Author: Rosemary (Page 1 of 2)

As the service draws to a close and our pastor ends the final prayer, we move out of the sanctuary with a thousand other people, greeting those we know with hugs and handshakes, and those we don’t know with smiles and hellos. Although our congregation is predominately white, we also have families of Asian, African, Arab, and Hispanic descent attending our church. Such was not the case for us growing up in Tensas Parish.

The churches were separated by race, a choice that is much the same today, along with other aspects of life that were not by choice. There were separate public waiting rooms at the hospitals and bus stations, separate water fountains and restrooms, no access to cafes for blacks, and separate rooms at bars. Blacks had limited access to other public facilities like the movie theater and the library, all which felt normal to us at the time, since our parents and our leaders taught us to believe “separate but equal” was the right way, a concept that seems ridiculous to us today, and was rejected by the Supreme Court in 1954, in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. (Wikipedia, Timeline of the Civil Rights Movement) Blacks were not treated as equals to whites, and I wince as I read some newspaper articles up through the 1960s where the names of black people were always followed by, “a Negro”, or courtesy titles such as Mr. or Mrs. were omitted, even for professionals such as teachers. (The Tensas Gazette July 31, 1964)

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Although Jimmie Davis spoke of bringing the people of Louisiana together, and did much to improve the health care system, infrastructure, and programs for the underprivileged, he was no different from most Southern politicians of his day in standing against the rising tide of civil rights, a requirement at the time if you wanted to get elected. Davis proclaimed he was “1,000 percent” for segregation and promised “no retreat and no compromise” on the issue, however, he did not fuel the fire with hate filled statements as others holding high offices in the South were prone to do. He vowed to make facilities truly equal for blacks and whites and went so far as to comment, “Right-thinking white people and right-thinking colored people know segregation is the best and only way of life in the South.“ Davis’ opponents were relentless with negative ads about him which he refused to respond to, but further stated, “If there ever was a time when our state needs peace and harmony, it is now,” maintaining this theme throughout his campaign. (64 Parishes)

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One article written by a black newspaper editor, Davis Lee, was widely circulated and reprinted in The Tensas Gazette, and outlined that same sentiment from the black point of view. In it Mr. Lee called some of the protesters “agitators and pressure groups that do not consider the cost of forced integration on the black people.” He cites examples of more black teachers employed at higher pay in the South than in the North and East, and predicts that 75% of them will lose their jobs if integration of the schools is enforced. Lee claims to have traveled extensively throughout the South and interviewed thousands of blacks ranging from poor sharecroppers in Mississippi to wealthy business owners in Atlanta, none of which want integration. He states that they want their own schools with equal facilities and pay, and to be treated with equal respect. Mr. Lee goes on to say that blacks in the South are in a better spot educationally, politically, and economically than elsewhere in the country, that race relations are improving, and that blacks and whites working together can do more than the courts, legislation, or pressure groups ever can, and that forced integration would set black progress back 50 years. (Davis Lee, Newark, New Jersery Telegram 1954)

Tensas Parish schools were segregated and each town in the parish was loyal and protective of its own schools. In response to state funding mandates in 1965, a parish wide plan was formulated to consolidate the white schools. The plan joined Waterproof High School and Davidson High School into one, leaving Newellton High School, and building new elementary facilities in each town, but the plan was rejected when brought before the voters. (The Tensas Gazette Oct. 22 1965) Yet, black students were already being served in a consolidated high school, Tensas Rosenwald High School, in St. Joseph, and bused from Newellton and Waterproof, requiring some students to board the bus at 5 a.m., and return home after 5 p.m. Rosenwald had an attached elementary school that served black students in the St. Joseph area. Lisbon Elementary in Waterproof, and Routhwood Elementary in Newellton served the black elementary students in each of these town. (The Tensas Gazette) Like each of the white high schools, Rosenwald H.S. prided itself on academic and athletic achievement, with qualified teachers and coaches, and strong community support. (The Tensasan 1965, Rosenwald High School Yearbook) Everyone loved their schools, and there was reluctance to change, on both sides of the aisle, but to paraphrase Bob Dylan, “times they were a changing.”It was evident that the peace and harmony that Governor Davis and others wanted could not be achieved through the “separate but equal” policies any longer.

In our unworldly existence, we understood little of the real reasons for the civil unrest that Walter Cronkite reported on the evening news, since our experience with the blacks in our community was limited, but in sharp contrast with the scenes we saw playing out in cities across the country on TV.

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I​t was a mile and a half from our house to the store on the corner of Newell Ridge Road. As children in the sixties, my brother and I would ride our bikes there, sometimes balancing one of our younger sisters on the handlebars or the back fender seat, a much easier task after our road was paved. A rough wooden building with a rusty tin roof and tar paper siding that was patterned to look like brick, the old store was randomly adorned with a wide variety of metal enameled signs advertising everything from Sunbeam bread, to Lucky Strike cigarettes. The single gas pump that stood in front had a hint of red paint showing through the rust and a clear glass gas tank on top that was filled by a hand pump from underground. Once filled, you could then remove the hose and let gas flow into your vehicle or can. The store was owned and run by an elderly African-American couple whom we knew as Son and Coreen.

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They were kind and patient with us as we surveyed the displays of penny candy that included Mary Janes, candy cigarettes, and large banana LaffyTaffys, or tried to choose between a Slo-Poke sucker, a Stage Plank cookie with its scalloped edge and pink icing, or a Moon Pie. If we had enough money for a Coke, they would help us use the slider Coke machine, showing us how to slide the bottles down through the icy water to the place where they could be removed, flashing gold teeth when they smiled and calling us “baby”. The RC Colas and Nehi orange sodas were in another cooler nearby that had a glass door, and could be opened by us. There was always a large jar of pickled pigs feet or pickled eggs on the counter, and I remember their dark wrinkled hands with pink palms taking our coins from the well-worn wooden counter where a single bulb hung for lighting. We’d sit on the front step near the screen door and enjoy our drinks, savoring the cool sweetness in the oppressive heat and humidity. Then we’d return the bottles for another piece or two of penny candy before pedaling back home on the newly paved road, shiny black, with half melted asphalt in the hot sun.

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We did all our own work, the cleaning, the laundry, the farming, and the mowing, and unlike the whites depicted in popular movies of today like The Help, we were in no position to wield power over anyone. Daddy would hire field hands for a few days at a time when the Johnson grass and cockle burs in our fields were more than we could handle. When he did hire workers in the fields, we were all out there working alongside them, pausing for breaks when they did, making sure they had plenty of water and anything else they needed. By the time I was twelve years old, the task of taking their lunch orders, and then driving the five miles to the store at Somerset to get them, fell to me. Somerset store sold fresh lunch meat, and I would fill their orders for summer sausage, salami, or bologna, RC Colas and Moon Pies, and pay with the money my daddy gave me. Our lunch break would then begin when I returned, eating meatloaf sandwiches and cream filled cookies, with Koolaid, on the porch while the workers sat nearby in the shade.

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Some black families that lived on Newell Ridge road at the time had been there for years, their ancestors originally receiving land from plantation owners after the Civil War. They farmed their own small acreage or hired out to help other farmers like us with their crops. Others worked full time in town or had other enterprises, one of which I was surprised to learn, included a popular brothel visited by men of both races from across the parish. The older folks had known my daddy’s family since he was a small child, and they called him “Mister Little Brother” and my mama “Miss Little Brother”, as was the custom at the time. They included Son and Coreen Claiborne, Riley and Pearl Robinson, Lee and Sarah Robinson, Calvin and Louise Holman, the Bert Piazzas, the Webb Jacksons, Willie Brooks, Thelma Williams, and others. I was impressed with Thelma Williams, a teacher, since she lived in what was probably the first brick house in the Newell Ridge and Flowers Landing area, and vowed that I would be a teacher some day, partly because of her.

Nationally of course, and as close as Jackson, Mississippi, racial tensions continued. The riots were fueled by police brutality, hate crimes of the Klan, and unfair political maneuvers by white politicians. These actions were designed to bypass federal laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlawed racial discrimination and segregation in employment, schools, and public places. (Mississippi Encyclopedia) The following year, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law, outlawing practices designed to keep black citizens from registering to vote, causing more protests when it was not enforced.

In this dark time, our country was involved in the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the real war in Vietnam, and was also dealing with the high profile assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, along with others involved in the Civil Rights Movement.(Encyclopedia.com) Legitimate civil rights demonstrations and anti war protests were sometimes taken over by extremists on both sides, and they got much of the news coverage, as they do today. One of our three television stations was WLBT in Jackson, Mississippi, where news reports of the racial violence, assassinations, riots, anti war protests, and police actions came right into our living room, though our understanding of what it all meant was limited at best, even for our parents, but the turmoil was clear, and frightening.

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In 1968 The Supreme Court ordered states to abolish segregated school systems “root and branch”. Five factors — facilities, staff, faculty, extracurricular activities and transportation — were to be used to gauge a school system’s compliance with the mandate of Brown. (Green v. County School Board of New Kent County) This decision caused fear and anguish in both the black and the white communities of Tensas Parish since we were all comfortable where we were, loyal to our own schools, sports teams, teachers and administrators. More than that, the Tensas Parish School Board was struggling with finances since they had refused to take federal funds to avoid forced integration, a tactic that proved to be futile. (The Tensas Gazette) With state and parish revenues decreasing, their budget was stretched thin with construction projects in progress for various schools. The construction projects, a shortage of teachers, lack of proper space, and lack of enough buses were some the reasons that the School Board gave in its appeal to a federal court order in 1969 to immediately integrate its schools, asking for more time to prepare for integration. The appeal was granted, for one year. (The Tensas Gazette Sept. 4 1969) In February 1970, the board presented its plan for integrating all the schools in the fall, and its plan was accepted by the court.

The stage was set for a total reorganization of the public schools in each town, but not everyone was on board with the plan. By the spring of 1970, the newly organized, Tensas Academy was under construction in St. Joseph and fund-raising efforts, hiring of staff, and meetings of the athletic supporters were well under way. It opened in the fall of 1970, with an enrollment of over 300 white students, with the majority of them from St. Joseph and Waterproof. (The Tensas Gazette April 23 1970) When my parents informed me that my siblings and I would be attending, I cried all summer, begging them to let me finish at Newellton, since I was going into my junior year, didn’t want to leave my friends, or stop being part of the band. Their decision was firm, and starting in September 1970, we attended Tensas Academy, making the twenty five mile commute twice each day.

Fifty years later I realize their decision was one that stemmed from their love for us, and was based on what they truly felt was best at the time, even though it required a great financial sacrifice for them. When I graduated from Tensas Academy in 1972, I had experienced instruction from excellent teachers, expanded my view of the parish beyond my hometown of Newellton, formed friendships that are still intact today, and most important of all, met the love of my life. But I can’t help but think of the possibilities. What would it have been like if it had all happened differently? If the parish schools had been consolidated in 1965? If integration had been embraced by all and worked through as a team?

I did not know an African American person my age until I attended Louisiana Tech in the Fall of 1972. Since then, it has been my privilege to know many, from fellow students at Tech, to fellow teachers, coaches, and administrators in my years as a public school teacher, along with the countless students and parents I have worked with and continue to work with today. We have worked together to achieve common goals, laughed together to celebrate our victories, and cried together when life was hard, coming away much richer for it. In doing research for this chapter, I have become friends with someone who has been generous enough to share his experiences with me as a young black person growing up in Tensas Parish in the 1960s, and how he escaped to make a better life for himself.

Born in Madison Parish, (Wilbert) Tang Watson’s family moved to St. Joseph when he was young, and he attended Tensas Parish schools until he graduated from Rosenwald High School in 1967. I have included his full interview in a separate page where he tells about his struggles as a dark skinned black kid, often seen in a negative light by blacks and whites alike, but states, “ I never knew any white people either, my age. I do admit I was really curious about white people, and they were not all bad, though, good ones too. Talking about how whites treated black people, some blacks treated blacks just as bad. It was simple most of the time. The blacker you were, the more bad you were treated or not respected. Not all, but some. If your family didn’t have a lot of educated members, others didn’t respect you. Not all, but some. I can say I hated the separate black/white concept and never believed for one minute that whites were superior or better than me. Ha, Ha, Ha, I never believed anybody was better, or could do more than me, given the chance!” This positive attitude, the support of his mother, and the determination and discipline to follow his dreams led him out of Tensas Parish.

