Tales from Alabama

Stories of Barbara’s colorful Southern relatives.

More Wild Things

The Death of Lat Conerly

Lat figured that if Dr. Bedsole thought he could make it up the stairs, he would.

MY GRANDFATHER, who grew up in Alabama in the 1880’s, was named William Latson Conerly, but everyone called him Lat. He had a brother named Otho Samfort Conerly. Everyone called him Bill. No reasons ever given, just Lat and Bill. Lat was an upstanding figure in the community, married to a schoolteacher and known as a reliable worker at the local lumber mill. His brother Bill was famed for his skills at hunting and fishing but was a bit of a reprobate who drank, gambled, and frequented establishments where those activities were encouraged.

Lat had rheumatic heart disease. Rarely seen in America these days, it’s generally caused by a tangled thread of germs, poverty, and genetics. Even today it remains a bit mysterious to researchers. Back in Lat’s day, it was greatly feared, sometimes survivable, often fatal. His case was initially mild enough that he made it to age fifty and fathered five children.

Then his symptoms grew worse. The main heart chamber of his heart strained with the difficulty of trying to pump blood from his lungs to the rest of his body. He became short of breath on any uphill climb. Grandfather Lat shrugged it off for a while but finally, on an afternoon in 1931, he decided to visit the town’s revered doctor, Dr. Bedsole.

Dr. Bedsole’s office was on the second floor of a building that was a nice flat walk a few blocks from the house Lat had built for his family ten years earlier. Lat knew he could make the walk easily, but doubted he could climb the stairs. Once at their base, he flagged down a passing child and asked him to run upstairs and tell Dr. Bedsole to please come down. The child was instructed to say that “Mr. William Latson Conerly needs him. He’s down on the street and can’t come up the stairs.” The child did.

Dr. Bedsole was having a busy day and only half heard the boy’s recitation. What stood out to him was the name “William Conerly,” which he assumed meant Bill Conerly, my grandfather’s brother. Bill’s drinking often resulted in injuries that the doctor had to repair, and on this day, Dr. Bedsole had had enough. “You tell that man if he wants to see me, he can come up those stairs himself!” he said.

Hearing this reply, my grandfather figured that if Dr. Bedsole thought he could make it up the stairs, then maybe he could. He gathered himself together and climbed. At the very top, Lat grew lightheaded and stumbled into the office. Probably the diseased cords that tethered his mitral valve finally snapped. Dr. Bedsole, horrified at the gray face of his friend, helped him onto the couch. He did what could, but Lat died the next day.

My mother, who was nine at the time, said Dr. Bedsole never forgave himself. He became a kind of substitute father to her. With his encouragement, she went on to medical school and became a doctor, an uncommon fate for little Alabama girls growing up fatherless in the Depression.

Now I am old and thinking about this history. My mitral valve isn’t working right and my echocardiogram hints that one of its leaflets may be flapping unnaturally, as if no longer properly tethered. I want Dr. Bedsole to come down those stairs and fix me, at last.

Lat Conerly’s funeral

“These people can’t sit here. Take them outside and bring the white folks in.”

MY MOTHER DIDN’T tell us many stories about her childhood, except to make it clear that we kids Had It Easy and she’d Had It Hard. As she aged, however, a previously hidden memory would sometimes surface.

When she was in her seventies, Mother had a stroke. I went to her home in Alabama to look after her and brought along an audio tape of To Kill A Mockingbird. My mother had never met the author, Harper Lee, but had often claimed a kind of regional ownership of her, as they’d both grown up in small Alabama towns about 30 miles apart and Harper was just a few years younger. Mother loved the book and hadn’t read it in decades, so I was able to convince her to listen to it with me. The fact that it had been a bestseller and a Pulitzer prize winner added further gloss to the deal.

We listened over coffee in her living room, occasionally stopping the tape to discuss the book. She reminded me again of the similarity between Harper’s hometown of Monroeville and her own town of Jackson. But as the tape rolled, what struck me was the uncanny resemblance between the character of Scout and my mother’s childhood self—little girls from single-parent households who noticed a lot but didn’t understand large chunks of their world, kids often left on their own yet encouraged to be bold and self-reliant.

During a silent moment as I switched to the next tape, Mother suddenly started talking about her father, Lat Conerly, who died when she was about Scout’s age. His death in 1931, during the Great Depression, was unexpected. He’d been in his early fifties and was thought to be a healthy man. He was also the sole breadwinner for his wife and five children.

