Redneck Boy in the Promised Land

Chapter 1 Everything Is Purple and Gray and Covered with Soot Hey, what the hell kinda deal is this?! Everything is painted purple and gray, there is soot and cinders all over everything, and overhead gigantic silver dirigibles are flying around. There are freight trains clanging and banging in the front yard, and ships the size of skyscrapers are cruising by. Most folks I see have darker skin than mine. It smells like collards and sweat and cigars, and what's that I hear? Off somewhere, across the water that is all around me, a bugler is playing "Taps." I live in the country in the middle of cotton and peanuts and corn, but this is all surrounded by a city of eighty thousand people. I'm two years old and I'm asking you: What the hell kinda deal is this?! Well, it really was that way for us. We lived in a railroad section house that looked out to a busy freight yard on the docks of Portsmouth, Virginia. But where we lived there was no neighborhood, no sidewalks, and no busy city streets; instead there were scrubby woods and plowed fields and marsh grass. You see, my father was the cigar smokin', tobacco chewin', whiskey drinkin' section foreman there for the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, and my mama raised four boys in that big ol' shack. Large railroads are divided into sections. The section foreman is responsible for the maintenance of a particular section of track. In those days, most railroads provided company houses on company land by the tracks for their employees. These were called "section houses." Most were well constructed, though many were quite old. But all of them lacked "conveniences." Well, if it was primitive, my brothers and I didn't know it. You don't miss what you never had. The one-lane road that ran along the tracks was called Harper Street. It was made of burnt cinders from the coal-fired steam locomotives around the rail yard. The engines produced clouds of thick black smoke all day long, and that soot settled everywhere: in the yard, on the house, and on Mama's wash out on the clothesline. The house seemed to have been plopped from above into a field between the freight yard and Scott's Creek, a tidal inlet off of Hampton Roads, down where the James River meets the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. The place was perched atop ten stacks of bricks about two feet off the ground. When Atlantic storms came on their howling visits, the old shack would sway and creak like a boat at sea, but would always settle back soft and easy on the brick piles. At one time, there were two scraggly Chinaberry trees in the yard. After a hurricane came through once, there was only one very scraggly Chinaberry tree in the yard. The rusting tin roof always hung on tight. The only plumbing in the house was a cold-water spigot in the kitchen. Our bathroom was a "double-seater" outhouse over the creek, reached by a short bridge, and flushed by the outgoing tide. Two seats hardly did the job for my parents and me and my two older brothers, "Buck" and "Bubba." They called me "Buster." We had no electricity then. Our world was lit by kerosene, and our entertainment was provided by battery-powered radios, windup Victrolas, and above all by Mama's beautiful singing voice. Royal Purple and Silver Gray were the official colors of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. The section houses were all painted purple and gray, as were the depots, station houses, yard towers, toolsheds, roundhouses, shops, and as I could daily verify, so were the outhouses. The paint crew appeared every five years or so to slap on another coat of gray over the sooty outer walls, trim it with purple, and seal the whole deal with a large black stencil nJones, Ben is the author of 'Redneck Boy in the Promised Land', published 2008 under ISBN 9780307395276 and ISBN 0307395278.