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My hometown of Edison is in deep southwest Georgia, a part of the state that remains terra incognita to those from Macon or Atlanta or Savannah, and part of another galaxy to those from other states.

But growing up in Edison during the 1950s I learned things that I could never have learned anywhere else. Much of that knowledge came when I was a bare-footed boy in short pants stopping at the gas station on the way home from school. Along with several friends I would  walk into the dim recesses of the store, slide a nickel into the drink box, and drag a six-ounce Coke through the rails. Then I opened it and poured in a bag of peanuts making what we called a  “Georgia cocktail.” The salty fizz that surged to the top was nectar, and the Coke and peanuts combination slaked both thirst and hunger.

Outside in the speckled shade of a chinaberry tree sat a half-dozen sun-burned men rocking back and forth on wooden 24-bottle Coke cases turned up on end, smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Those who didn’t smoke usually had mangled toothpicks in their mouths. The sheriff was there; he was always there, a big chrome-plated revolver riding low on his hip, squinting and moving his head from side to side as he looked up and down the four roads converging at the gas station. The men talked and laughed and pretty much ignored us except as the occasional butt of their jokes or to say, “Boy, does ‘yo daddy know where you at?”

One afternoon I heard one of the men call the name of a local farmer. Another man looked around the circle and with a sly grin and said, “I hear tell he’s a morphydite.”

“A what?” someone asked, eyes narrowing, not sure he had heard right.

“A morphydite.”

I sipped on my Coke and chewed the peanuts and looked down the road pretending to be interested in everything but what I was hearing. If I showed any interest the men would shoo me away.

“Now what the blue-blazing hell is a morphydite?” the sheriff asked.

If the sheriff didn’t know about this, it was big. He covered all of Calhoun County, from Wayback to Arlington and from Leary almost to Sutton’s Corner. What he didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing.

The man who started the conversation grinned, rocked on his Coke case, and said, “A morphydite is one what has it all; it’s a woman but it’s got an old thing just like a man.”

Silence. Nods. One man spit onto the hard red clay and the spittle danced and slid around as it turned into a ball of dust.

“So that’s a morphydite?” someone said.

“Yessireebobtail. That’s a morphydite.”  He paused. “I’ll tell you something else, too.”

He waited until someone asked, “What’s that?” and then he said,  “A morphydite can do it to its own self.” He stopped rocking and looked around the group. “It can get that old thing hard, stick it in its own self and flat go to town.” He held up a bony Baptist finger and again looked around.  “Now it can’t have babies.” He paused. “But it can screw its own self.”  He nodded and resumed rocking. “That’s a fact.”

“A known fact,” someone said.

The men considered this revelation for a long moment. Gnats buzzed around my eyes but I ignored them. Any motion might bring me to the attention of the men and they would tell me to go home. Finally one of the men spoke. “Then if that’s right, one of these morphydites can decide that any time he wants some it’s going to be the best he ever had.”

The first man considered this. “Well if it ain’t, he sure can’t complain about it.”

After the chuckles died down, the sheriff looked out from under the brim of his hat and asked, “You ever actually seen one of these morphydites?”

“I ‘spect we’ve all seen them,” said the man doing the talking.

Every head shook from side to side. It was unanimous: no one had ever seen a morphydite in Edison.

“Where you catch ‘em is at meetings,” the man said. “When they set down that old thing starts rubbing against the woman’s part and the morphydite gets itself all excited.”  He looked around carefully.  “I been to church and the way some people squirm around, I have my suspicions.”

The men nodded. Several spat onto the clay and stared at the skittering globs.

“Tell me this,” the sheriff said. “You mentioned a name. Have you ever seen him do something where you could flat say he was a morphydite?”

If anyone pointed the sheriff toward a morphydite, that morphydite was going to jail. Yes, sir. The sheriff of Calhoun County wouldn’t put up with such things in his county.

The man pursed his lips and stared north up the road. “Nope. Can’t say I have. But I ain’t never seen a queer either. Not one that I could tell you for sure was a queer. But I know they’re out there.”

“Not in Edison,” someone said.

Everyone nodded in agreement. “Ain’t no queers in Edison,” another man said.

More nods.

“Ever seen that Liberace fellow on the TV?” someone asked.

Wide grins all around. “Now that’s a real queer,” someone said. “No doubt about it.”

“Yeah, but he ain’t from Edison.”

“That’s a fact.”

“A known fact.”

The consensus that afternoon was that Edison had no queers but there was some suspicion about one farmer being a morphydite. I had the feeling that next Sunday morning in church a lot of people were going to be watching a certain farmer. One wrong wiggle and the sheriff would snatch him out of the pew and frog-walk him up the aisle, down the steps, and into his patrol car.

I got home and mother asked me where I had been and I told her up at the service station.

“Learn anything?”

“Yes, ma’am, I did.”

She laughed. “From that bunch of old men? I bet.”

My youth in Edison was filled these long shimmering afternoons where I sat around the gas station and learned things that people who grew up in other parts of America never knew. But it was the desire to know what other people knew that led me to leave. That plus, like most teen age boys, I wiggled and twitched in the church pews on Sunday morning.

Editor’s note: For more than 10 years and in between other books, the highly regarded writer, Robert Coram, has been working on a memoir about growing up in southwest Georgia. This story is an excerpt from that work in progress, “Me and the Sarge: the Making of a Writer.”

Photo of Robert Coram by Billy Howard