The funeral took place in the family home. Though mourners had begun to gather in the yard, my grandmother had shut herself up in the bedroom and wasn’t talking to anyone. The house was in disarray and the children scattered. The aunts and uncles— and there were many—had gathered chairs from various households. Nobody appeared to be in charge.

My mother, aged nine, looked around for signs of what to do. The problem that seized her mind was that of the mourners outside and the empty chairs inside. She could help! She could show her father’s friends to their seats. And who knew her father’s friends better than she did? He’d taken her to the lumber mill where he worked and introduced her to Jubal and Booker. He’d taken her fishing and made sure his pal Davis brought the bait worms. He even took her with him when his friend Whit was sick and together they’d brought his family the medicine he’d needed.

She went out into the swept dirt yard and began to lead people in. Listening to my now elderly mother talk, I had no doubt that even as a young girl, she’d been a person sure of how to proceed. Jubal and Booker, hats in hands, sat down rather nervously. Whit and his wife seemed to resist her directions for a moment, but then followed as well. Only Davis Clemens seemed to come without question, but then hesitated when she indicated the seat between Whit and Jubal. Davis bent down low and hissed: “Claire! These people can’t sit here. Take them back outside and bring the white folks in.”

This directive baffled my mother. She’d merely been trying to seat her father’s friends first. But suddenly the rest of the aunts and the uncles descended and her daddy’s friends with dark skin were outside and her daddy’s friends with white skin were inside, sitting on the borrowed chairs.

Mother couldn’t remember many other details. She couldn’t remember whether there was music, or who spoke, or how long it lasted. What endured was her conviction that her father would have approved of her seating arrangements.

Mother solves a math problem

“I’ll be giving you a B. I simply don’t give A’s to women.”

MY MOTHER WAS TAUGHT to be ambitious. She was raised in Depression-era Alabama in a dirt-poor household run by a powerful matriarch who urged her to aim high. And my mother always wanted to be a doctor, even though there were few women doctors at that time and fewer still from poor families. She told me that her earliest childhood memory involved talking a little friend into swallowing a dose of cod liver oil. She was the “doctor” who administered the medicine. I doubt this made her a popular playmate.

In high school she worked part time to save money for college. She found a small, low-cost school in Birmingham near her Aunt Lois’s house, where she lived to save on room and board. She got a job as a secretary in the college administration office to pay for tuition and books and the bus.

In school, she worked hard to make her mother proud. She kept an A average, which was required for a scholarship to medical school. Things were going well… until she took the calculus course.

The course was well-known for being tough, but that wasn’t the problem. She scored near the top of the class and assumed she’d get top marks. But one day towards the end of the semester the professor asked her to stay after class to discuss “a little problem” with her grade.

“You’ve gotten A’s on all your homework assignments,” he began. “You’ve scored above ninety percent on all your tests and quizzes and I’m sure you’ll do well on your final exam, too.

“So you’ll probably expect to get an A in this class,” he continued, “but you won’t get one. I’ll be giving you a B. I simply don’t give A’s to women.”

He looked at her. She looked back at him.

He then went on at some length about why he didn’t give A’s to women. My mother sat quietly, listening. With this teacher, she’d learned to “listen” just as surely as she’d learned the calculus he taught. It was simply another form of calculus. She continued listening until he ran out of steam. She assumed a serious and thoughtful look on her face and nodded.

“I understand,” she said. “You’re the teacher and you make the policies here in your class.” She told him how she appreciated his candor and his willingness to meet with her before school was over.

“I have no problem with how you grade your other women students,” she said. “But I want you to give me an A. I deserve it.” She folded her hands in her lap and looked at him with a gentle smile.

A stunned silence ensued. This math professor who’d had so much to say a minute earlier was drawing a blank. He’d clearly expected a different response and was nonplussed by the one he’d gotten instead.

“That’s all I want. I want you to give me an A because I deserve it,” she repeated.

When she told me this story decades later, she stopped there, as if that was the end of it. “So what happened?” I demanded.

“Oh, he gave me an A all right.”

“But he kept giving other women B’s? That’s terrible!” I said. My feminist hackles were up. I thought she should have stood up for the other women.

Later I reconsidered my indignation. It was 1941. She was a twenty-year-old woman whose future livelihood was determined by people like her math professor. She did what she needed to do. She’d gotten her A, and ultimately an M.D. from Washington University Medical School.

W.T. repels the raccoons

Turns out they’d been saving up their own pee all summer.

