In this foreword to her son Malcolm Franklin’s Bitterweeds: Life with William Faulkner at Rowan Oak, Estelle Oldham (Franklin) Faulkner recounts her life before and wedding to her second husband, written at least five years before the publication of the book in 1977, the year of Malcolm Franklin’s death.
For those who may be interested in Malcolm’s story of his close association of William Faulkner, I, his mother, feel compelled to write an unsolicited, explanatory forward. My son has written his own preface, as well as the text with follows—I use the word “text” advisedly, because fiction—imagination and literary embellishments—is completely foreign to his factual way of thinking.
Malcolm was born in Shanghai, the son of my first husband, Judge Cornell Franklin. We also had a daughter, Victoria (called Cho-Cho by her Japanese nurse-maid, and eventually by everyone but her father), a few years older than Malcolm. We were living in Hawaii when she was born, and she was still quite a mall child when Judge Franklin decided to move to China and go into the private practice of law in this flourishing international city of the Orient. A few years later Cornell and I agreed on an amicable divorce, and I brought the two children back to Mississippi.
It is not my intention to write a biography, but I feel the necessity of establishing the fact that our divorce did in no way alienate the deep affection of my former husband’s family in Columbus bestowed upon me. Visits by both families between Columbus and Oxford became frequent, mainly, perhaps, on account of the children. The train trip from Oxford to Columbus was particularly irksome—a change, and a long wait in a town called Winona. This is how Judge Franklin’s family met, and got to know, William Faulkner so well, for Bill would often drive us over, and he was very reluctant to forgo their hospitality. Their welcome was all too sincere. “Gran” (Victoria’s and Malcolm’s Franklin-side grandmother) was a charming and admittedly romantic woman, and it was she who approved and applauded my marriage to Bill. She also unhesitatingly upbraided my father for coldly insisting that I’d married a wastrel.
All this brings me to what I’ll wager was the strangest of honeymoons—one even a novelist would hesitate to invent: the groom a bachelor, the bride a divorcee with two children, and all of us having a gay, carefree time in a tumble-down old house on the Gulf of Mexico, with a colored cook loaned to us by my first husband’s mother.
It was late afternoon, the twentieth of June, 1929. My sister, Dorothy, had gone with us to College Hill, a village several miles from Oxford where there was a beautiful old Presbyterian church and an elderly minister whom we all knew, and who gladly performed the simple ceremony. At times I’ve wondered if Dr. Hedleston welcomed us to the church and married us out of pure Godly love and understanding, or was he thumbing his nose at the Pharisaical laws imposed upon divorce by the Episcopal Church? I’ll never know the answer.
Bill and I had talked over our plans for the honey-moon at some length. A friend of his had turned over a big old beach house for our use—unrentable, because at that time Pascagoula wasn’t a fashionable Gulf resort. Victoria was in Columbus with Gan, so Bill insisted that Malcolm be picked up with all our luggage, and dropped in Columbus till we’d gotten settle in our borrowed summer home. How simple it all sounded! I had left a note with Mama about taking Malcolm with us, so I thought that all we had to do was to take Dot home, gather Mac (Malcolm, jly) and the luggage, and take off for Gran’s. She was expecting us.
Mac was still such a baby that I had a nurse for him. Ethel Ruth was a fine playmate, but couldn’t read or write, or even tell the time by a clock with Roman numerals. So when Bill steered the car into our drive way, we found the child dirty, grass-stained and generally unkempt. Bill laughed, thrust Malcolm in the car, stowed our many bags, said good-bye to Dot and headed east toward Columbus.
By then it was late afternoon. We drove as far as Tupelo, and got rooms in the only hotel. I bathed Mac and gave him supper while Bill telephoned Gan that it would be impossible to travel further that night—to expect us for dinner the next day.
Jesse L. Yancy, Jr. was a politician who served the people of Mississippi from 1956 until his death in 1970.
Born in Springville, Mississippi on Jan. 17, 1926, Yancy moved to Bruce ten years later, where his father, Jesse Lee Yancy, Sr. had established a general store. He graduated from Bruce High School in 1944, joined the Army Air Corps in 1945, and served overseas in the Pacific. He attended the University of Mississippi School of Business and School of Law, earning his J.D. in 1951. In 1952 he married Barbara Young. They had three children.
Yancy served as an attorney for the City of Bruce for 17 years. His most influential act in that capacity came in 1961, when Bruce had outgrown its fledgling infrastructure, and the city was badly in need of repairs and updates to its streets, water, and sewer systems. Yancy commandeered a grant of $25,000 for the city to hire Cook Coggin, an engineering firm in Tupelo, to conduct a survey of what repairs and improvements were needed. On completion of this study, the city secured a loan of $500,000 to fund the improvements. Yancy helped Bruce to grow into a clean, attractive town, appealing both to current and potential citizens as well as businesses and industry.
He was a president of the Bruce Rotary Club, the Bruce Chamber of Commerce, the Calhoun County Bar Association, and a founder and commander of VFW Post 5571. He served on the Pushmataha Council of the Boy Scouts of America, and taught Sunday school at the Bruce United Methodist Church.
In 1960, Yancy was elected district attorney for the Third Circuit Court District of Mississippi. During the Meredith Crisis at Ole Miss, Yancy entered the national spotlight when a Lafayette County grand jury issued an indictment against Chief United States Marshall James P. McShane, Meredith’s escort to registration at the University, for inciting a riot.
While serving as D.A., Yancy became president of the Mississippi Prosecutors Association. Elected to the Senate in 1968, during his first term Yancy, as chairman of the Senate Elections Committee, guided the state’s first Open Election Law to passage. A member of the Senate Commission on Appropriations, he wrote and gained approval for the Idle Funds Bill, which authorized the investment of in place funding for the state, a key piece of legislation that has garnered Mississippi millions of much-needed dollars for over four decades.
Craig Claiborne, a culinary icon of his day and an avatar of ours, now seems overshadowed by his contemporaries, James Beard and Julia Child. Though described by Betty Fussell as more “accessible” than the vivacious Child or jolly Beard, by comparison the enigmatic, complex Claiborne remains now more than ever a shadowy–albeit Olympian–figure.
When it boils down to it, Claiborne might best be described as the right man in the right place at the right time. His hiring as the first male food editor of a major newspaper came about as the result of crass opportunism if not (as is hinted) outright chicanery, but The New York Times provided Craig Claiborne with the preeminent platform to fulfill his mission, which one authority (McNamee) describes as nothing less than “advancing the nation’s culinary culture”.
Claiborne’s trumpet for reform in his April 1959 column “Elegance of Cuisine is on the Wane in U.S.,” came at a time when the nation was ripe for unabashedly elitist change; within a year, Jackie Kennedy, designer clothing and a French chef were in the White House. Claiborne, with lavish finesse and training he received in Switzerland, set the tone of American culinary culture.
By the mid-Sixties Claiborne had become America’s unquestioned authority on the full culinary spectrum of foods and restaurants, chefs and cookbooks His columns went directly to print. His pervasive influence extended into the Reagan administration. In retrospect, his detractors–including John and Karen Hess, who wrote the seminal The Taste of America–seem nitpickers.
Claiborne wrote and co-wrote many best-sellers, first and foremost The New York Times Cookbook, to which he acquired rights while the Times editorial board was asleep at the wheel. More significantly, while he held the pulpit, he discovered and promoted chefs as cultural and media personalities – Jacques Pépin, Alice Waters, and Paul Prudhomme among many others – helped publicize the West Coast/James Beard movement and introduced Americans to nouvelle cuisine. Claiborne also reveled in a “pan-global eclecticism”, promoting the cuisines of China, Mexico and Vietnam (during that war), among others, and lived to celebrate a resurgence of great American home cooking.
