Blue Pines: Growing Up and Growing Old in Mississippi

By Bobbye Taylor

In Blue Pines, Bobbye Taylor has written a necessary and personal book that bridges the past and present of the mystifying and mythical place that is Mississippi. Through a lens of love and interrogation, Blue Pines, part memoir part tale rises above being a mere novel to being an experience that seeps into the skin and the soul.

—Aunjanue Ellis, Actor, Writer



Bobbye Taylor’s book is an interesting combination of “what is”—the poverty, inequality, and a myriad of socio-economic issues that continue to plague Mississippi; and “what if”—the things that could be accomplished with a more highly skilled workforce—a crucial rung in harnessing the state’s natural and human resources for beneficial development.

—Jack Ryan, McComb Enterprise-Journal



Emboldened by the fortitude of earlier strong generations of family, Taylor, an eternal optimist, espouses that we soar, without selfishness, on the wings of history, faith, hope, love, perseverance, and a vision of what could become a better life for ourselves and those to come after us.



—Charles Ray Nash, Ed.D.

The University of Alabama System

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645313274

Book preview

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Blue Pines

Bobbye Taylor

Copyright © 2019 Bobbye Taylor

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2019

ISBN 978-1-64531-326-7 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64531-327-4 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Prologue

On Becoming

Portrait in Blue

Plunk and Mama-Deah and Ma-Mé

Secrets in the Village

Cultural Development

The Color of Civil Disobedience

Matrimonial Madness

The Mississippi Runs Deep

The Last Frontier

National Crises—Return of the 1960s

Well Water, Are We There Yet?

Epilogue

Reflections

Acknowledgments

Suggested Readings

In honor of my mother, paternal grandmother, maternal grandparents, and a supporting cast of uncles and aunts

Mama-Deah’s grandmother

Three sisters visit the grave site of Plunk

and Mama-Deah

Special Thanks to my Computer Elves

Bethanye, DeeDee, and Gayle

Prologue

Blue Pines, a work of historical fiction, is an off-the-cuff title for banquet tickets I needed to order ASAP and realized I did not have a theme for the inaugural political fundraiser. Since the county is politically blue and heavily landscaped with seemingly one-hundred-foot pine trees, I thought, What an appropriate title. The narrative recounts the life of a Mississippi native who grows up and grows old in the state of her birth divided by nearly four decades of truly American experiences outside the perimeters of the Blue Pines state.

After many meetings with a different group of cloudy participants each time, the Sunday night phone call from my former co-author was the turning point. Her children were planning a golden anniversary celebration for their parents that weekend, and her densely packed matrimonial preparations would understandably not accommodate our scheduled meeting. She deeply regretted not being able to keep our appointment, but her cancellation fearlessly empowered me to send our plan for The Last Generation into one of the newly found planetary galaxies.

Using carefully drafted surveys which solicited information depicting personal experiences in the era of legal segregation, research from local and state archives, and oral histories from grandparents, we, the last generation to have known grandparents born in the late 1880s and 1890s, wanted to emphasize their strengths and character in providing social shields for our generation in spite of the dreadful happenstances of their own lives. No such happening anytime soon.

Most contacts did not remember conversations with their grandparents, and those who did—my family included—recalled community and cultural events centered around food, church, field songs, one-room schoolhouses, and hard work. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was castigated for some comment she made about not having remembered a lot about the Civil Rights era circa 1960–1965. That premise was not totally unfounded because communities were hermetically close-knit and protective of their developing identifiable African American culture.

Families did their best to raise children in cultural enclaves wherein discussions regarding heinous atrocities demanded that no chap be within earshot of the grown folks’ conversations. We envisioned addressing some of what we thought were the root causes of the disconnectedness between communities of color and American institutions—the most salient being "denial" of repercussions of slavery and the perpetuation of alternative facts.

Many whites take no responsibility because I had no part in that. Many blacks stated, We had moved to Milwaukee; I grew up in Chicago; My family relocated to California; I am from the Islands; My family is mostly white. Give me a Sartrellykumpy break. What biases white and black people experienced as to where and how they lived was a matter of degree not nonexistence. Of course, the availability of culturally refining opportunities, jobs, public transportation, access to restrooms, and some integrated schools and universities was a welcome melody befitting Lou Rawls.

The number of persons who would be able or willing to recount significant experiences was incredulously low, with crevasses too steep for my earthly decades. How-be-ever, I pass the torch to the generations of the 1970s and beyond to dig deeply into the sociological arguments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries regarding race, economics, and politics. I am hopeful that they will do a more compelling job of acknowledging, accepting, forgiving, and moving forward—without ever forgetting—the omnipresent seeds of the turbulent sixties which have grown to full bloom in the dawning of the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Go Zebras!

Kjelli, now the age that she remembers most about the influence of her grandparents, reiterates a few recurring themes and believes the millennial generation is undauntedly ready to charge forward like a raging bull to address them. She has recounted, sometimes overlapped with a touch of humor, five distinct threads that are stagnant barriers to progress in the Blue Pines state of Mississippi and to the nation at large: racism—the pyramidal tip of a crumbling base; injustice, particularly in the criminal justice system; inequality in education; socio-economic conditions; and domestic violence.

An argument which Kjelli may have some difficulty promoting is what a great place Mississippi is—God don’ shed his Grace on Thee.

Since this country’s inception, the caps of highly carbonated social bottles explode seemingly every fifty plus years or so.

Circa 1903: women’s suffrage; education of women; political participation; labor issues; industrialization, migration; and the omnipresent

racism

.

Circa 1950: political participation; labor issues; disparity in economic/education opportunity; industrialization, mechanization, globalization, immigration, and the omnipresent

racism

.