When he got his chance to go to L. A., and fulfill his life long dream, he was prepared and never looked back. He met his wife and life long partner, Pamela, shortly after leaving Tensas, and after years of hard work, is comfortably retired in a beautiful ocean side condo in Longbeach, California where he delights in watching his grandson Peyton play basketball at UCLA. Tang came from a large family of seven kids and describes himself and his success this way, “The reason I think I am so lucky and blessed is because I’m a son and the 7th kid, the 7th son. I’m a natural born salesman, I moved to Los Angeles in 1968 and was lucky and smart, all my life. Took the U.S. Post Office test in early ‘68, lucky and smart enough to pass it, even though I didn’t know anything about the Post Office, the 150 questions or anything else city wise. Passed it and began working for them, making almost $3000 a month and I’m 17 years old. It was only me, so I had plenty enough money. No money problems at all. I worked there for about 5 years, taking some classes at the local Junior College. I didn’t like the Post Office kind of work, and knew I wanted to get out when the time was right. I did, and got into sales. Never did anything else but sales to this day. Sold everything from women’s shoes to million dollar houses and properties. Being a natural, made it as easy to sell one thing as another. Sales took me though into some amazing situations, especially commissions sales, which means, if you don’t close your deal, you don’t get paid!”

Tang’s story is a testament to the ideals referred to by Dr. Martin Luther King in his famous I Have a Dream speech in Washington, D.C. in 1963, where he warns against “drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred“, and encourages those who are striving to change to “conduct the struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline.” I mentioned to Tang that I thought race relations were much better now than they were then, despite what we see on TV, and he responded by saying, “You are right, things are way better now than before, and getting better every day in a lot of ways. In almost all ways. We still have work to do, but we all know now that we all can become anything we want. We are a stronger nation when it’s like that.”

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‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

Mark 12:31

In doing research for this book, I have had the pleasure of reconnecting with friends and family members who were close to me as a child, but had drifted away as life got in the way. Some of the most valuable resources have been Glen Wayne and Janet, the two youngest siblings of the Willhite family, along with my mother, Mary Willhite, and my siblings, and cousins who grew up at or near Flowers Landing. We have laughed, cried and reminisced about times gone by, reinforcing the bond of the family started by Jim and Etta Mae. 

Although their days were filled with much hard work, Jim and Etta Mae found time to have fun with the family. In an interview with Glen Wayne, one of their three surviving siblings, he told how they would quit work at noon on Saturday, and everyone would bathe, the boys in the river in warm weather, and the women in the house. Then they would all load up on Jim’s flatbed truck and drive to Newellton down Newell Ridge Road, picking up friends and neighbors along the way. The area was well populated at that time, with thirty or more families living on Somerset Plantation, for example, and on Westwood Plantation and Newell Ridge Road as well. Newellton was a bustling town with clothing stores, grocery stores, a movie theater, two cotton gins, a sawmill, bars, and drug stores. By the time they got to town, the truck was loaded with people. “The men would go to the bar, the women would go shopping at the clothing stores and grocery stores. The kids went to the theater. We all had one quarter each. It cost 12 cents to get in the show if you were a kid. The Italians across the street had penny candy which was the size of a full size bar now, so we’d buy three bars. At the show the popcorn was a nickel and a coke was a nickel, so our quarter would buy all that, and we could watch the show as long as we wanted. About 8:00 Daddy and Mother would start gathering everybody up. I remember sitting on that truck between two adults and I didn’t know if I was going to fall off or not….bumpy gravel road. Mrs. Hawkins had the theater and there was a balcony. All the blacks paid on the side at another door, and sat in the balcony, never went inside the theater. Mrs. Hawkins would let almost anybody in for 12 cents…even if they had a mustache. Going to town on Saturday was a big deal, something to look forward to all week. Then we’d have church on Sunday. They always respected the Lord’s Day. “

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Jim liked to play the fiddle and he and Etta Mae, along with Carl, Jim’s younger brother formed a small band, with Carl playing the banjo and Etta Mae the piano. The families would get together when the weather was nice and play on Saturday afternoon, inviting others living nearby to join in. Enough food was usually cooked on Saturday morning to last through Sunday, so that the women could have some relaxation time.  While the women caught up on the neighborhood gossip, and the men talked mostly about hunting and politics, the kids played outside, inventing their own games and enjoying an escape from their chores. 

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Even though Jim and his boys hunted for a living, there were plenty of others who hunted for recreation, and despite its remote location, the Flowers Landing community bordered thousands of acres of wilderness, where premiere hunting was available. Important people from around the state and the country visited the Tensas woods. My daddy, Charles (Bubba), always referred to the important visitors as “The Hats”, and told about helping guide some of them on hunts in Tensas and Madison parish when he was a boy. 

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One important person that befriended Jim was Jimmie Davis, who later became governor of Louisiana. Jimmie Davis and Jim had much in common which is probably why they hit it off when they met. Jimmie Davis, born the son of a poor sharecropper in Jackson Parish, describes his childhood in an interview that appeared in The Louisiana Trooper, a publication of the Louisiana State Police, in 1990 when he was ninety-one years old. He tells about his large family, eleven kids, his parents and grandparents living in a two room cabin. Later, when his father bought his own farm, they all lived together in one room for a time. He is quoted as saying, “I was about 8 years old before I ever slept in a bed…...” Education was his escape from the poverty of his childhood, graduating from high school, then attending Louisiana College in Alexandria where he used his guitar and sang on the street corners for money. He later attended LSU and earned a Master’s Degree. 

He taught at a women’s college in Shreveport, served as Public Commissioner of Police and Fire Departments in Caddo Parish, and later ran for Louisiana Public Service Commissioner and won. During this time in the 1930s, he also met and married Miss Alverna Adams, whose father was a physician and one of the old families of Shreveport. She was cultured and played classical music on the piano, later helping Jimmie write some of his music. In a 2000 New York Times article he joked, ”I try out a song on my wife, and if she doesn’t like it, I rush right out and record it.” (The New York Times, 2000)

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While serving as Police Commissioner and Public Service Commissioner he was playing music and recording songs. He started playing on KWKH radio in Shreveport and was recruited by RCA to go to Nashville where he recorded songs like “Nobody’s Darling But Mine”and “It Makes No Difference Now” which did very well, along with “You Are My Sunshine”.(New York Times) He was not interested in being governor, but people all over the state kept asking him to run. His music career was doing well, and in his words, “I could make more money in a month singing, than I could make in two years and governor.” 

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He loved people, and when his political friends talked him into running for governor, he campaigned with his band around the state, “We’d talk a little, then we’d sing a little and people would dance.” (The Louisiana Trooper) It was during this time when he was campaigning in Tensas Parish, that he met Jim and Etta Mae. They had a small store on the banks of the Tensas River near the landing and when he came by there one day to ask for their vote, they discovered how much they had in common as they talked.

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Mr. and Mrs. Davis would visit Jim and Etta Mae at Flowers Landing and Glen recalls one visit when they had the Davises over for supper. It had rained several inches and the front yard of their old house was a giant puddle with black “gumbo” mud underneath. When Mr. and Mrs. Davis arrived, Mrs. Davis did not want to ruin her shoes, so she took them off and waded into the house barefooted. At other times, Glen was invited to come hang out with their teenage son, Jimmy Davis Jr. when they would be staying on Lake Bruin at a friend’s camp. He recalls conversations with Mr. Davis when he would drive him back home to Tensas, listening to the radio as they rode, and Jimmie telling him that he would never allow ads for cigarettes or beer on his radio programs. Another time Mrs. Davis took him and Jimmie Jr. to the state fair in Shreveport, and Glen claims that the Davises wanted to have him around as a good influence on Jimmie Jr. who was adopted and a little on the wild side. Their plan may not have worked, since Glen recalls that a few years later when he and Jimmie Jr. were no longer buddies, Jimmie Jr. engaged in antics such as speed boating on Lake Bruin with naked women in his boat!

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When he became governor, he did not forget his friends like Jim. One of the promises he made was to get electricity to his place, and when he was elected for his first term which was 1944-1948, electricity was provided for the first time at Flowers Landing.  When power was installed in the house they had a single wire with a bulb in each room, and the lights were so bright compared to the oil lamps they were using, Jim told the children not to stare at the bulb for fear it would hurt their eyes. When Jimmie Davis was elected for the second time in 1960-1964, he promised Jim that the road to his house would be paved and completed during his term. 

  The paving of that road that ran past our house remains one of my most vivid childhood memories. There were two small oak trees growing close together near the road in our front yard. My brother and I hauled boards up the trees and built a platform between them that we called our fort. Along with our younger sisters, we spent many hours playing there after school and in the summer, sometimes using it as an escape from Mama’s switch when we were in trouble.  When the crews began to prepare the road for paving, a man with a bulldozer came to cut down the trees, but saw our sad faces watching nearby and went away.  Our victory was short lived, as he returned when we weren’t watching and finished the job. During the months that the road work was being done, we had to walk a quarter mile alongside the red dirt foundations of the new road to get to the place where the school bus could pick us up. Compared to the gravel road we had always known, I remember how black the asphalt seemed with the bright yellow lines down the middle when it was new.  How much heat it reflected in the summer, and the steam rising after a sudden thunderstorm cooled it down, when we would delight in riding our bikes through the warm puddles. 

Jimmie Davis lived a remarkable life, holding important public offices, and writing and recording popular songs that sold millions of records, including “You Are My Sunshine” which was named one of the “Songs of the Century” and earned a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 1999. (64 Parishes Magazine) He continued to hunt in Tensas and Madison Parish while he was governor and for years afterwards, visiting with Jim and the family when he was in the area. He lived to be 101 and performed four songs at his 100th birthday party in 1999, dying at his home in Baton Rouge on November 5, 2000.

Sing to him a new song; play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts.

Psalm 33:3

As I pack up the last of the Christmas decorations and throw out goodies that sabotage our diets, I am reminded of holidays long past, that started in the fall and lasted through December. While different from today, they were precious to us, and the beginning of some of our treasured family traditions.

There were no elaborate decorations or costumes, blood and gore, or evil practices in our house for Halloween, just plain fun. We rarely attended the school carnivals that were always held, but come October, when Mama went to Tallulah for groceries at A&P, she would sometimes buy us a pumpkin to carve and let us go to Morgan & Lindsey 5 and 10 and look at the Halloween masks. We knew we could not choose the more expensive rubber ones with hair, or get a costume, but there was always a selection of the rigid plastic masks with round holes for your eyes and a thin elastic string to hold it on your head, costing twenty-five cents or less. Oh, the choosing…..a ghost, a clown, a gypsy girl, a witch, a cowboy, or a pirate? After we made our choices, we would try them on all the way home in the back seat of our car, struggling to breathe through the hard plastic, and breaking the elastic string on at least one of them before we got home. Somehow they would last a few days until Halloween night. Then we would each get a paper grocery sack for treats and a bar of soap for tricks, and load up in the car to go around the Flowers Landing neighborhood made up of relatives and long time neighbors who knew us well.

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As the sun set and the harvest moon began to rise, feeling disguised in our plastic masks, we would visit each one, shouting “Trick or Treat!” when they opened the door to our knock. We rarely had a need to use the soap to mark up their windows, which was the worst trick we could think of, because the treats were delightful and prepared special for us. One house would give us homemade popcorn balls, another fresh made fudge, and another Rice Crispy treats, along with bags of penny candy, chocolate bars, and bubble gum, all the while feigning fear and delight at our masked faces. Back home, we would spread out our treasures and compare to see who got more, then eat as much as Mama would allow, afterward playing masked chase around the yard in the dark, trying to catch fireflies until we used up the sugar energy and fell sweaty and exhausted into bed.

The end of November brought days out of school for Thanksgiving, and sometimes cooler weather, with plans for a family get together at one of our relative’s houses. That meant more cousins for us to play with, and each family would bring something for the meal that was served around noon. There was always turkey and dressing, chicken and dressing, sweet potatoes, fresh vegetables from the garden that had been picked and canned in the summer, cornbread and rolls and cans of jellied cranberry sauce that needed to be sliced. But the best part for us was the desserts; pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie, chocolate pie, coconut cake, pecan pie, apple pie, and cherry pie, since on this one day, we could have more than one piece! The afternoon brought grand games of Red Rover, Hide and Seek, or Keep Away with our cousins, while the grown-ups talked about work, politics, and the high price of everything, with Christmas around the corner.

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And then there was Christmas. The excitement started to build when the Sears Christmas Catalog came in the mail. My brother and my two younger sisters and I would argue and fight over it until we got a plan for sharing it between the four of us, spending hours studying the colorful, shiny pages filled with the stuff of our dreams, trying to decide what to ask Santa for. Even though we were all under the age of 10, we were aware that there were definite limits to our asking, but the fun was in the dreaming!

