The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

by Bob Zellner

  So that summer of 1949, I lived in Mobile with Aunt Peg and Uncle Doug, while my family lived in Loxley, Alabama. Going to live with Aunt Peg and Uncle Doug was a life-changing experience for me in a number of ways. I had an early taste of city life and I learned to read well enough to skip a grade and catch up with my group in school, going that fall from the third grade in Loxley to the fifth.

  Mobile and the fancy house on Old Government Street were a millions miles from Mom and Dad, Jim, Douglas, and baby David, back in the dusty little Alabama crossroads of Loxley. It was a novel experience to walk along the street in Mobile and not know anyone. In all the country towns we had lived in, you couldn’t do anything bad and get away with it. If you got into a fight, everybody knew about it. One time I went in a lady’s yard and picked some flowers for Mom who was sick in bed. I had to go back and apologize and the lady said, “I know your mom is sick so take some more, I’ll help you pick them.”

  My new home for the summer in Mobile was all hustle and bustle, compared to Loxley, where the biggest excitement was the occasional escaped criminal from the chain-gang shed just west of town, or the biggest potato or cucumber weighed-in down at the grading shed. The clean, neat look of the Mobile house and yard, and having the undivided attention of my uncle and aunt, combined with their upscale way of living, made me feel slightly ashamed of our existence back home. The moment I was aware of this feeling, I was ashamed of being ashamed.

  Loxley was agriculture and Mobile was post-war boom. To reach Mobile from Baldwin County and Loxley we had to drive through the Bankhead Tunnel, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, we children thought. Just before the tunnel we crossed Mobile Bay and just before that we drove through Malbis, Alabama, a Greek settlement. Daddy took us to the restaurant there sometimes because he had developed a taste for exotic foods when he was in Europe. The salad was divine with black olives and crumbly cheese and robust with vinegar and little green onions. I lusted after the rice wrapped in grape leaves and the thin pastry layered with honey and walnuts.

  All food paled, however, in the presence of my first steak. It was a small, tender, bacon-wrapped morsel of filet mignon grilled by Aunt Peg. Accustomed to making them each week for herself and Uncle Doug, she now added another for me. I simply could not believe that anyone could taste something this delicious without jumping up and down. It was red in the center and had blood running out of it! The Douglas Popes of Old Government Street, Mobile, Alabama, though, ate their steaks with one hand in their laps like it was the most natural thing in the world.

  I loved the new experience of rare steak, but sometimes I did miss Mom’s mounds of fresh vegetables. Aunt Peg cooked more like Yankees when she put three undercooked green beans and a spoonful of mashed potatoes next to the filet mignon. Well, one can’t have everything in life, and right then life was good.

  School was fun for the first time in my life. At Barton Academy, I learned to read by seeing a picture and the word next to it. I think the theory was to recognize whole words rather than break them into parts. My visual and auditory memory is strong and I can still see in my mind’s eye a picture of a “pegion” and the word “bird.” I guess that’s why I can’t spell pigeon. I am still a horrible speller. Thank you, Jesus, for spell check!

  As late as eighth grade I remember a teacher making me write the word “family” one hundred times so I would stop spelling it “fambly.” Part of the problem, I now realize, is that the Southern English of the street is far different from the King’s.

  Once I learned to read, I couldn’t get enough of it, but never to the extent of older brother Jim who had long since been dubbed a bookworm. “Always got his head in a book,” the old country people would say of Brother. “That boy will never amount to anything.”

  I loved Jack London, never knowing he was a lefty. His White Fang and The Call of the Wild and Bret Harte’s The Luck of Roaring Camp gave me untold hours of pleasure. And I never knew that Samuel Clemens was another iconoclast subverting unsuspecting boys and girls with his stories about Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and the racially subversive Pudd’nhead Wilson, and his book A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. Aunt Peg took me to the library and introduced me to Moby Dick, Little Women, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Robinson Crusoe, and The Grapes of Wrath, The Old Man and the Sea, and other classics. I had no idea I was beginning my education, I was just having fun reading.

