Lately I been thinkin’ too much lately…. ---David Allan Coe
Late last Saturday afternoon, just before dark on a cool, cloudless afternoon, I took one of my yellow labs and walked across Little Sandy Creek into the 30 acres of woods behind my house. I wanted to see the dogwoods, I told myself. As Spring elbows its way into the East Feliciana countryside, the dogwoods awake from their slumber like first responders called to a place of need and bloom amid the dormant thickets, their solitary colors intermittently visible through the thick brown woods. The sight is striking, as if Someone shook a paint brush here and there, smattering dots of white and pink to catch and hold the eye.
You can see a blooming dogwood hundreds of feet back into the latent woods. Lord, they are pretty…which, I feel the need to observe, is a sentiment coming from a guy who’s never been a “Hey, let’s stop and look at the flowers….” sorta fella. With these dogwoods, though, it’s as if Someone is saying: Excuse me, son…..I need your attention a sec. Just look at me. I am dawning life amid the winter’s toll. Feel me? I’m not a “hearing voices” sorta fella either, so any routine thought of wandering off into the woods to look at stuff that I usually ignore and listen to things I never hear is as foreign to me as Sanskrit. Lately, though, I haven’t really been myself and I’ve decided that some type of internal evolution might not be an entirely negative development.
So, I took whatever it is percolating under my skin into my woods for a test drive.
Liberated from her electric fence collar, Abigail bounded with delight through the scrub and into the hard woods, circling back every few minutes to see what was taking me so long to match her canter. When I never altered my pace, she seemed to understand that I wasn’t in a hurry … that I just needed to be out of sight of the world for a bit. Settling into a ranging series of circles that more or less matched my forward progress, Abby gave me some space.
We crossed my bridge over Little Sandy and walked up the old logging road that was once a winding approach to Neville Plantation, formerly situated 200 yards over my north property line on a knoll surrounded then and now by sweeping pecan trees. It burned to the ground in 1927 and presently only the pecan trees and the knoll are left, dotted ‘round with dozens of now-wild gladiolas and lilies of various types and colors.
As I walk past a deer feeder I see hidden on one of the bluffs overlooking my creek, I reflect on the history beneath my feet. Angling toward dogwoods, I meander in my mind.
The older, unmarried daughter of Neville’s owner had caused a scandal back in the days after Reconstruction by takin’ up with the Hired Man at adjacent Wildwood Plantation. Even now when the subject came up, as it still does in these parts, they say she married “beneath” herself. Apparently spurning convention (as the old story is now somewhat misty), she maybe married the Hired Man for love or maybe married him because he was her last chance. Anyway, what everyone remembers is that it was in opposition to her father’s wishes. There seemed to have been some vibrant but short-lived “family trouble” over the evolving relationship -- tension ended only by a timely passing. When the master of Neville Plantation died, she and the Hired Man moved in. The newly minted husband went from being hired help at Wildwood to the Master of Neville and the Lady of the House apparently took to planting a multitude of bulbed flowers. Untended since before Coolidge was in the White House, her plants still explode into life every spring even some 100 years later.
I always take her side in the discussions that roam around the issue down at the Port Hudson Mobil Station where I trade. She sounds like my kind of dame.
And, you can still feel her presence. Around Easter, a short hike to the old home-site is a treat. Scarlett gladiolas or white lilies and something-or-other bright yellow carpet what used to be the Neville Plantation yard. Some years before she died in 2004, I took my 81 year-old-grandmother on my 4-wheeler out to the site one Easter, just to show her. As we rode into the proliferation of color, “Babee” rattled off the names of the plants without hesitation. I regret that I’ve forgotten them now.