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Those weeks between Halloween and Christmas would be filled with extra work for my daddy. When the crops were all gathered and sold, he would turn his attention toward hunting, trapping, and fishing to make extra money. When he had a supply of fish, hides, and meat wrapped and frozen, he would plan a trip to Monroe and West Monroe, and load it all into the trunk of our car. With Mama in the front with him, and all us in the back seat, we would drive to Tallulah and take Hwy 80 all the way to Monroe, a treacherous 60 miles on a narrow two-way road filled with too much traffic, including semi trucks that were so close we felt like we could reach out the car window and touch them.

When we got to Monroe, we wouldn’t stop until we drove all the way down Desiard St. and crossed the bridge into West Monroe at Bayles Landing. Across the street from the landing was a grocery and meat market where daddy sold most of his hides and meat. Then we would go on out of West Monroe to Drew, where Uncle Myron Hart had a syrup mill. He would give us pieces of sugar cane to chew, and buckets of thick ribbon cane syrup traded to my daddy for fresh venison. Here we would eat the sandwiches and snacks Mama had packed for us before heading back to Monroe for some window shopping.

At Christmas, in our world, there was no place like Howard Griffin Land of Toys. The ads on our black and white TV promoted it with the jingle, “Howard Griffin Land of Toys, Lots of fun for girls and boys!”, but the ads were nothing compared to the real thing! We would stand mesmerized at the mechanical window displays of animals and elves, and Santa himself, moving their heads and arms to the Christmas music being played, and surrounded by fake snow and twinkling lights. Our eyes tried to take it all in, the rows and rows of shiny bikes that seemed to stretch for miles, and the shelves full of exquisitely dressed baby dolls with real hair and shiny eyes that would open and close. There were aisles with puzzles and games, building blocks, trucks, gigantic stuffed animals, hula hoops, toy guns, and play kitchen sets, all with the brand-new smell.

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If we were lucky, Santa would be there in person. I remember the fear mixed with joy as I sat on his lap, the softness of his suit, his fake beard, and how it felt to be asking a stranger to bring me toys, all the while hoping he would come through. Enjoying our free candy canes from Santa, we would be occupied for as long as Mama and Daddy let us look, and now that I think back on it, one of them would disappear for a bit while we were looking. When the time came to go, we would get back into the car and Daddy would drive us down Louisville Avenue to see the city decorations, stopping at Burger Chef for a rare treat of fifteen-cent burgers, fries and sodas before heading home. With our stomachs full and our hearts hopeful for Christmas toys to come, we would fall asleep to the hum of the road, leaning on each other in the back seat.

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We would put up our tree a couple weeks before Christmas. There was a board bridge across Mills Bayou and Daddy could drive our car over it and along the logging road into the Tensas woods for 3 or 4 miles if there had not been too much rain. He would let us all out and the search would begin for the perfect wild cedar tree to cut down. Once we made our choice, he would cut it down with the axe he had brought and load it in the trunk with part of it sticking out below the tied down lid. At home, the limbs were trimmed and shaped after being placed in the metal tree holder, rusty from the water it held each year. Mama would help us clip on the strings of lights, replacing the burned out bulbs if she had a spare, and then we could put the shiny balls and homemade decorations on the tree as we wished, with an angel on the top and a fake snow skirt wrapped around the metal tree holder. The icicles were the finishing touch to our masterpiece, packages of shiny foil strings that we threw by the handfuls all over the tree, scooping the fallen ones off the floor and throwing them again to cover it.

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For as long as I remember, we had fruitcake at Christmas, and we still make it today. Grandma Willhite had taught Mama how to make it, and we all helped. There were pecans and walnuts to be cracked and shelled, dates and candied fruit to be chopped, pans to be greased with shortening and lined with brown paper cut to fit the bottom. The recipe called for two kinds of raisins, two kinds of nuts, candied fruit, fig or pear preserves, a dozen eggs, a pound of butter, sugar, flour, spices, ribbon cane syrup, honey, orange juice and bourbon. Daddy would help us mix the stiff batter with the nuts and fruit in large dishpans before Mama packed it in the pans to bake. It took all day, and she would make two recipes, so there was plenty for us, and some for giving away or trading to other relatives for their goodies. The heavy loaves were wrapped in foil and lasted all through Christmas and into the New Year, making a favorite snack for my daddy to take hunting with his bottle of hot coffee.

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Christmas was special to Grandma, because she was a Christian and because she had met Grandpa at Christmas when they were young. She hosted a family party every year, hoping all could attend whether near or far. Most of my daddy’s brothers and sisters lived within driving distance of Flowers Landing in the 1960s, all with families of their own. They would come to Grandma and Grandpa Willhite’s on Christmas Eve for a gathering of 30 to 40 people depending on the year. Every family brought food, and there was a gift under her small tree for everybody, Grandma made sure of that. It may be a pair of socks, a small hand cream, toothpaste, a yo-yo, or a ball — whatever she found throughout the year that she thought we could use. We would all crowd into their small house for the blessing, then the cousins would be served first and sent outside to eat. A fire was blazing in the yard, and we all had fireworks to shoot, separating into two groups of the girls and the boys. The girls liked to shoot the Roman candles first, blasting their balls of fire through the bare limbs of the pecan trees on the edge of the yard, and then finish off with the sparklers, lighting them with burning sticks from the fire and twirling them in circles until they burned out. But the boys were all about the firecrackers, delighting in the noise and chaos caused by throwing large bundles into the fire as we girls were standing near it, and then attacking us with smoke bombs as we ran away.

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When everyone had their fill of food and had shot up all the fireworks, we would be called into the house to get our presents, say “Merry Christmas” and “Thank You” to Grandma and Grandpa, and our good byes to cousins, aunts, and uncles we didn’t see every day. Then we would all hurry home and to bed, because Santa Clause was coming!

In the years that have passed since then, I have not experienced any greater joy than those Christmas mornings when one of us would wake and tip toe into the living room to peek at the tree, then rush back to wake up the other three so that we could all four tear into the presents together. That same joy was on our parents faces as we showed them what we got, a feeling that I now recognize as the joy of giving someone something without expecting anything in return, as God did when he gave us His Son. Though we weren’t religious, and we did not talk a lot about Jesus, we had the true Christmas Spirit shown to us by the sacrifice and love of our parents, our grandparents, and our neighbors who gave us all they could.

“Give and it will be given to you. A good portion- packed down, firmly shaken, and overflowing-will fall into your lap. The portion you give will determine the portion you receive in return.”

luke 6:38

Standing in front of the house that was once my grandparent’s, I’m flooded with memories of sweet cornbread, grape Kool-Aid, and the smell of the gardenias and roses in the flower bed near the door. I remember stopping by to nurse a skinned knee, or get a cold drink on a hot summer day when we had pedaled our bikes up and down the gravel road in front of their house. Grandma was health conscious, and would sometimes hand us a slab of cold cornbread and a drink to enjoy outside on the steps, if she thought we might be sick, covering her nose and mouth with her apron. Other times, though, we would go inside, pretending we needed to use the bathroom, so we could soak in the ambiance of their house – clean, cool, and with a distinct smell of furniture polish mingled with pain relieving rub and cooking smells from the kitchen.

The radio drew us in, standing four feet tall with a beautiful curved cabinet made of wood veneers inlaid to form a design, with a grille cloth covering the speaker area. The large round dial with numbers for the stations fascinated us, as we tried the tuning and volume knobs. By the 1960s, Jim and Etta Mae were approaching their seventies and known to us as Grandma and Grandpa Willhite. Their bedrooms were now separate from each other and each contained items that were important to them. Hers was painted lavender with sheer floral print curtains covering the windows , with her sewing machine in the corner. The chenille bedspread covered a simple, full size iron bed adorned with a frilly pillow. His room was the most interesting to us, with a bed that had a carved headboard and four turned posts, full sized, but massive in our eyes, and covered with a quilt. He now kept his radio there, making space in the living room for the television which had replaced it in the 1950s. 

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I​n the 1930s and 1940s, the radio had been their lifeline to the outside world, along with the Tensas Gazette, the parish newspaper published in St. Joseph. With no electricity, they had one that ran on a 6 volt battery, like a car battery, but thinner. By 1941 O.D., Derwood, and Oliver, were all in the service stationed in Louisiana, Washington, and Georgia, and Jimmy was soon to follow. World War II was the first war to be broadcast, and news reports on the radio describing the battles with Germany in Europe and the brutal military actions of Japan and Italy were unsettling, but still a world away and hard to understand. Jim and Etta Mae, like other Americans, were trying to recover from the Great Depression, and did not support U.S. involvement in the European conflict. (“Watching the Radio”, America in WWII)

That all changed on December 7, 1941, when Japan bombed the United States at Pearl Harbor.

The country was resolved and ready to fight back after Franklin Roosevelt gave his radio address on December 8, 1941.

In it he stated, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan..” ……..and went on to say…….. “I believe I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again….. With confidence in our armed forces — with the unbounded determination of our people — we will gain the inevitable triumph —so help us God.”(“Watching the Radio”, America in WWII)

Now the threat was real for Jim and Etta Mae, that one or all their sons in the military would be deployed overseas. 

W​ith the older boys now gone, Nita married, and Carrie a senior in high school, there were five younger mouths to feed, and little time for worry. Unable to pay all his taxes, Jim had to sell much of his land, keeping a couple hundred acres at Flowers Landing. He let Derwood, John A. and Jimmy have land at Hunters’s Bend in Madison Parish which they were farming on their own before they entered the service, while Oliver had left years before, enlisting in the Army, and O.D. had left home in 1935 to find his own way before he was drafted in 1941. The hard work of surviving continued for the family, and Jim had much less help. George (Tut) was ten years old in 1941 and Charles (Bubba) was eight, followed by the younger siblings, Emma Lou who was six, Glen two, and six month old Janet.

Although they had food provided by Jim’s hunting and fishing and Etta Mae’s garden, along with their milk cows and chickens, their income was small and certain items were in short supply because of rationing. Each family in the U.S. received ration stamps good for certain rationed items such as sugar, coffee, canned milk, meat, and cheese. (National WWII Museum) Other items that were rationed included clothes, shoes, tires and gasoline, which hampered Jim’s farming, hunting, and trapping operations. My mother, Mary Willhite, remembers my daddy, Bubba, telling her that he and Tut had such ragged clothes during the war that they would hide in the ditch if a car came by when they were walking down the road. Jan states that her mother, Etta Mae, told her that the family faced extreme hard times during the war.

Like other Americans, they may not have fully understood what led up to Japan bombing the United States, or how the cancer of evil against the Jews began, or why Italy and Germany joined Japan in declaring war against the United States. But because of radio news, they knew there was a global war raging that presented a real threat to their family, and that it had to be stopped at any cost.

They had listened to reports of Hitler’s  reign of terror against the Jews, while his military began to invade eastern European countries, annexing Austria (Anachluss) in March 1938. This was reported live with vivid description by Edward R. Murrow, as he stated “It was called a bloodless conquest and in some ways it was – but I’d like to be able to forget the haunted look on the faces of those long lines of people outside the banks and travel offices. People trying to get away … I’d like to forget the sound of smashing glass as the Jewish shop streets were raided; the hoots and jeers at those forced to scrub the sidewalk...” (History of American Journalism) (The National Interest) https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/world-war-ii-how-one-journalist-used-his-microphone-fight-nazi-germany-189724

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  The radio, along with news reels shown at the movies, brought Hitler to America, displaying the force of his massive army and broadcasting some of his speeches made to the German people as he marched across  Europe taking over countries. https://youtu.be/LMbd-UYyEd0 (YouTube) One source states, “but imagine how menacing this barking, staccato speech, punctuated with cheers and Heil Hitlers, must have sounded to radio listeners in the American rural areas. Their regular music programmes suddenly interrupted by an announcer declaring that they were going over live to Berlin. It must have seemed like a voice from another planet.” (World War II on the Air) With the fall of other European countries by 1940,  Britain and Prime Minister Winston Churchill were left to resist the German invasion threat.

 In May 1940 more than 300,000 British troops were forced to retreat and became stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk, before Britain called on civilian ship and boat owners to rescue them.

