The Prince of Frogtown

by Rick Bragg

  The mill bosses insisted on men with families. A man with four or five paychecks linked to the mill was a man beholden to it, a man who didn’t complain. A man with a bunch of dirty-faced kids running around his legs, who knew he would be tossed out of his house if he even breathed the word “union,” would keep his mind right when blood was shed, and serve his master.

  The first bunch went down in ’05, and every year more and more men and women in faded overalls and homemade flower-print dresses trickled down, babies in their arms and barefoot children pulling on their hands. They lined up at the gate, waiting for injury or impertinence to make a place for them. They accepted the keys to the company houses, ran up a tab at the company store, and prayed at the company church. They held their tongue, or else, and the bosses never let them forget their place. One superintendent, W.I. Greenleaf, bought a panel truck and put a bed in the back so that his pregnant wife could be driven north as her time drew near, so that his baby would not be born on Southern soil.

  I do not know the details of why Officer Bob Ferguson attempted to place John under arrest. Would guess it to be for imbibing too much moonshine at one time. Anyhow, I knew it led to a confrontation of blazing guns in the very late hours of a Saturday night on the sidewalk of A Street between Houses 21 and 22. I think John received more than one wound. Possible hand, arm and shoulder. I do not recall how many times Mr. Ferguson was hit. I did hear he almost died from loss of blood before he received medical help.

  —CARL SMITH, of 21 A Street, in a written statement describing an altercation between mill worker John Barnwell and the Jacksonville police

  They absorbed degradation at work, and took it out on each other when the hated whistle blew. But in this community of violence and suffering were some of the finest people who have ever lived, who scraped a few handfuls of flour into a brown paper bag, house by house, until a full bag could be delivered to a family whose provider was sick, shot, cut or hurt in the machines. The choking dust took a lot of them, and some just never got over the fact that they left their mist-shrouded mountains for this, and died sorry. But they met their quotas and punched their time cards and went home to sleep under quilts dyed with roots and berries, a people neither town nor country, but something in between.

  Twice a shift, the women would come out onto a cement platform, where a line of older children waited with babies in their arms. The women nursed their babies not till they were full, but till the whistle blew, then handed them off to the older children and filed back inside. Shotguns and deer rifles rusted under beds as beautifully bred coon and rabbit dogs pulled at chains in cramped little yards, waiting for a hunt that never came. Women walked five, ten miles to find blackberry bushes and plum trees for jelly and preserves, and cut their peaches out of a can.

  People with no experience beyond the limitless pines were squeezed into a single, limited space. When men felt hemmed up, they reacted in unusual ways. It was common then for a man to get drunk and ride his horse or mule into a café in town. “There was lots of odd things that happened back then,” said Homer Barnwell, who grew up in the mill village, a child of its first generation of workers, and would become its historian. He cites the time in ’38 someone dynamited the brush arbor, and the time a man named Joe Pierce got drunk at Toughy Griffin’s blacksmith shop and pulled Slut Luttrel’s teeth—“and by the time he got done, he’d even pulled the right ones,” Homer said.

  The gentler townspeople of Jacksonville contemplated them at a safe distance, in awe, and fear.

  With the books of science and logic closed to them, they believed in things, in signs and warnings that had no foundation in the wider world. They planned their days in the morning, “turning the cup,” when they would empty the coffee grounds into a saucer and examine the patterns on the porcelain. A teardrop shape meant sorrow. A streak represented a road, and meant that you would travel, or that someone would travel to you. A series of specks meant rain. They divined more of the future in cards. A jack of clubs meant a brown-eyed, handsome man would come to your door. A king of hearts meant a wise, older man, of fair complexion, would affect your life. The ace of spades meant death. They believed that a swarm of gnats heralded violent storms, that they could cure a sty in their eye if they stood in the middle of a darkened crossroads and chanted:

  Sty, sty

  Leave my eye

  Catch the next

  Who passes by

  They believed it was an invitation to murder to bring an ax into a house, and the only way to undo it was to turn around three times and back out the door. They believed that a snapping turtle, if it bit their finger, would not let go until it thundered, that a coach whip snake could form itself into a circle, like a wheel, and roll down the trails after them until it caught them, and whip them to death. They believed if they killed a dove they would be punished by God, because the dove had been a sign of hope in a world drowned for its sins. They believed that the granddaddy longlegs, a delicate spider that moved on legs thinner than the finest wire, was good luck, and they would chant…

  Granddaddy, Granddaddy,

  Which way is your cow?

  …until the spider would lift one threadlike leg, and point.

  They believed that the presence of dragonflies, which they called snake doctors, meant a serpent lay nearby. They believed that they could cure warts by pretending to wash their hands over an empty washpot, and that old women could murmur worms out of the ground. They believed it was bad luck if a woman gave her man a knife, because it would cut their love in two.

  The village had its own witch, an old woman who could breathe the fire out of a burned child’s wound, and simple-minded children wandered into houses two blocks away and climbed into chairs at the dinner table, expecting to be fed. Faith healers blew rabbit tobacco smoke into the ears of squalling babies, and pressed scraps of Scripture to the chests of dying men.

