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© Reg Owens 2010
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Ellison, Georgia like many small towns is rich in events and incidents that supply a never ending source of characters and story lines for a novelist. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
The story begins in 1946 with the county sheriff, an illegal owner of a moonshine still operated by him and his ancestors dating back before Ellison was a town or Ellis a county.
GRITS is a breakfast food, finely ground from corn, indigenous to the southern states and seldom seen above the Mason-Dixon Line, a dividing point that separated North and South during the War Between the States in the 1860’s. Yankees call it “The Civil War” but then that’s another story.
If you like romance novels you will like GRITS. If you like humor interspersed, you will love GRITS.
If you are a true southerner you love grits with breakfast food.
The author wrote a song about Grits that was featured in a play about the last Confederate Cabinet meeting in Abbeville, South Carolina.
GRITS the song
You know just the other day I heard a man say, he knew all about the civil war
He said he had it figured out and without a lil’o’doubt to be sure, whereas, and furthermore,
Chorus
With another load of grits we’d of blown them all to bits
And the South would’ve won the civil war.
With another load of grits we’d of blown them all to bits
And the South would’ve won the civil war.
He got upon a table and he said loud and able like he knew from where he spoke for.
He said you cannot win at rummy on an empty tummy To be sure, whereas, and furthermore,
Chorus
In the battle of Atlanta and in Louisiana, the troops they were growing mighty thin.
Yeah they were so skinny, breezes blew away many and they were all Gone with the Wind.
Chorus
Well we here taking it all in when two fellars came in dressed in white from their shoes to their chin.
And as they carried him away he was over heard to say.
The South’s Gonna Rise Agin.
Chorus
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Chapter 1
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1946 arrived with lots of promise and hope. America is still recuperating from World War II. Her fighting men are home after years of killing across the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. Factories are switching back to peacetime production and the economy is booming. Automobiles are replacing tanks, babies are being born at a record pace and life is beginning to return to normal in the sleepy little town of Ellison, Georgia, population: 6000.
Like most other small southern towns, this one has the upper and lower classes of people who speak but don’t mingle with each other socially.
Ellison Cotton Mill, the town’s largest employer of hourly paid hands contributed to the war effort by providing cloth for military uniforms. Now the weaving looms with their shuttles carrying bobbins of thread back and forth one revolution per second with a rapid popping sound provides cloth for clothing and bedding sold nationwide. Cotton for the mill is supplied by the many family owned farms in Ellis County. Some use tractors but most fields are worked by mules. The ground is broken in the spring with two-mule teams pulling a multi-blade tiller and the driver is seated on top. The poorer farms use a single animal harnessed to a hand plow with the reigns rested over the shoulder of the plowman. The sounds of GEE and HAW can be heard as the man gives verbal commands to the animal. The hot sun beams down and both man and beast are sweating profusely. The work is hard and life expectancy is short. If the early spring rains are scarce, the ground is hard and dusty as it billows up from the blade of the plow choking the tiller but the work must be done in order for the man with the lean hollow face and his family to survive.
It’s a hard life and many give up and get jobs in the mill or elsewhere. The cotton is processed in the Ellison Cotton Gin. Cotton seeds go into a special container during the ginning process and cooked into oil giving off a most delicious aroma. The succulent smell permeates all of Ellison and most everyone gains a few pounds every year around cotton ginning time due to excessive eating.
Early fall is cotton picking time and pickers are paid two dollars per hundred pounds which amounts to just six dollars a day for the best of pickers. Across the fields of snowy white cotton bowls you see both white and colored pickers working row by row pulling a long sack that drags on the ground behind them. The more they pick the heavier the load. Cotton bowls have sharp burrs that prick fingers and cause them to bleed and hurt. Some wear cloth gloves with the ends cut off. Picking begins at first light of day and ends around five o’clock. It’s hot and sweaty and when the pickers reach the end of the row there’s two buckets of water with a dipper in each, one for whites and one for colored. The men wear hats and the women wear bandanas to keep the sweat out of their eyes.
Most Ellis County farms are small averaging forty acres in size and are leased from the handful of owners who pretty much control the county. These all-white land barons are called Boss Man and they lay down the rules and regulations. The workers have little if any say.
The poorest of the farmer is known as a sharecropper. He owns nothing except a few clothes and a second hand shotgun for hunting rabbit and birds. His weathered grey house unpainted and built for existing, not living, is scantily furnished with the cheapest of furniture mostly home made. The water is toted in from a hand operated windless well. An outhouse is located outback under a clump of scrub trees. It’s not uncommon for a family to have 7 to 10 children and they work hard as well. The house and land are provided to the sharecropper to work the fields and split the profits with the owner. Most work all their lives and never advance further than to pay off the bare essentials of food and clothing sold to them on credit by the landowner.
