Louisiana Kinfolks

Gramma Nora Barrett had family in Louisiana. We did not know them well and did not exchange visits very often. I know there was at least one relative in Oakdale.

Her brother, Clifton Brown, and his wife Sylvia lived in a house that he built on some land outside Hornbeck, Louisiana.

This is in northwest Louisiana where the joke goes: If Bill and Sue get divorced, they are still brother and sister.

Uncle Clifton served in the tank corps in WW II. He was under Patton’s command in North Africa in ‘42 or ‘43. He was outside his tank, working on it when he was shot by a German rifleman. The bullet destroyed his kneecap. disabling him for life.

I never got the whole story of what happened next, but he ended up back in Hornbeck on disability and working part time odd jobs for the US Army at Fort Polk (you can see it on the map - not too far from Hornbeck).

Clifton is on the right, next to Mom and Grampa Barrett.

When I was about 9 or 10, Gramma Nora and I took the train to visit Clifton and Sylvia. We left Beaumont going east on the Southern Pacific Sunset Limited. We changed trains in Oakdale and went north to Many (pronounced man-e) where Clifton and Sylvia picked us up and took us to their house.

This house was a ‘shotgun’ house, so named because it was narrow and deep and it was said that someone could shoot a shotgun in the front door and hit everyone in the house.

No indoor plumbing. There was a well out back and a little farther away a two holer outhouse. I became fully put off by outhouses during my week with the Browns.

There was not much to do. One day I got into Sylvia’s sewing kit and made a vest, pants, hat and tail cover for their old yellow cat. What a patient and tolerant animal that cat was.

There were relatives (I think this may have been Sylvia’s parents) about 3/4 of a mile away - through a field and woods. I never took the 3/4 mile hypotenuse of the triangle because there was a bull in the field who would kill intruders, I took the longer two half mile legs of the triangle along the dirt roads.

There were two female ‘cousins’ at this other house. I don’t know if they were my cousins but certainly they were cousins to one another.

They took me into the woods where we could smoke grapevine (yuck!). They also chewed tobacco. This was rural Louisiana after all. One day we were on the front porch of the relative’s house playing checkers. They were playing against one another and were seated along the porch. I was observing and sat with my back to the house looking toward the porch rail. They each had a ‘chaw’ of tobacco and were spitting into the yard and hitting dragonflies! I was so impressed. I was working on my own chaw. I saw a big fat dragonfly, took careful aim and let fly. tobacco, tobacco juice and saliva came out in a wad and made a mess of the checkerboard and the porch rail. The dragonfly was unscathed. I was eliminated from the tobacco clatch at that point.

My parents were to arrive on Saturday for lunch and to chauffeur us back to Beaumont.

Sylvia decided to bake a chicken for lunch. She went into the yard ( I was with her), selected a chicken, caught it, grabbed it by the head and flipped it so that the head came off in her hand. The headless chicken ran and flopped and exuded blood for a half a minute. She handed me the head to dispose of in the outhouse, She gathered the chicken and scalded it to loosen the feathers which she plucked in no time. Turned out to be a pretty good lunch topped off with really good watermelon.

I am sharing this with my brother Terry and my cousin Wayne Thomas. I hope that one or both of them will add comments to this post about their experiences in western Louisiana.