Though McDonald’s Ray Kroc and other fast-food titans have influenced America’s diet far more than Claiborne, he established food as media culture, and his sheer adventurism still informs our attitude towards food and cooking. Yet for all that, while Claiborne’s ill-advised 1982 autobiography, A Feast Made for Laughter (Henry Holt: 1983), provides copious evidence that his personal life does not bear up well under scrutiny, he remains something of a sacred cow, so I wouldn’t expect a biopic or a Netflix series any time soon.
Depending on the compendium of time it could have been Eudora Welty, Willie Morris’ grandmother, Marie Hull, James Canizaro, Mrs. Fred Sullins, Mrs. R.E. Kennington, Betty Edwards, or my mother who shared the aisles with them all.
Since around 1930, Jitney Jungle 14 has been a fixture in Jackson, Mississippi’s Belhaven neighborhood, providing food, conviviality, and a hub of small town news to those who shared its aisles on Fortification. While the Jitney served the culinary needs of a diversity of incomes and interests it was the equal servant of all. The price of eggs was always the same for everyone. This article will be primarily about Jitney 14 but in the course of its journey we will learn a few things about its famous corporation, early Jackson and two of its foremost families. Settle back, pour yourself a cup of Jungle Queen Coffee and enjoy shopping the aisles of our history at the Jitney.
There could have been no “14” if there had not been a “1”. That “1” was born April 19, 1919, the dream of three young men whose fortunes lay ahead of them in the risk and rewards of yesterday’s America where a man could fail and rise again to prominence and success with God’s help and a good plan. Such was the destiny of Judson McCarty Holman, William Henry Holman and William Bonner McCarty, the fathers of the little store where you could “Save a nickel on a quarter.”
A Bit of Family History
W.B. McCarty and Jud and Henry Holman were cousins who first operated a store together in September 1912, on the southwest corner of Adelle and Grayson (N. Lamar) Streets in north Jackson. Each of the cousins put up a third of the start-up cost. This business had relocated from a block north at the corner of Grayson and McTyere Streets which was torn down to build houses for the McCarty sub-division. That store was operated by W.B. McCarty, Sr. and Jud Holman and A.N. Brannon worked for him. It was a cash and carry store and had initially been operated by W.B. McCarty’s father W.H. McCarty and located in the 1200 block of N. West Street near Millsaps. It was called Jackson Mercantile Company, the name given to it by Mr. W.H. McCarty, its founder.
W.H. McCarty had moved his family to Jackson in 1905 after operating the McCarty Store in Hemingway, Mississippi in Carroll County. Jud Holman came to Jackson in 1907 after working in the grocery business for Greenwood Grocery in Greenwood and began work with W.H. McCarty in his Jackson Mercantile Store along with Anthony N. Brannan. W.H. McCarty died in 1909. W.H. Holman came to Jackson in 1910 and worked for Mississippi Motors in Jackson, run by Joe Coffee McCarty, bother of Will McCarty, until Holman and McCarty joined together in Jackson Mercantile. When Will McCarty and Jud Holman opened the first Jitney Jungle #6 on East Capitol Street in April 1919, W.H. Holman was in France during the end of WWI. He returned to Jackson in June 1919 and helped his two cousins proceed to convert their other stores from credit to cash and carry and self service with the Jitney Jungle name since that first self service store was doing more business than all the other five McCarty/Holman stores combined.
Mr. W.B. McCarty attended law school at Ole Miss in the early Jitney days and returned to continue with the operation and growth of the stores with his Holman cousins. His legal acumen came in handy with an early patent infringement suit which the Jitney stores won. Mr. W.B. McCarty continued to franchise grocery stores in those days in addition to being heavily involved in the chain’s wholesale and retail operations. In his later years, Mr. McCarty would continue to go to his office checking on sales volume as well as the back storeroom doors to be sure they were always locked or attended. Never would a Jitney store manager or worker leave the back door open lest a theft might occur. The Junior Food Mart convenience store company, JFM, Inc. is still in business today and operated by H. Russell McCarty. It had its beginnings in the supermarket franchising that W.B. McCarty started and W.B. McCarty, Jr. continued until his death in 2001. (1) A railroad strike in 1916, left credit customers in such a bind the founders decided to quit the credit business. Business improved and a second store was opened on South Gallatin Street and the McCarty Holman Store chain rapidly grew to seven including stores in Greenwood and Canton. (2)
The First Jitney
The first Jitney Jungle store was opened April 19, 1919 at 423 E. Capitol Street. A photo provided by Bill McCarty, III, grandson of co-founder William Bonner McCarty, shows the store’s interior as an open front surrounded by shelves alongside walls containing canned goods and other non-perishables. In the foreground was a glass case of tobacco products and sundries and in the rear a meat counter with glass bins displaying produce on beds of crushed ice. The prices were interesting. Bacon was 34¢/lb., salt jowls 15¢, veal steak 17¢, meat loaf 19¢ and baby beef roast 22¢. The manager was A.N. Brannon. (3)
How did Jitney get its name? According to Mr. Will McCarty, at the end of the First World War, returning soldiers would buy an old car for riding about town. They called it a “jitney”. The term “jitney” was slang for a London taxi cab and became jargon in the states for a nickel, the cost for a downtown cab ride.
Back when the establishments were McCarty-Holman Stores, it was the habit of Chancellor V.J. Stricker, who lived just up Adelle Street, to invite the three young merchants, who were living in a nearby boarding house, to his home for Sunday dinner. Mrs. Josephine Bailey’s boarding house at 343 Adelle, could be a dark and foreboding place. Mr. Will relates there was only one light bulb in the entire house and tenants would “borrow” it and pass it around from room to room. One Sunday the boys told the judge they were considering a strictly cash and carry business which would save the customer 20¢ on the dollar over their deliveries. Cash and carry could thus save “a nickel on a quarter.” The merchants asked Judge Stricker to suggest a new name for their stores. Since a cab ride to town cost a nickel, the term “jitney” became popular and it was customary for patrons to shop with “nickels jingling in their pockets.” Judge Stricker suggested the name “Jitney Jingle” but McCarty made a variation when he observed that a wide variation of stock in the new stores would make the store itself “look like a jungle of values.” The name stuck. (1)(2)
1920’s-30’s
Throughout the 1920’s, the owners added a number of stores, each with its own numerical designation which changed over the years. According to the 1930 Jackson City Directory, Jitneys were listed as:
No. 1 – 400 E. Capitol No. 2 – 1077 S. Gallatin No. 3 – 121 W. Pearl No. 4 – 2908 W. Capitol No. 5 – 209 S. State No. 6 – 423 E. Capitol (formerly No. 1) No. 7 – N. State and Fondren Ave. No. 8 – 412 W. Capitol No. 9 – 719 N. Gallatin (later 1209 N. State) No. 10 – 146 N. Farish No. 11 – 167 E. Capitol No. 12 – 850 W. Capitol No. 13 – 1241 N. West
This brings us to the birth of Jitney 14, which, according to the 1930 Directory, existed at that time. The listing contained the 904 E. Fortification Street address, a telephone number (9119) and a manager, Charles Alford. It is conjectured that the original store was small and became a “super store” some four years later. (4) Mrs. Betty McCarty Edwards, daughter of co-founder William B. McCarty, can remember when the new Jitney was just a hole in the ground. “My father had bought some cheap land around the Jefferson-Fortification Street corridor for investment. When the 1930 store was in its planning stage he offered to buy some fill dirt from a local vender. Mr. McCarty thought the price was too high and demurred. After a time the vendor went to him and said, ‘Just let me dump some of my dirt in that hole. No charge.’” Mrs. Edwards’s memories reflect back to when her brother (W.B. McCarty, Jr.) ran a Christmas fireworks stand as a youngster in front of one of the stores fronting Fortification. “He did well,” she said, “but would come home so cold on those December days he would question the wisdom of early entrepreneurship.