Of course, all of this drama took place decades after the area was decimated by the sharp fighting between General Banks’ Union Army and General Gardner’s Confederate detachment. A series of violent collisions between the armies resulted in the backing of Gardner’s vastly outnumbered rebel forces into their works at Port Hudson. In the end they were cornered along a broad semi-circle facing east, with the Mississippi River at their backs. Americans in 2 different armies fought desperately amid the stretches of these now placid woods. On the nearby Mississippi River, the Union Navy tried to run past the rebel guns on the Port Hudson bluffs and received a shellacking for their trouble. The United States battleship USS Mississippi, the vessel Commodore Mathew Perry used as his flagship when he had opened up trade with Japan, was forced aground by cannon fire and destroyed by the deadly accurate Confederate gunners.
And, I know the movie Glory proclaimed that African-American troops were first used in offensive U.S. Army operations at Fort Wagner up in the Carolinas.
Not true.
The 1st and 2nd Louisiana Native Guards were employed during the desperate assaults on the rebel fortifications here at Port Hudson a full year before the Fort Wagner attack. They were brutally and callously squandered here at Port Hudson at a place the men came to know as The Devil's Elbow…but….that, as they say, is another story.
It’s odd how all of this happened throughout my woods and over to the nearby river. Abby skitters around, chasing whatever she scares out of the undergrowth as I adjust my battered LSU hat for warmth and zip up my windbreaker. Spring isn’t fully here yet I perceive as we continue our trek up the logging road.
If you haul out my metal detector, you can quickly find civil war era bullets and mortar fragments still peppered within the soil. I have a box full of them. One of the Union soldiers shot down during the killing and left to die in these woods was buried on the plantation until after the war, when his family came and got him. John St. Paul Lanius, the 83-year-old gentleman from whom I bought my home and acreage (and who I called “Mr. John,” in the southern way), took me for a walk one day and showed me where he thought the grave had been, based upon what he'd been told as a boy, speaking about the episode as if it had all happened last summer. But, sadly, the details of this poigniant event are all lost now. I wonder idly if the plantation rebels said any words over Billy Yank as they lowered him into his initial grave in a cool, shaded hollow adjacent to Little Sandy and behind the main house. I wonder if they bowed their heads and asked God to bless his enemy, Yankee soul. Surely they must have. How peculiar that must have been, as was the rebels' marking and tending of Billy Yank's grave in the subsequent months and years, until a still-grieving family came to fetch him sometime after Appomattox.
The siege of Port Hudson lasted for months, culminating with the surrender of the beleaguered, starving Confederate position. Banks was never able to force it, but--- after Vicksburg fell--- the last fortified Confederate bastion on the river was no longer defensible. So, on the 9th of July, 1863, Gardner spiked his guns, hauled down his colors and stacked arms. The entire legth of the Mississippi River was thereafter in Federal hands. I always thought it was odd that this defender of the last Confederate position on the Mississippi –-a rebel general officer wholly devoted to The Cause--- was a New Yorker and a West Point graduate, Class of 1843. Gardner finished at The Point 4 places ahead of U.S. Grant. I have rambled for years about how I would like to do a biography of this obviously conflicted man…however…who has time for that?
As Abby and I reach my north fence line we slide out of the woods and into open pasture. The grass needs bush-hogging and the fence needs work. Between the hard winter and Hurricane Gustav last fall, there is plenty crying for attention. If I didn’t have to practice law, I could spend all my days just tending to this 30 acre patch of ground. I whistle for Abigail and we turn west along the fence and again into the woods. In the late afternoon sunlight, we find dogwoods adjacent to a small, hidden pond where the wood ducks trying to finish the day shift whistle in through the Spanish moss-laden branches, surprised to find a trespasser and his mutt mucking around their roosts. Miffed, they chatter to themselves and zip on through without stopping.
Dogwoods are small trees in general, fighting for survival here among much larger brothers. The legend is that the dainty dogwood once grew as large as the biggest oaks and that the Romans fashioned Christ’s cross of that dogwood. After that unpleasantness, however, it never grew large enough ever again to serve as crucifixion material. Thereafter, they say, its flowers appeared over time in a cross-shaped fashion, with bloodstains on the petals and nail holes on the petal ends and a crown of thorns in its center. I really don’t know about all that stuff but that’s what they claim. Legends aside, the flowers are lovely and I stare at them a long time while Abby laps water from the duck pond. I don’t really see blood and nail holes and what not, but I guess you could if you wanted to.
