[em]Jimmy Reed is an Oxford, Mississippi resident, Ole Miss and Delta State University alumnus, Vietnam Era Army Veteran, former Mississippi Delta cotton farmer and ginner, author, and retired college teacher.
This story is a selection from Jimmy Reed’s latest book, entitled [strong]The Jaybird Tales[/strong].
Copies, including personalized autographs, can be reserved by notifying the author via email (The Gutsy Goblin
The night was pitch-dark, a misty, moonless Halloween night, “blacker than a hundred midnights, down in a cypress swamp,” as poets would describe it. All of us are crazier at night than in daytime … triply so on Halloween, and so was Wayne.
His plan was not only crazy — it was diabolical. Muscular, barrel-chested and an imposing six-foot, five-inches tall, he was an outstanding athlete at the college where I taught. He was also a bully. Dressed in a white sheet with a bloody knife wound over his heart, a hood with slanted eyeholes and fanged, frowning mouth, calling himself Casper the Unfriendly Ghost, he hid in a tree beside a sidewalk, dropped in front of trick-or-treaters, raised his arms, and roared “Y-A-A-A-R-GH,” causing terrified tots to drop their bags of booty and flee.
- Thursday, October 17, 2019
Teenage boys who fall in love are hopelessly hooked. Such was the case when I fell for the girl everyone called “So Fine Caroline”.
She was an exotic beauty with golden blonde hair, a sensuous, seductive smile, and electric blue, come-hither eyes, set in a perfect, pimple-free face, glowing with mother-of-pearl smoothness. Caroline had no bad angle: from front, side, or behind, she was pure pulchritude — the kind of girl-becoming-woman who causes boys-becoming-men to sit up all night, staring at the moon, like lonely, howling coyotes.
In a “Dirty Harry” movie, Clint Eastwood aimed his Smith & Wesson .44 magnum hand cannon with a culvert-sized barrel squarely between a hoodlum’s eyes, who fingered his own gun’s trigger momentarily, and deciding a stretch in the hoosegow was preferable to instant decapitation, handed over his peashooter pistol. Handcuffing the thug, Eastwood patted him on the back, and said, “Good decision, son — a man has got to know his limitations.”
That’s good advice for anyone. Folks who know their limitations and play the hand dealt them by fate without complaint enjoy less stressful, happier lives than folks who don’t. In Leland, my Mississippi Delta hometown, Nate Nuckolls was just such a man. Uneducated, unassuming, unimaginative, and content with his place in life, he worked as a service station handyman, wiping windshields, pumping gas, fixing flats, rotating tires, and checking oil. He didn’t talk much, but the few words he uttered, counted.
James Jefferson Nicholson, III, known by all as Jimmy Nick, loved expensive clothes. Every day, he wore khakis, white shirt, blazer, and bow tie. When he returned from the university to practice law in our little Mississippi Delta farming community, he filled his closets with the finest suits money could buy.
On a day when he was to attend a meeting in St. Louis, he awoke to find the world blanketed in a foot of snow. Unconcerned, he reserved a seat on a shuttle flight from nearby Greenville to Memphis, 150 miles due north. Dressed in his nattiest suit, he sat beside Mrs. Dowd, the preacher’s wife, who was visiting relatives in St. Louis.
While touring William Faulkner’s Home, a student from California in my creative writing class asked, “Does the fact that Mississippi is a much-maligned state disadvantage its youth when they compete in the job market with peers from other states? Is there a stigma attached to being a native Mississippian?”
Considering the moral and cultural woes her home state wallows in perpetually, I bit my tongue to avoid a vituperative riposte.
The Mississippi Delta is known for its characters. Just as flatlanders categorize miniscule rainfall differences, ranging from “spits” to “frog drowners,” they also categorize characters, from those with benign idiosyncrasies, to those shockingly short of scruples, to raving lunatics roaming unrestrained among sane folks.
Although he was the wisest man I’ve ever known, my boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird could neither read nor write, but due to his excellent memory was conversant on many subjects, especially the Bible.
One afternoon as we sat on his porch, gazing across Dad’s Mississippi Delta farm, he listened as I read a verse from Proverbs, Chapter 3: “Despise not the chastening of the Lord; neither be weary of his correction: For whom the Lord loves He corrects.”
