Recollections: My Folks and Fields

RECOLLECTIONS:

MY FOLKS AND FIELDS

Eddie B. Rozelle

Edited by Rebecca Rozelle Burt

Illustrations by J. De Lavergne

Copyright © 2016 by Rebecca Rozelle Burt.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016900684

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5144-5007-9

                Softcover       978-1-5144-5004-8

                eBook            978-1-5144-5005-5

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Rev. date: 04/20/2016

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CONTENTS

Editor’s Comments

Hatchett Creek

Farming And Homes

Churches And Religion

School Days

Sickness, Disease, And Death

Politics

Roads, Travel, And Livestock

Mail And Reading Matter

Social Life

Hunting, Fishing, And Sports

My Jobs And Escapades

Goodwater

Some Folks I Remember

Negroes Of The Community

My Rescue

How Times Change

Appendix

EDITOR’S COMMENTS

After his retirement in the late 1950s, my father, Eddie B. Rozelle, undertook a third career, one that was to consume many months and require great perseverance. He began writing this book, Recollections: My Folks and Fields, a personal account of social and cultural life in rural Clay County, Alabama, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I know quite a bit about my father’s first two careers. As a very young man, he spent thirteen years teaching in a one-room schoolhouse. When I was a child, he told about those days as we sat around the supper table. He drew pictures in the air with his finger as he described his method for diagramming sentences and recited multiplication tables in the singsong manner required of his pupils. The stories I liked best concerned his confrontations with older male students—necessary, he said, to establish authority. Even as a child I realized how important those days were to him, how he loved being a teacher.

Since he had a growing family, however, he needed greater financial stability than teaching could offer. He went to work for the United States Postal Service and eventually became a rural mail carrier, remaining in this position until his retirement thirty-nine years later. I also remember the stories about the perils and pleasures of this second career: icy or muddy roads, women and children waiting at the box for the monthly check, joy at a letter from a son in the military service. When I was in elementary school, I spent quite a few summer days accompanying him on his route and saw firsthand how his patrons depended on him. He valued their trust, stuck to his schedule as closely as weather permitted, and often went beyond his duties to help. I remember Christmases when he sat at the breakfast table and packed small bags of candy, tying colored ribbons around the tops. On the last delivery before Christmas Day, the children who came to the mailboxes with their mothers had a special surprise.

Though I lacked the maturity or thoughtfulness to figure this out when I was still under my parents’ roof, I think now that he must have been an adaptable man. He seemed to maximize the satisfaction he found in teaching or in mail delivery. But it was clear to me then, as well as now, that the pursuit for which he felt the greatest passion was writing this book.

At the time when my father dedicated himself to his project, I was aware of what he was doing, but, I am sad to say, took little interest. Occasionally I expressed encouragement, but I realize now that my comments were feeble, more obligatory than enthusiastic. I shied away from becoming involved. He was in retirement mode, free to follow what had been a dream for him, while my attention was consumed with the demands of my own family. In addition to having primary responsibility for two young children and the majority of our household’s domestic chores, I was in the midst of completing my education as a teacher.

With hindsight, I see that in the typical fashion of the young, I was concentrating on myself. For this reason I lack a great deal of specific knowledge about the critical and practical details of his creative process: what to include and what to omit, how to organize a wealth of material, the decision about the best title. (I do recall that his working title was Horse and Buggy Days.) Even the time span involved in the actual writing, from the first sentence to the last page, remains a mystery to me.

My mother’s attitude toward my father’s project was more negative than mine. Frankly uninterested, she valued only the present and thought of the past as better off dead. She scoffed at his efforts and yawned when the book was discussed.

As for other people in my father’s life, given the general attitudes prevalent in Talladega, Alabama, in that decade, my guess is that most of his kin or former colleagues thought he was wasting his time. My father, however, was not one to be swayed by private or public opinion. He was determined to tell about life as it was—that is, how he saw it.

One family member was a notable exception—my brother, William Clarence Rozelle [See Appendix, pp. 266-274]. He was twenty-five years my senior, the eldest of my four siblings. Old enough to be interested in family history, Clarence was a source of encouragement and help, not only during the writing of Recollections. He read the finished product and declared it to be a valuable record of a historical era. He went so far as to ask J. de Lavergne, a New Orleans artist friend, to do sketches associated with certain scenes in the book. These appear in this new edition just as they did in the original.