  If you did not have faith, you trusted to luck. The men bet on game-cocks, cards, and which way a bird would fly off a wire when someone let fly with a chunk of coal or an empty bottle of booze. Between shifts, they pitched pennies in the bathroom, and gathered in a circle on the railroad switchback to roll dice. It was there, in the 1920s, that an unlucky man named Charlie Tune made the strangest bet of all. “Charlie Tune needed to roll a four, and he said, ‘If I don’t make this four with two deuces before I crap out, I’ll leave this town and you won’t ever see me again,’” Homer said. He cannot recall what it was Charlie Tune rolled, but it wasn’t a pair of deuces. “He got up, threw his coat over his shoulder and walked away, and nobody ever saw him again. Had a boy named Luther. We called his boy ‘Two-Deucey,’ on account of his daddy.”

  They brought more than their customs to town. They brought their livestock. Every house had a cow lot in the backyard, and when your cow went dry your neighbor gave you some of their milk, to help you get by. There was a sprawling, communal hogpen, and tiny gardens, mostly tomatoes, squash, rattlesnake beans, pepper, cucumber, a few stalks of sweet corn, collards, turnip greens and pumpkins. Chickens roamed the streets. No one stole, because the ambrosia of a frying pullet could not be contained by such thin walls. Likewise, no argument was private, no betrayal secret. If a man hollered at his wife, you heard it three doors down.

  “They were good, moral people,” said Homer Barnwell.

  “But,” he said, “pretty much ever’body carried a pistol.”

  A police officer was more likely to get hit with a brick and have his gun taken than serve a warrant. The hillbillies would kill you—that was a natural fact—so police usually left them alone to settle their arguments. When they did come, they came shooting.

  Donald Garmon, who is seventy-two now, grew up in the village. “When you got up in the morning and put your shoes on, you was pretty sure you was going to fight somebody, before the sun went down,” said Garmon. “Somebody was going to hit you, and you was going to fight. I hate to say it, but it was one of the meanest places I ever been in.”


  Shot five times by the police, mill hand John Barnwell—Homer Barnwell’s father—was still drafted in ’16, and fought in France, across no-man’s-land. In the trenches, the mustard gas ruined his lungs, and he came home to work again, coughing, smothering, in the cotton mill. A world war had changed nothing here. It was still either the mill, the backbreaking uncertainty of the fields, or surrender.

  They tried to unionize over time, to better themselves, and poor men burned rich men in effigy and fought each other at picket lines with pistols, knives and ax handles. But the mill bosses finally just locked all the doors, stopped taking credit at the store, and waited them out. It is hard to walk a picket line when the company owns your house.

  The rich people bought them, really, for pocket change, but in their hearts they were still in the mountains, still up high. As the cotton mill used up its first generation of workers, new handbills fluttered from barns and fence posts in the foothills outside town.

  WORKERS WANTED

  MEN WITH FAMILIES

  GOOD WAGES

  GOOD WORKING CONDITIONS

  GOOD HOUSING

  ELECTRICITY

  FREE COAL

  Bobby Bragg rode past them on his mule, oblivious to the promises and the lies. He never learned to read. He was a young man by then, still sharecropping in the bleak economy after the First World War. Finally, the lure of year-round money and a ready-made house wicked out and found him, too. He rode his mule into town, to try and get on. That’s how they said it, “gettin’ on,” like it was a boat, or a train, and if you didn’t get on, you got left behind.

  “You don’t drink, do you?” the mill boss asked him.

  “Just on Christmas,” Bobby said.

  * * *

  The Boy

  “RICK,” THE BOY ASKED, “how do you punch somebody?” We were supposed to be taking a walk.

  “You never punched anybody?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  I did not know what to say.

  “Will you show me?” he asked.

  I guess I should have told him there is rarely a good reason to punch someone, that it is better to turn the other cheek. I should have evoked Gandhi and King. I should have told him that the meek inherit the earth and all that razzmatazz.

  “Make a fist,” I said.

  I tapped the bridge of my nose.

  “You hit here, one time, hard, and it’s over,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “’Cause it hurts real bad,” I said. “Their eyes will water, and they will cry.”

  “Then what?” he said.

  “Then they will run to their mommies,” I said, “and tell on you.”

  “What if they don’t run away?” he asked.

  “They won’t be able to see good after you thump ’em good that first time, right?”

  He said he supposed so.

  “Well, thump ’em again.”

  He was named, this boy, for a man who wrestled an angel, but had lived a life free of contention, free of consequence. I wished I could tell him it would always be that way, but all I could do was teach him how to bloody another little boy’s nose.

  “Repeat after me,” I said.

  “Hurt ’em quick.

  “Make ’em cry.

  “Go home.”

  Father of the Year.

  “What if they try to step back when you swing?” he asked.

  “You try,” I said, as I reached out to tap him on the head.

  He lurched back but could not move.

  I was standing on his foot.

  “Oh,” he said.

