Footloose in America: Dixie to New England

by Bud Kenny

  When we walked out of the café, Suzanne said, “You know, you guys have no choice. You’ve got to go to Uniontown.”

  I had to re-shoe Della that day. So it was almost three in the afternoon before we got on the road. At the edge of Morganfield, we passed a driveway where six teenaged boys were climbing into a Camero. They all had their ball caps on backwards and were waving at us, when one of them yelled, “Where ya going?”

  Patricia shouted, “We’re going to Uniontown!”

  Simultaneously, they all burst into laughter.

  The road to Uniontown was a flat straight ribbon of asphalt that parted fields of autumn brown soybeans ready for harvest. Interspersed through the fields were several oil wells, most of which were pumping. Not far from mile-marker thirteen, we came to the intersection of Highway 666. The mark of the devil on the road to Uniontown.

  Not far from there, a farmer in a pickup truck pulled into a soy bean patch next to us. He yelled out the window, “I read about you in the paper today.” Then he asked, “If you’re walking to New England, how come you’re going this way?”

  “We’re going to Uniontown!”

  With thumbs-up, he drove ahead to a combine that was stopped in the soybean patch. He was talking with four other men beside the combine as we approached. When we got close, he strolled toward the pavement and shouted, “Are you guys crazy? You ought to ride in that thing.”

  I yelled back, “If we’re crazy enough to go to Uniontown, we’re crazy enough to walk!”

  All five of them doubled over with laughter.

  When we started down off the ridge into town, it was immediately obvious why everyone questioned our detour. Unlike Morganfield, with its well-kept homes and manicured yards, Uniontown had hap-hazard trailers on scruffy lots and buildings that begged the question, “Does anyone live here?” Everything seemed temporary. Parked in nearly every yard was a car with a door open and no one around. And in the streets along the curb, there were several junkers with their hoods up but no one was working on them.

  Then we came to that unmistakable smell of a recently burnt building. It got stronger the further we descended into town. Unlike the smell of a campfire or fireplace that coddles feelings of warmth and well-being, a burnt building has the stink of strife. It was a derelict smell that got stronger as we walked further into Uniontown. About three blocks from the signal light in the middle of town, we came to the smoldering ruins.

  It had been a house trailer on a rock foundation. Yellow plastic tape was laced through trees and shrubs marking the perimeter of the fire. At the center was a smoking rectangular pile of rubble, around which were burnt pieces of furniture and bright plastic parts of children’s toys. A sense of melancholy was in the smell of that fire.

  A late model pickup stopped, and the driver asked if we needed a place to put down for the night. I said, “Thanks, but we’re staying at Margaret’s house.”

  “You mean Margaret on Third Street?”

  “Yes. She said they have a big yard for our mule to graze in.”

  It was almost dark, so I couldn’t see the driver’s expression. But I could hear the reservation in his voice. “Okay. Do you mind if I wait for you there so I can take some pictures?”

  When we got to Margaret’s house, it was so dark it was hard to see her driveway. Normally, I would stop and check out the situation before I lead Della into a place like that. But that evening I just led her up onto the driveway and into the yard. Immediately I realized I’d made a mistake. Margaret’s big front yard was barely large enough to play a game of croquet in. Even if it had been bigger you couldn’t have played there because of all the shrubs everywhere. Della would tear the place up in no time.

  Margaret’s husband, Willie, said, “Don’t worry about it! Just run those stupid little trees over. We don’t care.”

  He was sitting on the front steps dressed in only shorts and sandals. A huge bundle of flesh hung over the top of the shorts and his thighs stressed their seams. Willie had a beer can in his hand and a New Jersey accent in his voice. “We didn’t plant the damn things anyway. They just came up on their own. So you ain’t hurting nothing.”

  The bushes weren’t the problem, it was the fenced yard. It wasn’t big enough to turn Della and the cart around in it. After I told him that, Willie stood and waddled toward me saying, “Aw, hell! We’ll just take the damn fence down. It ain’t much anyway.”

  “I’m sorry, but this just isn’t going to work out for us.”