In recent years I have, like Clarence, had time to reflect on my father’s accomplishment. After getting two of my own books into print, I am in awe of what he was able to do. Writing a full-length book, even in this age of word processing and instantaneous communication, remains a difficult undertaking. He had no professional training as a writer or even amateur advice on how to proceed; he relied solely on his instincts and innate ability to put words together. To bring a book to life under these circumstances required an extraordinary amount of dedication, discipline, and persistence.

Father was an early incarnation of the do-it-yourself attitude. He worked on his old black Ford, butchered hogs, plowed a sizable garden, built a concrete bridge, and sometimes took on home repairs that were beyond his skills. He must have set about the physical task of writing a book with the same sort of bold audacity. He knew exactly what he wanted to say and figured that getting it on paper would present no major obstacle.

He was dependent on what we think of as antique equipment. He bought an Underwood typewriter—manual, of course—and set up a work-station in a back bedroom. I can only assume that he spent hours of each day pecking away, doing his own editing as he wrote.

Once he had the manuscript, about 150 single-spaced 8 X 10 pages, into a form that suited him, Father contacted professional publishers. Never one to spend money unnecessarily, he decided their fee of $3,000 to $4,000 was entirely too steep. Instead of engaging them and putting the manuscript in their hands, he employed Lenore Bishop, a secretary with a full-time job who was willing to take on special projects such as his. She converted each page into a master gel copy for a mimeograph machine, taking care of basic line editing as she typed.

Then he bought a new mimeograph machine and set it up in an unused barn, one of the outbuildings at our residence, which during my childhood had been a sort of mini-farm. With no assistance he created his first edition, page by page. Once the book’s contents were sorted and stacked, my father took them to a local printer, who bound them with a heavy-grade paper. I do not know how many copies were included in the original run or in a second run some months after the first. The cover page featured one of Mr. de Lavergne’s drawings, a plow anchored in an abandoned field, a fitting evocation of a vanishing past.

When it went on sale in 1960, the price fixed at $3.50, Recollections did not go unnoticed. It was well received by historical societies and by many people and organizations interested in the cultural history of Clay County or rural Alabama. It was reviewed in area newspapers and historical society publications, and my father went to Birmingham to be interviewed for ETV (Educational Television, now PBS). Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black read the book and wrote my father an extensive response [See Appendix, pp. 280-282.] I assume this reception and subsequent sales were the reason for a second printing.

A few years ago I noticed that my paperback copies of Recollections had begun to disintegrate, the covers frayed and the pages yellowing. As several friends and family members had at times asked if I had any extra copies of the book, I began to consider the possibility of getting the original version into a proper and more permanent form, professionally printed and bound with a hard cover. It would be available not only to libraries and history buffs, but even to the interested casual readers.

I re-read the book and realized what my father had accomplished. As I was increasingly convinced that Recollections deserved any effort I could make toward its preservation, I began the process of preparing the text for publication. The first step as self-appointed editor would be to clean up the text, ridding it of mechanical or structural problems to improve clarity and achieve chronological consistency. I went through the book again and again as I made decisions. In a few cases I rearranged a paragraph, or group of paragraphs. Along the way I eliminated a few basic errors of the first edition, minor oversights such as typos, misspellings, or word repetition.

Some decisions were judgment calls. One small example involved capitalization. Christian terms were consistently capitalized according to traditional rules, but in some instances the upper case is used out of the respect that he felt for church organizations or other entities. In discussing his Sunday School, he capitalized both words even though this is not the usual and accepted form. The content makes it clear that in his mind this was an organized group with a definite identity, deserving to be set apart. I abided by his preferences.

In no way did I want to interrupt or corrupt my father’s distinctive style, as I admire and respect the flow of his book. His diction, detailed descriptions, and vivid narratives of specific scenes cause his past to come to life as he writes. To alter any part of this would violate the author’s relationship with his creation.

