The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  She never even saw any mound at Mound City.

  Arkansas City, Arkansas

  We asked a passenger who belonged there what sort of place it was. “Well,” said he, after considering, and with the air of one who wishes to take time and be accurate: “It’s a hell of a place.”

  —Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1884

  If Sam Clemens stopped to visit it today, supposing he could find his way inland several miles from the Mississippi, which has left it more forsaken than Mound City, he would be struck by its silence, an eerie quiet without even a trace of the hell-of-a-place atmosphere it had in the time of the steamboat, when he knew it. He knew how fickle the Grandfather of Waters could be, and what it had done to towns along its banks, but even he would be stunned into melancholy by the changes that time and the river have wrought upon this once-noisy metropolis.

  Because of its name, it is our flagship city, but Arkansas City is no more typical of Arkansas than, say, Virginia City is of Virginia; that one, which is not the famous Virginia City in Nevada or even the one in Montana, but a remote hamlet lost in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, has no suggestion of the piedmont or the tidewater, as this one has no suggestion of the Arkansas uplands. This is all delta. It is the only truly Southern place of these lost cities, and by very virtue of being Southern it takes on the flavor of Mississippi or Louisiana more than of Arkansas, which is not a Southern state, despite its misguided association with the Confederacy.

  Half of the nation’s states have their eponymous state cities: some of them, like Kansas City or Oklahoma City or especially New York City, became the largest metropolises in their states; others, like Iowa City, Texas City, and Jersey City, managed to become true cities; but most did not, and some, like Alabama City, Montana City, and that Virginia City, are little more than locales or ghost towns. Arkansas City could have become a major river port rivaling Vicksburg and Helena, if not Memphis or St. Louis. But the Grandfather first abused it, then abandoned it.

  Ironically, the best-known Arkansas City, the much more populous one, is the one in Kansas, where they pridefully but mistakenly pronounce the name of the city and the river that runs by it to rhyme with the state: Arkanziss. For years, until the invention of the Zip Code, much of the mail, including perishable baby chicks, destined for the fourteen thousand people in Arkansas City, Kansas, was misdirected to the town of seven hundred in Arkansas, to the chagrin of both postmasters, and even today some cross-country truck driver will negotiate his eighteen-wheel rig along the narrow blacktop that runs eleven miles from the nowhere highway to the nowhere town, and, finding that he is not in Arkansas City, Kansas, but five hundred miles off course, he will vent his trucker’s displeasure on whatever quiet, modest citizen informs him of his error. Usually this happens to be Mr. Robert Montgomery, the postmaster of the small third-class post office, recently moved from its old brick storefront facing the levee to a more official-looking building beside the volunteer fire station and the outdoor basketball court.

  Monty, who gets kidded for his lack of resemblance to the Hollywood star of the same name, just as Arkansas City gets kidded by those who know the big one in Kansas, is Kim’s first contact when she arrives. Had she known where to look, she might have found the small village library, in an old house, but the post office is more conspicuous. In a city as small as this one, the postmaster will know everybody.

  “Well, there’s a few young couples here I don’t know,” Mr. Montgomery admits to Kim. “Just moved in the last year or so. But everybody gets their mail right here: we don’t make any deliveries.”

  Postmaster for “only” fourteen years, he tells Kim he doesn’t know anything and she ought to talk to Verna Reitzammer, who was postmaster for forty-two years. As he is giving her directions to Mrs. Reitzammer’s house, a woman comes into the post office to check her box. “Wait a minute,” the postmaster says to Kim. “Maybe that’s who you want to see first: the mayor’s wife. She can show you everything.”

  He introduces them. Judy Bixler, forty-three, who looks as young as the youthful mayoress of Lake City (although, as Kim will later learn, she has three children in their twenties; the eldest, Cherie, works as a fashion designer in New York, where so many young people go), seems to have come into the post office at this very moment almost by design, for she will prove to be Kim’s primary contact. Kim will never meet Judy’s husband, His Honor Richard, who is now in his third term as the town’s mayor, although it is strictly a part-time activity, taking a share of his active career as a beekeeper. B & B Honey is, next to the giant Potlatch Corporation (paper), the town’s biggest industry, although the business is “operated” by the bees themselves, and their busy apiarist, Bixler, has found time as mayor to improve the streets, install drainage ditches, build a new water tower, a small “city hall” with recreational facilities, and a senior citizens’ center, and acquire a new fire truck.

