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.

BACK IN TECHE COUNTRY AT HALLOWEEN

Civil War ghosts

Every year in October, I return to New Iberia, Louisiana after spending the Spring and Summer months on The Mountain at Sewanee, Tennessee. We always seem to arrive in time to stand on my front porch and get bitten by giant Louisiana swamp mosquitoes while handing out candy for the "trick or treaters" celebrating Halloween.  

When I was a child living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, we celebrated Halloween in a different way from young people today — we either played tricks on the neighbors (e.g., kicking over piles of leaves already raked that hadn't been burned or hiding the covers to garbage cans) or telling ghost stories on my front porch. My father always carved out a gruesome mouth on a pumpkin, and we placed a candle inside so that we had the proper macabre atmosphere for the porch tales, but to tell the truth, I never liked this holiday. I was sensitive to "scare stories" and with good reason. One summer, I had seen what I perceived to be a ghost in my grandparents' attic in Franklinton, Louisiana. In later years, my older brother corroborated this story because he had seen the ghost of my grandfather step out of a mantel clock in my grandparents' bedroom of the same Victorian-style home.

A few years ago, I published a novel entitled Redeemed by Blood that features the appearance of a ghost throughout the book. It is the fictionalized ghost of my great-grandfather and is based on the apparition I thought I glimpsed when I made this foray into my grandmother's attic against her wishes. For Halloween observers who enjoy a ghostly celebration, I'm including the prologue to Redeemed:

"I felt the same icy apprehension that I imagined the small child experienced as she tiptoed up the old pinewood stairs, the staircase rasping in protest at each step she took. I crouched in the cubbyhole of the uncompleted kitchen, a cluttered space adjacent to the landing, fenced off by a folding guard used to prevent children from tumbling down. I had been reading a narrative written by my wife in her inscrutable handwriting, a sketchy account of my entire life reduced to a nine-page booklet, hole-punched and bound with red string. The gray construction paper cover bore the numerals 1733-1916, an insipid title that could have contained the history of anyone, anything. However, it chronicled the Green family history from the time they arrived in Rappahannock River country in Virginia on the ship Macbeth until the year my wife Sarah died. I had told the history of 200 hundred years, which Sarah, the poet and journalist, condensed into an ephemeral tract and hid in the attic of a Victorian mansion in Louisiana belonging to my son Ellis Paul. The book lay on Sarah's secretary alongside my saber, the frayed gray uniform I wore at Shiloh, and a Ku Klux Klan hood, symbol of my awful shame.

"The girl who approached my attic prison appeared to be about nine years old, and her lank hair needed curling. She wore a white pinafore with a lamb embroidered on the bodice and scruffy brown shoes her mother or grandmother should have replaced before the soles came off. The child had a sweet face — a high forehead, creased in a frown, and a sharp nose lifted in pride like her Scots ancestors. I perceived intelligence in her dark eyes, and as she reached the landing, I decided to appear to her. After all, she was Dana, my great-granddaughter who had come into the world the night Sarah died.

"I moved swiftly, knocking the saber that lay on the mahogany secretary to the floor. The child glanced my way, cupped her hands over her dark eyes, and stood immobile on the landing for a moment. I felt the incandescent warmth of my body enveloping her small body for that brief instant. When I released her, she fled down the stairs, silently, rather than screaming out to her Grandmother Nell, who waited at the bottom of the stairs, that she had seen the ghost of her Great-Grandfather Dade Green.

"I sensed that the child feared punishment from her grandmother for exploring forbidden territory more than she feared me. I comforted myself with the thought that the hug I had given her had left an imprint. Perhaps I'd become the cynosure of her life, and she'd be the one who released me from my ghostly state and the memories of indiscretions I had committed during my life on earth. I resumed by task of deciphering my wife's spidery handwriting and the story about my boyhood in Virginia."

A transforming event releases this ghost from his bondage, and perhaps the story doesn't qualify for a real Halloween spin, but you can decide for yourself by ordering a copy of Redeemed by Blood! Order online from amazon.com or from Border Press, PO Box 3124, Sewanee TN 37375.