a smaller slice of the good life

once my ex and i spent a few weeks in fulton, arkansas, a small town off interstate 30 sandwiched between hope, bill clinton’s hometown, and the larger border town of texarkana further south. hope’s town motto, “a slice of the good life”, was emblazoned on t-shirts sold at their annual watermelon festival, which i gathered gave folks in fulton a bit of an inferiority complex, although other than a few more people and marginally fancier stores, i was hard-pressed to tell the difference. back then, fulton was your stereotypical southern small town; there was one main drag, all the whites on one side and the blacks on the other. when it rained, the black side always got flooded.

we stayed with her grandma in this shaky old house propped up on some makeshift-looking stilts so the floor would stay dry after the rain. mama lived off the moonshine she made from corn and such and cooked a seriously mean side of greens. every sunday, she would get all gussied up and go sing her heart out at church.

my ex’s pops - everyone called him pops - worked at a factory up the highway, washing spark plugs in a sink filled with motor oil. joanne, pops’ sister, lived in a shack, also on stilts, about 15 min from mama’s. the company she worked for cut compressed recycled foam into slices just thick enough to sleep on.

through joanne i met red and tootie. red met tootie while serving in nam and brought her over sometime after the war. tootie was a gregarious woman. she talked a-mile-a-minute in her heavily southern-accented broken english, all the while shaking her big moon-face back and forth, and you got the feeling that she didn’t really give a shit if you understood her or not. i once spent about half hour bullshitting with her and all i got out of it was something about how like greens, older coons must be stewed longer or else they’ll be tough to eat.

a texarkana r&b station ruled fulton’s car stereos, where tunes like surface’s “happy” and mac band’s “roses are red” were in heavy rotation. of all the relations, only joanne had some vinyl around. she was a little milton fan and was jamming his “annie mae’s café” album (malaco, 1986) non-stop when i was there. as i sat on a lumpy sofa covered with a thin slice of foam in her canary-yellow living room listening to “i’m at the end of my rainbow” for the umpteenth time, for the first time in my life, i had an inkling of the meaning of the blues.

an old girlfriend once said that most relationships last a year too long. while i hated when she got all philosophical and shit on me, she was pretty spot on when it came to us. it’s during that pathetic year that civility really broke down and pettiness became a way of life. but the ensuing love/hate twilight zone was a great teacher of the blues. it was during that time that i really learned to appreciate the penetrating sentiment of big maybelle’s “so long” (savoy, 1957) and how basie and gillespie alum ernie wilkins’ subtle arrangement accented the pathos in her larger-than-life voice.

Posted by cellpharmer at March 24, 2005 10:25 PM