Which is sort of the point, I reckon.
Sometimes you can see whatever you need to see, depending upon your point of view.
I lose track of the time a little and failing light prods me to slap my leg for Abby, She hustles back from the far side of the water, gratified for some attention. In an instant she is by my side.
Come on, ole girl, I tell her, running a hand along the side of her neck. Let’s head back.
Casting a last look at the small but lovely dogwood and its pond, I wonder idly if exhausted cavalry mounts once watered here and if those troopers had been struck by the ancestors of the blooms now absorbing may attention. Did they find them incongruous amid the fighting? And, what about the lady of Neville Plantation? She obviously loved plants. What did she make of them? The battles around Port Hudson took place in the Spring. Did she collect and lay dogwoods on Billy Yank's grave? I wonder if those who come after me will stop and enjoy these first responders by this pond. How long will they grow and bloom here?
The wood ducks make another pass around the forested point, confirming my departure from their pond area so that they can finally angle at speed into their woodland and call it a day. Abby and I head again for the logging road and home, striding steadily into the glimmering last light of the retreating afternoon.
--- J.R.
Late last Saturday afternoon, just before dark on a cool, cloudless afternoon, I took one of my yellow labs and walked across Little Sandy Creek into the 30 acres of woods behind my house. I wanted to see the dogwoods, I told myself. As Spring elbows its way into the East Feliciana countryside, the dogwoods awake from their slumber like first responders called to a place of need and bloom amid the dormant thickets, their solitary colors intermittently visible through the thick brown woods. The sight is striking, as if Someone shook a paint brush here and there, smattering dots of white and pink to catch and hold the eye.
You can see a blooming dogwood hundreds of feet back into the latent woods. Lord, they are pretty…which, I feel the need to observe, is a sentiment coming from a guy who’s never been a “Hey, let’s stop and look at the flowers….” sorta fella. With these dogwoods, though, it’s as if Someone is saying: Excuse me, son…..I need your attention a sec. Just look at me. I am dawning life amid the winter’s toll. Feel me? I’m not a “hearing voices” sorta fella either, so any routine thought of wandering off into the woods to look at stuff that I usually ignore and listen to things I never hear is as foreign to me as Sanskrit. Lately, though, I haven’t really been myself and I’ve decided that some type of internal evolution might not be an entirely negative development.
So, I took whatever it is percolating under my skin into my woods for a test drive.
Liberated from her electric fence collar, Abigail bounded with delight through the scrub and into the hard woods, circling back every few minutes to see what was taking me so long to match her canter. When I never altered my pace, she seemed to understand that I wasn’t in a hurry … that I just needed to be out of sight of the world for a bit. Settling into a ranging series of circles that more or less matched my forward progress, Abby gave me some space.
We crossed my bridge over Little Sandy and walked up the old logging road that was once a winding approach to Neville Plantation, formerly situated 200 yards over my north property line on a knoll surrounded then and now by sweeping pecan trees. It burned to the ground in 1927 and presently only the pecan trees and the knoll are left, dotted ‘round with dozens of now-wild gladiolas and lilies of various types and colors.
As I walk past a deer feeder I see hidden on one of the bluffs overlooking my creek, I reflect on the history beneath my feet. Angling toward dogwoods, I meander in my mind.
The older, unmarried daughter of Neville’s owner had caused a scandal back in the days after Reconstruction by takin’ up with the Hired Man at adjacent Wildwood Plantation. Even now when the subject came up, as it still does in these parts, they say she married “beneath” herself. Apparently spurning convention (as the old story is now somewhat misty), she maybe married the Hired Man for love or maybe married him because he was her last chance. Anyway, what everyone remembers is that it was in opposition to her father’s wishes. There seemed to have been some vibrant but short-lived “family trouble” over the evolving relationship -- tension ended only by a timely passing. When the master of Neville Plantation died, she and the Hired Man moved in. The newly minted husband went from being hired help at Wildwood to the Master of Neville and the Lady of the House apparently took to planting a multitude of bulbed flowers. Untended since before Coolidge was in the White House, her plants still explode into life every spring even some 100 years later.