MY MOTHER ALREADY HAD many friends in Alabama when she moved back there in the mid-1970’s. Then she made new ones. She quickly got to know her neighbors, well aware that life in the country depends on knowing folks. With frequent hurricanes off the Gulf of Mexico, it’s vital to be on good terms with the local roofer. Calling on a neighbor with a tractor is helpful if you’re looking to expand your tomato patch. Being friendly with the daughter-in-law of a certain judge can come in handy in all manner of situations.

One of her new friends was W.T. Purvis, a local landowner whose family was long established in the county. W.T. was known to be little crotchety and always up to some scheme or another. He could afford single-malt scotch, but preferred homemade liquor. He had friends who went shooting in Texas at exotic animal ranches, but he preferred Alabama game. He was surrounded by good ole boys with the latest thing in trucks, rifles, and gun racks, but he liked pickups with a lot of mileage and weapons that were time-tested.

One day when I was visiting from California, W.T. stopped by to see my mother, accompanied by his friend, Doc Dearmon. Doc was not an actual doctor. He was given his nickname for feats no longer remembered by anyone, including Doc himself. I was in my early thirties. W.T. and Doc were both near seventy.

After some coffee and sharing of local gossip, W.T. and Doc said they’d best be off. They had an errand out in the woods, something having to do with the upcoming deer hunting season. Mother spoke right up and asked if they would please take her ignorant daughter along for a lesson in local hunting practices. I wasn’t sure what she meant but was generally up for an Alabama adventure.

We crammed into the cab of W.T.’s pickup along with all manner of equipment, food wrappers, and general debris. In the back were half-dozen oil drums with lids. They looked pretty heavy, which was good because the truck needed some ballast on the dirt roads W.T. favored. As we bumped and rocked our way across the county, W.T. and Doc pointed out local sights and said what happened where, though I couldn’t always tell if what happened was last week or back in 1947.

Finally, we stopped in a corn field surrounded by brush and a six-foot-high wire fence draped with feed sacks. The fence, I learned, protected their corn from deer right up until the first day of deer hunting season, when they’d take down the wire fencing and wait in a nearby blind. This was illegal, but no one in the county seemed to care.

Unfortunately, this defense was no use against the raccoons who filled the nearby woods and laughed at fences. Raccoons could strip a cornfield like this in an evening and still be home for the ten o’clock news. But W.T. and Doc knew how to repel raccoons, and that turned out to be the purpose of our excursion.

They took down all the feed sacks on the fence and brought them back to the pickup. Then they opened up the oil drums and suddenly a rancid stench filled the air, burning my nose and eyes. “What the world is that?” I asked. Turns out they’d been saving up their own pee all summer. Like me, raccoons are repelled by the smell of fermented human urine. The two friends dunked the feed sacks in this foul liquid and re-draped them over the fence, working methodically to make sure no length of wire was uncovered. “Everthin’s good for somethin’,” W.T. said.

Feisty

Beech was a good ole boy who knew how to wheedle or even bully when needed.

“AH MUST TELL YOU what I said to Mr. Beech last week,” my mother said. “That man thought he was such a smart fella, but you know how they are down here.” At the time, she was seventy-five years old. I’d traveled from California to visit her in southern Alabama, a place so swamp-ridden that a gas station attendant in Birmingham once told a friend who asked for directions, “Oh son, you don’t wanna go there. The gators will get ya.” Although she had lived elsewhere much of her life, my mother was born and raised in southern Alabama and returned there in retirement.

Some years after she returned, she was chosen to chair of the committee that ran the county library. The county needed a bigger library and had the means to build one, thanks to a large legacy from my mother’s sister and husband. It was considered only natural that she should oversee the erection of the expanded library, though her qualifications were scanty. She had no special knowledge of libraries, architecture, or construction.

But local people knew she was a keen judge of people and a good organizer. They called her “feisty”—sometimes meaning she was a pain in the neck, which she certainly could be, though they were also paying tribute to her toughness, her refusal to be underestimated. They knew she was smart, dedicated, and had raised additional funds for the building. And she found people with expertise in libraries, architecture, and construction to advise her. She hired Mr. Beech to build it.

He turned out to be a capable contractor. “You wouldn’t believe the problems we’ve had. Cost overruns, delays with building supplies, and that trouble with the soil on the southwest corner,” mother said. But Beech was an experienced good ole boy who knew how to wheedle or even bully when needed. He was also the swaggering type. Many people had a high opinion of him, but his was even higher.

