The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Whoever did business in these twin buildings, even if only buying or selling postage stamps, watched the daily comings and goings of the trains, the jerkwater combinations of freight cars with few or no passengers, that made up the once-glorious St. Louis Southwestern Railway. This line was known all over as the “Cotton Belt,” for it cut a large swath from Cairo, Illinois (not St. Louis, despite its grand name), down through most of Arkansas’s cotton country and on to Waco, Texas. In modern times the “Cotton Belt” has merged with the Southern Pacific, laid off hundreds of employees, and may soon merge with the Santa Fe and lay off hundreds more. But for years before Garland was incorporated as a city in 1903, the railroad was the town’s principal access to the outside world.

  The year 1903, coincidentally, saw the publication of a paperback jokebook, On a Slow Train Through Arkansaw, by a Chicago man named Thomas W Jackson who simply hopped on the bandwagon of a whole genre of paperbacks aimed at the amusement of train riders, who included everybody who could afford to travel in the great railroad era. A compendium of mostly stale gags and yarns, some with ancestry in the Middle Ages, none with specific relevance to Arkansas, it sold millions of copies and contributed enormously to the common image of Arkansas as a backward yokeldom where the hilarious trains stop not only once at every station but twice if the station has two doors.

  People who think Arkansas is per se a riot of hilarity usually find that blacks, or Jews, or Poles, are intrinsically funny. Not by accident is most of the humor in On a Slow Train Through Arkansaw directed not at the rube Arkansawyer himself but at the stereotyped comical “darky”—indeed, the book is subtitled Sayings of the Southern Darkies—All the Latest and Best Minstrel Jokes of the Day, and it employs all of the racial epithets: “coon,” “burrhead,” “niggah,” and “nigger.”

  Kim is surprised to notice that white people in Garland City clearly say “nigger,” or at best “nigra,” whereas everyone she talked to in Arkansas City said “black,” or at worst “nigro.” Arkansas City is distinctly Southern, with some of the South’s sense of gentility and manners. Garland City is Southwestern, with Texan arrogance and rudeness.

  “We don’t intermingle as such,” Mrs. Franklin says. “But there is no de facto segregation. It’s just sort of a custom.” The Garland City public schools, which, everyone agrees, are a complete disgrace, have been nominally desegregated as long as any other schools in the state, but there is no socializing between black and white, and many white parents have arranged to send their children to Lewisville, eight miles east, to attend the “better” schools there. In contrast to Arkansas City, the richest school district in the state, Garland City is near the bottom in school expenditures.

  But Mayor Franklin is universally loved by the black people of her town, and she is one of the few whites who call them “blacks,” not “niggers.” “I want to tell you another thing about blacks,” she tells Kim. “I found this out from my black friends. During slavery days—they didn’t have baby bottles then—the white people went to church in the mornin and the black mammies nursed the white women’s babies and their own babies, too, while they were gone to church. Then, in the afternoon, the blacks went to church, and so the black cooks in the house left their babies with the white women, who nursed their black cooks’ babies. They switched, you see.” Mrs. Franklin pauses to let this sink in. “And the blacks still go to church in the afternoons.”

  The door into the City Hall meeting room opens, and a black man carries in a stack of covered trays. “Dinnertime,” Mrs. Franklin announces, explaining that the meeting room is used for a hot-lunch program for senior citizens, both black and white, who eat together.

  Marshal Smead Franklin says that sometimes he joins them. “I’m a senior citizen, aint I?” He winks at Kim. A few elderly blacks appear and take their places at the long tables, from which the ceramic figurines have been removed, and the hot-lunch trays are spread out. The two or three elderly white people who enter do not sit next to the blacks but, rather, at a separate table.

  A tray is placed on the table in front of Kim. Nobody has formally invited her to join them for lunch, but it seems she is expected to. She looks at her plate: meat loaf, white beans, lettuce salad, and cornbread, almost identical to her lunch at Grundy’s Blue Front in Arkansas City. She wonders if it has been treated with any geriatric vitamins or medicines.

