Forty Acres and a Goat by Will D. Campbell

Author:Will D. Campbell [Campbell, Will D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Social Activists, Social Science, Discrimination, History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Religion, Christianity, General
ISBN: 9781496815880
Google: XpdWDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Published: 2018-04-17T01:03:18+00:00

VIII

When Other Helpers Fail …

“THAT’S THE BIGGEST wash pot I’ve ever seen,” T.J. said, standing back throwing a rock, trying to make it skip across the water.

“You really are country,” I said, pointing to the big pot. “You know how to play ducks and drakes. Only country boys know that.”

“You’ve been to my house. Did it look like Times Square?”

We were sitting beside a two-hundred-gallon iron pot behind my cabin office. Neighbors said Old Man Oscar Bass hauled it in on a wagon from The Hermitage. There is another one like it still there. I had put catfish in it when we first came. In one summer they grew big enough to eat, but by then the children had named each one and nothing with a name could be eaten. We compromised by catching them in a net and taking them to the lake. After that I got goldfish.

“That pot used to belong to Andrew Jackson,” I said.

“Didn’t everything? He must have had big britches.”

“That wasn’t a wash pot,” I said, remembering when we used to wash our clothes in a zinc tub, scrub them on a washboard, then boil them in an open iron kettle. “That was a sugarpot.”

“Well, that’s a lot of sweetening,” he said, still trying different size rocks to see if he could make them skip.

“Hey, did you know I’m going to be a famous sculpturer?” I asked him, gesturing around the pot to several pieces of metal junk I had welded together.

“This one here is called ‘The General Confession,’” I said. We had rebuilt an old tractor and had to replace the manifold. The six protruded openings which bolted onto the cylinders, with another in the middle for the exhaust pipe, looked like a Menorah. I welded the rocker arms onto it and it formed a baroque Patriarchal cross.

“And why do we call it the General Confession?” T.J. asked, knowing that I wanted him to.

“Because it’s made from a manifold.”

He went into his Sambo act, scratched his head on the opposite side from the hand he was reaching with, and grinned. “Do say?”

“Yeah, hit do say,” I said, doing a poor imitation of his dialect. “The General Confession, hit say, ‘We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness….’”

He pointed at the next one without speaking. “That’s the Tower of Babel,” I said. It was made of assorted sizes of augers and drill bits, welded in a zig-zag pattern and reaching twenty feet in the air. The one coming out of the ground was a heavy dirt auger, the kind used to bore post holes or plant trees. Each one going up got smaller until the top one was a short quarter-inch bit. T.J. rolled his eyes, shrugged, and grinned some more, still saying nothing. “You know. Original sin. The Tower of Babel. Trying to reach high enough to conquer God. Everytime we try to become as God, we are impaled on our own auger,” I explained.

He slapped his thigh and laughed out loud. “You mean, we screw ourselves,” he yelled.

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