Starting in July 1940, the Battle of Britain raged for four long months during which British ports were bombed by German forces, along with Royal Air Force airfields, the city of London and other industrial centers during daytime and nighttime raids. On August 24, 1940, Edward Murrow broadcast a special report, “London After Dark“, where Murrow gave a detailed description during a bombing raid with the sirens sounding in the background. He put his microphone to the ground and recorded people walking calmly into the bomb shelter, “like ghosts with steel shoes“, showing there was no panic. (World War II on the Air)

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Most Americans, including Jim and Etta Mae,  had never heard the sound of war, but radio reports like this, brought it into their living rooms. The Royal Air Force was successful in defending Britain against the air raids which ended in October 1940. (www.historyonthenet.com)

B​y the end of 1940, Italy, an Ally in WWI, had entered the war on the side of the Axis powers, led by Benito Mussolini, a Fascist. Much like Hitler in Germany, he had moved to dictatorship using anti-Communist propaganda, and his secret police to stop his opposition. Italy occupied Egypt, countries in East Africa and North Africa, Greece, and Russia, before being defeated by the Allies. (History of Western Civilization) Italy also formed an alliance with Germany, and Japan, who was waging war against China, and seeking to occupy parts of Indochina and the Philippines.

Japan needed natural resources for its industrial growth, and its brutal military actions were aimed at securing these from other countries. (timetoast.com) Italian and German forces continued their attacks in Europe, and in Russia, despite the treaty they had signed with Joseph Stalin. In June 1941, Hitler sent 3 million soldiers and 3,500 tanks into Russia, a surprise attack, which caused Stalin to sign a mutual aid treaty with Britain and join the Allies. The United States sent arms to Russia, as they had been doing for Britain. (historyonthenet.com)

When Japan launched the surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, it was hoping to cripple the U.S. long enough for its forces to take British, French, and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia. Radio broadcasts detailed the damage of the attacks, and that evening, a graphic report by Eric Sevareid from Washington D.C. described the frenzy in the courtyard at the Japanese Embassy, and the calm resolve that he saw on the faces of the crowds gathered on the streets.

“The Japanese had left one gate carelessly unlatched, and reporters walked in just in time to see Japanese clerks and guards throwing boxes of embassy documents on a bonfire. Each box was set afire by a quick-action fuse, and as the Americans started to come in, the Japanese shouted, ‘You must not come! You must not come!” (History of American Journalism) The next day, Britain and the United States declared war on Japan, and the war raged on for months with significant losses for the Allies.

T​he tide began to turn in favor of the Allies when the United States defeated Japan at the Battle of Midway in the summer of 1942, and Allied forces defeated the German-Italian army in North Africa forcing Italy to surrender by September 1943. (historyonthenet.com) On D-Day, Allied forces stormed the beaches at Normandy in Western France capturing the port.

By May 1945, Mussolini was executed by Italian rebels, and Hitler committed suicide, causing Italy and Germany to surrender. Victory in Europe, V.E. Day, was celebrated on May 8, 1945. (historyonthenet.com)

J​apan did not surrender until August 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing roughly 250,000 people, most of which were civilians. Edward R. Murrow described the bombs as “charging out of the bowels of the earth“. (World War II on the Air)

Over 300,000 American troops died fighting against Germany, Japan and Italy, but their sacrifice was not in vain, because it was the U.S. involvement alongside our allies that won the war against those who aimed to take over the world.

O​liver, the only Willhite son that served overseas, was stationed for a year in Britain, which served as a central location for American troops sent there to help free Europe from Nazi occupation. In his V-mail letters to his mother in 1943, he could not disclose his location, but tells her “I am well and fine as usual and I like the country okay. It’s been quiet here so far. I’m glad to hear about the good crop, maybe the Ole Man can get over the fence this year.”

He related some more stories about the war to my cousin, Betty. ” Uncle Oliver told me that when he got into World War 2 in France he wanted to call home to let his parents know that he was safe. He got an operator to try to connect him with the phone operator’s office in the Parish. The operator told him that the few numbers he gave her would not work. Uncle Oliver explained that there was an operator in the parish who would get in touch with the Sheriff who would drive over to let his Mother and Daddy know he was okay. The operator finally figured it out and was able to connect him with the parish phone operator.  During that time there were no home phones at Flower’s Landing. I think it was Denny Willhite, (O.D.’s son) who told me that in WW2 Uncle Oliver landed in France during the invasion period in a glider and played dead to evade the German soldiers. “

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O.D. was drafted in 1941 and spent most of his time in the service at Fort Polk in Alexandria, and Derwood enlisted and was stationed at Ft. Lewis Washington, working on the base. An article in the Tensas Gazette told about them all coming home together on leave, right before the war ended. “Mr. and Mrs. J.M. Willhite of Flowers Landing, Tensas River, are happy to have with them their three sons, on furlough visit, who have been in armed service for several years.” https://www.newspapers.com/clip/53813493/oliver-od-derwood-visit-home/

The article names Oliver, Derwood, and O.D. and where they served, and goes on to say, “First time these three boys have been at home together at one time in three years and it is, needless to say, their visit is enjoyed and appreciated not only by the parents, but by each other.” (The Tensas Gazette, August 10, 1945) Once again by the Grace of God, Jim and Etta Mae’s family had remained intact. 

Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. …

Ephesians 6: 11-17

Lush fields spread out before us on both sides of the road as we drive from Somerset to Flowers Landing, a result of work done by modern machinery and chemical farming methods. It’s summer, and the crops that were planted in the spring are growing vigorously, promising a bounty in the fall. Road sides are overgrown with clover, Johnson grass, coffee weeds, and the occasional palmetto, thriving in the humid June weather, with little threat of being mowed. The river winds by our porch, its color resembling coffee with heavy cream, not as wide as in the spring, but higher than normal for this time of year. Rain peppers the surface of the muddy water and starts to drip off our eaves, giving a brief break from the smothering heat and humidity.

When it stops, the loud twitter of the wrens resume, hidden in the thick leaves of the sycamores, as do the far off calls of the doves. The occasional rap of woodpeckers echo through the woods, reminiscent of others long gone. Now home to the red-headed woodpecker, downy woodpecker, and the pileated woodpecker, among others, the refuge, and the once massive Singer tract, was the location where the great ivory billed woodpecker was last seen. That sighting drew national attention to the woods through which the Tensas River flowed, and the resulting research and documentation shed light on the environmental impact that mammoth companies like Chicago Mill were having. It also gives us a glimpse of the conditions that Jim and Etta Mae’s family, along with many others, were forced to tolerate.

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With a wing span of almost three feet, and a length of twenty inches or more, the ivory bill’s striking features included black feathers with patches of white, topped with a bright red crest on the male, and were awe-inspiring. Their call was unique, unlike other woodpeckers, and described as a kent sound. They earned their nickname from exclamations of “Lord, God!” when spotted in the wild by those lucky enough to see one. The pairs would mate for life and build their nests thirty to fifty feet high in dead snags, where they peeled back the bark to eat beetle larvae. Ivory bills preferred thick hardwood swamps with large amounts of dead and decaying trees and a pair required about 10 sq. miles of forest to feed themselves and their young, so they would have been sparsely populated even at their peak. (Wikipedia) As the large tracts of virgin timber across the southeastern United States disappeared due to logging, the ivory bill woodpecker lost much of its habitat. 

Considered virtually extinct by the 1920s, the scientific community took notice when a Louisiana politician from Tallulah, Mason Spencer, shot and killed an ivory bill on the Singer tract in Madison Parish in 1932, and bragged about it in New Orleans at a meeting of Louisiana wildlife officials who had given him a permit. Then, in 1934, Dr. George Lowery of LSU published Birds of Louisiana, giving publicity to the ivory bill find. This got the attention of Arthur Allen, founder of the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who had spotted ivory bills in 1924 in Florida, a sighting which led to their death by hunters. He organized an expedition including himself, as well as, Cornell professor Peter Paul Kellogg, a graduate student, James Tanner, and a bird artist, George Miksch Sutton, to travel around the South using movie camera equipment to record rare bird sounds in the wild and search for more ivory bills. (Cornell.edu)(Singer.roots web)

They traveled in two trucks, one loaded down with sound recording equipment and the other with camping gear, photo equipment, food and other supplies. In April 1935, right after Jim and Etta Mae had moved to Flowers Landing, the expedition arrived in Tallulah and stopped at Mason Spencer’s law office to question him about the bird he killed. They followed his hand drawn map to J.J. Kuhn’s cabin, a game warden for Singer, who was to be their guide. Traveling from Tallulah to Sharkey Road, which was not more than a set of ruts between towering trees, their heavy trucks struggled in the mud until they were rescued by Ike Page, and his son, sent by Kuhn to help them.

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They left their trucks and put their camping gear in Ike’s wagon behind his team of mules, riding some five miles through the giant flooded timber to Kuhn’s cabin where they ate and slept, before hiking into the swamp to John’s Bayou the next morning, looking for the ivory bills. It took two more days of wading through palmetto, poison ivy, saw briars, and knee-deep water before the well dressed team of researchers, now rumpled and drenched with sweat, spotted an ivory bill nest with a pair of birds. (Philip Hoose, The Race to Save the Lord God Bird) “The whole experience was like a dream,” wrote George Sutton in his 1936 book Birds in the Wilderness. “There we sat in the wild swamp, miles and miles from any highway, with two ivory-billed woodpeckers so close to us that we could see their eyes, their long toes, even their slightly curved claws with our binoculars.”(Cornell.edu)

After the sighting, the team took the truck with its 1500 pounds of sound recording equipment to Tallulah for dry ground beside the city jail, dismantling it and rebuilding it in Ike’s wagon while some of the prisoners watched. Their equipment also included a fold down observation platform that could be “cranked up like a giant jack-in-the-box” to raise the observers to bird nest level.

Traveling all day with the wagon pulled by mules from Tallulah to reach the nest again, they spread a tent over the sound equipment. Using palmetto as a base for their sleeping bags to avoid the wet ground, they set up camp to observe and record the birds. Over the next two weeks, they were able to record the kent calls of the ivory bills, recordings which are still used today for authentication, and collect a multitude of photographs of the pair as they moved in and out of the nest. The team worked carefully, not wanting to disrupt the birds nesting, hoping to learn something about their behaviors that could lead to preventing their extinction. 

J​ames Tanner returned to the Singer tract in 1937 and spent three years studying the ivory bills and looking for them in other locations in the South, working on his doctoral dissertation which was funded by a grant from the Audubon Society. He discovered why they were decreasing, they were starving to death because there were no longer enough dead or dying trees for them to feed in, and the problem was about to get worse. Singer sold 6000 acres it held along the Tensas to Tendall Lumber Company in 1937, then sold the timber rights for the remaining acreage of the Singer Tract to Chicago Mill. 

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Chicago Mill Lumber Company cut top grade wood for furniture companies, including Singer for its sewing machine cabinets, and made wooden boxes of every kind and shape from the rest, including caskets, shell boxes and wagon seats. The company built sawmills near forests across the South and shipped the lumber down the Mississippi River on a fleet of company barges, feeding an appetite for wood that could not be satisfied. Chicago Mill began to cut trees in the Singer Tract at a rapid pace, building railroad tracks from Tallulah out into the woods and across the Tensas river at many locations, including the one that crossed at Flowers Landing. They set up logging camps with portable shacks brought in on the train for families to live in while loggers worked seven days a week “from can to can’t”, in rain and cold to cut the trees. When an area was cleared, the shacks were moved, and a new camp set up. (Philip Hoose, The Race to Save the Lord God Bird) Hermie Arnold recalls what he remembers about the logging camps, “We lived at the Chicago Mill camp on Sharkey Road in 1943-45. My dad, Gillis Arnold was an engineer on one of the engines that hauled logs off the Singer tract to the spur on the main line. Some of the families that lived at the camps were D.T. Sadler, S.C. (Red) Emfinger, Harmon Arnold, Morel Arnold, and a Singer family from Winnsboro. All the men had their wives and families with them at the camp. There was a bookkeeper, Mr. Foster from Tallulah, and a black man from Newellton who was a welder and all I knew him by was Uncle Top. I would see the German POWs. They were hauled in cattle trucks and guarded by armed soldiers.” It is estimated that at that time, 40% of the people living in the Tallulah area worked for Chicago Mill in some capacity.

I​n  Hoose’s book he writes: The hoots of the barred owls, the electric chatter of the tree frogs, the hair-raising cries of wolves, and the tooting calls of the ivory billed woodpeckers were soon drowned out by the grinding, growling machines. “Those woods were loud,” recalled Gene Laird, who grew up in the forest during those years. “The train whistle was earsplitting—-four blasts meant ‘get off the track’. Axes rang, people yelled and whoop-whooped to be heard, and behind it all the crawler tractors hauling logs were always growling.”

