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Time, as it was

by Tom Baxter | 13, Add your Comment | Jul 7, 2009

letter

It is a summer night in South Alabama, shortly before the 20th Century’s first great collision with hell. Austria-Hungary will declare war on Serbia in five days; within two weeks, the slaughter will be under way on both the Eastern and Western Fronts. The pace of events throughout the world is accelerating like a teamless wagon clattering down a hillside, but as Sarah Clementine Murdock picks up a pencil to write her daughter, time still moves at its immemorial pace.belle2

Clio, July 23, 1914

My darling Belle,
I have been trying to get the chance to write to you all this week; but it just looks like I never will do any thing. I just want to talk to you so much more than to write. I am trying to make Dad some shirts, and it worries me so to sew. I reckon I am getting too old; but I am always tired when I start. I was sorry that Minie wrote you about Nat, for you all have enough there. He is some better I think, all-though he is suffering with his back. They are treating it and going to try to keep from operating if they can help it. I hope so. Anyway, Lucy came back Monday, and brought her aunt and little sister with her; but I enjoyed it. She is a nice good girl, and I enjoyed her company, and she did not mind helping me. You would like her.

Things seem much easier these days. Wives don’t make their husband’s shirts, and back surgery, though no pleasant prospect, isn’t as dreadful as it would have been then. But we have paid a price for these luxuries.

Well it is awful still, everybody asleep, but me and the clock. Ha. It has been awful hot for the last few days but we had a little shower this eve, and it is right pleasant tonight.

Listen. You can hear the ticking of the clock, as if Sarah’s cursive traced the path of a phonograph needle. You can hear the quiet of the night, the stillnesses between every word and sentence, a rhythm that can no longer be reproduced.

A couple of weeks ago, my stepson called me from Los Angeles to tell me he’d just heard my colleague at the Southern Political Report, Hastings Wyman, talking about the Mark Sanford affair on National Public Radio. From his home in Westwood, he could see news choppers circling the UCLA Medical Center, taking the pictures I was watching on CNN of the crowd gathering to hear the news of Michael Jackson’s death.

Time and space have become conflated. It’s no longer enough to know what time it is, but what time, where. Things happen in a sort of distended now, the star’s death anticipated and announced repeatedly, the moment captured at the top of every news cycle.

We are more connected, superficially, than Sarah could have dreamed. We text; we twitter. When we see the news about a mass shooting or a bridge collapse we grab the cell phone and anxiously call our children, wherever they are. But how much do we really say to each other?

I think it was too sad about that poor girl, looks so hard for one to have to go that way; but we never know what way one will go. I read an account of it in the Journal, but girls ought not to go to such places, without some one to protect them.

bellewithcatrI wonder what it was that happened to that poor girl. Her tragedy has been obscured, not by time in the neutral sense but by our times, by the multiplication of tragedies, a century full of poor girls and boys without someone to protect them.

Time travels in one direction, but progress does not. My wife grew up keenly aware of the horrors her mother and father suffered in the Holocaust. But it was not until she accompanied her mother on her first trip back to Poland that she realized her mother had known one joy she could never share: a youth unshadowed by the memory of the roundups, the selections and the terrible trains.

I think Belle had a harder life than her mother, but that is unknowable. I do know her children were surprised when they discovered the 1914 letter. They remembered  Clemmie, as they called her, as a woman of austere visage — it was said she had some Creek Indian blood — who could sometimes be more affectionate toward Dusty, her dog, than her grandchildren.  (Not that they weren’t a handful. Once when Clemmie was visiting, the boys put my Aunt Myra up to crawling under her bed and doing push-ups while she was taking an afternoon nap; Clemmie awoke, grabbed her cane and whacked at Myra every time she tried to crawl out from underneath the bed.) For these children of the Depression era, the tenderness of this letter was, like my wife’s trip to Poland, a revelation.

They are expecting Estelle Baxter Brown to die, she has a cancer. So you see there is all ways something. There is lots that I could tell you but I will wait and tell you; would not have anything to talk about if I told it all – yes one thing – Ma Dillard quit the Baptist Church and went to Methodist. Would you believed it?

The Muse

Clio, the muse of history and mother of Linus, inventor of rhythm and melody, is usually depicted holding the scrolls of time.

It’s said that a traveling violin teacher suggested this classical name for the little town, future birthplace of George Wallace and Don Sutton, sometime around the middle of the 19th Century. But the Murdocks, the Baxters and a dozen or so other families who came down from the Carolinas to settle in Creek territory, had been in those parts decades before the violin teacher or the muse showed up.

