9 Forks Minden Lousiana
A place in my memory, like Proust’s madeleines, comes to mind whenever I smell eggs cooking. I remember visits to my grandfather’s dirt farm at the crossing of many high ways. It used to be a motel, of sorts, but by then it was just a collection of cabins without AC or heat. Baking in summer and cold as hell in winter. We slept in the big house, if you could call a bunch of cabins stuck together in a shot gun arrangement a house. I remember the down filled covers and how it felt like love and warmth in the cold nights. In the early morning, farm time, before the sun came out, my grandfather was out picking the warm eggs from the nests of his hens to cook. The eggs. They were laid by free range chickens and bantam hens who were used to running out in the road. The red dirt was everywhere, the stain of the South. The coloured folks lived next door. My grand dad would visit them; he had an easy way about it. Not the they were any better off - poor trash living next to each other.
Then there were visits to town to go hang out at the barber shop. The male place. Old men and hanger-ons sitting around shooting the bull. Looking at the local papers while they waited their turn at the chair, I remember reading about lynchings and wondering what kind of place they lived in where such things could go on and them talking about it as if it was the weather. I hated it. I hated the red neck culture, the good old boy network and the social economic class system of the South. But I was too young to be able to articulate it. One time in New Orleans, I sat in the back of the bus with the ‘coloured people’; much to the chagrin of my mother. My Rosa Parks moment. But I was too young - but old enough to know better. I knew that it was unfair and inhuman.
