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Dear Caelan,
It has been eleven years since I saw the family in Shreveport, and I've been thinking about some of the features of my childhood home; some of the things I'll see and experience again when I visit there in January. High up on the list is my mother's tree, a particular live oak that grows almost straight out from the steep red clay bank of Twelve Mile Bayou. She went there when she wanted to be alone while she was growing up across the street from the bayou at 1030 E. Kings Highway. I spent time there myself while growing up at 108 Adger, right next door to 1030 E. Kings Highway and across the street from 1034 E. Kings Highway, where Aunt Johnette and Uncle Pete lived in another house built on the two arpents of land bought in 1930 by your great-grandfather, Dr. John Gray Pou.
Along about a quarter of its length, Twelve Mile Bayou is a public park, and so the tree is in little danger of being lost to developers. One day, it may die of old age, be hit by lightning, or fall into the bayou because of its own weight if the bank erodes extensively. If none of these things happen, that tree will be there for you if you ever need it. "What good is a weird tree in Louisiana?" you may ask during faddish cynical phases of life.
Well, in my experience, that tree is a great perch from which to watch the ducks, turtles and frogs that live in the bayou. You can't just concentrate on them and ignore everything else in the world, you see, because of the other creatures that live there, including alligators (not intentionally mean, but unpredictable and, living in a city park as they do, with a keen taste for puppy, especially around the holidays) and Old Charlie, the gar.
Many times, walking along the bayou or across it on fallen logs, I have seen ducks put their heads underwater to feed and come up with no heads, thanks to Old Charlie, who was reported by elderly fishermen in my youth to be about seventy years old and twelve feet long. Around thirty inches of this length were devoted to his thin snout full of needle-sharp teeth. I never hooked him myself, but saw plenty of evidence of him, what with headless ducks, white geese swimming in spreading circles of red on one remaining leg after having the other amputated by Old Charlie's jaws, etc. Between him and the alligators, it was best to have a safe perch like my mother's tree from which to watch the more mellow denizens of the bayou.
Sometimes, at night, the alligators would cross E. Kings Highway and eat all of the goldfish out of your great-grandmother's fishpond. If the sun came up before they could get back across the street to doze hidden away in the shade, they would just keep on going across the yard and hide under my house at 108 Adger. Several times as a child, I went out to play in the sandbox, only to be frightened back indoors by the grunting of a large, grouchy alligator. I'd tell Edwina, who had a large share in raising me, about the problem and she'd call the dog pound, employees of which received special, highly scientific training in handling just this sort of situation. About 45 minutes after receiving the call, two guys in khaki outfits and straw hats would ride up in a pickup truck, upend their Falstaff beer cans, then walk into the backyard with ropes, lasso the alligator and drag it back across my grandmother's yard, where she was likely to whack it with a broom a couple of times for eating her goldfish, and take it back over to the bayou.
Those goldfish may have been glad to end it all, actually. They, like Mike the bird dog and the cats, Mama, Tommy and Wampus, lived on a steady diet of table scraps. The fishpond was coated inches deep in a scum of bacon grease, mashed butter beans, corn bread and peach pie. It wasn't that the goldfish wouldn't eat that stuff ... Closely related to catfish and first bred in medieval China as an aquacultured foodfish, goldfish will eat anything, including goldfish ... but just that there was so much of it, and that bacon grease and fishpond water don't mix.
Grease ... Your great-grandmother had to replace kitchen clocks twice each year after clogging them with grease, and I've seen flour stuck to the ceiling after her sifting, shaken loose eventually by the explosions of unmarked, poorly sealed Mason jars of fermenting preserves in the pantry down the hall. So the fish, cats and dog all ate the same table scraps, plentiful but stereotypically Southern, always containing food from the family garden and farm. We had walnuts, pecans, beehive honey, pomegranates, peaches, pears, figs, muscadine grapes(one day, you will come across a jazz tune called "Muskrat Ramble" which was originally named "Muscat Ramble" after a Prohibition-era black entertainment district in Shreveport called "Muscat Hill" after the grape arbors from which came muscatel wine), tomatoes, bell peppers, crab apples, corn, cantaloupes, snap beans, lettuce, cabbage and cayenne peppers in the yard. There were also chickens in one of the outbuildings up until the early '50s, and your great-grandmother's pet Hereford cow, Mabel lived there 1936-1938. At the farm, there were up to 100 cows and 50 hogs, and Dr. Pou hunted occasionally, mainly for the wild pigs that had escaped from the farm or were descendants of those who had.