They called the territory they settled Little Scotland. They told many ghost stories – darker stories, many of them, than you heard elsewhere. They seemed to have at least one hermit miser per generation, and worshiped in a bush arbor before they built the Pea River Presbyterian Church, according to Glenn Shipman Baxter, who wrote a brief history of the church in 1923. They came into the wilderness, she wrote, still longing “for the old kirk left behind.”

By the time I came along, the old name for the land around the Pea River was receding into memory. But people there still swore “by Jingo” and “by Ned,” and my father, to the end of his life, used that excellent old Scottish word, “chawed,”  to speak of someone perplexed by the absurdity of their situation, and described excited dogs or little children, or speedboats racing around a lake, as “cutting didos.”

Of my mother’s people, the Rileys and the Littlefields, and the black families who lived close by, there are other stories.

There is always something. Belle was living with her brother Aubrey and his family in Macon, working in a hat shop, when her mother wrote to her. She came back home and married her school sweetheart, Guy Baxter, settling down to life on a farm between Clio and Louisville. They had nine children, my father among them, and came to be known by everyone in those parts as Buddy Guy and Mother Belle. Buddy Guy was a man with a famous temper and a farm to tend. They say the night he learned my Uncle Jack had joined the Marines in 1942, leaving him with one less hand for the fields, the black family who lived a half-mile down the road came out in their yard to listen to his raging fit.

Bert is coming before long. I told him you were coming home, and he was awful proud. Haven’t heard from Cliff in some time; am afraid they are all sick. Has been so hot and dry down there. He has an Engine now.

The Murdocks were mostly railroad men. Bert later got my father a job with the L&N in Montgomery, where I grew up. In the summers I would go Down Home for long visits. Late at night I would lay in bed with Buddy Guy and he’d tell me the old stories of Rabbit and Fox, and the Old Man of the Woods. In the afternoons, Mother Belle would call when she saw the rolling store coming down the road, and my cousin Linda and I would scamper out on the steaming asphalt, hopping barefoot like Indian firewalkers, to buy Nehis and Ike and Mike gingerbread cookies. Clemmie had died in 1942, but the crepe myrtle she planted over Dusty’s grave still grew in the yard.

Those days have also passed. If you drive the straightened road from Clio to Louisville, you will find no trace of the Baxter farm, or the railroad section house in Clio where that letter was written in 1914. There is nothing but the graveyard at the Pea River Presbyterian Church where generations of Baxters and Murdocks, including Sarah Clementine, Belle and Guy, are buried. But on those six handwritten pages, we can hear the rhythm of that time. On this quiet night in the early years of a loud century, the clock ticks patiently, and stillness offers a salve to worried hearts.

Well it is nearly ten – guess I better stop and sleep a little – I am so anxious to hear from Aubrey – do hope he is getting on alright, bless his heart – I know he is tired – Hope it won’t be long before you all can come. I miss you so much. I got your things all right – think they were all so nice. I got them all put away for your honey-moon. Be sweet and let me hear from you real soon.

With a goodnight kiss, and a heart full of love,
Momma

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13 Responses to “Time, as it was”

  1. Cliff Green Cliff Green says:
    July 7, 2009 at 9:29 pm

    Although I came from the other end of Alabama, Cedar Bluff up in Cherokee County, I immediately caught the cadence, the rhythm of the language in that letter and in your recollections. Thanks.

    Reply
  2. Mary Ann says:
    July 7, 2009 at 10:16 pm

    Tommy, brought tears to my eyes…that is the pic I have of Mother Belle. Until now, the only story I know of “Mamaw Murdock” is one I heard Mother tell over and over. Apparently when she lived with them and Mother would be getting ready to go out for the night – maybe a date – Mamaw Murdock would say, “think you’re pretty?” in a sing-songy voice. It would irritate her so much. :) I can still hear Mother imitating her. :)

    This also made me remember a letter Ma Belle wrote to my mother – I’ll have to share it with you. The only thing I remember off the top of my head is her closing – she wrote “nite, nite”. Mother was grown with children of her own, but still Ma Belle’s little girl.

    Yes, I guess we have it much easier today, but we’ve also lost so much. Letters just one of those. Thank you for this!

