John was born at the end of the civil war while hostilities yet still festered. His father who later became a two term Republican Senator for the State of Georgia was eligible for election only because he had served as a scout for the Union Army in the later part of the great war. Confederates were not welcome in the southern legislatures for many more years.
John and his brother Barto came by rail to Bear Creek through Birmingham and Atlanta just before the turn of the twentieth century. Bear Creek was as far as the railroad pressed into the former Chickasaw territory. His wife Mary and two kids, one a baby in arms named Gussie, followed in a buckboard with a canvas cover . A makeshift covered wagon with all their earthly belongings. A table, a milk pitcher, that presently sits in my entry foyer, and a bundle of hand made quilts. Traveling 400 miles on rutted dirt roads with a only pair of horses, a cow and two kids. The woman had more grit that any man I have ever met.
John the elder was a wealthy man, but John junior had given up his inheritance for Mary, the woman he would marry. John could not approve the younger John with one of the Davis girls, a confederate beneath his esteemed station. Mary's father financed the elopement, provided the horses. John stole the buckboard from his father.
In due time they headed west.
John and his brother left by train a full month before Mary and the kids. Found a small bare wood house, a broken down mule and rented forty acres of good land, half in woods and half in crops, from Mr. Morrow. (Barto headed south, then west, and I am told, planted many a crop along the way.) In time Pop had a sawmill, then a cotton gin and by the time I was born, five gins and ten cotton warehouses. Futures markets made little sense to my grandfather with his third grade education but he knew when cotton sold for less than it cost to make it. Hence the barns to hold the bales until the price went profitable.
One of my greatest regrets happened one day in the back of the gin. Pop picked me up and threw me into a pile of fresh ginned cotton. I cried a big bucket of fake tears. I would give everything today for the feeling of the rush of air by my face and the soft white cotton. But that moment was that moment. Frozen in time it will never be again but it will never be completely forgotten either.
John gave the shiny silver gins and the white bales of cotton and the steaming hot Alabama warehouses to my father, He gave the feed store to uncle William, Money to go west to Cohen, and paid for education and a house for the others. But my father was the baby child. The one who everyone adores. The one that gets what he wanted when he wanted it. Buy a car, wreck a car, buy a car, wreck another. Cars, women, whiskey- and drugs. Within a year the fortune was gone. Our home was sold to Lue Cook to pay our debts and we moved into the one room house in Weekstown.
The next year dad had a plan, the big house once owned by the Garners was for sale. $5000 would get it and 44 acres of land. Emma and Dad would buy it together, Pop would cosign and Dad would get a job and pay for it all. Pop made some calls and convinced a seed buyer who had depended on grandpa for fifty years for his cotton oil supply to hire my father as a millwright for $100 a week. $100 a week of 1960's silver certificates. The job was in Memphis.
By then the drugs had taken a toll. Dad had a festering boil on the right side of his stomach from the injections of morphine that he bought in tiny little toothpaste tubes, the needle screwed on like a plastic bottle cap. Then the poison could be squirted in the fatty tissue and do its dirty deed.
I remember my elation as I sat on the enameled tub in that giant old house. Even as I watched my dad change the bandage on his torpid suicide wound, I was excited about the prospect of so much money. We would be alright. In my mind I knew, but somehow even in my six year old heart, I felt that something was so very wrong for a grown man live on baby food and tiny tubes of something that you stuck in your skin.
My Dad's story ended like those you are welcome to read about in the paper tomorrow, a "heart attack" - usually about thirty six. With apologies to the Temptations "All dad ever left us was a loan. " .
Pop followed a few years later of old age and a broken heart. Died in the style of the Kings of Israel who spent their lives building a kingdom only to have it dismantled by the sins of the favorite son.
In the past two years I have seen four close family members die of drug addiction and forty more addicted. Two of my children invoke the same feeling I had that cool October day. My mind knows they will get better. My heart feels the feeling I felt that day in 1960. My heart feels the truth I felt that day.
The seven counties that I hope to serve after November second lose over one thousand three hundred young mothers and fathers to drug overdose every year. They lose another thirteen thousand to addiction. On average they leave more than two children each as orphans to be raised by the grandparents and the State.
Mississippi has taken measures that have effectively moved the problem across the line. Alabama has become to Mississippi what Mexico is to Arizona.
I hate drugs, I hate drug addiction. It took my father. It took my daughter and her husband. It has my middle boy. It took my little wife's first husband, and her friend, the wife of a friend who happens to be the mayor of a small town in this district, The husband of a counselor at the mental health center. It took the son of a the woman who checks my groceries. It took the daughter of a co-worker. This handiwork of devil knows no class lines. No economic lines. No educational boundaries.
Too many people make too much money on the drug trade for it to end. The Lawyers make too much defending the addicts. The drug stores make too much money selling the dope. The counselors and defenders make too much from the drug courts. Everybody has a piece of the pie.
When I look at Mary on the left hand, working a wagon across Georgia,and contrast it on the right hand, with the mothers on meth and crack today, I can't help but wonder why there is no grit except in an exceptional few. I can't help but wonder who will raise the next generation when the grandparents with the tiny bits of remaining grit pass away?
