Chapter 13

A Sentimental Journey

In June, 1948, after visiting in Houston and taking in the sights there, at Galveston and all along the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico to Mobile Bay, and into Florida, Chester, his wife, Elsie, and I spent two nights in Auburn, Alabama, with A.Z. Carter and wife, Ethel, and visited Auburn College.  From there we went to Eastman, Georgia to see Aunt Ellen Shaddix, Mama’s sister.  Uncle John was dead, and she was staying with Mary Allen, her adopted daughter.  She had fallen and broken her hip, and was in bed, looking so sweet with her pretty white hair.  She remembered us, and was glad to see us.  We always loved her and Uncle John.  I thought of him now, how he used to chase us making noises like a wildcat.  We would run and squeal and go under the bed, and he would come under after us squalling and yowling.  I had to go out on the porch and cry a little.  Mary served us tall glasses of iced tea, cake, nuts and fruit.

The girls, Helen and Myrtle, took us through the woods to the lake where tall white birds swam and flew around.  We enjoyed the walk, for we had ridden all day.  Grady, Mary’s husband, came from his work and we met him, and we stopped and made a picture of Johnie, the son, plowing.

We ate supper with Jim Shaddix, the adopted son, and wife, who was Anna Newbery, the prettiest girl in Shinbone Valley after Aunt Hixie married.  Met two of their sons.  Spent the night at Ellaville, visited Franklin D. Roosevelt’s little white house at Warm Springs.  It looked like any little white house in the woods.  I got a hickory nut at the backyard gate for a souvenir.  Then we headed for Shinbone Valley.

Oh, boy!  We would soon be back in our homeland.  We felt like we would want to whoop and holler when we got there.  Chester said he hoped we wouldn’t be disappointed.  We took the Anniston highway, to Delta and stopped there to get some cokes.  Saw and talked with Chester Jenkins, our second cousin, Uncle Joe Carter’s grandson, then took a dirt road for Shinbone.  We soon came to a little church house in the woods that looked as I remembered, Good Hope.  Then, we saw a house that I believed was Tom Miller’s and soon one I thought was the McClintock place, where Uncle Tom Strickland lived when he ran the mill and when we visited them—and where Aunt Sidney Newsome was living when we left for Texas.  Chester didn’t think so.

The woods closed in around us.  We could see nowhere, only ahead.  Then, there was a house that had fallen down and was covered with kudzu vines and every kind of bush and briar—and then, another in the same condition.  Old Joe and Scott Smith places?  The big trees were all gone, but small ones grew, and brush so thick I didn’t see how a rabbit could get through.  There were no fields, just brush everywhere and kudzu vines draping the trees and everything.

We crossed what we guessed with Little Kichemedogee with a house on the bank—the Robert Gregg place?  Around the curve and sure enough, there stood Mt. Zion church house in an oak grove looking very natural.  We got out of the car and stood looking at it.  Are we home?  We bowed our heads in thanksgiving.

Then, looking around, saw most of the dwelling houses were gone or falling down.  Someone lived in Mrs. Hearn’s and Mr. Fuller’s houses.  The blacksmith shop was gone, the stores vacant and falling down.  A ghost town, so desolate, lonely and miserable!  Someone said there is no going back home after you’ve been away for a long time and we were inclined to believe it.

We saw only one person as we went through—Charlie Sasnet, who came through on a wagon and stopped to talk awhile.  He remembered us and we him.  Then we drove down the hill and up to Dr. Mackey’s house.  Bud and Lizzie Shaddix Stancell lived there.  They came out and we enjoyed a visit with them, though we couldn’t imagine how they changed so much—and perhaps they felt the same about us.

We went up to Union, and the church house looked as we remembered it. The cemetery was larger and more full, but well kept.  The schoolhouse was gone.  We traveled over Gray Hill and across High Falls Branch, up by Grandpa Elder’s place which didn’t look the same.  Most of the houses along the road were vacant; some had fallen down.  The Macedonia church house on the hill was gone and another had been built at foot of the hill.  Yes, we were disappointed!  Was this Shinbone Valley?

When we drove up to Uncle Bill Shaddix’s at the Wilf place, he and Aunt Julie were sitting on the porch just as I remembered them, only older.  After visiting with them awhile and learning that Vida lived in the house below Macedonia where we had once lived, I decided to walk down there.  By the road, on the hill near the church had been, was a chubby boy about nine or ten years old, and another nearby.  I asked, “What are you all doing?”  The chubby one said, “Nothing.”  I asked, “Why don’t you do something?”, and he said, “We don’t know anything to do.”

I walked down the road and over the little bridge where we used to stop and play on the way home from school.  When I got to the house, a pickup was parked in the road in front of it and a large woman was on the porch giving directions to the man driving.  He drove on and I waked up to the porch and said, “I would like to stay the night with you.”  She said, “Alright, come in.”  I went to the porch and stopped and looked around and said, “I might want to stay a month.”  She put her arm around me and said, “Alright, come on in.”  Inside, I asked, “Are you Vida?”  She said she was.  Then I told her who I was and she started jumping and shouting, “Glory, glory!”, and beating on me.  She was so happy and so was I.  I commended her on her hospitality.  She thought I had been a passenger in the pickup and was ready to take me in for a month, without any questions—not even asking my name.  We had a nice visit.  She had a large family, most of them married.  There was Billy Joe, Johnie, Jerry, Robert, and Roy still at home.