  An elderly black man seats himself directly beside Kim. His interest in her tape recorder bespeaks an eagerness to leave some record of himself in whatever form it will take, and Kim is reminded of her occasional feeling that her chance contacts seem to be ready and waiting for her. He wants to be remembered: David Adams, age ninety, used to farm a little, work a little on the Red River, now retired, except for being a proud member of Mayor Franklin’s six-member city council. “I try to help the town. Anything we can do to help the town.”

  Kim brings up a subject of mild controversy. “Do you say ‘Garland City’ or just ‘Garland’?”

  “I says Garland, Arkansas, ma’am,” David Adams declares.

  From across the table, Marshal Franklin declares, “It’s Garland City, lady. That’s its name. Just like if your name was Mary Ann, I wouldn’t call you Mary, I’d call you Mary Ann. Same with the ‘City’ part, ma’am. This is Garland City.”

  “But,” says Mayor Franklin to Marshal Franklin, “the city charter, the incorporation papers made out back in 1903, has just ‘Garland’ on it.”

  “Well, but most folks say ‘Garland City,’” the marshal reaffirms.

  “Most black folks says just ‘Garland,’” David Adams says.

  The two men eye each other. Kim changes the subject. “As a councilman,” she asks David Adams, “what improvements do you think the town needs most?”

  “I’d like to see some industry come in to help the people out,” Mr. Adams says. Mayor Franklin and Marshal Franklin nod their heads in agreement. That’s what Garland City needs most: industry, jobs. It is the same story Kim has heard in Cave City, Lake City, Arkansas City: when a town has a few hundred people in it, it has to have an industry to survive. Garland City has none.

  “This food is pretty good,” Marshal Franklin comments.

  “The food is really good,” David Adams agrees. Kim looks around and, without counting heads, determines that about a dozen people, most of them black, are eating. David explains that his wife, with whom he has celebrated a golden wedding anniversary, has a bad heart, wears a pacemaker, and can’t join them for lunch. Later he will take a lunch home for her. He likes the lunch program: it gives him a chance to get out of the house and see some friends. “Sometimes we sing,” he says. What songs do they sing? “Oh, we just sing church songs, you know. Or one of those Elvis Presley songs.”

  But there is no singing today. As soon as Mr. Adams has finished eating, Kim has time to ask him just one more question before he leaves to take lunch to his wife. He is obviously in good health. Has he never worried? Never, he says. Never in his life has he worried. “Whatever happens, I say it happens. Worryin don’t stop it. Don’t change it. It happens.” Then he shakes her hand. “I appreciate talking to you.” He is gone.

  “I tell you,” Martha Franklin tells Kim, or her husband, addressing both, “the blacks have a better time than we do!” She asks Kim, “You didn’t know that? Well, they know it! Oh, yes, they have a better time than we do!”

  “What do you mean by a better time?” Kim asks.

  “They just do have a better time, because, well, they can go fishin and they don’t worry about their bills. They get after me for worryin and scurryin around here and workin for them, and they tell me every day I’m not goin to live long and all this stuff, because I do worry. And they don’t lose things and they don’t hurry. They get after me constantly about me scurryin around and hustlin and tryin to do too many jobs at once.”

  Kim asks the mayor and the marshal, “Is David Adams the oldest person in town?”

  “Person?” says Mrs. Franklin.
“Funny you use that word, because the oldest person in town is Corinne Person—that’s her name.” Where does she live? A stone’s throw, if you threw the rock hard, from City Hall.

  “Have you worried a lot?” is one of the first questions that Kim puts to Corinne Cargill Person, widow of Levin Person, a lawyer and planter, in her mansion, set back across a broad lawn on East Fifth near its end at the levee. The Garland City levee is not nearly so high as the Arkansas City levee. The “Person place,” a townhouse rather than a plantation house, is one of only two mansions in town, but, unlike the other, the Price place, which Kim will visit this afternoon to interview another widow, is not authentically antebellum: its tall, slender columns and its doorway with split-ogee pediment are stock lumberyard fixtures added to make a two-story Victorian house look classical.