An obvious decision was to avoid changes that would modernize the language. His diction often seems antiquated, more typical of the time in which he grew up than of the 1950s. His manner of expressing himself was his own, an amalgam of his early years and the time he was writing.

A few words about his word choices seem appropriate. For instance, my father used Negro and colored people interchangeably. Wikipedia tells us these were once common terms, at that time respectful names for the ethnic group we now call African American. The history of the twentieth century attests to this. The NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) was founded in 1909. That organization has not abandoned its name. The same could be said for the United Negro College Fund, founded in 1944. As language evolves, so do the terms we use to identify racial and ethnic identities.

In the last fifty-five years, the period from the book’s publication in 1960 to the present day, its historical significance has become greater, extending the reach of the book. One interesting example is the Rozelle family’s relationship to the Reverend John Goodgame, Jr. In Recollections, in the chapter entitled Negroes of the Community, the Reverend Goodgame is referred to as being in the midst of a successful pastorate at the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church in Birmingham. His grandparents, Frank and Charlotte Goodgame, were former slaves who worked for and were helped by my great-grandfather, Enoch Rozelle. At one time Enoch Rozelle rescued Frank Goodgame from persecution by the Ku Klux Klan. Frank’s wife, Charlotte, was present at my father’s birth, was the one to put his first dress on him. She later had full charge of his discipline, at times taking a switch to him when he misbehaved or was disrespectful.

Later on, John Goodgame, Sr., the eldest of the Frank Goodgames’ twelve children, was taken in by my father’s parents, worked for them, sat in on their nightly devotionals, and improved his reading by taking advantage of all the written materials in their home. For years he struggled to further his education, finally graduating from Talladega College and realizing his dream of becoming a minister. After a few other pastorates, he was called to the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church in Birmingham and served there for twenty-nine years until his death in 1937. His son, John Goodgame, Jr., succeeded him in 1938, serving the church until his death in 1962.

Quite soon after this book was first published, and after the death of John Goodgame, Jr., the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a sister church to that of the Goodgames, was the site of the hate bombing in which four young girls were killed. The funeral for three of the four children was held in the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church sanctuary.

Another of my father’s recollections may be of particular interest to residents of Anniston, Alabama, particularly those who are associated with Grace Episcopal Church. In the chapter entitled Goodwater, the owner of the general merchandise store, Robert Franklin, is described as a good business man, widely known throughout the area. The son of the Franklins, Denson, became a Methodist minister. At the time of the book’s publication, Dr. Franklin was the pastor of the First Methodist Church in Birmingham. My father points out that he was reputed to be a great preacher and that raising such a child must be a source of great pride to his parents.

Interestingly, Dr. Franklin’s son, Denson Franklin, Jr., was also a Methodist minister and later became an Episcopal priest. His daughter, Lee Franklin Shafer, has been the priest at Grace Church in Anniston for several years.

References so distant chronologically can be seen to permeate our present in surprising ways. Documenting such connections brings the past more vividly into the present, and eventually into the future and the world of our descendants.

This type of historical extension occurs not only in the lives of our ancestors and their connections to us. In particular I was interested in a specific shift in entertainment preferences. After describing his own boyhood fascination with Western heroes in periodical booklets, my father comments on the fact that after so many years Westerns continued to be popular. This was the age of Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Wagon Train, Have Gun—Will Travel, and Rawhide. He was curious about the future, wondering, on that same page, if Westerns, the central entertainment vehicle of his boyhood and now his old age, would continue to be popular.

My father saw no need for historical objectivity in his account of his life. He writes as a Christian and a Democrat. His conclusions about the culture of his childhood and youth, its strength and weaknesses, are pointedly based on Christian doctrine and on his belief in the wisdom and endurance of the common man.

The ease and speed of life in late twentieth century bewildered my father. On one of our last outings, only a couple of years before his death in 1981, I took him to Clay County to visit the site of his home, the cemeteries, and the churches. He watched the road intently and spoke, almost in tears, So many cars. So many cars, he said, shaking his head from side to side.

For someone who drove a wagon load of guano pulled by two oxen through mud and mire from Goodwater to his father’s farm nine miles away, the mobility and speed of the world seemed almost a mystery. I was amused by his incredulity, as the world of the automobile was the world I had always known and had taken—perhaps too much so—for granted.

