On Hot Days After the Dusty Mexican Squirrel Fight…
On hot days after the dusty Mexican Squirrel Fight, no one likes Yazoo — nor does he expect them to. He has been an incendiary and worked hard at it: heckling the mean, little Latin-tongued squirrels, tossing hickory nuts onto the mat breaking up the game…No one likes that; and when we go to Peggy’s for good lemonade and fried raising pie, he is not invited. Yet, he is there anyway — with Dwayne. I remember...
The Pinkstons of Bryant Station
If your family lineage traces a long way back in Maury County history, you’d do well to study the names chiseled in rock at Haynes Cemetery, a fine old resting place high on a hill in Scribner’s Mill. Ancient red cedars border a plush, rolling green adorned by 400 headstones and sprinkled with spontaneous patches of purple irises, the Tennessee flower. Carved into the native rock, names encountered represent Duck River...
The Boy Driver
(Editor’s note — The names have been changed to protect the guilty.) My mother told this story about my dad, Jack White, when he was the 14 year-old bus driver at Culleoka School. He had been driving the bus since he was twelve, having been recommended for the job by his mentor, Bill Orr, the principal at Bryant Station. Jack White as a teenager It seems that the previous driver, a Mr. Harris, had been scaring the daylights out...
Two Jacks
Mr. Kinnie Polk “Sam” Freeland and Miss Ida had a boy born to them more than a dozen years after their last one, Tom (named after the bachelor uncle who lived with them in the big old house in Scribner Mill). Jack was the blessed infant’s name and, from the beginning, he was doted on and seldom corrected by Miss Ida. His uncle Thomas who lived in one end of the big old house was particularly amused by the boy and...
The Class Trip
Bryant Station School held classes for first through eighth grades in a two-room schoolhouse. There were two teachers presiding, one also serving as principal. When Mrs. Willie Hight was principal in the 1950s, she drove the school bus, in addition. The Bryant Station School in the 1950s with Mrs. Willie Hight and Mrs. Angeline Brown. In 1936, when my dad Jack White graduated from the 8th grade, the principal was twenty-five-year-old...