  Judy Bixler apologizes for not being able to take Kim to the mayor himself: Richard Bixler is out in the fields with his bees. “There aren’t any farm crops in bloom yet,” she explains, “but there’s always something in bloom along the river for the bees.”

  She herself is a busy hairdresser, but at the moment the town’s lone beauty shop has no customers waiting, and she will be glad to answer any questions or show Kim around. “What would you like to see first?” she asks.

  “Is there a cemetery?” Kim asks.

  “Sort of.” Judy smiles. “Follow me.” In her station wagon she leads Kim in Zephyra through the platted streets, each lined with sidewalks, ancient sidewalks cracked and tossed and weedy, sidewalks that run past mostly vacant lots, past the impressive courthouse, not on a square but in a neighborhood surrounded by houses, and on out to the northern edge of town, out a street called Avalon (although Avalon was the ocean island where King Arthur was buried, most of the streets in Arkansas City were renamed in the 1950s after the steamboats of old: “Delta Queen,” “Kate Adams,” “President,” “Morning Star”) and to the Arkansas City Cemetery.

  Such as it is. Flooded more often than the Lake City Cemetery, it was not even intended for the graves of the “better class of citizens,” as old maps once referred to the house lots of the white population, but became, rather, a potter’s field for the “low class of citizens,” or blacks, who have always been in the majority of the population here. But nowadays blacks and whites alike are buried in higher ground at Trippe, a community to the west, or elsewhere. John Campbell, whose slaves cleared a small plantation here in the 1830s, lies here with his wife in unmarked graves, not in the amphibious bogs of the cemetery proper but within a small mound rising up from it, possibly an ancient burial mound of the same Indians who established the larger mound several hundred miles upriver at Mound City.

  Kim sees this little mound and starts to climb it to look at the few headstones there, but a snake lies coiled in her path and frightens her away. If the snake is seeking to sun itself, it will have to wait for several days: the sun will not shine during the time Kim is in Arkansas City. She returns to her car and remarks to Judy Bixler, “I won’t find much of the historical past here.”

  “The past of Arkansas City wasn’t historical,” Judy says. “It was hysterical.” She invites Kim to go home with her, to her house-and-beauty-shop just a few feet from the post office (everything in this miniature city seems to be just a few feet from everything else). The Bixler residence is a modern house that looks to be reconstructed from old bricks, although Judy explains that the bricks are “antiqued,” new bricks made to look old; the interior walls, however, are paneled with old boards taken from a sharecropper’s shanty, weathered with a silvery patina. The street that runs out front, parallel to the levee, is called variously Front Avenue or De Soto Avenue or sometimes just Main Street, and throughout the town’s heyday it was a one-sided main thoroughfare on the riverfront, lined with shoulder-to-shoulder shops and stores. Judy Bixler’s house occupies the former site of one of the hotel
s. Another hotel, of two stories, is still standing, a scant two blocks away, the only really old relic along the street.

  One room adjoining the Bixlers’ living room has been equipped as a modern beauty parlor, with a row of chairs and floor-model hair dryers, although there is no sign out front advertising it, no B & B Beauty to match the B & B Honey. Maybe, Kim reflects, the double B’s don’t stand for “Bixler and Bixler,” but for “Beauty and Bee.” During the next two days she will see quite a lot of the Beauty, but never meet the Bee.

  “Do any of your customers ever get to talking about the size of the town—whether they hope it will get bigger or go on getting smaller?” Kim asks.

  “Most people like it just the way it is,” Judy says. “The older people, who remember it as a large place bustling with activity—I don’t think they would wish for it to be like that again.”

  Now Judy is on the phone, trying to line up some people to be interviewed by Kim.