  Margaret grabbed my arm and pleaded, “Will you still be my friend?”

  The guy in the pickup who wanted to take pictures of us was a big man. His friend was too. So they had the bulk to help Della back the cart over the curb and out into the street. Willie was bigger than anyone there, but he said, “My knees can’t handle doing something like that.”

  Margaret’s neighbor let us park the cart and stake out Della for the night in her unfenced yard. It didn’t have much to graze on, but we had plenty of hay.

  After we got her situated for the night, Patricia and I went next door to Margaret and Willie’s house. She fixed us a dinner of cornbread, beans and cream style corn from a can. Willie brought out a couple cans of Busch beer.

  Willie was fifty-three, and Margaret was ten years older. She described herself as, “A real mess. But I love people and I have fun!”

  Willie was a salesman from Jersey City who followed a job to Kentucky a few years back. When the job came to an end he returned to New Jersey. “But I couldn’t handle Jersey no more. I got spoiled here. You don’t make as much money, but who cares. Here you can really live. In Jersey you just survive. You have to put bars on your windows and you don’t look at nobody you don’t know. Here everybody waves and says ‘Hi.’ Back in Jersey they’d think you was crazy, or trying to rob ’em or something.”

  Willie was a telemarketer and in awe of the people in Uniontown. “These are real men around here. If their pickup breaks down, they fix it right alongside the road. No calling Triple--A. If their roof blows off, they get the stuff and fix it. Back in Jersey City, nobody does that. Here they do it themselves. Now that’s what I call real men!”

  I told Willie about the negative remarks we heard about Uniontown. “Aw, that’s all them people up in Morganfield. They think they’re more sophisticated. They call Uniontown the ghetto. Hell, they don’t know what a ghetto is. I do. They ain’t never seen real sophistication. But I have. I’m from Jersey City. I know what sophistication is, and Morganfield ain’t got it!”

  Normally Willie and Margaret didn’t sleep in the same room. If Willie was startled awake he would come up screaming and punching. One time, back when they did sleep in the same bed, he banged her up pretty bad. After that they slept in separate rooms. But the night we were there Margaret insisted we take her bed. She would chance sleeping with Willie.

  “How do they know we aren’t ax murderers?”

  Patricia whispered the question as we laid in the dark bedroom. Everyone in the house had just settled down for the night. I whispered back, “What are you talking about?”

  “I was just laying here thinking, they really don’t know us, and yet they invite us to stay in their home. How do they know we aren’t ax murderers?”

  “Invite? It’s more like she begged. Hey, that’s it! Maybe Margaret’s an ax murderer. That’s why she made such a big deal about us coming here. She and Willie are going to get us while we’re asleep.”

  My wife poked me in the ribs with her elbow. “Oh shush. They might hear you.”

  Then she pulled back the covers and whispered, “I’ve got to pee.”

  The door to the bathroom was halfway down the hall on the left. The door to Willie’s room was directly across from it. In the dark, as Patricia tiptoed toward it, she could hear voices in Willie’s room. When she reached for the bathroom doorknob, she heard him say, “How do we know they aren’t ax murderers?”

  In the morning, we moved our camp to the Uniontown city park. It�
��s adjacent to a levee that protects the town from the Ohio River. On the other side of the levee, in the bottoms, was a dense forest. Hardwoods, willows and vines that were woven with bits of plastic, pieces of metal and debris of all description from high-waters gone by.

  After we set up camp and staked out Della in a patch of lush grass, Patricia and I climbed on our bikes and took off to explore Uniontown. Before we left, we took extra precautions to secure everything we owned. We kept hearing how bad the thieves were in Uniontown. A seventy-two year old woman, who had lived in the area all her life, warned us. “Uniontown is a den of thieves! It’s always been that way. They even stole an elephant here one time.”

  According to her, in the late 1800’s one of the locals stole an elephant from a traveling circus. In the dead of the night he swam across the Ohio River with the pachyderm and sold it in Indiana to pay off a gambling debt.