The new Super Jitney made a special point of catering to women. According to Mrs. Edwards, when you entered the store there was a platform area to the left for the ladies to sit and visit before they shopped. “There was a woman who taught knitting and the ladies would knit or read as they visited. It even had the first restroom for ladies in a Jackson grocery store. There were also chairs for children to sit in but keeping them still in those seats could be a problem.” There were “Jitney dresses” for sale at all store outlets. “They were not made by Jitney,” Mrs. Edwards says. “They were ‘house dresses’ as slacks were not in vogue at the time. They were good sellers but of course, no two were alike!”
As the business grew, however, more space was needed to display groceries and in time the ladies area was discontinued. (5)(6) Mrs. Edwards grew up in the Belhaven area living first on State Street at Manship, where the new Baptist Hospital building is being constructed, then moving with her family to St. Ann. Later the family moved to the Council Circle area. In the early years of her marriage while still living in Belhaven, Mrs. Edwards and her husband would walk to the store and shop. Few had cars during the war. She would bring home the perishables and her husband would bring the other groceries when he came home from work. (6)
The formal grand opening of “The New Super Jitney-Jungle Store” took place on Friday, November 10, 1933, when according to articles in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger of that year, “Jacksonians gave a hearty welcome to the newest addition to stores of the city Friday and Saturday when thousands of persons visited the new Super Jitney-Jungle at the corner of East Fortification and North Jefferson streets.” (7) (8) Back then 14 was known to the neighborhood as the “Big Jitney” and No. 9 on North State, the “Little Jitney”. 14’s manager was Charles Alford who got his start at the first store in 1919.
Mr. Alford brooked no sloppy doings. Clerks were dressed down for failure to dress up. Ties were compulsory. Alford, however, did have a sense of humor as related in Henry Holman, Jr.’s publication “Save a Nickel on a Quarter”. According to Alford, the store butcher waited on a customer late one Saturday evening who had come in to buy a chicken. The butcher reached into his case and brought out his last chicken. He showed it to the lady but she wanted to see a larger one. He put the chicken back in the case, bent over, moved his arms about, rattled the ice a little – as if looking for the right sized one – and ceremoniously came up with the same chicken. The customer replied with a satisfied smile: ‘Yes, that one is just fine. I’ll take them both.’” Oops! (5)
The new Super Jitney was a honey. Bill McCarty, III’s photo shows it facing two-lane Fortification with red and green awnings, tile roof and a glass front through which the shopper could see fresh fruit and vegetables displayed. The interior consisted of wooden floors, school room lighting and aisles of shelving. It contained a bakery, a refrigerated meat counter and a glass delicatessen. It became only the second grocery store in the United States and the first in Mississippi, to have air conditioning.
Its Tudor Revival style was designed by neighborhood architect Emmett Hull and contained only the grocery and the new Price Cain Drugstore at the Jefferson & Fortification corner. There was a small area for angular parking in front of the building and a loading dock and parking area around the corner on Jefferson. Belhaven was a rapidly growing neighborhood and shoppers came from throughout the area to see the new store which featured specialty items and select cuts of meat. (4)(9)
The Jitney chain had expanded rapidly throughout the “roaring twenties”, but by 1930, the Great Depression was beginning to take hold. On a typical Saturday you might drive your new $495, Ford coupe to the Jitney to shop. As you walked the aisles with your grocery basket you would notice green beans, three cans for 25¢; Wesson oil, 49¢ a quart; lemons, 12 for 20¢; cigarettes, 15¢ pack; roast beef, 19¢ lb.; bacon, 26¢ lb.; eggs, 25¢ dozen; lettuce, two heads for 15¢; sugar, 10 lbs. for 50¢; light bulbs, 20¢; fresh salmon, 29¢ lb.; mayonnaise, 29¢ pint; flour, 12 lbs. for 12¢; fryers, 35¢ lb.; Irish potatoes, 4 lb. bag, 55¢; and house coffee, 19¢ lb.
Most of these items you would carry home and place in your brand new $33.95 Ward’s refrigerator. (10) Refrigeration was just coming into play in the early 1930’s. Most people still had iceboxes. Meat was displayed in coolers on crushed ice and fresh fruits and vegetables, usually purchased from street vendors, went quickly early in the day. “Are the greens really fresh,” a housewife would keenly inquire of the store vendor in his white apron. “Yes ma’m,” he would respond. “Always.”
A trip to Jitney 14 was always a special event for the family shopper. An ad in the August 2, 1930 Clarion-Ledger announced “Your Jitney Jungle is arranged so that you can shop from front to back and from side to side without taking unnecessary steps. Your Jitney Jungle fixture arrangement not only provides a one-third more merchandise space than any other fixture plans in the world but is the most convenient. By shopping at Jitney Jungle you ‘save a nickel on a quarter’ on your grocery budget and many steps.” It was obvious these grocery stores were far ahead of their time. (11)
The 1940’s
Jitney 14 in the ’40s,photo courtesy of Bill McCarty
In 1941, Jitney Jungle 14 underwent its first expansion, enlarging eastward to include space for several small businesses. By 1942, the original grocery and adjacent drugstore had added the Beauty Lounge, Marjorie’s Shop (notions) and Snow White Cleaners. It took on the name English Village after its Tutor design. America was at war and throughout the early 1940’s, food items were scarce and rationed and neighbors pulled together and shared what they had. No one minded the sacrifice for their country and its sons overseas. On occasion there were vacancies in the store fronts and Mr. McCarty would let the Junior Red Cross use an empty space rent free to pack boxes to send to the Europeans after World War II. (4) (1)
Henry Holman, Jr. relates this story of an event at Jitney 14 during the days of food rationing. “On a certain April Fool Day, my father had one of the office force impersonate an O.P.A. investigator (rationing enforcer), who telephoned, of all people, the personable switch board operator at the store to find out why she had been getting extra sugar stamps. Since it was strawberry season, she impulsively implied it was to can strawberries – a fruit she and her family never ate! A few moments later father had the ‘investigator’ call back and say he was coming by her house that afternoon to check on her canning. Immediately she scrambled to the warehouse and bought a whole crate of strawberries, then came by to ask my straight-faced father for permission to rush home and can the fruit.” (5)
My own memories of rationing were going to the store with my mother. She would hand me a ration book with pages filled with stamps and instruct me “Billy, tear out half a sheet of tanks and a third sheet of planes.” Regardless of how much money a person had to spend, they had to produce these stamps for sugar and coffee when they were available and a host of other scarce items. Soft drinks such as Coke, Grapette soda, Orange Crush and Royal Crown Cola (twice as much drink for a “jitney”)- like bubble gum and comic books – were mostly unavailable until after war’s end in 1945. There were red meat points for steak or bacon and blue points for canned goods. Tokens, worth a fraction of a penny, were used to “make change” for sales tax. Sometimes the most respectable ladies would don an old cloth coat and slip across the Woodrow Wilson bridge off South Jefferson and into the Gold Coast where black market items such as bobby pins and local beef were available without a ration book. Few questions were asked. A lot of commerce over the years has been done “across the river”.
Jitney Jungle in the ’40s, photo courtesy of Bill McCarty
I learned to shop at Jitney 14. I used to swing on its wooden turnstiles when I didn’t weigh quite as much as I do now. I was sent down one aisle for a five cent box of salt and another for ten cents worth of baking soda. I learned the brand names of foods and how beef and poultry were weighed. I looked for cookies and ice cream cones at Cain’s and helped carry grocery bags to our neighbor’s car since we did not have one. Later on, when I was a bit older, us neighborhood kids hung out near the freight dock on Jefferson. Mr. Elliott and his staff would unload oranges and apples and lettuce and onions and throw the boxes, crates and sacks out the back door for trash pickup. The orange crates were the prize catch. Made of sturdy wood, they had a divider in the middle. We would grab a couple, take them home, stand them on end and connect them with a board. The consummate lemonade stand was born with a shelf on either side for the cash register and the lemons. Profits were spent on Hershey bars and milkshakes at the drugstore. Our mothers loved the apple crates which were used as storage boxes and ideal for new bedding plants in the spring. Of course the lemons, sugar, paper cups and straws all came from inside the store where the high lights and lesser lights came and went. All were on a mission of their own, delighting in the plethora of food and furnishings made available at war’s end. Grand times!