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The demand for wood increased with the onset of World War II, with the armed forces needing boxes to hold everything it shipped overseas, from airplanes to dry food. Chicago Mill had an increased market for its product, with no labor to build them, until it was supplied in an unusual way. German prisoners of war were shipped to New York, and then to communities in every state, including Ruston, Louisiana. Camp Ruston was one of the largest camps for German prisoners of war and supplied men for smaller satellite camps around the state, including Tallulah.  The Tallulah fairgrounds was wrapped in barbed wire and turned into a POW camp, and the War Department allowed the prisoners to work on plantations and for companies like Chicago Mill. (64parishes.org)

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Hoose’s book states: “The Germans were like a gift from heaven to Chicago Mill and Lumber Company. Now it could make money three ways in one project: it could clear the Singer Tract with workers who were practically free; it could sell as many boxes as it could make to the ravenous War Department; and it could sell the cutover land to rural families who wanted cheap farmland. Chicago Mill didn’t even have to clean up the mess it had made. ” The waste, you wouldn’t believe it,” recalled Gene Laird. “If you stood at a cut-down tree and it didn’t measure three feet around, they’d just leave it on the ground. “

Valiant efforts to persuade Chicago Mill to stop cutting on the Singer tract, or at least the area where the ivory bills lived, failed. Led by the Audubon Society, the governors of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi, and Louisiana, as well as, officials of the Roosevelt Administration joined in the fight. On December 8, 1943, John Baker of the Audubon Society reported the results of a meeting in Chicago Mill’s downtown Chicago boardroom like this: “Chicago Mill refused to cooperate in any way, and said that it would not enter into any deal unless forced to. The Chairman said, among other things, ‘We are just money grubbers. We are not concerned, as you folks, with ethical considerations.’ They would not help in any way with the creation of a park or refuge unless forced to do so.” (Phillip Hoose: The Race to Save the Lord God Bird)

News of the ivory bill find on the Singer tract appeared in newspapers across the country, and scientists, students, photographers, artists and curious sight seers continued to visit the Singer woods on and off as late as 1944, until the last of the birds disappeared. My brother, Kenneth, remembers Grandpa Willhite (Jim) telling him about the Cornell University expedition and their equipment in the woods, likely seen on their frog hunts to Mack’s Bayou, Alligator Bayou, or Methiglum Bayou which were near the area of the expedition. Derwood was reported to have helped guide some expeditions, since the game warden,  J.J. Kuhn had been forced to resign when he defied powerful politicians who wanted him to allow their cronies to hunt freely on the Singer Tract with no consequences. (The Race to Save the Lord God Bird) 

The damage inflicted on the primeval hardwood forest of the Singer Tract was a painful part of the Willhite family’s daily lives at the time, with a Chicago Mill train track running near their house at Flowers Landing. Jim was able to buy some of the cutover land for farming, and they continued to hunt, fish and trap along the Tensas, steering clear of areas that were being heavily cut. 

“Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture? Must you also trample the rest of your pasture with your feet? Is it not enough for you to drink clear water? Must you also muddy the rest with your feet?”

Ezekiel 34: 17-18

The trees sway to the tropical breeze that has reached us, coming off the weather system in the gulf. It brings a welcome coolness, unusual for July, and relief from the mosquitoes that would be swarming us on the porch of our camp at Flowers Landing. As the light rain turns from drizzle to a constant peppering on the tin roof, we can still hear the redbirds and wrens calling from some rocking limb, oblivious to the rain or the wind. It’s Sunday, the Lord’s Day, and we’ve stopped here to rest on our way home from a long day’s drive, hoping to ride out the storm that is on the way. It’s the kind of storm that moves in gradually, as the bands of rain from the tropical depression down south spread across our part of the state. As a child, I remember more violent thunderstorms of the summer, brought on by the intense heat, that always caught us by surprise and seemed uncomfortably close to our beds, as we tried to sleep in a room cooled by a large fan mounted in an open window. 

I​t was on such a night that I had the most meaningful experience of my life when I was eleven years old. Even though my parents did not attend, my daddy was a member of the church that was directly across the road from our house since he was young. As children, we attended summer Bible School, and later Sunday School and youth activities without our parents, in response to our grandmother’s urging. The church held revival weeks in the summer, when a traveling evangelist preached fiery sermons about hell for consecutive nights, lamenting the perils of the lost. The sermon would always end with an altar call, pleading for those present to come forth and declare their salvation. I was much too shy to go forward after the loud rantings of the sweat drenched preacher, even though I felt that God was speaking to me.

We had walked across the road from church, and I went to bed as usual, but was awakened in the middle of the night by a sudden thunderstorm, flashing lightning, and hammering the tin roof of our house with a downpour through the booming thunder. I lay there in the bed, and prayed “Jesus, I surrender my life to you and from this day,  I will live for you. Please protect me from this storm.” I remember feeling a great sense of relief and comfort as the storm subsided, knowing that my prayer had been received. I was baptized later in life, but I mark that day as the day of my salvation. I believe that my decision was not the result of a fire and brimstone sermon, but a product of the prayers my grandmother prayed over every member of her family through the years, including me. 

By the summer of 1935, Etta Mae had become acquainted with women living in the community around Flowers Landing. They shared their gardens with each other, loaned a cup of sugar, eggs, or other staples when needed, and participated in community wash days, pooling their resources of soap, tubs and clean pump water, to do laundry. Some of them were Christian, like her, raised Methodist, and others from varied church backgrounds, but there was no church in the community.  She had also made connections with people in Newellton and inquired about preachers who may come to Flowers Landing, with a driving desire to worship the Lord and keep her family in The Word, while bringing others into the fold. 

According to Jeanette Colvin, a local historian, and author of “History of Flowers Landing Baptist Church and Surrounding Area” in 1980, T​ensas Parish developed from the plantation system of the 1800s. Rich landowners from Mississippi established plantations in the fertile floodplain of the Mississippi River. They moved hundreds of slaves to the area, but traveled back across the river for church and social activities, leaving the slaves to live on the farms. So naturally, the African-American churches were established first, many of them Baptist, and numbered many more than the Anglo-American churches in the 1930s and 1940s.

 There is no written history of Baptist work in the area prior to 1920, but there is evidence of an African-American church being established as early as 1869. She interviewed John Brooks, who was eighty years old at the time, who remembered attending Shackleford Church when he was a child in 1906, and stated that it was an old church then. Eddie Lee Guice, a deacon at Martin Chapel on Tensas Bluff stated that his church was over 100 years old. These churches may have been organized by white Baptist missionaries from Mississippi who came to Tensas parish in the 1800s to establish churches among the people living here, but were powered by African American preachers who chanted the word and who were skilled in performing sermons with no written text. (Joyce Marie Jackson)

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The churches in the area were totally separate at that time, and as Joyce Marie Jackson states in her 1997 article for the book published by the Festival of American Folklife, basically remain so today, even though they both adapted similar religious traditions. “Yet, though some congregations are now integrated, especially the Full Gospel churches, religious life in the South continues to be divided along racial lines. The assertion that 11:00 a.m. on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in American society is probably as valid today as it ever was. However, the segregated nature of Southern religion is one that African Americans and other ethnic groups chose, in order to worship not only with a sense of dignity and independence but also in their own style.” Folk preachers in the South have contributed to a more informal image of the clergy as Joyce Marie Jackson states. “In fact, the clerical profession in general has not been the same since the spiritual services took to the brush arbors and camp meetings.“

Jeanette states that families of white share-croppers and others living along Tensas River, like her family, “lived, were married, raised their children and buried their dead, all without the existence of even one church in our community. On one occasion that my father told me about, there was no preacher available for a funeral, so they just got a ‘religious’ man out of the community to say a few words over the body. “

There were churches in town, like the Union Church in Newellton, but lack of transportation and poor roads made the trip impossible for most rural families. Churches were being started in other communities, and Baptist missionaries began to work in the parish in the 1930s. By 1935 Newellton Baptist Church was established using the school as a meeting place, along with Bethany Baptist church in a rural area west of town. Apostolic or Pentecostal preachers were preaching in the Tensas Bluff area, holding outdoor brush arbor services, once or twice a week, weather permitting. Jeanette’s family lived at Tensas Bluff, ten miles down the river from Flowers Landing, and her mother told her that they would sometimes attend the Martin Chapel on Tensas Bluff, and sit on the back pews out of respect. (Jeanette Colvin)

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By spring of 1938, Etta Mae and Jim had started having church services in their yard. Extra food such as fried chicken and biscuits, cornbread, and cakes and desserts were cooked on Saturday so the family could rest and share their meal on Sunday. When the weather was nice, Etta Mae asked a varied number of preachers from the area to preach from the front porch, inviting the families living nearby to come for church. Under her watchful eye, the family would dress in their best and be ready when the preacher arrived. As long as the pastor was preaching the Bible, it did not matter to her what their particular religion was. Glen states, “They always stopped work Saturday at noon. You had Saturday afternoon and Sunday. They respected the Lord’s day. Mother got preachers to come out there and preach. The preacher would stand on the porch and Daddy had cut stumps and laid sawn boards on them to make benches in the yard and other families would come for church. It didn’t matter what kind of preacher we had….holiness preachers (Apostolic or Pentecostal), Baptist preachers, any preacher that would come to the area.” She played the piano and helped lead the singing, using her shape note hymnal which she had learned from when she was a girl. I thumb through my old hymnal like hers and see favorites like “Holy, Holy, Holy“, “Amazing Grace“, “Washed in the Blood“, “Standing On The Promises“, and “Sweet By and By“, songs that are still sung today in my church, although the words are projected on the wall. (The Modern Hymnal, 1926)

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In August and September 1938, week-long revival meetings were preached by Baptist missionaries, led by Brother A.C. Holt who played a folding organ, with an average attendance of 30 people per night, showing a growing interest in organizing a church at Flowers Landing. Some of these services were under a brush arbor, a shelter constructed of poles with a palmetto roof. Carrie Mae, and Jimmy were listed as those who came forward on profession of faith to be baptized, along with Etta Mae, Oliver, Nita, and her husband Johnny White. Their membership was listed with the Newellton First Baptist Church, along with others who joined. In summer, baptisms were conducted in the river near the landing.

During this revival, Brother Holt and his wife visited with Jim and Etta Mae, sharing his vision of a Baptist church being established at Flowers Landing. Even though they had both been raised Methodist, Jim and Etta Mae knelt in prayer with Brother Holt and his wife, promising to help establish a Baptist church there, provided it was God’s will. Later, Etta Mae was baptized, becoming a Baptist, but Jim remained Methodist and did not take part in services as much as she did. For the next three years the church met on and off, and with some improvements to the roads, a school bus from Newellton Baptist Church would offer transportation into Newellton, or Oliver would drive the family flat-bed truck, giving people rides into town for church.(Jeanette Colvin)

The people of Flowers Landing began to use a small shotgun house on the Willhite farm near the landing as a mission of the church at Newellton. It sat on the site where our camp is now located, a fact that adds to my affection for the spot. Jim donated use of the house for as long as the church needed it. According to Glen, “There was a Baptist missionary, Brother Murray, would come there. He’d preach somewhere else Sunday morning and then come there about 1:00. He’d chew gum and stick it behind his ear.” Here the church could meet more often, in any kind of weather, and it flourished. 

By January 1945, Flowers Landing Mission was officially established with Sunday School materials furnished by First Baptist Church at Newellton. Area Baptist pastors, including Brother A.N. Murray, as well as, a lay minister, Mr. John Arnold from Bethany Baptist Church, held services at the mission. Baptists from all around the area were praying for the Flowers Landing church to be established, and the church began to grow, with families like the Mr. and Mrs. David Humphries and their sons from Somerset, and Mr. and Mrs. J.Y. Head who had a farm across the river from the landing, along with others in the area. When the small house could no longer hold the group, a new church was planned, but first they needed a place and a pastor. The decision to build the parsonage first made sense, since it could also be used for services. (Jeanette Colvin)

Jim donated an acre of land up the road from the landing and the church began to raise money to build a parsonage. J.Y. Head cleared the land and Jim donated the foundation timbers. The state Women’s Missionary Union (WMU) donated $300 that was used to hire Myron Hart, Etta Mae’s brother who was a carpenter, to be in charge of the building, aided by men in the community. Others donated time, equipment, and lumber, including 3,000 feet of pine donated by Mr. Hermie Buckles, a deacon from Natchez. Other materials and supplies were purchased on credit from the Newellton Elevator Co. By June 1947 the parsonage was finished and the church met to officially organize as Flowers Landing Baptist Church, Calling Reverend H.M. Roach as pastor, Mrs. J.Y. Head as church clerk, and Mrs. J.M. Willhite(Etta Mae), as treasurer. The service ended with the Baptism of ten new members in the Tensas River at Flowers Landing. (Jeanette Colvin)

The parsonage had four rooms, a bathroom, an outhouse and large rainwater collection vat and was where the church met for a time.  The windows were opened for people to stand outside to hear the sermon and the singing when there was no more room inside. Families from as far away as Madison Parish and Somerset attended, some becoming prominent in the church in later years. Donations were taken and the church held fundraisers to contribute to the building fund for a church building, as well as, to support the pastor and his family. (The Tensas Gazette) While money was being raised to build a church, a large circus tent was purchased and set up near the parsonage, using rough lumber for supports and flooring, and an oil drum for a heater. The church met in the tent for two years before the new building was complete, allowing Brother Roach and his family to move into the parsonage.