  Uniontown got its name when the hamlets of Francisburg and Locust Point merged as one community in the mid 1800’s. The first settlers were trappers and loggers. Then coal was discovered on that part of the river.

  The 1937 flood was a turning point in Uniontown’s history. On February 1st, the Ohio River was 64.2 feet above flood stage. There was no levee then. But even if there had been, it wouldn’t have made much difference. Willie told me when the Ohio flooded in 1997, he could sit on the top of the levee and slap the water.

  “If we’d gotten another inch of rain it would have been all over for us down here.”

  In the 1997 flood the river crested eleven feet lower than it did in 1937.

  Fire also shaped the history of Uniontown. In 1975 a blaze swept through most of the downtown historic buildings. They were replaced with un-ornate, single-story structures. Like the house trailers and parked cars we saw when we walked into town, these buildings had a sense of temporary about them.

  That afternoon, during our tour, we stopped at the VFW for a beer. The bartender told us what really killed Uniontown was when the coal mines shut down. The first one was in 1988.

  “We had five good mines with plenty of work for anyone who wanted it.”

  The man next to us at the bar said, “Now if you want work, you have to go to Morganfield, or Henderson, or over to Evansville. That’s what’s really killing Uniontown.”

  So why does anyone live in Uniontown? It will always have the threat of flood. You have to drive somewhere else to work. The crime rate is high and esthetically the place is hardly attractive. So why live there? To quote Margaret, “It’s home. I’m comfortable here. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.”

  The next morning after breakfast, Patricia and I drank our last cup of coffee while we watched Della graze near the levee. Suddenly, two large dogs jumped up onto the top of it from the other side and started barking. It surprised Della and she bolted. With hobbles on her front feet she leaped away from the levee. In mid-air she came to the end of her rope, which made her flip head over hooves. When she hit the ground it was square on the top of her head, and as the rest of her body crashed down I heard something crack. For a frightening moment, she laid completely still as my body began to shiver. Had Della just broken her neck?

  Patricia and I both screamed “Della!” as we scrambled toward her. But just before we got her Della shuddered, rolled over and up onto her feet.

  When she flipped in the air the rope broke at her hobbles. So Della was loose. But when she whirled around to run away she was face to face with me.

  “It’s okay, Big Sis.”

  I threw my arms around her neck and tried to control her. But it didn’t work. With me still holding onto her, Della spun back around to look for the dogs on the levee. My feet scrambled for footing like a marionette dancing across a stage.

  Now there were two boys with the dogs on top of the levee. The dogs continued to bark, while the boys stood and looked dumbfounded at us. I yelled, “Get those dogs out of here!”

  Della whirled around again to run away from the levee. But this time, she also had Patricia’s arms around her neck. “It’s okay, Sissy Belle!”

  With both of us embracing her, Della began to settle down. I looked back up at the top of the levee. The boys and their dogs were gone. The event was over.

  When we examined Della, all we could find was a cut gum in her mouth and a small tear inside one nostril. Aside from that, she was all right. A couple of hours later we had her hitched to the cart and on a residential street headed for the highway out of Uniontown.

  We were a block from Third Street when I heard a clicking sound from the left rear tire. At first I thought it was a rock or a bottle cap stuck in the treads. But what I found was a huge tack. When I pulled it out air hissed. Our first flat tire of this trip would be in Uniontown.

  It was a slow leak, so I was able to plug it before it went flat. Someone said there was an open gas station on the road out of town. On the way there, I began to smell something that I had smelled when we first arrived in Margaret’s yard two days earlier. It wasn’t the burnt building. This was different. When I asked Willie what it was he said, “You smell something? I don’t. Oh, maybe it’s the oil tanks. I’m so used to it I don’t smell it anymore.”

  It did smell like oil, and when we got to the gas station the stink was really strong. The station was closed because it was Sunday. That meant the air compressor was turned off. So I got our hand pump out and went to work.

  I was putting the pump back in the cart, when I remembered the coal miner in Sturgis who said, “My buddy’s girl friend asked him to kiss her where it stinks. So he took her to Uniontown and kissed her.”