Now I feel a greater identity with my father’s state of mind. When I am in the company of young people, I worry about their dependence on small electronic devices, their heads bent constantly forward as their thumbs fly over the letters. I sigh and shake my head at reports of traffic accidents attributed to texting while driving. All these developments amaze (and sometimes befuddle) many people of my advanced years.

On the other hand, I have no doubt that my grandchildren perceive of the experiences of my youth as ancient history. They listen tolerantly to my tales of milking cows and riding my pony to school, of watching television through a store window just to see the wonder of the tiny oval screen with live action in progress. At times I’m not sure they believe me.

My admiration for my father and for his book grew as I worked with the text. I am amazed at his memory. As far as I know, or observed in my childhood, he never kept a journal or made notes. I can only assume he carried an amazing number of specifics around in his head, from place-names and descriptions (churches, stores, homes) to the full names of people he knew or knew of (teachers, friends, neighbors, preachers) to childhood experiences (plowing, picking cotton, hunting). Perhaps this clarity of recollection inspired him to undertake the task of getting his memories and thoughts into print.

He had a way of giving life to history. The people, though perhaps at times idealized, are real and memorable. His descriptions of events, whether his own experiences or those related to him by other family members, display a skill for narrative that is remarkably vivid. Any one section of the book can stand alone as a detailed story of some aspect of a time now long distant.

This book offers modern readers, particularly the very young, a benefit apart from the graphically presented information about the experiences of a common man of four or five generations ago. The life of a farmer’s son, born in 1890, was from childhood dominated by work, in all seasons and all weathers. The quality and scarcity of physical comforts, entertainment, and worldly goods was comparable to that of an undeveloped third-world country of today.

We fidget with impatience if our computers take an extra minute to perform a process. They were thankful when mail delivery began so that colored circulars and the Christian Advocate would be available for reading by lamplight. Electricity is now almost universally accessible, and many of our homes are air-conditioned, free from dust and pollen. They lacked the luxury of screen doors to keep houseflies away from food.

Vast leaps in technology have improved the physical quality in all areas of our lives. In the United States most people whose status is comparable to that of my father’s family maintain comfortable standards of living undreamed of in 1900. Indeed, in looking back, I see that my father was at times distrustful of the ease of our lives in mid-twentieth-century Talladega. His appreciation of even the hardships of his early life, made bearable by a loving family and supportive community, led him to write this history.

Perhaps attention paid to daily life of 125 years ago can evoke a sense of gratitude for the abundance of opportunities and advantages available to us. I come away from the book with such a response. I have an equally distinct reaction to my immersion in my father’s world. I feel a sense of loss, a wistfulness for the small close-knit world characterized by the strength of family and community. Though I am sure there were notable exceptions (and my father points out some of them), most inhabitants of that area worked together to improve their lot, both collectively and individually.

Women like Charlotte Goodgame or my grandmother leaving their homes to travel through cold and mud to help with a sickness or a birth, to lay out the dead. Men coming together to clear a patch of ground or raise a barn. Every able-bodied man and boy taking his turn to maintain public roads.

Clay County in the late 1800s and early 1900s was no utopia. Life was hard. But surely the discipline and self-sacrifice exhibited by such lives can be considered, if not heroic, thought-provokingly admirable.

I admit to being proud of my father, and not just because he had the courage and fortitude to stick to his writing, which re-creates a world we do not know. He does not glorify himself. He confesses to his early racism, his follies and cruelties. He realizes that he did not pursue his education as vigorously as he should have, that he was too easily distracted by youthful amusements and particularly by his pursuit of girlfriends. The remarkable part of his character, however, is that he was willing to change, to see his mistakes and broaden his perspective.

One of his convictions did not change. He never lost his identity with and compassion for those who struggle with life’s hardships. I believe that this became the guiding principle of his life and led him to reach out without judgment to those who, for whatever reason, needed help.

Rebecca Rozelle Burt

Hatchett Creek

Hatchett Creek flows gently and lazily on most of its course, but upon reaching the rapids, it leaps, splashes, rushes, and roars. When the heavy rains of winter and the freshets of spring arrive, it becomes huge, vehement in action, swelling until its unbridled power inundates the bottom lands, destroys the crops, carries away topsoil, and sweeps away everything standing in the path of its swift and roaring waters.

