Big Black Bull Bream — Bite!

One warm, sunny April morning, while my boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird and I were lounging on his front porch, enjoying cornbread chunks in cold buttermilk, and gazing across my father’s Mississippi Delta farm, he said, “No work is going on, planting time is a few weeks off, and we’ve got nothing to do. Let’s try those big black bull bream in Blue Bottom Bayou.” When I opined that bream, so delicious when fried and eaten with hush puppies, probably weren’t bedding up yet, he said, “Maybe, maybe not. Some years bream bed early, fixing to spawn, and that’s when they are scrappier than ever.” We loaded the johnboat in his pickup and headed to Fratesi’s Grocery to get crickets for bait and our favorite fishing day food — sardines, onions, crackers, and RC Colas. On the way, Jaybird showed me his new fish basket. The old black man was mighty proud of his purchase. Before, we used stringers, which were troublesome because they had to be untied from the boat to string up the catch. With the basket, pushing the lid down and dropping in fish was much easier and quicker.

We fished hard all morning, but found no spots around cypress knees where spawning bream preferred to bed up. Jaybird caught a huge bottom-feeding fish, called “gasper ghoul” by Delta folks, that is extremely ugly and too bony to eat, but his hogs loved them, so he slit its throat and dropped it in the basket. At midday, we stopped to eat. After the meal, Jaybird laid his pole aside, relaxed, lit a Camel, and told me to take a nap. Whether we caught fish or not, I loved being on the lake with that old man. What memorable days those were! I can still see the ancient cypress trees, with knees all around them like little children, unchanged since dinosaur days, hear the hypnotic symphony of insects, frogs, and birds, and feel the gentle lap of water against the boat. But most of all, I still cherish the memory of absolute peace and security that I always experienced when I was with a man who loved me as if I were his own son. That day was no different — until his roaring voice interrupted my nap. “Damn! Where is the basket?” Apparently, the rope had come untied, and it sank to the bottom. “I paid twenty bucks for it. We will be back on this lake tomorrow. That gasper ghoul will be bloated, making the basket float.” Sure enough, the next day the basket, buoyed by its deceased, putrefying occupant, was floating, not far from where we stopped for lunch the day before. “Even my hogs wouldn’t eat that ugly, stinking fish,” Jaybird said, and dumped him out. Then he noticed a good supply of crickets left over from yesterday. “Shoot — we’ve got plenty of bait, we’ve got our poles, and something to eat. Let’s fish,” and baiting his hook, he commanded: “Big black bull bream — bite!”