at one another and began shelling.

Four red, sore fingers and four hours later, we had done one tubful. We worked steadily in a silence broken only by the buzz of the sawmill further up 10^th Avenue. Our grandmother stayed in the kitchen next to the porch because she disapproved of Grandfather putting this Herculean project in our hands. The noon whistle whined and died, but no one called us in, and we plodded on, heaping shells on the green painted concrete floor of the porch.

At first, it had been fun to see the fat speckled bean pop out as we peeled back the shell, but amazement quickly turned to monotony. Mutual, fast shelling became a matter of who could lollygag the longest. After all, we were to be paid equal wages, so it didn’t matter who did the most work, Paul said.

My grandfather came home for lunch, patted us both on our damp heads and didn’t offer for us to stop working. I could hear my grandmother in the kitchen admonishing Grandfather about “child labor.” We had begun to sweat heavily, and the beans were early salted. When 4 p.m. showed on the Motor Sales clock that hung on a solid wall leading into the kitchen, we sat staring down at an inch of beans lying at the bottom of the second tub.

Grandfather came home early because he said he hadn’t sold anything except a handful of auto parts that day.

“Well,” he said to my Grandmother, who had finally decided to check on us, “do you need help canning these beans?” He gave us an evil grin.

My brother and I looked at one another and stood up, then left the porch, letting the screen door bang behind us and not looking back at the inch of beans on the bottom of the second tub.

“Fifty cents between you,” he called after us. ‘You didn’t finish the job.”

We sat under the pear tree in the side yard until dark when Grandfather came out to look for us.

“I shelled the rest,” he said. “And I paid myself twenty-five cents for finishing the job for you.” He didn’t bother to smile and turned to go inside where my grandmother was waiting supper on us. I heard him saying something about being a good Baptist and to remember the parable of the workers in the vineyard to my grandmother, who mumbled the words “proof texting.” I went to bed early, my heart filled with spite…and my stomach gnawing with hunger…but not for butter beans.

Paul ended up thanking him, but I quit going down to Motor Sales in the afternoons where I had worked the adding machine, pretending I was selling cars for my grandfather. I no longer wanted to be a businesswoman. It seemed like business people skimmed the best off the bottom of the tub and cheated the ones who did all the labor.

However, three years later, when I broke my front tooth playing croquet on my grandparent’s side lawn and Grandfather Paul had to witness me squirming in a dentist’s chair, he gave me $25 to spend on whatever I liked… and I didn’t have to perform any tasks to earn the money.  

But I have trouble digesting butter beans to this day, especially speckled ones.

A THANKSGIVING VISIT

I doubt that most readers observed Thanksgiving by visiting a cemetery, but it seemed a meet time for me to visit Ellis Cemetery in Franklinton, Louisiana, where most of my relatives are buried. I wondered if the cemetery had been named after my Grandfather Paul Greenlaw’s middle name, Ellis. Some local citizens believed that his initials, P.E.G., indicated that he’d be prosperous (which he became) because the bearer of a name having initials that spell another word will inevitably become wealthy. Such are the superstitious countrynisms of a small town in southeast Louisiana where so many of my recent ancestors lived and died.

The day was sunny, one of those halcyon days typical of autumn in Louisiana. I’d only been in the cemetery five times or so, but I knew the exact location of the “old” section of grave sites and recognized the plot immediately. When we turned onto the side road leading to the Greenlaw family plot, I glimpsed a profusion of pink camellias in a tall tree beside the gravestones. My first thought was that my relatives’ remains had greatly enriched the soil near the tree, causing it to bear such beautiful blossoms at this time of year. There they were – the headstones of my grandfather, grandmother, mother, father, and one of my younger brothers – and across the road the stones of my great-grandfather, great-grandmother, and one of my great-uncles. The stones represented a gallery of professions that included a poet, a physician, a lumber baron, a Ford dealer, a draftsman, and domestics like my mother whose stone bore the legend: “She was a real wife and mother.”

Cemeteries can be sad places, but as I stood in the bright November sunlight, I began to feel connectedness and peace, and a line from one of my funeral homilies came to me: “They go to the father, and they remain with us.” Even the great-grandparents, whom I never knew but whose stories I had heard many times, were with me, “in still small accents whispering from the ground…a grateful earnest of eternal peace…” (Gray’s “Elegy Written In A Country Graveyard”).

I enjoyed one of those peak moments when communication comes from a source beyond and was strengthened by their spiritual presence. For perhaps thirty minutes, I walked among my antecedents, noting that their headstones needed cleaning or that I should preserve the inscriptions in rubbings. This is a process where butcher paper is taped to the headstones with masking tape and charcoal or crayon is rubbed over the stone to make the etched lines appear without the engravings being touched by the charcoal or crayon. When the paper is removed, all the words appear just as they were initially etched into the stone.

I also noted that the women in the family, except for my mother who died at the age of 69, lived 84 – 88 years. This fact heightened my good mood for that kind of longevity could mean six – ten more years of fruitful living for me on this earth. When I returned to New Iberia, I re-read the poem I’d written about Great-Grandmother Greenlaw (who also wrote poetry) after seeing her gravestone for the first time. This is an excerpt from that poem, “Resurrection of the Word,” taken from my first published book of poetry, Afternoons in Oaxaca:

“...Now in the remembered scent of jasmine,
bees buzz around her headstone,
I look up at the winter trees,
great filigrees of ruin
hovering over her grave,
and I think:
words do not end,
words spill out,
making a poem in her soil,
thoughts emerge from another world,
the door to the tomb
falls open with a grating sound,
and the Spring of the year, curiously,
fancies itself reborn.
I did not urge her resurrection,
it was an old rebellion,
roots gnaw deep,
above, the stone is cracked,
and insects linger between deeply-etched lines
about the One Whom None Can Hinder.
Beneath, her hollow eyes do not see me,
but her heart burns, a firebox of words,
grave poet of the missionary senses,
Great-grandmother Dora Runnels,
mapping her slow advances in poetry
  in me."