Us kids, however, were only familiar with the outside of the dock area. Mrs. Betty Edwards’ son Steve, who began as a bagboy at “14” knew it as an assistant store manager from the inside out. “The only unusual feature of Jitney 14,” he said, “was the tiny back room area. When the trucks came in, many of the cases of fast moving large items, such as toilet tissue or seasonal extra goods were sent by a conveyer belt to the dark cavern beneath. It was the most challenging storage room of any store in the company except the Jitney in Philadelphia, MS., regarding truck unloading, dock area and storage.” (12) Since all our readers know by now there is or was a ghost in most of Belhaven’s early digs, this one might have lived in the stock room.
Belhaven, from time to time, has been the haunts of several ghosts – most of them good. Rumor has it one lives in the water fountain at Laurel Street Park. One of these days we are going to have to look further into the adventures of these elusive creatures. Throughout the 1940’s and 50’s and into the 60’s, “the Jitney” was the neighborhood’s hub of commerce. And oh, the stories; some not always verified but all, of course, true.
One of the primary ways a young boy could make a little pocket money was to be a bag boy at a local grocery store. It didn’t pay much and was hard work, but rewarding back in the times of self-reliance and personal responsibility. Such a bagboy was Coleman Lowery who, as told by his daughter Maggie, “From the summer of 1946, when I was in the 8th grade at Bailey Junior High School, until the spring of 1951, when I graduated from Central High School, I was a package boy at Jitney 14 where Miss Eudora Welty was a regular customer.
She tipped the package boys a dime. We were making thirty cents an hour – so we fought over the ladies who tipped. Mrs. Fred Sullins and Mrs. Robert Kennington tipped a quarter! Sometimes Miss Welty did as well. “In the fall of 1951, I entered Vanderbilt University, where I graduated in 1955, and that fall in my freshman English class we read ‘Why I Live at the P.O.’ During the discussion that followed I raised my hand and said ‘I know Eudora Welty. I carried her packages at the grocery store at home.” And just to think, Miss Welty could have written “Why I shopped at Jitney 14”. (13) Perhaps someday a manuscript will be found!
Being a package boy was many a youngster’s first introduction into the business world. Both Henry Holman, Jr. and Bill McCarty, Jr. served in this capacity as they learned from the ground up the intricacies of their family business. Store manager Alford once said “All young men in Jackson should start out carrying packages for Jitney.” The Jitney Jungles back in the 1960’s published a little handbook which was given to all the newly hired boys. It began with a mission statement “The purpose of this manual is to show you in step by step fashion, what you should do to be successful in your Jitney Jungle job, and what the store needs and expects of you as one of its important employees.” (14)(5)
The manual goes on to outline instructions on neatness, promptness, making sensible decisions, care and packaging of the grocery product, courtesy and thoughtfulness and always leaving the customer with the comment “come back again and bring a friend.” It concludes “We welcome you into the organization. We hope you will like playing on the Jitney-Jungle team. The game is just beginning. We’d like to see you become a seasoned star – a veteran…you can – and will – if you do your best.” (14) What wonderful lessons for a 14-year-old boy to learn and practice. What good advice on which to enter the professional world.
Writer Willie Morris grew up in Yazoo City. He didn’t get down to Jackson often but many times when he did he visited his grandparents Mr. and Mrs. Percy Weaks who lived at 1017 N. Jefferson Street. The house left the tax rolls in 1968 and the home site has been a vacant lot since. A Tote-Sum Store once sat at the corner with Fortification with a loading area in the rear. Bill McCarty, III remembers as a child an artificial limb maker behind the Tote-Sum and several times going by with his dad at night and seeing prosthetic legs or arms reaching skyward from a pile outside. “That certainly terrified us!” Just north along the sidewalk a small, battle – scarred magnolia remains on which, according to Joanne Prichard Morris, Willie once carved his initials – but time has removed them. Willie Morris was familiar with Eudora’s Jitney. (1)(15)
Writing in his book “Homecomings” in the 1989 article A Return to Christmas Gone, the author tells of his purchase of a half dozen roses in Oxford and brought with him to the gravesites and former homes of his antecedents, the last of whom lived in Belhaven. “I retrace the Christmas journey – down Woodrow Wilson, right on North State Street past Millsaps, left on Fortification to Jefferson….My grandparents’ house is no longer there, long since a parking lot near the Jitney Jungle across the street. The magnolia is still in front, but where the house was is grim, bare asphalt, cold and wet now from the rain. ….Mamie and Percy, Maggie and Susie would be greeting us now, just beyond the magnolia where the front porch was. I close my eyes and hear their happy welcomes. Old Skip has raced beneath their feet into the house in search of turkey livers, and my great-aunts follow in their flowing black dresses.
“I stand in the parking lot where the parlor was. I feel the ripple of the lost voices. I drift back into the kitchen. Time, as one ages, is a continuum. Past and present consume themselves into the ashes. There is no good place for the last two roses. I put them on the asphalt where the dining room table was. Tomorrow someone will run over them in the parking lot. But who would disturb them today?” (16)
1960’s – 80’s
As the years approached the 1960’s, another expansion of English Village and Jitney 14 was underway. It was a massive undertaking of space increment and modernization. New businesses were Pridgens Florist, Collins Barber Shop, and the Beauty Lounge to accompany the older establishments. Cain’s had given way to Parkin’s. Other enterprises that have occupied English Village over the years included the Automatic Laundry Services (washeteria), Neal’s Barber Shop, Ben Franklin Hardware, Southern Pulmonary Clinic, the ABC Coin Laundry, the Village Inn & Pub and now Basil’s. (4) [Basil’s went out of business in early 2014, and a new restaurant, owned by Louis LaRose, is scheduled to open soon.jly] A new and enlarged parking lot was constructed to accommodate growing patronage. A major feature was a complete and enlarged bakery at the front of the store. The pungent odors of fresh bread, cookies, pies and cakes wafted through the store attracting shoppers like a magnet to the freshness and taste sensations of these delicacies.
A photo provided by Bill McCarty, III depicts modern floors and lighting, wider aisles, shelving throughout the store, frozen food cabinets, an up-to-date refrigerated meat market, two turnstiles, six efficient checkout lanes with new calculators and scales and a lunch counter near the front of the store. As a young man, Bill cut his Jitney teeth here. He tells of when he first went to work to learn the shelf stocking end of the business. “Wooden floors were under newer tile throughout the store. One of my jobs was to do shelving on the sales floor. When I stocked the orange juice, I had to put my foot beside one wheel of the cart as I loaded juice into the retail case or else the cart would roll across the aisle. This was simply the result of the wooden floor’s old age. The eastern most addition to Jitney 14, when the entrance was moved to that side from Fortification Street had concrete sub flooring throughout.
“One clear memory was the kitchen directly behind the former Fortification Street entrance where Mrs. Pitts, the deli manager, and the ladies who had cooked there for so many years used a gas burner as part of the stove to cook icings and other bakery items. I once tried to change her brand of flour but after being told that she only cooked with one brand, I went to buy that flour at the best price I could get since I knew I was not going to change her wonderful ways. Mrs. Pitts, who catered many a reception and social event with her great recipes, also had a hand in starting the development of the delicious pimento cheese still available for purchase in McDade’s deli.