In 1949, the first Flowers Landing Baptist church structure was a sprawling white building with asbestos shingles covering the outside, and a green shingle roof. Its sanctuary had a high ceiling and green and white linoleum tile on the floor. A kitchen and dining area, and a hall of small rooms on the back where Sunday school classes met were added later, including bathrooms. It had no steeple, much like other country churches in the south, and was not built as well as it should have been. “They didn’t know how to build a foundation in that black land. They dug down and made a chain wall around the edges and built the church on that. Then they poured the floor as a floating slab. The chain wall ended up breaking up about every eight feet and right down the middle of the church there was a big crack“, according to Glen. Wide windows along each side of the sanctuary served as a source of air in the summer, and large space heaters were placed in the front and back of the pews for heat. 

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The original building was still there in the 1960s and was located directly across the road from our house. As children, we’d sometimes find the metal hoops that my daddy used for his nets, and climbing up to the roof of our shop, roll them off toward the church yard to see how far they would go. After retrieving the hoops, my brother and sisters and I would then go inside the church during the summer, marveling at how cool it felt compared to our house, and sometimes lie down on the cracked tile floor to rest from the intense summer heat. The building smelled of old hymnals, wooden pews, and furniture polish, and was the most peaceful place in our world at the time. There was a communion table in front with the words, “This Do In Remembrance of Me”, carved in the wood along its edges. It sat in front of a simple podium and held a large opened Bible on an easel stand. We’d run our hands across the words carved in the wood and take turns trying to play the piano and sing, although none of us knew how. 

In February 1975, the old building was replaced by a more modern brick church with a steeple and a beautiful stained-glass window over the baptistery behind the altar. The carved table and large opened Bible are placed in front of the podium as before, and new pews are complete with comfortable padded seats. Because of sacrificial giving by the church members, a note burning ceremony in December 1976 marked the debt paid in full in two years. Along with the J.Y. Heads and the David Humphries, some of the families that have helped grow and build Flowers Landing Baptist church over the years include, the Colvins, Godfreys, Coopers, Grissoms, McCartys, Ransbottoms, Vinsons, Wilkins, Campbells, Wallaces, Hisaws, Merritts, Kellys, Williams, and Roberts. Many pastors contributed to the growth of Flowers Landing Baptist Church over the years,  but the most memorable to me was Brother Don Thornton. Although he was a full time teacher and coach at Newellton High school, he graciously filled in when the church was without a pastor in 1959 and 1960, and recruited boys from the community to help paint the interior. He and his wife, Bea, were married in the church during this time. Later, in 1965, Brother Don was again called to pastor the church, serving for twelve years, marrying my husband and me in 1976. (Jeanette Colvin)

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On the wall in the entry of the church are paintings done by Etta Mae in the late 1960s and 1970s, depicting the shotgun house near the river, the large circus tent, the white building with the green roof, and the brick church that is there now. She attended church and played the piano in every building, using her shape note hymnal, even though newer hymnals were used by the congregation. Once when she was playing, she found the page in her shape note hymnal missing for the particular hymn announced by the preacher, and peeking her head around the upright piano, she announced, ” We’ll have to play another song, I don’t have that one!” Jeanette Colvin tells about her watching from her house by the landing for the lights to go on at the old church in the winter before she started there for night services, hoping that the heaters were lit. The new church was the site of her funeral in 1995, and my husband and I were married there in 1976, but the old white church building will always live in my memory as Flowers Landing Baptist Church.

“For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”

Matthew 18:20

Visiting our Tensas river bank camp in the spring of 2019, the muddy water stretches wide through the trees on either side of the river, swollen from the rains. Looking through the newly leafed out sycamores near our porch, fish splash and turtles sun themselves on every available floating perch. White clover blossoms share their nectar with the bees while the squirrels feast on pecan tree blossoms overhead. The birds offer the background music as they join together in song, blending their different calls into a symphony of spring. Being here in the spring always reminds me of my daddy, Charlie Seth. Like Etta Mae, he always greeted the morning with a song and was fond of singing in the kitchen wearing nothing but his boxers while making coffee. He loved mornings like this in spring when the birds were singing, calling them “tweedle dee dee mornings”, and often woke us all up before daylight practicing his calls while getting ready to go turkey hunting this time of year. 

As a child in the 1960s, some of my fondest memories are of our trips up the river when we would camp out, fish and swim at Fools River and explore the woods around The Brick House, swinging on the vines that hung from the towering trees.

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Recent spring rains have the Tensas River high upon its banks, making it easy to navigate over dead trees and debris that block it when the water level is low. Heading up river from Flowers Landing, with my brother, Kenny as the guide, our boat slices the milky water with ease, and we make good time slowing only to navigate around fallen trees or low hanging limbs. We pass more than one small gator sunning on floating logs, half hidden in the underbrush of what will be treetops when the river goes down. The camp we call McLemore’s is on the left as we slow and snake our way through the trees to the bank, where we see the chimney as soon as we reach the top of the river hill. Standing more than 50 feet tall and fifteen feet square and made of bricks fired from riverbank clay, it’s an imposing site among the towering trees rising from the palmetto floor. Although we’ve been here before and searched for our names carved into the bricks, along with countless others over the decades, we have the same feeling of awe as the first time we visited it as children.

It’s presence marks a time when many other plantations were in the area, farms with thousands of acres of rich farmland worked by slaves, and owned by wealthy families from Mississippi. Families from Port Gibson, Mississippi, which lies a few miles to the east across the Mississippi River from Somerset, were instrumental in the establishment of the town of Newellton, as described in this account by Mary Alice Fontenot and Edith Ziegler. “Newellton owes its settlement and name to a love story. Edward Drumgould Newell, merchant of Grand Gulf, Mississippi, fell in love with Celia Ann Dorsey, daughter of a wealthy planter at Port Gibson, Mississippi. Newell asked for her hand in marriage; Celia Ann was willing, but her father said an emphatic “NO”. He based his refusal on the fact that young Newell was not a land owner and therefore was socially inferior to Miss Celia Ann. The resourceful Newell went across the river and bought himself a piece of land – 10,000 acres. Newell named his place Cypress Plantation. In 1834 he married Celia Ann and took her to Cypress Plantation to live. In 1875, with two of his sons, Newell founded the town of Newellton, about 5 miles east of Cypress Plantation. “

The 1860 census lists major slave owners in Tensas Parish with the names of the plantations including those in the Newellton area such as Westwood, Shackleford, Durrossett, Winter Quarters, Routhwood, and Mabry (Somerset). Norman Frisby’s plantation names were listed as Palo Alto, Forlorn Hope, California, and Australia with 150 slaves.

The chimney was once part of the cotton gin on the Norman Frisby plantation, with ruins of his mansion more than a half mile further up the river. According to Sam Hanna’s newspaper article in The News Star in 1957, Frisby came from Mississippi about 1855 and had hopes of a great cotton empire here on the banks of the Tensas River. He owned 20,000 acres and wanted more, aspiring to build the largest cotton plantation in the south with a three story mansion that stood tall enough to see the lights of Vicksburg in one direction and the lights of Natchez in another. Constructed by his slaves, numbering more than one hundred fifty, the house was all brick standing on 32 ten foot tall pillars and measuring 100 feet square. The pillars stood on a brick floor and were tall enough to drive a buggy under. The inside was to be cypress and other wood harvested by hand from the surrounding swamps. But the mansion was never finished.(Sam Hanna The News Star)

F​risby was plagued by lawsuits and mounting debt, and ran the operation of the plantation from a smaller house on the property where he lived with his young wife, Anna and their seven children. Old stories paint him as a cruel master and capable of murder to save his gold. With Union Troops taking control of the Mississippi River at Vicksburg and moving south, Frisby reportedly put all his gold into the large silver bell that hung at the plantation, sealed it with lead and had two slaves take him deep into the swamp and help him bury it. According to most versions of the story, and the one our daddy told us as children, he then killed the slaves and buried them on top of the bell so that no one would know the location. Treasure hunters, including some in our family, have searched the brick ruins for years, and the surrounding woods, and if the treasure was ever found, it’s a well-kept secret. 

N​one of the tales regarding the buried treasure have ever been verified as true, and in Jimmy’s book, My Family and the Tensas, he related a story told to him by an elderly preacher who was a small child living on Frisby’s plantation at the time, Reverend Mose Martin. Mose described the move from Mississippi in detail and the layout of the complex that made up the plantation. He also gave insight into the silver bell and where it came from, as well as totally disputing the story of the buried bell full of gold. Mose visited the Willhite family on Sundays when Jimmy was a boy, and over the course of time told them stories about Norman Frisby, and his brother-in-law Orlando Flowers who also had a large plantation with a steamboat landing and gin at Flowers Landing. Mose also described the knife fight between Frisby and Flowers over stray mules in a cornfield that ended in Norman Frisby’s death. 

T​he ruins of The Brick House and the standing chimney echo a time long past, a time of stress and debt for the owners and dreams that did not come true, and a time of endless hard work for those enslaved. Thick green moss grows over the bricks while vines entwine the decaying columns, as if God is attempting to cover the sins of a generation past, and one man’s misguided efforts. Deteriorating year after year, the ruins are privately owned, but continue to be a landmark for hunters deep in the Tensas refuge. As we walk among the thousands of bricks, handmade more than 150 years ago, we can imagine how it felt to be there then. The sweltering heat, the straining of the animals and men under the heavy loads that were hauled by wagon from the kiln to the construction site. How the bell rang to signal and summon the workers, the noise of the steam powered gin, the hymns of the field hands as they worked. The place is special but haunting, representing one of the most remarkable family legends of the south, it also stands as a silent monument to what can go wrong when greed, pride and passion rule. 

A couple miles further up the river we pass the entrance to Fool’s River, then across the river at McGill Bend, we slow and wind our way among the trees to get a closer look at the bank, searching for what my brother knows are there, Jim’s 1930 flatbed truck and one of his 1929 Farmall tractors with iron wheels. We make passes back and forth until we spot the outline of wheels among the weeds and vines along the bank. It’s easy to reach them now, with the river up high enough to cover most of the bank, and we can park our boat within feet of the wrecked vehicles. We use a machete to hack back the vegetation to get a closer look. The bed of the truck is separated from the cab and flipped over, but the rubber tires are intact, providing a resting place for a sleepy chicken snake that pays us no mind. An elm tree grows straight through the windshield of the cab, like a giant skewer pinning it to the earth, with a rusty fender detached and lying nearby. Looking inside we see gauges, the steering wheel, and gear shift still in place. We can imagine Jim or one of the older boys driving it, loaded with furniture and personal belongings, when they moved the family to Tensas in the winter of 1935.

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The tractor sits about fifty yards from the truck, covered with saw briars and poison ivy, and it takes some effort with the machete to uncover it. Our work reveals its chassis with iron wheels, engine, and radiator attached, with the seat and steering wheel missing. The braised seams on the radiator and engine housing show evidence of long ago repairs. We spy a metal box in front of where the seat would have been, and when we dig through the three-inch layer of leaves and soil, we find spare spark plugs and nuts and bolts, now rusted with age.

Searching further along the bank reveals more artifacts of the family’s past life. There’s part of the old house standing that was once there, and the remains of a wood stove and a kerosene refrigerator that was in the camp, first used by Jim and his boys for hunting, then later by my parents as their first home when they farmed the fields that were cleared after the black locust posts were harvested.

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Along with The Brick House chimney and mansion columns, although a century apart, this place stands as  a silent reminder of work once done and lives once lived, now reclaimed by the wild. 

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

matthew 11:28-30

The dictionary defines the word survival as “the state or fact of continuing to live or exist, typically in spite of an accident, ordeal, or difficult circumstances.” (Dictionary.com) Those first years at Flower’s Landing were nothing short of that for Jim and Etta Mae’s family. A close family friend, Jeanette Colvin, told me of a time she was visiting with Etta Mae in later years, and she asked her, “Mrs. Willhite, what did you think when you first moved up here to Tensas? ” Etta Mae’s answer was, “I thought I made a mistake!”

