Blossom

In the autumn of 1944, six month old, newly named, Henry David Early, Jr., was brought by his new mother to live in Blossom, Arkansas, the ad-ministrative seat of Evergreen County, a cluster of unrepentant bigots and hypocritical Bible-thumping backwoods Baptists stuck way down in the bot-tom left-hand corner of a state which was in all important aspects officially the second most primitive in the union, having been saved from rock bottom by Mississippi. It was a place constituted by the omnipresent smell of pine, much more than the sweet, sticky smell from the flowering magnolia trees planted on the courthouse square, after which the town was named. Pine not only scented the air, it consumed the senses, thick enough to leave its pungent residue on skin, conspiring to make human relationships particularly sticky, invading mouths to cause a slurring of words and a slowing of speech, so that almost everyone sounded more or less ignorant, even to themselves. All that pine odor, acrid as cheap gin, made the air seem so disinfected that you might almost believe there was some natural immunity to the inevitability of sin, although sinning was as abundant among them as the pines. Advertisements for anything a Baptist would object to were not ac-cepted by the local newspaper, and although they had a premature vision of what sex might be like from dogs coupling gregariously in front yards and on town sidewalks, they were led to believe that sex of any kind, saving for ordained marital procreation, did not exist in polite society. That did not hinder each new generation from tumbling directly into coupling. Parked on logging roads cutting through pine thickets, boys discovered that syrupy flattery and ardent confessions of eternal love was all it took to heat up the back seat of the car, in spite of persistent predictions of damnation for taking part in the unmentionable. Blossom had two sit down movie houses, the Diamond and the Rex, and two drive ins, the Moonlight and the Starlight. In the colored neighborhood there was a storefront shop showing eight millimeter reels on a draped bed sheet; in a room out back customers encountered racier offerings. Blossom had two banks on opposite corners of the square and three restaurants downtown. The Willow Restaurant sat across the street from the Texaco sta-tion Hank Early would lease in 1946. Hank would drink ten or fifteen cups of coffee a day in there. White men did business, made deals, and passed along rumors in the Willow. Southerners in places like Blossom held no special loyalty to compa-nies. A man neither bought his gasoline nor had his car washed and serviced at the Texaco simply because it flew the bright red Texaco star. He went there because it was Hank Early’s place of business, because Hank was a friend and a neighbor. In the south of that time, a man’s loyalty was only given to another man, not to a thing. Things came and went, but a man was always there. They lived and died with the same people, the same unchanging population. From his father’s father to his father and to him, and on through his son and son’s son, there existed a line of male humanity unchanging and dependable. In Evergreen county and places like it, a man, black or white, carried with him as a crown or a crutch, a cultural heritage more powerful than any institution, be it Texaco, the state, the nation, the church, the law, or even in the crunch, God. When you knew the father, you knew the son, and you would know his son’s son. All trust, all honor, all business, all the values of life were rooted in that knowledge of a man and his place in the great southern scheme of things. It all floated through the social landscape on a thick river of Willow Restaurant coffee. Whites up front, coloreds out back. People in Blossom, white people in Blossom, believed they lived in the tiny, unobtrusive center of the universe, presuming that everyone worth knowing resided in the area bounded by their limited physical travels. Al-though they could get radio stations from Chicago, Nashville, Memphis, and Del Rio, people in those places were likely to be as odd as extraterrestrials. It was an undeniably egocentric and insular vision of the world, not even pro-gressive enough to be provincial.