1958 or maybe ’59. Time back then moved like smoke through a screen door, slow and hard to pin down. Not long after I went tumbling headfirst down the front steps of the farmhouse near the cigar factory like a sack of potatoes launched from a cannon, Daddy declared war on farming and decided to become one of the merchant class. The dirt and sweat had beaten him enough. We packed up everything, including my brother’s 5-ton upright Chickering piano, and moved to town.
Daddy bought a grocery store from Mr. Brooks on the west side of Hahira. Store in the front, living quarters in the back, all stitched together like a Depression-era dress made from a flour sack. This became home for the next five years.
Our store, Spearman’s Grocery and Market, sat wedged between tobacco warehouses, liquor stores, and churches where people sweated salvation into handkerchiefs every Sunday morning trying to keep cool with hand fans supplied by one of the local funeral homes. The churches on our side of town seemed to meet all day long on Sunday. And music, Lord, the music pouring out of those churches. A memory 62 years later.
Our little store carried everything a family needed to survive: canned goods, vegetables – collards and mustards, turnips, potatoes, and fresh fish (mostly mullet, bream, and perch) packed in chipped ice, and a meat counter with rows of all kinds of meat from every part of the cow, hog, and chicken. A bandsaw and slicer, which we were forbidden to get within 10 feet of. A butcher block, meat cleaver, and butcher knives.
It was there Daddy would slice me off a cold hunk of raw liver pudding and hand it to me like it was candy from the gods. An interesting taste that I’ve never been able to find or replicate. Do they even make liver pudding anymore?
Souse meat or hog head’s cheese. A Southern delicacy that must be experienced more than enjoyed. An affront to the sight and taste. Just what are those bits congealed inside?
It was there the comic book man showed up with boxes of “split covers.” Comics mutilated during shipping, their covers sliced clean through so stores couldn’t sell them retail. Daddy bought stacks of them anyway because they were cheap. Far as I know he never sold a single one. He bought them for me and Jon. Batman, Superman, Archie, Spiderman. We read them till the staples rusted and the covers fell off, but not before you ordered some Sea Monkeys from the inside back cover.
It was there the AME church held Saturday night fish fries that scented the whole neighborhood with peanut oil and the raising of money for any one of the many “societies” in the church. Missionary Society, Deacon Society, Pallbearer Society, and more. Fresh mullet snapping in hot oil while deacons and deaconesses in sweat-dark suits and white dresses laughed loud enough to wake the folks on the other side of the tracks on the east side. Mama always bought me a “slab without bones.” A boy too young to pick through the mullet without getting a bone hung up in my gullet.
And it was there my brother Junior ran his empire from a propped-open wooden push window during tobacco season. Hot dogs. Hamburgers. Snow cones glistening with cherry red syrup. Warehouse workers and farmers lined up during tobacco season with hunger in their bellies. His tiny summer operation grew legs and eventually became Jr’s Dairy and Burger Bar. Paid his way through college too. Only in America does a snow cone stand become a ladder to a scholarship.
This was before integration, before the signs came down and everybody pretended they’d never been there. Before MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Before the riots and the National Guard.
Fortunately, our little town was spared the violence and the spotlight, but the signs were there, the signs were there without even being signs. An unspoken, unwritten separation. It pains me to think of this because in our world, on the west side of the tracks, in our store, all were welcomed.
But catty-cornered from the store stood a public toilet labeled plain as day: WHITES and BLACKS.
No code words. No disguises. Just the naked machinery of the thing sitting in the sunlight.
The laundromat was segregated. The schools too.
One day a traveling photographer set up shop near that public toilet. Folks lined up in their Sunday clothes to have their souls trapped on glossy paper. Daddy took me and Jon over there and had our picture made too. Somewhere buried in the hoarding piles of our family clutter, that photograph still exists. Daddy holding Jon in his lap, me sitting by their side.
We sold cookies from a giant glass jar with a cowboy embossed on top of each one. Folks called them “hossie cookies.”
“A hossie cookie and a slice of cheese,” they’d say. Others just wanted an RC and a MoonPie.
Mama would carve off sharp cheddar from a giant red-rind wheel and slap the slab on top of the cookie. They were delicious!
The store had a candy counter too. Lord God, that candy counter.
A row of boxes of penny candy seducing the sweet tooth of everyone around.
Mary Janes.
Squirrel Nut Zippers.
Bazooka gum with stupid jokes inside.
Double Bubble.
Chiclets.
Atomic Fireballs hot enough to take the skin off your tongue.
MoonPies stacked like edible hubcaps.
Salted peanuts meant for dumping into bottles of Coca-Cola because that’s the way we do it in this part of the world.
Every afternoon kids poured in from Webb-Miller School carrying sweaty heat and noise and pockets full of pennies and nickels polished smooth by rubbing against each other.
They’d examine the candies, make decisions, and then spill their treasure onto the counter. Candy in one hand. Coins in the other.
Daddy ran the market but Mama ran the register.
“Sweetie, you don’t have enough.”
Or sometimes:
“You got enough for a few more pieces if you want some.”
Always kind but a gentle salesperson too. That was my Mama.
Then came the day one little millionaire ran in grinning like he’d robbed the local bank. He slammed down two fistfuls, made a return trip to the candy counter and flopped down two more fistfuls beside a shiny new quarter. The boy was grinning. All you could see was teeth.
Mama started counting.
She separated the candy into two piles like a dealer separating chips at a Vegas craps table.
Twenty-five pieces in one pile. Ten in the other. The grin faded.
Then she pointed at the large pile and delivered her accounting.
“That’s all you get for a quarter.”
I remember that line better than John 3:16.
Because somewhere along the road of busted dreams, divorce, drug addiction, bad whiskey, good women, cheap notebooks, and stories scratched out at various dining tables in various continents, that sentence became holy to me.
Even now, whenever I finish writing a chapter or a story, whenever I shove another ragged piece of myself into this machine called life and hear it clank to a stop, I still say it out loud to the cosmos and to Mama somewhere beyond the veil:
“That’s all you get for a quarter.”
And dear reader, standing here at the ragged edge of memory, the knot still on my head from my first fall, with liver pudding trying to claw itself back into my memory, and penny candy rattling in my skull…
that’s all you get for a quarter.