  Each summer afternoon I got off the city bus and walked home along Government Street with its centuries-old live oak trees bowing low with necklaces of Spanish moss, turning slowly onto Old Government, past the park at the fork on down to Aunt Peg’s house on the right. I did not realize at the time that I was becoming the little boy that she never had. I wondered why she and Uncle Doug did not have little children but I was happy that she met me after school with cookies or a small sandwich before I did my homework. That was a chore I had to complete before going out to play with the neighbor kids.

  At home we never went to summer school and we could do our homework after it got dark. Another difference was the fastidious way Aunt and Uncle kept the house and the yard. There also was not a single thing to eat in Aunt Peg’s garden. Dad’s victory garden at home was a survival necessity for our family while the Popes’ garden was for beauty alone.

  During that summer of school in Mobile, Uncle Doug and Aunt Peg drove me over to Loxley every Friday afternoon. Arriving with them in their new Nash to a hectic weekend of washing clothes and canning confirmed the relative chaos of home. The backbreaking work Mom performed as a matter of routine became painfully visible as she and we boys did the washing on the back porch in an old wringer machine.

  Dad’s and Mom’s work clothes for church and school and the mountains of dirty boys’ clothing were beaten by the agitator, rinsed twice, and wrung out a final time into the wash tub to be hung out to dry on clotheslines—people in those days were using solar energy before anyone had ever heard the term. Sheets alone from four or five beds each week filled several machine loads. Mom ironed most of this mountain until she taught Jim and me how to iron.

  Then there were beds to make, floors to sweep, and restaurant-sized batches of dishes to wash, dry, and put away. Jim and I milked Janie the cow morning and evening and the rabbits and chickens had to be fed. Doug and later David and Malcolm did the feeding.

  The events of the day seemed to happen in Loxley by chance and very slowly, but the schedule in Mobile was exactly the same every day. Up at the crack of dawn, the fragance of night-blooming jasmine still drifting through the house, and breakfast at exactly the same time. Uncle Doug and I taking turns in the shower (at home we had never, ever had a shower), and then stuffing ourselves into our clothes. We had a contest of who could dress first. Uncle said I had an unfair advantage because, “My Peg has fitted you out in nothing but short pants and that silly jacket that says ‘Barton Academy’. Pretty fancy for a country boy like you, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” I hollered back to my favorite uncle, “but you got out of the shower first and had a head start.”

  “Yeah, Bobby, but I got to put on a whole suit, with shirt tie and all.”

  Fleeting memories of living in Mobile that first time include the smell of diesel as the huge buses pulled off after letting me out at Barton or back home in the afternoon. It reminded me of the kerosene scent of Mom’s kitchen stove back in Slocomb. At other times Mobile simply stank from the International Paper and Scott Paper Company paper mills situated just north of town. The smell was hard to get used to but native Mobilians seemed never to notice it. Much later, when voters became more environmentally conscious, they asked Governor George Wallace to do something about it. Rather than require the mills to invest in anti-pollution equipment, George said, “What do you want me to do? That’s just the smell of money.”

  The odor could be so powerful it sometimes made people do funny things. Mother told a story that became par
t of our family lore. When she first moved to Mobile to live with Daddy, they had been married only a few days. She joined Dad in his ministry to the seamen and the homeless—“tramps,” we called them—along the wharfs and the dives of the old Mobile waterfront.

  The Salvation Army Commander’s wife, Evelyn, took Mom under her wing, trying to prepare her for that life. A country girl with a strict upbringing, Mom knew that the cloistered confines of Bob Jones College had hardly prepared her for life in a rowdy port city. One day Mom and Evelyn were walking arm-in-arm past Bienville Square with its moss-covered oaks and flowing fountain when Mother was struck by an overpowering stench. She reflexively moved away from her new best friend who laughed, “That’s all right, Ruby, it’s just the paper mill. The wind must have changed. It ain’t me babe.”