The creek rises with three prongs in west central Clay County, Alabama, flows out in the southwest corner of Clay County into Coosa County, and on into the Coosa River. At one time, five grist mills dotted its banks: Hart’s Mill in the Bethlehem community, Wheeler’s Mill at Coleta, Ingram’s Mill near Marvin Chapel, Garrett’s Mill near old Shiloh Church, and East Mill in the Brownville community. They ground a great deal of grain for the farmers but were gradually abandoned. The mill houses and dams slowly decayed, the freshets came and swept them away toward the Coosa River, and today little remains to identify their locations except an embedded piece of the old dam and scrub trees and briars on the mill lots.

Indian names are on our waters and we cannot wash them out. Like many other streams in Alabama, Hatchett is derived from an Indian name—Hatchie, meaning water. There were also two Indian villages near this section, Hatchitchope and Hatchetigbee. In some of the places along Hatchett’s banks where Indian villages once stood, arrows, pieces of clay pots, and other reminders of the original owners and residents of this country can be found.

Hatchett Creek settlement, lying in the Appalachian foothills of east Alabama, adopted the name of the creek that flowed through it and embraced approximately six miles square in the southwest corner of Clay County. This name has remained since its early beginning and became known throughout Clay, Talladega, and Coosa counties.

It was in a house hewed of logs in this simple community of Hatchett Creek that I was born on October 1, 1890. Although Hatchett Creek was similar in many respects to other Southern communities of that time, in some ways it was rather unusual. I grew into manhood there, and to me it seemed to be a world of its own. I spent many pleasant times in my boyhood, when amusements were simple and improvised but often very exciting. I was intrigued by the carefree life I lived and the plain, unvarnished, salt-of-the-earth people who spoke firmly about what they believed and called a spade a spade.

Almost fifty years ago I married and moved away from these familiar scenes, but nostalgia often seemed to possess me and I returned to the place of my boyhood. I watched the residents gradually move away, looking for better schools for their children and greener pastures. I watched the homes rented and the houses slowly deteriorate. I watched the big groves in front of these old homes disappear, some being cut for lumber and others blown down by tornadoes. As farming on small farms grew unprofitable, I saw the farmland slowly grow up in scrub trees and bushes, and the big and stately trees in the wooded areas cut and sawed into lumber, with only saplings left in their place. The narrow, winding, scenic road, which held romance for me, disappeared. The modern paved highway came through, leaving the countryside unrecognizable to the former residents.

On April 15, 1959, I stood in front of the deteriorating remains of my old home place. Very little was as it used to be. The house was only a shell. The storehouse was standing but dilapidated. The pretty grove had gone. Only the spreading beech tree remained, the one that was set out by my father in front of the yard gate when the place was first settled. Most all the familiar places had vanished. The good springs and frequented fishing holes down on the creek were covered with debris and undergrowth and could hardly be reached. Nothing much was left but memories.

While I stood there reminiscing about days past and gone, an idea came to me. Why couldn’t I write a book (cognizant of the fact that I am not an author), describing in detail the mode of living and farming, the traditions and the other aspects of life in those days of few labor-saving devices, with none of the gadgets we have today? These facts are known by a few who still live. But soon these happenings will be dimmed by time and unless they are recorded will be completely erased. Our grandchildren and their children might like to look into the traditions and ways so different from their own.

OUR OLD HOME PLACE IN 1960

Farming and Homes

Our historical records tell us that the first farming in Alabama was done by Indians. I was told by my grandpa that a tract of land on the Rozelle farm, near the bend of Hatchett Creek, was the spot where the Hillabee Indian village was located. On many occasions we picked up arrows, large pieces of clay pots, and many other reminders of Indian handiwork. This was an elevated tract of land, ten or fifteen feet above the bed of the creek. We were told that the Indians, using crude tools, deadened the trees near their village in the lowlands, later planting corn and perhaps other kinds of vegetables. These, along with wild berries, fruit, and fish, provided their daily food, supplemented by various kinds of wild game.

When the territory was first