  The landing on the river was there for years before it was called Arkansas City. For steamboats coming up the Mississippi from New Orleans, it was the first place to stop and take on fuel wood after Vicksburg. Most likely it got its ambitious name, Arkansas City, simply because it was the first stop in Arkansas for a boat coming from Louisiana and Mississippi. Upstream from Arkansas City is the place where the Arkansas River flows into the Mississippi, and an equal number of miles up the Arkansas is the first white settlement of the Territory, Arkansas Post, established in 1686, two hundred years before our commemorative year. This place has been marked by events that may have been hysterical but are surely historical: it became in 1717 the center for a scheme far more ambitious than the naming of an aspiring town “City.” The Scottish-born financier and mountebank John Law, who hoaxed all Europe with an investment scheme that came to be known internationally as the “Mississippi Bubble,” actually intended to colonize large tracts of wilderness near Arkansas Post, but the closest he came to it was to ship five hundred black slaves from Guinea to clear the way for eight hundred Alsatian Rhinelanders. The Germans had no experience with frontier life but held out as best they could, with the help of friendly Indians, until the bubble burst and they emigrated to New Orleans, there to settle a more civilized area that is still known as the German Coast.

  Arkansas Post changed hands from the French to the Spanish and back to the French until it became the first capital of Arkansas Territory. One of its residents, John Patterson, the first white child born in Arkansas, in 1790, lived on until that fateful year of 1886 and wrote his own epitaph: “I was born in a Kingdom; / Raised in an Empire; / Attained manhood in a Territory; / Am now a citizen of a State; / And have never been one hundred miles from where I live.” He did not identify any particular place one hundred miles away where he had never been. He could not have been thinking of Little Rock, which is farther than that; more likely it was Arkansas City, which became called such as early as 1850. If the city was fated to spend its later years being confused with Arkansas City, Kansas, it probably suffered very early from confusion with Arkansas Post, which thrived as a major steamboat port even after it lost the capital to Little Rock.

  During young Sam Clemens’s days as an apprentice steamboat pilot in the late 1850s, he knew the fuel-stop woodyard not as Arkansas City, but only by the name of whoever owned the woodyard after John Campbell died and it was no longer called Campbell’s Landing. Three miles upstream from it, and in competition with it, another landing tried to call itself “city” in the early 1870s, though it succeeded only in giving its name to the new county, Chicot (from a French word meaning “stump of a tooth” and referring to the snags or stumps of trees left littering the swamps after the timber was felled for steamboat fuel). Chicot City was very quickly thwarted in its ambition to become even a village, let alone a city, although Chicot County thrived, and Lake Chicot, formed in an old abandoned oxbow of the Grandfather, is the largest of Arkansas’s natural lakes.

  If young Sam Clemens did not know Arkansas City, he knew the only major Arkansas town on that stretch of the river, called Napoleon, which was founded in 1820 by a French general from Arkansas Post, a subordinate of Bonaparte named Frederick Notrebe. For years during the booming of the steamboat era, Napoleon flourished as the principal Arkansas port on the Mississippi; because it was located at the confluence of both the Arkansas River and the White River with the Mississippi, it was the transfer station for cargoes and passengers on the smaller streams whose sternwheelers could not manage the Grandfather. When Sam Clemens first saw Napoleon in 1854, it was “a good big self-complacent town. Town that was county-seat of a great and important county [Desha, of which Arkansas City later became, and still is, county seat]; town with a big United States marine hospital; town of innumerable fights—an inquest every day; town where I had used to know the prettiest girl, and the most accomplished, in the whole Mississippi valley…” But when Mark Twain came back twenty years later to look at it, he found “a town no more—swallowed up, vanished, gone to feed the fishes; nothing left but a fragment of a shanty and a crumbling brick chimney.”

  Is it better to be consumed by one’s spouse than abandoned? The Mississippi River swallowed Napoleon whole; many years later the river went away and left Arkansas City miles inland. But by 1874, when an especially devastating flood drove the few remaining citizens of Napoleon southward to Arkansas City, the newer town had already been incorporated; in 1879 it was declared the new seat for Desha County (it is pronounced Dee-shay, named after Ben Desha, that early settler and politician who was Bob Crittenden’s second in his duel with Conway). The day would come when only its function as the seat of county government and jurisprudence would keep Arkansas City alive, and the citizens of thriving McGehee, centrally located eight miles to the west, would clamor to take away those functions.