A lot of blood had to be spilled and work had to be done to keep food on the table, which required the efforts of every family member every day.  Most deer and hogs were field dressed right after they were killed, the process of removing the internal organs to prevent spoilage. Then the carcass was dragged or carried out of the woods to the boat left on the river, then transported up or down river to their home. Once there, they would hang the deer or hog to be skinned and cleaned further, and large pieces of the ham or back strap would be ready for Etta Mae and the girls to cut up and cook.

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They would slice the meat into steaks, season it and roll in flour for frying. Any pieces that were not large enough for steaks would be cubed, cooked and canned for later use in stews or gravy. With no electricity or refrigeration, my daddy, Little Brother told me they would pack the cooked meat into five gallon cans and cover it in lard to preserve it, or can it in jars.   In cold weather, the deer could hang for days without spoiling, and with such a large family to feed, one deer would last them about a week. The turkeys and hogs were often skinned, cleaned and cut into pieces, then smoked and cured in the smokehouse for later use. The frogs and fish they caught were cleaned and cooked at once, or taken to the market in Newellton and sold right away. 

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Besides feeding the family with the meat that was killed, Jim and his boys were making money that they desperately needed for household items, clothes, medicine, guns, ammunition, fishing nets, fuel, and vehicles. There was also equipment to be maintained such as outboard motors, chain saws, tractors and trailers and other farm equipment. Vehicles like their 1930 Ford flatbed truck and 1929 Farmall tractor with iron wheels always needed repair, as well as their Evinrude Outboard Motor that they used daily.

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Jim did most repairs himself, with the boys learning at his side, and taught them how to maintain the equipment and firearms. He and Etta Mae knitted their own nets and taught other family members how to do it as well. Most of his other fishing equipment was hand made by him, including dip nets, large live boxes that were eight feet square, and even a large wooden boat that they used for much of the hunting and fishing.

He had brought the specially made gar gigs mentioned in Jimmy’s book, with him from West Monroe, forged for him by a blacksmith there. The guns they used were also brought from West Monroe and included a double barrel shotgun that “would kill at both ends” because of how hard it kicked, according to Glen, the youngest son. Jim would give them three shotgun shells to go squirrel hunting, and they were expected to bring back three squirrels. They used the Stevens-Savage Model 70 pump 22 rifles that he and Etta Mae owned, a Remington Model 24 automatic 22 rifle that loaded through the stock, as well as Jim’s Model 94 30/30 rifle that was always by his side. 

With the average wage for a man working as a laborer in 1935 at about two dollars per day, they could easily surpass that on a good night of frog hunting, when they would catch a hundred pounds or more and sell them for fourteen cents per pound, according to Jimmy’s book. Fur was in demand during the Depression and well stretched raccoon hides sold for ten to fifteen dollars each.(Whites County Historical) Jim would have a hundred or more hides at the end of trapping season, at first selling to local buyers, then later contacting buyers in St. Louis and Memphis who would come to Flowers Landing and pick up the hides. They caught hundreds of pounds of catfish, gar, and buffalo in the river and sold them for fifteen to twenty cents per pound, most of them at Hugo Jereslaw’s market in Newellton, or J. Salomon, or Barfield’s who also bought their furs.

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    The move to Flowers Landing had been difficult and risky, but was paying off for Jim and his family. Etta Mae could order clothes, shoes, and household items from the Sears and Roebuck catalog, as well as a battery operated radio for Jim, which gave them a link to the outside world.  They could listen for about an hour and a half without recharging it when they tuned in to “The Grand Ole Opry” on Saturday nights, and sometimes “Amos and Andy”, and later “The Life of Luigi” along with the news. She also shopped at Roby’s Ready to Wear, L & M Devries, or Kullman Brothers in Newellton. Jim traveled to Jonesville to buy fishing net twine and other supplies from Champlin Net Company, and went to Monroe for outboard motor parts from Howard Griffin. Most of the farm supplies, guns and ammo was purchased in Newellton at Kaufman’s Hardware, or Newellton Elevator, and later Iley Gaar’s Feed and Seed. Medicine they needed was bought at Wilkerson Drug Store or Tensas Drug Store located on main street in Newellton, along with other stores including Cash Grocery, Hugo’s fish market, Babe’s Bar, and Right Place. (Tensas Gazette May 26,1939)

There was extra money to spend, something that Jim had not had since his moon shining days, and he began to invest it in land. The lumber companies began selling off land that they had cut the timber from, and Jim became friends with the land agent for Chicago Mill, who would let him know whenever a parcel of land was about to be released for sale. Tax sales were also common during the Depression, when land owners lost their land because they couldn’t pay the taxes. (The Tensas Gazette) Jim took advantage of this, and bought up land near Flowers Landing and along Tensas River as far up as McGill Bend and Sharkey Plantation. This gave him more land to farm, hunt and trap on legally, and harvest wood from for the sawmill he had set up on the banks of the river at Flowers Landing. Before he had the mill, he and the older boys had cut cross ties for the railroad by hand and hauled them to Somerset for sale. With the mill he was able to hire some of the local sharecroppers for the work. 

Part of the land he bought up the river at McGill Bend, had a large grove of black locust trees, either springing up from where there was once a plantation field, or planted by Chicago Mill after cutting the timber. They were valuable as fence posts because of their strength and resistance to rot. Jim built a barge from logs and installed a Model A Ford motor on it with a hand rudder for steering. Men he hired to cut the fence posts camped out at McGill Bend until they had the barge fully loaded, then Jim drove the barge down the river to the lumber mill at Clayton, an all day trip.  This gave him more money for farm equipment, seed, fuel, fencing, cattle, and land, his holdings totaling hundreds of acres at one time in Tensas and Madison Parish, until he was forced to sell much of it.

H​e expected a lot from the boys, even at a young age. In Jimmy’s  book, My Family and the Tensas, he tells of a seven-day frog hunt Jim sent him and John A. on alone. “When I was ten years old, John A. was twelve and Oliver was sixteen, Dad sent us on a seven night frog hunt. We hunted Tensas River from Flowers Landing to Rafkin (Rathman) Mound and back to Tendal. We caught a lot of frogs and the next year he sent us back to do it again. This time he sent only John A. and I. I can tell you now, there was a lot of difference in John A. and I making this trip than it was when Oliver was with us. Without that third paddle we couldn’t make nearly as good a time. Besides that, Oliver was a grown man. He knew how to cook, lay out bedrolls, and put up mosquito nets for the best protection, and a hundred other things that John A. and I had never thought about. It is true, we had made the trip the year before and thought we knew exactly how to do it. (Remember I said “THOUGHT”).” He goes on to describe how they survived for seven days on flapjacks and cane syrup, except for some food a stranger gave them. Jim would meet them in certain places and pick up the frogs they caught, but brought them little more food.

Jim had a commanding presence, with a square head and kind eyes, but not overly affectionate. ​He was strict on the boys, expecting a full day of work from them at a young age, and even had Nita and Carrie helping with stretching hides, knitting nets, and working in the garden and fields. Prohibition had ended, and even though he had cut back on his drinking, he was no one to be crossed, even when sober. His strength and temper were well-known in the area, and lesser men would step aside when they met him on the streets or in the saloons at Newellton, not wanting to tangle with him. 

Tensions between him and the older boys began to grow, as money was coming in, but they felt they weren’t getting a large enough share for all the hard work they were doing, partly because of Jim’s appetite for buying land. As Jan put it, “We were very poor, but we had lots of land.”  He and O.D. clashed often resulting in O.D. leaving home by 1935.

The following paragraph from Jimmy’s  book, My Family and the Tensas sums up how Oliver and Derwood were feeling after O.D. had left , and Nita had married. When they came home for Christmas, they applied to work at the Civilian Conservation Corps, a depression era relief program for young unmarried men. “On the way down the river they reflected on the winter’s trapping. It had been a hard grueling winter. First, there was the forty-five days they spent at the tiny little camp at Republican Bayou without seeing a single person except John A. and me when we took them food and picked up their fur. The cold rain and sometimes sleet and freezing rain and the long trap-lines had just about taken its toll on them by the time they went home for Christmas. Then there were the three days they stayed with the rats at Singer Shack and the three weeks they stayed at the camp on Big Board. All of this time they ran long trap-lines seven days a week. It had been a hard winter. Derwood asked Oliver if he thought he would like the C.C.C.’s. Oliver said “It will beat the hell out of trapping.” 

By 1940, Nita had married, O.D. had left home, and Derwood, Oliver, Carrie Mae,  John A., and Jimmy were soon to follow. Even though Jim had not paid more than twenty-five dollars per acre for any of the land he bought, he had to pay taxes on it every year. He sold off some, and started giving forty acres to any of his kids that wanted to stay in the area. Nita and Johnny White, her husband, had forty acres near Flowers Landing that they cleared with mules and farmed, and the house they built there stands today. He gave Derwood forty acres at Hunter’s Bend, and John A. and Jimmy eighty acres there together. By then he had about two hundred acres of land cleared for farming near Flowers Landing and part of it fenced for cows. He also ran cows in the woods across the river, which was allowed under the free-range laws at the time.

Farming was not his favorite, so of course, he continued to hunt, fish and trap, relying on the younger boys, Tut and Charles to help out with the farm. The primitive conditions of their house, no running water, or electricity, and the daily hard work affected the older girls the most, causing them to look for an escape as soon as they were old enough. 

Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.

Joshua 1:9

My uncle Jimmy, James Martin Willhite Jr., wrote a book in 1995 describing the first few years of the family’s life on the Tensas River at Flower’s Landing. His book, My Family and the Tensas , included on this site, gives a first hand account through the eyes of an eight year old, of how Jim taught them to survive and use the resources of the wilderness to make a living for themselves. It serves as a valuable resource to me in writing about those years. 

The house he bought at Flowers Landing was nothing more than a barn, but served as shelter for Jim and the older boys over the next year and a half as they prepared for moving the family. They spent day after day hunting, trapping, and fishing on Tensas River, cleaning the fish and game and stretching the hides, clearing land, and working on the house to make it more livable. Jim was traveling back and forth from Tensas to West Monroe, bringing the fish, meat and furs to the markets in the Monroe area, or selling them at Newellton.

He would then buy supplies for the boys such as food, clothing, ammo, and building materials for fixing up the house. He also took Nita back and forth with him, hoping to help her recover. It was during this time that she met and married my uncle Johnny White, in May of 1933, and they began to farm nearby on Newell Ridge Rd.

  Prohibition had ended, and there was no longer a market for his homemade whiskey., so Jim spent his time trying to make as much money as he could to get them out of debt. Etta Mae stayed on White’s Ferry Rd. with Carrie 10, John A. 9, Jimmy 8, George (Tut) 3, and Charles (Bubba) 1. She worried about the older boys when Jim left them alone at Tensas, praying daily for their safety, and when Jim was with them, she dealt with the care and feeding of the smaller children alone, now without Nita’s help.

F​inally, in January 1935, the family was reunited when they moved the last of their household belongings  to the house at Flowers Landing on the banks of the Tensas River. They moved in a 1930 flatbed truck, but when they got past Somerset, the road was so bad that they had to hitch mules to the truck to pull them and their belongings on to the house. According to Jimmy’s book, the repairs to the house were not all complete by January 1935, even though the family had already moved in. His description of waking up on his first day there in the freezing cold with snow in his hair is followed by a description of the house. “I had visualized a fancy two story home like the ones you see on big ranches and plantations. Well, it was a two story alright. It had two rooms upstairs. It was built with mill run oak and sweet gum lumber and there were no battens over the cracks on the walls. The roof was made of rough oak boards that had warped and curled up on the sides to a point that you could see the sky through the cracks.” 

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It was indeed a primitive place, compared to any of their houses in West Monroe, which were near paved streets and had electricity, some running water and possibly indoor plumbing. The surrounding property was barely cleared, the yard consisted of weeds and dirt or mud depending on the weather, and the road leading to it from Somerset or Newellton was no more than a muddy trail through the woods after the gravel road ended at Newell Ridge. Glen remembers it this way, “ The road  was what is now Newell Ridge and kept going and went through where the Humphries lived curved around to Mother and Daddy’s house. In order to get a road up and down the river, the land owners had to clear the right of way. It would be so bad during the winter and spring that it would take four mules to pull a wagon. After the landowners cleared right of way, the parish would come in and put a little gravel down. The ice truck would come from Newellton and the grocery bus would come when they could get down it.”