  With a move every three or four years, it was not easy being the new kid in town with four brothers and a school teacher mom and a preacher daddy. Jim and I had to fight our way into every little town. The South has a culture of violence—the honor code. It is much like that of our national ethic. It just seemed Southern boys had to fight a lot, but I never knew when my fighting would “get Daddy in trouble” with the powers in the church. My older brother Jim was as slim as a dragon fly and more refined than most boys his age. He read a lot and listened to music. Jim liked lure casting, for instance, while most south Alabama fishermen used stink bait for catfish or plain old worms for bream and bass. Jim was pretty fast with his fists. We were best friends and we watched each other’s back when we had to fight. When I started first grade at Slocomb in 1945, it seemed like I had to fight every morning and afternoon on the way to and from school. Jim was bigger and more experienced and he told me that we would have to fight for the rest of our lives, at least for the first few weeks in each new town. He said new guys in town didn’t have to be good at fighting, they just had to be willing. “I’m willing,” I said, “but I don’t like to do it because it always makes me cry. If it’s so natural to have to fight why do I always cry?”

  My brother told me that he didn’t know—that was just the way it was. He said it was better not to cry but the main thing was to put up a good fight. After you fight someone, then they know you have heart. You may not have to fight them again; you can become good friends and help each other in fights with other boys. I told Jim that he and I were good friends, and that I appreciated it when he helped me fight. Jim said he didn’t help me fight—that he just told the other boys that if more than one at a time got on me, they would have to deal with him.

  When Brother and I fought our way into Loxley, Alabama, he gave me pointers aimed at improving my fighting style. “You’re good,” he told me, “and you’ll soon be better than me. I can barely handle you now. You are getting bigger, and I can tell you’ll be heavier than me, and stronger.”

  That was quite an admission for an older brother, and I remembered it some years later when Jim went out for football at W. S. Neal High School in East Brewton. He was desperate to play ball and spent several years sitting on the bench in blue and gold waiting for a chance to get into the game. It was ironic because the coach had tried to convince me to try out. My shrewd mother, however, had other ideas. She bought a brand new gold-plated trombone with the understanding that because it was so expensive and such a sacrifice for the family, I would have to promise to stay in the band. I could march on the field at half time but not play football where I could get seriously hurt. Maybe she was right, but when I saw Burns Blackwell, the halfback, bull his way up the field tossing defensive backs out of the way like they were dried corn stalks, ripping off fifteen yards at a time, I thought to myself, “I could do that.” But a promise is a promise.

  To fight or not to fight became an obsession when my father was appointed by the Bishop to serve the church in Daphne, Alabama. We moved from Loxley in June and I started the fifth grade that fall in Daphne. Jim was a sixth-grader and our little brother Doug was in the first grade. Mother was the first-grade teacher.

  Before school started, I told Jim that I didn’t plan to fight at the new school. “I just cry,” I explained again, “and it doesn’t make sense to fight if all I’m going do is cry. They’ll just have to accept me the way I am. I’ll tell them I don’t believe in fighting and it’s not because I’m chicken.”

  “I don’t know, little brother, that doesn’t sound like a real good plan to me. I don’t think they’ll understand; you won’t get away with it. They’ll just think you are a coward and they’ll make your life miserable until you show them you got heart.”

  “I got heart, Jim, you know I got heart.”

  “I know you’re not scared,” Jim said. “The problem is, those bullies don’t know that. I suggest you think about this some more.”

  I suggested that maybe there weren’t any bullies in Daphne but my big brother didn’t agree. “There’s bullies in every town,” he said, “and they’ll all have a try at you. The more you don’t fight, the more bullies there’ll be. Shoot, even the scared ones’ll start picking on you.”

  My stomach was tying in a knot and I was dreading the start of school. There has to be a better way, I thought. Brother said maybe there was and maybe I’d find it, but he doubted it. For what seemed like weeks after school started I was brutalized before school, after school, and at recess. I didn’t tell anyone and my brother looked on in agony for me. Finally, Mother asked if anything was going on at school that she should know about. She noted that four out of five mornings I had a stomachache and begged to stay home. My eyes started squirting tears while I begged her not to make me go to school, but I didn’t intend to tell her what was happening. This didn’t do any good because she had seen for some time that I was black and blue. She said she’d been waiting for me to say something to her. “Is someone bothering you at school?”

