Yesterday I was driving my 95 year-old daddy Brother Jack White to Sonny Willis’s kennel in Lewisburg. Sonny has a training ground on his place and I was taking my dad for the sole purpose of showing off my German Shorthaired Pointer, Zula the Dog.
Ninety-five year-old Jack White and Zula the Dog
It was an hour round trip so I had plenty of opportunity to hear my dad’s old stories about Maury County in the 20s and 30s. Most all of them I’d heard before about 127 times but once in awhile some new ones will spring forth.
Here are three:
The Corn Thief
My dad’s father, my grandfather Bob White, was a highly regarded farmer. He lived by the Almanac, the stars, and his own gut — which produced straight rows, tall crops, and good bounty.
Bob White (left) with his brother Fred and Fred’s daughter Ann Louise.
He was a particular man. An old hickory-handled claw hammer hung on a nail by the corn crib. When his boys shucked the corn for the stable crib, he had them hammer off the rotten kernels from the tips of the cobs so his horses and mules were only fed good corn.
One day, he noticed that several shucked ears had been pilfered from the crib. The next day he discovered more were missing. This went on for several days until he surmised he had a persistent problem.
Being a very wise man he devised to catch the bandit. He took out his old pocket knife and whittled several sharp splinters of cedar wood which, in turn, he hammered into the mushy pith at the center of the cobs. That way, if he found the marked corn cobs in a neighbor’s crib, the mystery would be solved.
My dad, being about seven years old at the time, was astonished by his father’s ingenuity.
A few days passed as Bob casually visited his neighbors at their barns. At each stop, he would nonchalantly whittle on the ends of corn cobs he found in their cribs.
Finally, he returned home one day looking crestfallen. Jack was tying a cow in the milk barn and noticed his father’s demeanor.
“What’s wrong, daddy?” inquired Jack.
“I found the corn thief.”
Jack could not contain his excitement. “Who was it?”
Bob wearily studied his young son and said, “Jimmy McQueen.”
“Jimmy McQueen!?” Jack exclaimed.
Jimmy McQueen was a six foot, four inch African American man of about 300 pig-iron-hard pounds who, over time, had cultivated a consistently foul attitude and a poor outlook on life. In contrast, my grandfather was a right spindly fellow who stood about five feet, ten inches and weighed about 150 pounds soaking wet with rocks in his pockets.
“What did you do?” Jack cautiously implored.
Bob looked at his boy with sad eyes.
“Well, it’s like this. I had him treed, but I was afraid to bark.”
At that moment, Jack learned that his dad was a man much smarter than he was brave.
Note: Names have been changed in some of these stories to protect myself from descendants in case any of them inherited some of their family’s proportions.
The Strip-ed Prize
One day Tommy Kudlow was walking down the lane to visit his truelove Wanda Wood who lived in a sharecropper shack over the hill from his family. He had a handful of golden and purple irises for Wanda which he had picked from Haynes Cemetery, a landmark along his journey.
As he was walking, suddenly he spotted a skunk waddling through the weeds beside a fence row. Being an occasional trapper, he knew the going price for skunk hides was a dollar and a half! He could not let this opportunity pass!
Luckily for him, he was an amazing slingshot marksman who, most fortuitously, was never without his weapon. Additionally, being fleet of foot, he gave chase to his prey, nailing him with a breathtaking 25-yard shot, on the run, before the unfortunate varmint could escape through a split-rail fence.
Tommy immediately took out his pocket knife and skinned the skunk, then hung the hide in a tall cedar tree to be collected after his courting call.
Summarily, Tommy arrived at Wanda’s door and knocked.
Wanda opened the door smiling, so excited to see her ever-faithful inamorato.
Yet abruptly her glowing expression transformed into an unequivocal scowl.
“What…is that smell?” she painfully implored.
Tommy meekly explained, “…skunk.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry, Wanda, but I saw me a skunk on the way and I just could not pass up killin’ and skinnin’ it. That’s a whole buck and a half from the fur peddler’s pocket.”
“Well, you can’t come in this house smellin’ thataway!”
So, sadly, Tommy agreed to turn-tail home and clean up before returning.
It was a long, dreary walk home and by the time Tommy caught sight of the Kudlow cabin, he was mighty tired — so tired in fact, he didn’t feel like starting a fire for the kettle and hauling bath water from the pond. Furthermore, it was a right coolish evening and he did not want to risk poor health.
Fortunately, he remembered a bottle of Evening of Paris toilet water that his poor deceased momma had left behind in her personal effects. He figured that a liberal splashing-on of the French perfume would surely overcome the aroma of dead skunk. So, he broke out the Evening of Paris and proceeded.
An hour later, he arrived back at Wanda’s doorstep carrying a new batch of graveyard flowers. He knocked.
Wanda opened the door smiling. Then the familiar frown returned.
“What?” inquired Tommy Kudlow.
“You left here smellin’ like a skunk, and you come back smellin’ like a fool!”
The Hot-head
Claudie Collins lost an eye in a rock fight but he liked to let folks think he was a casualty of war — and he never left Park Station in his whole life.
Anyhow, the loss of an eye had no effect whatsoever on the volume of his talk. He couldn’t help it, but he was always talking loud and, most often, to broadcast his own accomplishments or great physical prowess or his good fortune.
The boy’s at Bryant Station store would say, “He shore likes to brag.”
One day, some of the boys were playing Rook at the store and it was noticed that Uncle Johnny White, my great-grandfather’s brother, had brought a jar of red-hot cayenne peppers that rested on the floor beside his chair.
“You gonna eat them peppers?” asked Claudie.
“Nossir,” replied Johnny. “Them peppers is mighty hot. MIGHTY hot. I like to cut ’em up real fine and eat ’em with my field peas.”
“I ain’t never seen a pepper I couldn’t eat whole,” offered Claudie.
The boys at the card table bowed a bit in unison. They were so weary of Claudie’s self-promoting proclamations.
“Well, these is hot,” Johnny rejoined.
“Give me one of them peppers!” Claudie sharply commanded.
Slowly and reluctantly, Johnny lifted the jar from the floor and began to unscrew the cap from the Mason jar. He really liked them peppers on his peas and he wasn’t too enthusiastic about giving one up so Claudie could show how tough he was. But he opened the jar and Claudie reached in and snatched one.
Claudie immediately and without hesitation tossed the pepper in his mouth and crunched down.
Suddenly, Claudie’s face turned beet red, his whole head seemed to swell up, sweat rapidly speckled his forehead, then…HIS GLASS EYE POPPED OUT!!!
Claudie, a rather large man, jumped up from his seat and chased his eye as it rolled across the uneven and slightly-sloped wood floor.
Nobody laughed until Claudie went home. They were so astonished by the whole spectacle.
But after he did go home, Johnny offered an observation to his fellow card players.
“He may not be able to handle them peppers, but he’s mighty quick for his size.”
My great-grandmother Ophelia Tennessee Davidson White with her brother-in-law Uncle Johnny White