I learned that the two boys I saw on Macedonia Hill with nothing to do were Robert Dees and his nephew, Dale Gann.

The bigger boys came in with buckets full of blackberries, and back at Uncle’s late that afternoon, Chester and I went up and down the road in front of the house picking berries and eating them.  They grew everywhere.  Chester found a vine by the barn with big fat ones on it and called to me.  We picked some and ate them, and they were not as good as the others.  We told Uncle Joe about it and he said it was a tame vine.  They were not nearly as sweet and flavorful as the wild ones.

The next day we ate lunch with Vida and family and she baked a big blackberry cobbler that was so good!  We spent four glorious day s full of excitement and genuine pleasure in the little valley.  Uncle Bill Joe and Aunt Julie explored with us.  We went to Grandpa Elder’s old home, our last home in Alabama.  The big oaks out front, the apple and peach orchards, the shrubs and flowers in the yard, and grapevines were all gone.  Only some arborvitae and small oak were in front of the house.  No maples or beeches along the roadside.  They were all gone and none had taken their place.  Was this Grandpa’s house?  Was it once our home with all the good and beautiful things around it?  How said it now looked.  Grandpa’s house down across the road was also gone. This house that Grandpa had built when Mama was a little girl still standing there looking sad and lonesome.  Mrs. Bell lived there.  A bell girl and I walked down the little path by the well and scuppernong vine, which as still on an arbor and loaded with young scuppernongs.  The pine grove was gone where I loved roam and dream.  A few sassafras sprouts were there.

We drove to the cemetery and walked over it and picked huckleberries at the edge of the Union church yard.  Then to Smith’s mil place.  The house where we lived at the turn of the road above the mill had fallen down and was covered with kudzu vines.  The mill house, gin house, dam, bridge and millpond were all gone.  “Uncle” Dave’s house was still there, as well as the well and well shelter where butter-and-eggs used to bloom in the yard and Galveston beauty grew.  Also, the barn across the road with its stalls where Hayes kept his two red oxen was there.

Aunt Julie and I waded across Kichemedogee at the ford below the dam place and walked a way down the road toward Grandpa Strickland’s place.  There were trees and bushes growing in the road.  We had to go back by Mt. Zion and the upper bridge and down the creek.  The house looked familiar, only all worn out.  Renzo and family lived there.  We met them.  I met Helen, the girl with whom I had corresponded and loved, and that afternoon and the next day I learned to love her more.  She and I took a long walk over the place.  There was the plum thicket where I used to stop on the way home from school and watch for a rabbit making the trails through the dead grass under the plum bushes, and there was the road, grown up now, down Kichemedogee, where we marched home from school.

Back at Uncle Bill Joe’s, Robert Dees and I went to the field to pick blackberries.  A row of blackberries at least ten feet wide and almost as tall as a house reached all the way across the field, and was loaded with ripe berries.  We soon filled our buckets and didn’t make a dent in them.  About that time, Johnie and Jerry Dees and Dale Gann came, bringing swim suits for us all to go in swimming in Chulafinnie Creek.  I decided to sit on the bank ant watch the boys swim and it was great fun.  Then we went to the house and pitched horse shoes.

Uncle Bill Joe, Chester and I went on the first shelf of the Horseblock Mountain huckleberrying.  It was great climbing the mountain.  The dogs were with us and they “treed” a rattlesnake but it got away.  There were berries everywhere—huckleberries and gooseberries—but most of the huckleberries were on tall bushes.  But we got enough off dwarf bushes to make a pie.  And oh, boy!

Saturday afternoon we went to Oxford and Anniston to see Uncle Northern and Aunt Beula, and Uncle Seph and Aunt Cora and also visited with Whit and Ellie Carter and their girls in their store.  IN town, there were people everywhere, and cars and streetcars.  We saw Odessa Carter Turner in town.

Sunday morning we went to church at Mt. Zion with Uncle and Aunt, and Jerry and Robert.  The crowd was small, and no one we had ever known except those we were with, and Walter Strickland and wife, Willie, my uncle, Renzo and family, and Wych and Hattie Carter of Munford.  They had heard we were there.  After church, people were coming from Oxford and Anniston and everywhere and bringing food.  It was spread on tables in the yard and what a feast, and what a good time eating and meeting people and talking.  There were 90 there.  L.D. and Audry Turner and baby, Shirley, were there from Fort Payne, about 85 miles away.  Whit Carter had called them.  They were our friends in Texas.

Monday morning we went to Mt. Cheaha, the mysterious mountain I had looked up to so long ago.  Here I was on top of it.  It was not in the wilds as it used to be.  Man had tamed it to some extent, but it was wild enough to be interesting.  There were still those fascinating things to see that I had heard so much about as a child.  We went up in the tower and looked at the country.  When we went to the waterfalls it was so much more breathtaking than at the top of Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, Tennessee, from which one could see into seven states. 