“Oh, Ah know he’s good at his job. But he thinks Ah don’t know what Ah’m doin, just because Ah don’t lay bricks for a livin,” she said. “That man is too big for his britches.” Still, she treated him with the consideration he was due and claimed to have kept her opinion of him to herself. (Knowing my mother, that part of the story sounded dubious.)

When the building was nearing completion, my mother led the board of directors on a walk-through, along with a few others knowledgeable in the building trades. They inspected the whole place, noting minor deficits and problems. She didn’t invite the contractor, figuring he couldn’t tolerate much criticism of his work. Instead, she reviewed their recommendations with him the next day.

“Ah kept it businesslike. Just gave him the punch list and went over it.” She said that she was respectful but firm. He agreed to follow up on the entire list, but clearly thought she was a crotchety old bag and needed to be put in her place. “Miz Ramsey, if I do each and every one of these things, will everybody be happy?”

She ignored his sarcasm. “Ah told him, ‘Mr. Beech, in my experience, there is almost no situation in which everybody is happy.’

“And he says, ‘Well, Miz Ramsey, last night when I had sex, everybody was happy.’ Then he grinned lakh a fool.” Mother paused for effect. “So Ah asked him, Ah said Oh really. Were you masturbatin?”

“That shut him up real good,” she said.

Boots and the thongs

“You can’t expect us to wear granny panties.”

HER REAL FIRST NAME was something southern and multiple, like Betty May or Lula Belle, but no one ever called her that, not even her own mother. Boots was just Boots. She had a maiden name, then she took her first husband’s name, and finally she married Irwin Misrok and that was that. Boots Misrok.

I knew Boots through my mother who met her through a land deal, a time-honored way of meeting people in Alabama. My parents sold a small piece of their land to Boots’ mom, making them neighbors. That was reason enough for Boots to stop by to see my mom when she stopped by to see her mom. Soon enough, she was stopping by to see my mother more often than she saw her own. Boots and my mother were both unconventional, both smart and mouthy, and they became fast friends.

As a young woman, Boots began working in the small textile industry in southwest Alabama where the Tombigbee River heads south to meet the Alabama River. It was nothing on the scale of the old textile towns in Massachusetts and New York, but nonetheless vital to the state’s economy. Boots worked her way up through the ranks at a clothing plant, from seamstress to supervisor to manager. In the head office, she met Irwin. He owned the factory but Boots ran it.

Irwin had a winning smile and a nice car and thought the world of Boots. After she split from her first husband, Irwin proposed, but on the condition that she convert to Judaism. She met with a reluctant rabbi and charmed the yarmulke off him inside of twenty minutes. After that, she was never seen without a star of David around her neck. Her steadfastly Baptist family accepted the deal.

Boots was broad minded, shrewd, and keen to learn. She was also knockdown gorgeous, easily the most glamorous woman from Choctaw County to the Gulf of Mexico. She could dress up like a New Orleans Mardi Gras queen when need be or dress down to Ellie Mae Clampett as required.

She could also be surprisingly naive. Despite her sophistication, she was largely unfamiliar with the world beyond southern Alabama. With her first husband she had a son whose favorite book was the story of a baby elephant named Bimbo—a Dumbo knockoff. Boots thought her little son resembled the cartoon elephant, with his big ears and the ambling way he walked, so she started calling him Bimbo. The name stuck. Boots had no idea what the word “bimbo” meant until her son found out in high school. By then, it was too late. Hundreds of people across three counties knew him as Bimbo, and Bimbo he remained. He went on to local prominence as the owner of a catfish camp, an eating establishment that specialized in fried seafood, hush puppies, and guys in XXL overalls. You can guess what it was called.

BOOTS ALSO HAD a younger daughter, Pia, who couldn’t have been less like Bimbo. She left Alabama after high school, married an American entrepreneur of some kind, and moved to Indonesia where she ran a party-planning business for expats. Pia never was fond of southwest Alabama, but she did like her mom and the beach, so they met frequently over the years on the Gulf Coast. Pia had two daughters who looked forward to their visits with grandma. They loved her way of talking, her outrageous stories (an Alabama clothing factory can be crammed with intrigue), and their Uncle Bimbo. They were even happy to spend some of their vacation time north of the Gulf, past Mobile, up Highway 17, to Boots’ house in Yarbo. They’d stay in her guest room and hang out with various colorful relatives.