When I was growing up on my father’s Mississippi Delta farm, some of my childish faults annoyed Jaybird, my best friend and mentor. Because his patience had no limits, the old black man was particularly put off by my inability to wait.
One day as were putting poles, minnow buckets, paddles, and lunch in his fishing boat, I was fidgeting and kept saying, “Let’s hurry — I can’t wait to get on the lake.”
My friend Mark, owner of Fratesi’s Grocery, a famous Mississippi Delta country store, is a superb perpetrator of practical jokes, a skill shared by my boyhood best friend and mentor, the beloved old black man known by everyone as Jaybird. Mark sells a variety of baits, including crickets for bream fishermen. Before spending a day on the lake fishing for Chinquapins, the biggest, scrappiest, best-eating bream of all, Jaybird and I always bought crickets at the store.
Knowing that being rewarded with a free absence excites college kids, I offered my creative writing class a chance to compete for one. In their essays, they must describe Heaven, and in keeping with the class curriculum, be creative.
“Professor Reed, will this contest offend the King of Heaven, even if we write about subjects more in line with earthly activities?” someone asked.
My brother Ronnie and I were exact opposites. He was the good boy; I was the family’s black sheep, curious about everything, and constantly getting into trouble, seeking to satisfy my insatiable curiosity. Many a switching I got because of Ronnie’s snitching. Occasionally, though, events worked in my favor. Such was the case with Chippie.
One summer evening as we lounged on Jaybird’s porch, looking across my father’s Mississippi Delta cotton fields, I asked the wise old black man, my best friend and mentor, what his final piece of advice would be on the last day before he departed this earth for his well-earned eternal rest.
“Always advance — never retreat,” he answered.
“Does that mean I should go down fighting instead of giving up, even when the odds are stacked against me?”
While growing up on my father’s Mississippi Delta farm, I marveled at Jaybird’s ability to remain at peace with the world around him, even during difficult times. Because the old black man was my best friend and mentor, I wanted to be like him, but unlike him, I was often encumbered with worry and stress. Noticing this, the master teacher helped me overcome this weakness by explaining that much of my preoccupation resulted from wanting the “wants”:
While attending the funeral service for a friend who committed suicide, I sat beside his daughter.
“Read this page in his diary,” she said. “My father always kept one of these diary notebooks in his pocket and penned daily entries.”
In the entry dated the day before his death, he wrote, “On any given day at any given moment, any given 1,000,000 people, of whom I might be one, are pleading for God’s mercy and help, and 999,999 of them are more worthy of His attention than I, so why bother praying? He will never hear me.”
Recommending a book he just finished reading, a friend said, “You will love it. The author rattles skeletons in the closets of some well-known folks. The juicy gossip it contains made the book a bestseller.”
His comment confirms what we all know: With shameful regularity, gossip attracts even the most virtuous souls, and for those of us nowhere close to being in the most-virtuous-souls category, its appeal reaches intoxicating proportions.
Even while sliding down life’s slippery septuagenarian slope, having passed the halfway point, I keep vowing to slow down, but instead remain in a frustrating state of hurriedness.
How haste harms is a lesson I should have learned years ago, when my hobby was fishing. I had a small boat and motor, a pole, a paddle, and bait box. On the lake, rat race gave way to snail pace, and I had fun, whether the fish bit or not.
When a civic organization asked me to speak during its weekly luncheon, my ego being what it is, I accepted. The man who introduced me, a retired bank president, was once a student in my college composition courses. I mentioned this to the audience, and commented on changes in classrooms of today and those during his college years.
Imagine a world in which people of different nations work together, unconstrained by fear of nuclear holocaust, tyranny’s oppression, or the lurking subconscious “Chicken Little” psychological preoccupation with imminent annihilation resulting from inter-continental ballistic missiles raining down from above, as if the sky really were falling.
Such will be the case in the Kingdom awaiting the faithful, but not before then. As Bataan Death March survivor General Jonathan Wainwright said, “Peace is a militant state, not secured by wishful thinking. To be sure of liberty, we must be willing to fight for it.”
Recently I visited my Alma Mater to discuss earning another degree. Riding along in 'Loretta'--my Dodge pickup with more horsepower than any sissy Chevrolet or fearful Ford--I listened contentedly as she ingested dinosaur-derived fuel and belched its aftertaste melodiously through dual exhausts.