Wendell Berry

You read a book like A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry, and you’re reminded of your own family and where you came from. Characters like Burley Coulter and Uncle Jack seem to be almost lifted wholesale from what I remember of many of the “characters” I knew as a child.

My father’s family lived mostly in the Shreveport, Louisiana, area, with a much larger group in Brookhaven, Mississippi (it was my grandfather who would wander away from Brookhaven and settle first in central Louisiana, in a town called Jena. He was working as a surveyor for a railroad company, and he lived in a boarding house operated by my great-grandmother and his eventual mother-in-law. 

My father and his three sisters were all born in Jena but had moved to Shreveport by the late 1920s. Rubye was the oldest, followed by my Aunt Myrtle, my father, and my Aunt Ruth. There would have been an Aunt Elouise, born two years before my father, but she died the same year my father as born.

Each summer, from the time I was 8 to about 13, I would fly to Shreveport to spend a week with my grandmother. My grandfather had died when I was nine months old, so I never knew him. My grandmother lived across the street from my father’s oldest sister (and the family’s firstborn) and her husband. Aunt Rubye and Uncle Revis were responsible for some of my most vivid memories of Shreveport.

Both were “characters,” Aunt Rubye only slightly more staid than Uncle Revis. She was famous for her looks of disapproval and her biscuits. He wore a cowboy hat and drove a gigantic Dodge that was a faded pink and only slightly smaller than an ocean liner. My grandmother usually ate her lunch and dinner with them, which meant I did, too, when I visited. My visits usually coincided with harvesting the acre of vegetable gardens they had behind their small frame house. I learned to dig up potatoes, pick corn (and when to know it was ready), pick green peans (and help shell them; no body ate for free). 

Saturday evenings were devoted to watching the Lawrence Welk Show on television. I wasn’t a particular fan, but the best part was the running commentary on the individual acts from Uncle Revis. My favorite part was when the Lennon Sisters performed. You would hear my uncle begin to mutter until he couldn’t stand it any longer. He’s shout “Ignorant!” at the television set. “They’re ignorant1” My grandmother would smile, my Aunt Rubye would roll her eyes, and I’d go off into gales of laughter. I suspect that his commentary was for my benefit and amusement.

He’d let me tag along with him when he ran errands. He always seemed to have a pipe in his mouth, even when he wasn’t smoking it. We’d go tooling all over Shreveport in that big Dodge. I’d go with my grandmother when she had errands to run as well. She drove a black 1940 Ford that always, always was breaking down, usually in a part of town you didn’t want to break down in. I met the most interesting people because of that car’s problems.

Uncle Revis hated one thing even more than the Lennon Sisters. 

Cats. 

When I was about 10, I was sitting with him on the back steps after dinner. For whatever reason, we had no garden duties that might. It was one of those beautiful Southern summer evenings, still light. He was smoking his pipe, and he was talking about his favorite writers, of which James Michener was No. 1 on the list. Suddenly, he grabbed a rifle from behind us (which I didn’t know he had at hand) and fired off a shot at the fence between his yard and the neighbor’s house next door. A cat went flying in the air. 

The next-door neighbor loved cats, with at least a dozen and often more roaming around. If they stayed at the neighbor’s house, Uncle Revis would have been fine. But, as all of them were outdoor cats, they roamed the outdoors. And they seemed to know that Uncle Revis didn’t like them. All the more reason to visit.

Aunt Rubye came flying on to the back porch, shouting at my uncle. This might have been Shreveport in the 1960s, but firing a firearm inside the city limits was something only the police could do. But that wasn’t Aunt Rubye’s issue. 

What she was upset about was the reaction from the neighbors. As it turned out, they were their son’s in-laws. And they might, she said, breathing fire, think it was an insult aimed at them.

“Well,” Uncle Revis said, “they’d have to be pretty smart to figure that out. That won’t be a problem.”

Uncle Jack and Burley Coulter up in Port William, Kentucky would be proud. Yes, sometimes fiction does indeed imitate life.

Top photograph: My father and my Aunt Ruth in Jena, Louisiana, about 1923.