Eudora Welty, photo courtesy of fanart.com
“Extra thin sliced bread was so popular we spent hours preparing it on a noisy cast iron slicing machine that was in action every time I went into the kitchen. My personal favorite was the Old Fashioned bread in the wide loaf, one of six sandwich bread items baked in the Mill Street bakery. It came in a white bag with the logo printed on it and tasted much like real homemade. During the Christmas holidays we had red and green and other colors for each holiday that followed designed to compliment party sandwiches requested by our customers. You could just about tell the holiday by the color of the bread. In addition to governors, mayors, lawyers, legislators, doctors and everyone else in town, I vividly remember Eudora Welty coming by and talking with me as I stocked shelves or ran a checkout stand. Frank Haines (former Jackson Daily News entertainment editor) asked me when we were going to get a supply of George Washington Seasoning, so I ordered some for him. One item Jitney 14 always stocked was the small glass jar of Smithfield Deviled Ham spread. I learned to love it in 1972 and special ordered it for myself until it was recently discontinued by the distributor. I remember Mrs. Noone, an elderly lady from up around Madison Street with an Australian accent who came by every day to buy Ryvita Wafers for herself and a small bag of litter and a bit of liver for her 14-year-old cat. ‘The liver had to be tender,’ she told me, ‘or my cat will not eat it.’ On occasion she returned it the next day for more tenderization.
“I recall the Jefferson Street side entrance to Parkin’s Drugstore and going in to their soda fountain as a child where I either had a banana split or chocolate malt.” (1) How many young fellows in the Belhaven neighborhood running barefoot along the hot sidewalks of summer must have done the same.”
Jitney 14 was an icon, attracting patrons from throughout the Jackson metro area and beyond. The pace was quick, the new computerized checkout stands crowded and the clerks challenged with the need for speed and accuracy. One in particular caught the attention and love of many customers: Johanna Wade. Johanna, a native of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, was a 16-year veteran of Jitney 14 when she appeared in a local newspaper article. She was a popular favorite of Jitney shoppers and as the head checker knew many on a first name basis. “I know them by name,” she told the reporter. “I know their children. I like the people. I’ve got lots of friends here in the neighborhood. They’ve always been real good to me.” This goodness came through in 1986 when her husband died. They invited her over for the holidays to relieve her loneliness and they were happy to share their family day with her. When her parents died in 1988, and she made two trips to Holland in a week, customers expressed their sympathy by helping send her. “I came back and it was all in the office- money, checks, everything.” Then store manager Sam Holley called her not only an asset to the store “but to the entire neighborhood.” Such are the rewards of a friendly smile, accommodation and knowing the rhythms of Belhaven. (17)
The 90’s
Eudora’s Jitney rolled into the 90’s with a full head of steam. The company had expanded to hundreds of stores throughout the southeastern United States. Bill McCarty III reports that “business was brisk and by 1994 the Jitney-Jungle chain had expanded to 105 stores in six states and annual sales exceeded a billion dollars. That large volume continued to produce a profit for the company through hard work and efficiency.
“Beginning in 1987, the Jitney 14 structure was completely rebuilt from the inside out with the entire building being replaced except the exterior brick facades and walls along Fortification and Jefferson Streets and the north walls and east main entrance. This preserved the historic character of brick, tile and copper exterior with big improvements to the 30,000 square foot store. The store remained open during this period and the grand reopening was October 8, 1988. Parkins Drug Store was relocated to the structure occupied by Basil’s Restaurant today.” [See note above, jly](1)
The 21st Century
Times change; new generations take over and old ways are altered by current need and circumstance. The sale of the Jitney Jungle chain was finalized in March 1996 and at that time the annual sales volume was approximately $1.2 billion. After the sale, some difficult times followed with subsequent companies. However, Greg McDade purchased the old Jitney in 2005 just before it was to be closed forever and it flourishes today at the same location. Through the 84 years Jitney-Jungle was a McCarty-Holman enterprise it was state of the art as the store remains today. Its staff was courteous and well-trained, its stock and produce of the highest quality and its reputation a solid testament to what a family business can attain with vision, hard work and careful attention to the needs of its customers. Simply put, it did the right things at the right time in the right place.
Eighty-two years after the “Big Jitney” and Price Cain’s drug store first anchored the northeast corner of Jefferson and Fortification, McDade’s Market sits proudly on the site of Jackson’s very first air-conditioned supermarket. Our neighborhood owes a great debt of gratitude to the McDades for saving our store and making it viable. Road equipment churns down the new Fortification bustling with innovative ideas and the coming aesthetics resulting from countless hours of careful planning. Twenty-first century patrons pause along the aerated bins of fresh produce and the well-trained cashiers, stockers, sackers and department managers who hustle to fill their daily needs. The world is faster now but shoppers still pause to say “good morning” and “How are things?” And the employees say the same. It remains our neighborhood grocery.
McDades Market on Fortification in a rare Jackson snowfall. (photo by Jesse Yancy)
As we shop McDade’s this Christmas season and gather together the spices and condiments of the year in anticipation of family reunited, we can reflect on Eudora’s tips to package boys and the spirit of Willie’s roses in the rain. Together they, as have we, been a part of the little store which became an exponent of the American dream as it brought its bounty to our dinner tables and conviviality to our lives. But remember also its journey. The early footsteps are stilled. The old hand-cranked adding machines have been replaced by computers. The aisles are brighter and bracketed with a plethora of universal foods, spices and specialty items. The turnstiles have given way to electronic doors. Roast beef costs a bit more than 35¢ a lb, but on sale days you can still save a nickel on a quarter. New writers and artists recreate its glorious past and its future shines like a freshly polished apple. But beneath it all, through the wooden and concrete floors clad in contemporary colors lies the ground that heard those footsteps in 1930 and above the main entrance, under the archway looking eastward into the sunrise, still stands a harbinger, a numeral that takes us from yesterday to tomorrow at Eudora’s Jitney: “14”.
Bill and Nan Harvey
Bill and Nan Harvey
Nan Ertle Harvey is a native of Yazoo County, a graduate of Mississippi College and has lived with her husband Bill in the Belhaven neighborhood since 1994. She worked in a research position in the Department of Microbiology at UMMC, retiring in 2003. Nan’s hobbies are photography, nature study and family research. She is a volunteer at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Bill Harvey is a native Jacksonian, living most of his life in Belhaven. A MSU Bulldog, he has had careers in journalism, education and as development director of the Andrew Jackson Council, Boy Scouts of America. Bill enjoys photography, music, writing articles for neighborhood sources and sharing experiences with friends at a local coffee shop. (Text copyright Bill and Nan Harvey, used by permission of Bill and Nan Harvey; photos of Jitney Jungle copyright Bill McCarty III, used by permission of Bill McCarty III)
Sources: (1) Conversations with Bill McCarty, III, Nov. 2012 [Details are from memory, family members and an April 3, 1962 interview between W.B. McCarty, Sr. and his son W.B. McCarty, Jr.] (2) “Lesson Learned from Strike Here in 1916 was Start of Jitney-Jungle organization” [Jackson Daily News, Oct. 1, 1950] (3) Jitney Jungle is Celebrating Start of 12th Year of Service [Clarion-Ledger, Oct. 12, 1930 (4) Jackson City Directory, 1930, 1916 (5) “Save a Nickel on a Quarter: The Story of the Jitney-Jungle Stores of America” [Address by William Henry Holman, Jr. to Newcomen Society in North America, Jackson, Mississippi, April 18, 1973] (6) Interview with Betty McCarty Edwards [Madison, Mississippi; Nov. 12, 2012] (7) Formal Jitney-Jungle 14 Grand Opening Invitation [Clarion-Ledger, November 10, 1933] (8) “New Super Jitney-Jungle Has auspicious Opening” [Clarion-Ledger, Nov. 12, 1933] (9) Registration Application/National Register of Historic Places/NPS – P. 74. (10) “Store with a thousand Items” [Clarion Ledger, June 26, 1930] (11) Store ad, [Jackson Clarion-Ledger, August 2, 1930] (12) Conversation with Steve Edwards [Nov. 14, 2012] (13) “Knowing Miss Welty: I was Miss Eudora’s Package Boy” – Coleman Lowery as told by his daughter Maggie [Lemuria Book Store blog, Aug. 9, 2012] (14) A Handbook for Package Boys (1960) (15) Conversation with Joanne Prichard Morris [October 31, 2012] (16) Homecomings by Willie Morris (University Press of Mississippi, 1989) (17) “Check Her Out” by Sherry Lucas [Clarion-Ledger, Feb. 7, 1994]
Special thanks to Mrs. Betty McCarty Edwards, Steve Edwards and particularly Bill McCarty, III who provided essential information and much-appreciated assistance. [This article was first published in 2014.]