Today: school violence, immigration; climate change; drug/alcohol abuse—opioid addiction; political participation; domestic violence; disparity in educational opportunities; external interference in democratic elections; loss of jobs due to technological advances; poverty; police brutality and/or utter disdain for the men and women in blue; and the omnipresent

racism

.

Most of these issues lie dormant in perpetual weedy fields or concrete-covered paths that stifle seeds of discord until one or more of the wind-blown seedlings surface in the plushness of our own lawn. They show no favoritism to one’s historical era nor to geographical location. Sometimes, propitious economic conditions are unable to provide refuge for our self-inflicted selfish wounds. One only has to recognize the families whose lives have been turned upside-down by the reckless behavior of many members of the current administration.

To my lack of understanding, these indescribable

leaders

are indubitably supported by most of the Pines state’s elected officials who vow to change Washington. If Washington were Mississippi’s problem, the state would always be mired in poverty. Many of the voices of silence are foaming to divorce the conundrum of posers that some heritage keepers and some victims choose to continue to recap.

Kjelli attempts to plug fragments of history which have been verbally manipulated or euphemized into canvasses wherein truths cannot and will not go unheeded by more boisterous generations. All agree that socio-economic inequality/injustice in the prison system; inequality in education; political abuse/apathy; mental illness; culture of violence—particularly domestic; women’s rights; distrust of the police and police brutality are smothering American institutions nationwide, thus destroying any semblance of democracy.

Point of interjection here: for collected data which indicate that Mississippi undeniably has more than its share of all of the above threads and usually ranks at or near the bottom of any category, filling out forms of any kind is not a virtue of too many citizens in the state. So whatever information was collected was probably skewed by a lack of participation.

A renowned award-winning writer recently implied in a quote-tweet that if Mississippians tried to read difficult works by William Faulkner, the works of the state’s famed author would be banned. There is some credence to the newspaper article where the writer implied that many Mississippians are intellectually challenged when it comes to reading, but some do not read for no other reason than they choose not to. Academic openness was shown when that same critiquing writer was invited to be the keynote speaker at the Young Writers Workshop.

The state must improve its educational system vis-à-vis its prison system to prepare workers for a global economy to attract the myriad of expansion projects available—that process begins with literacy. When that goal is achieved, its Old Man will continue to flow north and south from one end of the lower forty-eight to the other branching tributaries from east to west. The state’s unparalleled air quality, water, and rich soil provide opportunities for prolific economic development.

While embarking upon the incalculable journey, Kjelli shows amazing grace when she lets go of the bubbles in her own life and visualizes vibrant needles ready to stitch the next patch of Mississippi’s effervescent quilt. Then too, maybe she can figure out who stole all the cast iron wash pots and clothes irons that disappeared from every grandma’s yard. Some white folks from only God knows where may have those relics that date back to slavery, but there’s little doubt as to how they got them. Communal dysconnectivity is a very sharp weapon.

Part 1

On Becoming

Chapter 1

Portrait in Blue

As a little scrawny girl with legs a bit broader in diameter than a twig, I was one inquisitive child who would ask every imaginable question until some adult threatened to answer my query with a backhanded slap in the mouth. Ironically, that threat was made often but never materialized because no one wanted to deal with the ire of my mother for chastising her daughter.

I asked all kinds of questions. One I still laugh about was Aunt Ayn’s dreadful fear of a strand of human hair falling into a cup of milk. While happily allowing a ten-year old to help her make pancakes, she poured a cup of milk and insisted, Kjelli, put on this hairnet so no hair will fall in the milk.

What’ll happen if it does? I asked.

Kja, you know that strand of hair will turn into a worm, she said.

I replied, That is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard.

When she turned away, I poured some milk in another cup, yanked a strand of my hair and dropped it in. Naughtily, I said, Let’s see, Aunt Ayn, if that’s true. Screaming as if she had just seen a mouse, she looked in the cup with me waiting to see the new creature. See, I told you that was ridiculous.

We both laughed as she told me, Kjay, one day, you are going to give somebody a heart attack.

Sometimes, I think I got away with behaviors that would have merited that backhanded slap, especially when I posed grown-folks questions.

One thing I knew for sure was if I could ward my Aunt Verne off by herself, she would answer all my questions such as, Why does Cousin Vickie look white? Why does Aunt Ayn always answer ‘I forgot my glasses’ when it was her turn to read in Sunday School? Why does Mama-Deah insist that we listen to her stories about the picture hanging above her bed? Why does Aunt Aggui look different from the rest of y’all?

One conundrum for me was how much Mama-Deah loved those folks she had worked for most of her adult life. Once her health failed, and she could no longer work, they hired a cousin just around the corner.

I queried, Why don’t they come to see Mama-Deah when they drop off the new maid who lives right around the corner?

Without much emotion, Aunt Verne uttered, You cook their food, clean their homes, care for their babies who become maternally attached to you, and you become a hot potato if you can’t make it to work.

She paused, then emphasized, Some of them would gladly visit her if they could without social repercussions. Some others have hearts of stones and just don’t care.

* * * * *

Growing up approximately 160 miles from Kiscoski (her place of birth) to Peaks County where she spent more than her biblical allotment, Mama-Deah endured more than her share of cruelty at a very young age. One morning, in late August of 1896, the Bridges family received the dreadful yet not surprising news. Messengers from developers told Jess Bridges and Lou Knowles that land clearing would begin day after tomorrow on the Bordeaux estate.

Y’all gotta be off this property by sundown day after tomorrow. Property got new owners and don’t need no nigra help. Within two days, at sunrise, the Bridges and Knowles families would be out of their Kiscoski abodes with all their belongings and headed southward. Even the mutts hated to leave their crafty confines of the Bordeaux estate.

Wealthy widower with a young son, Mr. Bordeaux, who had owned the vast estate for years, had decided to sell the colonial style