  “I have a very easy disposition and I do not hold grudges and I do not talk bad about people,” Corinne Person declares. “And I have a weak mind and a strong back.” She laughs at her transposition of the adjectives. She neither looks nor sounds her age, which may or may not be older than David Adams’s, though she was born on October 1 of the same year as he, 1895. “I used to think it was 1896, because…But you don’t want this trash on there, do you?” She points at Kim’s tape recorder. She is a handsome woman with dark hair, and her house is lovely. She will give Kim a tour. Did Kim notice the church right behind the house?

  Yes, Kim noticed the church—“chapel” would be the word for this small red brick neo-Gothic structure. Its many pointed-arch windows are set with stained glass, not in awkward representation of lambs, saints, Christs, or Levantine landscapes, but in abstract geometric and floral motifs that, when the sun is shining in the east of a Sunday morning, bathe the pews with rainbow light. (In the fructuous year of 1886, John La Farge had revived the art of stained glass with his work Red and White Peonies, setting a standard for floral motifs.) The church has no steeple or tower to speak of, other than a sort of canopy over an open vestibule placed on neither the front nor the side of the edifice but upon the corner, giving the plan further Gothic asymmetrical organic freedom but also “addressing” not the Person place or any house on the other side but the open “common,” if a vacant lot can be called that, in the area of the post office and city hall, if they can be called those. Although the building and the self-effacing architect are of the twentieth century, the style harks back to the English medieval parish church of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, “one of the most beautiful and appropriate buildings that the mind of man could conceive,” as one Victorian neo-Gothicist called it. This church would look out of place anywhere in America outside of, say, tidewater Virginia. Here, surrounded by the ugly, the undistinguished, and the feebly parvenu, it seems entirely miscast, anachronistic, misplaced, and supremely lonely in a place of great loneliness.

  On a bronze plaque affixed to a brick pier of the cater-cornered portal are the words “TO THE GLORY OF GOD AND IN LOVING MEMORY OF CHARLENE BEASLEY PERSON WHO MADE THIS CHURCH POSSIBLE.” Nothing else. No date, no builders, no congregation.

  “My mother-in-law, Mrs. Person, built that church for this community, and it’s a community church,” Corinne Person tells Kim. “Anyone, Methodist or Baptist, can preach there, although the Methodists want it to be only Methodist and the Baptists want it to be only Baptist. But she, my mother-in-law, built that church, paid for every nickel of it, and she wanted it to be a community church for any denomination.”

  The conflict between the Methodists and the more numerous Baptists is partly solved by letting the Methodists have it early on Sunday mornings; next comes a “mixed” Sunday School; then the Baptists get it for the 11:00 A.M. service. Blacks, of course, never enter it.

  Charlene Beasley Person’s son, Levin, his widow explains to Kim, “used to be called a ‘planter,’ but now they call them ‘rancher.’” Levin’s mother bought this house, which was the Murray place, and changed it into the Person place sixty-four years ago. The Murrays were an “old family” before the Persons became an “old family.” There are few other “old families” in town; Kim will meet widows surviving two others, the Prices and the Phillipses, later this afternoon. The Franklins, declares Corinne, Martha and Smead Franklin, are definitely not “old family.”

  “You must meet Demie Price,” Corinne urges Kim. “She is one of my best and oldest friends, and I love her so. But she is ill.” Corinne is anything but ill (although there are people in town who say that she is eccentric, dotty, or nuts) and, thinking of Demie, “who paints,” she jumps up and begins to conduct Kim on a tour of her house, to show her paintings of her own. “I paint, too, or I did.” The paintings are mostly pleasant landscapes, no local views, not primitive, not amateur. Among the paintings not her own there is one small painting of a girl, ornately framed, which Kim could swear is a Renoir, or a perfect copy of a Renoir. Corinne smiles. “That isn’t mine. I mean, I didn’t paint it. My grandmother Harrington acquired that.” Kim asks how the name is spelled.

  Every room is filled with antiques whose provenance Mrs. Person wants to relate to Kim. She paid only $25 for this beautiful wardrobe. That divan was the Beasleys’ but this étagère was the Harringtons’. She shows Kim a once-common musical instrument, the melodeon, a sort of small reed organ, which Kim has never seen before.

  After the tour, Kim asks her casual question about whether the town should be called Garland City or simply Garland. Corinne Person shrugs. It is not important, she says. She doesn’t really care. Call it whatever you wish.

