Columbus Freepress - November 7th 2013 Nov 7 2013 | Page 21

One foot rooted in the South
By John Petric

T

It got easier as the school year wore on.
And I’ve never held this against those fine
southern people. Because frankly, the more
my family got to know Alabamians, the
more we liked ‘em. None of them cussed.
None of them used the ‘n’ word (my father
did). Few of them drank. Everybody went to
church. Genteel to the max. And eventually we did consider them fine people. And
became quite fond of them.
The men were soft-spoken and gentle;
the women were proper but kind, sincerely
kind. The little rituals breaking us in aside,
they really did want to show us southern
hospitality.
It’s the only place in the entire world I saw
this: when Mrs. Geiger picked us and her
kids up after school, she’d say hi to every
passing car coming her way. No, really. A
smile and kind of a breathy, “Hah.” I was
fascinated.
So I was seven, figuring out how to survive
in this strange, humid place, in a school
which had no library, only a handful of
books on southern heroes printed in the
1920s languishing on one of two shelves
next to my desk. Andrew Jackson, Jim
Bowie, Davy Crockett and J.E.B. Stuart
became my heroes. I hated what happened at
the Alamo.
But for me, growing up with a woods, a
creek and a mountain behind our house was
a dream come true. In the northern ‘bama
pine forest there was freedom--no adult
supervision, just tree houses, forts, pine cone
battles and perfecting our rebel yells were

the order of the day.
The weather was decent year-round and
mum’s plants started blooming in February.
Pa and I hunted arrowheads on the weekends with his work colleagues, nearly all
ex-WWII vets--a couple Normandy paratroopers and a couple Pacific Marines. I was
in the company of giants, walking cotton,
tobacco and corn fields looking for Cherokee and Creek Indian artifacts and finding
them, bags of ‘em, while hearing war stories
fighting the Nazis and Japs. I was in heaven.
Southern men make great soldiers.
We hunted arrowheads on high ground
near rivers, from George to Mississippi,
through Alabama and southern Tennessee.
You will never meet a white boy whose
walked more cotton fields than I. I saw
sharecroppers and snakes, poverty and
mansions. I fired pistols on lunch breaks and
saw more backwoods southern country than
Sherman, a previous Yankee interloper.
I was sad to leave my tree house and
friends, the sweet soft smell of southern pine
forests.
When I started getting serious about music, I eventually realized Elvis couldn’t’ve
come from Cleveland; Booker T. and the
MG’s could only have happened in Memphis; Hank Williams Sr. had to start out in
Butler County, Alabama, and then meet
Rufus Payne, a black street performer in
Georgiana who became perhaps his biggest
influence. And of course the re-channeled
Southern Baptist hell fire of Jerry Lee
Lewis. Southern men are passionate, their

“NOW MORE THAN EVER”

hanks to a
southern mother
and time spent as a boy growing up in the
heart of Dixie, I have a devotion to the
region. This, I think, helped me understand
the fertile cultural and emotional soil from
which the rock ‘n’ roll and soul music
revolutions sprang. Maybe, maybe not. But
I like to think so. Southerners are not like
Northerners.
Margaret Yates was born beautiful, stayed
that way her whole life and had a whole
lotta soul if not a whole lotta education.
Second eldest of 11 kids, she grew up
in Richmond, Virginia, during the Great
Depression, dirt-poor and left-handed, two
things the tender mercies shown by the
Catholic nuns never changed though they
left painful memories from the trying.
But that part, as they say, is another story. I
was my mother’s son.
We moved around the country a few times.
Dad was an up-and-coming steel company
manager frequently promoted and transferred. Which is how I came to live in northern Alabama for a few precious boyhood
years, Gadsden, to be exact.
We were pegged for civil rights workers
at first, it being the early ‘60s and with Ohio
license plates on our ‘63 blue Mercury. The
first day after school at Eura Brown kids
threw dirt clods on the street in front of the
car to express their rebel disdain for us Yankee carpetbaggers. Strangely, I didn’t take
it personally. I was already used to hostility
from a new neighborhood.
Once I explained to ‘em during recess
the next day I hated black people as much
as they did, they relaxed a bit. I didn’t of
course, but I wanted to play kickball. I was
in. Whatever. I was seven years old and
navigating my way through the churning
changing waters of the Deep South--though
I didn’t know it at the time, obviously.
What did give me fright was having to
participate in early morning Bible readings.
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