  “Someone?” I blurted. “They’re all beating me up. Every day at recess.”

  “Aren’t your teachers doing something?” she asked.

  I told Mom that I had made up my mind not to fight and I told her the reasons why. Even before she could answer, I started my arguments, pointing out that she and Dad had always told us not to get into fights. As preachers’ kids we have to set a good example for others, I reminded her.

  Mother was outraged. She said I should have told her about this a long time ago. She’d take it up with the principal and have a stop put to this misbehavior instantly. Now I was truly terrified. If she did that, I’d never be able to hold my head up in the school. Struggling to control my rising panic, I pleaded with Mother not to talk to the principal. “If you don’t want me to go to the principal,” she said, “then you’re just going to have to fight those boys.”

  That was a proposition I could understand. Out went my nascent nonviolence. When Mother started with the pep talk, however, about not having to win the fight but just proving you would fight, I decided to try again to convince her. I informed her that I had fought plenty of times—that Jim and I always fought our way into every new town but now I had decided not to fight. I assured her that Jim supported me in my decision, that it was harder on him to see me punished every day than it was for me to actually be punished. Mother obviously didn’t understand that I had made a decision. She said she would get Daddy to give me fighting lessons.

  That night when Dad came home from his pastoring rounds, he agreed to give me some lessons. He said the most important thing in fighting was to be sure when the fight started to hit the other person as hard as possible on the nose. That method assured, he said, that even if the person went on to beat you up, at least you have done damage to them and they don’t get off scot-free. They may wind up beating you, he said, but they paid a price. But most of the time, if you managed to get in a good sock to the nose, Dad assured me, you can go on and clean their plow. Cleaning plow was always big in my family. Daddy ended my fighting lesson with the story of the chairman of the official board. Once during a heated se
ssion of the board of his church stewards, a right-wing, very important deacon had threatened to throw my father “out that window, preacher or not.”

  My father’s response was the stuff of family legend. “Deacon so and so, you may indeed throw me out that window, but if you manage to do it, you’ll sure enough know you’ve been in a fight, Chairman of the Board or not.”

  It is telling that my father’s fighting lesson did not demonstrate how to stand or how to hold one’s hands or even to make a fist. Dad apparently believed that technique would take care of itself if one’s attitude was correct. First things first, and of course Dad was a minister and therefore much better at telling than showing.

  So, Dad on one side and Mother on the other, Jim looking on, little brothers lurking outside the door, they all assured me that I would have to fight, principles or not, otherwise my life would remain miserable. I told them once again that I always cried when I had to fight and I didn’t see why it was necessary. “Well, it is necessary,” Dad said, “so get on with it, Bobby. Jim you watch him tomorrow and if more than one gets on him at a time, then you get in there, too.”

  My brother looked hurt that Dad would think it necessary to tell him that. Later when we got to bed, Jim told me he was looking forward to tomorrow. I was not at all looking forward to tomorrow.

  The next morning I timed my arrival to coincide with the bell so I got to my room without incident. The shoot-out at the O.K. corral would have to wait till morning recess at ten o’clock. At recess I walked onto the long front porch of the grammar school. By that time I had forgotten that I had sneaked into school just before the bell. I strolled along in the middle of a Gary Cooper daydream. Word had gotten out that Bobby was a changed man . . . boy, and not to mess with him. To do so would mean instant death. Just then one of the bigger boys grabbed me from behind. The element of surprise, however, shifted to my side because heretofore I had never resisted. They had gotten used to treating me like a rag doll. I caught a glimpse of my big brother just as I made a mighty heave, throwing the boy who had me around the neck past me on the left. As the startled bully hurtled by me, I swung at his nose with my right fist. Missing his nose, my fist bounced off his cheek and smashed into the post holding up the porch. I looked at my knuckles and saw white bone but very little blood. That made me mad so I advanced on the still-stricken boy with both fists landing solid blows. I must have hit him twelve times in half that many seconds.