I always take her side in the discussions that roam around the issue down at the Port Hudson Mobil Station where I trade. She sounds like my kind of dame.
And, you can still feel her presence. Around Easter, a short hike to the old home-site is a treat. Scarlett gladiolas or white lilies and something-or-other bright yellow carpet what used to be the Neville Plantation yard. Some years before she died in 2004, I took my 81 year-old-grandmother on my 4-wheeler out to the site one Easter, just to show her. As we rode into the proliferation of color, “Babee” rattled off the names of the plants without hesitation. I regret that I’ve forgotten them now.
Of course, all of this drama took place decades after the area was decimated by the sharp fighting between General Banks’ Union Army and General Gardner’s Confederate detachment. A series of violent collisions between the armies resulted in the backing of Gardner’s vastly outnumbered rebel forces into their works at Port Hudson. In the end they were cornered along a broad semi-circle facing east, with the Mississippi River at their backs. Americans in 2 different armies fought desperately amid the stretches of these now placid woods. On the nearby Mississippi River, the Union Navy tried to run past the rebel guns on the Port Hudson bluffs and received a shellacking for their trouble. The United States battleship USS Mississippi, the vessel Commodore Mathew Perry used as his flagship when he had opened up trade with Japan, was forced aground by cannon fire and destroyed by the deadly accurate Confederate gunners.
And, I know the movie Glory proclaimed that African-American troops were first used in offensive U.S. Army operations at Fort Wagner up in the Carolinas.
Not true.
The 1st and 2nd Louisiana Native Guards were employed during the desperate assaults on the rebel fortifications here at Port Hudson a full year before the Fort Wagner attack. They were brutally and callously squandered here at Port Hudson at a place the men came to know as The Devil's Elbow…but….that, as they say, is another story.
It’s odd how all of this happened throughout my woods and over to the nearby river. Abby skitters around, chasing whatever she scares out of the undergrowth as I adjust my battered LSU hat for warmth and zip up my windbreaker. Spring isn’t fully here yet I perceive as we continue our trek up the logging road.
If you haul out my metal detector, you can quickly find civil war era bullets and mortar fragments still peppered within the soil. I have a box full of them. One of the Union soldiers shot down during the killing and left to die in these woods was buried on the plantation until after the war, when his family came and got him. John St. Paul Lanius, the 83-year-old gentleman from whom I bought my home and acreage (and who I called “Mr. John,” in the southern way), took me for a walk one day and showed me where he thought the grave had been, based upon what he'd been told as a boy, speaking about the episode as if it had all happened last summer. But, sadly, the details of this poigniant event are all lost now. I wonder idly if the plantation rebels said any words over Billy Yank as they lowered him into his initial grave in a cool, shaded hollow adjacent to Little Sandy and behind the main house. I wonder if they bowed their heads and asked God to bless his enemy, Yankee soul. Surely they must have. How peculiar that must have been, as was the rebels' marking and tending of Billy Yank's grave in the subsequent months and years, until a still-grieving family came to fetch him sometime after Appomattox.
The siege of Port Hudson lasted for months, culminating with the surrender of the beleaguered, starving Confederate position. Banks was never able to force it, but--- after Vicksburg fell--- the last fortified Confederate bastion on the river was no longer defensible. So, on the 9th of July, 1863, Gardner spiked his guns, hauled down his colors and stacked arms. The entire legth of the Mississippi River was thereafter in Federal hands. I always thought it was odd that this defender of the last Confederate position on the Mississippi –-a rebel general officer wholly devoted to The Cause--- was a New Yorker and a West Point graduate, Class of 1843. Gardner finished at The Point 4 places ahead of U.S. Grant. I have rambled for years about how I would like to do a biography of this obviously conflicted man…however…who has time for that?