    Mary Ann

    Reply
  3. Charles McNair says:
    July 7, 2009 at 10:43 pm

    Tombax, this is a lovely, elegant piece. My people come from Clio too — my cousin on daddy’s side, Horace Adams, grew up with George Wallace and told how The Fighting Judge used to pay the colored boys to box with him, back when he did the Golden Gloves. There’s a famous story of George’s daddy, a country doctor, riding home from some piece of medical work in the country on a stormy night and having something drop out of a tree on him and grab ahold around his middle and start screaming. It spooked the horse, of course, and they ran all panicked until the doc could pry loose the hands of a little retarded girl, naked, who was lost and living wild out in the woods. My mama’s people, kin to the Suttons by the way, lived over in Eufaula. In that pretty cemetery off the street with the mansions, there’s a gravestone with the name of James Carr, 21st Alabama. It’s a Confederate marker, and it bears a little harp carved into the marble, a designation that my great-great-grandfather had served in the music corps.
    Like that madelaine on Proust’s tea saucer, your story unlocked these memories. Your letter did the same for you. Thanks for the gift of this story, and these thoughts.

    Reply
  4. Marko says:
    July 8, 2009 at 8:09 am

    Beautiful story, Mr. Baxter. Thanks for sharing it with us.

    Reply
  5. Billy Howard Billy Howard says:
    July 8, 2009 at 9:12 am

    This is the most beautiful piece I have yet to read on the Dew.

    Reply
  6. Billy Howard Billy Howard says:
    July 8, 2009 at 9:12 am

    This is the most beautiful piece I have had the pleasure to read on the Dew.

    Reply
  7. erudite recondite eremite says:
    July 8, 2009 at 9:14 am

    A beautifully told story – social history at its best. Yes, we have lost much, and thus these voices from the past are so important!

    Could not that “poor girl” be Mary Phagan since she (SCM) “read an account of it in the Journal” and the date corresponds to the time period after the trial?

    Reply
  8. Joey Ledford says:
    July 8, 2009 at 11:09 am

    Tom: Much admired your piece. It recalls a much simpler time and place. I often long for such a world in order to escape from this whirlwind of a city.

    Reply
  9. Jim Tharpe says:
    July 8, 2009 at 2:22 pm

    Most excellent. Can’t get that kinda writing in a tweet.

    Reply
  10. hanks says:
    July 8, 2009 at 7:58 pm

    Tom,

    What a wonderful, sweet remembrance of our grandmother and great-grandmother, and the quieter days past! I think Mother Belle did have a hard life, but it’s nice to see again the pictures of her youth before the hard days began. I’ve often daydreamed about writing a fictional “what-if” story about her. What if she had stayed in Georgia working in the hat store, and some nice, ambitious young man came along and provided for her in a better way? But then, there would be no “us”, would there? Thanks for sharing our memories.

    Beth

    Reply
  11. Rachel says:
    July 9, 2009 at 12:21 am

    Oh, what a lovely thing to read this is! Having grown up in the fifties and sixties in a little South Carolina town, this was like listening to some of the old folks long gone. This also brought to mind why I so much enjoyed (and now miss) Celestine Sibley and Lewis Grizzard. I add my thanks and admiration for your evocative piece.

    Reply
  12. Winston Maddox says:
    July 10, 2009 at 3:34 pm

    Hey, Baxter…great article. It motivates me to get serious about digging into my grandmother’s black box, a collection of letters written to her by her first husband, who died a year after they were married of consumption, and also letters from my grandfather, a minister, arguing against Paul’s admonition, “to the unmarried and widows I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am.” 1cor. 7.8 Needless to say, I am quite pleased that she relented. Thanks, Winston

    Reply
  13. Diane Cibulsky says:
    July 23, 2009 at 11:34 am

    Tom, What a wonderful piece you have done!! We loved it so much. I am printing it for Mom and also for Rudy and Martha. Thank you for your hard work for making a few moments in time come alive for us all. Just a great tribute to our family. Love, Diane

    Reply

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Tom Baxter
Tom Baxter
About the author Tom Baxter: Tom Baxter is the South's leading political reporter. He is currently editor of the Southern Political Report and senior vice-president of its parent company, InsiderAdvantage, a media and polling firm. For more than 40 years, he has worked for newspapers in Montgomery, Ala., Columbia, Md., Charleston, S.C. and Atlanta, Ga. At the Atlanta Journal-Constitution he was a reporter, editor of the Sunday Perspective section, national editor, and for 20 years, chief political correspondent.

Last 5 posts by Tom Baxter