In just three generations in the wild, pigs will revert far enough from the farmyard to have tusks, and the best way to hunt them was to climb a tree with a gun and wait for them to come down the path. One did not wish to be on the ground if one of these creatures decided to charge. Granddaddy hunted partially for sport, partially for meat, and partially to get rid of these creatures that rooted and tore up large stretches of his farm and crops when they got the urge.
The farm was named "Shackville" after Shack, a black man who looked after it for a time in the '20s and '30s. Unfortunately, Granddaddy found out one day that Shack had been stealing and selling his cows. They say that Shack and his family starved to death after he was fired and evicted from the farm. I don't want to believe that my grandfather, a doctor who delivered 50,000 babies and accomplished many other things based on the Hippocratic Oath, would let a family starve, but those things happened in the segregated, Calvinist Deep South during the Depression.
Broadmoor, the Shreveport neighborhood where I grew up, was first cleared and populated around 1930. By 1936, when Aunt Millie was born and my grandparents brought Mabel the cow to town from Shackville for fresh milk, it was turning into a real neighborhood. One neighbor, Mr. Ockley, did not care to have a cow next door, even if she did come when my grandmother called her, and he complained to Mrs. Pou about it. She told my grandfather about the complaint, and he went next door with his medical bag and a crowbar from the trunk of his Packard, picked Mr. Ockley up and hooked his collar on the fence, broke his arm with the crowbar, set the broken arm and pinned a bill for the housecall to his shirt, then went back home. Mabel stayed in town for two years, then went back to the farm, to return eventually as steaks, roasts, etc. for the deep freezer.
The neighbors generally left the Pous alone, and sometimes regretted it when they did not. The family had a great capacity for doing what it wanted to do. One day around 1930, a long, black Packard limousine pulled up in the driveway with two motorcycle policemen as escorts. Out stepped Governor Hughie P. Long, our country's answer to Mussolini, to ask Dr. Pou if he would serve as State Coroner. Hughie Long needed a cooperative doctor in that office to cover up politically motivated murders. Neither doctors or anyone else refused Hughie Long very often because they knew that he might have them murdered. Dr. Pou, however, told the Governor that he did not like his politics, did not like him as a person, and did not like his presence on his property.
In the same years, Mrs. Pou, formerly Gertrude Moreland, who had gone from her family farm in Claiborne Parish to nursing school along with her sisters, Ruby, Zelma, Doris, and Lilla Mae (though not Edna or brother Drew) was attacked by an eagle while hanging laundry on the line. Broadmoor was a neighborhood, but still pretty far from being urban. The eagle dove at her again and again, sharp talons outstretched to rend and stab, but the former nurse, more than a match for German spies in her youth, killed it with a wet towel. Everyone was proud and the incident was probably reported on the society page in the Shreveport newspaper.
The Ku Klux Klan didn't care much for Dr. Pou, because he treated black patients. In those days, Southern blacks were not allowed to become doctors, yet white doctors customarily did not treat them. Hospital care, usually in a separate wing or basement room with separate but unequal treatment was available in extreme cases, but that was all most Southern blacks could ever expect. They received more from Dr. Pou, who, unlike the majority of men of all colors and in all regions of the country, was too self confident to need inferiors. When word reached the Ku Klux Klan that a white doctor was treating black patients, even making house calls when the patients felt that such medical service was needed, they tried to put a stop to it. Late one night, a dozen riders in bedsheet cloaks and pillow case masks trotted into the front yard at 1030 E. Kings Highway and began erecting a cross under one of the pecan trees. Before they could get it lit, though, a shotgun blast rang out, and they found themselves pelted with pecans from the tree into which Dr. Pou had fired and with much cursing and threatening from the porch, where, shotgun in one hand and pistol in the other, growling dog at his side, your great-grandfather had no intention of changing his ways for any mob of hooded hoodlums. The Klansmen left in a hurry.
These pages describe the delusions, fantasies &