As Abby and I reach my north fence line we slide out of the woods and into open pasture. The grass needs bush-hogging and the fence needs work. Between the hard winter and Hurricane Gustav last fall, there is plenty crying for attention. If I didn’t have to practice law, I could spend all my days just tending to this 30 acre patch of ground. I whistle for Abigail and we turn west along the fence and again into the woods. In the late afternoon sunlight, we find dogwoods adjacent to a small, hidden pond where the wood ducks trying to finish the day shift whistle in through the Spanish moss-laden branches, surprised to find a trespasser and his mutt mucking around their roosts. Miffed, they chatter to themselves and zip on through without stopping.
Dogwoods are small trees in general, fighting for survival here among much larger brothers. The legend is that the dainty dogwood once grew as large as the biggest oaks and that the Romans fashioned Christ’s cross of that dogwood. After that unpleasantness, however, it never grew large enough ever again to serve as crucifixion material. Thereafter, they say, its flowers appeared over time in a cross-shaped fashion, with bloodstains on the petals and nail holes on the petal ends and a crown of thorns in its center. I really don’t know about all that stuff but that’s what they claim. Legends aside, the flowers are lovely and I stare at them a long time while Abby laps water from the duck pond. I don’t really see blood and nail holes and what not, but I guess you could if you wanted to.
Which is sort of the point, I reckon.
Sometimes you can see whatever you need to see, depending upon your point of view.
I lose track of the time a little and failing light prods me to slap my leg for Abby, She hustles back from the far side of the water, gratified for some attention. In an instant she is by my side.
Come on, ole girl, I tell her, running a hand along the side of her neck. Let’s head back.
Casting a last look at the small but lovely dogwood and its pond, I wonder idly if exhausted cavalry mounts once watered here and if those troopers had been struck by the ancestors of the blooms now absorbing may attention. Did they find them incongruous amid the fighting? And, what about the lady of Neville Plantation? She obviously loved plants. What did she make of them? The battles around Port Hudson took place in the Spring. Did she collect and lay dogwoods on Billy Yank's grave? I wonder if those who come after me will stop and enjoy these first responders by this pond. How long will they grow and bloom here?
The wood ducks make another pass around the forested point, confirming my departure from their pond area so that they can finally angle at speed into their woodland and call it a day. Abby and I head again for the logging road and home, striding steadily into the glimmering last light of the retreating afternoon.
--- J.R.
Wish I was there with you and Abby now. But I'm here, and you're there, fixin' to go into your surgery. I am praying for you, JR.
ReplyDeletebruce
Brother JR:
ReplyDeleteI've been thinking about you all day, wondering how you're holding up to the doctor taking that melon scoop to your shoulder. I know they say a dog's saliva is more hygenic that a human's, but I still wouldn't let dear Abby lick your wound quite yet, at least not literally.
Todd
Prayin' and waitin' to laugh and live with you for a long long time my friend. Come see me down here soon. Love, Rafe
ReplyDeleteI've been checking and re-checking your blog all day to see how your surgery went. I'm sure it went great and you are on the mend. Great big hugs from your friend, Meg
ReplyDeleteWell, I am a little retarded in reading this post, J.R. living in the south has gave me a understanding of the war between the States...
ReplyDeleteOne day your gonna have to take off that LSU hat of your and have me over for some PAC 10 football. I will park my Explorer, with the "TROJAN" license plate right in front of your house and we will have some ribeye's as only a true Southern Gentleman from the Louisiana can prepare them.
Surf and Turk Louisiana style with crawdads, corn and potatoes. And if we are really filling gluton some andouille and red beans and rice...
After we are tired of going back and forth about you beloved kittens and my stout warriors, I hope you will take me out to this lake, if LSU doesnt have a night game.
Miss you bro,
remy