The morning picking session lasts till Noon and it’s a group of weary souls who slowly drag themselves to a designated shade tree at the edge of the seemingly endless rows of cotton picking misery. An hour is allocated for the bone tired band of exhausted laborers to eat their lunch they brought to the fields. Afterwards they lie on the grass to recuperate for the afternoon ordeal which is much worse with the afternoon temps nearing triple digits, sometimes more.
Upon returning to the fields the weary zombie like pickers resume bending and plucking the now stiff white balls and the throbbing of pain sets in once more. No one speaks but there is one who knows how to find some relief however minor.
He’s a pecan tan man named Josh. He begins to sing to pass the time taking his mind off an aching back from stooping so long. A dull pain bites his over-worked fingers. He’s six feet tall, muscular, and wears denim overalls with just one gallous strap snapped and no shirt. A worn straw hat shades his face from the Sun’s 100 degree scorching.
The other coloreds join in; “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen; nobody knows cept my Jesus.” Pretty soon the cotton field comes alive with spirited worship that sounds like a Sunday church service. They pick up the tempo and both hands began working faster with more and more cotton being picked and shoved into the long bags. The whites get into the groove and everybody’s filling bags faster in the baking Georgia heat with a side-benefit of worshipping their God while working. The back wrenching work continues to the time the overseer yells five o’clock. “Let’s weigh yo bags and head on in for the day.”
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Chapter 2
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The few two story buildings around the Ellison Square cast a long morning shadow across the granite statue of the Confederate soldier standing proud in the center of a garden of trees and benches for resting. The courthouse clock striker pounds the big bell eight times to begin a new local government work day.
In the office of Ellis County Sheriff Johnny Clark, the big man is leaning back in a wooden chair supported by four roller wheels. A huge cotton stuffed pillar gives comfort to the most powerful man in Ellis County. The morning sun glaring in the window heats up another scorching day overtaxing a fifteen year old revolving fan which makes a loud grinding noise that could easily mean give me a squirt of oil or put me outta my misery.
John Clark is a big man standing six feet tall and weighing two hundred fifty pounds. With coal black hair parted in the middle, a few grays are beginning to sneak up around his ears and temple. He chews the longest cigar he can find but it’s not lit for a good reason. He savors the sweet tobacco taste occasionally spitting the excess juice into an empty number ten tomato can next to his desk. There are brown marks all around the can displaying all the times he missed since the floor was last scrubbed by a trustee county prisoner.
In a small telephone exchange building just off the town square, a telephone operator picks up a wire and plugs the metal pin into the switchboard that sends a ring to a black desk phone over in the Ellis County Court House.
“Sheriff’s Office, John Clark speaking!”
“Sheriff Clark, we have your car ready,” can be heard from the sweet sounding secretary at Ellison Ford Sales. She’s almost forty and no one has ever seen her on a date. Her attire is homey and a crown of long black hair is wound in a ball and pinned to the top of her head. She wears no makeup and attends the Ellison Church of God on Willow Street.
Her daddy nipped her in the bud by constantly putting her down when she was growing up telling her she was ugly and mentally impaired, that she was too dumb to ever amount to anything.
“Ellie Mae, you sound just like a sweet morning angel.”
John can’t see her but he knows she blushes a cherry red glow and her head’s tucked down to the collar of her long pink flowered dress that falls almost to the floor. She always wears pink her favorite color.
Like clockwork, Johnny Clark has his cars inspected on a regular basis to insure good running order. He despises loosing chase when he’s after anyone attempting to make a getaway from his long arm of the law. The engine is a police special tooled to exceed 100 miles per hour.
Two prewar 1941 model sedans both black with long whip antennas on the rear bumpers make up his fleet of two patrol vehicles, one for the sheriff and the other for his only deputy Clyde Brown. Johnny’s wife Sarah is his secretary and radio dispatcher.
“Thanks Ellie Mae for tuning my car, I’ll send my handsome deputy Clyde over directly to pick it up,” and he cradles the phone grinning.
Deputy Clyde, six-two beanpole and a hundred sixty pounds soaking wet sits by the army surplus two-way listening to the radio traffic from other law enforcement offices in the area.
Sheriff John treats Clyde like Ellie Mae’s Dad treated her. Clyde fluffs him off by paying no attention. Right now, he’s paying no attention to the sheriff’s phone call and doesn’t hear John the first time he speaks to him about running an errand over to the Ellison Ford Sales. Clyde looks like a red neck reject but in actuality, he is brilliant with a 135 IQ. He will need all 135 later when fate sets him up with some major responsibilities.