  So, there in the middle of all that Uniontown stink, I walked up to my wife, wrapped my arms around her and said, “I love ya’ baby.”

  Then I kissed her.

  On the road to Union Town.

  CHAPTER 6

  MISTER PARAGRAPH 18

  “YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT happened to this neighborhood? I’ll tell ya. Niggers!”

  I’m repulsed when someone uses that word–nigger. It ripples up my spine and makes me want to spit at the person who spoke it. I’ve never done that, and this man was not the one to start with. Don was six inches shorter than me and probably outweighed me by fifty pounds–and it was not fat. He looked like he could have been a wrestler. The Jessie Ventura type, but Don was shorter. His voice had that same gruffness that most of those guys have. He was not someone to mess with. Besides, I asked him about the neighborhood in his driveway. He had his right to free speech–especially in his driveway.

  With more than 120,000 people, Evansville, Indiana was the largest town we had walked into. When we met Don, we were just east of downtown on Washington Avenue. From our camp on the east edge of the city, Patricia and I had bicycled in to explore the heart of Evansville. Della stayed in camp to graze on lush grass.

  “It’s a damn dirty shame,” said Don. “There’s some fine old homes here. But when the niggers started moving in, everybody else moved out.”

  Washington Avenue was a shaded thoroughfare with huge old oaks and elms in their early shades of autumn. Behind those trees were houses built between the 1920’s and 40’s–homes for the families of coal miners, mill workers and other middle-class types. Folks who could afford a two story house with a small front yard, neighborly porch and a driveway that led back to a detached garage. We also pedaled past some houses that were more like mansions–not the multi-millionaire type–but houses for people who were better off than most. The kind who didn’t have to wear work-gloves on the job.

  The closer we got to downtown, the more unkempt the houses and other buildings were. We saw people living in places with boarded up windows, busted front doors and peeling paint. It was about 1 p.m., the first Thursday in October. The sky was clear and temperature perfect for being outside. So, lots of those residents were on their porches, or hanging out on front steps and sidewalks. All sorts of folks, but mostly African-American.

  We had stopped to look at an old church, when Don pulled in
to his driveway across the street. It was a simple buff brick Catholic church with weeds growing out of its cracks and crannies. Patricia and I were wondering if it was still being used. So I pushed my bicycle across the street to ask him. That’s when I asked, “What happened to this neighborhood?”

  After he told me, “Niggers!” Don said, “I know that makes me sound prejudiced, but I’m not. I’ve got black friends and they ain’t the problem. It’s the niggers!”

  The house that Don’s truck was parked at, and the ones on either side of it, were in good repair. “We lived in this house when I was a teenager. My dad moved us all over this town buying and selling houses. He’d get a good deal on one, and we’d live there a couple years. Then he’d sell it, make some money and we’d move into another one. We lived in this house the longest–probably four or five years. It was my favorite, and back then this was a great neighborhood.”

  Don was a Vietnam Veteran who did two tours–1967 and 1969. “My job was to get the body bags out of the field. Sometimes they were bagged and sometimes they weren’t. Didn’t make much difference. It was always a raw deal. I dodged a lot of bullets getting a bunch of dead guys home.”

  Between his tours in Vietnam, Don spent a few months on the streets of Evansville playing the part of a blind vet. “I had this Doberman I was real close to, and I took him everywhere. The only way I could get him in a bar was if he was a service dog. So I acted like I was blind. Wore dark glasses, got the harness for the dog, carried a stick–the whole bit. Told them it happened in ‘Nam.” He leaned against the tailgate of the pickup and folded his arms across his chest. A grin grew across his white-bearded face as he chuckled. “That sure was fun, and it got me a lot of free drinks.”

  Shortly after Don got home from his second tour, he was driving up Washington Avenue and saw a For Sale sign in the yard of the house we were standing in front of. “I thought, Wouldn’t that be sweet? I’ve got my GI Bill, hell, buy it! So I went to the front door to find out what they wanted for it. When I knocked, a bunch of niggers came flying out and started wacking at me with straight razors.”