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Before meeting Gertrude Moreland at Schumpert Sanitorium in 1918 and twice after their marriage, Dr. Pou went to the jungles of South America to help build a railroad through what was at that time unmapped territory. Two groups of railroad workers had preceded Dr. Pou's first trip and never returned, though the shrunken heads of one group were found on poles at the end of the tracks, and I can remember finding some of them in Granddaddy's desk and playing with them as a child. Working on a railroad far from civilization and thousands of miles from home attracted many colorful characters, some of whom were probably responsible for the disappearance of the first two building parties via starting wars with the natives. In Dr. Pou's party, "Rat" Bean and Jim Wade slipped away from camp many times to capture and torture Indians to learn the secret location of lost Inca gold.
In addition to treating the tropical diseases, snake bites, work-related injuries and other health problems of the workers, your great-grandfather's job included health treatment for any native tribes encountered by the building party. The railroad executives figured that goodwill health care would keep the natives pacified so that they wouldn't decapitate or eat the railroad building crews, and so Granddaddy spent a lot of time in primitive villages, both using his 20th century techniques to help cure their ills and learning about traditional tribal remedies from the tribal shamans. In one friendship ritual, he had to sit in a muddy village with the whole tribe at a social gathering, drinking a beer made by the old women of the tribe. Rather than just shoo them out of the village when they became too old for hard labor, as did many neighboring tribes, this particular group had the toothless crones sit for hours each day and chew raw corn to a mushy pulp, then spit it into a large earthenware pot. This, after a couple of weeks fermenting time, was their tribal beer. Like some pretzels with that?
Among other plants useful for medical practice, the natives introduced him
to a fruit related to the persimmon, the high alum (a contracting or puckering
agent) content of which made it useful in closing wounds. Granddaddy dried and
ground these plants and used them as an ingredient in a feminine hygiene product
he made and distributed to the natives, and no tribe ever attacked the train
after realizing that it was their only source for what is still today marketed
in the Deep South as "Jim Wade's Douche Powder." He also helped them build water
pipes from bamboo for sanitation and irrigation. Prior to his arrival, many
of the tribes along the Amazon simply left a hole in the floor of their huts,
which were built on pillars on the river bank, dropped all household waste through
the hole, and waited for the annual floods to carry it away. For Indians and
those of European descent, he improved treatment for malaria by showing them
how to distill quinine in a more potent form from readily available cinchona
bark rather than wait for costly shipments from the coast.
These adventurous trips into the jungle were made in order to make as much money
as possible in a short time. Dr. Pou was the eldest of fourteen children (including
Aunt Gracie from Scotland, adopted to keep the only girl born to the family
company) on a farm near Oxford, Mississippi, and, as a teenager, he made a deal
with his father. His father said that he could pay for only one child to go
to college and medical school, but that he would send him if he would then use
the money he could earn as a doctor to send all of his brothers and sisters
through college. With this obligation as well as the expenses of making a home
and life for his own family, Dr. Pou had to take the highest paying job he could
find, even if it was extremely dangerous.
He fulfilled his obligation to his father, educating Budd, Bonn, Walter, Perce, Rex, Gracie, and those whose names I don't recall, as well as his own children, Johnette, Jack, Helen and Millie. His wife, Gertrude, stopped working at the hospital just before having Johnette in 1919, though she accompanied Dr. Pou (which is what she always called him, by the way ... never "John" or anything) on house calls through the mid-1930s.
When the parents were gone, the children were cared for by Einez and Brother.
Einez worked for the Pous through about 1964, and her grandson, Johnny, was
a childhood playmate of mine. One day, Johnny and I looked up from Aunt Johnette's
swimming pool to find the whole fence (one of those tall, wooden, Fort Apache
things) lined with neighborhood kids, who were highly upset about a black boy
being in a Broadmoor swimming pool. Uncle Pete came out and helpfully showed
us a large bag of coral which he had bought for his rock garden, suggesting
that we aim particularly for the cracker children's eyes.
At some shadowy point during the '40s, Brother was replaced by Penn West, a small, ill-postured, very black man with blue gums and later, as he was able to afford them, a growing number of gold teeth. Every Saturday morning at dawn, Penn would walk about six miles from his shotgun house in Bossier City to 1030 E. Kings Highway to work in the yard. Every Saturday afternoon at about 4pm, Granddaddy or Johnette or somebody would drive him halfway home, dropping him with his paycheck at his request outside a liquor store. We often heard rumors that Penn was a fearsome character in his neighborhood, with a straight razor in his sock that everyone knew he would cut people with without hesitation, but we never saw any of that side of him.
Your great aunt, Millie Pou, lived in New York 1956-1994, sharing apartments and houses with her best friend, Phyllis Bothwell, a Rhode Islander by birth, who first came South to visit in 1962. When the car from the airport pulled up at 1030 E. Kings Highway, there was Penn, cutting the grass in a Citadel cadet's uniform he'd bought at the Salvation Army, looking to the untrained, Yankee eye as if this was the livery he always wore when working for the white folks in that columned, neo-Grecian home. That picture made quite an impression on Phyllis, but the best was yet to come, as both Penn and Judge, his counterpart who worked for Johnette and Pete, shut off their lawnmowers and ran over to the car shouting, "Xmas gif'! Xmas gif'!" It had to be explained to Phyllis that they were reminding everyone that having visitors made it a special day, one on which tips might be in order.
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