In the late 1990’s when the granddaughters were in their teens, they flew down to see Boots while their mom went to New York on a shopping trip. One day they went out to a local swimming pool while their grandma stayed home and tidied up. When taking the girls’ clothes out of the dryer, she noticed several strange fabric scraps mixed in with their clothes, maybe a dozen of them. At first she thought some poorly made garment had snagged on the agitator and shredded into pieces. On closer inspection, she decided that they might be some kind of underwear that had shrunk to tiny bits in the dryer.

When the girls returned, Boots showed them the scraps and apologized. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “I think I jes’ ruined some of your clothes!” The girls looked at them, held back their laughter, and reassured their grandmother that everything was fine, that the “scraps” were their thong underwear.

Boots was aghast. “You wear them? Lakh that?”

“Oh course,” one replied. “You can’t expect us to wear granny panties.”

Boots, always fashion conscious, was mortified. Then in her sixties, she wore what she considered stylish bikini-cut underwear. When she realized her granddaughters considered them “granny panties,” she suddenly felt old.

Early the next morning, Boots strolled into the guest room, combing her hair and humming to herself. “Time to rise and shine, dumplins!” she called. She was wearing just a thong and a very short T-shirt, nothing else. The girls opened their eyes and a second later two piercing cries were heard all the way down Highway 17: “Grandma!!”

Daddy goes back to work

Everthin’ was fine, the swamp water was drainin’ out real good. Then we saw the gator.

ORTHOPEDIC SURGEONS in the 21st century can be a highly specialized bunch. They do only hip replacements or practice sports medicine or limit themselves to shoulder repair. But when my father practiced orthopedic surgery in the middle of the 20th century, his practice ran the gamut.

Daddy performed joint replacements, corrected spinal deformities, and removed musculoskeletal tumors. His main stock in trade was repairing injuries. But despite seeing thousands of such injuries, he never accepted the fact that human beings can be clumsy, careless, or downright stupid. People who didn’t wear seatbelts enraged him. He thought woodworkers who failed to take precautions when operating power saws were idiots. And children who ran with scissors? Don’t ask.

Still, he was fascinated with the injuries themselves and was especially obsessed with repairing hand trauma. He loved the planning and ingenuity it required. Orthopedists’ work can be crude and heavy—mending large, dislocated joints or amputating limbs— which accounts for the old saying that an orthopedic surgeon is “strong as an ox and half as smart.” But when repairing the delicate fretwork of nerves in the hand, my father was part neurosurgeon. His skilled hands restored the function of other skilled hands.

IN THE 1970s, my parents retired to Alabama, where my mother was born and raised. I knew she’d find lots to do, but I was worried about my father. How could a person go from decades of working 60 hours a week to having no occupation whatsoever?

He did fine. He started an EMT training course for the local fire department. He bought a small tractor and helped my mother grow vegetables. He loved chopping wood to stoke their winter fires. He wrote weekly letters to his five daughters. And occasionally he resumed being a doctor.

One morning when mother was off at a library board meeting, my father heard a loud knock at the back door. Answering it, he found two unknown men, curiously alike, with unkempt blond hair, matching sunburned faces, and identical blue overalls. The one in front clutched his cap with both hands and cleared his throat.

“We heard you was a doctor. That right?”
“Yes, that’s right. My name is Dr. Ramsey. And you are...?”

He said they were the Perkins brothers, that they lived nearby, and that his name was Leroy. Woody was the fellow behind him. Woody was hurt and needed a doctor.

My father invited them in and all three sat at the kitchen table. Woody unwrapped the towel around his hand and held it out. Beneath a lot of dried blood my father could make out an even row of puncture wounds on top of his hand. Most of the bleeding had stopped but the hand was swollen and badly bruised.

“How’d that happen?” he asked sternly, preparing to hear some typical story of carelessness or inattention.

Woody shifted in his chair, reluctant to speak, so Leroy began the tale.

“Well, we went out this morning early to drain that swampy patch behind our fields. Everthin’ was fine, the swamp water was drainin’ out real good. Then we saw the gator.

“He was lying in the mud like he owned the place,” Leroy continued. “And this might sound awful strange to you, but we felt bad for the old thing! That swamp’s been there a mighty long time and who knows how long he’s lived there.”

They’d agreed the alligator deserved a new home and resolved to move him to a much larger swamp down the highway. They figured the gator was small enough to fit in the back of their pickup truck, so they drove it down to the edge of the former swamp. Leroy, clearly the mastermind, decided he’d grab the tail. Woody grabbed the other end. Mayhem ensued.

My father sat back, momentarily speechless. He’d seen hundreds of puncture wounds in his life but never one like this. Preventable injuries usually made him furious. But this time, he smiled and went to grab his black bag.