In 1938, after Carl, Jim’s younger brother, bought property and moved to a place a little further up the river, he and Jim cleared the road to their properties and petitioned the Tensas Parish Police Jury to declare it a public road so that it could be maintained by the Parish. Their petition was granted and the road was graveled with the condition that Jim and Carl would be responsible for keeping trees and debris cleared from the right of way. (Tensas Gazette)

With the family all together, even in harsh conditions, they were better off than some at that time, and they wasted no time on self-pity. In Chapter 7 of his book, Jimmy tells about the work they did. “When we are growing up during the depression everyone who was old enough worked. When I was eight years old, I was expected to be out there working alongside my older brothers. I may not get as much done as they did but I worked just as hard. While some of us were working with the crops, clearing land and or doing anything else that needed doing, Dad and two or three of the older boys were always fishing, trapping, frog hunting, alligator hunting, or doing anything they could to keep some money coming in.”  O.D. left home by the summer of 1935, and the older boys, Derwood and Oliver and John. A did enter school at Newelton, along with Carrie Mae, but none of them attended enough to graduate except Carrie Mae.

Although most of the woods surrounding their property up and down the river was considered a refuge, with no hunting and trapping allowed, it served as the sole source of income and food for the family during that first year, and in later years as well. Not all land along the Tensas was part of the refuge, and game from the refuge roamed back and forth freely on it. The lines were sometimes blurry, and trapping and hunting during the day in season was legal in some places.  Jim was stopped by a game warden once in 1925 while trapping, but not arrested. Jimmy mentions this in his book, as well as how skilled they would become at avoiding arrest when they were hunting deer for food at night. In the chapter “We Became Experts“, he tells of a close call when he and John A. and Derwood were bringing the deer out in the dark, and they were able to paddle their boat within feet of the game wardens without being detected. 

​ The papers of that day are full of trespass notices, arrests, and articles touting the crackdown on poaching, a widespread problem due to the severe economic hardships of the time, and the draw of the Big Woods as a place where the game was premium and plentiful. There were two kinds of poachers. The ones who came to kill for the joy of killing were rich hunters and politicians from other parishes or states, looking for trophies or bragging rights. Reports of arrests by game wardens for two hunters killing six or more deer, or finding hundreds of squirrels killed and left hanging in the trees to rot, proved they were not hunting for food. (The Tensas Gazette)

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The other kind, like Jim and his boys, were hunting to survive. They, like other families all over Louisiana, respected the woods and viewed the game as a provision for their families, not to be abused. In the first chapter of Jimmie’s book, My Family and the Tensas, he quotes Jim’s lesson on this when they had killed three hogs and Derwood wanted to shoot more. “Afterward Dad explained we had three hogs on the ground and didn’t need any more meat. Then he said never kill any more game than you need to eat. If everyone did this there would always be game to hunt. Dad field dressed the three hogs and headed home.” The game wardens respected that, since they were local men who had been raised doing the same thing. They knew about the hunting and did make attempts to catch them in the act, but did not try hard enough to actually arrest them with the game when they got away.

The task of feeding and caring for a family of twelve in primitive conditions would be daunting for anyone, but Etta Mae embraced it with fierce determination and a song on her lips. She was very interested in cooking and good nutrition, and had been a member of the Home Demonstration Club since the 1920s as stated in this article when she was honored for 50 years of membership. There were numerous other families living in the area at the time, and Etta Mae became a leader among the women, sharing ideas about cooking, canning, child care and nutrition.

According to stories Glen was told. ” Nita left first, then O.D. and that left 6 or 7 kids at home. Derwood said he never got full until he was 18 years old! She had a wood stove and a big ole pan, and she would cook biscuits about the size of a softball. She would shut it off at 40…….refused to cook more than 40 biscuits in the morning. Every single day…..what happened was one of the boys…..took turns….would get up and get the fire started in the cook stove. She knew every song in the songbook….the Baptist Hymnal. We’d be up in the loft bedrooms and she would be singing in the kitchen. Sometimes playing the piano. She was 13 years old when she started playing the piano in the church where she grew up. She became a pioneer woman when they got married. And she was pregnant a lot of the time. Grandpa played the violin. They used to have a little band with Uncle Carl, and they’d get together on Saturday afternoon and play. Mother played the piano and Daddy played the violin.“

Besides biscuits, there  was also venison, pork, and eggs along with fresh milk from the cows. She cooked enough at breakfast to pack lunches if Jim and the boys were going hunting or fishing for the day, or camping out at night, then cooked another meal for them all for supper.  Cleaning up the kitchen was a major chore in itself. Water had to be hand pumped outside and brought in for washing dishes, then heated on the wood stove, creating comfort in the winter, but almost unbearable heat in the summer. Of course, dishes, cooking utensils, and pots and pans were all washed and dried by hand after breakfast, then again after supper. 

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After the kitchen chores were done, more work awaited the girls and younger children at home. By the summer of 1935, Etta Mae was pregnant with their eleventh child, Emma Lou, with Bubba still in diapers, and four year old Tut to watch after. Nita had left home when she married two years before, and Carrie, at eleven years old, John A. 10, and Jimmy at 8, helped watch the babies and did other chores such as bringing in the wash, gathering eggs, feeding the chickens, and milking the cows, when they weren’t at school. That left Etta Mae, even though she was pregnant, to do the heavy cleaning like scrubbing the floors, washing, mending, and ironing clothes, growing the garden, picking vegetables and canning.

Glen remembers one wash day like this, “I remember once when I was five years old, four or five families would get together once a week to wash clothes at our house. They would build a fire under a big cast iron pot outside in the yard and have a couple more pots for rinse water. In the house they would heat starch in a dishpan on the stove. The families lived across the river on the Head place…..two different Matthews families lived in houses over there. One day the women were washing and took a dishpan of hot starch off the stove and set it down on the ground. A toddler backed up and sat down in the pan of hot starch…… Mr. Ed Sikes, son Roy Sikes sat down in the starch. Old people had remedies for everything…..they took butter and coated him with it…….temporarily. All his back was scarred after that.” Etta Mae worked hard at holding the family together during those difficult times, taking care of their needs and praying for each of them every day, but she could not stop the changes that were sure to come.

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

Jerimiah 29:11

Etta Mae powered through the hardships, caring for her nine children with little money and sometimes not enough food, and relying on her deep faith. She prayed for Jim, especially when he drank; she prayed for provision and safety for her family, and she prayed for the strength she needed to hold the family together.  After the flood and relocation to White’s Ferry Rd., tragedy struck, and Etta Mae had her greatest test of strength and faith. Jim had continued to fish, trap, hunt and sell whiskey all through the Prohibition years, and his drinking had also continued. In his words, “I had become my own best customer!”. 

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  On a hot July day in 1932, he had been out all night drinking and Etta Mae went looking for him. She had packed him a bag and left it on the steps in case he came home before her, planning on asking him to leave unless he quit drinking. With nine children ranging in age from 15 years to 8 months old, the older ones were often left in charge of the babies while Jim and Etta Mae were away. Such was the case on this day when O.D., Oliver, Derwood, and John A. were swimming in D’Arbonne Bayou to cool off. Gustal, known as “Boots”, who was two years old had followed them and was sitting in the boat while the older boys swam. They called him “Boots” because he was always climbing in and out of the big boy’s boots left by the door. Nita and Carrie were likely in the house watching Jimmie who was 5 years old and George (Tut) , who was 8 months old.

Boots fell out of the boat without the boys noticing, and he drowned in the muddy water despite all their panicked efforts to save him. When Jim and Etta Mae returned together, they were greeted by a sorrowful sight. The older boys had retrieved Boots from D’Arbonne Bayou, and unable to revive him, had laid his small body on the bed, waiting for the terrible news to be tearfully told.  

The sorrow, like the humid July heat, pressed on the hearts of the whole family that night, and for nights and months to come. The older children were heartbroken with the  loss of their baby brother and the guilt of having let it happen on their watch, but it sat heaviest on Etta Mae’s heart, a mother’s heart, not equipped for the full force of losing a child to sudden death.

She washed and dressed his body, and greeted friends and family who came by that night to pay their respects. The next day. she endured the funeral at McCormick Cemetery near Drew in a daze, standing motionless as they lowered the painfully small casket into the grave. After the funeral she washed and folded Boots’ clothes and packed them with a lock of his hair in a small trunk that had been hers as a child. She kept it in her room near her for many years.

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  Giving over the household chores to Nita,Carrie, and the boys, she sat on the porch for hours each day, staring into the muddy water of D’Arbonne Bayou, willing that time would turn back. Her pain was intensified by the circumstances of how and why she had not been there, and it cut like a knife between her and Jim. He was broken, and begged her to forgive him, swearing that he would never drink again, a promise he kept.

Calling on her faith and the power of prayer more so than ever before, she found it in her heart to forgive him and move on. B​y the fall of 1933, Etta Mae had given birth to another son, Charlie Seth, and Jim had made a decision that would profoundly affect them all. He had decided to move the family to Flowers Landing in Tensas Parish. He had been going there whenever he could since 1925, as mentioned in Jimmy’s book, My Family and the Tensas, hunting and trapping to supplement his income. 

  On his first trip to Tensas, according to memories of my brother Kenneth and stories daddy told him, Jim didn’t let distance stand in his way. He bought a heavy-duty bicycle with a basket, invested in steel traps and camping equipment, loaded everything on a rail car headed east to Tallulah, then south, with a stop at Somerset Plantation, a cold seventy-mile ride. Off the train, he likely bought some supplies at Somerset store, then peddled the five miles toward the river, tough going once off the plantation, but it brought him to the edge of a hunter’s paradise. Before him lay the wild, a dense stretch of hardwoods covering more than one hundred thousand acres. Owned by the Singer Manufacturing Co., Chicago Mill Lumber Co., and others, the refuge teemed with game and was floored with a thick growth of palmetto. Crossing at the new railroad bridge at Flowers Landing, he found a place to camp, then trapped along the river for more than twenty miles, staying until he had all the hides and meat he could manage to haul out. 

Jim  continued to trap and hunt the refuge for the next eight years, going back and forth on the train and later in a truck with his boat and Myron Hart, Etta Mae’s brother. His skills as a woodsman helped him learn every inch of the thick woods, where every break or lake was located, and every bend of the river so well that he could navigate his boat at night without a light. 

When he was away, every member of the family was expected to help keep things running smoothly at home. Under Etta Mae’s supervision. Nita and Carrie, were responsible for helping run the house and care for the younger children. He had taught his older boys, O.D., Oliver, Derwood, and John A. to work at the sawmill, help run the nets, and kill and process game by the age of five or six. By the time they were ten or twelve, Jim took them on hunts with him on the Tensas River, teaching them how to survive and thrive in the Big Woods. He reportedly left O.D., and sometimes Oliver,  camping out in the Tensas woods for weeks at a time to kill game and run the traps, while he went back and forth to West Monroe. 

He became familiar with the woods along the Tensas River as he hunted and trapped there,  and also became acquainted with the family that had a place near the landing.  When the husband died, the widow offered to sell it to Jim at a bargain price, so she could move to New Orleans near her family. Jim jumped at the chance, sold his interest in the Howard Griffin machine shop and used the money to buy her forty acres with a house, sheds, and outbuildings, for two hundred fifty dollars. In a time when countless people across the country had lost all hope, Jim had found his at Flower’s Landing. When he told Etta Mae about it, she was unsure at first, but knew they needed a change. The Depression was affecting their businesses and money was getting more and more hard to come by. Still saddened by the death of Boots, she was also dealing with  the rebellious behavior of Nita.  

The way they lived offered little entertainment for a beautiful young woman like Nita. Her days were filled with the hard work of cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, changing diapers and caring for small children, all without the help of any modern conveniences. She had attended school on and off up to the seventh grade, but she dropped out altogether to help her parents, as her younger brothers had done. At least the boys enjoyed adventures when they were out hunting and trapping with Jim, but there was little adventure in working at home the way she did. It’s no wonder she looked for the company of an interesting person who made her feel pretty, took her dancing, and gave her his undivided attention. He was a welcome escape from the drudgery at home, but she may not have been a good judge of character, considering her lack of experience. Evidently, she wasn’t, and when there was an unwanted pregnancy, Jim forced her to abort it. According to Jan and what she heard from other family members, it was reportedly a botched procedure and she never had other children, and worse, it caused her to have long lasting emotional problems resulting in more than one nervous breakdown. Later in life Nita told my mother, Mary, that her parents had made her break it off with “the love of her life” and that she would never get over it. Emma Lou, one of the younger siblings was once asked why her parents had moved to Tensas in the middle of nowhere and she replied, “To get away from the evil influences of town.” She was referring to Jim’s drinking and the incident with Nita.

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit”

psalm 34:18