A Place to Be

“We all jus’ prisoners of the earth, Mistah Bud, mostly jus’ trying to get along in the place where we’re at. Now, I ain’t saying this here is the best place they is anywhere on this earth, but it’s where I be now, and I make do.”

The man who said these words was Felix Johnson, a huge black man that worked on my grandfather’s farm. He was not a philosopher, just a laborer who sweated with me in the sweltering summer peanut picking season. It was his response to a question I had asked, not so much for wisdom but in an attempt to break the silence that hung heavy between us that day.

It was late August, 1963, the summer of my senior year at the university. We were sitting together in the dust, drinking the last of the sweet iced tea, sucking the sugar off of the ice cubes. Our backs rested upon the peanut combine while the setting sun cast a shadowed orange haze over the bone-dry landscape. The stripped field lay silent in the dusty brown windrows of desiccated peanut vines. Nothing moved. Our day’s work done.

I was 21, contemplating my life’s options—he was 35, living his. I had asked, “Felix, do you think people know what they want out of life, the place they want to be?” He spat. A long arc of brown snuff juice sliced the air, and the powdery dust swelled and rose where it landed, then settled again. He said, “Well, I reckon folks think they know what they wants, but it seems to me they generally don’t know. They jus’ trying to find how to get on in the place where they’re at.” He sat motionless, statuesque.

We worked together for another couple of weeks until the last peanut had been picked. We cleaned the equipment, oiled and greased its bearings and rollers, replaced its missing roller tines and stored it for the winter in the barn. Felix returned to his regular farm chores, and I returned to my place in Athens to conclude what would be the final year of my “higher” education. Different lives, different places, but a common fate of making the most of the respective places where we found ourselves at the time. What choice did we have?

Felix was named after my grandfather. He lived alone “on the place” in one of the many tenant houses scattered around the large farm. It was built in the late 1880’s and lay down a dark, sandy lane in a grove of water oaks. In the yard of his place “free-range” chickens scratched for seeds and grubs in the sandy loam. Two dogs usually lay languid in their hollowed-out dusty places beneath the porch.

Nothing remains in this place today, the forest having reclaimed its own. Except for a few scraps of wood, moldy and rotten, lying in the shadow of a stone chimney, still standing stately and blackened from fires of the past, little intimates that life once existed here. Strange, how it remains in my memory, with Felix standing stoic, iconic, on his porch when I arrived to pick him up, and where he retreated when I had returned him at day’s end. He had no wheels, just an antique Ford tractor, the red markings nearly rusted from the fenders. Occasionally I would see him riding the old mule…he made do.

My places changed often in those ambitious years after college and the past was subsumed by the present. On a visit “home” for Thanksgiving a few years later I learned that Felix had found an affinity for strong drink and had been killed in a knife fight in one of the bars down in “the quarters.” These obscure places were winked-at by the local law, realizing that farm life often got boring and there needed to be places to find relief. Unfortunately, Felix chose the wrong place at the wrong time, or the wrong woman, his choices sending him to his final resting place.

A lot has happened since those days. I’ve often thought about this “sense of place”-- a place, or places-- where we can “be” who and what we are at the time. Often we ourselves, unknowingly, define a place to others, even as others, like a favorite bank teller, or mechanic, or waitress, define their own environs to us. The old, the familiar, the comfortable speak to a fundamental need of some sense of permanence in a transient, changing and reinventing world.

Places often define us. We adapt, their milieu molding us subliminally in ways we never anticipated or realized. Once in my hometown church I was accosted by two elderly ladies. “We hardly recognized you since you were ‘out of place’. Your place was the back right, and you were in the front left.” I thanked them for reminding me of this lapse of memory but assured them that God had approved of the move. “Praise the Lord,” they said in unison. Some things never change.

It seems a fair statement that humans like to complete circles, reconcile them in their minds so as to move on in life. In September, 2004, some 41 years later, the last of our family farm was sold to another farmer. It was once over 11,000 acres and had been in our family since the late 1880’s, having been acquired partially by lottery and by private sale. Imagine, farming such a spread with mules and men…my great grandpa must have wanted a job mighty bad! Yet five generations were nurtured and fed by this farm. It seemed a sacrilege to have sold it.

Later that year, in November, my mother was laid to rest in the family plot in the city cemetery. The day was cold as the mourners huddled together closely with the casket flower sprays under canopy of the small, white tent over the grave. The farewell service was short, what more can be said at a grave? The crowd dispersed and left at a respectful pace…graves are no place to linger for long. Another circle had been completed, and everyone there knew there’d be more circles concluded in that place soon. The family retreated to the Methodist church for the remainder of casseroles and ham and fried chicken the “church ladies” had generously prepared. They would soon be off to their own places. I left the food and the family and took a final drive to close a circle of my own.

I eased the car off of the still-dirt road into the edge of a field that was no longer ours. It was the same field Felix and I had sat in on that hot August day, 1963. I wandered into that deserted plot, the dust swirling with every step, leaving a gray, powdery haze atop the smooth, shiny leather of my city shoes. Eerie, I thought. Nothing had changed in 41 years. It lay silently, just as it had in my youth, except for one thing: Ghosts of the past, of former days in that very place, were still there.

Slowly I stepped further into that field, strangely out of place in a blue funeral suit, anticipating something unknown. The composting brown stubble of another year’s peanut harvest was scattered about and littered the field. It issued forth a rank stench like mold and mildew in its decomposition. Small birds gleaned the peanut remnants. When startled, they flew up wildly into the wind, soared a few feet and lit again. Memories of another time began to live again in that place. As in my youth, I picked up and flung to nowhere small pebbles of limestone chips and assorted round stones from a Paleolithic age.

The American Indians have a saying that one’s ghost remains restless and present until the person is buried properly. A funeral was necessary here this afternoon.

But there were no visible graves there, only the sameness of the place lying fallow in the wind and heat and cold, waiting for the return of the mechanical torture of the plow and combine. That place rested now, but in a few months it would again be alive with green shoots of another year’s crop. Another family would toil, sweat, be nurtured and fed by the miracle of that dust upon which I walked. And walked for one last and final time.

I had come here for a conclusion, a reconciliation of an episode in my youth. As I strolled from that field a chipped arrowhead of flint lay exposed, chiseled by a Creek Indian ages ago. It rested peacefully, undisturbed for years, in its own place among the dust. I stooped, retrieved it and rubbed it on my pants. It reflected the late afternoon sunlight, brilliantly exposing another man’s efforts…a man who had also nurtured and fed a family in this place in a time so long ago. It was out of place in my hand, so I tossed it back where I found it. Grave robbery is not my occupation.

Whose field is this, I asked aloud to the wind? It whispered, “Why, it’s every-man’s field for a time, yours as well as theirs, a usufruct to everyone who are and have been prisoners of the earth.”

Leaving that place I crossed the short, barbed wire fence back into the road’s edge. I glanced over my shoulder one last time. On the far edge of that forlorn field they stood, Felix and the Indian, returning my glance. What could I do but smile and wave? I did. The field smiled back as the wind swirled the dust, and as evanescent as they appeared, their ghosts faded forever into the dark woods of another place. They were finally free to move on, and so was I. A memory had been re-lived and a circle had closed.

Some memories of my youth found peace that day in that place. Yet there were more fields to walk, and a few more ghosts to bury while time was still available. But in my heart I knew that the dust of another place was ultimately in my future…but not for now.

Driving away I thought, as prisoners of the earth, we have little choice but to move on, yet with the imperative of contributing something, even as small as sweat or an arrowhead, to the places we find ourselves while we can. While we can.

Bud Hearn
September 10, 2009