  “Do you think there’s much community spirit here?” Kim asks.

  “Very little now. It used to be big, a busy little town, when I came here as a bride. Wagons and horses and so many niggers everywhere. And there were a lot of nice people here, too. Not now. My sister says to me, why don’t I just leave? Since Lev died, what is keeping me here? But I can’t just leave. My roots, whatever I’ve got, are here.”

  “What happened to the community spirit?”

  “There were so many people here, so many wonderful white people, and they all moved away. I tell everybody, ‘There’s nobody here but me and the niggers!’” Corinne laughs at herself and says, “But I say that just to be silly.”

  Ira Phillips was born in 1896, a year later than Corinne Person, but like her came to Garland City as a bride when “it was a booming little town.” Although Corinne has referred to hers as an “old family,” her husband was actually just a railroad worker who later drove a school bus, and Ira lives alone in nothing approximating a mansion but a modest compote house without antiques, closer to the railroad depot that said “Garland City.” “Why they put ‘City’ on that depot I’ll never know,” she tells Kim; she and most people say nothing but “Garland,” which is what the post office said for years.

  Kim realizes there were topics she meant to ask Corinne Person about but forgot, such as the floods and the dynamiting of the bridge. Regarding the former, Ira Phillips declares she can’t remember any serious floods since the big one of 1927 (although, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hydrology records, the town was “flooded” in 1935, 1938, 1945, and two years in succession in 1957 and 1958). About the dynamiting, Ira, like just about everyone else, does not know who did it, but she remembers, laughing, “Everybody was asleep and everybody got up at the same time, I ’magine.”

  Though she raised five children in Garland City, they are all scattered to faraway places now. Kim asks if they ever come back to visit and what they think of Garland City these days. Ira says, “Well, we don’t comment on it.”

  Seeming to drive in circles, Kim finds herself right back across the street from Corinne Person’s mansion to locate Ira Phillips’s good friend Vera Wright. A relatively young seventy, compared with the other widows, she lives alone in an attractive “permanized” house trailer, an immobile mobile home, full of potted violets. When she first came to Garland City the year after the 1927 flood, her family moved into a tenant house where the overflow�
��s mud had to be scraped from the walls and floor.

  Her late husband was born and raised in Garland City and called it that, but she has always said just “Garland,” although “I don’t know really what it’s supposed to be. What is it on the map?” (All official state maps have it as “Garland City,” but all service station maps say only “Garland.”) Although she loves the town and wouldn’t be happy anywhere else, “It’s not the Garland I knew when my children were growing up. We had a school. It was segregated. Some people even then, if they could afford it, sent their children to Lewisville to school. Now…our schools are just something else again. There’s nothing here for young people; they have to get out if they’re going to do anything.”

  When her two sons had grown up and flown the roost, she and her husband left, too, and stayed away for seventeen years; but her husband’s homesickness was incurable and he never gave up hope of returning. This they did, after he had retired. Now that he has died, Ira Phillips and Corinne Person are her only buddies. “You have to have someone to associate with. This is a town of widows.”

  Kim mentions that she has seen Corinne Person and her lovely home full of antiques. Vera Wright says, “She’s like the rest of us now. She’s alone. And can’t get anything done. Everything falls down around us.”

  This is a town of widows. Demie Price, Vera Wright has told Kim, “hasn’t been well for about a year,” which is the information that others have given Kim, too. But she decides, as the afternoon moves on, at least to see the Price mansion, which is at the end of Price Drive, on the western end of the town, near Garland City’s tiny “airport,” which was mostly a private strip for the Prices’ airplane. From the mansion and airstrip the Prices’ plantations extend as far as the eye can see westward and southward. The mansion was built by William Wynne in 1835, a year before statehood, just two years after Rufus Garland settled the area. Except for the Albert Pike mansion (1840) in Little Rock and other antebellum houses there, it is the only authentic “Southern” “colonial” “antebellum” “Greek Revival” mansion that Kim has ever seen outside a movie theater: it might have served as a set for Gone with the Wind. In contrast to the parvenu frailties of the Person place, it is authentically classical, massive, and very, very Southern. It lacks only Spanish moss hanging from the live-oak trees to complete the picture.