Thank you for submitting your work, The Existential Tomato, to the University Press of Missitucky.
Your book received a great deal of consideration. Our assistant senior editors, Mr. Pastel and Ms. Brawn, engaged in a lively debate on whether a vegetable can be considered “existential” with Mr. Pastel contending that it’s not the vegetable itself that is existential but rather the perception of the vegetable that is of an existential nature whereupon Ms. Brawn threatened to tear the rug off his head and shove it up his ass.
Ms. Ergot, who manages most of our culinary titles, said that while The Existential Tomato does have many farm-to-table aspects, the recipes for the most part seem to be more in the grandmère à petit enfant vein, which while a valid culinary movement, is little known and even less understood in this country.
Our graphics editor, Mr. Waters, was quite enthusiastic, and prepared no less than nine prospective covers, none of which depicted anything even remotely resembling a tomato. The copy editor, Mr. Yawn, said that your writing, while crisp, clean, and incisive, not only had too many semi-colons and long dashes, but was also peppered with such unfamiliar words as “macerate”.
While lucid, amusing, and informative of the state of mankind in the early 21st century, The Existential Tomato does not meet our criteria at the time.
Calhoun County provides north Mississippi with a bucolic idyll between the burgeoning metro areas of Tupelo and Grenada. The Skuna and Yalobusha Rivers run east to west through Calhoun at equal distance into the Yazoo via the Tallahatchie, so geographically the county is divided into thirds. The land is typical of north central Mississippi: wooded hills creased by swampy bottoms.
Given the proximity to Oxford, the county provides a model (if not original) of Yoknapatawpha, but the county seat, Pittsboro, arguably the smallest county seat in the state, is a sleepy village, much the opposite of Faulkner’s bustling Jefferson. Pittsboro sits atop a ridge of hills that marks the southern edge of the Skuna River valley. To the south, the land slopes in a more leisurely manner to the Yalobusha just south of Vardaman, Derma, and Calhoun City.
Jo Brans is a member of the Reid family, who have lived in Pittsboro for time out of mind. Brans’ writings have explored many subjects, most in a much more scholarly vein, but Feast Here Awhile is a thoughtful examination of the changes in American cuisine from the 50s to the 90s. Feast Here Awhile (the title, by the way, is taken from Shakespeare’s Pericles, I,iv,107) is the story of her own culinary coming of age that takes her from the gentle hills of north Mississippi to Belhaven College in Jackson (which was strictly for young ladies until the year after she graduated, in 1955), to various locations in Texas, Minnesota and, finally, New York City as well as through two marriages, one to an American journalist, the other to a Dutch academic.
Brans moves from her mother’s kitchen through college cafeterias, Texas eateries and European fare on to DeNiro’s TriBeCa Grill. She also moves through (predictably, since the book has a pronounced literary bent) Child, Beard, and Rosso, managing to mention Proust, Welty, and Kerouac on the way. Indeed, Brans is somewhat of a compulsive name-dropper, both of the famous and the near-famous, but I was infinitely proud of her for managing to squeeze in Ernie Mickler and his wonderful White Trash Cooking.
In short, Feast Here Awhile is a personal encapsulation of the American culinary experience in the second half of the twentieth century, and a compelling read from any standpoint. It helps, of course, to be up on the literature, culinary and otherwise, but Brans is an excellent writer and rarely boring. I would recommend this book for any Southerner interested in food and cooking, more specifically Mississippians of that bent and particularly the good people of Calhoun County itself.
In preparation for this article on her, I attempted to get in touch with Brans for an interview, but countless attempts to discover her publisher or literary agent failed. Finally my friend Michelle Hudson, who heads up the reference department at the Welty Library asked, “Have you tried the phone book?”
Well, no. Sure enough, in minutes Michelle gave me a number to call. When I did, early on a Saturday evening, a polite young man answered the phone and said he’d pass my message on to Jo. Within an hour Ms. Brans called. After making sure I was from Calhoun County (that didn’t take long at all) we chatted. She said she’d think about my request and let me know. Some three days later, she replied:
Dear Jesse,
After serious reflection, I have decided that the project you propose is not for me. I enjoyed writing Feast Here Awhile. I am pleased to find that it has found favor with readers, including, especially, you. Many folks, over the years since its publication, have looked me up (“on purpose,” as we Southerners say) to offer thanks and to relate their own pleasures at the table. I would have had material for several sequels.
But no, I thought, and think, not. Essentially I have said in Feast what I have to say about the changes in American eating over the last five or six decades. It’s all there, from the joys of good home cooking and the family dinner table to the more complicated pleasures of Julia Child and those whom she terrified, taught, and liberated–usually all three–and beyond.
Feast Here Awhile is also a personal odyssey, if that’s not too highfaluting a term for just growing up. I ate my way from childhood in a small Southern town through various stops along the road to life in New York City, and recorded the trip, hit or miss, in “The Food Book,” which became Feast. Though food was the focus, I was always aware as I typed away that I was recording the arc of my own life. No news for either of us there: that’s what writers do.
Jesse, I’m flattered that you want to work with me, but don’t be content to retread. I really like your piece about Sambo Mockbee and I suspect, from our brief communication, that you want to be a writer, not an editor. If I’m right, cut loose. My way in was food. Maybe yours is food, too, but your food, not mine. Find your own way in. Tell your story. And send me a copy when the book comes out. Good luck and God bless, Jo Brans
Banner is a hamlet in Calhoun County some three miles north of Bruce, Mississippi. In 1975, Tom Yancy, a junior at Bruce High School, wrote a letter to Eudora Welty, who responded.
In March, 2017, Joan Didion published the notes of her jaunt forty-eight years ago through Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi in a slender book, South and West (Knopf). We’ll take a much more in-depth look at the book in a later entry, but first let’s focus on the passage in which Didion meets with the legendary “Voice of the Rebels” Stan Torgerson, in Torgerson’s home town of Meridian, Mississippi.
Bear in mind as you read that the month is June, the year is 1970. Nixon is in the White House for his first term. The nation as a whole is in a somewhat less turbulent mode after the riotous Sixties, but no section is more complacent than the South, where the key word had become progress. This passage is in essence an examination of the ongoing homogenization of the South as seem through the eyes of a transplant from the upper Midwest (Torgerson) and told to a visitor from California.
At times Torgerson sounds like a one-man chamber of commerce espousing racial harmony, social equality and industrialization. When Stan says, “We’re not as inbred as we used to be” he’s referring not (necessarily) to genetics but instead to the influx of people and ideas from outside the South; when he says “we don’t wear crinolines any more” he’s telling Didion that Old South is gone. But though he says, “If there were elm trees hanging over the street it would be very midwestern,” as they drive through residential Meridian, the issues of race and poverty he discusses are those of the South.
This section from Didion’s work appears here in its entirety not only for the more compelling reason that it needs to be read in toto to grasp its exhaustive effect on Didion and to understand more fully Didion’s comments in context—particularly the last line—but also on a somewhat sentimental level because those many of you–as I do–remain familiar with Torgerson’s voice from his 17 years on air with Ole Miss sports might recollect his voice in the cadences of the quoted passages.
When I called Stan Torgerson for lunch at his radio station, WQIC, and asked him the best place to lunch, he said Weidmann’s, “but it wouldn’t win any Holiday Magazine awards.” In fact it had, and was not a bad restaurant, but everyone in Mississippi begins on the defensive. “I’ll be the biggest man in a green shirt to come through the door,” he advised me. He was, at lunch, wary at first. He said he didn’t think I knew what I was doing. I agreed. He refused drink, saying he wasn’t in New York City. Stan Torgerson came out of the cold North (Minnesota, I think) and headed to Memphis, where he went into broadcasting. He worked in Miami, and then, for a year, in San Diego, living in La Jolla. He felt ill at ease in La Jolla—his neighbors kept to themselves, had their own interests—and he wanted to get back south. His son had won a football scholarship to Ole Miss. He was worried about his children and drugs in California. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I just haven’t reached the point where I think pot is a way of life.”
