Cabin Life. Chapter One. Introducing the reader to Carl Johnson 'of course'

X. Bill's Place in the Missouri Ozarks

X. Bill's Place in the Missouri Ozarks

Like Thomas Hart Benton, my father was born in Neosho, Missouri, metropole of the Ozarks. Patrick Henry Gratton grew up there because of the railroad; my grandfather John had secured a superintending position on a minor road in that country, quite a step up for a poor lad from County Leitrum. My maternal grandmother came through the same hill country, though she was born in Kentucky. Her kin had deeper roots in the United States than the Grattons; the Scotch-Irish had been scrabbling in the hills since the colonial days. They peopled the poorer lands from Appalachia to the Ozarks, places that were hard to not get killed in and then hard to make a living in. They came prepared for that; they hailed from the Borderlands between England and Scotland, where they were used and abused by the English. From the 15th century, they served as Protestant shock troops sent in to pacify Catholics like the Grattons in Scotland and Ireland. They were a herding, fighting, quarrelsome, hard drinking, singing, pious lot.

When they sailed to the colonies, they found the sweet land in the Tidewater had been taken by planters like Washington and Jefferson. They had to go up in the hill country we call Appalachia; the plantation owners liked that, since the hillbillies could fend off the troublesome Indians. In time some went further west to better land and to cities; they did just fine. Those who stayed in the hills did not, spreading south west into the Ozarks and other unremunerative places. 150 years later, during the Dust Bowl, some got forced out. Those who made it to Los Angeles and Phoenix did just fine. Those without enough initiative to leave their dirt-poor farms and failing coal mines did not do just fine. They settled into the Ozark way of life; poorly educated, clannish, so xenophobic they distrust and kill each other. Their rates of alcoholism, divorce, child and wife abuse, poverty, welfare use, and now, drug addiction are shocking. They handle snakes in their worship.

I know that I write that which is not polite but I say it is true and I say it as a native. These are my grandmother's kin and mine, though she escaped that benighted culture. Her family had moved west from impoverishment in Kentucky to poverty in Missouri. These Wrights finally settled for scarcity in Oklahoma; intensely Protestant dirt farmers save for an infamous blind "Irish" barman, they were Sooners. As a girl on that farm near Oklahoma City, Molly Grace Wright witnessed one of the region's periodic calamities; as the wagons moved out of the parched farmland, she told me the "thick dust rolled up and over the wheels, Brian, and then it blew out in clouds scattered by the wind." Molly thought her family short on ambition and hard on domestic help. Her mother had abandoned her husband, her children, and the farm just as Molly turned 14; the girl was left to cook and clean for her father and older brothers on a rough working farm. She removed herself as soon as she was of age, marrying a wandering Texas boy name of Johnson whom she met on the streets of Oklahoma City. It was said he rescued her from the amorous intentions of an Indian Chief. It was said he had served as a cabin boy on the famous Galveston/New York City ship route. It was said he had been a barker in a traveling circus.

She had her first child in Wanette, Oklahoma; my aunt Wanette was reported to be the first white child born in that town. Molly had 4 other children in a series of failing homesteads across Oklahoma and New Mexico, rattlesnakes dropping down into cradles in dug out dwellings, crops failing and little to eat, boys lost off the back of wagons, post-partum blindness, just the ordinary stories of frontier women. As a vigorous, dignified old lady, while we played double solitaire, she told me of back when she was a little girl in the hill country in Missouri. She claimed the James Gang were her neighbors. I thought that unlikely based on the rules of geography, but her stories were so good I didn't care. One she told was of the raw pioneer time, the forest partly cleared, houses half built, barns a kilter. This isn't up north on the Missouri, where the German farmers and the plantation Virginians staked their different claims on rich river bottom soil. These are the Scots-Irish, slouching west from the poor hill farms of Appalachia. In that place and time, Molly said to me, a boy with a hat like Huckleberry Finn's cocked on his head sits on a wrecked barrel next to a good road. The weather is fine. The barrel stands in front of a small, yellow farmhouse, better built than most in this country; the boy is smoking a cigar, made up of raw leaves, badly wrapped. Tobacco is being grown back behind the house; next to that bright homestead there's a garden with peas and shining green eatin' corn, the silk out. The corn for the cows and pigs grows ragged in the patch beside the barn. A tall man, burned by the sun, his thick black hair ill cut, stands in the middle of the tobacco field. He holds a hoe in hand, the brown-red rows rising up behind him like a twisted accordion, his lanky loose clothed frame elongated, the way Benson would have painted the scene.