John and his brother Barto came by rail to Bear Creek through Birmingham and Atlanta just before the turn of the twentieth century. Bear Creek was as far as the railroad pressed into the former Chickasaw territory. His wife Mary and two kids, one a baby in arms named Gussie, followed in a buckboard with a canvas cover . A makeshift covered wagon with all their earthly belongings. A table, a milk pitcher, that presently sits in my entry foyer, and a bundle of hand made quilts. Traveling 400 miles on rutted dirt roads with a only pair of horses, a cow and two kids. The woman had more grit that any man I have ever met.
John the elder was a wealthy man, but John junior had given up his inheritance for Mary, the woman he would marry. John could not approve the younger John with one of the Davis girls, a confederate beneath his esteemed station. Mary's father financed the elopement, provided the horses. John stole the buckboard from his father.
In due time they headed west.
John and his brother left by train a full month before Mary and the kids. Found a small bare wood house, a broken down mule and rented forty acres of good land, half in woods and half in crops, from Mr. Morrow. (Barto headed south, then west, and I am told, planted many a crop along the way.) In time Pop had a sawmill, then a cotton gin and by the time I was born, five gins and ten cotton warehouses. Futures markets made little sense to my grandfather with his third grade education but he knew when cotton sold for less than it cost to make it. Hence the barns to hold the bales until the price went profitable.
One of my greatest regrets happened one day in the back of the gin. Pop picked me up and threw me into a pile of fresh ginned cotton. I cried a big bucket of fake tears. I would give everything today for the feeling of the rush of air by my face and the soft white cotton. But that moment was that moment. Frozen in time it will never be again but it will never be completely forgotten either.
John gave the shiny silver gins and the white bales of cotton and the steaming hot Alabama warehouses to my father, He gave the feed store to uncle William, Money to go west to Cohen, and paid for education and a house for the others. But my father was the baby child. The one who everyone adores. The one that gets what he wanted when he wanted it. Buy a car, wreck a car, buy a car, wreck another. Cars, women, whiskey- and drugs. Within a year the fortune was gone. Our home was sold to Lue Cook to pay our debts and we moved into the one room house in Weekstown.
The next year dad had a plan, the big house once owned by the Garners was for sale. $5000 would get it and 44 acres of land. Emma and Dad would buy it together, Pop would cosign and Dad would get a job and pay for it all. Pop made some calls and convinced a seed buyer who had depended on grandpa for fifty years for his cotton oil supply to hire my father as a millwright for $100 a week. $100 a week of 1960's silver certificates. The job was in Memphis.
By then the drugs had taken a toll. Dad had a festering boil on the right side of his stomach from the injections of morphine that he bought in tiny little toothpaste tubes, the needle screwed on like a plastic bottle cap. Then the poison could be squirted in the fatty tissue and do its dirty deed.
I remember my elation as I sat on the enameled tub in that giant old house. Even as I watched my dad change the bandage on his torpid suicide wound, I was excited about the prospect of so much money. We would be alright. In my mind I knew, but somehow even in my six year old heart, I felt that something was so very wrong for a grown man live on baby food and tiny tubes of something that you stuck in your skin.
My Dad's story ended like those you are welcome to read about in the paper tomorrow, a "heart attack" - usually about thirty six. With apologies to the Temptations "All dad ever left us was a loan. " .
Pop followed a few years later of old age and a broken heart. Died in the style of the Kings of Israel who spent their lives building a kingdom only to have it dismantled by the sins of the favorite son.
In the past two years I have seen four close family members die of drug addiction and forty more addicted. Two of my children invoke the same feeling I had that cool October day. My mind knows they will get better. My heart feels the feeling I felt that day in 1960. My heart feels the truth I felt that day.
The seven counties that I hope to serve after November second lose over one thousand three hundred young mothers and fathers to drug overdose every year. They lose another thirteen thousand to addiction. On average they leave more than two children each as orphans to be raised by the grandparents and the State.
Mississippi has taken measures that have effectively moved the problem across the line. Alabama has become to Mississippi what Mexico is to Arizona.
I hate drugs, I hate drug addiction. It took my father. It took my daughter and her husband. It has my middle boy. It took my little wife's first husband, and her friend, the wife of a friend who happens to be the mayor of a small town in this district, The husband of a counselor at the mental health center. It took the son of a the woman who checks my groceries. It took the daughter of a co-worker. This handiwork of devil knows no class lines. No economic lines. No educational boundaries.
Too many people make too much money on the drug trade for it to end. The Lawyers make too much defending the addicts. The drug stores make too much money selling the dope. The counselors and defenders make too much from the drug courts. Everybody has a piece of the pie.
When I look at Mary on the left hand, working a wagon across Georgia,and contrast it on the right hand, with the mothers on meth and crack today, I can't help but wonder why there is no grit except in an exceptional few. I can't help but wonder who will raise the next generation when the grandparents with the tiny bits of remaining grit pass away?
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