  I told him most little boys swing wild, from the side, and don’t connect with much of anything. I lost as many boyhood fights as I won, but I learned. I tried to show how to block, jab. “You punch straight ahead, like driving a nail,” I said.

  I could hear my father’s voice in my head.

  “Is it okay to cry?” he asked.

  It’s not even okay to ask that question, I thought.

  “Try not to,” I said.

  I am not, usually, an idiot. I knew I was being a little careless with the boy, the way I was with everything else. It is easy to teach someone to throw a punch in abstract, hard to explain the sick feeling that precedes any violence, even playground violence.

  So I told him to walk away when he could.

  “Is that what you would do?” he asked.

  “Not on your damn life,” I said.

  He was confused now.

  “I have run,” I explained, when I knew I couldn’t win, and the cause didn’t seem worth the pain. But I was always sick, after. You choose the sick feeling you can stand most, the one before you fight, or the one after you run away. But that was complicated, for a ten-year-old.

  “Son,” I said, “I once ran away in a Mustang.”

  I told him that the rules of conduct, from the school, the church, his beloved mom, didn’t matter much in the dirt, if you were getting hurt.

  “You bite,” I said.

  He looked amazed.

  “It’s fine to gouge,” I said.

  Then his mother walked up, and I was in trouble again.

  She would raise a gentle boy if she had to lock me in a shed.

  “He doesn’t need to know,” she told me.

  I nodded my head, hoping that might spare me.

  It never has.

  “He’s ten years old,” she hissed.

  I told her, yes, he was getting started late.

  “You are twelve,” she said.

  Still, I tried to modulate my behavior around the boy. Once, he asked me how to defend himself against a bigger boy.

  “Kick him in the…” and I searched my mind for a Baptist word.

  “Kick him in the scrotum,” I said.

  “What’s a scrotum?” he asked.

  He walked around giggling for an hour and a half.

  So, when his mother was not looking, we boxed in the living room, and sparred in the yard. But the boy wanted to be a fighter like I wanted to be a fat Italian opera singer. He smiled when he punched, he giggled, and I knew he might live his whole life, a complete life, and never strike another man in anger.

  “How did you learn?” he asked me.

  I told him it was in my blood.

  I saw my father fight. He barely took time to cuss a man before hitting him in the face. I remember he fought moving forward, almost dancing. At every reappearance, he schooled me. He baby-tapped me in my shoulders and gut as I swung so hard I fell. By the time I was six years old he smacked me upside the head, harder, when I dropped my guard. It was still just a tap, but it was like being hit with the end of a post. “The boy likes it,” he said, as my mother snatched me up and put a stop to it. I know I will never forget feeling like a big boy, fists clenched in front of my face.

  I was six, in my last fight he knew about, on the playground at Spring Garden Elementary. A boy shook loose of the hold I had on his neck and punched me in the eye. The teacher sent me home on the big yellow bus with a note folded in my coat pocket.

  My father read it, and tossed it in the trash.

  “Who whupped?” he said.

  I told him we didn’t finish.

  “Finish it tomorrow,” he said.

  I tried to tell him it was Friday, that we didn’t have school the next day. I waited, miserable, sad and nervous, to pick a fight with that little boy.

  The woman tells me I am a throwback, that children settle differences now with lawyers, guns and money.

  But you can’t do right all the time.

  A boy needs to know how to make a fist.

  You know that, being stuck on twelve.

  * * *

  CHAPTER THREE

  Bob

  BOB NEVER MET a man he wouldn’t fight at least twice, if insulted, and he intended to slap all the pretty off Handsome Bill Lively’s face. It happened in a weed-strewn clearing at the corner of Alexandria Road and D Street, around the time of the Second Grea
t War. The village gamblers liked to gather there, where the thick hedges, honeysuckle and possum grapevines screened them from their wives, the rare police car, and the Congregational Holiness Church. A man named Doug Smith got cut across the eyes there, “and there was always somebody fightin’, cuttin’,” said Jimmy Hamilton, who grew up in the mill village with his friend Homer Barnwell, and was just a boy then. “I remember Bill Lively as a nice-looking man, dark-haired,” said Jimmy. “If he’d had one of those pencil-thin mustaches, ain’t no tellin’ how far he could have gone. Well, Bill liked to pick at Bob when Bob was drinkin’, and that day, Bob come down to the poker game, drunk. Him and Bobby got to fightin’, and he worked Bob over a little bit.”

  Bob limped home, beaten.

  “Well, about fifteen or twenty minutes later, here come Bobby back,” Jimmy said.

  Bob was naked.

  “For God’s sake, Bob,” said Handsome Bill.

  “You whupped me with my clothes on,” Bob told him. “Now let’s see if you can whup me nekkid.”

  I would give a gold monkey to know what Bill Lively thought, standing there looking at Bob’s little-bitty, sweat-slicked, naked body, everything pretty much fish-belly white except the red on his arms and face and neck. Where do you grab a solid hold of a naked man? We just know that Bob balled up his little fists and flung himself on Bill Lively for revenge I guess, because I am not sure if you can fight for your honor with your parts exposed.