“Clyde, git over to the Ford place and bring my car back.”
“But Sheriff, it’s a long walk.”
A snarling Johnny mocks Clyde’s complaint with a high falsetto taunt, “But sheriff it’s a long walk!” then added with a deep scowl, “I said go git mah car and I mean now,”
Grudgingly Clyde walks out the door of the office located in the rear of the courthouse mumbling about quitting and going back to the cotton mill. He’s considered this threat for the past five years but if push came to a shove you couldn’t run him off with a baseball bat.
He enjoys wearing his normally freshly pressed brown uniform which is now wrinkled from perspiration as he walks with pride in the morning heat tipping his hat with a good morning to every lady he meets on the street and they give him a big grin and a nod right back.
In a back room of the sheriff’s office there’s a small kitchenette that Sarah had John install right after he was elected. It contains a small range, table with four chairs, and a military bed he picked up at an Army Surplus Store. A closet converted to a pantry is filled with grocery supplies. To the right of the refreshment center there’s a large room with two holding cells both of which are now empty. When John arrests prisoners he moves them out as soon as possible to the prison farm and maintenance shop out on Radio Station Road to await a bond hearing.
Presently, John senses the yummy smell of fried bacon emitting from the break room as they refer to it and John dearly loves the taste of bacon. He has it for breakfast every morning.
“John I got your breakfast,” Sarah informs her husband as she enters the High Sheriff’s office with a tray of bacon and eggs, grits, and two slices of fresh grown cantaloupe. At thirty-nine years old, Sarah still maintains her high school figure as well as her homecoming queen good looks. Her dark brown hair is neatly combed in a pompadour. John on the other hand being five years older has acquired a pot belly and sports an unkempt mustache which falls over his top lip, needing a trim as usual. His uniform looks as though it had been worn for pajamas the night before. His Smith & Wesson thirty eight police revolver holstered on a black belt wraps below his pot gut and hangs halfway to the floor. As he walks toward his breakfast he keeps pulling up the hardware.
Being in his third four-year term he has become somewhat of a slouch but does a remarkable job of keeping the peace. John is also the doer of some of the county’s not so legal deeds.
“Sarah you only brought me two fried eggs and no sign of bread,” he complains gruffly.
“John Clark you are gaining entirely too much weight and it’s high time you went on a diet.”
John considered diet a four-letter dirty word.
“Don’t ya bring up diet to me Sarah Clark I’m healthy as a gorilla and twice as strong.”
“Maybe back when you first won this job but just take a good long look in the mirror; your belly is spilling over your belt big time and you know it’s the Gospel truth.”
John began eating his eggs with no bread and grumbled with every other bite. He made no further comment to Sarah. She always won anyhow. Having been the captain of the debate team every year in high school she knew exactly how to get the best of Johnny Clark and how well he knew it. So he just licked his verbally inflicted wounds and sulked. She turned and grinned to herself at yet another triumph over the great Johnny Clark who was so well-liked by the voters of Ellison. He might be the High Sheriff and most powerful man in the county but she could handle him any day of the week. John finished his breakfast and poked the stogy back in his mouth.
Unconsciously he began flipping his Zippo lighter getting ready to light up the cigar.
“Don’t you dare fire up that stink pole in this office?” she admonishes with a stern look that could droop a sunflower at twenty paces.
“Hurmp!” was all he mumbled as he placed the lighter back in his pocket and started chewing the end of the cigar like it was a piece of licorice. He had tried to give up tobacco dozens of times but he was hooked and hooked good.
Sarah loved her man and always stood by him although she did not approve of him making moonshine liquor or running a gambling house on their farm. She did however love the good things of life that the illegal profits provided.
It would be hard living on just their county salaries. Still she wished she could have both worlds, but that would be impossible. She felt that someday somehow she would change him.
Her father tried his best to persuade her not to marry John Clark when she was twenty-two and fresh out of college.
“You can do a lot better with your brains and good looks honey. You don’t have to settle for a no account lawbreaker like John Clark. He didn’t attend college and will never amount to anything”
“But daddy, I can change him, I just know I can.”
And no one could dispute the fact she tried; and tried; and tried. As sure as you can’t remove the red off a baboon’s ass, you can not change generations of lifestyle bred in one Sheriff John Clark. Not even the badge could turn him around. He crossed his fingers behind his back when he raised his right hand and took the oath of office. She had just about given up on John when something miraculous happened a few years later.
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