When the black radio station in Meridian came up for sale he bought it. He also broadcasts the Ole Miss games, something he began doing when he was in Memphis. “That’s right,” he said, “I own the ethnic station, WQIC. In its thirteenth year of serving the black community here.” He programs gospel and soul, and reaches 180,000 in several Mississippi and Alabama counties, the thirty-second largest black market in the country, sixty miles in all directions and forty-three percent of that area is black. We serve a major black market, program soul music and gospel music, but what does that mean? A month ago in Billboard there was a survey pointing out that the Top 40-format stations are playing basically soul. Jackson 5 with ‘ABC.’ ‘Turn Back the Hands of Time,’ that’s Top 40 but it’s soul. Once in a while we throw in some blue-eyed soul, like Dusty Springfield with ’Son of a Preacher Man.’ We don’t play rock because our people don’t dig it. We don’t play your underground groups like the Jefferson Airplane . .. We have goodly reason to believe that ten to fifteen percent of our audience is white; some of the phone calls we get in the afternoon for dedications, they’re definitely white voices. We get thirty-six percent of the audience.”
He said I was probably wondering why he came back to Mississippi. “I came because I dearly love this state. I have a son—he’ll be a senior this fall—playing football at the University of Mississippi.”
He pointed out that Meridian was timber country, hill country. Pulpwood is the backbone of the agricultural product. He pointed out how progressive Meridian was: its three new hospitals. “In most southern cities there is a much stronger tendency to old-line money . . . Southern retailers stayed in business privately, home-owned, until very recently. In most cases the retailer has just begun to feel the competition from the chains. There’s the greatest business opportunity in the country right here in the South . . . We don’t have a McDonald’s in a city of almost fifty thousand people, don’t have any of these franchises here yet. You give one corner of one intersection in Jackson, Mississippi, or you give me the whole ball of wax right here in Meridian, I’d take the whole ball of wax and I’d put a McDonald’s on one corner, a Burger Chef on the other, a Shoney’s Po’ Boy (sic! jly) ‘cross the street . . . “
His voice kept on, weaving ever higher flights of economic possibility. “There is and must be,” he said, a “continued turning to the South by industry. The climate is certainly one reason. Another is that the South wants industry and is willing to give a tax advantage to get it. Another, of course, is that there is a relatively low level of unionism in the South. Lockheed assembles tail sections here and ships them to California for assembly . . .
“Atlanta is the magic city for the young around here, across the whole social spectrum . . . The great migration out in the past ten years has been black, they get these glowing letters, and of course they’ve got relatively liberal welfare programs in some of the northern states . . . No doubt, too, there appears to be greater opportunity in the North.”
More on the progressive nature of Meridian: “Our radio station has probably got as fine a list of blue-chip clients as any in town, black or not. We’ve got all four banks, and anyone in retailing who’s interested in doing business with the black—the black’s dollar is very important. The minimum wage was probably the most important thing to happen along these lines, and then food stamps were a good dead, I would say they added millions of dollars to the economy.”
“We are in a transitional phase. There’s a tremendous push to education on the part of young blacks. The schools here are completely integrated. Of course, neither you not I can change the older black, the forty-year old, his life patterns are settled.”
“Ole Miss has its standards to keep up. As more and more blacks get an educational advantage, you’ll see blacks at Ole Miss. There’s a feeling among some black leaders that because these kids have not had advantages they should get some kind of educational break, but basically what has to happen is the standards have to stay up and the people come up to meet them.”
We were driving through town at night, and Stan Torgerson interrupted himself to point out the post office. “There’s the post office, the courthouse where the famous Philadelphia trials were held, the trials for the so-called Philadelphia deaths.”
“If there were elm trees hanging over the street it would be very midwestern,” Stan observed as we drove through the residential district. He pointed out his $29,500 house, a two-story frame, “twenty-eight hundred square feet, with magnolia, dogwood and pecan trees.” He pointed out Poplar Drive the “Park Avenue of Meridian, Mississippi, all the houses built by the old-line families.”
Fervently, he kept reverting to the wholesomeness of life in Meridian. His daughter, who would be a high school senior in the fall, had “her sports, her outdoor activities, her swimming. It’s a quiet, pacific type of living, which is one of the reasons I wanted to come back down here. The kids are taught to say ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am.’ I know it’s very fashionable to poke fun at the South, but I’ll pit our slum area any day against the slum areas where the Cubans and Puerto Ricans live in Miami, Florida, and Miami’ll lose.”
Meridian is the largest city between Jackson and Birmingham, and there is a naval base there which means a great deal to the community. At apartment buildings largely inhabited by the navy there are cars with plates from all over the country.
Some random social observations from Stan Torgerson included: most of the local children go to college within the state, at Ole Miss or Mississippi (sic jly): the other country club, built with federal money, has a membership which includes “assistant managers of stores and some navy people’: most of the subdivisions in Meridian feature “custom houses.” Torgerson paused dramatically, to emphasize the versatility of the new blood in town: “A fabric store.”
I asked if some of the children did not leave, and he allowed that some did. “Nothing here for the kid with an engineering degree. And of course the girls go where they marry. Southern girls are notoriously husband hunting, but I guess that’s the same anywhere.” It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?
Torgerson was would up now, and I could not stop his peroration. “There’s been a great metamorphosis in recent years in the South, the Volkswagen dealership for example comparable in size to anything you’ll find anywhere.”
“The KKK which used to be a major factor in this community isn’t a factor anymore, both the membership and the influence have diminished, and I cannot think of any place where the black is denied entrance, with the possible exception of private clubs. We don’t have any antagonistic-type black leaders working against racial harmony. Since the advent of black pride, black power, there is a little tendency to be self-segregating. On our station, we have a program we call Adventures in Black History to point out the contributions black people have made—a black minister does it. I have blacks working in the WAIC Soul Shop, and there’s a black druggist here, a man eminently qualified, who is a local boy who went north and came back, received his training at the University of Illinois. We have a certain degree of black business, including this gas station here, which is owned by a black. The key is racial harmony, and education, and we’ll try to provide our people with both, ‘cause we’re gonna live together a long time. Every major retailer hires black clerks, Sears has a couple of black department heads, there’s a black business college here, and a black and white Careen Training Institute.
“Of course we have transplants, too, new ideas, like any other hybrid we’re generally stronger. We’re not nearly as inbred as we used to be. We’ve been withdrawn in this part of the South for many, many years, but we’ve become more aggressive, and as people come in they’ve helped us become more aggressive—we don’t wear crinolines anymore, no we don’t.”
“And about our politics, well, George Wallace got a lot of votes in Indiana, let’s face it. I’m not saying I’m going to have a black minister come home to dinner tonight, ‘cause I’m not. But things are changing. I had a man the other day, owns an appliance store, he never believed you could send a black repairman into somebody’s house. Now he can’t find a white … He asks me if I know a black man who makes a good appearance. That’s progress . . .”
Of course, there’s a tremendous lack of skilled blacks, and the problem is training and education. It’s no longer a matter of lack of opportunity, it’s a matter of lack of skills. We’re still two generations from full equality, but so are they in Chicago, in Detroit, and have you ever been in Harlem?”
Glazed by the two hours in which this man in the green shirt had laid Meridian out before us as an entrepreneur’s dream, a Shoney’s Po’ Boy (!) on every corner and progress everywhere, even at the country club, I dropped him off and drove through the still-deserted streets of the downtown. A few black women were on the streets and they carried umbrellas against the sun. It was almost five o’clock. In the middle of 22nd Avenue, the main street of Meridian, there was a man holding a shotgun. He had on a pink shirt and a golfing cap, and in one ear there was a hearing aid. He raised the shotgun and shot toward the roof of a building several times.