  The people Judy Bixler is trying to contact are not available today, she reports with regret to Kim after several phone calls. For once, it seems, Kim’s interviewees are not lined up and ready for her. Judy suggests that they go out to lunch. Where? Kim did not notice anything approximating a restaurant or café when she came into town. Except for Cave City and Lake City, none of these lost cities were large enough to support an eatery. But there are two restaurants in Arkansas City, and although Kim would not notice them she was fated to eat in both of them. For lunch today: Grundy’s Blue Front. Located on Delta Queen Avenue, not far from an out-of-place ultra-modern complex of the Arkansas City Schools, it is scarcely more than a shack, one large low-ceilinged room with a few tables and chairs haphazardly arranged on a dirty wooden floor. The exterior is painted a once-bright, now dull blue, but the name may as well refer to the menu. A permanent blue-plate special is meatloaf, white beans, lettuce salad, and cornbread. A large black woman (Mrs. Grundy? or just “the help”?) bakes her own pies fresh daily, but the dessert today is simple pound cake. Despite the cool weather, the beverage is iced tea, and it has been presweetened. The few other customers are either workingmen or farmers in town for the day. Judy tells Kim that her husband won’t let her eat here alone, so she is glad to have Kim with her.

  Kim remarks upon the quietness: even here in the Blue Front their voices seem to be the only sounds; there is no banging around in the kitchen, no talk from the other customers. Judy apologizes that Kim won’t be able to hear a thing from any of the people that Judy is trying to line up for her, not today. Could she come back tomorrow?

  The afternoon is free, but not empty: Kim goes for a walk. Leaving her car at Judy Bixler’s, she climbs “Judy’s Hill,” the levee. She walks along the roadbed atop it, looking down at the remains of storefronts along De Soto Avenue, at the whole town spread out before her, platted evenly and orderly, but sparsely planted with buildings, as if a selective tornado had plucked out from each block a handful of stores or homes. On this levee where she walks, the tents of refugees during the Great Flood of 1927 were planted side by side for miles; the western slope of the levee became a boat dock for hundreds of
skiffs bringing the homeless to this island, while the eastern slope of the levee, where the risen waters of the Mississippi were actually lower than the waters of the Arkansas on the western side, was crowded with rescue steamboats, houseboats, and makeshift motor launches coming and going over the overBig overMuddy. But Kim does not know this; she has not yet seen the photographs of the human congestion atop the levee during the flood. With no sound from the far-distant river now, with no sound at all except the wind blowing her hair back, she sees not the flood, but the town as it must have appeared at its best, in the Gay Nineties: excursion steamers and showboats lining the waterfront before the levee obscured it, the floating opera and the floating palace, elegant ladies on their way from the elegant hotels to the opera house, gambling men in vests and string ties going and coming from the thirteen saloons along the Front Avenue (there was not a church in town in those days), and the carriages driving away from the railroad depot, where a spanking new passenger train has pulled up. In all this quiet, it isn’t hard to imagine the sounds, the noises, then: of bells, whistles, gongs, calliopes, brass bands, the songs of roustabouts, cries of vendors, and laughter everywhere, of people having the time of their lives.

  Kim is having the time of her life. She is the happiest she will ever be in any of these lost cities, save one, toward the end. She has not yet seen the detailed maps that the Sanborn Map Company, purveyors to the fire-insurance industry, who inspected every building in every city of any size in the United States and left detailed dimensions and data, made of Arkansas City in our cartographic year of 1886, in which Front Avenue already had its two-story Parker Hotel (“new, not finished inside”) on the same block with two saloons, a dry-goods-and-grocery, a candy-and-fruit store, a drugs-and-stationery, and a millinery, but even without the map Kim can already imagine that ladies’ hat shop, and the sort of trimmed and untrimmed flats and felts and frilly bonnets with plumes and ostrich tips, aigrettes and jetted ornaments, ribbons and wreaths. For a moment, Kim’s head feels naked. In those days, she would not have dared to let her long blond locks blow free in the breeze as she walked here along the levee, above the town drowsing in its afternoon tranquillity.