We saw a trail leading to the Balk Rock.  Chester said, “I’m going to Bald Rock.”  I said, “I’m going with you.”  We left Uncle Bill Joe, Aunt Julie and Elsie at the hotel, and followed the trail.  Sometimes had to go around trees that had fallen across it.  A huge bare rock at the edge of the mountain overlooking a wide valley or canyon of wild, rugged beauty.  Looking away across the canyon to another part of the mountain, Chester pointed out the Pulpit Rock, what we had known as “The Devil’s Pulpit”.  He had been there and to the Balk Rock with Uncle Rich’s boys when he was small, and I had heard Papa tell of finding his hogs there once eating acorns.  Looking out over it all now filled my heart with wonder.  O, if I could only sit there and contemplate on its beauty and glory.  If I could just stay up there and ramble to my heart’s content!  But other things were calling.  We didn’t see the cave with sand as white as salt, or the cedar cliffs, and so many things that Mama told us about after going up there with a group once.

We bade Uncle and Aunt goodbye, wishing we could take them with us.  Went to Alabama City to J.D. Strickland’s where we were treated royally by him, his wife, Pearl and lovely family.  Then to Aunt Hixie’s at Albertville.  Uncle John was dead, and she lived alone.  Her old pal, Donnie Smith Hudson, and husband, Othal, were her next door neighbors.  We saw them.  Spent two nights with Aunt Hixie, and went on to Rainsville to John Tom Turner’s.  They had been our neighbors and friends in Texas.  Then to Dutton to see Abury and Naomi McKenzie and family, who had an apartment with us here in 1941, and we loved them.

Then up the Tennessee River to Chattanooga, where we took in the sights atop the Lookout Mountain, went through the Civil War Museum and cemetery where the famous “battle above the clouds” was fought and 36,000 men in blue and gray fell in two days bloody fighting, church services at St. Elmo, sailed up the river aboard the cruiser “Seven Seas” to and on Chicamauga Lake, went through Ruby Falls Cavern, then home, all agreeing that it was the most wonderful trip we had ever taken.

Chester and I knew that Elsie hadn’t enjoyed Shinbone Valley as we did, but if she didn’t have a good time there she was a good sport and didn’t complain.  We knew there were four things on the trip that she didn’t like—first New Orleans French Quarter’s coffee, but I don’t believe she mentioned it until we were out of town.  It is said that a man complained once about their coffee, and  next day he felt a sword through his middle.  She didn’t like the cable ferry on the Tallapoosa River in Alabama, the covered bridge on Hilliby Creek, nor Ruby Falls Cavern where she bumped her head on a stalactite.

I have been to Shinbone Valley three times since, but those four days of that “sentimental journey” in 1948 were the greatest.

In June, 1968, Odessa and Ercella Turner and I went on Mr. Cheaha. Going up from the west.  It was foggy and misty up there.  We could see only a few feet from us that day.  We were up in the clouds.  We didn’t see much.  Stopped at the store and got some cards, and on the way down on the east side, it seemed we just worked our way down among the rocky cliffs like mountain climbers, not able to see anything below us.  Sometimes it seemed surely the car would somersault and hurtle into nothingness—into eternity!  Eerie?  Yes, but I’m glad for the experience.

In 1968 a beautiful new brick home had been built about where Grandpa Elder’s blacksmith shop had stood, among the pines west of the road.  A lovely little log cabin sat at the foot of Gray Hill, north, and a beautiful, modern trailer home belonging to Roger and Linda Strickland was between the log cabin and High Falls Branch.  But, as moderns as they may make it, it will never be as lovely again as it once was unless the trees are again allowed to grow big and tall.

To a certain extent time has healed the wounds left by lumbering in days past, but there are no giants of the forest as in former days.  As soon as a tree is large enough for lumber, it is doomed.  In 1968, I found a pine on Grandpa Strickland’s place above the house, west, that I could barely reach around.  I felt sad, for I knew that it would soon be cut down, dragged out and hauled to the mills.  The hills were full of timber roads and lumber trucks piled high with logs were passing all the time.

Today, my mind goes back to the little valley as I knew it in my childhood—to its mountains and hills, its people, who were so dear to me.  Shinbone Valley was inhabited with ordinary, everyday people, each one different from the other, some seemingly very insignificant, yet each one filing his place—playing his part.  It took them all to make Shinbone Valley what it was.  They, all together, represented a quality of life that was deep-grained in the fabric of our valley.  Without any one of them there would have been a vacancy, and my memory of Shinbone Valley would not be so rich and colorful.

Yes, my mind goes back to those people, those mountains and hills.  Other mountains loom higher, and other valleys are richer, but these were my people.  These were my mountains and hills, and this was my valley that offers a feast of tempting names—Shinbone, Chulafinnie, Kichemedogee, Cheaha…they sing so sweetly!  And I shall love them forever.