I stopped the car and watched him a while, then approached him. “What are you shooting at?” I asked.
“Pi-eagins,” he said cheerfully.
In this one demented afternoon Mississippi lost much of its power to astonish me.
In north Mississippi, where the Father of Waters skirts the final foothills of the Appalachians, the land undulates mile upon mile between river bottoms and wooded ridges, the sun is strong, and in December a weary green lingers in the woods and roadsides. There I spent my childhood. While not rich by any means, most of my family was well off when few were, but my father Jess Jr. made no bones about being a child of the Depression. He remembered the grinding hardships of his youth and sought to make better of his remaining time for us and for others.
Our lavish Thanksgiving comprised an overture to Christmas. Soon after, my mother Barbara filled the house with glowing towers of glazed glass jars, papier-mâché crèche figurines, and ornaments light as air hung with shining ribbons. Her trees took days to decorate; among her most memorable was a loblolly pine draped in angel hair studded by tiny blue lights and hung with glittering glass ornaments. Garlands of smilax, holly, and magnolia adorned mantles and lintels, bowls of walnuts, almonds and pecans, oranges, tangerines and hard candy topped the tables, and on the hearth stood a bucket of dried pine cones to start the open fires where we roasted peanuts and made popcorn in a long-handled pan.
Barbara provided a groaning board. What she didn’t cook herself, she shared food friends and relatives brought for her table: ambrosia from Aunt Gay, bread-and-butter pickles from Ruby Zane, tea cakes from Aunt Leila, peanut brittle from Betty Edwards, pecan divinity from Ora Crocker, or a coconut cake from Zara Arrington. A splendid cook, Barbara spent days on the Christmas feast, making pans of chicken and dressing, baking turkeys, a hams, and yeast rolls, candying sweet potatoes, and stuffing dozens of eggs. This largess was there for all who called, and our doors were always open.
Above anyone I’ve ever known my father Jess loved Christmas, threw himself completely and unreservedly into the essence of the season and drew everyone he knew along in his wide wake. He was the Spirit of Christmas Present, bigger than life, colorful, jovial, generous and gregarious. For him, Christmas was to be celebrated with everyone in that world he called his own.
By the first week of the month, Jess had set his plans in motion, beginning with a party at the community building at the city park on the south side of town where local bands provided music for dancing (an activity widely frowned-upon at the time) and the local blue laws banning liquor were casually set aside while he pumped his friends for contributions to fund his Christmas expedition. After the party, he would make a trip to Tupelo to the Lady Lee outlet store, where he would buy boxes of firecrackers and bottle rockets, huge sacks of Tootsie Rolls, cinnamon candies, peppermint sticks, and butterscotch rounds. From there we’d head to Cockrell Banana Company where he’d buy crates of oranges, apples, and tangerines.
These he brought home where they were put in a spare bedroom, and in the days before Christmas my brother Tom, sister Cindy and I along with a cadre of neighborhood children would sort them out and stuff them into small paper sacks, staple the tops together and pile them into boxes. On Christmas Eve, we’d pile into a car, at best a station wagon commandeered from a neighbor, at worst a ’65 Mustang convertible, and we’d drive across the tracks.
Jess wore a Santa suit, and Barbara would dress us children as elves. He once drafted his brother-in-law Jim to play Santa while he sauntered alongside laughing and greeting, often setting up visits to his law offices off the town Square. When we first rolled across the railroad tracks, we collected a troop of children flanking our route, shouting and jumping, reaching out to catch the sacks of candy, fruit, and fireworks. Jess would make sure that those children who were too shy to come to the car received their share, and he would often walk into homes where he knew of special need bearing a ham or an envelope with money.
Jess was in his glory then, doing what he felt was the most important thing he did all year. His career in public service gave him an opportunity to help many people, but seeing the eyes of these children for whom his visit was the only Christmas many if not most of them would have gave him a sense of wholeness that few men are afforded. His largess, his sense of noblesse oblige, was untainted by any shadow of arrogance; he remembered the deprivations of his own childhood and sought to ameliorate those of others.
Now I am an old man with quiet holidays, but the living memories of childhood resonate. In dull Decembers, my father’s gifts shine on.
First published in the Calhoun County Journal Dec. 20, 1984, this memoir of my father, Jesse L. Yancy, Jr., was written fourteen years after his death by his friend and political partner, Sellers Gale Denley. Jess Jr. was a remarkable man in a difficult time, colorful, vibrant, and generous, his life a vision of community, unity, and compassion.
If there was ever a man who loved Christmas, it was the late Sen. Jesse Yancy of Bruce. The word “loved” is used advisedly. For there are those who might be said to “enjoy” Christmas, “respect” Christmas, “anticipate” Christmas, etc., but Jesse loved Christmas. His enthusiasm might have been regarded as extreme; except that was the way Jesse was about most things. He worked hard. Then he played hard. More than likely this approach to life was a primary cause of his untimely death on Aug. 26, 1970, at the age of 44, from a massive heart attack. Prior to assuming the senate post he served as district attorney of the third circuit court district for eight years and was city attorney in Bruce for 17 years. So it wasn’t unusual that the new city library was named in his honor.
And the way that Jesse launched the Christmas season was not particularly unique or unusual, either. It began with a big party with his friends at the Bruce community building. Funds were solicited for a live band and a case or so of assorted spirits and goodies, with a few dollars left over for another project. You see, Jesse had a secret Christmas vice. He liked to dress up in a funny red suit, hide his face behind a mask of white whiskers and, on Christmas Eve, visit the area in South Bruce where most black citizens lived.
Before each of these visits his automobile was filled with candy, nuts, fruit, toys and firecrackers. In the early 1960s it was all the Christmas some of the children had. The ritual started in the ’50s when he dressed up to play Santa for his own children. His family decided he should also go see the children of the black woman who worked for them. His appearance was an immediate hit. It was the Christmas of 1960, when I started helping him with the project, that he said he realized back then on his first trip that most of the black children had never really seen Santa Claus. So it became an annual event, growing in scope each year, to make the Christmas Eve appearance. The addition of toys and other goodies was a part of the evolution. The project was financed with any excess funds from the party, plus contributions from several of us who usually helped, with Jesse taking up the slack. It started each year with several trips to area wholesalers to purchase the large volume of goodies needed for some 250 to 350 children.
The bounty would be hauled in and the Yancy children—Cindy, Tom and Lee, often assisted by cousins Bill and Bob Cooper—and others would assemble individual sacks. Then, on Christmas Eve, Jesse would put on his Santa suit, we would load up a vehicle or two—the most memorable and utilitarian being a dark green Mustang convertible— and begin the appointed rounds. There must have been a lookout, for as soon as the first vehicle crossed the railroad tracks, which marked the boundary of the black community, several young boys would take over the lead position. With wide-eyed excitement they would precede the caravan down Murphree Street shouting: “Here he comes. Here comes Santa. Here he comes.” And for the next hour or so Jesse would be in his Christmas glory.
He handed out presents to those close by while keeping an eye out for those too shy to come up to him, so he could seek them out later. He knew quite a few of them by name. And almost all of the parents knew Jesse and whispered their thanks. But if the children knew him they didn’t let on. And neither did they let on if they sometimes got a whiff of the Old Charter Santa and his helpers found useful in warding off the cold and other miseries.
The custom died with Jesse. The party lasted another year or two, and some of us talked about continuing the Santa Claus visit. But, we rationalized, it was 1970 and the children were being encouraged to visit Santa on the Square, sponsored by the city as a part of the Lion’s Club Christmas parade. So we didn’t. It has been 35 years, but every Christmas about this time I begin to get a little bit anxious. Like you feel when you know there is something you probably need to do. Like you feel when you know there is something you probably will never get to do again.
It has been suggested that one can sometimes recapture the spirit of Christmases-past by recording remembrances. I am confident that Jesse would overlook my indiscretion in writing about it now.
Jess Jr. (left) with his brother-in-law Jim Young as Santa.
